Alone at home in his trackpants and old Siouxsie t-shirt, Murray Chalmers thinks back to another world of ‘posh’ dining with the world’s beautiful people
“Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone” is not only a line from one of Joni Mitchell’s most well-known songs, Big Yellow Taxi, it’s also a signifier of our current times.
We’re all now getting used to a new world, one in which freedoms we took for granted just aren’t available. Living alone at disorientating times like this I retreat into my mind, helped greatly by music, books, films and art (of course I have Instagram, WhatsApp, wine and my friend David next door for those non-hermetically sealed moments).
Culture may not put food on the table but it sure provides nourishment for the soul. But still, when the night comes around, one’s thoughts inevitably turn to food – in fact when the day breaks our thoughts turn to food also. Actually, let’s be honest, we think about food every damn moment of the day right now!
When I think about dinner though, just around the time I wonder if it’s wine hour SOMEWHERE in the world, is often when my thoughts turn to restaurants, wonderful inventions that combine food, friendship, allure and pleasure into a beautiful package that can cost as little as £40. What an elusive bargain that seems right now.
Already restaurants seem such exotic creations, don’t they? Places where you don’t just slob from bed to bath to workspace to table in your Adidas trackpants and an old Siouxsie t-shirt, and then do it all in reverse in the evening; places where there’s buzz and laughter and glamour and joy; places where you can snog the face off a bottle of Chianti as you look at your loved one adoringly. Oh wait, have I got that the wrong way round? Oh, and in restaurants someone else cooks the food for you AND no one has to argue about the washing up.
So this column today is a wistful nod to some of my best restaurant experiences. I am in no way ignoring, negating or downplaying the severity of our current situation but the truth is we all watch the news and we all are doing our best to make the most of a bad situation. So to write JUST about the hardships we’re all facing would be both unnecessary and unwanted. Just as so many friends seem to be going through their photo collections (who knew photographs existed in hard copies, stuffed in a suitcase in the wardrobe, for so many people?) I’ve been going through some random restaurant memories in my head, a precursor to good times that we all hope will return before too long.
Firstly, a bit of background to help explain. From 1985 my main job has been working with musicians and singers, helping promote their careers. It’s given me a lot of pleasure, mainly because I get to work with creative artists who I greatly admire. But it’s also meant I’ve travelled the world and eaten in a lot of great places that would seem unreachable to the kid who, in 1965, faced a new life in Lochee with his mother and an infestation of bugs so bad our two-room flat had to be fumigated before we moved in. Happily there were no bugs in the outside toilet we shared with five other flats.
So the fact I work with some well-known people will mean some of what follows might be classed as name-dropping, something I try to avoid but which is inevitable here in the telling of the stories.
Please forgive me and know that as I type this I sit in isolation with my house smelling of a vat of boiling chickpeas, with an adopted elderly cat biting me because I can’t get to M&S to get the chicken thighs she prefers. Glamour is in the eye of the beholder.
Memorable dinners
My most obviously glamorous meal was actually quite recently in the Ritz dining room, often called the most beautiful dining room in London. I am here to confirm that it is. In the middle of a day of promotion at the hotel I had asked pop superstar Kylie Minogue if she wanted me to order food from room service but, throwing schedule to the wind, she decided that we should eat in the hotel dining room.
The trouble is they have a strict dress code at the Ritz and while Kylie looked like a million dollars, some of her gang – myself leading the renegade way – quite frankly didn’t. Negotiations took place through me to no avail but of course it was Kylie herself who swung it, somehow managing to get the hotel to give us a table which was both private and yet very much part of the intrinsic glamour of the room. The staff were wonderful, the food was superlative and the company was obviously great. It was a landmark lunch and one made all the better by the fact it was spontaneous, special and had an air of the illicit about it.
