CELEBRATE WITH PASSION!

Maybe a feast is called for! Or not! That's true whether in 1800's France being served roasted peacock by waiters on horseback or today grabbing some Wagyu ribeye and Cheetos and call it a meal

Over the time I knew chef Jean Claude Tindillier, I was regaled with crazy food stories. A roaming cherry picker went from farm to farm each fall in small towns south of Paris not only to pick but also to put up a 55-gallon drum of cherry liquor for each farmer’s family to enjoy over the year until the next cherry-picking season arrived. Sometime in the mid-19th century, there was a circus-like dinner with Jean Claude and his other chef buddies in some high-cooking-or-drinking society that began at 8 a.m. —yup, a celebratory dinner starting in the morning! Courses were delivered —astoundingly!— to the dining room’s tables on massive silver trays held aloft by servers on horseback. All the rest of the details of that morning-to-afternoon-to-who-knows-when soiree are lost to memory. My friend’s stories could only have been zanier had he been talking about the earliest days of wine making about 6,000 BC, not to mention describing the foods eaten then.

A feast can be eaten in a restaurant. I was wont to give Jean Claude —chef at Chouette in Wayzata, Minn., at that time— a certain amount for the cost of an anniversary meal, for example. Then, I told him to “surprise us.” Turnabout being fair play, I decided to “surprise him” once with an invite to my home for a celebratory meal that I’d cook. What was I thinking? Me cook for him! Well, we were good friends . . . and I probably could come up with something halfway presentable. It was game on! As I recall I served some kind of salad with seafood in it. The rest, I’ve no recollection of. But, given the chance, I’d eagerly ask a notable French chef for dinner again.

In the 1970’s, happily cooking for my French chef buddy, Jean Claude, in our home kitchen

Jean Claude with two adoring patrons, March 23, 1980, at his restaurant, Chouette, in Wayzata, Minn.

The star of one ultra-special at home feast in 2021 —the primary reason for the party!— was this 1986 Chateau Mouton Rothschild, Pauillac, which I’d given to a very dear wine-loving friend decades ago and which he dragged halfway across the U.S. to share in its drinking with his wife, my wife, and me

A spectacularly hand-lettered menu by my dear friend’s very dear wife

FIRST COURSE

Canape’s of smoked salmon, seaweed, dungeness crab, and scrambled eggs served with Donkey & Goat “The Gadabout” white California wine.

SECOND COURSE

Le Montarlier Comte, Alta Langa La Tur, Vermont Creamery bijou, Cowgirl Creamery red hawk {not in photo: sea salt & olive oil Marcona almonds, pine nuts, dark chocolate pistachio toffee, Adriatic fig spread}

MAIN COURSE

Thomas Keller blanched asparagus

Joel Robuchon pommes puree

Grilled American Waygu ribeye & lamb loin chops

Inartfully —I must say— plated boneless ribeye Wagyu, lamb chops, asparagus and pommes puree

A SOUVENIR

This wine cork from the 1986 Mouton makes me think about the roughly 8,000 years it took man to come up with as refined a drink as profoundly lovely as this First Growth, not to mention the gargantuan leaps in the way food is grown, harvested and prepared for today’s tables

PLEASE ANSWER ONE SIMPLE QUESTION . . . WITH DETAILS

ON VALENTINE’S DAY Did you dine out? Did you do takeout? Did you cook in? Did you buy chocolate . . . or flowers? Did you do nothing —nothing!— on that historic, decidedly romantic day?