Reflexions, Richard Olney

I've loved Richard Olney's writing ever since I first opened up Simple French Food. His food, to me, is the acme of cooking. His Ten Vineyard Lunches is my candidate for most overlooked cookbook on the planet. Concise, but masterful. So when I picked up his autobiography, Reflexions, I was ready to be entranced.

I'm still reading, so no conclusions yet. My first impressions? One does not think of sex when thinking about Richard Olney, but there is an awful lot of it in this book.

Second, I found this delightful passage, which it pays to meditate on in the wake of our over-the-top dinner at Ko:

It (a restaurant in Piraeus, Greece) was an odd place. Except for the staff, there were no Greeks present. The food was banal, but they had created the formula, a quarter of a century before the nouvelle-cuisine loonies launched le menu degustation, of the non-meal - fifteen or twenty little dabs of unrelated foods, served in interminable succession, one after the other . . . .