THE FIRST TABLE THAT I REMEMBER with a particular pleasure is the one my family labeled the low table, where we children were confined during important meals. This table, besides being lower than that of the adults so that it was possible to sit around it by using the small chairs of our playroom, had the fundamental characteristic of allowing an almost absolute freedom, since we were far away from the scrutiny of my mother, who, with her primordial fear of hunger, used to stuff us with food during our daily meals. This low table was so caned to distinguish it from the tall one where the adults discoursed on a high level, which to us children was incomprehensible at the time. There, we would not have been allowed to sprint to our seats as soon as we heard the call “a tavola,” nor to prop our elbows on the table, nor to reduce the distance between the food and our mouths to an efficient minimum by slumping forward, unbridled and happy, as we did at the small table. There, at the most, we received looks of disapproval from my father, who could not get up to give us a well-deserved slap on the head because of the guests.
To return to what I consider the comfort of a table, I think that several elements need be considered. For instance, its height is essential, not only to prevent the guest from having to raise his elbow too much when he eats, but also, and above all, in order to make him comfortable. Too high a table creates a material and psychological barrier among the people who are seated around it and makes it very difficult for ideas, feelings, and spontaneous emotions to be transmitted. An adequate chair would seem the remedy, but this is true only up to a point, because the chair’s height must allow the soles of the feet to touch the floor. Furthermore, the angle between the thigh and the calf must never be above or below 90 degrees. If a man is seated on a chair, the table should be at the level of the navel.
Another important consideration in determining the right height of a table is the height of the ceiling above it. We do not want to be crushed by the vertical immensity of a room. In order to ensure the equilibrium of this proportion, in the two apparently identical rooms of Harry’s Bar in Venice, the tables on the ground floor are lower than those on the first floor. There’s only a foot of difference between the two ceilings, but it still had to be taken into account.
Then there is the primordial question of the table’s shape. Should it be square, rectangular, or round?
The square table in my opinion is probably the worst since it creates a sharp division among the guests. It should be used only for games, certainly not to eat. The four cardinal points are opposed, and the same antagonism, as subconscious as it may be, is necessarily generated among the four people seated around it. When there are just two people facing each other, the effort required to maintain visual contact through such an insurmountable barrier will undoubtedly produce digestive and emotional difficulties.
A rectangular table is more suitable for adulterers because, if it is not too wide, it will be relatively easy to touch the foot of a lover who is seated in front of us. If the lover is seated beside us, we can still press our knee discreetly against hers and get a mute but concrete promise in return.
As enjoyable as these secret messages under the table may be, they are not always as effective a means of communication as one would like. I remember that one evening my wife started to kick her neighbor at the table, thinking she was kicking me; she was trying to prevent me from telling a bit of anonymous gossip I’d just heard that actually concerned our charming hostess. I only found that out too late, on our way back home. I also remember a dinner that was ruined when one husband, who knew that his wife was having an affair, saw a woman’s foot nestled seductively between the legs of the friend seated beside him. Thinking that it belonged to his wife, who was sitting in front of him, he jumped up, stared at her, and said, “Don’t you think this is going a bit too far!” On the contrary, it was soon established for the benefit of all present that the innocent owner of the guilty extremity was the wife of the man’s friend, who was also seated in front of him. Therefore, I do not trust rectangular tables because they can be the origin of countless unpleasant misunderstandings. And if they are long and narrow, they do not favor the conversation among those who are seated along the same side.
It would seem therefore that the perfect table is the one with the most natural shape: round, like the form of the universe. A round table is also the only one that can be made to stand firmly on any floor. For years, my father had the hardest time keeping the tables from wobbling. He eventually discovered that he could solve the problem if he took away one of the four legs and arranged them like a triangle instead of a square. But only a round table can have three legs. Moreover, this shape eliminates priority problems among the guests. I remember the dinner organized at the Doge’s Palace in Venice for the conference of the industrialized nations. The presidents of seven states were present, and the only possible table that would have avoided antagonisms of etiquette was the round one. It is the table of equality, in which corners are replaced with calm curves. It is not by chance that it was chosen by King Arthur for his knights.
I am always surprised that the world’s most able diplomats keep forgetting the advantages of a round table. We all remember the distressing images of the long rectangular table during the negotiations between North and South Korea. The northerners were seated on the north side, and the southerners on the south. They were trying to negotiate an armistice, which was reached only after years of long and endless discussions and denials because, I am sure, of that table.
