MARIANI’S

  June 28, 2004                                                         NEWSLETTER

EDITOR'S NOTE:  Readers may now access an Archive of all past newsletters--each annotated--dating back to July, 2003, by simply clicking on   ARCHIVE .

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Cover Story: In Papa Hemingway's Footsteps by John Mariani

New York Corner: Montrachet by John Mariani

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In Papa Hemingway's Footsteps

by John Mariani
 
 
"As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white
wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid
from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to
be happy and to make plans."
--A Moveable Feast (1964)
 
 

Life's greatest gifts to Ernest Hemingway were his appetite and his being born in a century that allowed him to indulge it. No one traveled more widely or immersed himself so deeply in the culture of a place, picking up the language on the street, so that he could say with certainty, "If a man is making up a story it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is."
      Hemingway knew every café in Pamplona, every hotel worth staying at in Switzerland, every concierge in Paris, the perfect recipe for a Bloody Mary (which he said he introduced to Hong Kong in 1941), and what price marlin roe went for in the Havana markets.  At a time when the word "intrepid" had real meaning, he was undoubtedly the greatest and most influential travel writer since Marco Polo, and much of his finest work in that genre--25 columns--appeared in Esquire magazine from 1933-1939, including masterpieces like "Out in the Stream: A Cuban Letter" and "Shootism versus Sport: The Second Tanganyika Letter."

     He was considered one of the great anglers of his day, and he knew how to gut and cook every species. His thorough knowledge of hunting is evident in every line of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and True at First Light, while Death in the Afternoon and The Dangerous Summer remain textbooks on the art of bullfighting. He never thought of himself as a food writer, but he was always giving recipes in his fiction and nonfiction. He even sent one for fillet of lion to Sports Illustrated, writing, "First obtain your lion. . . . Hang  [the tenderloins] overnight in a tree out of reach of hyenas and should [wrap] in cheesecloth to prevent them from being hit by blowflies." His page-by-page descriptions of the meals, wines and spirits he and his fictional characters consumed were so exquisitely crafted as to become quintessential moments readers have ever after sought to evoke  on the same exact spot. His appetite and eye for detail allowed him to bring to vivid life the taste and smell of cooking pancakes and trout in Crisco up in Michigan as readily as he could effect the sexual excitement of a breakfast of brioche and eggs at a hotel overlooking the beach at Palavas: "They were big eggs and fresh and the girl's were not cooked quite as long as the young man's. He remembered that easily and he was happy with his which he had diced up with the spoon and ate with only the flow of the butter to moisten them and the fresh early morning texture and the bite of the coarsely ground pepper grains and the hot coffee and the chicory-fragrant bowl of cafe au lait."
      He knew a tremendous amount about wine, which he called "one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing which may be purchased."  He had an amazing capacity without getting drunk, though he often did, and he could write descriptions with great exactitude about drinks like the sugarless frozen daiquiri at the Floridita bar in Havana: "The frappéd part of the drink was like the wake of a ship and the clear part was the way the water looked when the bow cut it when you were in shallow water over marl bottom. That was almost the exact color."
   
       Hemingway was the best kind of connoisseur--relentlessly  curious and open to everything, from absinthe, which he said "tastes exactly like remorse," to African eland. He liked his Martinis made with 15 parts gin and one of dry vermouth, a mix he called a "Montgomery" after the British Field Marshall who liked to outnumber his enemy by that ratio before attacking. Hemingway preferred Russian vodka, Gordon's gin, and Bacardi rum, and called deusico, a Turkish coffee he tried in Constantinople, a "tremendously poisonous, stomach rotting drink."
     Ever since he wrote about places they have been trying to live up to the Hemingway's version.  So indelible are his descriptions of certain places that whole quarters of Paris, clean, well-lighted cafes in Madrid, and tangy bars in Key West survive intact only because of a fleeting mention in his work, or because he was once a visitor.
     Hemingway makes for very good tourism.  A major tour bus stop on the Old Havana circuit is Papa's favorite bar, La Floridita (right, with wife Mary and actor Spencer Tracy), recently turned into an elegant restaurant (which it wasn't in Hemingway's day) by the Gran Caribe hotel group. Out in Miramar, the Ernest Hemingway International Marlin Fishing Tournament is held annually at the Hemingway Marina.  Americans, Germans and Japanese throng to Pamplona to run with the bulls, and the now kitschy streets of Key West teem with shops selling Hemingway t-shirts.  So overwhelming can Hemingway's impact be, that there is even a restaurant in Madrid whose awning proudly proclaims, "Ernest Hemingway never ate here."
    Dickens' London is mostly vanished, Balzac's Paris was razed during the Second Empire, and Chekhov's Moscow was wiped away by the war. But Hemingway's Paris and Madrid and Venice are just the way he left them. On my own first trip to Europe, at the age of nineteen, I was on a pilgrimage to those same Hemingway shrines  thousands of others go to around the world only after reading about them in his work. Reveling in the romantic melancholy of the lost generation, I landed in Madrid lonely as hell and found a fourth-floor, two-dollar-a-night pension whose concierge was an old woman who received me with a dead, skinned rabbit in one hand. In the next room was a slender, dark French girl, two years older than I was, whose husband had run out on her after six weeks and left her without a peseta. She was beautiful in the way that many girls are beautiful when you're very lonely, and she was far lonelier than I, so I took her out for tapas and beer at a clean, well-lighted café like the one in the Hemingway short story, feeling quite the  magnanimous and protective American hero. I fell in love with her, of course, but two days later I had to leave for Paris and I never saw her again. It was. . . perfect.
   
