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SEX EDUCATION À LA JAPONAISE

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Next Friday, November 28, 2014

UNDERNEATH HER CLOTHES

You might think that the glamour photographers who shoot the nudes would be devoid of any such male fantasies. After all, what would remain to fantasize about when you see the most beautiful women in their most seductive attributes through your lens and watch them prancing around the studio in the nude, day in and day out?

Tags Geishas, Lee Hall, Ray Falk, Sake, Shabu Shabu, Shueisha Inc, Tadashi Wakana, Yastaka Sasaki, Yuko Kato

Categories Corporate Matters, Culture, Food & Wine, Japan, Social Customs, Travel

UNLOVED IN THE LANDS OF L’AMORE L’AMOUR

November 13, 2014 //

Haresh Shah

My Not So Intimate Encounters With Italy And France

The first time I landed in the land of Ciao Bella and O sole mio, they dumped our baggage on the tarmac next to the aircraft, barely said sorry and told us we would have to carry it to the terminal ourselves – that the ground personnel had just decided to go on a strike. A bit different story when I first arrived at Charles de Gaulle in Paris. I am met at the airport by Gerrit Huig and the editorial assistant Ann Scharffenberger. They talk me into and I unwittingly agree to drive us through the city in our rented little Citroën. Though I had taken lessons in driving a car with manual transmission, this is my first time trying it out without an instructor sitting next to me. I haven’t yet gotten the knack of synchronizing the gears with the accelerator and the breaks. The car would shudder, stall and come to an abrupt stop in the middle of swirling rush hour traffic. Happens several times on the Arc de Triumph round-about. I get furious faces, obscene yelling that I don’t understand, French version of the finger and then silly mocking giggles from my two passengers. But I somehow manage to survive both welcomes. Not exactly j’taime.

Now years later, I wonder whether my first flights into Milan and Paris were symbolic of my not so close relationships with the romance lands. I can’t even remember how I was welcomed when I first flew into Rome years later. Quite in contrast to the recent Lufthansa ad proclaiming: Seduced by Paris. Inspired by Rome. And I can see why. What is there not to love about the countries with the history so rich, the languages so sweet and sexy, so languid and full of l’amore and l’amour. And yet, no matter how many trips I would end up taking to the either over the next two decades, they never warmed up to me. Likewise, as natural as I am with learning languages, as hard and long as I have tried to learn the Italian and the French, they both have eluded me.

And so have the people. Beyond the business, people just went home. Of course there were some dinners and a bit of socializing now and then, but by and far when I think of the huge amount of time I spent in Milan, Paris and Rome, what I remember the most are the evenings when I often found myself sitting in elegant restaurants all by myself, slowly savoring their delicious Euro-Mediterranean cuisine, sipping on their exquisite wines and contemplating life. In Paris, when I finally managed to get Annick Geile, the editor-in-chief of the French edition out to lunch, while we have hardly set down at our outdoor table, she turns her wrist to look at her watch, and as if talking to herself, whispers: my days are divided in segments of twenty minutes. The message was as clear as can be. Though I wondered how many segments I was allotted, I totally ignored her utterance as if I didn’t even hear it.

While I still lived in Munich, I couldn’t wait to return back to my home town every weekend, catching that around eight o’clock flight back. How could you be in one of the three most alluring cities in the world and not want to spend weekends there? Especially if you have to be back first thing Monday morning, and you’re staying in some of the most exclusive hotels and every penny you spend is paid for?

Because, after you have seen all of the historical monuments; passed through Duomo umpteen times, admired the glamour of the Scala, climbed up and down the Spanish Steps, sprawled St. Peter’s Square in Vatican, have been in awe of the Coliseum and have crossed the river Tiber in Rome and paid your tribute to the Notre-Dame, smirked back at Mona Lisa in Louvre, looked down at the breathtaking view of the city of light from the top of the Eiffel Tower and gawked and wished at the shop windows along Champs Elysees and have sat in enough cafes and restaurants all by yourself, you are done with them. For who I am, I can barely begin to relate to the places without meaningful connection to their people.

Not that I didn’t try to connect, but then you learn that like love and friendship, people either click or they don’t. And the sad truth remains, we just didn’t.

Ironically, my most memorable weekend in Italy remains to be the rain drenched and bone cold long Easter weekend I spend with Rainer and Renate (Wörtmann)in their newly acquired Mill House in Tuscany’s Pontremoli. Not Rome, nor Milan.

My memories of Paris are not that dismal. Walking around by yourself in Paris is a different kind of experience. Even with no other human being walking next to you, the city itself accompanies you wherever you choose to walk, especially the left banks of Seine and along the cafes of Boulevard Saint Germain, conjuring up the lives of some of my favorite authors. Françoise Sagan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir. And then Earnest Hemingway, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald and Henry Miller. Just thinking of them you could while away a snifter or two of excellent French Cognac or the cooling tall glasses of Pastis. They all come alive at every step in Paris. But in Rome and Milan? Nah! The only one I could think of is Alberto Moravia and his The Woman of Rome. Probably also because I have had a pleasure of shaking hands with him after a speech by him in the courthouse gardens of the University of Bombay.

In the backdrop of my non-relational acquaintance with Milan and Rome, the two cities I least looked forward returning to, it was then quite amazing for me to hear the following story almost twenty years after my last trip to Italy.

It was two years ago when Jan (Heemskerk) came on a visit to Chicago, we got together with some Playboy old-timers to reminisce the shared déjà vu. Among them, Arthur Kretchmer, the recently retired editorial director of the US Playboy. As much as I respected the man the super editor, Arthur and I at the very best had mostly perfunctory professional relationship. But Jan and him got along really well and so we meet Arthur at his favorite restaurant The Indian Garden on Chicago’s Devon Avenue – a stretch of which is also named Gandhi Marg. With Arthur, it’s mostly him talking and you listening. And so it was during the lunch. Just his very presence intimidated me, creating an atmosphere of speak only when spoken to. So it were Jan and Arthur conversing with me pushed in the background. But somewhere along the line, I got to interject and now having acquired distance of time, I confessed, I was always intimidated by you.

‘You should have been.’ He answered and even though I would have liked to know precisely why, I left it at that. But then Arthur decides to smooth things over and asks me: Do you remember Mario in Rome?

Of course I do. In Italy, Playboy’s trajectory included three different publishers. We started out with Rizzoli in Milano. Some years later, the magazine was moved to another legendary Italian publishing family, Mondadori. Or more precisely, to the independent Georgio Mondadori, who had split from his family to go solo. When that relationship didn’t quite work out, the magazine was licensed to Edizioni Lancio SPA, in Rome. Also family owned – albeit much smaller. Lancio specialized in photo novellas that were and probably still are extremely popular all over the world. Curiously, in India, those novellas were distributed by my uncle Jaisukh’s Wilco Publishing Company, which is where I had first started learning the ropes of the publishing, when a teenager.

Lancio proclaimed the re-launch to be Nuova Edizione Italiana. The new Playboy in Italy had a semblance of small editorial team under the mild mannered aging journalist, Alvaro Zerboni, but it was the company’s president Michele Mercurio who wielded the total control over the pages of the magazine. From the very first meeting it became clear to me that Lancio was not the right kind of publishers for our beloved bambino. The years that I was subjected to work with them, we constantly collided over what direction the edition should take. As diplomatic as I would try to be, we never came around to see eye to eye, thus creating a constant tension between Rome and Chicago. Being able to develop any sort of personal rapport never even came into the play.

Even so, I was accorded a certain protocol like status. Always being picked up from the airport and brought back in the company Mercedes Benz sedan by Mario. Picked up from the hotel and whenever needed brought back also in the Benz. Mario barely spoke any English, but I was trying hard to learn the Italian. So other than the editor in chief Alvaro Zerboni, my real human face of Rome was Mario, a very pleasant, ever smiling of the angular round face, very white of the skin and of a stocky built, he played the role that of the executive chauffer, a messenger and a sort of unofficial PR person for his employers. Mario for one, had high curiosity level and the fact that he spoke no English and I spoke only rudimentary Italian never inhibited him from asking me questions and manage somehow to wrangle out answers from me in my odd mélange of Italian, Spanish and English. He was interested in me. He was interested in the mystic of India. He was charming and sweet in the way Italians can be and somehow felt close to me. I liked him and he liked me. But that was the extent of it. The rule was that his schedule was determined by Michele’s executive secretary Christina Schlogel and had to have her command for him to ferry me around, he often took it upon himself to pick me up or bring me to the airport even over the weekends. For which he did get into the trouble with Christina for a couple of times. But he sloughed it off with a hearty laugh.

