Harvey Shmidlap Seeks the Perfect Cheesecake

By Eugene Shafir

Harvey Shmidlap has a half baked plan to make his family famous. He is sure that once the Eponymous Food Organisation, the international body responsible for naming foods, tastes his mother’s cheesecake the name Shmidlap will join the esteemed ranks of other eponymous delights such as the Pavlova, Madeleine, Stroganoff and Wellington.
There are, however, problems. Not only has his mother, Lusha, stubbornly refused to bake a cheesecake for ten years, she won’t even tell her only child the recipe insisting that can only divulge it to a daughter. To help butter her up Harvey tries to enlist the aid of his wife a vet more interested in furry animals and his uni student son who hates everything Harvey stands for.
Not that Harvey stands very often. Most of the time he can be found sitting in Helga’s cake shop doing his research – that is eating cake. But cakes have ears, and not only does Helga get wind of Lusha’s cheesecake, but vainglorious gluttons from around the globe soon wants a slice of the pie. One man in particular will stop at nothing to get his hands on Mrs Shmidlap’s recipe; in fact, he’s even prepared to get his hands on Mrs Shmidlap!
This is a hilarious tale about family, and love, and food.....mostly food! Although firmly based in Melbourne and its famous Acland St cake shop strip, it traverses the world weaving Harvey’s quest with historical and hilarious explanations for the origins of other eponymous foods. Like a truly great cheesecake the only way to know what it is like is to really sink your teeth into it and enjoy the feast. If that’s not enough to convince you to read the book – it contains a recipe for cheesecake!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eugene Shafir
• Release date: Sep 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476418612

Eugene Shafir

Born in Melbourne to Holocaust survivors, Eugene Shafir is a food critic and a new media player. Culturally straddling Old World traditions and the hedonistic freedoms of the New World, Eugene grew up confused, anxious and chubby. His dominating mother instilled in him the drive to prove himself, though his innate laziness meant that he wouldn’t drive too fast. As a teenager in the 1970s, trying to embrace the hippy lifestyle, he began asking life’s Big Questions. As an adult, when he’d lost all ambition and given up on the Big Answers, his life-long love of food and constant criticism of his table manners led him to become a restaurant reviewer. However, frustrated with eating establishments turning the tables on him and reviewing him instead, Eugene recently put his cheesecake where his mouth is and opened a café of his own in an extremely cool part of Melbourne. Harvey Shmidlap Seeks the Perfect Cheesecake is his life’s work, such as it is. His life, that is, not the novel. The novel is brilliant.

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Harvey Schmidlap Seeks the Perfect Cheesecake

by Eugene Shafir

Copyright 2011 Eugene Shafir

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THE MENU

ENTREE

LAMINGTON

MILQUETOAST

CAMPBELLS SOUP

DOBAS

CHARLOTTE RUSSE

BEEF STROGANOFF

CHANTILLY

SWEETBREADS EUGENIE

HAMANTASCHEN

PIZZA MARGHERITA

CURZON SOUP

BISMARCK HERRING

PEACH MELBA

MADELEINE

WALDORF SALAD

TOURNEDOS ROSSINI

EGGS CHURCHILL

SACHER TORTE

LARSON DONUT

BISMARCK PFANNKUCHEN

CHICKEN TETRAZZINI

SARA LEE

CARPACCIO

LOBSTER THERMIDOR

FRANKFURT

PAVLOVA

LAYLA

DAGWOOD SANDWICH

TOURNEDOS RACHEL

NURENBERGER

GENERAL TSO CHICKEN

MANDELBAUM BAGEL

EGGS BENEDIKT

BIRCHER MUESLI

FREDDO FROG

MALAKOFF

LINZER TORTE

MOZART CHOCOLATE

ESTERHAZY

NAPOLEONSKI

CHATEAUBRIAND

ZSERBO

XXXX CHEESECAKE

GOLDBERG

JUST DESSERTS

FROM THE EFO HANDBOOK

HARVEY UNZIPPED (NOT A PRETTY SIGHT)

WORD STOCK

ENTREE

In his child’s bedroom attempting to put his twelve-year-old son to sleep, Harvey tried not to think of his parents’ recent separation, his unfulfilling marriage and pointless job. Surveying Justin’s moon face and flaccid, toneless body, the forty-year-old worried momentarily for the future of the house of Shmidlap, before moving on to a happier subject, the speech that he had been rehearsing since his youth. It was still a speech for which he had no occasion, yet it obsessed him.