My most nerve-wracking dinner was probably one thrown by Hedi Slimane who was the groundbreaking designer at Dior Homme from 2000 to 2007. I was in Paris with the Pet Shop Boys and Janet Street-Porter – I think we had gone specially for Hedi’s show as it was such a big deal at the time – and we were invited to the celebratory dinner after the show.
I should have suspected that I would be the only non-famous person in the room and that also I wouldn’t be seated next to my friends. In truth I had no idea who would be there. It’s probably enough illustration of the scale of the dinner to say that opposite me at the table was Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger; last to arrive and seated a few spaces to my right was fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld, who arrived with fan a-flutter. I confess that my legs were shaking under the table. Nevertheless I got through the night with reasonable aplomb, my only near miss being when a fellow diner asked me to pass the red wine and I reached towards the bottle in front of Mick Jagger only to hear one of my companions mouth to me “ just not THAT one”.
Most of my funniest restaurant moments I remember are those that have been with close friends when we’ve howled with laughter throughout the meal. I still remember when my friend David stole a pepper-grinder from a then uber-cool restaurant in New York. That in itself wouldn’t be that amusing – in 1993 everyone who went to Terence Conran’s newly relaunched Quaglinos would “acquire” one of their iconic ashtrays.
But to this day David proudly claims he stole the pepper grinder in New York as an act of class war and animal activism, and who am I to question that?
The incident with the pepper grinder
At the time the swanky China Grill was one of the hippest places in New York, and one that was almost impossible to get a reservation for. I have no idea how we managed it but we got in – maybe it was our “cute accents”.
The soaring space was truly magnificent, as was, sadly, the equally lofty attitude of some of the staff on duty that night. We instantly felt a little bit out of place, to be honest. It might have been that strange sense of being underdogs that many Brits used to get on their first visits to the Big Apple – the buzz, the glamour, the choice, the ambition all made even London seem like a village, and not a particularly global one at that.
Maybe it was the fact that the restaurant staff all seemed to have walked from the pages of a fashion magazine via central casting. Or maybe it was our British teeth or our distinctly un-posh attire.
Whatever – there was a frisson of fear as we perused the expensive menus, and that’s before we realised that they contained so many things we had never heard of (this was 30 years ago, before we were all world travellers and au fait with stuff like Manchego, mozzarella and mortadella). These were the days when you’d bring back Calvin Klein underwear to replace your British passion-killers, and toothpaste from Duane Reade because all we had here was bicarb or soot, or so it seemed.
Anyway, we got very drunk during the dinner and suddenly felt fearless, even in the face of our annoying waiter who managed to combine disdain, disinterest and mild disgust into performance art.
“Do you guys need help with the menu?” he rasped, actually more an accusation than an offer. “Ask me anything you want because I know everything” he beamed.
He then pointed out a tank of live lobsters across the other side of the room, gleefully announcing that we could pick our lobster and then watch it be removed to be cooked for us. David, not quite the confrontational creature that he would become in later life, sat seething with Geordie resentment as he realised he was suddenly part of a potential killing spree on W 53rd St.
The meal passed lobster-less and without an uprising. Buckets of expensive American Chardonnay gave us the confidence of Tory minister Jacob Rees-Mogg opening a bottle of vintage claret from his cellar like it was Buckfast. We survived.
Afterwards as we settled the bill the waiter scrupulously checked that we had tipped enough money before deciding on his level of obsequiousness to bid us farewell into the inky Manhattan night. We even got a pursed smile.
When we left David seemed inordinately pleased with himself. He unbuttoned his jacket which he had been clutching to his chest. Inside was a pepper grinder of such gargantuan proportions, the one that our waiter had stupidly left on our table after he’d managed to make even grinding pepper into a battle of wills.
How David managed to slip this monster into his jacket and walk out without anyone noticing, myself included, is a small wonder of the world for me.
“Why did you do that?” I asked, veering between horror, fear and respect.
“Well”, said David, “That smug bloody waiter might have known everything but what even he didn’t know is that I’d stolen his precious pepper grinder from right beneath his stuck-up, pursed nose”.
