MUCHO MUSSO

I once saw Sally Kellerman in Musso and Frank on Hollywood Boulevard.  And then I saw her in an episode of 90210, in a scene filmed in Musso and Frank.  Art imitating life imitating art.  Like this:

 

Another time I was there I saw Tim Curry sitting at a table right by the front window so that anybody passing in the street could see him.  I suppose he must have wanted it that way.  He didn’t look like this:

 

Musso and Frank is one of my favourite restaurants in the world - it's been there since 1920, the year before Prohibition started - and not only because of the presence of celebrities.  But it does no harm. 

 

Of course it’s a long way from where I live to Musso’s but I do my best to recreate certain elements of the experience, not least the martinis.. When I was there last year the bartender gave me some cocktail stirrers to take away as a souvenir, which helps a little, though I don’t use them in martinis. And of course I never had the little flask containing a second helping, and which is apparently called a sidecar.

The food is another matter.  One of the starters that always hits the spot is celery sticks filled with blue cheese, which look like this:

Photo by Caroline Gannon.

 

So the inamorata and I tried to recreate them – she did most of the hard work. I found a convincing recipe online though it required various things we didn’t have to hand.  

The cheese should have been Roquefort but all I had was Stilton left over from Christmas. You’re supposed to thin the cheese to make it more pliable by the addition of sour cream, but we had Greek yoghurt.  And then supposedly you use a piping bag to put the mixture into the celery. I believe I’ve never so much as touched a piping bag. And frankly our celery was too thin to hold much cheese, and as you can see, I went a bit mad with the smoked paprika. But apart from all that it really wasn’t bad at all.