I kind of got interested in the timing of the service. They’d bring you a course. It would take you about a minute and a half to eat it. Thirty minutes later you’d get another course. I began timing it. Almost 30 minutes to the dot. Yes, this was planned. Thus, if you had a five course meal, there was no way you’d get out in less than two and a half hours, three hours for six course, etc. Our meal took three and a half.
And what were you doing when you weren’t eating? Sweating. The heat in the room became unbearable. Linda said she was getting dizzy. Me, too. When we finally emerged from the place, we were like miners who had been trapped underground for 10 days, gasping and clutching at the cool night air.
I won’t get into the rest of it, the cheese platter, followed by four, count ’em, separate desserts. “Who can eat all those?” I asked Linda. “She can,” she said, motioning to a lady at the center table whose mouth was opening like an alligator’s. Oh yes, the bill. No, I won’t get into that, not at all. I’m too ashamed.
People we spoke to continued to rave about the Auberge. But some of the restaurant people we got to know told a different story.
“At one time that style was fashionable, but they haven’t changed with the times,” said a chef at a small restaurant where we ate a couple of times. “It’s a style the Michelin people can understand.” Well, not us.
Here, then, are our top 10 in Germany, Alsace, Luxembourg and Italy’s Alto Adige:
1. Hotel Turm, Fie, Grade 9.22
Highest grade we’ve ever given. Best restaurant in Italy we’ve ever eaten in. Herr Prahmstrahler is also the chef. His cooking is light and delicate and unforgettable. Huge, natural wine cellar with rarities from the region at modest prices.
2. Tie between Luc Brendel, LaTable du Gourmet in Riquewihr, Alsace, and Wald Hotel Sonorra, Dreis, Germany, 8.17
Magnificent French cooking with an Alsatian twist at La Table. Best sweetbreads I’ve ever eaten. The Wald Sonorra is one of those countrified landmarks people flock to. Very fancy. Considered one of Germany’s keynote restaurants, but we didn’t know it. We just stumbled in late on a Sunday afternoon and had a marvelous meal.
4. Rotisserie Ardennaise, Luxembourg, 8.06
Another of those Sunday “got lucky” meals. Fresh escargots and steak au poivre.
5. Three-way tie among Auberge Le Bouc Bleu in Beblenheim, Alsace; Zum Treppchen in Beilstein on the Mosel in Germany and the café at Schloss Johannissberg vineyard in the Rheingau, 8.0
Bouc Bleu, a pretty little place, became a real favorite. Husband-wife team. He’s the chef, she’s from the Southwest of France and supervises the wines, notably Cadillacs and Madirans. Zum Treppchen bowled Linda over with its selection of giant baked potatoes stuffed with all manner of wonderful things and a dessert that the owner, Rita Schneider, explained was from her home in the Tirol. It’s called Kaiserschmarm and it consists of shredded pancakes and raisins in vanilla ice cream. “You’re not doing it justice,” Linda says. “Light and delicate, still warm when we got it …” OK, OK already. Our lunch at the Schloss was very light, but everything was perfect, including a fresh trout. You can’t get that in restaurants in the U.S.
8. St. Michael-Eppan, Alto Adige, 7.835
An inexpensive workingman’s place a few K’s from the inn where we always stay. Of the five or six times we’ve eaten there, Linda has had the turkey in pepper sauce, I’d say four times.
9. Weinhotel Landsknecht, St. Goar, Germany, 7.56
Perfect white asparagus in Holandaise sauce, terrific wines of the Mittelrhein from the owner’s vineyard.
10. Hotel Uhrerhof Deur, Bulla, Alto Adige, Italy, 7.5
We’ve stayed here for years. Owned by the Zemmer family, and the papa, Walter, formerly the head chef at the Greif Hotel in Bolzano, does the cooking. Dinners are included in the very modest hotel bill, which is just fine with us because his menu is full of surprises, everything done with the lightest possible touch.
