At any rate, there was no lack of bustle at chef Michel Richard’s Central, on Pennsylvania Avenue. I’d eaten before at his acclaimed Citronelle, in Georgetown. This new restaurant—a James Beard winner—is a casual nouveau bistro designed to move the crowds in and out.
The first impression wasn’t altogether favorable: The atmosphere was closer to loud than energetic, and in scale the room is long and boxy, as if it were a holding cargo for tourists famished after a day traipsing up and down the Mall. The blandly tasteful architecture of the squat corporate buildings just outside the door seemed to have swept in with the evening and rearranged itself as decor.
But, as they say nowadays, no worries. The food came with a quickness that was potentially disconcerting, but visually the dishes were enticing creations—just the right amount of fuss—and, better yet, on the palate they were warmingly robust and tasty: Our friend Diana, who joined us, thought her cassoulet was a bit dry, yet it was undeniably a handsome dish for winter, with a plump duck leg sitting neatly on a mound of beans in which the sausage was concealed like holiday coins. And my beef cheeks with tagliatelle were absolutely delicious, rich but not cloying—and amusingly presented as two columns, one of the meltingly tender medallions of beef, the other of the pasta, folded over neatly, with shaved carrots sprinkled down the middle.
The bread, by the way, was terrific as well, and a traditional salad of frisee, lardons and poached egg was very satisfying.
Given the heartiness of the fare, our server recommended we drink the Dom. Ligneres “Aric” from Corbieres, France, which I’d never had. We found the wine to be big and dusky and, regrettably, an uninspired, one-dimensional match for the sophisticated comfort food from the kitchen.
The wine list was dominated by California and French wines with a smattering of Italian, Austrian and Spanish labels. I noticed some interesting reasonably priced gems: a Chablis from Dom. Bernard Defaix, a pinot blanc from Marcel Deiss, a reisling from Dom. Weinbach, a Givry premier cru from Michel Sarrazin, a cabernet franc from Frederic Mabileau, a gamay from Christophe Pacalet, a syrah from Dom. du Tunnel and a banyuls by the glass from Dom. de la Rectoire. Central also offered by the glass a Cremant d’Alsace brut rosé from Lucien Albrecht.
So: We came away sated and pleased, if not quite relaxed—maybe that’s Washington?
Also, if I can momentarily join those tourists traipsing up and down the Mall: We visited the new World War II Memorial, a spectacularly unimaginative site that, apart from access ramps, looks conservative enough to have been first sketched around the time of the Potsdam conference. With its funereal iron wreaths and dancing waters, it looked like a forlorn little postmodern joke on Il Vittoriano, the enormous Victor Emmanuel monument in Rome. Grrr!
I told Aldo a better title for this would be Stuffed Game, but he thought that didn’t capture the turkey’s sense of panic, futility and stupid pathos at holiday time. And there is something touching about the little yellow feet pressed up against the glass at the bottom of the bottle.
The title itself, taken from a George Herbert poem, strikes the precisely correct balance between the spiritual and, well, spirits: “When God at first made man/ Having a glass of blessings standing by/ Let us (said he) poure on him all we can.”
Pym’s comic novels are parochial affairs involving, mostly, tensions in Anglican vicarages and the lives and longings of highly literate, rather lonely people who occupy their time with careers as index-compilers, translators, proofreaders at scholarly journals and the like. Blessings is a little different in that its narrator, 30-year-old Wilmet, is comfortably married, with subtle but not inexpensive taste (“I always like myself in deep clear colours”). She has a great deal of leisure time in which to flirt and be flirted with, although she approaches men with an innocence not far removed from Jane Austen. Nothing outwardly momentous occurs in the book, although she clears up some misconceptions about her marriage, friendship and romantic fantasies—and this is momentous enough.
The road to this new maturity is dotted with constant breaks for lunches and dinners, usually with company that is highly amusing and quite happy to share a cocktail, a glass of wine or sherry. She will have a Tio Pepe while waiting alone for a late lunch companion. On another occasion she will have a glass of Chablis with a chicken fricasee at home. She invokes a spumante, its bubble gone flat, when remembering her younger days in Italy.
Pym, a quiet master of the comic novel, uses such details very carefully: These references to wines and drinks are slipped in nearly always in a scene in which Wilmet is feeling gay, nostalgic, romantic, triste or all of the above—scenes in which she is being most essentially her daydreaming self. Just as she dresses, so she drinks: Alcohol seems to be a matter of “deep clear colours” that add a certain lilt to her mood. If, in an early chapter, Wilmet elects to have a martini at the start of a dinner party, it’s because “it doesn’t seem quite the weather for sherry—too mild or something.”
The conversation turns to which sort of wine would best complement a dessert of gooseberries. “If you like,” says a guest, “I will raise the matter with my own wine merchant—a man of considerable courage, even panache.”
Much later, Wilmet has lunch with her old friend, Rowena, and with both affection and envy the two of them observe young lovers meeting at a nearby table:
“They’re going to drink a whole bottle of claret,” said Rowena in a low rather sad voice. “What will they do afterwards? Walk in the park? … They might go to an art exhibition… Really modern art is extraordinarily sympathetic when you’re in love and have eaten and drunk well.”
There’s no need to go overboard with any of this, except that Pym captures so well, and so glancingly, how subtly wines and spirits feed a sense of glamour, anticipation and sensuality. (Pym’s characters tend toward a frumpy, tentative mousiness, which might make the transfigurative aid of wine even more significant.) You can also argue that she includes a cautionary note of the abuse of alcohol: Wilmet is mildly (and misguidedly) infatuated with an old friend, Piers, who clearly drinks too much. But that doesn’t make him any less funny or charming—it just hints at a personal conflict within him that Wilmet is slow to understand.
