Birthday Bubbles

Is it a good thing for somebody who has just written the first few, trembling paragraphs of what will hopefully become their first book on the subject of food to find that they are seated between Albert Roux and Sir Terence and Lady Conran at dinner? I'm not sure if it was a warning from Olympus against the dangers of hubris or an augury of good fortune for the journey ahead. Answers on a postcard please.

Needless to say, I kept resolutely schtum on the subject. The dinner was a good one - a very good one, in fact, and M. Roux agreed that he too didn't think that he had eaten better food served for as many people. The lucky diners - 200 of them - were celebrating the 200th birthday of the Champagne house Perrier-Jouët at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris on Monday night.

P-J doesn't have the high profile of some of its rival grandes marques Champagnes and you won't see it in the supermarkets. What it does have is the flowery bottle - yes, that flowery bottle, the Art Nouveau one. That, and the benefit of being rather lovely and somehow as feminine and flowery and flouncy on the inside as it is on the outside.

The table decorations answered mostly to the same description and featured the same anemones that entwine themselves around the bottle. They were planted among grass in beds that are bigger than the ones in my "garden," I suspect, and the grass motif itself was continued in the synthetic grass that covered the floor. Some imaginative guests (female) had even tricked themselves out to look, if not exactly like bottles of the grande cuvée, Belle Epoque, because you don't want to actually look like a bottle of anything, do you? - but in the right greens and with attendant anemones here and there doing some more entwining. Don't worry - it's Paris. And it's le spectacle.

My wife seemed a bit worried that Catherine Deneuve might still come under the heading of `hot' - "I see, so it's `come to Granny,' now is it?" - but then she wasn't there (and didn't know that Alain Delon seemed to get the same juices flowing in the other direction (or something like that, anyway - I forget how it all works).

Lady Conran wondered if the chicken cooked sous-vide with a broad stripe of slices of black truffle slipped beneath the skin was in the style called demi-deuil  -"half-in-mourning"? "Ah, oui" said M. Roux, "it means that the 'usband 'as died, but the lover 'as not. "Or", with a shrug and his trademark twinkle "the other way round, I suppose." Very Paris. Very schtum.