The size of a table, on the other hand, is less important than its shape, except that when you have a small number of guests, the wider their table is, the more they will have to raise their voices in order to be heard. The new czars of restaurant design, the acousticians, never tire of reminding us of this simple fact when they sing the praises of the small table, and in this one instance they are right. I believe that, starting from the presupposition that people — as I have said previously — absolutely need companionship not only to live, but also to eat, it is a good thing (and not only good, and deeply human, but also profitable for an innkeeper who needs to make maximum use of the space available to him) to place them as close together as possible. This way they can eat, laugh, joke, even touch each other a little with their elbows, and do everything that’s natural to feel alive and present without making a show of it.
But on the whole I would send the acousticians back to their soundproof booths where they belong. Some claim that a man who dines should be able to enjoy the calm and tranquillity of a semidark and silent room. Undoubtedly this is good for an ecclesiastic retreat or for a high mass. But personally, I do not like silence or indirect lighting or the excessive and onanistic obsession with the scarcely audible vibrations of the papillae on the tongue. I believe in the Dionysus, and in free spirit, and that man must be allowed every honest enthusiasm.
If, as we have seen, the shape and size of each table deserves the most careful attention, equally important are the quality and color of its natural ornament: the tablecloth.
I like to sleep and eat with very fine linen. Perhaps it is an indulgence on my part, but I think it is one I share with most people. The color of the tablecloth is crucial, of course, if only for the reason that it is reflected in people’s faces. You will never find a beautiful woman who can sit calmly at a table with a green tablecloth, because instinctively she will realize that the green is bound to reappear on her beautiful complexion. On the other hand, pink will not go well with the purple color of her gallant companion, because at the end of the meal, he will seem more prone to a stroke than to a serene digestion. A pale yellow and ivory are the colors that I prefer, because they confer a pleasant clarity onto the surroundings.
I often think of the lace tablecloths that thousands of women from Burano have patiently embroidered for centuries — tablecloths on which they would never eat, objects that are splendid and marvelous because of the millions of stitches made by hand and woven with imagination. I wonder how many historical pronouncements have been made by heads of state on the wings of one of these embroidered butterflies.
As for the shape and color of the glasses, they deserve a whole treatise all to themselves. Two years ago I remember seeing some small glass amphorae at the Museum of Gallo-Roman Civilization in Lyons, France. Their exquisite lightness, which complemented their very pale blue color, made me breathless. Seeing them, I was confirmed in my belief that in matters of taste, there is nothing new under the sun, even though industry has progressed all these years. To hold in one’s hand one of the slender octagonal glasses that were blown by the masters of Murano is always a thrilling experience, and to drink from it offers a moment of ecstasy.
In choosing a glass, balance is paramount, followed by color, which must be transparent. In order to be appreciated in all its spheric essence, wine must be looked at naked, like a beautiful woman. Then comes the rim, which must be as thin as possible, as is the case with coffee cups and demitasses. I do not like excesses in the size of a glass, since most often this is only a matter of showing off the virtuosity of the glassblower, and the shape must always be round. All the different shapes, colors, and artistic etchings that can be found in glasses undoubtedly reach remarkable formal effects, but in my opinion such glasses are not suitable for daily use.
Dishes that are disproportionately large always aim at hiding the poverty of what is being served. Not to mention the fashionable exaggerations by which the forms and the colors of a course are presented only as a decoration of the dish itself, regardless of substance. Dishes must contain the food in its various forms, and they serve just this purpose. Appropriate size to everything, sober and elegant decoration of the rim, and never of the center, which I prefer to be white.
My father revolutionized the choice of silverware in his establishments. After having gained experience in the great French and Italian hotels, he realized that, in many cases, the excessive number of forks and knives placed on the table served only as a cause of shyness and confusion among the guests. Where is the person who, at a gala dinner, has never peered up to see what his neighbor was doing before taking the right silverware in hand? Moreover, the knives and forks, not to mention spoons, that are designed to be used with the main courses are undoubtedly too large and heavy. Because of this, my father decided to set the table for his clients only with the silverware that is usually used for the dessert. And he always used only two pieces, a knife and a fork, which were of course changed for every course.
Silverware for fish seems to deserve special treatment, but it is not true that the knives and forks designed especially for this purpose are more suitable than the normal ones to separate the meat from the fishbones. In earlier days, before the invention of stainless steel, special silverware was used because knife blades tended to turn black when they were put in contact with lemon juice or wine.