12. Collecting
You either have the collecting instinct or you don’t. There is very little middle ground. I have had it from the age of five, when I got my first look at the model soldiers of W. Britain, Ltd. It has never left me; it has only grown and spread horizontally, threatening to devour the house in a mass of cartons and boxes and objects still to be classified and arranged. It has reached the point at which only small objects can still be collected.
Briefly, my collecting interests encompass the following, and I’m sure I’m leaving off a few:
•Books
•Football programs
•Military miniatures, also known as toy soldiers
•Coins
•Cigar box labels
•Menus (only restaurants in which I’ve eaten and liked the food)
•Wine labels and metal Champagne capsules (only things that I’ve drunk)
•Casino chips, worldwide (Collection now defunct, having been stolen by neighbor who came by to take my mail in while I was on trips. She took a lot more, too, including a basic coin collection I started as a youngster. Coins made a comeback, the chips project was abandoned after setback.)
•Stamps (I think the old albums I had as a child are around somewhere. Still three old storage boxes to look through.)
The most important thing a collector can have is a wife who understands. She doesn’t even have to have the instinct herself, she just has to be tolerant and avoid, at all costs, the deadly, “Why do you need another … ?” My wife, Linda Bailey Zimmerman, known to my readers as The Flaming Redhead, has been a collector all her life, the purest kind, the one who is not backed up by huge sums with which to snap up entire aggregations. As a child in a modest household, she gathered rocks, bits of paper, fabric, anything that didn’t require cash outlay. Later, as an artist, she became fascinated by the Bohemian lifestyle of Paris in the 1920s and ’30s. One thing led to another, and it was only a matter of time until the books in our house formed an amalgamation with that earlier, Parisian way of life, and it found expression in the works and life of Anais Nin.
So unlike my rather sloppy, undisciplined collecting habits, the Redhead narrowed her focus and in time built up a serious Nin archive helped immeasurably by the dealer, Peter Howard of Serendipity Books in Berkeley. I’ve known Peter for years, having been drawn to his interesting trove of radical literature, but something about the Redhead sent a message to him that this is a person who is really serious. So when Anais Nin’s brother, Joaquin Nin-Culmell, died in Berkeley in 2004, and Peter was entrusted with the sale of his archive, he called Linda and invited her out to have first crack at the material, an unquestioned act of kindness. The items she picked up became the cornerstone of a worthwhile collection.
And now we must contrast that with the obverse side of the collecting picture. The sad literature of divorce is filled with tales of spouses who either destroyed their mate’s collection or dumped it off at the Salvation Army or Goodwill, as a pointed and painfully effective act of malice. I’ve heard my share of these stories and I take them the way I take all such chronicles of marital battles. I won’t pass judgment until I’ve heard the other side, until I can figure out what brought this on? Assault, extreme public embarrassment, a straight right cross? It had to be something.
But I have my own little story about the stormy confluence of the collecting and non-collecting instincts, with no malice involved, except that generated by people who have to listen to this tale. No true collector ever has let me finish it; it becomes only too obvious what is coming. It’s always hand on the forehead, and then the entreaty, “Stop … please … don’t tell me any more.”
In the early days of my first marriage, I returned home from work one evening, intending to devote some quality time to that most enjoyable of pastimes, cataloguing and rearranging a collectible, in this case coins.
“Honey!” I shouted. “Have you se
en my silver dollars?”
“You know you were supposed to give me money for the supermarket this morning,” I heard from the next room, “and you didn’t, so I …” That’s as far as I’ve ever gotten. It would have been interesting, sociologically, to have seen what the result … check that … it wouldn’t have been interesting at all. It would have been horrible.
When I was five, and right up the time until I was 11 or 12, I got almost no allowance from my parents. I was paid off in “sets.” Sets were the toy soldiers of the English firm of W. Britain, Ltd. Eight foot soldiers, or five mounted, or in the case of exotics such as camels (Bikaner Camel Corps, for instance), three formed a set. Each set cost 79 cents. If I did something particularly noteworthy, I’d get to pick one out. Generally this happened once or twice a month, but I distinctly recall one glorious stretch when I was on a once-a-week pace for at least a month and a half.