     In Paris I headed for Montparnasse, overpaid for a Hemingway-inspired lunch at Brasserie Lipp, located Hemingway's first flat (fifth floor) in a building on the Rue Cardinal-Lémoine (below) where I leaned against the wall the way I saw him do in a famous Left Bank photo, found my college pennant at Harry's New York Bar where every American was drinking a bloody Mary, browsed the book stalls along the Seine, and longed to meet a woman like Lady Brett Ashley who would say to me, "Oh, darling, I've been so miserable."
    I've been back to Paris many, many times since then, but never felt quite the same way about it until I returned  with my wife and  son, who had just read The Old Man and the Sea in school. We stayed lavishly at The Ritz and The Crillon, ate in brasseries and deluxe dining rooms, and threaded our way through the back streets of Montparnasse in search of Hemingway.  One day I asked my son what he wanted to do--sail the model boats in the Luxembourg, descend into the vast, winding catacombs at Port-Mahon, or finding sinister gypsies at the Metro shops--but he said he was perfectly happy getting to know the Boulevards, strolling down the narrow Rue Mouffétard ("that wonderful narrow crowded market street which led into the Place Contrescarpe," Hemingway wrote), stopping each afternoon for a chocolate eclair at Pains et Plaisirs near the Place Vendôme, and watching Paris flood by from a café. He got it.
     Many of Papa's haunts are gone. The original Sloppy Joe's in Key West is now Capt. Tony's Saloon, while another bar, wholly unrelated to Hemingway, has appropriated the Sloppy Joe's name.   Marceliano's in Pamplona ("where the wood of the tables and the stairs is as clean and scrubbed as the teak decks of a yacht except that the tables are honorably wine-stained") has closed.   Le Dingo  ("Crazy Man") café in Paris, where Hemingway first met  Scott Fitzgerald, is now a Venetian restaurant called L'Auberge du Venise, and Michaud, in whose restroom Hemingway assured Fitzgerald he was anatomically sufficient, is now Brasserie L'Éscorailles. The seedy Le Trou dans Le Mur ("Hole in the Wall"), which Hemingway called "a hangout for deserters and for dope peddlers during and after the first war," on the Boulevard des Capucins has been turned into a Chinese restaurant.
    So much is so wonderfully intact though, and anyone following in Hemingway's footsteps today can get a very sure sense of a place from his writings.  The man's charming two-story Key West  house and writing room at 907 Whitehead Street, overrun with dozens of his eleven-toed cats is open to tourists, and his first walk-up apartment on Paris' Left Bank, at 74 Rue du Cardinal-Lémoine, was not long ago  up for sale for about $200,000.  When he and his first wife, Hadley, lived there he remembered their being "very poor and very happy," but later, when he could afford to stay at good hotels, he always booked the finest on the Right Bank.
  
