Eating Around The World

For almost thirty years I was a globe trotter. My job was licensing cartoons and documentaries for broadcast on global government and private stations in close to one hundred countries and overseeing product licensing of the comic characters in the USA and countries where the programs were broadcast. I was the first American woman to have this position and was Vice President of Marvel Comics and later Executive Vice President of Filmation Studios. A few of the characters I represented are still famous today, such as Spiderman, Captain America, Hulk, Ironman, The Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, He-Man, She-Ra, and Fat Albert..

Part of my job was entertaining clients, taking them to dinner was my forte! I learned to read menus in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and fake several others while translating them to clients, explaining in detail what to expect. Escargots was one of my favorites. You try to tell someone whose station group sent them to Cannes what to expect — snails stuck in a shell with a lot of garlic, butter and shallots. Or perhaps octopus cooked in its own ink. That always went over well. And then, at the end of the meal they would want coffee, American coffee only, please. With cream. The Italians cringed in horror, they called American coffee aqua sporca – dirty water.

This was a long time ago, the Soviet Union had recently broken up into various countries whose buyers had not been out of their country often, some — never. I remember publishers in from Poland to negotiate a license to reprint Marvel Comics. I invited three of them to lunch at Le Cirque in Manhattan. In 1978, one lunch in a good New York restaurant could feed an entire family in Poland for at least a week or two. Gail, a lovely blonde and head of licensing, always tastes everyone’s food, checking out what she’ll order next time.

One of the Polish gentlemen looks across in horror as she stabs her fork into one man’s dish with her eye on the next. When it’s his turn, he can’t control himself. Hands fly out and around a serving of Fois Gras creating a bulwark of arms and fingers clutching in protection against the blonde with the marauding fork.

The good side is, as entertainer, I pick the restaurant, the wine, and the menu. The not so good side is I must also eat with clients in their homes or home territory. As a result, I have become the unaclaimed expert on food poisoning. In Paris I had to eat the amuse bouche in a client’s beloved restaurant. It was a raw oyster on the half shell marinated in a secret sauce. It must have marinated beyond its sell-by date because both my assistant and I had severe food poisoning lasting several days. That was topped by a sea urchin specialty at a wildly expensive Tokyo restaurant. I was so ill my husband had to call the company to find a doctor and they sent over the president’s personal physician to take care of me.

I took a long time to learn. In Italy, Gail and I were invited to a client's home. He knew I loved carpaccio, raw steak sliced like paper and served with salt, pepper, olive oil, touch of balsamic vinegar or lemon juice, parsley and thin slivers of parmesan cheese. I was presented with a platter of thin sliced raw chicken with all the accoutrements of carpaccio. Gail took one looked and not-so-politely refused to take any. I, being so polite, took two slices and gagged it down. When my hostess spotted my empty plate, she insisted I take more. Gagging down three more slices, I watched Gail. She was trying not to laugh out loud and hiding her face. On the way back to our hotel she was howling with laughter at the expression on my face as I ate the last three slices.

OK, that was my epiphany. I admitted it. From then on, I was going to stop with the fucking-phony-polite behavior. No more oysters to amuse my bouche, raw chicken or sea urchin. I had learned to say “NO” with emphasis.

At the next convention, we had an eight AM meeting with a Romanian publishing company. As we walked in their office cubby at the book fair, I was handed a glass of suspicious looking amber fluid. “What is this?” I asked.

“Schnapps, of course. We start every day like this.” Said the publisher.

I looked him straight in the eye. “Well its not the way I start the day. Take this away.” I thrust the glass back at him. “Now, send someone to get me a cup of coffee and let us proceed.” It worked like a charm. Gail drank it and had the good grace to choke a bit. This time I gave her the eye.

From then on I refused sea snails to be eaten with a long needle, frog legs, rabbit and roasted wild boar. I said “no” to anything Indian or Mexican with very hot spices. If the client insisted ‘just try, you’ll love it’ I knew it was time to be more emphatic.

I also learned to love of lot of new delicacies. I had grown up in a household of roast chicken and grilled steak. No lamb, pork and hardly any fish unless we had caught it ourselves. We did eat lobster, and shrimp. Mother was a great maker of pies, blueberry muffins and cookies. Not so great about making the main meals. It was thrilling to expand my palate and find new dishes to love.