‘Of course I know Mario,’ I answered Arthur.

‘You know, he really liked you?’

‘Yah, probably he was the only one, other than of course poor Alvaro.’

To that Arthur begins to tell the following story. Which he would repeat a year and a half later in an email before answering my queries for the blog entry Perfectly Unbound.

But even before that, I have a little ‘playboy story’ for you. The 2nd or 3rd time that Patricia and I were in Italy in the early ’90’s — so ’93 (probably 1994) would be my guess — I met Don and Louisa Stuart as well as the Mercurio’s. For a reason I no longer remember, I ended up being driven somewhere in the Lancio Mercedes 300E by their driver.

I spoke a small amount of Italian. He spoke no English. As we rode along, he asked me some questions that I stumbled through. When he figured out that I was with Playboy, the next question he asked was if I knew Haresh Shah.

I said yes. He rattled off a bunch of Italian that I didn’t get, but ended on a partial sentence that I understood to the effect that Haresh Shah was a wonderful man.

I did my best to acknowledge your wonderfulness in Italian when he said, in hesitant English, “When Haresh come… the best food, the best wine, the best girls.” He waved his hand in the air, and didn’t say another word.

Good old Mario. He really did like me:). Who am I to argue with his perception of me? Thanks Mario. True or false, it even impressed Arthur and he remembered to tell it to me almost twenty years later.

© Haresh Shah 2014

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

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THE NAIL THAT STUCK OUT

Deru kui wa utareru, literally means: The nail that sticks out, gets hammered down! This aptly defines the psychology of the group in the Japanese society. To be different is to be hammered down. In the society where individuality has no place, I knowingly decided to commit the ultimate social faux pas, at the risk of alienating my Japanese hosts.

Tags Anick Geile, Arthur Kretchmer, Edizioni Lancio, Gerrit Huig, Jan Heemskerk, Mario, Michele Mercurio, Milan, Paris, Rainer Wörtmann, Rome

Categories Culture, Food & Wine, France, Italy, Loneliness, Memoire, Playboy, Profile, Women

PORK, DUMPLINGS AND CABBAGE

February 6, 2014 //

And The Power Of The Power Before And After The Communism

Haresh Shah

‘So what are some of the Czech specialties?’

‘We only have three.’

‘And they are?’

‘Pork, dumplings and cabbage. Dumplings, pork and cabbage and cabbage, dumplings and pork.’ Answers Ivan (Chocholouš) and breaks out in a big laugh.

‘And of course there is Svíčková…’ he continues. Which is not as common to come by.

Every time I return to Prague, my dilemma remains the same. What to eat? There are other things on the menu – klobasa? Breaded and fried chicken breasts? Fried cheese? Fruit dumplings? But time and time again, Ivan will make me take the U turn and order Vepřo, Knedlo, Zelo. By now he knows my taste. More like my sensitivity to the fat contents and the toughness of the meat normally served by most of the local restaurants. Pork, dumplings and cabbage being the national dish, the chances are that in a good restaurant the cut they serve would be tender compared to the neighborhood hospodas.

This is the late spring of 1990. Mere seven months since the Velvet Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Most of the restaurants are still owned and operated by the State, where the quality level of the ingredients is far below the accepted standards of even the cheapest places across the border, say in Austria and Germany. I am having hard time with the fat-filled meat tough as leather. For someone who grew up in a staunch vegetarian family, in early days in the West, I would find even the tender most filet mignon a bit hard to swallow. What they served up in the Czech restaurants during those early days at the end of the communism, was not something I looked forward to.

I have similar problem in Hungary every time I visit Budapest. And would in Warsaw, Poland a couple of years later. Even though the Berlin wall didn’t fall until November of 1989, the Hungarians had already began to disregard the constraints of the communism almost a year before when the first inquiry from the couple of Hungarian born and now living in the States venture capitalist landed on my desk, expressing desire to launch a Hungarian edition of Playboy. John and Eva Bryer had somehow managed to escape to Austria and onto the United States following the Hungarian revolution of 1956, in the fashion of the cold war breath taking suspense story, making it good across the ocean. Now in their middle age, they brought us young and ambitious independent Hungarian publisher, Deszo Futasz, who had already been publishing the Hungarian edition of IMG’s Computer World magazine, which lead to Playboy licensing its first edition behind what was still considered to be the iron curtain.

On my first trip to Budapest in the spring of 1989, I was very much looking forward to the authentic Hungarian Goulash – a spicy paprika doused meat stew served on the bed of spätzle.Something I had loved when I lived and worked in Offenburg in Germany and something I frequently ordered at the Bahnhof Restaurant and at Engel where I would meet my Hungarian friend Sinaida for lunch. But when I ordered it in Budapest, it was nothing like what I remembered it to be. First of all, it wasn’t spicy at all. A bit watered down even and bland. The meat tough with rinds of fat around it. Something I just couldn’t stomach. Wiener Schnitzel contained pork instead of traditional tender veal. Even in better hotels and restaurants, it was tough going. As good a wine as Hungary makes, not up until later did I get to taste them. The saving grace in Czechoslovakia were their excellent beers like Pilsner Urquell, original Budweiser and the local Staropramen.

In the neighborhood restaurants, you’re greeted with small flimsy squares of disintegrating tissues that passed for napkins. Even McDonalds had better napkins, but unlike in the States, they were rationed to one with each order. Once I commented on them to Kirke’s Mirek Drozda, who along with his wife Mirka, runs a graphic arts studio-come stock photo agency.

‘Compared to what we used to have, this is luxury.’ Mirek says to me and then picking up his napkin proceeds to tear it at the folded creases and piles on the table the resulting four pieces.

‘This is what we got before the revolution!’ What could one say?

When I launched the first edition behind the former Iron Curtain country Hungary, as was my tradition, I had invited all European editors to attend the inauguration. We were all staying at Hilton up the hill on the Buda side of the Danube. Once it must have been a luxurious hotel and it still boasted five stars, but at a closer look you realize that the place has long been neglected and is in dire need of repair with peeling wall paints and battered and old cheap looking furniture. Sad remnants of the glory long past of the Austro-Hungarian empire of fin-de-siècle. When I get out of the shower and am getting ready, I realize that I have run out of my hand and body lotion and hope to buy some from the lobby shop downstairs.

Just then I hear a knock on my door. Standing outside in his pajamas is our German editor-in-chief Andreas Odenwald. He is holding in his hands a mangled and squeezed-out of-it-the-last-drop, a blue tube of Nivea moisturizing cream.

‘I need some cream.’ He says.

‘I do too, I’m afraid.’ I grab the empty plastic bottle from the bathroom, turn it upside down and squeeze it to the hollow sound. Not a drip. We break out laughing.

Having checked out the hotel kiosk and not finding any, Andreas and I venture out in search of Nivea. I still remember looks on our faces as we stood in the middle of the empty shelves of a drogerie. Forget about the imported Nivea, there wasn’t anything there that even came closer to a hand cream. Such an unnecessary bourgeois waste!

Little over a year later, I am in Prague. I split my stay between Forum ( now Hotel Corinthia) which is five star modern, prim an proper like any other international chain and then at U tři Pstrosu, a small boutique hotel on the Mala Strana. It is certainty a charming little place. Followed by even a smaller and cozier jewel box of seven room B & B, U raka, near the Prague castle. It is owned by a husband and a wife team. He is a photographer and his wife, an artist. The main floor, which is also a large open hall, showcases both of their works. Quite impressive. The place is a walled enclave with well groomed small Japanese garden and even smaller detached structure by the huge main gate that serves as the reception, the breakfast room, the lounge and the kitchen. It’s a true B & B where they take your breakfast orders the night before. The husband gets in his car every morning, drives to the closest German border and picks up fresh supply – mainly fresh fruits and other produce. My friend Susi from Munich has joined me, who’s crazy about fresh fruits, yogurts.

