Four Meals on the Wall

Yvonne and I love having art in our home.  

Some of our favorites are by Hank Virgona (left), a New York friend who before passing had illustrations and paintings in the Museum of Modern Art; Linda Anderson, another friend and folk artist who had a major exhibit at Atlanta’s High Museum; and Maggie Kidd, our daughter, who was a darn good artist as a young child. 

However, perhaps our most unusual paintings are Four Meals on the Wall.   

To explain, we need to hop back several years to a time when Yvonne was deeply involved in the food industry. As part of her job, she took magazine and newspaper food editors to fine restaurants, and she and I often went afterward and then saved the artistic covers. Some of the art was frame-worthy and ended up on our wall.

The first menu was from Restaurant Jamin, by Joel Robuchon, the late and legendary French chef, whose food was enjoyed by Yvonne, me, and our friend Joel Bean. Jamin was the first Michelin three-star restaurant we had ever been to. Yvonne and I had no idea what to do with all the pieces of silverware. And just when we thought we were done, another dish or dessert or cheese course would appear.   

The second menu was from Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’s wonderful Berkeley restaurant, where California Cuisine was invented. We would snag $50 plane tickets from Los Angeles to San Francisco in order to dine at this restaurant.

Next was La Tulipe, a famous French resturant in Greenwich Village of New York. The place was created by female chef Sally Darr, who had opened her kitchen for a couple of evenings to the world-famous guest chef Jacques Pepin. 

Yvonne and her client, the California Avocado Commission, hosted food editors for an impeccable evening of food and wine.   

And finally my favorite, an artful menu on my 40th birthday and arranged by Yvonne, which showcased the foods of an up-and-coming chef named Elmer Azuma, who opened a restaurant in Hollywood called Chabuya. 

Azuma converted a 17-seat sushi bar into a “Franco Japanese” fine-dining restaurant, and we bought it out for the evening. It was a multi-course menu, and we totally confused the wait-staff when we had our 17 guests change seats between each course, so the guests could get a chance to mingle with all in attendance.  

Four Meals on the Wall hang over our dining table, reminding us of the wonderful food and friends we’ve enjoyed.