"Europe in the eighteenth century enjoyed a tastebud revolution. As glory had previously been attained by naming a new tulip, now having a dish with one’s name on it was the greatest of accolades.

"At a dacha outside Petersburg, the chef waited for his master. The Count would invariably return ravenous. If it was his birthday, he might wash his hands, but usually he’d just plunge one weather-beaten mitt into a bowl of lard, grab a pile of bread with the other, stuff some fish in his crusty mouth, and sit on the dog in front of the fire. Later in the evening, he’d go take a shit on the grass. Those were the days!

In days of old,

When knights were bold,

And toilet paper wasn’t invented

They’d wipe their arse

On a blade of grass,

And walk away contented."

As he sang, Harvey hovered over the boy, one year from barmitzvah yet still such a child. He scrunched his eyes and swivelled his head back and forth like a spoiled child angling for more food. When he was a baby, Justin would laugh himself silly at this.

Now, Justin may have been pleased his father was uncharacteristically happy if he weren’t so close, pressing him into the mattress, and spraying him with garlic. Harvey, mistaking Justin’s squirming for dancing, was inspired to continue

"If the Count wasn’t what we might expect an aristocrat to be, neither was the chef what we would expect. He was just some guy whose food preparation didn’t make the Count as sick as when other peasants did it. The two of them rarely spoke, but when there was a big log on the fire, a real blockbuster, they would often pass the night staring at it together.

What did they do for entertainment before fire was invented? Good question you might ask, son. Harvey paused, savouring the word son like a mouthful of fine wine, but Justin was asleep now, or at least pretending to be, so that the story would finish, and his father would go away.

"Yes, there had been great advances in science – but cooking wasn’t among them. Considering the Count and the chef had only one good tooth between them, eating, especially, a leathery sole wasn’t such a pleasurable experience. And for dessert – there was nothing but dysentery.

"One day, the chef heard a horse – his master had come back faster than usual. But then there was more clipper-clapper, and more – the Count was not alone.

"Sometimes, his master brought back some mates, filthy whoremongers like he, only a title and a better class of fur skin collar differentiating them from the lower classes. They’d gather round the fire and cheer on a log, while picking their teeth with their toenails.

"Suddenly, the Count barged into the room. ‘Cook for me!’ he screamed at the chef. ‘Gourmet cuisine!’

"Perhaps his master had finally succumbed to his syphilis, and was speaking in tongues? The chef proffered some lard. The platter went flying. To settle the Count down, the chef whacked him over the head with a smoked fish.

"When the Count eventually came to, he made a little more sense. It turned out that his riding buddies had been in his ear about a new craze in Petersburg called dining. Apparently people now ate together at special times. They used special utensils to gather food for themselves, and ate off plates, instead of using their hands. Furthermore, dishes were now to be brought out one by one, not all at once. As far as entertainment was concerned, staring at a log fire was now passé. Guests were supposed to sit around the table, on chairs no less, and discuss the food that was in front of them.

"‘As for the plat,’ the Count spluttered out another foreign word, ‘it has to be different. It needs a je ne sais quoi, a foie gras … now make me a dîner!’ he exclaimed. ‘And quickly – a good log is about to catch fire!’

"‘So, bread and lard is no longer good enough? The sonofabitch insists on something new, fresh and exciting – what can I do?’ The chef was stumped.

The storeroom, as usual, was almost bare: a few onions, some tomatoes, garlic, and some indefinable meat.