But in-between, probably at Ivan’s recommendation, I want to try out one of the communist era’s landmarks, Hotel Praha. When Ivan tells me that prior to the party bosses having decided to build themselves a concrete monument, the property was a vast and a beautiful park called Petschkova zahrada, loved and enjoyed by everyone. He remembers the park fondly and with a certain sense of sadness – the place he used to visit during his childhood. There were of course many protests against them razing their beloved park. But to no avail. As my good old Mom would have said: prudence doesn’t work against the power. Or as Joni Mitchell so aptly sums up in her song: They paved paradise, to put up a parking lot.

Built at the total cost of 800 million Czech crown, all of its 136 rooms have a view of the Prague Castle. Opened in 1981, at the height of the communist regime’s glory days, it was not opened to the public but was exclusively meant to accommodate the high ranking party officials as well as the foreign dignitaries and was the home to the Communist Chapter of Czechoslovakia. The Velvet Revolution of of 1989, caused the hotel to be taken over by the city administration and they ran the place up until the year 2000. Beyond that it would be taken over by the corporate giants Falcon Capital and turn it into a luxury hotel in an attempt to recapture the country’s most recent history and possibly the nostalgia.

So here I am, in January of 1991, residing in an impressive, albeit totally run down building. It has the reception area vast as an arena, looking dark and desolate because of the lack of anything to fill the space. Elsewhere it would have been a bustling lobby bar. The high ceilings make the space look even emptier. And the rounded palatial stairs leading down to the ballrooms and other conference halls, devoid of any human traffic are engulfed in the gloomy dimness. And then there is a swimming pool, with the vast body of water looking like a sinister black hole.

Ivan tells me that those stairs used to hold fashion shows, with the audience looking up and the models descending those stairs in their dainty little steps, stopping and taking their bows. Definitely the pride and joy of the communist regime, where they entertained foreign and local dignitaries and accommodated them in one of their rooms. I could certainly imagine the grandeur of the days past. Fortunately, I could see for myself, how awesome the place could have been, when years later in my post-Playboy days, working with Ivan at Mona, he would hold one of the company Christmas parties there with about a thousand guests and cornucopia of food and booze, music and dance. And what I remember the most is how elegant all the women looked in their long and glittery outfits. And how absolutely breathtaking it was to watch them descend one step at a time with their long dresses billowing so seductively. Especially, my co-creator in making of Esmeralda special, Alice Sedliská wrapped up in her floating green dress in the image of Leticia Calderon in the title role.

But let me take you back in time and in to my room. Having ridden into a sluggish ascending elevator and walk through dimly lit corridor, the room reminds me of my room at the Indian Student Hostel on Fitzroy Square in London. A single bunk like bed flush with the corner, a desk and a chair stacked against the right wall. I am not sure if there is an armchair of sorts. Fortunately, there is a full size window overlooking the garden and the Prague Castle, of which the hotel is so proud. My London room had a sink, but we had to use communal toilets and showers. My room at Praha is equipped with a bathroom of its own. Their breakfast buffet is meager even by the eastern European standards. It’s crying out for tender loving care and some well invested hard cash. Though it stands in the prestigious residential quarter of Prague 6, when you put it in perspective, it is tucked away in the remote corner, far away from the glitter and the glory of the city that calls itself Zlata Praha – the Golden Prague.

The irony of it all is: Thanks to the privatization of the place, up until a year ago, it had become one of the Prague’s alternative luxury hotels at $300+ a night rooms. Even Tom Cruise stayed there during the filming of Mission Impossible 4, and loved it. And just as the people of the country had began to accept it as a monument to its recent communist history, in early 2013, the hotel was abruptly closed down without explanation, leaving guests with reservations stranded and scrambling for rooms elsewhere. The new owner, Petr Kellner, of PPF, said to be the richest man of the country plans to demolish the hotel and put up in its place an upscale school to be named Open Gate. There has been protests against it, but once again – this time around, not only the power but also talking is the clanging cash.

© Haresh Shah 2014

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

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Next Friday, February 14, 2013

THE PEEPING TOMS

If you’re lucky, it’s only once in a life time that you meet a person quite like Franz Hermann Gomfers, let alone call him your friend. Here was the man, for whom everyday of his life was a Karneval. Yes, like in Rio. But he would argue it to be the one in Köln. It wouldn’t be fair to compare his parties to that Playboy mansion’s. FHG as we called him, had a style of his own.

Tags Berlin Wall, Czechoslovakia, Deszo Futasz, Eastern Europe, Eva Bryer, Hotel Praha, Hungary, Ivan Chocholouš, John Bryer, Velvet Revolution

Categories Communism, Czechoslovakia, Food & Wine

WHO’S EVER SEEN GOD?

January 23, 2014 //

Body And Soul Union

Haresh Shah

Actually our destination this Sunday is Las Mañanitas, more in line with an all day weekend outing for Playboy executives to spend a leisurely afternoon in the lush gardens of one of the most beautiful hotels and restaurants in the world. Enjoy sumptuous Mexican delicacies washed down with Tequila Sunrises and Daiquiris. Only a short half an hour drive from Mexico City, the town of Cuernavaca is heralded the City of Eternal Spring by the geographer, naturalist and explorer, Alexander von Humboldt, is a perfect escape from the dense clouds of pollution, swarms of crowds and the constant dint of noise of Mexico City. It is the pride and joy not only of the town of Cuernavaca, but of the entire country. We sit under the open sky and under the cooling shades of the trees and sip on our psychedelic tropical drinks. We are surrounded by the tall royal birds among them the proud peacocks gracefully prancing up and down with their iridescent tails spread out into magnificent round throne like fans. Prancing along are other long necked beautiful birds swaying and strolling while jumping monkeys frolic up and down the tree branches. It feels like being in paradise, the garden of Eden as one would picture it. The only other time I would come upon such an exotic place would be several years later on my first visit to Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles.

Feeling euphoric, soon as we are settled, a waiter comes by, carrying a huge blackboard and sets it down on the ground. On it the menu of the day is listed in colorful and curlicued script. We order and then continue with our drinks. In no hurry to go anywhere, just letting ourselves loosen up and enjoy the moment. Time slips by and then we are invited to the table all set up for us on the terrace shaded with bright and vibrant umbrellas. The food! The food!!! This is my very first trip to Mexico, which was originally meant to be just a short orientation thing, but as has been with my life, it stretches into almost three weeks. Work! What else? I am required to dive right into the thick of it, as I had to several years earlier in Germany. And so I do.

The people I am working with are wonderful partners and the hosts. This is the rewards part of the hard work. Our taste buds are treated to the fat succulent camarones con ajos, and fresh red snappers and carne asada replete with Mexican flavors of chili and cilantro and lime. No hard taco shell anywhere in sight, like back in the USA. I didn’t know anything about the TexMex and the CalMex part of what I had come to think of as the authentic Mexican food. Soft shell flautas at McGill’s in Isla Vista washed down with XXX beer is as far as I had come to know of the Mexican cuisine. So it turns out to be the most deliciously pleasant surprise.

I am brought here by Carlos Civita, the partner of our Mexican publishers, Ampudia family of Editorial Caballero. Carlos, of the famed Civita family originally from Italy, but known for their publishing empire Editorial Abril in Argentina. During the political upheaval there, the family just decided to cash in and leave. His father, Cesar Civita is now living in New York City while Carlos has taken up residence in Mexico City. The delightful bunch, some of the most wonderful people I have ever been fortunate enough to know. Carlos basically takes me under his wing and the very first weekend that I am in Mexico City, he just hands me the keys to his little Renault, so I get to explore the city on my own. Now when I think back, it could well have been a disaster. Because driving in Mexico City is not exactly like driving in Chicago or even New York. Its more like Bombay and Saigon where the chaos and survival of the fittest reigns supreme. Not to mention extra attention I needed to pay to the car’s manual transmission. I remember, how the little Renault shuddered and came to a stand still right in the middle of a square with hundreds of cars zapping by and not paying any attention to stranded me. Not even the cops nearby directing traffic budge an inch. Somehow I survive and get the thing going again. I won’t even mention how many times I got lost during that weekend.

