The Grand Restaurant

Sometimes I don’t hit it off with restaurant managers. Not that they’re not all very nice, but I have a soft spot for the old kind: Italian, white-haired, with melancholy doe eyes. The kind of people who tell you all about this or that place and have been there so long that they have become part of its very fabric, embodying a certain attitude to life. And that’s exactly the kind of person who works here. You arrived, freshen up, enjoy your aperitif, and the quiet ballet of the waiters is already in full swing – their jackets darkening from day to night. Light and graceful, organised with the precision of Mossad. In my opinion, Europe’s most beautiful spectacle.

Candles are lit, the sommeliers wear bow ties, the restaurant managers are clad in black, someone tinkles away at the piano in the background – everything as it should be, if nothing else. You sit in front of old silver, look up at the huge wood-paneled ceiling, lay your napkin across your lap, and wait for Angelo to bring you the wine list. He immediately brings me a Swiss Pinot Noir to sample in a small eighth-of-a-liter glass, just the way I like it. He mentions having read about me somewhere, noting that I like to pour my own wine. I fell in love with this man right from the start. I admired his stature, his straight shoulders, the short gray hair. He possessed that old-world butler gene that can only be innate. Attitude instead of politeness, and Italian to boot. He worked at the Villa d’Este during the summer. He performed the same tasks as the other waiters, only without perspiring, without the fumbling, with an air of grandeur – yet he needed the others and their missteps to shine by comparison. He showed me a video of the Champs-Élysées, the Yves Saint Laurent store that had just opened, or was it Louis Vuitton, I can’t quite recall – the one that resembles an enormous suitcase and glitters at night. In any other context, I wouldn’t have been interested, but I had just been there, taking a nighttime stroll down that very street with my girlfriend. We talked about many other places. For him, it was Pompeii, Sardinia, and Nice. For me, it was Paris, Vienna, Milan, Antibes, Madrid, and San Sebastián. If I didn’t sit in Lilas at least once a year, swim around Cap d’Antibes, drink at the bar in Camparino, read something in Café Sperl, wander through the Retiro, see Matisse’s balconies, eat at Tito’s, or think about breaking up with my girlfriend at Lago di Como, I felt off-kilter. It was wonderful to all this with him in this room.

The candlelight reflected warmly off the wooden ceilings, while outside, beyond the large windows, the frozen lake lay still under the night sky. Angelo would often stop by to ask what I thought of this or that thing – skiing, Macron, hotel restaurants, and even pavements – nodding as if our agreement was now a secret that bound us both together. Of course, he frequently had to leave. There’s a silent exchange of signals among the waiters. If everything is running perfectly and something happens – a fork falls or someone gets the wrong wine – it’s a scandal. It’s embarrassing. Not because the incident itself, but because so few people can handle it gracefully. Angelo could, but that kind of composure only comes with experience and an ability to read people and understand their nuances. In the end, he said, ‘See you tomorrow, Signore, I’ll tell you the rest then.’ He said it as though reassuring me that Europe and wine would still be around tomorrow.

The next morning, I was woken by the housekeeper. Not that I minded in the slightest. She said ‘desculpe’ and ‘bom dia,’ her Portuguese warmth shining through. I replied in Portuguese that it didn’t matter, I wanted to have breakfast anyway – and what a dream breakfast it was. Not the food, because I hardly ever eat in the morning, but the setting and everything happening around me. Outside, the early blue light of day filtered through transparent curtains, while inside, chandeliers cast a soft glow over white jackets with gold epaulettes. It was like being on the Titanic. Grand hotels are the stages on which history prefers to play out. They shine like white embassies of civilisation on the coasts of this world and stand in cities like consulates that you can use, touch, and even tarnish. They steam like large ships in the mountains, traveling through time and transporting the present of a bygone era so that the world of yesterday can still exist tomorrow. They preserve long-forgotten manners, keep extinct professions alive with love, and have something lost-yet-necessary-for-survival on board, like an ark. There is a difference between classic hotels like the Kulm and nouveau riche hotels, where people only go to flaunt their wealth. The difference lies in a truth that everyone has to discover for themselves by finding out what truth truly means. In any case, it cannot be equated with money, except for those who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.