Perhaps Justin’s pretend snores had fooled him, or perhaps Harvey just wanted to go and eat. In any case, he stopped talking, and after stamping his son’s head with a wet thumb (he found kissing rather tacky), rose awkwardly, took a few steps, turned as if to say something else, thought better of it, then turned again and left the bedroom.

When it was next his turn to put his son to bed two nights later, Harvey continued his speech. Granted, the story wasn’t the usual bedtime fare for a twelve-year-old, but it was very interesting, at least for his father. It was also fortunate that the boy was not having the same trouble with sleep as Harvey had had lately. Mind you, the little chap didn’t have to worry about where his next meal was coming from.

"Meanwhile in Vienna, Prince Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar von Metternich was stewing over his place in history. Though currently the toast of Europe, without peer as a diplomat and statesman, he doubted whether Vienna would remember him. He was the leading politician in the Habsburg monarchy, so he had arranged the marriage between Napoleon and Marie Louise. The middle class that he had helped create couldn’t be bothered with all that. Interested only in material things, they wanted what the upper-class had – refined furniture, decorative objects and, distressingly, as far as the fighting fitness of the Hapsburg Armies was concerned, fine wine and food.

"Though trouble was brewing once more with France, and the same old dynastic struggles among ambitious princes engendered continual violence, the streets outside the palace were busy. Wrapped to the hilt in furs, couples passed the Imperial building from which the Prince had recently emerged with nary a glance upwards to the offices where life-and-death decisions of State were made, yet slowed their pace to admire the spidery, somewhat crazy, decoration on a new building in the so-called Art Nouveau style. This style was all about romance, mysticism, the sublime and the fantastic, and Metternich, who had spent a lifetime trying to organise bickering countries into tidy, rigid blocks and cementing them together into a solid structure called Europe, could not understand it.

"He’d hosted thirty-course banquets for royalty, yet now he peered through a window into the strange building like a tramp. Unlike his palace’s austere furniture, the padded chairs in the room seemed to actually be comfortable to sit on, and sat on they were. On each plump cushion was an even plumper Viennese bottom. Reflected in the many mirrors was a proliferation of corseted waists and wide-open mouths, embroidered tailcoats and rouged faces, twinkling eyes and curled, painted lips. He heard tinkling laughter, the clinking of glasses, and the dainty rattling of fine china. His attention was drawn to the dapper young men and bosomy frauleins dressed in green and yellow silk brocade who were whirling about the room, silver trays balanced precariously on gloved hands. Every so often they would dip their trays with a flourish in front of the seated patrons, as if performing a waltz. The Viennese, obviously loving the show, squealed like little piggies.

"Prince Metternich, gathering his courage, fixed his meticulously trimmed and pomaded brow to the icy window. As far as he could make out, the silver trays bore little cakes.

"Although the décor of the room was called Biedermeier, which meant plain, the petite pastries, flans and slices radiated eighteenth-century fashion in their lavish rococo decoration. Some wore sashes of icing like Prussian nobility, while others were adorned with epaulettes of golden wafer, like Hussars in dress uniform. A smooth, white polished disc of pastry was engraved with colour as daintily as any champleve work he’d seen on enamel. A praline ball was filigreed with chocolate with all the detailing of a sacristy cup, and yet, despite their newly acquired fine manners, the Viennese were ripping into these delicate morsels as if there was no tomorrow.

There was a tomorrow though, because Metternich had knocked the heads of all the troublemakers of Europe together and made it so, but none of these gluttons cared.

What makes a man great? Harvey grilled his son, but Justin’s head was buried in the pillows, and Harvey didn’t have the energy to dig it out, so he answered his own question: "Metternich could have taken the easy option of retreating back to the Palace and redrawing the political boundaries of Europe, but he took the much more dangerous option of intruding between a ravenous Viennese and his stomach. With one thought in mind, he strode brusquely into the building, past the tittering merrymakers, and into the kitchen.

