There’s a hole-in-the-wall restaurant along the waterfront in Puerto Montt, Chile. It’s called Astoria’s. We rolled in there about dinnertime in early March a few years ago after spending hours going through the markets, looking at strings of dried oyster, eel and mussel meats, dozens of species of iced and glistening finfish and mounds and mounds of colorful fruits and vegetables. Cobs of fresh sweetcorn six inches in diameter, and bunches of cilantro that would barely fit in a bushel basket, dwarfed what we were used to back home.
Fall had settled on the southern hemisphere and the full bounty of this thin country along the Pacific coast was on display everywhere. It was unusual for Dorsey to be on vacation during the harvest season, but back home, on the Eastern Shore, hunting season was over, the air was still cold and damp, and the ground too wet for the plow. A good time to get away.
Most intriguing in the seafood stalls of Puerto Montt were the fresh barnacles. They got Dorsey’s attention. If it was unusual, he wanted to try it. These barnacles looked just like the ones we scrape off the bottoms of our boats, only they were as big around as cantaloupes and had polished white sides that soared like the walls of miniature castles. (I can hear Dorsey in my ear even now — “Sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me.”) But it isn’t, it was real, and I know that if the menu at Astoria’s offered barnacles Dorsey would have ordered them – along with sweetbreads and octopus snouts too if they had had them. But Astoria’s wasn’t that kind of place.
Linoleum floors, modest wooden tables and light from low-wattage florescent bulbs reminded us of the furnishings of a Hemingway novel. A drunken sailor draped over a little round table halfway across the room mumbled stories to his patient girlfriend. Astoria’s menus, even if they had them, which they didn’t, would have been impossible to read in that gauzy atmosphere.
This was really Dorsey’s kind of place. In the last ten years or so, he had increasingly enjoyed the camaraderie, sniping and laughter of being with friends and family around a table crowded with food and wine, good Scotch, and cheap vodka mixed with tonic and cucumber or tonic and lemon.
We would argue. The tonic has to be Schweppes, he would say. Canada Dry is better, I would say. But he would just go silent and shake his head firmly left and right. There was no argument. He took life that way: with big mouthfuls, big draughts from the glass, decisively, and with firm opinions.
But back to Astoria’s. Dorsey had the habit of putting menus aside and asking to be brought whatever the chef thought was the best and most interesting offering of the night. That worked great at Astoria’s. The waiter/chef/owner spoke no English and all we had was what I call Tarzan Spanish, and the big dumb smiles and laughter that we found opened many doors.
“Want food.” “Want vino.” “Roja” (That means red.) And blanco. (That means white.) And then we would laugh. And then we said “pescador.” (That means fish.) And then the waiter went away saying “si, si,” with his moustache and his black pants and wrinkled white shirt, and a toothy smile that said he had just the thing. By the time he came back with two carafes filled with red and white wine, the sailor and his girl were trying to stumble their way through a dance. After he stepped on her feet a few times (kind of the way Dorsey danced, too) they decided sitting down and smoking a cigarette might be the wiser course. Meanwhile, birds nests of shining black electric wires hanging from thin poles along the narrow street in front of the restaurant crackled in the thick fog rolling in from the cold fjord fields to the south. Astoria’s blue and red neon sign in the steaming window shorted on and off while the wine settled in our bellies and the chef worked his magic.
Gail and Becky chatted while Dorsey and I discussed the relative merits of the Chilean wine we were drinking. “That’s good red wine,” he said, smacking his lips and leaning back in his chair. I let it roll around my mouth, coating my tongue, swishing it over my teeth, taking long sniffs with my nose stuck deep in the squat, stemless glasses used throughout Chile. Dorsey pretended not to pay attention.
“A good grape,” I said. “Taste the currants and the raisins, with a little bit of smokiness?”Of course I was trying to test his patience. That was easy to do. “It just tastes good to me,” he said. “I either like it or I don’t. I don’t need to hear all that crap about hints of horses’ behinds and decide whether it tastes like sweaty leather mixed with pools of honeysuckle. That’s all a bunch of BS.”
“Pearls before swine,” I said, figuring that maybe if I alluded to hogs, which he used to raise, it might sink in. Maybe I should have mentioned a mule. “But Dorsey, you’re missing half the fun of drinking wine if you don’t try to think about it and talk it through.” And he said, “I either like it or I don’t,” and the girls laughed and we drank more wine and he got more stubborn and I got more mouthy.
We drove north for days through Chile’s mountains, toward Santiago. We talked often about the amazing bowls of fresh salmon, in a brown sauce sprinkled with green peas, that the waiter in Astoria’s brought us.
Dorsey loved to drive. Did anybody ever get his hands off the wheel, or the helm? Easier snatching a pork chop from a dog. We had a deal in Chile. Dorsey would drive, I would navigate, and the girls would sit quietly in back and watch the scenery. Very little of that worked the way it was supposed to, except for Dorsey driving. The girls weren’t quiet, and though I tried to navigate, we all know that the man with the wheel has final say.
I’d say “Go right here.” Dorsey would slow down, look to the mountains on our right, look at the fields straight ahead and the crossroads we were approaching and he’d say “Are you sure?” and he’d keep going straight. That was routine. Gail said: “Dennis, now you know what I go through,” as Dorsey kept on driving. We argued onward. I couldn’t get him to admit that a good bottle of wine had subtle nuances worth noting. Dorsey Owings, it has to be said, was not a subtle man.
Near the end of the trip, we rolled into the main town of the Maipo Valley wine-growing district. After several nights testing $20 and $40 hotels and inns, we decided to splurge and stay in the best, and only, hotel we could find in San Carlos. It proved my undoing. It really was a fine hotel, with stucco walls painted in bright reds, rich blues and deep sand colors. Big yucca plants stood in the corner of the dining rooms and lobby. Heavy wood beams, so much part of Chilean architecture, accented inside and outside.
Behind the main part of the old hotel, connected by a flat stone walkway, was a tall, vaulted room with windowed cases along each side displaying the different wines of the region. A high arch led to the tasting room, further back. Just above the archway, in big, ornate black script, entangled with green grape vines, flowed the words that haunted me in the ensuing years whenever Dorsey and I drank wine together. It pained me to translate the phrase: “Me gusta el vino porque el vino es bueno.” “I like the wine because the wine is good.”
Dorsey was triumphant and insufferable.
We drank four bottles of wine with dinner that night, all reds, all good (some a little too smoky and one with a blush of honeyed celery that I questioned) and persuaded our waiter to steal the corner off a huge volcano cake being served as the dramatic finale for a corporate dinner in an adjacent dining room. He got a tip as generous as the wine we poured. The sweet cake filled our sleep with dreams that burned away like fog in morning light.
Our wine adventure in Chile was to forge itself into one of those great memories that lodges in the land of no forgetting.
Robin Wood Kurowski says
Salud…