  More than anywhere Hemingway's spirit is still palpable  in Paris, especially at the nexus of Boulevard Montparnasse and Boulevard Raspail, where the brasseries and cafés like Le Dôme, La Coupole, Le Select and La Rotonde (where the "the scum of Greenwich Village, New York, has been skimmed off and deposited")  vie for customers still in thrall with A Moveable Feast, The Sun Also Rises and other Hemingway's works. Sitting at one of these cafés it became, in Malcolm Cowley's words, "an event of the evening" to see the "tall, broad and handsome [Hemingway], usually wearing a patched jacket and sneakers and often walking on the balls of his feet like a boxer."  Le Dôme is now a splendid, old-fashioned seafood house, remodeled in 1986 but still possessing its art deco veneer. The room, with its murky black-and-white photos of celebrities from the early days, has the wonderful smell of coquillage--platters of oysters, shrimp and lobster brought to most every table with an endearing pomp. The food is very good and very simple--a fritture of whitefish with sauce tartare, a ruddy soupe des poissons, sweet grilled langoustine and firm, fleshy sole d'Ile.
     La Coupole looks little like it did in Hemingway's day. Once in danger of being razed, it was remodeled in 1988 but retains the landmark painted columns. Cavernous and always busy, with gobs of American tourists, La Couple serves fairly standard brasserie fare--choucroute garni, onion soup, a rather anemic lamb curry, and a good, rich cassoulet, all of it tasting better when accompanied by a glass of cold Alsatian lager or a bottle of Riesling. No one thinks of Cloiserie des Lilas for its food, but it's still one of the most vibrant cafés in Montparnasse, at whose tables Hemingway wrote "Big Two-Hearted River," where he read the Old Testament with John Dos Passos, and where the waiters took up a collection to help Hemingway pay for a painting he'd bought from a young artist named Miró.
     Brasserie Lipp is quite another thing. You can eat the exact same meal Hemingway described in A Moveable Feast--potatoes marinated in olive oil, cervelas sausage, and demi of beer--none of it very good. Lipp became famous for the famous people who have eaten here, not for its mediocre grub, and while the greeting at the door by owner Michael-Jacques Perroçon, grandson of Hemingway's friend, Marcellin Cazes, is a bit warmer to strangers these days, it still helps to arrive with a pretty girl to get a table downstairs, and some of the waiters do their job with the demeanor of men with aching teeth.
     After Hemingway started making good money from his writing, he crossed the Seine for his pleasures, staying at the two hotels that are still the very finest in Paris--the Ritz and the Crillon. While on assignment in 1944 for Collier's, Hemingway and a group of G.I.s "liberated" the Ritz on the Place Vendôme,  clearing out a pocket of German soldiers and celebrating by ordering 50 Martinis. After the war he frequented the "Little Bar" here, since enlarged and re-named "The Hemingway Bar," where bartender Colin Field still keeps Papa's memory burning and they play old 78 RPM records on the phonograph.
    Hemingway craved the glamor of The Ritz, which opened just a year before he was born, recalling the unalloyed pleasure he took "always haveing [sic] at least two bottles of Perrier Jouët in the ice bucket and the old Kraut Marlene [Dietrich] always ready to come in and sit with you while you shave." One night at The Ritz he stayed up until dawn drinking Scotch with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Today the Ritz has suites named after both Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, and its dining room, L'Espadon, down the long corridor of mirrors and display cases, has a glittering Regency formality that seems to swirl around you. It's easy enough to imagine Hemingway sitting down with Dietrich to a dish of buttery scrambled eggs with plenty of black truffles in puff pastry and remembering it for use in a story. The duck here is among the best in Paris, and the turbot cooked impeccably, all supported by a wine list ready to provide Papa with any bottle he desired.
     Only the Crillon's prospect over the Place de la Concorde (left) vies with the Ritz's for grandeur. "When I had money," said Hemingway, "I went to the Crillon," and the deluxe hotel--the only one still in French hands--is mentioned in several of his works, including "The Snows of Kiliminjaro."  It's a pretty swell place for a man to be stood up, as was Jakes Barnes by Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises.
    The Crillon's famous Long Bar, at which Hemingway often drank,  is now a restaurant, while the current bar flanks the Crillon's formal, very beautiful Les Ambassadeurs restaurant, with its shimmering mirrors and marble pillars.  The wine list is strong in Bordeaux, especially one of Papa's favorites--Mouton-Rothschild.
    When he was flush Hemingway favored the seafood at Prunier on the Rue Duphot, opened in 1872 by Alfred and Catherine Prunier and decorated in ravishing art nouveau style by Louis Marjorelle (only the bathrooms--with landmark status--remain intact). Prunier was the first to offer raw oysters in Paris and to import Russian caviar, and he courted American expatriates. In 1980 the restaurant was taken over by Jean-Claude Goumard, who re-named it Goumard-Prunier (now just Goumard), and it ranks with the best seafood restaurants in the world, having always exploited the market for the freshest possible fish--never more than 36 hours out of water and never touching ice.
    Goumard ennobles the humble cod with a bath of red wine and wild mushrooms, does a wonderful fritture of
sole, and the sautéed frogs' legs with pureed potatoes are addictive. But when Hemingway just wanted to meet friends for drinks, he, like every American since 1919, headed for Harry's New York Bar at 5 Rue Daunou (printed on the window, for Americans' benefit, as "SANK ROO DOE NOO").  Festooned with American college pennants, this birthplace of the Bloody Mary (under the name "Red Snapper") was where Hemingway once dragged an ex-welterweight and his defecating pet lion into the street for disturbing the customers--an incident that somehow gave the writer the courage to begin writing "A Farewell to Arms" about his World War I experiences as an ambulance driver in Italy.
   