One of my favorites was Soupe de Poisson from the South of France. It’s a thick, rich redish seafood soup made with almost any white fish that swims in the Mediterranean, served with crisp toasted baguette slices you rub with raw garlic, then slather on rouille, a mayonnaise concoction with even more garlic, and top with slivers of Parmesan cheese. Several of these well-dressed toasts go into the bottom of the bowl and the soup is poured over them. The result is a luscious combination of seafood, cheese, bread, and garlic. By the time you finish two or three bowls, garlic ends up coming out of your pores as well as your mouth. At the conventions in France and Monte Carlo, on arrival everyone ran to their favorite restaurant for Soupe de Poissons and load up on garlic because they knew everyone else would reek of garlic too. It was the only way to survive the typical European two cheek kisses and hug. I almost killed a British buyer by hugging her when she had just arrived and I had come back from a stellar portion of fish and garlic at my favorite place overlooking the Mediterranean.

Head cheese, or Fromage de Tête became another favorite. Made from taking a pigs head, scraping off the meat and boiling the head and chopped up meat in wine, vinegar and seasoning to make a gelatin. The mixture is placed in a loaf pan in the refrigerator until jelled solid, then sliced like a bread and served cold or room temperature, either as an appetizer, or with a baguette. But finally, escargot, garlic and all, became my favorite appetizer.

Lamb chops, muscles in wine, and fois gras, caviar, roast leg of lamb, grilled fish, all warmed my palate. My husband was French, and we often cooked and prepared parties together, serving much of our own favorites to friends. Simple dishes like roasted sweet red peppers served with olive oil, slices of garlic and fresh basil for appetizers, shrimp cooked with chopped garlic, onion and pepperoncini in ½ olive oil and ½ butter piled on slices of baguette to soak up the garlicky liquid, Spanish egg, onion and potato tapas, all added fun to a traditional barbeque.

Anything Italian gained my approval and love. In Modena, a restaurant's specialty was serving a variety of pasta. I always tried two or three different sauces. Vodka, marinara, truffle, seafood combinations, olives, meat sauces, whatever they gave me, I loved!

Sushi in London, Paris and Spain was the new rage, and it was delicious. The only difference between countries was the price, London winning as the most expensive. I was still leery of Tokyo after the sea urchin experience.

After a few years, people at the conventions came to me for recommendations of restaurants. I sent quite a few to my favorite in Théoule sur Mer, near Cannes. In its day it had the best seafood on the Riviera. I had the same waiter for years. His English was scanty, but he was charming and funny. I gave parties at the restaurant and brought many, many clients who came back. One afternoon my husband and I went for lunch before the convention. Our waiter brought us a large basket of fish to choose what we wanted. A woman at the next table called him over and yelled at him for showing “the American” the fish before her. My husband couldn’t stop laughing. The waiter told the woman, “You live in the next block and come here to eat once or twice a year. That lady comes from Los Angeles four times a year, for many, many years, and stays about ten days each time. She brings clients, throws parties and today comes with her husband for lunch. Of course she gets to see the fish!” And then he stomped away. When my wonderful waiter retired, it was not the same and we stopped going there.

My last story is about a group from the Netherlands I was consulting with for their proposed new animated feature. The man in charge, Dirk, was very handsome and married to a top European model. He created a company around a sexy cartoon character and raised a small fortune from gullible executives in publishing and video, and a pig farmer, to produce an animated film for television to move merchandise licensing and video sales. Dirk was not the best conman, but he was doing a good job of it. He took his backers to Cannes to be wined and dined and see how the business worked. Giving them a little glitz and glamor worked and the money flowed in. I arranged a dinner for him and his financiers at the Carlton Hotel dining room, the glitziest on the Croisette in Cannes.

Dirk and his model wife arrived, both stoned out of their minds. Oh crap, I thought. This is going to be a nightmare. Two other consultants were there to chat up the backers. My eye rolling conveyed the message we had to keep them occupied and not talking to Dirk. As the dinner rolled along, Dirk and wife quarreled. She was flirting with two guys at the next table. To keep their attention, she pulled up her top and flashed bare breasts at them. They looked away. The lobsters we ordered arrived. She ripped off the two big claws, whistled at the guys, and when they looked over, put claws to her ears and wiggled them while running her tongue around her lips. The backers were startled, but not as much as the consultants. We had no idea what to do when Dirk grabbed her by the arm. Dragging her from the restaurant and hotel, he left us with the mess. I signaled the waiter, asked him to rearrange the table for less diners. Then ordered champagne for everyone. We had Dirk’s company credit card, hoping it still worked. The rest of the dinner was uneventful. The three of us told show business stories to entertain the backers, who left thoughtful. Forever after that evening was known as the ‘Lobster Ears Dinner’.