OK Its November, enough of these quasi lexicographic pieces.
Its cold outside so let us lighten the tone with a little name dropping.

Snaffles in Leeson Street was The smart restaurant in Dublin in the sixties and seventies. I was lucky enough to work there about this time.
I was reminded of my early days in Snaffles by a little piece I saw on the paper yesterday.

We were having an (unusually) quiet lunch there in what must have been some time in 1971 when the phone rang.
It was that call you dread during a quiet lunch. A booking for two at 2.30. This meant we would all be hanging around for an extra hour .
John Nolan, our Maitre D’ who took the booking, said it was in the name of a Mr. Litter.

Snaffles was in a basement in Leeson Street (Leeson Street has changed a lot since then)

The Staff of Snaffles circa 1971
Jack Williams, My Hairy Self, Hugh,.John Nolan, and Danny.

While we waited for Mr. Litter to come we all kept an eye on the window through which we could see the stairs down which every customer had to travel to ring the bell to get in.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a gold lurex pair of platform boots, studded with sequins begin to totter slowly down the steps.
I had a sudden moment of enlightenment, “Its not Litter John!, Its Glitter!
Its Gary Bleeding Glitter!
And so it was.
The reminder came as I read that the same man had disgraced himself once again this week .

The fact that you had to ring the bell in Snaffles deprived us of what would have been our greatest prize.

John Huston was a fairly regular customer, often bring his gawky teenage daughter Angelica.
He rang one day when lunch was finished to apologise for not turning up for a booking.
“We were late” he said “ I sent Paul down and when he saw the door was locked he assumed you were closed The fool didn’t know you had to ring the bell!”
The fool was Paul Newman, then involved in making “Macintosh Man” in Galway.

While I was in Snaffles Stanley Kubrick was making his much maligned classic “Barry Lyndon” in Dublin.
He brought all his stars in to Snaffles to eat, Marisa Berenson, up close was even more stunningly beautiful, Ryan O Neill was perfectly charming but the bit I remember most was his daughter Tatum, making long reverse charge telephone calls from the phone in the kitchen to her pals in LA. A brat of the first order. It was somehow satisfying when she ended up marrying superbrat John MacEnroe about 10 years later.A match made in heaven.
A strange coincidence was that Kubrick filmed some of his locations in Waterford, in Ballinakill House, where I was to spend about four years as a chef much later.

Our own celebrities were not backward about coming into Snaffles either.
Charlie Haughy was a frequent customer with the bold Terry Keane.
Boy did that man have charm and charisma!
Every time he ate (inevitably in the little private back room, called the PR) He would stick his head into the kitchen and say “Martin ! How are you”. to my total delight! (John told me much later that he would get my name from him just before putting his head in.)
Ruth Buchanan and Shane Ross did all their courting there and were so fond of us all that they asked as all to the afters of their wedding (on a Saturday night unfortunately, when none of us were free to go)
When Thelma Mansfield got engaged to John Morris, Lord Kilanin’s son she came into the kitchen to work for a week to learn how to feed the lord.

The list of celebs in Snaffles was endless, I remember watching Virginia Wade being snogged by someone in the corridor, Garreth de Brun, of Guinness and Chieftains fame, whose wife, an Eastern Princess would solemnly eat all the flowers off the table before commencing dinner.
Molly, Lady Cusack Smith was a frequent costumer and a loyal fan of the restaurant. When a member of her party once spotted a fly in the gravy and started to point it out she instantly raised the jug to her lips, downed it and the fly in one go and said , regally, “More Gravy John!”

There is a wonderful story told about the same Lady Cusack Smith, a lady who in her day was such a beauty that Harrods obtained her permission to use her portrait on the tin in which they packed their fruit cake and called it “Molly O Rourke” in her honour. The story was that Lady Smith, for many years master of the Galway Blazers, arrived back from the hunt one hay with her horse covered in sweat and obviously exhausted. Her reply to the groom, who said
“Jaysus Maam you have him in a terrible lather” was a classic.
“So would you be my good man if you had been between my thighs for the last four hours”

I don’t think that any of my subsequent places of work were as star frequented as Snaffles.
True we used to feed Edward Heath, and his bodyguards, in the Wife of Bath, and on one never to be forgotten day, in the same restaurant, we fed my great culinary heroine; Elizabeth David.
I can remember having a long conversation with a charming Garret Fitz Gerald, the then Taoiseach, while doing my stint aboard the Galley in New Ross.

In Dwyers I had my claims to fame too, the actress Drew Barrymore on her Honeymoon with her Groom (for five minutes) Tom Greene, Jean Kennedy Smith coming into the kitchen and saying how much she liked the house wine, and would I ask the supplier to contact her.
I did, and he did, and she ordered some to be delivered to her residence in the Park.
One bottle!

A musician friend was organising a concert in London for the victims of the Omagh bombings some years ago, as they were performing some of his music, Andrew Lloyd Webber came to cast his eye on the proceedings. On discovering that my friend was from Waterford he said
“ Ah, Waterford, I had a lovely meal there once, in a place called Dwyers.”

Well, the title should have warned you, it was going to be that sort of piece!