They were beautiful little things. On most pieces the arms were hinged and they could move. The best were the figures on which both arms moved, such as the kneeling Coldstream Guard officer, holding a pair of binoculars. Up, down, up, down, his arms went, as he lined up the distant target for the seven kneeling riflemen, with their high bearskin hats, alongside him. I loved that set, but anything on horseback that bore the designation “Guards” was good too. Life Guards, Horse Guards, Queens’ Own, Prince Albert’s Own … I was exceptionally taken by anything designated as someone’s “Own.”
I could get modern metal soldiers at Woolworth’s for a nickel apiece on the off times when my parents would send me a nickel or dime my way, and these were the rough pieces for playing with. With the British sets, never. You lined them up in formation and put them back in their box, which incidentally, had, written in script, the name of the battles in which that unit had distinguished itself. You treated them with respect. I knew this even as a wee lad. A born collector. That’s why those early sets still exists today … somewhere … maybe in the garage … maybe in the big box in the attic … I swear they’re around somewhere.
I couldn’t sleep the night before a trip was scheduled to Macy’s, or even better, FAO Schwarz on 59th and 5th, to buy a set. On the trip down to Schwarz, riding the old 5th Ave. bus with the open top, I’d be on my feet, practically dancing up and down. Central Park, the zoo, oh my God, we’re coming to it!
This might come as a surprise, but the price of 79 cents per set did not hold, but as I traced the course of my toy soldier collecting through the years and replaced the original term, “toy soldiers” with the somewhat fancier “military miniatures,” I never have felt that the prices for wonderful figures seemed out of line.
I graduated to the more elegant handmades. I became a habitué of the soldier shows, but for years my favorite place to buy soldiers was Le Petit Soldier Shop on Royal and St. Peter in New Orleans. The owner, Dave Dugas, employed local artists to paint the figures, and I got to the point where I could actually begin to tell the work of different people. The prices, somewhere between $15 and $20 apiece, actually seemed low, considering the painstaking effort that went into painting what my wife calls, “Your little people.” I would spend hours in that shop, going through hundreds of figures, piece by piece, gradually finding the absolute gems.
Well one day in the late summer of 1970, I was in New Orleans covering a Jets-Saints exhibition game and the first place I headed was to Dave’s shop in the Quarter.
“I’ve got something to show you,” he said. “It’s way outside your price range, but you ought to look at it.”
He reached in a drawer and pulled out the finest individual piece of military miniature art I had ever seen. It was totally outside my collecting interest, which, at that time was Napoleonic. It was an oversized Baluchi, a turn of the century Pakistani, when the troops were part of the British forces, in green fatigue dress, carrying sergeant’s insignia. He wore a peaked turban, his hair was long, his mouth was turned down in an expression of pure merciless cruelty, and setting it all off were the coldest, deadest, murderer’s eyes.
“It’s a competition piece,” Dave said. “Took a bronze at Lancaster, Pa. I’d like to see what won the gold.”
I was barely hearing him. To have that figure … to have it … how much, Dave, how much, Dave, how much, Dave, how much … ?
“It’s $250,” he said, and my heart went clunk because I knew it would be something like that. As he had said, way beyond my price range. Don’t forget this was 1970.
“I want to thank you, Dave, for breaking my heart,” I said and stormed out of his shop, into the sultry New Orleans heat, striding blindly, past Bourbon, past Chartres, the eyes, they were burning a hole in my brain, those eyes. I had to have that piece. I stopped short. I knew exactly what would happen. He’d have the piece out. Some rich collector would arrive, take one look at it and it would be gone. Gone forever. I turned and started trotting back, then sprinting. People stared at a crazy man running by them. I burst into the shop, the sweat running down my face, just in time to see Dave wrapping up the piece, the Baluchi.
For me.
“I knew you’d be back,” he said.
There’s a very happy kicker to this story. A week later my parents were at our house. Now my mother was the kind of old world mama who could spot a new object in the house wherever it resided, and she would immediately point to it and say, “How much?”
