Eat Me: Love, Sex and the Art of Eating

INTRODUCTION

Prior to starting our journey through the mesmerising alchemy that stems from the marriage of food and love, I should like to give you a little background information about myself. So here are a few pertinent details about where I’ve been and what I’ve done, which should afford you a better understanding of the author, my credentials and the experiences that have led me to write this book.

I was born in London to Italian parents sometime in the early- to mid-sixties. (I don’t like to be too precise about my age, female prerogative and all that, let’s just say that I’ve been around long enough to have learnt about the harsh realities of life, but not so long that I am no longer able to be excited, amazed and enraptured by it.)

Given that my parents owned a restaurant, the Bongusto (which as kids we re-christened the Gone Busto, naturally out of earshot of my father), I was steeped in a foodie culture from a very young age. I have warm and vivid memories of ‘going down the shop’, as we used to call it, to help out in the school holidays. It was not unusual for there to be three generations of Antonionis in attendance at any one time: my parents, occasionally my grandfather (although he came to eat and generally observe proudly from the sidelines) and we three kids – my older sister and baby brother and me.

We were all working towards the same goal: a successful family restaurant serving first-rate, home-cooked Italian food in a cosy, friendly atmosphere, affording the kind of welcome and familiarity that comes from seeing the same faces over and over again. Many of these people became an integral part of our extended family and even today, long after my father has retired, they still have a place in our hearts.

Having spent the better part of the school holidays and weekends working in the Bongusto it was only natural that I should grow up with a leaning towards hospitality as a career. Having learnt the basics I spread my wings, and in the early Eighties, newly married at the tender age of 20, I moved to Hong Kong with my husband. There I lived and worked for many years managing some truly fabulous restaurants, amongst which was Grissini at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, the brand new and utterly gorgeous diamond in the Grand Hyatt crown.

Grissini was a world away from the Bongusto and, unbeknownst to the hierarchy of Swiss hoteliers that employed me, I was totally inexperienced in the running of a fine dining restaurant. To say that I talked up the family business and my hospitality experience is an understatement – it was a far cry from the family-run, all-day-breakfast café/restaurant of my youth and an extremely steep learning curve. But learn I did; the young, gifted Italian chef at Grissini was a genius and through this book I hope to do him justice in passing on his knowledge of food and its ability to seduce.

Grissini was a highly romantic restaurant in a wonderful setting overlooking Hong Kong harbour; floor-to-ceiling windows afforded fabulous views of the South China Sea. It was a heady time indeed for little Alex Antonioni from North London, to suddenly be presiding over such an exalted dining room full to the rafters with the beautiful people: witnessing their romantic assignations; first dates, reunions, proposals, celebrations, secret trysts and, of course, the occasional tearful parting.

I watched and learned.

It is a fact that every night in a restaurant, any restaurant anywhere in the world, a theatre production takes place: the guests are the star characters and the staff and food their producers and props. Every night there was drama, every night a new lesson in love and life.

Unfortunately, my marriage was not to last and after my divorce I left Hong Kong and returned to London. After a period of settling in, the advent of a fabulous new career in restaurant PR and being very much a single girl about town, I ‘serially monogomised’ for the first time in my life, enjoying a succession of very agreeable one- to two-year relationships.

Despite the fact that the guys I became involved with turned out to be Mr Right Now rather than Mr Right and the liaisons came to their own natural conclusion, I wouldn’t have changed a single thing. I loved, laughed and learned a lot; there is a lot to be said for being an independent, single, successful, commitment-shy woman. The world was now my oyster.

I left for Singapore in the late Nineties where I worked for a couple of years writing restaurant reviews for a local newspaper. After a while the gypsy in my soul needed a change of pace (can you see a pattern forming here?), so, in a bid to reflect on my life and ‘find myself’, I headed for Australia with no job and no idea of what I was going to do once I got there.

It was there, having been totally captivated by the inspirational Australian food culture, that I first had the idea to write a book incorporating the two things that were so pivotal in my life: Love and Food. I wanted to convey to women how easy it was to seduce a man with food in much the same way that a spider uses her web to entrap her prey.

I spent a year researching the shift in attitudes and other people’s perspectives of the sometimes cold, hard world of modern-day dating. It would seem that things have changed a lot and, armed with this information and drawing on my, it has to be said extensive, personal experience and a strong belief about the nurturing effect of food on romantic love, Eat Me was born.

This book is best described as a tongue-in-cheek, sometimes searingly honest and occasionally painful journey through the highs and lows of a modern-day relationship for serial romantics who adore food. But, if used correctly, Eat Me can also help transform even the most inexperienced and reluctant cook into a culinary siren; one who appreciates the importance of enhancing and nurturing relationships through food and the cooking of it.