But the weekend after, he wants to show me around and picks Cuernavaca and Las Mañanitas as our destinations, accompanied by his visiting parents, and makes it in to a family outing. They pick me up from my hotel around ten. Early for Mexico, because the lunch is never served before two at the earliest. But before we settle down and splurge at Las Mañanitas, he wants us to attend that morning’s mass at Cuernavaca’s Catedral de la Asunción de María. That seems a bit odd because Carlos and his family are not exactly what I would call religious folks. Plus, they are born Jewish, though Carlos’ wife Marta is Catholic. But he has heard so much about the uniqueness of the mass performed by the Bishop of Cuernavaca cathedral, and how uplifting his sermons are and how they are devoid of religious dogmas.

The Bishop is more like a secular philosopher and a teacher than a Catholic priest. Apparently very popular among his followers, majority of them very young. He seems to have a rock star status within his congregation whom I end up naming the Pop Priest. His manner of conducting the mass is nothing like I have ever experienced. Flamboyant and colorful, his words that I don’t understand, sound so uplifting and optimistic. And he has built himself a reputation that surpasses that of the historic cathedral – a proud landmark of Cuernavaca that rivals even Las Mañanitas. Thus making them the perfect twins in balancing the material world with the spiritual life, symbolized so appropriately by its revered Bishop.

Probably in his late Fifties or the early Sixties, he wears an easy smile Wrapped over his white cassock is a green shawl. And his choir is made up of a six piece rock band, containing of three guitarists, two violinist and a drummer. They all wore long frizzy hair and are dressed in their blue jeans, t-shirts and such – tops normally worn by teenagers. His voice is gentle and natural. His congregation is dressed not in their Sunday best, but in their ordinary street clothes. At this point, my Spanish is non-existent, but I like the soothing and even tone of his voice vibrating in the air.

Post mass, he stands outside the front gate greeting the exiting crowd, making small talk. He breaks up in a smile when he sees me emerge from inside and folds his hands together in traditional Indian gesture of namaste.

‘How did you like the mass?’

And we converse for a while. He asks me about India and refers to Buddhism and Hinduism and tells me how the message remains the same; be it Jesus or Buddha or Krishna. Devoid of any theatrics, what strikes me the most is that unlike other services I have attended, he certainly does not talk or constantly repeat the name of Jesus in vain. He doesn’t make you feel that unless you believed in Jesus you were doomed to be engulfed by the long and thorny tentacles of the wild hell fire. Likewise, I don’t once get a feeling, the one I normally got in the past from the priests whose message was loud and clear: Jesus is the way and the only way. I see in him an image of Gandhi – who though extremely religious, and very much into his Hindu beliefs and rituals, never lost the sight of the fact that there were other beliefs and they had to be revered and respected. Like my own dad.

My dad remains the most religious person I have ever known. He followed his Vaishnava faith to the T. An entire room of our home was and is still devoted to his in-house temple designated as Thakorji no room. His daily rituals lasted an average of four hours. Longer on the religious holidays. Of us eight siblings, the rest could be said to be more or less religious to the extent that they all follow bits and pieces of my parent’s total devotion, but as for me, it would be fair to say that even for a long while I identified myself as an agnostic, finally I have come to realization that that was a cope out on my part, because what I really am is: an atheist. After holding out hopes for me up until I was in my early thirties, my dad astonished me one night. I had just returned from paying my tribute at the shrine by our house – something I did out of sheer respect for my dad and expressly to please him.

‘You don’t have to go to the temple just to please me. You’re just crowding it and taking a place away from a true believer.’

What he didn’t verbalize was what I read in the look on his face. I know you’re a good kid and that’s all that matters.

Not withstanding occasional and almost always politically provoked sectarian violence in India, especially in it’s most metropolitan city Bombay, is where you also grow up respecting every religion, every culture and every custom. No one ever walks past without bowing his head, be it a temple, a mosque, a church, a derasar, a gurudwara or a Parsi fire temple. As religious and as devoted as my father was in his belief of Nirvana and reincarnation in his worship of Bal Krishna (infant-playful Krishna), he never had anything denigrating to say about other religions. The person with that kind of tolerance and accepting of the other faiths is in my eyes a true Vaishnava.

Just as the Spanish inscription carved in the most modern typeface on the large marble plaque on the wall behind us says:

NADIE HA VISTO NUNCA A DIOS

PERO

SI NOS AMAMOS UNOS A OTROS

DIOS PERMANECE ENTRE NOSOTROS

***

NO ONE HAS EVER SEEN GOD

BUT

IF WE LOVE EACH OTHER

GOD RESIDES WITHIN US (AND SO DOES HIS LOVE)

Atheist or not, I certainly can say Amen to that.

© Haresh Shah 2014

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

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Next Friday, January 31, 2014

LET IT BE A SURPRISE

Not sure which one of the ones I am working on will be ready to go over the weekend. Just let’s wait and see, because I am afraid that’s how inspiration works! I promise whatever comes out on the top will be GOOD:-)

Tags Bishop of Cuernavaca, Carlos Civita, Cuernavaca, Food & Wine, Las Mañanitas, Mexico, Profile, Religion, Travel

Categories Culture, Food & Wine, Mexico

THE TERROR OF THE TWO Cs

January 2, 2014 //

Haresh Shah

The People, The Pride, The Passion And The Philosophy Of Making California Wines

His desk is huge and cluttered and we’re face-to-face with an unkempt and eccentric looking vintner wearing the wine stained sweatshirt bearing the logo of one of his creations, Le Sophiste. With shoulder length long black hair, he looks like a cross between Tom Jones and Abbe Hoffman. Bonny Doon‘s President for Life and the founder, Randall Graham is known in the industry as the Rhône Ranger as in the Lone Ranger, a.k.a Crazy Randall, because of his refusing to succumb to what he calls the terror of Cabernets and Chardonnays. Instead, he devotes his energy and resources to growing exclusively the Rhône varietals such as Grenache, Mourvedre, Marsanne, Rousanne, Viognier, Cinsault and Syrah. His response to the industry’s perception of himself: when your foes believe that you are insane, you have a great technical advantage.

Life is too short to keep drinking the same wines, Graham philosophizes, I have a soft spot for ugly duckling grape verities, he adds with a wry smile. Randall studied philosophy at the University of California in Davis, prior to getting into the making of wines in 1983. Realizing hat he wasn’t a good philosopher, he decided to blend his love of philosophy with that of wines he would make.

He believes wines need certain raison d’etre, and he has made Bonny Doon’s mission to make wines that complement California’s emerging fusion cuisine, which is closer to the Mediterranean and south of the border than it is to the American meat and potatoes.

His is a loft office in what once must have been a barn. I see a cat scurrying in the background and also a couple of young women busily hurrying back and forth across the hall carrying stack of papers. The cackle of the wood burning fire place makes you fell warm and cozy on this cold, gray and rainy day

The looks and the ambience of the place reminds me of the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young classic of the early Seventies.

Our house is a very very very fine house

With two cats in the yard

Life used to be so hard

Now everything’s easy ‘cause of you.

Randall’s eccentricity and the courage of his conviction shows in his demeanor and the pride in his going “solo” against the wind in the wines he chooses to make. Bonny Doon wines are hand crafted and produced with tender loving care. The philosophy and the character of those wines is apparent in their creative labels illustrated with unusual, if not controversial images of Alcatraz prison, a flying saucer beaming up above a Chateauneuf-du-Pape vineyard, a portrait of Marcell Proust, and in the contents of those bottles described by the RG himself, sounding scholarly with a tongue in cheek humorous twist. Here is how he describes Le Sophiste: Sophism: from Gk. sophistes sage (def): A spacious argument for displaying ingenuity in reasoning or for deceiving someone. And then throws in some Italian just for the fun of it. Like on the label of Moscato del Solo; stampatore o’dell. incisore c. casa. DOONOMINAZIONE DI ORGINE CONTROLLATA 1993. DA SERVIRE FRESCO.

●●●

My first awareness of California came when I met Ann (Stevens) at Positano restaurant in Munich. I became instant friends with Ann and her husband Mark. It was because of them that three years later I ended up moving to Santa Barbara, California. And it was them who first introduced me to California wines and what has now become known as California cuisine.