"Metternich had assumed that no-one would recognise him, but as soon as he ripped off his tunic, the staff kowtowed before him. Turning to the young patissier, he demanded, ‘Make me a cake!’

‘Your Excellency, please help yourself to as many cakes as you would like. We have a wide selection.’

" ‘Fool! I don’t want to eat a cake – I want to be a cake!’ He addressed the cakes on the shelves behind the patissier: ‘I want to be eaten,’ he whispered. ‘I want to be one of you!’

"The baker understood his challenge and, imagining that it was he who was swaying the rulers of Austria, Russia, Prussia and Great Britain, hatched a plan as inspirational as any of the great man’s. Methodically, he removed flour, eggs, powdered sugar, white sugar, dark chocolate and apricot marmalade from their assigned places in the pantry, and combined them with steely purpose.

Meanwhile, sitting in a none-too-comfortable Biedermeier chair, Metternich, more nervous than when standing in front of kings and diplomats at the Congress of Vienna, waited for the debut of his creation.

Harvey’s eyes, usually watery, had now misted over completely.

"While both the peasant chef in Petersburg and the apprentice cake maker in Vienna created dishes that are today regarded as classics, they fared quite differently. The Petersburg chef gave the Count his recipe, and was rewarded with two gold coins, but had he kept it, he would have been far richer, for it would have been he who was immortalised in the annals of Eponymous Food, not his boss, Count Stroganoff!

As for the man who wanted to have his cake and be eaten too, go into any cake shop and ask for a Metternich, and you’ll be met with a blank stare. But go into any cake shop, even Helga’s…

Helga’s. Justin couldn’t help but betray a sign of life on hearing that word. Helga’s in Acland Street was his dad’s favourite cake shop. He never stopped talking about it, and had made a habit, a tradition he called it, of taking him there at least once a week. That was until the week before, when Harvey had returned from his parents’ house looking like death, and had announced, in a voice even more wrinkled than usual, that Helga’s was over with. Your grandmother cursed me if I were ever to visit Helga’s again! he’d sobbed. She said, ‘May all your teeth fall out except one, so you’ll have a toothache!’

No don’t go into Helga’s, Harvey, his fingers feeling for his teeth through his ample cheeks, corrected himself. "Anyway, don’t you think it’s ironic though that the statesman who ran rings around the most powerful leaders in Europe ate the cake, but the lowly chef from the Vienna hotel has the cake shop? Ask for a Sacher torte, and everybody knows what it is!

Leave the boy alone already! his wife Marla called from the study.

Alright already! Harvey yelled back.

Though she was Jewish like he, his third-generation Australian wife, with her huge Aussie family, just didn’t understand! His parents were Holocaust survivors! Fleeing Poland in the late 1940s, his father Yosl was the last of the Shmidlaps, and his mother Lusha and her mother Soira were the only ones left from their family. His parents had met in faraway Melbourne, married, and given birth to a miracle, him. Harvey Shmidlap! And he, well Marla, had in turn given birth to another miracle, this doughnut, Justin Shmidlap! If only he would turn out to be as good a son to him as he had been to his parents.

Whereas Marla had distant relations all over the country, people who were distant in more ways than one, his family was small and warm, and he owed it to all the Shmidlaps he never knew to make it great again, although exactly how that was going to happen he wasn’t sure. He’d been told he was terrible talented, but food was his passion. Therefore, on this occasion he could not just tiptoe from his son’s bedroom, biting his tongue as his naïve wife told him he should do.

Long live the Shmidlaps! he muttered in her direction, and backed his two-hundred-pound arse out of the room.

LAMINGTON

Ten years later.

When she’d arrived in far-off Australia forty years earlier as a penniless refugee from war-torn Europe, the only cakes available were as hard and dry as the unforgiving land. The predominantly Anglo locals, whose experience with cakes extended as far as the Lamington, a sickly tasting chocolate-coated brick, were overwhelmed by her colourful, generous and often boozy creations. Her cake shop in Acland Street, in the suburb of St Kilda, was an instant hit.

