Neocon POS Riichard Perle Discusses His Dinner Parties --->>>

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/fashion/25costco.html?ref=style

Tightening the Beltway, the Elite Shop Costco
By ASHLEY PARKER
Published: November 25, 2007
WASHINGTON


RICHARD PERLE said he was game for a reconnaissance mission.

Mr. Perle, the neoconservative and former adviser to Donald Rumsfeld, offered to walk through his local Costco, pointing out the products that he said were increasingly drawing D.C. power shoppers like himself.

That Richard Perle? The gourmand with a home in Provence who once dreamed of opening a chain of soufflé restaurants?

Yes, Mr. Perle proudly shops in Costco’s concrete warehouses stocked with three-pound jars of peeled garlic and jumbo packs of toilet paper. And he has no problem serving the store’s offerings to dinner guests.

“Because it should have been Dean & DeLuca?” he asked, sounding half incredulous and half amused. “I really think there’s a socio-cultural thing here, and people are entitled to their pretensions.”

As a recent article in Vanity Fair lamented, the days of glamorous Washington dinner parties are long gone. Indeed, some hostesses today aren’t above serving Costco salmon, nicely dressed up with a dollop of crème fraîche.

Mr. Perle said he shopped at Costco once a week when he was in town, and at a dinner party he held recently for several colleagues and friends, most ingredients were from there — the beef for his daube à la Provençal, the limes for his lime soufflé. The salmon for gravlax — also from Costco. He said he always received compliments, and he always got double takes when he told his guests where he shopped.

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Mr. Perle knows no such shame. “The book section, the cheese section, the seafood, I almost always get some fresh produce there,” he said, rattling off his favorite Costco haunts. “I just bought chanterelles there the other day, and they often have fresh shiitake mushrooms.”

Perfect for a mushroom soufflé.