I would love to hear about your romantic foodie moments and any ideas or suggestions you may have. Please contact me at eatmemail@yahoo.co.uk

THE BEGINNING, THE MIDDLE, THE END

(Manners of a Modern Romance)

I’m not shooting for a successful relationship.

At this point I’m just looking for something that will prevent me from throwing myself in front of a bus.

I’m keeping my expectations very, very low.

I am just looking for a mammal. That’s my bottom line.

And I’m really very flexible on that too.

LUCILLE BALL

So, my fellow modern-day romantic gourmand, if you have bought this book you are one of the many amongst us who appreciate the unbridled joy that is love combined with the pleasure of all things oral.

Love and Food – the ultimate pairing of the senses. What more could a mere mortal ask for … ok, maybe a pair of vintage Manolos, but, hey, can you eat them?

Welcome, then, to Eat Me, where culinary possibility flirts with romantic probability. Exciting, sensual and utterly blissful, a stimulating and deeply fulfilling manner in which to woo and be wooed, Eat Me is neither cookbook nor love story but a journey through modern romantic love (on a full stomach) from start to finish.

Yes, yes already, I know, I said finish.

Before we start on this journey, it is my duty to explain to you the three stages of Love in the game that is modern-day dating.

Think Bridget Jones, Sex and the City, 9½ Weeks (the fridge scene!).

Time to wake up and smell the testosterone. Baby, times they are a-changing. Our generation is dealing with a completely different set of rules, which we are playing by ear and making up as we go along. The days of ‘Forsaking All Others Forever and Ever, Amen’ are but a cloud of well-trodden, soggy confetti in the fairytale nuptials of our wildest imaginations. Divorce is on the up; true love is proving to be more elusive than ever. It is a bona fide serial-dating, bed-hopping jungle out there.

Deal with it.

We live in a world of serial, but temporary, monogamy; a smorgasbord of endless possibility, where a broken heart is no longer terminal but instead easily and endlessly restorable. It happens the moment yet another cutie with the right combination of looks, style and, if we are lucky, cash, appears. He/she will have that certain something, that je ne sais quoi that enables him/her to turn our heads and make our bruised and battered little hearts beat, to the sound of their drum, that little bit faster.

Hey presto! We are no longer heartbroken, actually we are the opposite: heartsick, horny and in lust. In fact, off, once again, with the fairies.

Today we seek not so much Mr Right as Mr Right Now, thus a staggering percentage of relationships exist in the sphere that is:

‘The Beginning’ ‘The Middle’ ‘The End’

Hey, back off! I didn’t write the rules, so don’t shoot the messenger.

Come on, don’t get too disheartened, of course True Love exists. Look around you, surely you know loads of people in successful relationships, happily married with a couple of kids, white picket fence, roses over the door, etc? Whaddaya mean they’re all divorced? There is no place in our world for such blatant (though, some would say, justified) cynicism. I as the author reserve the right to keep an open mind. One day my prince will come, as will yours.

Honest.

Meanwhile, in the parallel universe that is Serial Monogamy, I will embark on every new relationship with relish and have myself an absolute ball. Life is too short to mope around and beat one’s, hopefully ample, breast over yet another lost love. Not all men are bastards, just as all women are not gold-digging ball-breakers: this is but an urban myth. I hope.

So there you have it, in most cases life is not the fairytale we were told it was going to be but, hey, neither is it so bad. We may have to kiss a lot of toads before we find our prince but … kissing the right toads, in the right places, whilst feasting on the perfect morsel, can actually be a lot of fun.

Please enjoy your Serial Monogamy in the knowledge that one day, when you are old and grey, rocking in your chair surrounded by your gloriously doting grandchildren (or you’re the oldest swinger in town, suckin’ down a Margarita with your latest toy boy/girl), you won’t regret the things you did.

Only the things you didn’t.

Your words are my food, your breath my wine, you are everything to me.

SARAH BERNHARDT

Right, I’m glad that’s over with. Now let’s have some fun. Let’s talk food, my next favourite subject.

It is my belief that food plays a significant role in the seduction, the pleasuring and the binding together of two newly-dating individuals. This first became apparent when, at the tender age of 16 and a total innocent, I was taken out to dinner on a proper date for the first time ever. Mitch was 24 years old and a friend of a friend, he used to come over to my house and we’d spend hours listening to music and just hanging out. When he asked me to go to dinner I was over the moon, but my parents less so and only allowed me to go out with this ostensibly much older man on the condition that I was home by 11pm, sharp.