Since then, Helga’s cake shop had not changed, and Helga, the patissier, was still to be found there every day, bending over a hot stove, chatting with customers and tidying up, always tidying up. Even though the city’s health department now forced her to wear a snood over her luxuriant hair, dressed in an immaculate dirndl, she was an Acland Street institution.

However, Helga was no longer a pert young fraulein, and her vertebrae cracked like a croque en bouche as she fell onto her hands and knees to clean up her cake display at the end of each day. But the pain she felt was not from arthritis – it was from seeing so many of her pretty girls remaining unsold. In the old days, she had been called the village belle – neither she nor her cakes were ever left on the shelf back then.

While wiping the catwalks between the rows of cakes, Helga accidentally poked a leftover rum baba. It was every cake’s destiny to be eaten, but this disfigured masterpiece would end up as bird food. Echoing the song, ‘Dirndls and petticoats, where have you gone?’ she asked aloud, Where are my customers?

A huge clump of Black Forest Cake remained. In the good old days, a whole forest would have been razed to the ground.

A forlorn Stollen cringed in a corner. One couldn’t even give it away! Untouched and unloved, this poor lass would never feel the caress of a human hand, or a mouth’s warm embrace.

Helga was ashamed of all the unconsumed marzipan! Even though Melbourne was not Lubeck, the delicacy’s home, the animals that she moulded from the sweet, pliable mixture of almond paste and sugar used to not only walk out the door, but fly to adoring customers overseas. Today, a whole zoo survived.

Catching sight of the cake remaining on the middle shelf, Helga burst into tears. The golden cheesecake, with her smooth uncracked skin, looked right. Dense, with a slight indentation in the middle, she felt right. Her texture was exquisitely balanced between coarse and fine, perfectly al dente. Her taste combined lemon and sweet in perfect proportion. So why had she been left behind to curdle?

Sure, the street had changed. Not the buildings so much, but the traders and the customers. Even if the original shopkeepers weren’t making huge amounts of money – even if they did, they would never admit to it, in case the tax man might be listening – they were so proud of their shops that they had vowed to never leave. But, feet first, most of them had now departed – the watchmaker, the dressmaker, the haberdasher. Even the bespoke tailor who, while his little mannequin was tapping on the window, had shortened countless hems and let out countless waists, was no longer spoken for.

Only a few fatal optimists, clinging to their youthful dream of success in the new world, remained on the Street. Slowly suffocating inside their rundown premises, these traders flaunted their delusions, cramming their shop windows with rubbish they regarded as treasure. Handwritten paper signs advertised everything from discount djellabas to houses for sale. Everything was on sale – for one week only, and then another week, and then one more. At night, the shops were dark, so the signs were not visible, but even by day, did anyone read those signs? Picking poppy seed from the creases in her blouse, Helga scanned her choc-a-bloc shelves. Was the writing on the wall for her shop as well? Like so many of the once-familiar names on the Street, hers too might soon disappear.

These days, Acland Street, like Luna Park, the refurbished fun park around the corner, wore an unhappy face. The new shops – trendy record stores, home-ware outlets and fashion boutiques – were the same sparse boutiques that were to be found in any mall. Some shops didn’t even make sense. Internet café? Juice bar? Aromatherapy products? What kind of nonsense was this? There were even shops that were empty. Junk mail grew on their doorsteps like fingernails on corpses. Her clientele had also changed. The hairy, barrel-chested men, their equally hairy, buxom women, and their gloriously fat children had either died of heart attacks, or were too afraid of cholesterol to visit her now. In this modern, diet-crazed world, it was rare for a customer to buy six doughnuts and finish two before he had collected his change. Her most common visitors were Japanese tourists, who didn’t even enter the shop, but snapped photos from outside. If they bought a cake at all, it was to share among six of them. In the old days, she had never been asked for a plastic fork. Now, she gave away more forks than she sold cakes.

