giving paris one more chance

Ah, departure. Tomorrow I fly back to the states, and accordingly I find myself craving good indian food and better chinese than I can get here. My last few days have seen some good meals - the pleasures of a falafal sandwich grilled for me on the spot at a market, another great meal at the cantonese restaurant down the block from me, and several new cheeses that I don't quite have time to detail here. Let's just say that import laws don't allow them into the US. I've been drinking mostly burgundies, and did have one very nice tapas meal at a friend's house, featuring puerto rican fried plaintain slices and a chicken stew. I'm nervous about travel chiefly because my bags were lost on the way into Paris, and because one of them contains a bottle of very excellent banyul dessert wine.

The most pleasant thing to think about seems like foods I'd like to eat on the next trip. First and foremost, more crepes. I really didn't seek out the best crepe places in Paris, largely because it was winter during this trip and the pleasures of street foods were accordingly well, less pleasurable. Then, a trip or two to dairies outside paris, and perhaps down to the Loire for wine. My stay was so Paris-focused that I didn't explore regional foods - except insofar as the Ile-de-France does have a few distinctive cheeses - or travel outside the area much. So here's to returning soon. As it's said in that old New Yorker cartoon, while you're up, could you get me a grant?

The Georgian Cantonese

Since the last post there's been too much eating for easy summary. Shannon took off for the US, my mother arrived, and in the same week I ate with each of them at the Cave la Bourgogne, currently my favorite cafe-restaurant, at the base of the scenic rue moufftard here on the left bank. The kitchen is not an ambitious one - Andouilette, omelettes, plates of charcuterie, salads - but extremely competent. The real pleasures there are of the cave - i.e., vin - and of the ambiance. Its a slightly dark, wood-lined interior space lit in red and yellow tones, and manages to feel lively without being too noisy to hear those around you. And the chevre toast that tops the salade complet, is just great.

Also notable, was the Restaurant Priosmani - one of Paris' few Georgian restaurants - where we had dumplings stuffed with sour cherries, chicken in an almond sauce, and lamb in tarragon. While I wasn't blown away, the experience of eating Georgian food was worthwhile, and the combinations of spices were quite unfamiliar and hence, pleasant. And Tat Ming, a cantonese restaurant off of the largely Asian rue Tolbiac, near my apartment, was just great. I consider their yushiang eggplant, chili fried squid and shrimp shiu mai to be the equal of most places I go in san francisco, and that's hard for a chinese restaurant stuck so far inland, in a city where most people don't like spice.

The best discovery though, was that there's an excellent restaurant, "Au temps du cerises" around the corner from my apartment, serving French workers' cuisine - nothing fancy, but ample portions of meat, beans, bread, wine, and some interesting items like a pear smothered in soft melted cheese. Their wine list is good, the atmosphere very friendly, and the posters and art on the walls conjure Brechtian visions of art as the hammer smashing capitalist reality. Its very bourgeois to treat Marxism as a digestif, but for some of us, its a digestif that works well.

until next time - hopefully soon!

London Part II

Getting back to the London trip, our visit to Borough Market deserves a write up. This covered market is so well known not only in London but in the food world in general that it hardly needs a basic description, but here goes: green tin roofs and tarps, light slanting in from above on over a hundred stalls selling everything from hawaiian and french sea salt to parts of pigs and goats we don't usually sell at american farmers markets. The crowds are intense: there are many spots, where a queue for sausage come up against a thoroughfare, where you can't actually move forward, and where it would be impossible to fall over. For me, the star of the show at Borough is Monmouth Coffee.

These guys are serious coffee importers, roasters and retailers, who sell beans (never ground) or grind and brew coffee for you on the spot in the store. Their outfit has few places to sit: low wooden tables, with pieces of baguette and pots of jam on them. They sell some pastries, but the real focus is the coffee itself. What's interesting about it is that Britain has not generally joined the artisinal coffee roasting movement (and as I've observed, neither has France) so its nice to see these guys putting in such an effort. The guatamalan we had was fantastic, and I almost didn't mind spending $12 on three cups.