Mark introduced me to the Fetzer Zinfandel, which was so good, but a bottle cost $3.50. A hefty sum in the early Seventies. We decide to buy a case instead, for $36.00. Certainly the first of many we would continue to acquire and consume. Little did I know, twenty years later I would be sitting in Hopland in Mendocino County with Ken Boek – the Master Gardener at Fetzer Valley Oaks Food & Wine Center, who would introduce us to the basics of making of the wines. True to its creed of from earth to the table, Fetzer has committed itself to the organic farming. As Jimmy Fetzer, the oldest of the eight Fetzer children and the winemaker tells it: the first step in making wine is growing grapes.

Fetzer is the largest mainstream winery in Mendocino County. The business no longer belongs to the family – though they still till the land and make their wines. Personally heart breaking for me is that under the corporate umbrella of Brown Foreman, Fetzer family too has succumbed to the terror of the two Cs, and they no longer make the Zin that introduced me to good American wines. Apparently Zinfandel is an extremely low yielding grape. Another reason Cabernet Sauvignon claims competitive advantage. Small comfort that there is still a strand that bind us. Jimmy Fetzer, is married to one of our own: September 1974 Playmate Kristine Hanson. At the time of publication, a student of communications at California State University in Sacramento and working part time as a black jack dealer at Harrah’s Casino in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. We run into jeans clad Jimmy at Boonville’s Pinot Noir tasting. He is soft spoken, tall and handsome, a proud wine maker who is equally as proud of his beautiful centerfold wife; she looks sexier now than when she appeared in Playboy more than twenty years earlier.

●●●

As we crisscross the wine country, I realize that eventual corporate buy outs or not, the business of making wines is basically tied to the soil and the farming, which at the end of the day is a family affair. Dry Creek is the father/daughter team of which David Stare is the owner wine maker and his daughter Kim takes care of the marketing. Kim’s husband Don Walker too is enlisted and is now in the process of learning the ropes.

Business should never get too big for its britches,

David Stare tells us as we are having a lunch at Bistro Ralph in downtown Healdsburg. Here is the man with degree in civil engineering from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and MBA from Northwestern University. Academically oriented, he looks the role of his preppy self, dressed in his khakis and crew neck sweater – a tedious nerd. But as he puts it, from early on he was becoming a cork dork. This leads him to add yet another degree in enology from University of California at Davis. An article in The Wall Street Journal talking about the bright future of the wine industry in the U.S. prompts him to combine his business acumen with his “cork dork” passion and take a plunge by buying 55 acres of land in Sonoma County in 1972. Twenty three years later, Dry Creek wines are considered to be some of the best values for the everyday wine consumers.

He believes, Wine should not be an investment. It’s something you buy because you enjoy it at the time. So do 90% of Americans who consume their purchases the same evening on which it was bought.

The morning, we cross the Golden Gate Bridge to visit Dry Creek, I feel a certain affinity for their wines. I couldn’t help but think of the evening almost fifteen years earlier, my colleague Donald Stewart and I had killed two bottles of their Fumé Blanc over a dinner – which helped us resolve some work related conflicts the two of us were experiencing. Just what good wines are supposed to do.

In the early days, Dry Creek produced predominantly white wines, among them Chardonnay, Chenin Blanc and Fumé Blanc. So did most of the California wineries. It all changed almost overnight when in 1992, the sales of red wines sky rocketed in the aftermath of the highly watched CBS program 60 Minutes aired a segment called The French Paradox, crediting red wines for the longevity and good health the French citizens enjoyed.

●●●

Later that afternoon we meet with Bob Levy, the winemaker and one of the partners of Merryvale Vineyards. Bob had joined University of California in Davis to study medicine, instead he got interested and switched to enology. We spend fair amount of time in Merryvale’s barrel room, tasting and talking wines. Lightly bearded and balding Bob is a serious man, even looking a bit sad and melancholic at times. He gives you a feeling of being more of a doctor or a professor than the man in such intimacy with his wines. He shares with us some of his best along with his deep passion and philosophy of wine being the beverage most conducive to romance.

I see wine as romance, like raw oysters. Blend good wine with good food and think of intimate things that can happen.

His thoughts are centered around romance even when he speaks of the technical aspects of wine making.

Timing for picking grapes is extremely important. Harvesting is the most exciting time. We work 18 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s a multiple orgasmic feeling.

In that barrel room filled with the pungent aroma of the wines aging, listening to Bob Levy talk about them makes Omar Khayyam come alive:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread–and Thou

●●●

How could one even begin to talk about California wines without talking about the Mondavi family and the invaluable contribution made by the patriarch Robert Mondavi for putting American wines on the world map? He not only makes some of the best California wines but he is also the ambassador at large for the entire wine industry of the United States. Robert Mondavi will also go down in the history as having forged the joint-venture with Baron Philippe de Rothschild of Mouton-Rothschild and establish Opus One winery right across the street from his own. In the true family tradition, working with him are his wife Margrit Biever, his sons Michael and Timothy and his daughter Marcia.

His striking mission style winery complex leads you in through an imposing archway flanked by the wine tasting room, a souvenir shop and the administrative offices. Inge Heinemann of public relations gives us a quick tour of the winery before we settle down for leisurely tasting of their wines paired with some exquisite dishes created specially for us by Margrit’s daughter, Annie Roberts, who is the chef at their elegant, airy and spacious Vineyard Room.

During the course of the meal, we are joined by the younger Mondavi son. Lanky, debonair, tall, brooding, gaunt and bearded with full head of black hair, Timothy is the family winemaker – though he prefers to be called the wine grower. He differs slightly with his father’s philosophy of making good wine is a skill, fine wine an art, to making good wine is a skill, growing good wine is an art Because; the three most important things that give its personality and noblesse to an artistic wine are; soil, climate and philosophy of the people involved. One needs to grow grapes in synchronization and harmony with nature. As he talks to us about wine and good life, he turns his head in a circle and looks around the room; this room is about celebration of good life. Wines are civilizing aspects of being a part of a meal and therefore of good life. And then he continues: artistic wine’s purpose is to express its personality in a pristine way. After all, life is too short to drink bad wines”. Timothy Mondavi somehow seems to echo the sentiments of the wine country’s madman, the Rhône Ranger, Randall Graham.

© Haresh Shah 2014

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

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ON FRIDAY, JANUARY 10, 2014

UNEMPLOYMENT BLUES

It wasn’t until after more than a year later that I show up at the unemployment office to apply for the benefits I was entitled to. This in itself was enough for David M. to wonder about during our initial interview. There were other things about my application that he couldn’t quite put in the standard slots. What followed was enough to drive him up the wall.

Tags Annie Roberts, Bob Levy, Bonny Doon, California Wines, David Stare, Dry Creek, Fetzer, Jim Fetzer, Merryvale, Mondavi, Playmate Kristine Hanson, Randall Graham, Timothy Mondavi

Categories California Wines, Culture, Food & Wine, Playmates, Romance

MY WINTER VALENTINE

November 21, 2013 //

Haresh Shah

Of Pinot Noir And The Burlaping in Boonville

The year is 1995 and talking of California wines to the Europeans is somewhat of a joke like the early transistor radios made in Japan were to everyone. Never mind that almost twenty years earlier on the day of America’s Bicentennial on July 4, 1976, the world’s wine experts were asked in a blind tasting to compare six California Cabernets and Chardonnays along with as many of Bordeaux and Burgundies and to everyone’s horror and American wine makers’ delight, California’s best stood shoulder to shoulder with the French on everyone’s scorecards, putting them instantly on the world map.

While the wine professionals of Europe took a note of it, the wine consumers of the Continent remained oblivious to even their existence. Frustrated, California’s vintners decided, the time had come to make the world aware of the lush Napa Valley and its wines that were growing by leaps and bounds off the northern California Coast.

As a part of the broader push, California Wine Institute has invited the Dutch edition of Playboy to experience California’s wine country in all its glory, including its rapidly emerging cuisine and enjoy their steadily growing warm hospitality industry, in hopes that Playboy would take the message to its upscale demographics in Holland.

