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07/20/2022 08:30 AMThe memories are indeed sweet and spicy and creamy and chocolatey because they are the memories of Restaurant du Village, a fixture in Chester for some 30 years until it was sold in 2009 and the new owners changed the name.
Now Christine Montegut Bastian, a server at the du Village for 19 years, has organized a reunion to celebrate the restaurant and the people who worked there. Christine herself is still a server in a French restaurant, now at Bar Bouchée in Madison.
She has kept in contact with some of the du Village people who remain in this area, among them Beth Tarran of Deep River, a former sous chef at the restaurant. They reconnected in the most suburban of ways, at a little league practice near Christine’s home, and they started talking old times. Pretty soon, Beth recalls, they agreed they needed a reunion.
“I thought, oh my gosh, we are all getting older; life is short, we have to have a reunion,” Christine says.
“I thought it was going to be maybe 20 people. It has just kept growing,” Taran says.
Ivoryton resident Jessica Nevins, who once tended bar at du Village, and is helping organize the reunion urges everybody on the “du crew” from dishwashers, waitstaff, bussers, and chefs from years past to make contact for reunion information.
Taran and her husband Elliott Dunsing are themselves a bit of du Village lore. They met at the restaurant. Beth worked as sous chef, and Elliott as garde manger, the kitchen specialist who makes salads and does prep work. When they married, du Village did something special to celebrate the event: they closed.
“On a Saturday night, the busiest time; that was a story,” Christine remembers. They had to close because the entire staff was at the wedding.
So far, Christine says, some 62 people, including spouses and children, plan to attend. She says two are coming from Colorado; one from Maine. Both sets of former owners, Priscilla Martel and Charles van Over, who opened the restaurant in 1979 and sold it to Cynthia and Michel Keller in 1990, will be there. Martel says this is not the first reunion of du Village staff. She recalls an earlier one years ago, but can’t remember the exact date.
Restaurant du Village was the first job Christine had when she came to this country from the small town of Thezan-les-Beziers in southern France. A schoolmate had family in Old Saybrook and had moved there. In 1986, she visited and dated a local young man.
For three years she divided her time between France and the United States, before the couple decided to marry, with weddings both in France and in the United States. She recalls when his family came to her small village how curious residents were.
“They had never seen Americans,” she says.
The couple, who Christine describes as amicably divorced for some six years, had twins, a boy and a girl, now 29. They are completely bilingual, Christine says, because she spoke to them only in French and her husband in only in English.
Christine was hardly bilingual when she first went to du Village for a job. She remembers looking through a window, and being immediately drawn to the restaurant. “I knew I loved that place and I wanted to work there,” she says.
She went inside and asked van Over about a job. He told her to come back at three o’clock. Not quite understanding, Christine asked when she could start. She recalls Martel had a one-word answer: today.
Though she had worked in hotels and restaurants in France, her first job, lacking fluent English, was bussing tables. She took English classes, read newspapers in English, but admits, “I am still making mistakes.”
Over the years Christine has also worked as a substitute for French classes in Old Saybrook High School and now tutors in French.
When du Village was sold to Cynthia and Michel Keller in 1990, Christine got a promotion from bussing tables to waiting on them. Cynthia Keller remembers her enthusiasm.
“Her English wasn’t too good but she was French so any mistakes she made would sound authentic,” she says.
For the last eight years of her time at du Village, Christine was also the dining room manager.
Talking to both sets of owners and to Christine about the restaurant one of the words that comes up regularly is family.
“That’s what we were, a family,” Martel says.
Cynthia and Michel Keller had what amounted to official family time every evening, a dinner for all the staff every night before the restaurant opened where all the staff from busboys to chefs ate together.
“It was a great meal, a wonderful meal, a family meal, a time for everybody to talk,” Christine says.
When not at the restaurant, Christine loves cooking making everything from crepes and boeuf bourguignon to fancy deserts and, in the winter, lots of soups.
“I love to create,” she says, which in practical terms means she never does the same recipe quite the same way. And one more thing, Christine adds, “I love to eat. People can’t believe how much I can eat.”
For the upcoming reunion, everybody is being asked to have one memory to share. Christine’s is the time she had on a delicate silk blouse and she leaned over the table she was setting. It had lit candles on it. Her blouse caught fire. She started beating her chest to put it out.
“Like Tarzan,” she says.
She was in a corner so no one saw the accident, but the front of her white shirt was completely gone. She ran into the kitchen and couldn’t come out for 20 minutes until another server called home to get a white shirt from her brother that Christine could wear.
The burning blouse might have been awkward at the time, but the awkwardness is gone and, quite literally, warm recollections remain.
“They’re all great memories,” Christine says.