AIOLI

I can’t remember just why Mr. Los Angeles and I were driving down the achingly fashionable street in achingly fashionable Santa Monica that early summer afternoon, but we were, and because it was lunchtime, we stopped into an achingly fashionable restaurant for lunch, where Mr. Los Angeles ordered a hamburger, cooked the way that people who like hamburgers like them cooked, and garnished with the sort of things with which people who like hamburgers like them garnished, and I ordered a chicken sandwich with arugula and aioli, having grown mildly addicted to that delectable garlicky mayonnaise sauce during our recent trip to Cannes, home, not only of the Film Festival, but also of the resplendent Provençal cooking of which aioli is the crown jewel.

Our orders arrived in good time. Mr. Los Angeles’ burger was suitably juicy, and my sandwich was almost as I would have wished except that someone in the kitchen had made a mistake and given me pesto instead of aioli. Oh, well, I thought, it was perfectly nice pesto, and probably healthier for me than the requested condiment, so we lunched on happily and all was well with the world.

Then the waitress reappeared.

“How is everything?” she asked, as waitresses will.

“Delicious,” I said. “Although I was given pesto instead of aioli, but it’s very nice pesto and I’m enjoying the sandwich anyway.”

The waitress bent to inspect my plate.

“That’s not pesto,” she said. “That’s aioli.”

I looked again at the dark green basil-infused dressing that accompanied my chicken. “No, it’s pesto,” I said. “But don’t worry about it, I’m enjoying it, so everything’s fine.”

The waitress’s jaw set just a little.

“It’s aioli,” she repeated. “We have a chicken sandwich with leaf lettuce, avocado and pesto, and a chicken sandwich with arugula and aioli. Your sandwich has arugula and comes with aioli.”

“It has arugula,” I agreed. “But the sauce is pesto. It’s not a problem because I’m happy to eat it. But this is pesto.”

“It’s aioli,” said the waitress.

“It’s pesto,” I said.

The waitress looked around the achingly fashionable room and then back at Mr. Los Angeles and me. Although my husband and I are spanking clean in both body and conscience, we are, visibly, neither achingly fashionable nor even mildly twingingly so.

“Aioli,” she explained kindly, “is a French sauce. You don’t find it in …”

She paused. The class of bottom of the basement, cockroach-infested, drug dealer-frequented, E. coli-conferring flea traps that you pair of low-lives are quite clearly more accustomed to frequent, bellowed her facial expression more loudly than Gabriel’s trumpet.

“… many places,” she continued diplomatically. “But the chicken and aioli sandwich is a very popular item in this restaurant.”

I have always held that the reason we have words is in order that we can accurately describe the world around us.

“This is chicken and pesto,” I said.

“It’s chicken and aioli,” she said.

“It’s pesto,” I said.

“It’s aioli,” she said. “It’s a very popular sandwich here.”

Mr. Los Angeles swallowed a mouthful of his burger and brandished it gently in the air.

“And this,” he commented, genially, to no one in particular, “is one damn fine hot dog.”

The waitress closed her eyes against the combined cacophany of our shared vulgarity.

“It’s aioli,” she repeated, wearily.

I was not looking for a fight; but if she were prepared to die on Condiments Hill, then so was I.

“It’s pesto,” I said.

“It’s aioli,” she said.

It was then that Mr. Los Angeles changed the game.

“It’s not like any aioli we had in Cannes the other week,” he said.

Something clicked in the waitress’s mind.

“You were at the Film Festival?” she asked, with what a thinner-skinned sort of person might have regarded as a marginally less than flattering degree of surprise.

Well, yes, astonishingly enough, we were: we may neither of us have well-behaved hair, but we are nevertheless allowed out into the wide world on occasion, and sometimes even without an attendant.

A calculator began to tick behind the waitress’s eyes. There are people in Los Angeles, she began to remember, who are so stratospherically powerful in the entertainment industry that, unthinkably, they are absolved from the responsibility of dressing in designer clothes. There are some most unexpected individuals, she began to reflect, who occasionally make their way to the top of the Hollywood heap; and Mr. Los Angeles, after all, was a tall man of, potentially, given a radical makeover of wardrobe and a less distressing brand of wristwatch, imposing aspect; and his wife did have that British accent …

“I’ll call the manager,” she said.

In due course, the manager appeared, smiling pleasantly at these putative, maybe, possibly albeit improbably but you never could be too careful, Hollywood movers and shakers.

“Does there seem to be a problem?” she asked.

“Not really,” I said. “But the waitress does keep telling me that my sandwich has aioli in it when it’s obviously pesto.”

The manager, too, bent to inspect the rapidly diminishing remains of my sandwich (it was a really good one).

“That’s our chicken and arugula sandwich,” she said. “It’s a very popular item. It comes with aioli.”

I looked again at the rich green infusion of herby, garlicky, pine nutty, parmesan cheesy olive oil – which, on reflection, might not have been so very much healthier a choice than the aioli after all, but then if I’d wanted healthy, I wouldn’t have ordered a glass of wine – that flavored my sandwich.

“It’s pesto,” I said. “And very nice pesto too.”

The manager smiled compassionately. “I can assure you, Ma’am,” she said, “that this is aioli. Our chef makes it himself from an authentically French recipe. I’ve brought you the recipe card so that you can see it.”

From behind her back, she produced a stiff card and began to read.

“Egg yolks,” she began.

She squinted a little uncertainly down at my sandwich, and returned to her card.

“Olive oil,” she continued more confidently.

“And crushed garlic.” Now she was on a roll. She returned to the card, nodding in satisfaction.

“Whisk the egg yolks with the olive oil,” she read.

She paused for a moment.

“Until they are light yellow …” she continued, the roll slowly faltering.

“… and fluffy …”

She paused again and gulped just a little.

“Then mix in …”

Her voice trailed off as the realization dawned that, authentically French as the chef’s aioli recipe might have been, it was not that which had been making its way into the restaurant’s popular chicken and aioli sandwich.

“It’s very nice pesto,” I offered, thinking to cheer her.

“I’ll talk to the kitchen staff,” she said.

It occurred to me as I looked around the achingly fashionable restaurant where this sandwich was so popular an item, that a more than hefty proportion of its achingly fashionable clientele had almost certainly also been in Cannes a couple of weeks earlier.

“Hasn’t anyone else here mentioned this?” I asked.

She too looked around the room, and frowned.

“No,” she said. “You’re the first.”

From which we learn that when achingly fashionable people travel abroad to film festivals, they are required to keep themselves so very busy being achingly fashionable there that they don’t have time to sample the local cuisine.

Which is as good an advertisement as I have ever heard for not being achingly fashionable.