The editor-in-chief Jan Heemskerk himself takes upon the project and picks me to accompany him and assigns me to write a major piece for his edition. Not because by any dint of imagination I am a connoisseur or even an expert of wines, but because he thinks of me as someone who knows his wines, especially the ones from California.

He certainly doesn’t expect me to write something like what is on the back label of the 2011 Ménage à Trois I just picked up from the store: Ignite the romance with our silky, smooth Pinot Noir. Made with grapes from a trio of top California growing regions in a lush, fruit-forward style. It’s utterly irresistible. Bright cherries mingle with sultry violets and hints of toasty oak in a delicious slow jam on the palate. Whew! Enough to induce an instant wet dream!!! Nothing like that. You haven’t picked a wine that I didn’t like. I’m obviously flattered and pleased. Not to mention all the fun we would have traveling together. Also to get out of Chicago’s bitter winter during the month of January is nothing to sniff at.

Over the next eleven days, we did the wineries of Napa Valley that included Sonoma and Mendocino counties. We met with the owners, wine makers, PR people and tasted a whole slew of what California had to offer in terms of wines paired to what has come to be known as California Cuisine, and enjoyed tremendously the hospitality of exquisite small, quaint and cozy boutique hotels, such as Vintners Inn and Medowood and others dotted along the wine trail. I hope to write of them in detail some other time, but the story I want to tell you today is that of the evening we spent with Pinot Noir farmers in the little hill-top town of Boonville.

With Ken Beck of Fetzer, a group of us drive up the long and winding mountainous route 128 to the place called The Sound Bite. It’s a down home all American small town restaurant and bar, complete with the pool table and serving very basic food. We have what looks and tastes like minced meat pie baked with a layer of mashed potatoes. The place is buzzing with the wine grape growers and winemakers of Mendocino County. They have gathered here to present, taste and talk about their own Pinot Noirs, for which the region is renowned. More than any other varietal, they tell us, Pinot Noir is very site specific if truly great wine is to be made.

Through the evening, we taste total of twenty one Pinot Noirs, including three sparkling varieties. The tasting is divided into six flights. Each flight contains wines from three to four wineries. Most of the wines presented are of ’93 and ’94 vintages and to our un-educated pallets they taste more like Beaujolais Nouveau. For us, non wine-growers, the most interesting thing is to be among the wine farmers and the producers themselves, instead of the owners and the PR people describing their wares. The men and women we find ourselves surrounded by are the real farmers, they till the land, harvest the crops, press the grapes, make the wines and bottle them. You can see a definite parental pride and joy in their eyes as they fondly fuss over the wines that cross our lips and titillate our taste buds.

Of the five women sitting at our table of eight, four are grape farmers with their own Pinots, the fifth, Leisha is Ken’s daughter, and even though Ken too is a wine maker, he is with us as an observer – the other two men being Jan and I. Curiously, us three men are either married or committed, whereas all five women are apple heads–the Boonville slang for single women. I will call the four farmer femmes, Sally, Nicky, Christine and Mandy. They are all in their early to mid-thirties. Good looking even, in rustic sort of way. While they are dressed up for the evening, you could see and feel that they are true farmhands, wholesome and strong of toned muscles. After a couple of flights and after the ice has been broken between us, the women let their hair down and begin to educate us in the local secret language called Bootling.

‘You know what an apple head blanketing means?’ Asks Nicky. Seeing that we’re shaking our heads, she continues.

‘That means, a single woman getting laid. Like our Mandy here.’

‘Nicky! Please!!’ Mandy throws a faux embarrassment.

‘Actually she got burlaped, didn’t you Mandy?’ quips Christine.

‘What’s that?’ either Jan or I ask.

‘That means…’

‘No, don’t you dare! You are embarrassing me,’ squeals Mandy. Nicky throws a friendly wicked smile at Mandy and continues.

‘That means she got taken on top of a burlap bale,’ we see Mandy’s face turning water melon red.

‘Ouch, that’s got to scratch your sweet little booty good!’ It’s Christine again.

And while we are trying to imagine Mandy getting burlaped, the girls break out in a roaring chorus of a laughter, joined by Leisha and Ken, and then also by us while poor Mandy tries to hide her still reddening face behind the shield of her hands. The rest continue with how about, and throw at us some more Bootling slangs, such as Bucky Walter, Horn of Zeese, and Bal Gorms. They mean public telephone, cup of coffee and good food. And not to forget Madge and Moldunes meaning a whore and big boobs. Madge because in the days past, a woman called Madge ran the local bordello. Moldunes comes from the early Hippies that had migrated to the region and their women let their pendulums hang out and down – braless. There’s a story behind all of them and there even exists a book or two to keep the lore alive. While we’re all having lots of laughs interspersed with different Pinots, Sally somehow seems withdrawn, lost and a bit out of it. She is directly in the line of my vision and I can’t help but notice and observe the sadness settling on her face.

‘Poor Sally here, she’s sad tonight. She just broke up with her boyfriend of two years.’ Interjects Mandy, probably to shift the attention from her being blanketed on the burlap. But realizing that perhaps she has touched upon a raw nerve, the girls switch back to talking about their wines.

While I am busy conversing with Leisha, who’s sitting next to me, my attention keeps drifting to the sad face of Sally. She is the runt of the group, perhaps even youngest and wears shorter hair that hugs closer to her neck. She has been quiet all evening long. She looks so sad that I feel she may just break down and cry. The passive pain of her face makes you want to caress and comfort her. I see her excusing herself and slowly walking out of the restaurant.

‘She probably needs a smoke and wants to be alone for a while,’ says Christine. I wonder about Sally all alone outside the restaurant, smoking. Something draws me to her and I find excusing myself to go to the john and than casually step outside in the open. Sure enough, she is smoking, leaning against the hood of one of the parked pick-up-trucks.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Yes. Just needed bit of fresh air.’

We engage in small talk. I ask her discreet questions about her break up. She gives me a feeling of being welcoming to have someone to talk with. The night is crisp and clear, the stars are bright and the mountain air is refreshing. Our subdued voices waft in the air like mellow musical notes. The stray light illuminates and deepens the sadness of her face. Us both leaning on the hood, seem to have slid closer. A sweet whiff of her perfume and her gentle breathing feel somehow intimate. I imagine her face tilting and resting over my shoulder, sliding down and buried in my chest. Out lips are so close, fluttering. We’re at that certain now or never moment of either sealing or quelling of our suddenly awakened ardor.

And then I think of Susan, two thousand miles and two time zones away in Chicago, probably sitting in front of a television. We’ve now been together for more than two years. Something similar must have been going through Sally’s mind as well. We consciously and slowly retract and step back.

‘It was wonderful meeting and talking to you. Hope you write a nice article about the Pinots.’

I wait until the taillight of her pick-up disappears in the downhill slope.

●●●

I do write a nice article about the California Wine Country. I write a series of them. A few days before the Valentine Day, Susan and I are having Sushi at Kama Kura in Evanston. We both are quiet or making polite low key conversation to fill the void that seems to have dawned between us two since my return from California. I sense it, but can’t quite put my finger on the possible cause.

‘You’re too sophisticated for me.’ I hear her say. Right!

She obviously has given our relationship some serious thought during these days. We talk for the umpteen time the perception and reality – misunderstandings and interpretations. But we both know, there is nothing more to say.

‘You know, you’re right, I have middle class values,’ she concedes. I’m disarmed.

Two days later, its Sunday and two days before the Valentine Day. The night before I have cooked an elaborate Indian meal. We have washed it down with a bottle of Cuvee Fumé Preston. We have spent another one of the most loving and passionate nights. We are sitting at the round glass top table in the breakfast nook of my kitchen. There are tears. No more words. Laying in the middle is a bouquet of a dozen champagne roses – more my style than the traditional red ones.

And then she is gone. Emptiness begins to fall like the fluffy snow flakes. Slowly accumulating and settling on the ground.

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

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Next Friday, November 29, 2013

“HE’S A SON OF A BITCH’

That’s me they’re talking about. The question most asked of me time and time again is: How does one get a job at Playboy? Or more to the point: How did you get to work for them? Other than joking around, I have always avoided giving a straight answer to these questions – lest it may end up sounding like a boast.