And no matter how much you told her, she’d clutch her heart and gasp, “Oh my God.”
How much? A dollar forty nine, ma. Oh my God. How about this? Eighty-nine cents, Ma. Oh my God. I think you’ve got the picture. Like an idiot, I forgot to hide the Baluchi before she came. She barely said hello to everyone before she was standing in front of it.
“How much?” It wouldn’t do to lie. She could always tell when I was lying.
I drew a deep breath, closed my eyes and said, “Two hundred and fifty dollars.” She continued studying the figure.
“That’s all?” she said. “It’s a real work of art.”
Yeah! Yeah! I almost let out a yell. That’s what it is all right.
The moral of the story is that if you really love something, if it speaks to you, buy it, even if it means going without lunches for a month or so, as I did to pay for the Baluchi. This is especially true at auctions, although it’s easy to get caught up in what they call “auction madness” and lose all perspective. I don’t remember any of those lunches that I missed … (uh, how can you if you missed them? All right, all right already, there’s a point to be made here.) Lunches are overrated anyway. It’s a matter of priorities. And you never forget the ones that get away. It haunts you. If only I’d have thrown in that one last bid.
There’s a joy in collecting things that were fantastically cheap, in retrospect, especially when you had a feeling at the time that they were absolute steals. I started picking up football programs when I was in high school. I kept, of course, the ones from the games I had seen, all annotated and marked up, but these were from the games involving teams with a certain level of history attached to them. I haunted a store on 44th and 6th Ave. called Midtown Magazines that featured mostly girlie magazines. It was kind of an unhealthy place. You never wanted to lock your gaze onto any of the regular customers, or you might hear some suggestions that might not appeal to you. But for some reason, Midtown had a huge supply of old football programs, dirt cheap because few people other than me were interested in them.
Thus I was picking up Fordham in the 1930s with Vince Lombardi and the Seven Blocks of Granite, plus Army and Navy when they were powerhouses, plus any number of professional programs with Sammy Baugh and Sid Luckman and Don Hutson, for a dime apiece. Bowl games were more expensive, maybe a quarter, but when I bought in bulk, which I always did, they’d give me a negotiated price.
My father was furious. “More magazines … you mean he’s bringing more magazines into the house?” And I lived in fear that one day he’
d go through some sort of clean-up pogrom, and there they’d go, so I’d try to find exotic places to hide them, which wasn’t easy in a four-room apartment. But they were absolute gems in those days, featuring long articles by the leading sportswriters of the day, cartoons by Willard Mullin and others, strategic think pieces that were invaluable as reference points when I started writing about the sport.
When I went out to Stanford, I discovered, on my first trip to Los Angeles, the Adco Sports Exchange on Wilshire, run by an odd little birdlike character named Goodwin Goldfaden. His prices were high, compared to what I was used to, but he had real quality items, such as Carlisle with Jim Thorpe and Ivy League programs from the 19th century. His asking price was $5 apiece, but since I was the only one really interested in them, I could generally do OK via discounts, even on my college boy funds.
Ivy League programs of the 1890s interestingly were sold at the time for a dollar apiece compared to the standard 25-cent rate 50 years later. But Ivy numbers were mini-hard cover books, and only rich folk went to those games anyway. But a dollar then … gosh, you could have a meal at Delmonico’s for that.
Wine labels and champagne capsules are nice things to collect because they’re free, if you know how to boil and then scrape off a label. (They use some iron glue type of stuff now.) So are menus, uh, sometimes. My method always was to slide it under the left armpit, lower the arm, and the jacket covered all. It wouldn’t work, of course, if it was an informal type of place, with no jackets required, but a lot of times I’d wear one anyway, anticipating the fact that there might be a menu worth having.
My wife, Lady Law and Order, put a stop to this, at least temporarily.
“Just ask them for it,” she’d say. “I’m sure they’ll let you have it.”
This advice was correct about 60 percent of the time. A few restaurants actually sold them to us.
Dr. Z Page 31