Bono Vivant

It appears that when U2 superstar Bono is not unloading bags of millet and barley for the wretched of Africa, he likes to suck down oysters, rip into chunks of bloody meat and wash it all down with bottles of wine the price of which could have nourished a starving child for a year or more.

Describing a lunch with the U2 singer at the New York City bistro, Balthazar, James Traub writes in today's New York Times Sunday Magazine that the aspiring Messiah "ordered half a dozen oysters, the filet mignon and a half-bottle — and then, sometime later, another half-bottle — of a Clos de Vougeot."

At another steak dinner described in the article, which is generally hagiographic in tone, the following transpires:

Bono had started with a glass of white wine, but when I said I was drinking red, he switched over and ordered a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino. U2's manager, Paul McGuinness, is a wine nut, and Bono caught the bug from him. Bono has unabashedly bourgeois tastes, and he spends his money on the kinds of things most of us would spend our money on if we had as much as he does — a family-size Maserati, a house on the Riviera, a charming hotel in Dublin, great food and wine. I was raving about the Brunello, which was many stations above the norm for me. Bono was less impressed, but he didn't want to dampen my enthusiasm. "It is," he said, after some consideration, "a not immodestly great wine."

So in addition to being a pop star, "brother of the oppressed, Christian visionary, ironic trickster, devoted husband and father," Bono also likes to affect the mannerisms of a sniffy wine snob. That he delivered his witheringly superior judgement in pink oversize sunglasses and in an "Irish publican brogue," Traub helpfully informs the reader, renders the act "endearing" in his eyes rather than simply insufferable.