But, back to Paris. We had our first experience with a vegetarian Chinese, Tien Hiang, which generally pleased me. They're still not on the same page as vegetarian asian places in the states - too much of a focus on replacing meat with soy protein, rather than abandoning the 8 ounces of protein per dish rule altogether, which would be more culinarily and nutritionally sound. I enjoyed the veg turnip cake, the bun bi - vietnamese noodles with spring roll bits thrown it - and a seaweed salad.

More soon - we're headed back to Angelina tomorrow morning so that Shannon can try the hot chocolate.

the continued travels

After a too-long absence I'm returning to my blog. I realize that, by the blogosphere's standards, my last post was about 2000 years ago; just one of the hazards of using today's technology with an attitude better suited to the last decade.

During a recent weekend trip to London I was steered, by wise friends, to some of the best food I've had during this trip to Europe. The irony of leaving France to find better food in England is amusing but really only part of the story: I was traveling with my vegetarian girlfriend, and it really is much easier for vegetarians to find something good to eat in london than in Paris. The French are stuck in the 70s when it comes to vegetarian food: think pastel-painted, flower-hung rooms, dishes that replace the boring 8 ounces of meat with 8 ounces of soy replacement, and an approach to vegetables that seems based on the principle that they taste better when barely cooked. London, on the other hand, has The Place Below, a vegetarian lunch counter in the Norman crypt below St. Mary-Le-Bow church, which makes amazing soups and delicious baked grain dishes, and whose chefs are confident enough in the potentials of vegetarian food that they don't need to base the entire meal around the "absence of meat." We also at at a terrific south indian veg on Drummond St., a solid meal that was actually eclipsed by the even more terrific Anbala, the best Indian sweets shop I've ever been to... I can't recommend it enough. No visit to London will be complete, from here on out, without a trip there. The gulab jamun blew the lid off of my puny taste puds with its honeyed goodness.

Our big (and expensive) meal of the trip was at Moro, a Spanish restaurant near Islington, Northish within London, a big, friendly and noisy room. The menu is innovative but stays within the basic parameters laid out by Spanish tapas: wines and ports (including a nice manzanilla I found just sweet enough), plates of sliced tuna in olive oil, tender meat dishes. I had a slow cooked pork chop with pieces of bacon garnishing it, sides of cooked turnips with a little fig compote. Dessert was a cheese plate, idizibal and two other cheeses, sheep-based as most Spanish cheeses are. I was completely satisfied, and had that feeling which is pleasant once a month or so, of leaving a restaurant with my ability to walk diminished.

Back in Paris, I've been discovering the Asian restaurants of Rue Tolbiac, in my neighborhood, largely Chinese and Vietnamese. Steamed buns and "nem," which basically means rolls or buns, are a mainstay of the places here, and I really enjoy strolling along, very unfrench, while munching on something.

Must run - work calls - Ben

Snow Falling on Pain au Chocolat

After almost two weeks of silence, the blog surfaces again. I had to pour my writing energies into a review essay, and was working on some poems - c'est la vie, as very few people here in Paris actually say. The best thing I've recently eaten was a pain au chocolat under very specific meteorological conditions: a suddent snowfall during my commute to the bibliotheque nationale. frankly, croissants are a bit of a crap shoot even in Paris: you have to know a good patisserie, first of all, and second of all you have to get them right after the croissants have come out of the oven - a few hours later, and the peak experience that makes pastry here subtly but completely different from pastry in America, is lost. I got lucky last monday and bought my pain au chocolat from my usual bakery, and bit into it as I walked out towards the underpass and through the snow, feeling little bits of it (the snow, not the pastry) on my face and neck and hands, vision slightly obscured by snowfall, and _felt_ the counterpoint between the cold weather and the hot, buttery pastry and the melted chocolate inside it. It was like being reminded, in an age in which "beautiful" images are on billboards all around us, that beautiful things are from an entirely different order of being. It rocked my world. I worked for six hours straight and then came home and collapsed. It was a good day.