In fact, from the very beginning the history of silverware has been plagued by an anxiety of decorum that has produced the most nonsensical aberrations. From Adam to the year 1633 everybody used his hands, then Charles I of England imposed the use of forks. Now we have entered the modern age, and perhaps we can at last agree not to confuse the technical limitations of the past with the truly immutable principles of classical form.
But all the attention paid to tables, chairs, and tableware will not make up for any flaw in what constitutes the true soul of a great restaurant: the people who sit at those tables, commonly known by us restaurateurs as the clientele.
The clients of a restaurant are divided, more or less, into two categories, according to the function of the table they sit at: those who “make” the table, and those who need a table to feel important.
The main motivation of the clients belonging to the first category is to enjoy to the maximum all the positive things that their chosen restaurant can offer. Therefore, they do not care much about the table’s location. Before the enlargement of Harry’s Bar in 1960, I remember we were often patronized by a very rich Parisian banker who never refused a table, no matter how crowded we were, how poorly placed the table. One evening he ate in the middle of the service entrance without complaining. He calmly ate his dinner with his wife sitting next to him, surrounded by the confusion of the waiters, the cooks, and the busboys who were rushing by with trays piled high with dishes and glasses.
But it is an unfortunate truth of the restaurant business that such clients are rare, and that those who need a particular table to feel important are a vast majority. The widowed wife of that same Parisian banker demanded, and still demands, to dine only if she is given a table in a corner. Anybody who wants to open a restaurant today would be well advised to shape the dining room like a star, as that is the only way to please all the customers who demand to be seated in a corner.
It has always seemed to me that, while the forces that move the heavenly bodies and everything else in the universe are many and mysterious, there are basically two forces that motivate people: luxury and snobbishness. And there is no better place in the world to see the difference between these alternating impulses than in a restaurant.
After years of careful observation, I have come to the conclusion that snobbishness can flourish only in times of great affluence, while luxury appears in times of crisis as a source of equilibrium. Snobbishness consists of the desire for the superfluous and in the intentionally careless use of the things that we use every day. When it is allowed entrance into the world of gastronomy, it leads to the most absurd sets of priorities and generally means giving a lot of importance to things and very little importance to people. In fact, the snob always qualifies almost everything that is obvious and normal as “divine.”
Luxury, on the other hand, is the quest for quality, and hence for what is rare. In contrast to the snobs, those who seek luxury are interested not in the quality that can be found in things, but in the quality that only people know how to give.
I remember the 1970s as the decade of maximum snobbishness, a time that coincided, incidentally, with the rejection of the traditional Italian and French dishes. Those were the years of macrobiotics. It was said that the intestines could not function if one did not force down two or three heaping tablespoonsful of horrendous bran that had been swept up by some very sly farmers from the floors of their barns, and which were put in little plastic bags to be sold as the remedy for constipation. Sitting with resigned, almost transcendental smiles, the credulous victims of the bran dogma had scarcely enough energy to stand up at the conclusion of their so-called meals, which generally consisted of two grains of wild rice and a portion of buckwheat seasoned with soya.
As was to be expected, it wasn’t long before the tyrants of gastronomy, the food critics, had sold their souls for a provocative headline and given their stamp of approval to this “nouvelle cuisine,” and shortly afterward, the restaurants fell in step. Soon, dining out at a fashionable restaurant meant swallowing two peas in a prune sauce, a very thin slice of Hungarian goose liver, and two raw spinach leaves, served as a side dish on splendid Limoges dishes.
“Divine!” the snobs cried out. But in the evening they collapsed onto their beds in comalike sleeps, despite what they had been told by the Master Chan Zi, which was that on a diet of peas and spinach leaves they would have the stamina to make love thirty times a week. Master Chan Zi died shortly afterward, killed by a car in front of which he had fainted, crushed by fatigue, while he was crossing the street.
The fads of the 1970s ultimately made me realize that man is the most credulous among the planet’s inhabitants. Omnivorous since the beginning of time, he is easily convinced that, for instance, meat and fish are terrible poisons that will cause sudden death the minute they are ingested. But you would have a hard time convincing a lion to eat only honey and yogurt by telling him that the meat of the gnu is indigestible.