     Hemingway's early memories of Italy were solely of survival and romance, not travel and eating, but by 1949 when he entered Venice as a literary giant, he ate and drank his way through the city's best hotels and restaurants, always taking a grand suite at the Gritti Palace that forms much of the setting for his 1950 novel Across the River and Through the Trees.  He also set scenes for that book at Harry's Bar (wholly unrelated to Harry's New York Bar in Paris)--"Then he was pulling open the door of Harry's bar and was inside and he had made it again, and was at home"--even making owner Giuseppe Cipriani a character in the book.  Cipriani took good care of the author, put him up at his locanda on the isle of Torcello where Hemingway could shoot ducks, once packed a ten-pound tin of caviar for Papa to take to a hamburger dinner, even drank with him--a rare thing for Cipriani to do with a customer. There's a photo above the bar of the two of them, looking painless in straw hats.
    Today Harry's is one of the most outrageously expensive restaurants in Italy, but its simple Venetian food alla Cipriani--the famous bellini cocktail and beef carpaccio (both created here), the green noodles with ham and cream sauce, the risotto in cuttlefish ink, and mile-high meringue desserts--is incomparable. With its signature low tables and chairs, the mad rush of waiters up and down the back stairs, and a clientele full of European royalty, artists, and rich elderly men with their beautiful young nieces, Harry's has worked hard to keep the atmosphere Hemingway knew so well alive.
    Hemingway's link to London was slight, but when he was there, he took to bed at The Dorchester, a hotel that still marries the best of old British tradition with twentieth century modernity. Its prospect over Hyde Park is glorious in all seasons, and the food at The Grill (below, right), with its curious Spanish decor, is still nonpareil--the fattest, most delicious Dover sole, the richest slabs of Prime rib with Yorkshire pudding and one of the best cheese tables in London.
  
   It was Spain that Hemingway loved most of all, from the days when he covered the Civil War that formed the backdrop for For Whom the Bell Tolls to his reportage on the bullfighting season of The Dangerous Summer, originally published in Life Magazine in 1960, then posthumously in 1985.  He liked nothing better than hanging out with matadors in papas bars from Pamplona to  Zaragoza, and he was always treated like royalty in Madrid, making his choice of hotels, The Palace, a natural. Commissioned by King Alfonso XIII in 1911 and completed within 18 months, it has recently been brought back to its original grandeur; the hotel sits opposite the Prado, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, the Plaza Neptuno and its direct competitor, The Ritz (left). Its Rotunda Hall, under a glorious glass dome, has been host to everyone from Hemingway and Ava Gardner to Placido Domingo and Bruce Springsteen.  Tables surround the lobby and offer a Mediterranean menu of unusual creativity, and the wine list brims with the best wines from every region of Spain.
      Walk up the street from The Palace to the Plaza Santa Ana and you'll find one of Papa's favorite surviving tapas bars, Cerveceria Alemana, decked out with photos of famous bullfighters he knew well. Papa would drink with them here while gobbling up a platter of Iberian ham, boiled shrimp with mayonnaise and crisp, potato salad, sweet squid fried with vinegar, and wash it all down with white mugs of Mahon beer. Cerveceria Alemana remains just like that, scruffy, fast-paced, unforgettable.

    But Hemingway's favorite restaurant, which he called "one of the best in the world" in The Sun Also Rises, is also one of the oldest in the world: Sobrino de Botin (below, right), amid the curving streets off the Plaza Mayor since 1725, has not changed its menu since Hemingway sat here scarfing up the most delicious suckling pig and baby lamb imaginable, carried in sizzling on platters and set down with a bottle of Rioja and a side order of green beans with slivers of ham.  The claustrophobic wine cellar is sought out by regulars, but the more spacious upstairs room is far more convivial, if overrun with American tourists.
   
