This is my week for classic Fort Lauderdale restaurants. Tuesday night we went to the soft reopening of the Mai-Kai. The food was OK (as I remembered it) and the drinks were excellent, though I sent back my Floridita Daiquiri - described as Hemingway's favorite from the Floridita Bar in Havana - because it arrived frozen. When I complained (I don't think Hemingway drank frozen cocktails) I was told that all the Mai-Kai's daiquiris are frozen. We were seated outside, as the dining room was not yet open, and after the meal we went in to look at the bar, which was as atmospheric as I remembered it, though I seem to recall the old one had windows with water continuously running down the outside panes, giving the feeling of being inside a waterfall. But it was good to see the place beautifully restored.
Last night, I went with some friends to Cafe Martorano. I had heard it was loud, and it was; a bit like eating in a disco - there is a disco ball over the bar - except that nobody was dancing. The chef-owner doubles as DJ. As Max Beerbohm once said: "For people who like that sort of thing it's just the sort of thing that they like."
Mark F. Brzezinski, US ambassador to Poland, spoke last night at the University of Miami. The tone of his talk was upbeat: In a world of bad news stories, he said, Poland is a good one. He told of the nine million Ukrainian refugees who arrived in Poland after the Russian invasion, and how they were taken in by Polish families. One million remain, most of them now with their own apartments, as they’ve integrated into Polish society. Except for the right to vote, they enjoy all the rights of a Polish citizen.
There are now, he said, 10,000 American troops in Poland, working alongside the Polish military. He described Putin as “a KGB agent who’s the son of a KGB agent. He’s not a politician like Yeltsin and Gorbachev.”
He talked about Poland’s progress with regard to energy: the fact that it no longer relies on energy from Russia, and is less and less dependent on coal. The country just signed a deal with an American company to build a nuclear power plant.
The talk was so positive he didn’t speculate on his fate under the new administration.
Also leaving us this week, also at the age of 95, was Charles Dumont. Most famous for writing the Edith Piat hit “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” Dumont was a singer as well, interpreting his songs with a gruff, lilting gracefulness. (“C’etait le temps, souvenez-vous/le temps des grives aux loups.”) Now he joins those two other Charles’s – Aznavour and Trenet – in the French chanson afterworld.
Arthur Frommer died yesterday at the age of 95. Best-known at the author of Europe on 5 Dollars a Day, and founder of the Frommer travel guides, he was also the only person who ever called me out of the blue to offer me a job.
It was in the late ’90s. I had met Arthur once, when he spoke at the Barnes & Noble in Plantation to talk about his new magazine Budget Travel. I ended up writing a column about the evening, in which I said: “What Dr. Spock was to child rearing in the ’50s, and Masters and Johnson were to sex, Arthur Frommer was to travel.” Shortly after, a travel writer at the LA Times, who heard him speak in Los Angeles, told me Arthur used that line in his introduction.
So one afternoon, while I was sitting at my desk in the Sun-Sentinel newsroom, the phone rang and Arthur was on the other end. He said that he was stepping down as editor of Budget Travel and wanted to know if I would be interested in the job. Everything about the offer was appealing – editor of a glossy travel magazine in the media capital of America – except the nature of the publication. As its name suggests, Budget Travel was a practical magazine of tips and information, far from the evocative travel writing that I loved and, surprisingly, was allowed to do at the Sun-Sentinel. I told Arthur I’d think about it – Hania was intrigued by the idea of living in New York – but I eventually decided to stay in the provinces, putting out the kind of travel publication that gave me joy.
I think I made the right decision. After The Best American Travel Writing anthology debuted in 2000, the Sun-Sentinel’s name appeared in the first nine editions. Its last appearance came in 2008, the year I got laid off.
My favorite films from the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival, which concluded yesterday, were Black Dog (China) and Junks & Dolls (Iran). Dissimilar in many ways, they both depict people finding purpose, and connection, in inhospitable settings.
The movie last night was a French comedy, Robot T-0, in which a single mother obtains a personal robot. The robot cautions the woman about her heavy consumption of carbohydrates but says nothing about her smoking.