The Tastes Of James Bond, Part 4: “Live And Let Die.”

Ian Fleming adopted up the success of his first James Bond novel, On line casino Royale (1953), a yr later with Stay and Let Die. The film model, which was Roger Moore’s first outing as 007, got here out in 1973. 

The novel’s plot includes Bond going after a Black-American legal named “Mr. Massive” (actual identify Bonaparte Ignace Gallia) who can also be linked the USSR’s spy community SMERSH. Massive is smuggling gold cash to finance Russian spy operations within the West, so Bond goes to New York and Harlem, the place the cash have been displaying up. He and CIA agent Felix Leiter are captured by Massive, who employs a gorgeous astrologist named Solitaire to find out if they’re telling the reality. (Leiter later is thrown right into a shark tank and loses an arm and a leg however survives.) Bond goes on to Jamaica and, whereas attaching a mine onto Massive’s yacht with Solitaire onboard, is captured  once more, the place Solitaire and Bond are to be dragged over a coral reef, however the hooked up bomb explodes and saves them. Massive is thrown within the water and killed by sharks and barracudas.

 Stay and Let Die is filled with foods and drinks episodes: In chapter one Bond is staying at New York’s St. Regis lodge, the place he has lunch with Leiter and an FBI man named Dexter, ordering room service for softshell crabs with tartare sauce, hamburgers, French fries, broccoli, a combined salad with Thousand Island dressing and ice cream with melted butterscotch, accompanied by a bottle of Liebfraumilch “pretty much as good as you will get in America.”  The St. Regis was constructed by John Jacob Astor in 1904 (he co-owned the Waldorf-Astoria as nicely); one in every of its luxurious improvements was that every room had its personal telephone. It grew to become well-known within the Jazz Age as the placement of the King Cole Bar. 

Subsequent day with a room service breakfast of scrambled eggs and double espresso a bomb arrives however is found, which doesn’t preserve 007 from a lunch on Lexington Avenue a diner named  Glorified Ham-N-Eggs. For dinner they first cease at Sugar Ray’s,  which actually was owned by the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, the place they’ve a nip of Haig and Hair punch bottle Scotch, then on to dinner at Ma Frazier’s, which was at 2067 Seventh Avenue at 124^thRoad, which Leiter says is one of the best restaurant in Harlem, the place they eat Maryland rooster and littleneck clams. Afterwards they go off to the Savoy Ballroom (the “Residence of Blissful Ft”)for Scotch-and-soda and to look at the dancing {couples}. The Savoy was a very talked-about membership of its day, that includes the massive jazz bands of Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. It closed in 1958. The 2 brokers end off the night time, or early morning, with rooster sandwiches at a fictitious membership known as the Boneyard. 

Bond bonds romantically with Solitaire and escape from Mr. Massive, on the Silver Phantom (really known as the “Meteor”) pullman automobile, the place Bond observes that its eating automobile service of camembert cheese is “probably the most welcome surprises on American menus.” The prepare ran between New York and Miami, as of 1939 as the primary diesel-powered streamliner. Later it was offered to Amtrak.

At their lodge in St. Petersburg Bond orders a Haig & Haig and Leiter presents to take them to the Tampa restaurant Los Navidades, an previous Spanish-Cuban meals place that opened in 1890 at 1418 Seventh Avenue in Ybor Metropolis and was a haunt for the Sanchez y Haya Cigar Manufacturing facility employees. It closed in 1972. 

At a small grill known as Pete’s, Bond orders “the most important steak, uncommon, with French fried he had ever seen,” with a pint of Outdated Grandad bourbon. In Jamaica he relishes the Caribbean meals at MI6 agent Commander Strangeway’s house within the Blue Mountains: Paw paw with a slice of inexperienced lime, a dish pile with purple bananas, purple star – apples and tangerines, scrambled eggs and bacon, blue Mountain espresso – probably the most scrumptious on the earth – Jamaican marmalade, nearly black, and guava jelly.” 

 Afterwards, getting ready for a strenuous scuba-diving swim to Massive’s island, Bond abstains from alcohol, and after the conclusion of a profitable mission, he and Solitaire eat an enormous breakfast of “the primary black crabs of the season,” roasted suckling pig, avocado salad and guava with coconut cream, with “one of the best champagne in Jamaica.”

 Within the movie model of Stay and Let Die Bond exhibits himself as a considerably prissy connoisseur, entertaining—and baffling—his superior “M” with an enormous and sophisticated La Pavoni Europicola espresso machine.  In any other case there’s not a lot foods and drinks within the film. In  New York Bond take a cab to Harlem and stops on the Fillet of Soul restaurant the place he asks for bourbon with out water, solely to be informed that it’s going to prices additional with out water! 

In Jamaica he checks into the San Monique lodge (the and now the Sans Souci Resort) and orders Bollinger in his room and but once more later in New Orleans on the Royal Orleans Resort, starting a protracted affiliation with that Champagne in Bond movies. There’s one other Fillet of Soul restaurant there, the place Bond orders a Sazerac. Other than just a few different drinks, the movie is devoid of any extra meals.