ABSTRACT
One day in February 2004, around noon, Dawn Drzal realized that she “couldn’t bear to be home when my husband returned from a business trip later that day. By 6:30 that evening, I was on a plane to Europe.” “Table for One” is the story of her adventure in Madrid, including the last-minute Manhattan shopping spree for a sack full of travel guides, a description of her luxury boutique hotel, and her exploits trying to get the captainsommelier at “the celebrated Pedro Larumbe” to take seriously her request to see a full wine list. Drzal earned the captain’s admiration for choosing a “very Spanish dish” that “no foreigner has ever ordered” (Iberian pork cheeks with oloroso sherry on a swirl of apple and pea purée). Her tale was published in the New York Times Travel section the following May. In the piece, Drzal condes to her readers that she has been a wine book editor, that she is certied by the Wine & Spirit Education Trust, and that the line that won over the sommelier (who insisted she did not need a full wine list but merely a list of wines by the glass) was her claim that her husband’s family owns a vineyard in Côte Rôtie. After allowing the captain to choose a selection of cheeses for her in lieu of dessert and gaining much respect for recognizing Idiazábal (as his raised eyebrows register surprise “that an American should know a Spanish cheese beyond manchego”), she cavalierly offered him the remainder of her decanted wine with the hope that he would “do me the honor of nishing this with your dinner” (19). The story lacks only a nal exchange of fond glances with the sommelier and perhaps a glimpse of the writer boarding the plane home with a new-found sense of satisfaction to have all the makings of a feminist-lite chick ick, complete with domestic help, marital strife, expensive interiors, exotic food, and urban chic.