    But that's the way it is with every place Hemingway stayed, ate, drank or wrote of. By transforming everything he did, everywhere he went and lived, and everything he ate and drank into art, he told us a truth proportionate to the breadth and depth of a man of insatiable appetites.  Despite the psycho-babble of revisionist critics who mistake Hemingway's complexity and insecurities as mere macho bravado, no one ever lived a more exciting life in so short a time.  Hell, a regimen of Prozac and a dose now and then of Viagra might have kept him working on those books later published (against his wishes) in unfinished form. He would have been 105 this year.
     Who ever visits a place solely because Noel Coward, Orson Welles, Pablo Neruda or even Scott Fitzgerald stayed or ate there?  Far beyond those authors' and others' ability to make a place memorable, Hemingway's greatest strength was his gift for enticing people to follow in his footsteps, to savor what he saw, ate and drank, and to feel what he felt, so that after visiting those places you could read again the opening line of his story "One Trip Across"--"You know how it is there early in the morning in Havana with the bums still asleep against the walls of the buildings; before the ice wagons come by with ice for the bars?"--and you can nod and say to yourself, yes, that's the way it is, that's the way Hemingway promised it would be.

      

NEW YORK CORNER
by John Mariani

MONTRACHET
239 West Broadway
212-219-2777

      To say that Montrachet sparked a revival of the area of south Manhattan known as TriBeCa (triangle Below Canal Street) is not true.  There really wasn't anything to revive when Drew Nieporent opened his handsome French restaurant there back in the mid-1980s.  At that time TriBeCa was a pretty awful place with little social activity on its decrepit streets and few restaurants of any note (the lovable Odeon and Capsouto Freres being the only two of note), so turning the lights onto West Broadway helped enormously to civilize the neighborhood.  After Montrachet received 3 stars from the New York Times soon after opening, the restaurant can be said to have helped gentrify what is now a very trendy and increasingly expensive neighborhood thronged with restaurants, including TriBeCa Grill. Layla and Nobu (all run by Nieporent's Myriad Restaurant Group), as well as Chanterelle, City Hall, Bouley, Danube, Harrison, F.lli Ponte, and Dominic.
     Montrachet's allures were many from the start:  It was a solid, unstuffy and quite serious French restaurant (whose named acknowledged its passion for Burgundy), its prices were reasonable, its location very grungy cool, and its host, Nieporent himself, who had trained at some of the haughtiest of French dining rooms, one of the most affable in NYC.  The wine list was one of the best in town, and the cooking, originally under David Bouley, and since, under several notable chefs that include stars like Debra Ponzek and its current resident , Chris Gesualdi, was always scrumptious, hearty, several cuts above bistro fare and never part of the exaggerated conceits of the then-fading nouvelle cuisine.  Montrachet thrived, the area got better, and Myriad became one of the most successful and influential restaurant developers in the U.S., especially after it opened Nobu, with the help of celebrity investors like Robert DeNiro.
    I shall leave it to others and another time to chart the soaring rise and gradual flattening out of Myriad's success, and I was always among the first to criticize Nieporent for his frequent absences from his flagship Montrachet.  But the restaurant has always done very well, both with a very regular crowd and a very wine savvy bunch who came for sommelier Daniel Johnnes' frequent and illustrious wine dinners.  Crunch time came recently, however, when the NY Times interim restaurant critic, Amanda Hesser, dropped Montrachet to two stars and seem to take personal aim at Nieporent for mishaps and insufficiencies.  It was an odd and quite damning review that stunned Nieporent.
    Always happy to return to Montrachet, I thought this a good opportunity to do so and to see if the restaurant's luster had fallen so far.  After a delightful evening there, in a room that seemed as full as ever (though Nieporent says business has never fully recovered after 9/11), I saw nothing to change my own estimation of Montrachet.  Since I loathe the star system (as does every self-respecting food writer), I will not comment on another's rating.  But I saw no drop-off of quality or service, and certainly no diminution of the wine list that would make me think twice about dining here.  Despite frequent changes of chef, Montrachet's kitchen has always remained true to form, as evident in Mr Gesualdi's wonderfully lusty braised tripe with roasted salsify, ennobled with black truffles. There was a fine crab soup with ginger and lemon grass, a delicious and perfectly cooked magret of duck with pomegranate and a green peppercorn sauce, and woodsy-tasting sweetbreads with pea puree, porcinis and asparagus.  I can't say I was raving about a pleasant Chilean sea bass "en barigoule" with Parmigiano cheese, but a filet of dorade with braised leeks and chanterelles gained spark from smoky lardons of bacon and aromatic mustard oil. Desserts ranged from the ubiquitous warm chocolate cake with pistachio ice cream and a croustillant of kiwi (haven't seen them in a while) and passion fruit.
     Prices at Montrachet are actually pretty remarkable: At a time when plenty of mediocre restaurants are edging their prices near $40 for a main course, Montrachet's range from $24-$30, with starters $11-$22 (the latter for foie gras), and desserts $10 and $11.  There's a 6-course tasting menu at $79, and $95 gets you 8 courses.  And there is hardly a wine you could possibly crave that Mr. Johnnes cannot provide.
    Montrachet never aimed to be the grandest of haute cuisine restaurants in New York, but it proved from the start that strikingly fine and delicious food could be found in an unpretentious setting that still never veered into either the trendy or the ultra-modern.  If many other NYC restaurants have come close to Montrachet's standards, it because Montrachet set them almost twenty years ago and still maintains them with a measured regard for all that passes for "creative cuisine" these days.  Nieporent and Myriad never reproduced anything like Montrachet anywhere else, and its other restaurants, except Nobu, have all been different from one another.  If you go to Montrachet now, it will be as you remembered it, as good as ever, the way it should be, the way you want it to be.

