Food

THE head waiter’s beard bristles as he takes our order in a slightly sinister manner. ”Would it be possible,” I ask politely, ”to turn the heating up a little?” One of our party has just arrived from Los Angeles and is feeling the cold.

”No,” he barks. ”It’s at maximum power.” Not for the first time I wonder how on earth people get into jobs for which they are manifestly not suited. An experienced head waiter would deal with the problem more gracefully. He would beam his co-operation, say ”certainly, sir”, twiddle with the control and allow our imaginations to do the rest.

Such subtlety is beyond our friend. Nor can he let matters rest. By now he has the look of a villainous walrus. His small powerful body is hunched in an attitude of pure hatred. ”Too many people,” he says with a bluntness that could be described as offensive, ”sit on top of their coal fires.”

A LETTER arrived from Warsaw this week. At least, it was a belated Christmas card that had somehow grown into something bigger, an epistle of six pages jotted down between times by my old friend Stas, running from one card on to another and then on to writing paper.

FOR EVERY pub discussion I’ve heard about why Guinness tastes better in Ireland I wish I had the proverbial quid. That it does so is a starting point accepted without argument: it is a creamier pint.

The theories are numerous, nowhere more so than in Ireland itself. They say that at St James’s in Dublin the brewers have a mystic secret that has eluded their counterparts in Park Royal, London. It’s the Liffey water. The Irish version is not pasteurised. The Irish drink so much of it that constant movement out of the keg keeps the stout in tip-top condition. Publicans must look after their stout better because an informed public would accept nothing else.

From the Arnold Kemp archive

SOMEWHERE in the Italian lakes, perhaps, a tall and portly head waiter called Philippo is presiding theatrically over an elegant, fashionable,
and suitably expensive restaurant. In my mind’s eye I can see him clearly against a background of lake and mountain, and can hear the     
rolling cadences as he tells some party of diners about the day’s bill of fare. What he does not know is that he almost certainly if indirectly inspired a character in the latest Rumpole by John Mortimer.     

Philippo used to be head waiter at the Malmaison, Glasgow, in the last days of that famous restaurant which for so long was effortlessly the best in Scotland. It was about 10 years ago that I first made his acquaintance when I went there to dine with a party of friends.