When she had finished cleaning up, as if on cue, her husband Wolf appeared. "Ach! All these old hags still hanging around? Overweight, badly dressed, can’t even get picked up in a shop window! Helga, your cakes are as stale as you!"

What else could she do? Trying to move with the times, she’d displayed a gay rainbow that had been given to her by the traders’ association who suggested, wrongly as it turned out, that there was a pot of gold at the end of it. She’d introduced low-fat milk and artificial sweetener. She’d changed the menu from coffee and toast to lattes and focaccia. And because the small-bummed, flat-chested new generation had seemed scared of her brash and buxom continental cakes, she had, against the order of nature, cut down on eggs, tweaked sugar levels, and even started using carob and low-glycaemic chocolate. When these skinny cakes didn’t run out the door, she was not entirely surprised – they were too weak!

Brandishing the morning paper, Wolf declared: Your cheesecake has been selected to compete in the Swiss Food Olympics! This should have been good news, but he made it sound like a tragedy.

The newspaper article referred to the upcoming Eponymous Food Organisation Awards. Founded by Raoul de Strang in the early nineteenth century to protect the signature dishes of professional chefs from imitators, the Geneva-based Eponymous Food Organisation (EFO) was the Olympics Federation of food, bestowing awards on winning recipes. The award was much greater than a mere gold medal, however – because the victor was awarded naming rights to his dish, it was a guarantee of everlasting fame. Think Peach Melba, Beef Wellington, Coquille St Jacques …

Any chef worth his salt would kill to receive an EFO Award, and many had died trying. Though he had spent half his life bending over a hot stove, combining countless ingredients like an alchemist, de Strang himself had never produced anything worthy, and it is said that he died choking on a piece of Melba toast.

The newspaper’s readers had suggested that, as Helga’s cheesecake was undoubtedly the best in the world, the EFO would surely award it the moniker Helga Cheesecake. In fact, from her almond brot to her yeast kuchen, Helga’s girls had garnered innumerable awards over the years, but her cheesecake was the most popular of all. Batman, the founder of Melbourne, had declared that ‘this was the place for a village’, and since Acland Street was referred to as the village, and Helga was the village belle, her cafe had become known as ‘the place for a cheesecake’.

According to Wolf, however, the readers were living in the past. Her cheesecake was now as passé as an avocado vinaigrette or a prawn cocktail. She was kaput!

Her worried face glared back at her from between the boxes of chocolates which sat forlornly on the mirrored shelves. Wolf was never much help, but he was her husband, and she must listen to him.

"The Jewish bake the best cheesecake. Everybody knows!" he hissed.

Helga shook the sleeves of her lacy blouse, releasing puffs of castor sugar around her. "Ah so! I never trusted that old Jewish!" she thought aloud.

Many years ago, she’d asked a pain of a customer she knew only as Joe what he had thought of her cheesecake. He’d shrugged, told her she had nothing to worry about, and tried to grab some cherries that had fallen out of the Black Forest. She’d rapped him on the knuckles, perhaps a little too hard, but he’d looked back at her with sweetness in his crinkled eyes.

One day, however, the old Jewish had let his guard slip. My wife’s cheesecake is better, he had boasted.

Wolf cracked his knuckles. "Ach, I know where to find this Jewish. He calls himself Joe in this country but that’s a lie. His name in Jewish is Yosl. I’ll make this Yosl cough up his people’s recipe, you’ll make the cake, und zen, we’ll win the prize!"

Helga looked alarmed. "Liebchen, you won’t hurt him, will you?"

"I haf my vays und means! " replied Wolf.

MILQUETOAST

On the same day, not very far from Acland Street, in the kitchen of a comfortable three-bedroom double-brick house on a decent-sized block of land, Harvey Shmidlap dropped his toast into his mug of milk when his eyes fell upon the newspaper article about the Eponymous Food Organisation and its upcoming awards.

