Dinner at Château Marouatte - Day 1

 Dinner at Château Marouatte

Dinner at Château Marouatte was exactly the sort of evening I had imagined when I thought about staying in a French château—not simply because of the food, but because of everything happening around the table.

We gathered in a wonderfully atmospheric dining room, surrounded by dark carved wood, old furnishings and the sense of history that seems to follow you from room to room here. The table itself was dressed in deep red and gold, with wine glasses, water carafes, baskets of bread and candlelight scattered among us. It was elegant without being formal—the kind of table where you immediately settle in and stay awhile.

And we did.

The First Course

Dinner began with a beautiful bowl of creamy tomato-colored soup. It was smooth and rich, with the deep orange-red color suggesting tomatoes and perhaps other puréed vegetables. A little seasoning dusted the edge of the plate.

With a glass of white wine in front of me and conversations already moving around the table, it was a lovely beginning to the meal.

And conversation would become almost as important as the food.

Salmon for the Main Course

The main course was a generous piece of salmon topped with a creamy herb sauce and fresh herbs. Alongside it were green beans, roasted potatoes and wonderfully soft roasted tomatoes.

It was a particularly pretty plate—the pink salmon, bright green beans and deep red tomatoes surrounded by the pale cream sauce.

The potatoes had browned, slightly crisp exteriors, while the tomatoes looked as though they had been roasted until they were beginning to collapse into their own juices. The salmon was substantial enough to be the center of the plate without making the meal feel heavy.

Of course, serving fish immediately launched an entire discussion about who eats fish and who absolutely does not.

One person simply doesn’t like fish. Another could happily be vegetarian much of the time, although perhaps “pescatarian” would be more accurate. Someone thought 70 or 80 percent vegetarian sounded about right.

Then we somehow traveled backward in time to childhood fish sticks.

From fish sticks came Kraft macaroni and cheese.

And from Kraft macaroni and cheese came a much more decadent version involving four cheeses, bacon and breadcrumbs.

This is how dinner conversations work here.

And Then There Was Dessert

Dessert was definitely not subtle.

A wedge of dense chocolate cake arrived topped with an enormous scoop of vanilla ice cream, with berry sauce running down the ice cream and another pool of sauce beside the cake.

It was the sort of dessert that makes any previous conversation about healthy eating temporarily irrelevant.

The chocolate cake had that slightly cracked surface that promises a rich, almost brownie-like interior. The cold vanilla ice cream began melting over the warm-looking chocolate, carrying the tart berry sauce down with it.

It was wonderful.

And somewhere around dessert, our conversation had moved far beyond food.

We heard a story about a professor who discovered just how little geography a group of otherwise very bright students knew. Countries, cities and capitals were mixed together—Moscow, Russia, Spain, Paris, Bucharest and Belgrade all wandering around the imaginary map.

Out of approximately 100 students, only two apparently completed the geography exercise reasonably correctly.

That started a much larger discussion about travel and how much—or how little—knowing the rest of the world matters.

Then we went to Alabama.

And South Carolina.

And Arkansas.

And Birmingham.

We talked about people who have traveled throughout the world and people who have barely left their home states. We talked about politics, social change and the differences between communities.

Then somebody noticed a bracelet.

Suddenly we were talking about beads, magnetic clasps, friendship bracelets and making jewelry with grandchildren.

And then came one of my favorite discoveries of the evening: we apparently had a former television commercial actor among us.

There were stories about auditions, beer commercials, enormous stacks of beer on a set, unusually large actors, cowboys and assorted adventures in front of a camera.

At one point we even acquired the memorable line:

“I shot the cowboy.”

How we got from salmon to cowboys, I couldn’t possibly reconstruct.

But perhaps the best line of the evening came when someone looked across the table at Karen and said:

“Karen, you look like you spent eight hours at the train station.”

Her answer:

“I feel like I spent eight hours at a train station.”

After our recent train adventure, everyone understood.

So we have now established a new standard for determining whether someone has truly experienced France.

When someone says, “I’ve been to France,” we can ask:

“Yes, but have you spent eight hours in a French train station?”

No?

Then clearly you missed something.

Sitting there in that extraordinary old dining room, surrounded by carved wood and centuries of history, I realized that this was becoming one of my favorite parts of Château Marouatte.

Not simply eating dinner.

Sitting around the table.

A bottle of wine. A basket of bread. Candlelight. Salmon and roasted vegetables. An unapologetically large chocolate dessert.

And people who were strangers not very long ago telling stories about childhood meals, professors, Alabama, grandchildren, television commercials, cowboys and disastrous days at train stations.

The château may provide the setting.

But it is the people around the table who create the evening.