Le Train Bleu is a restaurant in Bloomingdale’s that is modeled after a luxury French night train which 
carried wealthy passengers between Calais and the French Riviera in the 1920s. We had breakfast there today and it really did feel like we were in a train car.
No, Annick Goutal is not a chef. And this post is not about the food at Le Train Bleu, which was not particularly memorable. Annick Goutal is a French perfumer who had a short but successful career. She’s also dead btw (cancer, age 55) but she lives on through her perfumes which are highly regarded by professional noses, and through her daughter Camille Goutal and the official Goutal “nez”, Isabelle Doyen.
We met both Camille and Isabelle at a breakfast that they hosted for scent afficionados . I won’t tell you how we got interested in scents. Anyway, we asked them to sign our bottle of Petite Cherie, which was made expressly for Camille by her mom Annick. I guess getting your perfume bottle signed by Doyen is like having your restaurant menu autographed by Daniel Boulud.
Petite Cherie is described as “sweet, fruity . . . gourmet notes of peach and pear mixed with the flowery touches of rose musk on a vanilla base”. I also tried their masculine fragrances such as Eau d’Hadrien, which the Goutal website describes as a “refreshing citrus scent containing the acidic aromas of Sicilian lemon and grapefruit ripened under the Mediterranean sun that blend in perfect harmony with the subtle notes of citron and cypress.” Sounds like part of a wine review, doesn’t it?
So the food was nothing to write home (blog home?) about, but the fragrances were certainly very good, at least to our untrained nez. So it looks like Marita and I have a new hobby. Now we are going to be conscious about all the scents and smells around us, which should be a good thing, we hope. Marita actually changed her scent to Petite Cherie, after almost 25 years with Diorissimo.
If you’d like to learn the language of scent snobs and also what your favorite fragrance is made of, go to www.basenotes.net .
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