Charlotte Au Chocolat: Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood
Charlotte Silver
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 1594488150
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Like Eloise growing up in the Plaza Hotel, Charlotte Silver grew up in her mother's restaurant. Located in Harvard Square, Upstairs at the Pudding was a confection of pink linen tablecloths and twinkling chandeliers, a decadent backdrop for childhood. Over dinners of foie gras and Dover sole, always served with a Shirley Temple, Charlotte kept company with a rotating cast of eccentric staff members. After dinner, in her frilly party dress, she often caught a nap under the bar until closing time. Her one constant was her glamorous, indomitable mother, nicknamed "Patton in Pumps," a wasp-waisted woman in cocktail dress and stilettos who shouldered the burden of raising a family and running a kitchen. Charlotte's unconventional upbringing takes its toll, and as she grows up she wishes her increasingly busy mother were more of a presence in her life. But when the restaurant-forever teetering on the brink of financial collapse-looks as if it may finally be closing, Charlotte comes to realize the sacrifices her mother has made to keep the family and restaurant afloat and gains a new appreciation of the world her mother has built.
Infectious, charming, and at times wistful, Charlotte au Chocolat is a celebration of the magic of a beautiful presentation and the virtues of good manners, as well as a loving tribute to the author's mother-a woman who always showed her best face to the world.
I used to go visit my father’s studio. I remember one evening during the height of summertime when he pulled up on the curb in his latest crummy, wheezing old car and got out to greet me. He wore a pair of denim shorts coarsely cut off below the knee. I thought to myself, Oh, no. Not the denim shorts. The paint-splattered black pants were bad enough. But then, I was dressed pretty shabbily myself. I always made a point of wearing my oldest clothes whenever I saw my father, because that way I
slept there, on a rust-colored sleeping bag with a busted zipper flung on the dusty floor. When I visited him there, I could see holes in the wall, and I wondered if rats lurked behind the cobwebs. “What do you think of that sofa?” my father asked me, pointing. “Isn’t it great? It’s called a fainting couch.” I did like the sofa: moss green velvet, curved low to the ground. I liked the name, too: a fainting couch. It was the only piece of furniture in the room, and made a very dramatic
the gilded back of the chair. “Please stay for lunch,” she said every time. “We’d love, love, love to have you.” The front of the house had to settle for staff lunch and I had to order off the menu, but chefs and former chefs got special samples: thumb-sized dabs of pâté; a new entree, duck breast with fingerling potatoes and artichokes, not yet on the menu; chocolate éclairs whipped up that morning in the pastry station, just for the fun of it. “You’re the real talent, Gus,” my mother said at
Mary-Catherine ran the dining room and greeted customers. Until I was six years old, we lived in a rambling white farmhouse in Bedford on a piece of land called Dudley Road. There my mother used to watch my brother and me while making the desserts for the restaurant. In the yellow French country kitchen of the farmhouse, she stood at the table wearing a coarse white apron over her pink-and-green Shetland sweater. The charlottes cooled in their tin molds while she squeezed lemons and crushed
that was the uniform. This was before you ever saw waiters wearing plain black T-shirts instead of white shirts, before bottled still water was offered and not tap, before olive oil and not butter came with every bread basket. At the Pudding, the shirts the waitresses wore varied: blouses that plunged past the breasts and wrapped around the waist; blouses with gathered sleeves and Peter Pan collars; blouses trimmed with black velvet or jazzed up with rhinestone buttons. The waiters all wore the