First it’s illegal for Americans to buy Cuban cigars the fight against world

First, it’s illegal for Americans to buy Cuban cigars; the fight against world communism must go on. Second, cigars and strong drink seem at odds with the American obsession with health. They console themselves by pointing out that cigars don’t cause lung cancer, but they do cause others, so the claim doesn’t hold much mineral water.It matters not a bit for patrons of The Cigar Bar at Beekman Bar & Books (889 First Avenue). BB&B is one of a trio (soon to be quartet) of upscale bars decked out to look like a clubby library – never mind that the books seem to have been bought by the yard. The effect is refined and worldly, especially in the Cigar Bar itself, a small room at the back with a $25 minimum per puffer.

That sounds like a lot, but not if you order a Limited Edition Dunhill Chairman’s Reserve ($50) and Remy Martin Louis XIII ($125 a glass).While I didn’t get to see that place when it was smokin’, I did spend time at a new joint called City Wine and Cigar Company, in TriBeCa (62 Laight Street). This is a serious restaurant-bar where the cigar room has a resi- dent expert to guide you through the choices ($4.50 to $30 for a rare Partagas 150). By 6 on a Friday even- ing, half the people at the bar were puffing away. Most were guys in suits, brandishing hefty brown tubes (with varying degrees of assurance) and talking guy talk. Overheard: “did I tell you I’m going stag-hunting in Scotland?” Freud would like that one.It’s not only in bars that New Yorkers go cigar-crazy. Wine merchant Nancy Maniscalco, of Nancy’s “Wines for Food” (313 Columbus Avenue), reports that tobacco takes top billing on some customers’ menus. “They want a good wine to go with cigars – and some ask where they can go to buy them.” They need hardly bother, since the highly-rated Ansonia restaurant one block away (329 Columbus) has its own cigar area.

Senor Swanky’s is even closer, and its pretension-free cigar menu offers suggested pairings of smoke and liquid.Which combinations work best? My enquiries suggested that people stick to their favourite drinks, whether from grain or grape. Red wine is popular, but so are whiskies, Cognacs and Armagnacs. Vintage port is booming in New York at the moment (driving up prices worldwide), and I can imagine that a good specimen would coat the tobacco-furred tongue nicely. The Swanky’s list includes a number of superior aged tequilas, and these too make sense. As a non-cigarist, I am in no position to judge, but expert informants say that a good drink brings out the flavour in the cigar.

Whether the cigar does any favours for the drink must be a matter of opinion.Cigars may be booming now, but New Yorkers get through crazes like a baby through toys Eventually they’ll move on, and Holley can’t wait. “Cigar bars are the shoulder pads of the food business, some day we’re all going to be very embarrassed about them.”. After Travelling around the South Pacific for a few weeks, there is something unbelievable about arriving in Tahiti. I do not mean the startling silhouette of Moorea or the fantastical peaks of Bora Bora beyond. It is the beady eyes, the beaky noses, the nobbly, white knees of the Frenchmen who guard the entrances to this particular paradise that are astonishing. “What are you still doing here?” is the thought that leaps to mind. And, for French officials, they do look slightly embarrassed, as if after nuclear tests and Tahitian riots and world boycotts they are now not too sure themselves.

They hardly, for instance, knew how to deal with my friend Ieremiah, a Cook Island Maori, who couldn’t find his passport and frankly didn’t give a damn, only partly because he was tanked up on Air New Zealand’s Grand Marnier.
We were on our way to Raiatea, once the royal and sacred island of the Tahitian kings, about 100 miles west of Papeete. Ieremiah, an old school friend and nominally my photographer, had come on the trip because, he said, his ancestors were from Raiatea, and also because he likes flying business class. We left Faaa airport and were swept along an expressway into Papeete.There are some places in the world so cut off from their past or their own surroundings that they induce a weird sense of dislocation in the visitor – Abu Dhabi airport at 3am is one, the freeways outside Louisville another. Papeete is a third – especially at the Hyatt Regency, sprawled over a lonely cliff looking into darkness.