There’s a scene in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service that’s even more dated than Roger Moore’s leisure suits and Sean Connery’s terrycloth cabana wear. After ordering a heap of beluga caviar to share with Bond girl Diana Rigg, one-shot Bond George Lazenby beats an evil henchman into unconsciousness, then helps himself to a heaping spoonful of glistening black fish eggs on a wedge of toast on his way out of the demolished hotel room.
Today, that single spoonful of caviar would cost you at least a hundred dollars, if you could get it at all. The James Bond created by Ian Fleming on the page and in over 20 movies onscreen is a self-styled sybarite and gourmand, but this might be an even more fantastic aspect of Bond than the villain’s lairs in extinct volcanoes or the tricked-out sports cars.
Anthony Rommens runs Caviar Direct in the basement of Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market, and when he began in the business 15 years ago you could still get real caviar from Caspian Sea sturgeon. One of the ironies of Bond is that the Soviet empire he fought against his whole career ensured him a steady supply of beluga for his amorous conquests; once the Berlin Wall fell, fishing for sturgeon in the Caspian became a free-for-all eventually controlled by the mafia. Three years ago, a ban was put on export of caviar from the area.
“Basically, it’s fished out everywhere — it’s an endangered species,” Anthony tells me. “Even the average millionaire can’t afford it.” He’s found alternative sources for his caviar, but you’d expect to pay at least $165 for a tiny jar of beluga that would barely have filled Lazenby’s spoon.
“The idea of Ian (Fleming) being a sophisticated good liver was nonsense,” says John Pearson in James Bond: The Real Story, a British documentary airing on the Discovery Channel this weekend. Pearson is the author of biographies of both Fleming and Bond, and was the writer’s assistant at London’s Sunday Times. “He really didn’t know anything about wine, and he didn’t know how to mix a good martini. All that stuff about ‘shaken not stirred’ — that’s typical Ian; a clever journalist. ‘Shaken not stirred’ — ah, good phrase.”
At the showcase Summerhill outlet of the LCBO — Ontario’s SMERSH-like liquor monopoly — product consultant Stewart Bailey is trying to help me price out the sort of cellar a James Bond would need to have. A 2000 Dom Pérignon would cost $220, but a ’55 — Bond’s favourite vintage — runs between $1,205 and $1,942 according to a search on winesearcher.com. He’d need a good supply of gin and vodka for his martinis, and a few bottles of something like the 2003 Chateau Latour at $1,843.23 — “minus $0.25 for the bottle deposit.”
Late one night, I decide to get in a Bond frame of mind with a couple of his vices. My wife informs me that I’ll void my life insurance policy if I try to smoke his 60-plus cigarettes a day, though in any case, recent Bond Daniel Craig has said that he’s entirely opposed to showing Bond smoking onscreen. I mix up a very dry vodka martini, shaken with a twist, and realize after the first bracing mouthful that a few of these will render me very muddleheaded and un-Bondlike. Midway through my quest to become Bond, I see that the wallet as well as the flesh is far too weak.