Ben

it's the simplest things

That make life here OK. I treated myself to a omelette jambon sandwich - yup, a ham omlette stuffed in a baguette, sort of like a better version of an egg mcmuffin, something I've only eaten once, in midwinter when I was desperate for something warm. Eggs have the magic power of making grease OK. The secret is to put mustard on the baguette first.

cafe theory

I am sick and tired of cafe theory. How about that for an assertive start? In fact what I get tired of, are the attempts to view the cafe, or usually the coffee-house, as a pivotal social institution in the development of modernity in Europe. I don't mean that it wasn't important - those who read Jurgen Habermas on the cafe, or who read Carl Schorske's work on Viennese coffee-houses, certainly are right that they played a role in creating political and aesthetic meeting-points. I just mean that the cafe risks being turned into an abstraction, in that nice cloud of verbiage. What strikes me about Parisian cafes, is just how diverse they are, and how the behavior people display in them runs over the limits of community center, political center, and so on... they remind me of just how fragile and limited our academic "maps" of these social spaces can be. So far, I've watched people complete Sudoku puzzles, make out, read books, type on laptops, greet friends, give tourists directions, get drunk, get high on caffeine - perhaps the only generalizations possible, is that people tend to know each other in the smaller cafes, not to know each other in the larger ones, and that they tend to use them like living rooms, for everything they don't have the space or inclination to do at home.

Just speculating for a moment: might one of the differences between the American and the French cafe, be that the French version has a more established place in the local culture, and is thus a less anxiety-provoking topic for the French than for the Americans, who worry when Starbucks encroaches on their territory?

the taste of milk

This morning I'm drinking my coffee with milk, reading Michael Pollan's New York TImes magazine piece on "nutritionism" (which is pretty good - perhaps too self-referential for my tastes, but, well, we all need to self-promote), and listening to the Tallis Scholars on my itunes. Wait. Milk? I'm a black coffee person. But, I'm also a person who recently discovered how good bio-milk can be in France, and when I added some to my coffee (nothing great - Lavazza's pre-ground bel canto brand) I was reminded of just what coffee with milk is supposed to taste like. Full fat, coating my tongue and gums and cutting the acidity without making me feel like I'm drinking melted coffee ice cream. When I want that, I'll buy ice cream and leave it on the table all day in a bucket.

Today's cheese, is Couommiers, basically a small think brie, quite sweet. I bought a very young piece. I think its made from pasteurized milk, although there's also a raw milk version. Having never had raw milk brie, I'm eager to try that.

I realized that I do have a small complaint about the French cheese market: the dominance of French cheese (I know, duh) and the French taste for their own productions, makes it very hard to find good Italian cheeses, or the Dutch cheeses I love. Of course you could make the same complaint anywhere else in europe - its only in America that you get that great trade of quality for variety, since we're the worlds most diverse importer of specialty cheeses.

well-vinegared

I'm holding a bottle of vinaigre de Banyuls, a vinegar from the south of France, and savouring its taste on my tongue. It's sweet, but not the way balsamic vinegar is sweet - this has a rough, biting edge to it, as though you wouldn't need much more to make carpaccio than to take a swig and breath on the display in a butcher's shop. I just ate a salad of lettuces, oil, and a drop of this - "the dominican," as its called. I think the vinegar is made from the leavings of the region's wineries, and since Banyuls is typically a dessert or appertif wine, its appropriate that the vinegar maintains that same tone. I actually have hardly frequented specialty food shops in Paris, but with my newfound confidence that I can actually cook even in my tiny kitchen, I will start to.

The latest cheese find: Figue, a chevre from Aquitaine, with a particularly chevre-y taste for a cheese that's actually aged quite a bit, and drier than many french goat's milk cheeses. I hate to admit it but I've been enjoying the cheap mass-produced camambert quite a bit; I now have a collection of the little round cardboard dishes they come in. I think the appeal is something about the relation between camembert's national cred in France - its the country's cheese, after all - and its lowbrow, unsophisticated packaging, the way the packaging gestures weakly at the seriousness with which the French treat cheese. Or we think they do.

