Camille is a restaurant built for revelry, excess and an appreciably French disregard for hyper-productivity or abstemiousness. There is a mirror scrawled with the day’s suggested digestifs, racked bottles of wine that wink and blow kisses from behind the little bar, and a lone tap that issues perspiring, lavishly-frothed schooners of draught beer.
So, of course, the one thing that my mate Richard was not anticipating from the other two of us at the table, just as our server came over to take drinks orders, was a furtive, simultaneous admission that we were both off booze for the night. “Neither of you are drinking?” he said, striking a tone of lightly betrayed surprise. We can debate the precise etiquette of when to drop the bomb of temporary sobriety on friends implicitly expecting the opposite. Separately, there is probably a conversation to be had about the degree to which some of us tend to blithely buttress every social interaction with alcohol.
