ON POLISHING
EXCERPT FROM Keith McNally’s I REGRET ALMOST EVERYTHING:
“A month before construction on Balthazar began, I drove around France looking for restaurant furniture. In a remote salvage yard in Burgundy, I found six 19th century train compartment luggage racks. Each one aged naturally over the past hundred and forty years. They were terrific and would fit perfectly above Balthazar’s banquettes. I bought the racks and asked the salvage yard owner to store them while I headed south in search of bistro chairs. I’d pick them up in five days, I told him.
Between the flea markets of Béziers and Montpellier, I found all the chairs I needed and made my way back to Burgundy. As I arrived at the salvage yard, the owner was standing at the entrance with a wide smile on his face.
He then told me he’d improved the luggage racks for no extra charge.
I got out of the car and followed him inside a small wooden hut, and there on a long table were my six nineteenth-century luggage racks. Only they were no longer nineteenth-century. They were twenty-first century. The owner had scraped, scoured and scrubbed a hundred and forty years of beautiful oxidation off them and in the process had purged them of all character.
I was distraught.
“I’ve had a long day.” I told him. “Let me find a hotel and I’ll return in the morning.”
I didn’t return in the morning. I didn’t return at all. I drove all the way back to Paris without stopping. ”