Harvey was into food, and it was into him. And out of him again. For fifty years he had been an eating machine. He had propelled himself through life sucking it in one end and squeezing it out the other. He loved food so much he wanted to be food. Not that he wanted to be eaten himself – unless in the sexual sense – it was his name that he wanted to be eaten. He wanted to look after not merely his posterior, large as it was, but his posterity. He was definitely not going to make the same mistake as Metternich or whatshisname who had worked for Stroganoff.

He tore the milk-splattered entry form out of the paper, and in the space marked recipe, he wrote the word cheesecake, and in the space marked eponymous name substitute, very slowly and deliberately, he wrote the word Shmidlap.

Cheesecake was undoubtedly the queen of all cakes, and the queen of cheesecakes was definitely his mother’s. If the EFO could make such a big cheese of Sacher, whose torte was nothing but a dry sponge, how they would laud the king of cheesecakes, Shmidlap!

There was only one hitch to his master plan – he didn’t have the recipe. His mother had it, but if he were to ask her for it, as he had done so many times already, she’d just brush him off, and if he attempted to connive it out of her, she would be able to see through him as easily as through her double-boiled, twice-strained chicken soup.

CAMPBELLS SOUP

On the other side of the globe, the upcoming Eponymous Food Awards were also making waves.

When in Geneva, a relaxing cruise on a beautifully preserved paddle-steamer past the rolling hillsides of La Côte, the climbing vineyards of Lavaux, the steep cliffs of the French Chablis and the resplendent shores of Haute-Savoie, is not to be missed. However, on this occasion, one man, about five feet six inches high, very stout, with a large head and a short neck with a good deal of double chin, dressed in a blue serge suit with turned-back lapels, did not bother to join the other tourists on the deck who were busily snapping photos this way and that. In fact, he spent the whole cruise resolutely turned away from the views and constantly checking his watch, looking anything but relaxed. As the boat approached the Quay du Mont-Blanc, he suddenly snapped his briefcase shut, jumped to his feet and made an ungraceful dash towards the exit, his protruding belly leading the way. Despite the shouts of a sailor telling him that the gangway was not yet secure, he strode confidently ashore.

While other tourists might linger at the trendy boutiques, antiques and curios dealers, restaurants and bistros in the centre of

the city, and then stroll down the lakeside quays admiring the elegant old residences, beautiful flowerbeds and stately monuments, the busy gentleman stopped only at the famous flower clock, and then not to admire Geneva’s preoccupation with watchmaking, but to check the time: 9.20 a.m., 6th February. He then charged ahead.

Continuing along the Rive Droit, he arrived at a kiosk selling hot chicken, and after reading a directional sign, veered into a park. Had he had time to stop and read the accompanying plaque, he would have learned that the park had been bequeathed to the City of Geneva by a local duke a hundred years ago, on the proviso that chickens be allowed to roam freely on its grounds. These days, unfortunately, chickens wandered here at their own risk. It is said that there are nuggets of gold beneath the streets of Geneva, but at the Palais de Manger, the nuggets were chicken.

Weighing heavily on a hillock, the imposing brown structure was by no means the most beautiful of Geneva’s buildings but, at twice the size of Versailles, the Palais de Manger was definitely the largest. Affectionately known as the Giant Turd, it was the headquarters of the Eponymous Food Organisation.

The huge columns of the portico were designed to impress, yet curiously, as the man approached them, he seemed to grow in stature. A large Warhol hung above the entrance. It was similar to the famous picture of a can of soup, however instead of the word Campbells, the label on the soup can read ‘Your name here … ’

Despite being bald around the temples, with ragged, unbrushed wisps of hair on the upper part of his head, his carriage was dignified, and the security guards allowed him to stride past them without putting up any more than a feeble show of protest. The man entered the building determinedly, his footsteps thudding on the marble floor like heavy rain.

Suddenly he was accosted by an unkempt fat man.

What have you got for me to hang a lip over? he entreated. "A fabulous new what – sauce, schnitzel, cake?"

The man in the blue suit was not to be trifled with, however. He pushed the pathetic food addict out of his way, and strode to