This weekend I'm attempting a vegetable curry with winter veg, depending on whats in the market, and plenty of basmati rice. I'm missing rice. And Indian food. While I don't have a reliable source of naan, here, I think that the lebanese bread merchant at the farmer's market has something that will do me, for the sake of appearances.

that's it for now - more later this weekend - ben

making sandwiches in a bed-sitter

Too long since the last update - no, I haven't been skipping meals, catching a stray "baguette tradition" only when I exit the underground fastnesses of the Bibliotheque Nationale - in fact, right near the area where I'm working, there's a fairly decent cafe where you can get a cup of coffee -


Coffee. Ok. Tangent. Coffee in Paris is, as friends told me it would be, not what it is in the bay area. While its true that the average 'cafe' which is basically a slightly taller and thinner espresso shot, is much better than the average cup of coffee in most places in America, Paris hasn't quite caught the specialty coffee bug the way America, especially the West coast and New York, have, and I'm craving a cup of something whose country of origin, bean, and roast type I'm told by an informative lable or barrista. No such luck. End of tangent.

- In fact, I've been eating rather well, but mostly at friends' houses. But this brings us to another topic. Given that most of us in student apartments in paris have not much more than a "coin culinaire" or kitchen nook, with one or two hotplate electric burners, a sink, and very little countertop space - I also have a microwave, which I don't use much - what's it like to cook? Fortunately there are books about this, including Michael Roberts' Parisian Home Cooking, and Katharine Whitehorn's classic Cooking in a Bedsitter. The latter, which is sitting on my table, has a cover illustration of culinary impliments hanging from the railing of a bed, intimating to the reader that he or she will learn how to prepare four courses while keeping the duvet cover neat at the same time. But its hard - one-pot meals are possible, soups and pastas and other such things, and of course Paris is full of the Picard chain of frozen-food stores (shudder to think, but some of the stuff there, like premade puff pastry, is useful) - but its still hard to find the space to chop everything and then store it until its time to go in the pot. Not to mention that I'm trying to do too many things at once here in Paris, leaving little time to cook, and making me forget that even back in Oakland, there wasn't much time to cook either.

What's currently saving me, is Tang Freres (yes, francophones, it should be Les Freres Tang) my local Asian grocer here in the 13th Arrondissement. Everything for the classic one-pot noodle or rice-based meals is there... and if they don't have much cheese or wine, well, that's everywhere else. And being in an Asian grocery made me feel strangely at home, ironic given that I never feel 100% at home in them, back in the states.

That's it for now - back to stir the pot.

give paris one more chance: week two

welcome to give paris one more chance, a diary about my experiences in paris, mostly concerning cheese, wine, and other comestibles, and the places where i eat. before i begin, a word on why its starting two weeks into my stay. my bags arrived a week after i did, and arrived slightly pilfered, so its taken some time to put myself together. my friends here mentioned that i was, in a sense, arriving in an ideal state for a stay here - namely, a state of annoyance. there are better things that have happened since i arrived, but i can say with confidence that my apartment is not one of them - not bad in and of itself, in a lovely location in the 13th, but when i arrived it turned out the keys had been hidden in a former latrine in the hallway outside. after digging in a defunct toilet bowl, amid soaked rags, i was able to get into the apartment. the title of this diary is taken from a song by my favorite singer-songwriter, jonathan richman, and i had no idea how fitting it would be when i chose it.

but, in the spirit of going out into the world and finding something to cheer onself up, two little cheeses, bought at the farmer's market delightfully near my apartment;

St-Marcellin -a small (they're supposed to be 80g;mine was 100), strong cow's milk cheese, orange on the outside and creamy yellow on the inside. Made in Dauphine - I usually find it to be too strong on its own, but good with a few grapes and some bread. A good choice for a cheese plate where other things can balance it out.

Crottin de Chavignol - almost too famous to mention. This is a Loire valley raw goat's milk cheese, with a gorgeous nutty flavour. Apparently it hardens and takes on a different taste with age - this one would have been very young, about two weeks old or so. A very safe bet for a chevre, and about the size of a really big button.

and a recommendation: my friends John and Emily steered me towards the hot chocolate at Angelina, on Rue de Rivoli. It's a gorgeous if stuffily fancy room, and the hot chocolate comes close to a coherent argument against atheism. its worth the trip across town, and almost across the pond.

until next time -

ben