     
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WHICH MIGHT BE EXPLAINED BY THE FACT THAT THE CHEF DIED A YEAR AGO

“We noticed on visits made over the last few months that [chef] Steve DePietro, long the star of the kitchen, seemed to be absent, and entrees suffered without him.”—M.H. Reed, in a review of Il Cigno, New York Times (March 28, 2004).















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DOES THAT INCLUDE A LAP DANCE?

 Prices per bottle at Larry Flynt's Hustler Club in NYC vs retail price at a liquor/wine shop:

Hennessey VSOP  $325                       Retail: $37
Courvoisier XO     $500                       Retail: $100
Perrier-Jouët Rosé $850                       Retail: $130
Bombay Sapphire  $275                       Retail: $20

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* From October 17-29 John Mariani, publisher and editor of this newsletter, will be a host aboard the Crystal Serenity cruise ship, from Athens to Barcelona, with stops in Dubrovnik, Zadar, Venice, Taormina, Monte Carlo, and Barcelona.  On October 19 he will welcome guests for a cocktail reception and 6-course tasting menu with wines in the Private Vintage Room. On Oct. 26 he will host a dinner at La Chevre d'Or (two Michelin stars) in Monte Carlom with a 6-course meal with fabulous wines. Othe activities to be announced. For info call FESTIVALS AFLOAT at 1-800-297-8505.

* Sofitel and Lenôtre catering firm have launched  a "Paris Gourmet Package" designed to immerse guests in the world of French cuisine who will enjoy luxury accommodations (2, 3, or 4-night stays)  in Paris at one of eight Sofitel Demeure Hotels, with early check-in, late check-out, daily complimentary breakfast, welcome gift; a 4-hour cooking lesson at  Lenôtre’s Cooking School; either  lunch or dinner from a special tasting menu  in the restaurants of the hotels where they book their rooms. Guests staying 4 nights have the option of dining at Lenôtre’s Le Pré Catelan.    2 nights starting at $1,150; 3 nights, $1,415; 4 nights $2,135.  For details visit  www.sofitel.com.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: This newsletter is also available on the very comprehensive food site www.sautewednesday.com
which has dozens of other links to food articles from around the world.  New York Corner reviews are also available at
 www.nycvisit.com/johnmariani

MARIANI'S VIRTUAL GOURMET NEWSLETTER is published weekly.  Editor/Publisher: John Mariani. Contributing Writers: Robert Mariani,  Naomi  Kooker, Kirsten Skogerson,  Edward Brivio, Mort Hochstein, Lucy Gordan. Contributing Photographers: Galina Stepanoff-Dargery,  Bobby Pirillo. Technical Advisor: Gerry McLoughlin.

 John Mariani is a columnist for Esquire, Wine Spectator, Diversion and the Harper Collection. He is author of The Encyclopedia of American Food & Drink (Lebhar-Friedman), The Dictionary of Italian Food and Drink (Broadway), and, with his wife Galina, the award-winning new Italian-American Cookbook (Harvard Common Press).   To  purchase from amazon.com, click on the image below.

copyright John Mariani 2004