He picked me up at 7.30pm in his rather flash and very red sports car and took me, at somewhat high speed, to a very ‘in’ bistro in Mayfair. Walking into that jewelled, cavelike restaurant was the most amazing moment of my thus far rather sheltered 16-year-old life. Everywhere I looked there was glamour, I felt like I’d arrived. As a family we’d always gone to lovely restaurants but this was different, this was very grown up, utterly sophisticated and terribly sexy.

We were seated at a corner table with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, aka The Widow, which to this day remains my absolute favourite champagne. He ordered for both of us. (So manly.) We started with huge pink prawns dripping with butter and oozing garlic, which we ate with our fingers, catching the butter with our tongues as it dripped.

That was the precise moment that little Alex Antonioni realised that food was sexy. Really, really sexy. My mother had made this same dish a thousand times and it had never had quite this effect on me. This was indeed a revelation.

The prawns were followed by a perfect roast chicken whose ancestry lay in Bresse, France. It was presented to us on a silver salver; a whole roast chicken, crispy and golden and surrounded by perfectly turned baby carrots, tiny little roast potatoes and bunches of watercress to mop up the juices. An impossibly well-dressed waiter carved it in front of us at the table whilst all the other diners looked on enviously. Apparently you had to order this particular dish 48 hours in advance, Mitch had done just that.

I felt like a princess.

Pudding was Crêpes Suzette, which involved more tableside theatricals. Although by this point I think the waiter was just showing off, it was glorious. Piping-hot sticky crêpes were served whilst on fire and to a 16 year-old on a first date it was the absolute height of elegance. I felt like Audrey Hepburn somewhere between Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Pygmalion.

The memory of that meal has remained with me always. Over the course of that evening Mitch, who in reality was just ok-looking, became a prince amongst men. In the flickering candlelight of that restaurant, bewitched by the combination of ice-cold champagne, delicious food and flirtatious, giggly banter, I would have agreed to pretty much anything Mitch had in mind. I was utterly seduced.

My parents knew exactly what they were doing by not letting their daughters out of their sight for too long and when, after another round of coffees and a large Amaretto, I realised to my horror, Cinderella-like, what the time was I somewhat unsteadily left my idyll and Mitch escorted me home.

I was over an hour late. My father’s fury, conveyed via a colourful selection of choice words and the slamming of the front door, ensured Mitch never called me again.

Coward!

I never looked at food in quite the same way ever again, hence the concept of Eat Me; a collection of anecdotes, suggestions, aphrodisiacs, nibbles, rude food, drinks, dinners, lunches, bed picnics, quotes, feasts, snacks and comfort foods alongside a selection of menus to entertain friends and family that will ensure your lover’s full attentions and, well, who knows …

THE BEGINNING

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Your eyes meet across a crowded room at a party, on the tube, in a pub, at a wedding, down a coalmine, or even at Grandma’s funeral. It matters not a jot wheresoever the first glimpse occurs when Cupid’s arrow strikes and we meet a stranger who literally, inexplicably, takes our breath away. That spectacular, bestillmybeatingheart moment when everyone else in a 5km radius disappears and kapow! You are in lust.

Asinine, garbled conversations tend to follow, both stumbling over words, finding everything the other says fascinating, achingly familiar and hysterically funny in equal measure. Then, with slightly glazed eyes and manic grins, numbers are exchanged along with meaningful, longing glances … here we go again.

The stage is set …

The Players are eager to play …

Enter stage left, boy meets girl …

ATTRACTION

Like a Moth to the Flame

So, Debbie McGee, what first attracted you to the millionaire, Paul Daniels?

MRS MERTON

In order to transform ourselves into the gastronomic goddess we yearn to be it is crucial that we have a subject, namely a man, around whom we can weave our culinary magic – and not just any old guy, he must be someone that we like enough to want to impress and don our pinny for. If you already have someone in mind, good for you; for those of us who are still looking, this chapter is especially for you. (Although, even if you have your prey in sight don’t skip this chapter ’cos, honey, you never know.)

I love to cook and enjoy nothing more than inviting good friends round, cooking up a storm, sharing a few bottles of wine and putting the world to rights. I’m a little more reticent to cook for a man, a new potential Mr Right – I don’t flash my copper-bottom pans for just anybody.

The problem is, as I’m getting a little older I’m getting a lot fussier. These days it takes a little more than a cute arse and a moody stare for me to want to grind my spices, rattle those pans and shake my booty.

Much has been written about Attraction. Why is it that some people attract us like a moth to a flame whilst others, for no apparent reason, leave us as cold as yesterday’s custard? How