The Official Takaw Mata Dining Room

This post is for Gina, who asked for it. Sort of.

This is where it all happens. Every month or so, we gather around a massive table that can accommodate nearly thirty diners. Draped with antique linen, the table is littered with silver candelabras that have gone without candles for more than two hundred years. The cutlery and china are kept on display in an André Charles Boulle–style étagère, made of black wood and gilded in bronze. The ceiling, painted by Eugène Appert, features a pale blue sky almost completely covered by gray and white clouds. Hanging over the table are huge chandeliers that look like crystal approximations of star systems, or maybe like painfully glowing clusters of myoma.

Then an army of French maids arrives, serving us grand cru wine, anally prepared and complexly presented meat and vegetable dishes, bowls containing permutations of the sauces mères, and desserts that are as delicious as they are beautiful: gastronomic and architectural wonders on tiny plates.

In between bites we talk about our colonies and the difficulty of ruling over savages, as well as our friends who lost their heads, literally, thanks to the guillotine.


In photo is the grand dining room of the Napoleon III apartments at the Musée du Louvre. Using a flash has made the photo look like crap.