Table talk
What's the French for "Slainte"?
Guests at the 60th birthday party of Britain's longest-standing three-Michelin-starred chef, Michel Roux, were treated to the sight of him in full Scottish dress. Although reportedly declaring: "I am old now so I can wear what I like!", Roux later added that the real justification for the kilt was that he was proud to be one of the Keepers of the Quaich, the whisky producers' organisation. Just in case you didn't know, a quaich (with a soft -ch, as in "loch"), is a shallow two-handled cup which nowadays is normally reserved for ceremonial usages. Roux said he would not be wearing the kilt every day, "just on special occasions".
Absolute-ley, positive-ley, pennypinching-ley sil-ley
The Tetley Walker Football Club has been booted off its ground because its players do not drink enough beer at their Carlsberg Tetley sports and social club in Warrington, Cheshire. A spokesman for the social club said: "We're talking about a huge sports complex. If people don't spend money at the bar, we simply won't survive."
Hard to tell who really got screwed
The French chambermaid may have become a staple of the saucy video, but it was a porter and his insignia that got the owners of one of Paris's poshest hotels hot under the collar. His uniform clearly identified Le Crillon hotel as the unwitting backdrop to a popular porn video starring well-endowed Italian stud Rocco Siffredi. Keen to preserve its upstanding image, the hotel persuaded the courts to cut 13 minutes of offending footage. But, proving that porn can pay even for unsuspecting extras, the porter's income was enlarged by the award of £10,000 in damages.
World's biggest conger line
Simon Woodroffe, managing director of restaurant chain Yo! Sushi, might be interested to learn that the world's biggest sushi has just been made in Japan. About 560 people helped create the enormous conger eel sushi at a brewery in Kobe. The giant dish measured 210m, a length chosen to celebrate the dawn of the 21st century.
Try telling him to put that into the communal pot
Stringent cutbacks among many Wall Street firms made an unnamed British stockbroker's £11,000 tip to a New York head waiter front-page news in the US city. But a trawl through Caterer & Hotelkeeper‘s archives suggests that the world's big tippers are becoming tighter-fisted. The £11,000 given to Lenny Lorando at Nello's Italian restaurant looks like small beer against the £25,000 left to staff at New York's Plaza hotel last year by newlyweds Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas. And this sum dwindles to vanishing point compared with the £1.2m tip Swiss banker Erich Sager gave to barmaid Gwen Butler at Boston's Federalist Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge in the same year.
That's fine, but where's the accumulated interest?
Honesty is the best policy, according to Vic and Rita Hindmarch. Fifty years ago the couple, from Rossett in North Wales, spent their honeymoon at the Derwent hotel in Torquay. Unbeknown to them, they were mistakenly overcharged by an extra half-guinea (53p). Years later, to their surprise, they received a written apology and a refund from the hotel. Vic, who has just celebrated his golden anniversary at the hotel with his wife, said: "In those days, my wages were only £6 11s 6d (£6.62) so we had to save quite hard to find seven guineas (£7.58) for the week-long honeymoon. It was a lovely surprise when we had 10s 6d (53p) returned to us."