Tags Boontling, Boonville, Breaking Up, California Wines, Haresh Shah, Jan Heemskerk, Napa Valley, Pinot Noir, Relationships, Romance, Travel, Wine Farmers

Categories California Wines, Food & Wine, Pinot Noir, The Netherlands

THE DUTCH TREAT

October 10, 2013 //

Haresh Shah

Happiness Is A Piping Hot Croquette

Art directors are a breed unto themselves. Crazy as they come. Crazy as in creative crazy, in positive sense. They are normally temperamental, egocentric and a proud clan. Starting with the Godfathers of them all, Art Paul and Tom Staebler of the U.S., Rainer Wörtmann of Germany, to Milan Hlaviček of Czech Republic and Andrzej Pągoski of Poland – these masters of the visual communication are also the purveyors of good taste, dressed in their own individual style, be it the beat up pair of blue jeans, or wrinkled khakis and equally as wrinkled shirts and jackets. Or the designer suits and long fancy rain coats. The category in which, the first Dutch art director, Dirk de Moei falls.

Always impeccably dressed in his light crème suit and his longish off white trench coat, his trademark tortoise shell red framed glasses with inquisitive and confusing looking set of smoky green eyes peering through tinted lenses, Dirk is flamboyant, no taller that 5’9”(175 cms), his rusty brown hair isn’t too long, nor short, his round face makes him look no different than Mr. middle of the road from the planet earth. The man of good taste in clothes and food and he carries the most expensive Smythson of Bond Street, thick as a paperback address book, he is the man about town. To the editor-in-chief Jan’s (Heemskerk’s) somber personality, he is the fleshy one of the duo that arrived in my Chicago office in early 1983, to learn the ropes.

As opposed to the editors with whom I discussed and disagreed on the ideas of the overall content, I often butted heads with the art directors. Lucky for the editors that in most of the cases their texts were in a language I couldn’t read or understand. But I could see clearer the graphic ideas of the art directors and have an opinion of my own. And I would have ideas of my own to contribute. Art directors also being an emotional bunch and extremely possessive of their talents would resist the most. When Dirk came up with the re-designed front of the book pages, splitting two or more rubrics on the same page instead of devoting a page each to Music, Books, Films and other sections, he was up against resistance from me. That’s altering the basic design and the format of the classic Playboy. My job it was to preserve and guard them.

‘We neither have as much material, nor space and ads like the US Playboy to afford that kind of luxury. While the U.S. Playboy has an average of 230 + pages every month, we would l have about 130.’ Dirk throws a bewildered look in my direction.

That logic of his did it for me. Those pages looked nice, if a bit cluttered like a small Dutch house, where every single centimeter has to be judiciously utilized. The steep stairs with an incline only a slightly more than a stepladder against the wall, every nook and corner had to be used in the most productive way. Furthermore, his improvised design gave more editorial flexibility. Made imminent sense. In the end we would agree on a compromise, and from all our disagreements, the magazine benefitted the most. I thought of Dirk a couple of weeks ago when I saw the grand old dame The New Yorker’s, front of the book pages similarly split after 83 years of publication. Dirk did it with their issue # 0.

There was rarely animosity between us and we got along famously at and outside of the work. Dirk was also the man about town and would be often consulted as to where we should go out for dinner.

So it is no wonder that Dirk wants to introduce me to the best of what Holland has to offer in terms of the culinary excellence. One evening, he picks me up from the hotel with his live-in squeeze Ans and we drive into the Dutch countryside to the restaurant de Hoefslag in Bosch en Duin. It is awarded no less than two Michelin Stars and its cuisine is known to stack up to any

I am flattered and I am curious. Really looking forward to it as Dirk builds it up how exquisite and exclusive the place is – not to mention how expensive! Soon as we walk in, Dirk and Ans are fussed over by the co-owner, chef Gerard Fagel who ran the restaurant with his brother Martin. We are given a prime table in the middle of the restaurant that allows us the generous panoramic view of the ample space that the dining room occupies. A bottle of champagne appears without being ordered and while the chef and Dirk are babbling away excitedly in Dutch, catching up, Ans and I look at each other like Alice and Alex in the Wonderland.

The dining room is spacious and airy. It’s lit just right with enhancing and highlighting plants and other inanimate objects. I am presuming that this is Ans’ first time also, from the way she surveys the place, as if in awe.

Now my memory is a bit fuzzy on the exact details of the meal we consumed over the next two or so hours. What I remember clearly still is that the appetizer contained of a diminutive quail egg topped with a spot of glistening Beluga caviar, resting on the bed of exotic looking mix of lettuce, and somewhere along the meal, no bigger than a Kennedy silver dollar in diameter and about two inches (5 cm) thick Filet Mignon crowned on the mound of various accoutrement and revolving bottles of champagne all through the meal. All served on shiny white plates, a smaller one nestled into a large service plate. Every course visually enhanced by the chef’s artistic skills.

It was a multi course meal and I am sure there were wine pairings. None of which I remember. But just to give you an idea, I have had my son-in-law Carlo Lamagna, who is currently the executive chef at one of Chicago’s top, Benny’s Steak House and was sous chef at the elite, known for its earth to table cuisine, North Pond, frequented by likes of Ricardo Mutti and Gérard Depardieu, make up the following sample menu of that night now thirty years later.

MENU

Amuse – trio of melon with balsamic and basil

1st course – vichyssoise, black truffle, chive baton

2nd course – quail egg, beluga caviar, frisee, garlic vinaigrette

3rd course – foie gras torchon, sauterne Gelee, brioche crouton

4th course – lobster poached in vanilla butter, celeriac puree, wilted spinach, sauce américaine

5th course – petite filet mignon, pomme puree, roasted chantrelles, marchand di vin

intermezzo – beet granite

6th course – vanilla creme brulee, mascerated raspberries

Yum! Or like the Dutch would say: lekker! We are properly wined and dined and are buzzing pleasantly with the champagne circulating through our veins like the chemicals scurrying in slow motion roller-coasters through the test tubes in a science lab, with bubbles and all. The only way I can describe it is: we’re feeling no pain as we say our thanks and goodbyes to the chef and the restaurant.

As we’re driving back in near silence, Dirk’s Alfa Romeo Sports is gliding along the tree covered roads and snaking towards Amsterdam, I hear Ans shuffling in her back seat and leaning forward.

‘So, did you like the meal?’

‘Of course. It was exquisite. Nothing like I have ever tasted before.’ And then I turn my face sideways to look at Dirk. He’s wearing a smile of satisfaction. Then I turn around and face Ans.

‘But you know? I’m still a bit hungry!’

‘You are?’ She doesn’t come out and say what I read on her face.

‘Aren’t you?’

‘To tell you the truth, yes, I am a bit too.’ I hear a not very happy grunt coming out of Dirk’s throat.

Just having vocalized what my stomach is telling me, gurgling, I come out and say what I am thinking.

‘You know what?’

‘What”?’

‘A fresh hot chicken croquette with mustard would taste really good right now!’

‘I think so too,’

‘Let’s stop for one. My treat!!’

What I see clearly on Dirk’s face is utter disgust at us two ungrateful creatures. And yet, he suddenly exists the dark avenue we have been traveling on and within minutes is pulling up at an all night automat. At the first bite of the piping hot croquette, both Ans and I feel we died and went to heaven. Dirk refrains from having any.

He has just plunked down hundreds of guilders on wining and dining us.

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

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MY FATHER’S SECRET STASH

When my father died, he left behind a trunk full of personal stuff containing of things that were near and dear to him, mainly several watches that he wore through his lifetime, gold cufflinks and shirt buttons, several bottles of partly or barely used men’s fragrances, among them a bottle of Playboy fragrance, several little bottles of herbal attars, fancy pocket handkerchiefs and such, which my mother wanted us four brothers to have. Since I was coming home soon, my brothers decided to wait to open it when all four of us would be together. But they had gone ahead and taken a quick peek…

Tags Ans, Carlo Lamagna, Croquette, de Hoefslag Restaurant, Dirk De Moei, Food & Wine, Nouvelle Cuisine, Playboy Netherlands, The Netherlands

Categories Food & Wine, Friendship, Profile, The Netherlands

MY INTIMATE ENCOUNTER WITH EROTIC OYSTERS

August 29, 2013 //

Haresh Shah

How I Came To Like / No, Love Oysters?