But even at the height of their authority, the gurus of the nouvelle cuisine could not keep preaching a gospel that stood in such stark contradiction to all the five senses of man. So to make up for what the taste buds were lacking, they spent all their energy describing the way the food should look. This explains the appearance in restaurants of very expensive Limoges porcelain, which, above all, had the function of diverting the attention of the eater, whose palate was silently protesting the scantiness of the courses, from the substance of what he was eating. I remember once sitting with my wife at a table for two in a famous restaurant in the late seventies and calculating the cost of the table setting. Without considering the linens, I arrived at several thousand dollars. Then the food came. With the exception of the wine, every dish was a disaster.
Even the terrorism of the period was a form of snobbishness. Born out of affluence, it replaced the properly human quality of reasoning with bullets and pistols. But the hidden pretentiousness of the terrorists was known only to themselves, some of whom, I learned later, occasionally took their young initiates to eat at Harry’s Bar.
Happily, the jig is up for the snobs of gastronomy, because the crisis they caused is leading us back to the quality of tradition. The French chef Paul Bocuse, an extraordinary cook who has always had an infallible sense for which way the wind is blowing, told me recently that he now feels free to lift the lids off his pots and let the rich aroma of his grandmother’s sauces saturate the kitchen. Soon the snobs will no longer be fashionable and will be replaced by the unsightly, but much less bothersome, hordes of nouveaux riches. They will pick up the crumbs of snobbishness and pay exorbitant prices — to the great benefit of us restaurateurs.
Regardless of the fads, however, the snobs will continue to cause trouble when it comes to table reservations. It is part of their nature, and I would sooner try to teach the sun to revolve around the earth than teach the snobs to behave reasonably when they expect to be shown to a certain table.
One August afternoon a few years ago, a former cadet of the Venice Naval Academy came to Harry’s Bar. The school was noted for its stern discipline, and its students included the scions of Italy’s best families, such as the Aostas, the Rattazzis, and the Colonnas. In the 1970s the sons of these illustrious families became habitués of Harry’s Bar every Thursday and Saturday evening, their evenings of liberty.
The former cadet was named Longanesi, an extremely polite young man I was quite fond of. He came in that August afternoon and told me in great secrecy that he had become the personal secretary of Prince Rainier of Monaco, who would be coming to Venice that weekend in a strictly private capacity. He said the prince wanted to dine at Harry’s Bar on Saturday evening but thought it advisable to reserve the table in the name of Longanesi. I took the reservation in Longanesi’s name.
That was on Tuesday. I had plenty of time before Saturday rolled around to forget, which is something I often do, the particulars of the Longanesi table among the other reservations for Saturday evening. I ought to mention as well that a reservation at Harry’s Bar usually means you have the right to a table, but it may not be ready on the dot. This is not an affectation but a practice necessitated by what ought to be a rule in our business: no matter what the circumstances, it is totally unacceptable to deny a customer a table. So it often happens that we accept more reservations than we have tables, which means, unfortunately, that some customers may have to wait at the bar until a table is free.
That Saturday night we were full to capacity, and at eight o’clock sharp, in came Mr. Longanesi with Prince Rainier right behind him. My forehead broke out in a cold sweat. I had completely forgotten Longanesi’s secret, and there was not a free table in the place. At least in the main floor dining room. Then I remembered our dining room upstairs.
I told Mr. Longanesi that for reasons of security I had thought it advisable to set aside a table upstairs. And I rushed up the stairs like a streak, only to find that the last table had just been taken. I pulled myself together, put on a smile, and stopped the prince in the hallway to ask if he would mind waiting a minute at the bar. Ten minutes later the prince lost patience and left, followed by Mr. Longanesi, who threw me a glance of sad reproof.
To my dismay, I never saw him again.
This is what happens sometimes to people who are not used to Harry’s Bar. It’s not that we have a policy of making people wait, but I must confess that the whole issue of table reservations is often confusing enough to overwhelm even the best of us. There is something mysterious about it, almost unfathomable to the human mind, and I often find myself treating it more as a matter of faith than of knowledge. Just the other day one of our habitués came in unexpectedly after he’d been away on a long vacation and asked if he could have a table for lunch. There was none. But we told him there was, a statement that, as anyone who is worth his salt in this business will confirm, was not a lie but a prayer. And somehow, with a little waiting, a little rearranging, we found him a table.
It was a little miracle, the likes of which happen almost every day at Harry’s Bar.