Table talk
Sensory deprivation, or just senseless?
A 26-year-old English chef, Paul Liebrandt, is pushing back the boundaries of culinary taste at Papillon, a restaurant in Manhattan. Diners have to eat their fixed-price (£80) meal while blindfolded and bound, measures which are taken to enhance their gastronomic pleasure. Dessert is sucked through a baby's bottle, and guests bob for foie gras, the way children do for apples in a barrel at a village fâte. A reviewer from the New York Times said that rubbing sandpaper with one hand did nothing for the langoustine tartare he was eating with the other. However, another reviewer said that being blindfolded certainly enhanced the flavour of her pig's cheeks.
A rucking good idea to raise money
A very shaken yet miraculously intact bottle of Taittinger Champagne has been used as the baton in a 3,000-mile relay race by Hilton and Watford-based rugby team Saracens. The bottle's journey took in all 77 of Hilton's UK and Irish hotels, and each group of staff had to choose how to transport the bottle to the next hotel. Every form of transport was used, including boats, helicopters, vintage cars, and plain old legs. The three-month relay race finished with the Saracens squad, nursing the road-weary bubbly, sprinting the two miles from London's Hilton on Park Lane to the Metropole on Edgware Road. The stunt raised about £150,000 for various charities.
A spot of tiffin with Her Maj
There was a very grand meal for Isle of Wight hotelier Nicky Hayward the other day. Summoned to lunch at Buckingham Palace, the Seaview Hotel proprietor found herself in the pleasant and mixed company of luminaries ranging from yachting heroine Ellen McArthur ("full of life") to England football manager Sven Goran Eriksson ("rather shy"), not to mention Her Majesty and Prince Philip ("extremely charming"). And the menu? Seafood ravioli, pheasant, and upside-down pear tart, washed down with a good Chablis and Leoville Barton 1988.
A, B, D, C… One, two, four, three…
John O'Sullivan, the general manager at the Four Seasons in Cairo, who is gamely fighting the fall in occupancy in Egypt (Caterer, 29 November, page 8), admits to one major slip-up in his marketing efforts. "We were doing a special offer of giving people one night free for every three nights they stayed," he explained, "but unfortunately I went around describing it as three nights for the price of four. Thank goodness I didn't send it to the printers like that."
Sometimes, a little is just too much
The chef at a New Zealand restaurant has attracted controversy after he took umbrage with the whiff emanating from one of his guests. He offered a napkin to Janet Hunt, celebrating her 48th birthday, to wipe off her perfume. Jonathan England of Two Rooms in Wellington explained that, once or twice a year, someone walked into his restaurant in half-a-gallon of $3 perfume, wanting to take on the $30,000 wine cellar and good food. He said that they never won. Hunt said that her bottle of perfume cost $125 and added: "The perfume is not the issue. It is the pretentiousness of the chef that's the issue."