I suppose this is really a very roundabout way to encourage people to read this wonderful writer. And if you have a glass of sherry with it, you won’t be any the worse.
In his leisure time, which takes up the bulk of his life, Aldo is fond of sketching images with a wine theme. I post this image at his request. He describes it as “the concept of terroir as embodied in the figure of the divine eternal feminine.” I think it looks more like a young woman with an eye open for the nearest toga party, but Aldo’s sensibility is his own.
Last night our dinner guests left relatively early—they have these things called “children,” and apparently you have to get home to them—so Aldo and I decided to pop one of our favorite Hitchcock movies into the DVD player. It was Notorious—you know, the one about the 1934 Pommard.
Many people, I suppose, may think of this 1946 classic as the one with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant or, more significantly, a beautifully sustained thriller of intrigue and lush sadomasochistic romanticism: Bergman and Grant play a spy and her handler. They become lovers (how could they not?) but nonetheless spend most of the movie lurching between extremes of rapture and disdain even as they try to bring down a house of Nazi scientific schemers presided over by Claude Rains—who in turn loves Bergman with a deluded, puppyish ardor that ultimately is more touching than Grant’s brusque, manly conquest.
But Hitchcock, with his supremely suave cinematic style and fundamental cruel perversity, is a complex director, and his best movies can be appreciated from a number of perspectives. Which is why we think of Notorious as the one about the 1934 Pommard.
The Pommard, in fact, is only the most significant bottle in a movie awash in alcohol. Hitchcock (who was a lover of wine) took meticulous care in plotting out his thrillers, springloading the narrative with details that would trigger suspense while also swiftly establishing the psychology of his characters. Notorious begins with Bergman, the daughter of a convicted Nazi spy, behaving very badly, getting stinking drunk on hootch at a party in Miami while flirting with Grant, an uninvited guest.
Aldo and I always feel badly for Bergman in this scene—Hitchcock women who hit the sauce don’t often end well. (Remember the naughty lady with the spectacles in Strangers on a Train?) Recruited by Grant, Bergman flies with him down to Rio, where she cuts back on the liquor and falls for him even before getting all the details of her assignment.
As he goes off to headquarters to learn those very details, she tells him to bring back a nice bottle of wine for dinner. Needless to say, Aldo and I feel our pulses start to quicken at that instant.
What can wine signify but class and genteel, fade-to-black sex? It’s a stepup all around! Mr. Grant does better: He buys a bottle of champagne. In Hitchcock, champagne is what you get for the gorgeous high-society ice sculptures like Grace Kelly. But Grant forgets the bottle at headquarters when he learns, to his shock and disgust, that Bergman’s task is to fling herself back in the moral sewer by seducing Rains.
Ingrid is such a pro at the espionage game, she quickly goes beyond the call of duty. She becomes Mrs. Rains, which means that while she spies on him, she gets to run his large household and open all the closets for inspection—except for the wine cellar. Claude Baby won’t hand that key over. This is, for Aldo and me, a spiking moment of intense curiosity and excitement: We feel like two Mrs. Bluebeards wanting to get behind that bolted door. And Claude Rains wasn’t exactly Andy Devine: you know his stuff will be top-drawer.
We would have ordered the servants immediately to cut down a large tree from a corner of the garden and fashion it into a battering ram. Ingrid, however, must use greater spylike craft.
She throws a fabulous society party at which the best champagne is served—we know the champagne is good because, in Hollywood’s subtle telegraphic style, the words “Top Quality” are stamped on the foil. Bottle after bottle is opened and consumed—how excited Aldo and I are to see a party where the host doesn’t stint on champagne! Should we be having champagne ourselves? No, because the plot is sweeping us along—While the well-heeled guests are guzzling champagne upstairs, Bergman and Grant explore Rains’ wine cellar, where they suspect he and the Nazis have been hiding a secret project: What they find is a row of Pommards from a famous vintage, 1934. And look—the label! In closeup! Aldo and I couldn’t be dizzier if we were Kim Novak going off the belltower in Vertigo. When Grant accidentally knocks a bottle to the floor, it shatters—and we scream as if it were the shower scene in Psycho.
At this point, to be honest, Hitchcock lets us down a little: The glass splinters into shards, but no wine flows. The bottle—and presumably the other bottles in the row—was filled with a mineral ore the Nazis intend to use to make dangerous new bombs. Well, fine, now we know the real stakes behind the story—but where did all the Pommard go? Was it just wasted, dumped down the drain? Did Rains drink it alone in the tub or on one of his prize horses? Did his Nazi comrades have it served at one of their ironically elegant dinner parties at which they plot assassinations? Or did Claude Rains’ mother, a German dragonlady, buy the bottles as empties somewhere?
Hitchcock never answers these salient questions.
Instead, Rains and his mother start dosing Bergman’s coffee with a slow-acting poison. This is, for us, a stunning plot twist—and the point at which we always stop watching. I mean, Grant somehow rescues Bergman, doesn’t he? It’s just that we aren’t an audience who will sit there biting our nails over toxic caffeine. If we wanted high drama from coffee beans, we would have watched Out of Africa.
It seems a pity, really, that Bergman and Cary Grant didn’t get to enjoy the Pommard by themselves.
