The meal we had the day we got engaged has stayed with me. It was a lunch at Asador Astillero in Getaria, a professional, business-like affair frequented by business-like Basques, at the very end of a business-like pier. I always enjoy places like that – ones that don’t romanticise what’s implicitly romantic. I like clean, plain tables, sturdy chairs – nothing perfunctory, of course, but nothing indulgent either. Restaurants in Milan often have this quality. So do some in Genoa and the Basque Country.
That morning we had made a pilgrimage to the Balenciaga museum in Getaria, Cristobal Balenciaga’s hometown. Afterwards, we followed various people’s directions and found ourselves the beneficiaries of the last table at Asador Astillero. After a bit of handholding, as we struggled with the names of dishes in Basque, we landed on percebes – goose barnacles – and rodaballo – a huge turbot cooked over fruit wood and served dripping in olive oil and fried garlic. These are two of the most famous dishes of the lands around the Bay of Biscay. We drank txakoli, which is from Getaria. Later that day, after a long and beautiful descent into Deba, we were again fate-kissed. We got a hotel room in town. We dropped our things, ate cheese and bread and drank local cider. We went to the beach and hopped around, finding shells. And then we got engaged.
Someone asked Pete if he had planned the engagement, and his answer had just been to recite the day we’d had, especially the meal at Astillero – as though after a meal of percebes, rodaballo, txakoli, just the two of us, alone in a sea of gracious Basques, beside the gracious sea, of course we decided to get married.
There are other meals. The plateau de fruits de mer that we ate later on the same trip at Chez Albert in Biarritz, or a year later, a similarly unexpected lunch – exploring a mountainside on bicycles – of preserved duck and salad and whatever light red wine they were pouring. The point is the way that restaurant meals can mark time. They are spiritual milestones. Often it is their fullness that inspires action – admitting that you love someone, making momentous decisions, understanding that you’ve touched, for a moment, the completeness of what life has to offer. That is, I think, what the great restaurants can offer.
