FAR FROM WASTED

 

The first time I had a margarita I thought somebody was having a laugh, either that or they were trying to poison me.  It was in a bar in New York, and I was with people I didn’t know very well, and I couldn’t believe that any sane person would put salt around the rim of their glass.  

 

Well the years go by, our taste buds change, and these days I think the salt is the best reason for drinking a margarita.  I mean I like the tequila, I like the lime juice; I could totally live without the sweet sticky Cointreau or Triple Sec, but I absolutely couldn’t live without the salt.

 

Psycho-pic by Caroline Gannon

So finding oneself in Macayo’s in Scottsdale, Arizona, and attempting to go very slightly native, what could be better than a coupla margaritas and a giant bowl of nachos?  Very little. Macayo’s looks like this.

 

And then a couple of weeks later, in the bar of the Leopold Hotel in Sheffield, England a margarita was again to be had. It looked like this:

smaller and perhaps a little more intense than it’s American cousin and far more expensive ounce for ounce, but still very definitely with the salt.

 

The Leopold Hotel looks like this:

FEEDING FRENZY

I watched Alfred Hitchock’s Frenzy the other night: I reckon its one of his best. There are wonderful scenes in the old Covent Garden market, culminating in a horrifying ride in a truck, involving a dead, naked, (obviously) woman’s body in a sack of potatoes.  It does have one of those “let’s get this over with in the next 30 seconds” endings that Hitchcock is so fond of, but here it really works.

One of the oddest notes in the film involves the police detective (played by Alec McCowen) and his wife (Vivien Merchant.)  Merchant presents her “meat and potatoes” husband with ludicrously fancy French food.  The scenes are in fact pretty funny, and Merchant does play the wife as a pretentious fraud, but at bottom there is some kind of weary, philistine, xenophobic, joke about “foreign” food being foul and inedible, and perhaps also the suggestion that even to care about food at all is somehow effete and snobbish. 

Another mark of the wife’s pretension is that she serves up some madly inscrutable drink called (wait for it) a margarita, which is so wild and crazy that it features salt around the rim of the glass!  And some unheard of substance called tequila!  Now presumably Hitchcock had spent enough time in Hollywood to know all about tequila, but he makes the wife utterly pathetic by having her mispronounce it as “tay-kwee–ya,” which actually made me feel enormously fond of the poor woman, surrounded by these unsympathetic English boors.

Given Alfred Hitchcock’s size, I assume he must have had an intense, if not straightforwardly happy, relationship with food. There’s a famous story (which exists in multiple versions) that Hitchcock bet a man named Dickie Beville  (variously described as his assistant or his unit manager) that he (Beville) couldn’t spend the night alone on an empty movie set, the pace supposedly being unbearably scary at night, maybe even haunted.  Beville accepted Hitchcock’s bet.  Hitchcock then said he didn’t trust Beville, and to make sure he kept to the deal, he handcuffed him to a heavy camera tripod so he couldn’t run away in the middle of the night.  Beville grudgingly accepted this, and Hitchcock made nice by giving him sandwiches and a flask of coffee to get through the night. 

The coffee, of course, was laced with mighty laxatives, and Beville had quite a night of it, but I suppose he did win the bit.  Not the least interesting aspect of this story is that although there’s very little evidence for its literal truth, nobody who knew Hitchcock ever doubted that it happened.  Hitchcock may not have been a gourmet, but he does seem to have been something of a psycho.  Are we altogether surprised?

PAY LESS WITH BAYLESS

I went to the Red O restaurant on Melrose Boulevard last night, Rick Bayless’s  Los Angeles outpost, though scholars differ on how involved Bayless actually is with things there - not very is the received wisdom.

It’s a good looking room: that's the "tequila tunnel" you see above, the service was friendly if sometimes a bit fussy. the food was fine, the starters better than the main courses: the pork belly sopes were excellent, and the tamales with fresh corn, goat cheese and poblano chiles weren’t bad at all, though give me some goat cheese and poblano chiles on a square of carpet underlay and I probably wouldn’t complain too much.

The sopes looked like this:

And the drinks were better than the food.  I had the La Dama Margarita “tres agaves reposada tequila, Serrano chile, mango grenade, lime juice and pomengrate liqueur.”  It was great: sweet and sour, soft and aggressive, fruity and fiercely  alcoholic, all at the same time.  I see that the drinks menu (which I just looked up online) also says the drink comes “garnished with pomegranate seeds” which may or may not have been there, but if they were I didn’t notice, and if they weren’t I didn’t miss them.

Somehow I managed to resist the $100 Red O margarita which some people (one or two of them employed by Rick Bayless) will tell you is actually cheap at the price.  It contains three kinds of fancy extra-aged tequila and some top shelf Grand Marnier, though as discussed elsewhere in this blog I have my doubts about putting really expensive booze in a margarita, in much the same way that, for instance, I’d have doubts about making a brandy and Babycham with Remy Martin Louis XIII Black Pearl Limited Edition.   But since I’m never going to be in a position to do it that who’s to say I’m right?  Maybe if I was rich and stupid enough I’d be washing my feet (or someone else’s) in Krug.

Something else that ups the price of the Red O $100 margarita is that the rim is coated in kosher salt and gold leaf. Ah me.  I’m always fascinated by the “most expensive” this and that – like the world’s priciest hamburger or the world’s most luxurious sandwich.  It seems kind of ludicrous to me.  I mean if you want to up the price or any food dish, all you have to do is slap on an extra dollop of caviar, or add another layer of gold leaf, or for that matter.  Where’s the sport in that?

When I was staying in Guadalajara a couple of years back, the hotel bar (the hotel was the Victoria Express, the bar was the Bistro Garden, very Mexican-sounding, right? - that's it above) served a nice line in beer-based margaritas.  I’d never heard of such a thing till then, but I know I don’t get out much.  They were really (perhaps surprisingly) very good.

Of course nobody is ever likely to pay $100 for a cocktail containing beer. But then again some of us aren’t all that keen to pay $100 for a drink that has gold leaf round the rim.

I just dug out my copy of Rick Bayless’s “Mexican Kitchen: Capturing the Vibrant Flavors of a World Class Cuisine.”  It contains just three margarita recipes, none of them involving gold leaf, nor pomegranate seeds for that matter.  But it does contain some of Bayless’s “philosophy.”  He writes, “It’s my conviction that good wine and good food … are natural allies.”  Gee Rick, you’re really courting controversy there, ain’t ya?