I have had a long day. Up at 4:30 in the morning, I take a quick shower and get into my Buick and zoom through the Mittlerer Ring and rush to Munich’s Riem International Airport. Catch the first flight to Düsseldorf. Pick up a rental car and race to Essen. Heinz (Nellissen) and I work through the day, do it non-stop through the lunch and don’t even get around to grab their delicious Fricadel and Brötchen with mustard from the company canteen. I need to leave promptly at five and rush back to the airport and catch the last Paris bound flight. Hungry as I am, I skip the anemic looking cold cuts served onboard. We’re having dinner at La Coupole.

Brasserie La Coupole on boulevard du Montparnasse is a Paris landmark like no other. It is the quintessential symbol of Montparnasse’s history as well as the art of living and socializing in Paris. And is hailed as the temple of art deco. I have never been there before and am very much looking forward to this evening.

I check in at the George V and after a hurried shower, hail a cab and arrive at Le Coupole at little after nine. There are about eight of Playboy people sitting at sidewalk tables pulled together. Waiting on the tables are ice buckets filled with chilling bottles of Chablis and Sancerre, large platters of shucked oysters placed on the bed of ice, their wet and slimy surfaces shivering and still pulsating with life surrounded by the wedges of lemon strewn in-between the oyster shells. The tables are littered with little plates and the bread crumbs that continue do drop at every tear of the crust.

This is Playboy Foreign Edition’s second international meeting. Its small and intimate with only four countries onboard. Over the years, it would mushroom into an annual, one most important event that brought together Playboy families from around the world. The French and the German crowd is already there. We’re still waiting for the Italians and the Americans to arrive. While everyone else is wine happy and feasting on the freshest and the most delicious oysters – I am guessing, because I have never tasted an oyster in my entire life. Just the look of them give me creeps, yikes!! Their slimy slippery wetness looking like devil’s eyes makes me nauseous. And they are still alive!! Couldn’t even imagine actively picking one up, let alone putting one in my mouth and slurping it in, chewing or washing it down with a gulp of wine and really enjoying it, as everyone around the tables seems to be doing.

But I am beyond starving. I am famished and feeling physically weak at lack of sleep and with the day like I have had, I am feeling run down. You can eat only so much bread and drink so much wine on an empty stomach. A hefty piece of steak-au-poire avec pommes would be great. But I can’t just go ahead and order it while we are still waiting for the rest – among them my own bosses – who I understand are just checking into the hotel. So it probably would be another hour or so before they really make it to the restaurant. In the meanwhile, those present are greedily slurping down oyster after oyster, tearing off pieces of bread and washing them down with the excellent wine. The consumed bottles are taken away and replaced by more, the ice in the buckets replenished and the large aluminum platters filled with oysters keep sliding in and out of their stands like frisbees. All those live vibrating lumps shoved down the palates in easy gulps.

While I hear my stomach growl, I feel a buzz in my head. I watch people still picking up oysters from the platters, squeezing the lemon wedges over them, picking up the shell, putting it halfway through their mouths and slurp up the meat.

To distract my thoughts from my intensifying hunger, I think of the legend that La Coupole has become. Since it opened its doors just before Christmas in 1927, forty five years before, attended by 2500 guests – 1200 bottles of champagne were popped open. Since then it has become the stomping ground for artists and writers, musicians and singers that include Picasso and Matisse. I imagine Josephine Baker at an inside table dining with Simenon. Jean-Paul Sartre holding court at his table # 149 with Simone de Beauvoir listening adoringly. I am imagining Henry Miller to stride in at any moment and charm a meal and a bottle or two of vintage wine out of some sucker for his sheer brilliance and then walk out with his lady friend hanging on his arm. And I would certainly get up and shake hands with Albert Camus, whose existential novels were all the rage ten years earlier among us young and inspiring writers in India. And wouldn’t it be awesome if Serge Gainsbourg were to walk in with gorgeous Jane Birkin, making his trademark flamboyant entrance, to whose J’taime us disco set danced night after night?

‘Come on, try one. They’re so delicious!’ Prods, I no longer remember who, but one of our French editors who I’ll call Rémy. I am rudely awakened from my reveries and brought back to the reality of my poor growling stomach.

‘I can’t!’

‘Why can’t you?’

‘Because…’

‘Because what? How can you be in France, sitting at La Coupole and not taste our own huiters de Normandie? They are probably harvested this very morning, you know? Normandy yields some of the world’s best oysters. Hell, we have the best oysters in the world.’ I see Rémy’s face beaming. True French pride. ‘And after a long summer, the oyster season has just began and this year they are particularly incredibly good!’

‘May be so, but I don’t know, just look at them!’

Someone who grew up being a vegetarian in whose family even eggs were considered meat, I have come a long way. Up until I was twenty five, I have never had eaten any meat dishes. During my two and half years in London, I may have ventured in to taste chicken curry a few times and may have managed to swallow a few pieces of meat placed in front of me, just not to offend those kind hearted host families in England and in Holland – where I interned during my summer and winter breaks. But it wasn’t until after I graduated and landed a job with Burda in Offenburg while living with a German family did I begin to eat meat in earnest. Even so, I had hardest time eating any seafood. The most I had managed over the interim four years in the States, was to acquire taste for fried shrimps and broiled lobster tails. Couldn’t deal with any of the fish at all. I did try escargot once. Baked inside their little shells and swimming in the garlic butter. I was able to swallow half a dozen yucky looking black curled up creatures, only because I nudged them down with the garlic butter soaked piece of bread and with my eyes closed, and a glass of wine at ready. But oysters?

‘I’m looking at them. But they are meant to be eaten, unless you’re looking for pearls,’

‘Pearls?’

‘Yeah. Didn’t you know that the most beautiful pearls are found inside certain types of oysters?’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Of course. But never mind. Just try one. I promise you would like it.’

‘But Rémy!’

‘These are so delicious! And they taste and feel just like, you know?’ Rémy has this knowing look on his face as if I knew what he’s talking about. Realizing that maybe I really didn’t know what he was leading to, he elaborates.

‘Just like, you know? Woman’s sex. How do you call it?’

‘You mean pussy?’

‘Oui alors, exactement!’

This conjures up an image of a photograph I had seen some place. Perhaps in an old issue of Playboy even, featuring aphrodisiacs and erotic food as displayed on different parts of the female anatomy. The one with oysters has a close up of a shapely woman’s pelvic region from the waist down to her upper thighs. Arranged like the bird’s nest in a diamond shape is fresh mesclun lettuce, that hides and at the same time enhances her pubic areas by giving them the fall colors, rusty red on the fringe of wild green leaves, the edges of the leaves simulating the curls of thickly concentrated pubic hair. Three shucked dark shelled oysters are placed at the each corner of the lettuce – raw, moist, succulent, tender and glistening. A tantalizing image even for those of us who shudder at the thought of eating one of those.

I look back at Rémy and smirk, still with I don’t know expression on my face.

‘Come on, try one or two. I’ll help you’ And even before I have time to say anything, Rémy has picked up an oyster from the platter. In his other hand is a little baby fork, with which he expertly and gently dislodges and tugs the oyster out of its shell and is holding it in front of my mouth. Seeing I am still hesitant, he asks me to close my eyes and open my mouth.

It feels on my tongue like a lump of slimy moss. I feel something moving over my tongue on its own and I’m about to throw up. Instead, I swiftly pick up my wine glass and take a big swallow and the first oyster of my life is on its way down crawling through my system. I pick up and break a piece of bread and then wash it down with another gulp of wine. Rémy’s eyes are riveted on me.

‘See, it wasn’t too bad, was it? Let’s try one more time.’ Doesn’t he see the tears rolling down my eyes? Even if he does, he is incorrigible. He yanks out another oyster and down it goes.

‘Now try it yourself!’ Still feeling squeamish, I mimic the ritual of first squeezing the lemon, holding the oyster in my left hand and pulling it out with the little fork and slowly lift the lumpy little slime and catch it between my lips, let it linger on my tongue, feel and taste the freshly squeezed lemon juice, even chew it a little bit, and let it slide down on its own. And I try the another one, and yet another one.

Delicieux.

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

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