FINALE

Well I am back from Paris and enjoying the plethora of baked goods my mom made me. I can't tell you how excited I am to eat spicy food, salsa, avocados and decent sushi again. I can tell you how excited I am to be once again under the legal drinking age; I guess some how with the time difference I have become to immature to handle the ability to buy Pabst Blue Ribbon and Cheap-as-sin Vodka. Jet lag does that.
Anyway, I wanted to really thank you guys for reading my blog over the past four months. Things didn't exactly work out as well as I wanted them to with "A chef's table", but I have really enjoyed writing this blog. I have never been one of those people who keeps a journal, and frankly I have always been jealous of the fact that some people know exactly what they were feeling at a certain point in their life. So while the flavors of all the madelienes, the vietnamese food and the oysters have left my palate, I am truly pleased to be able to look back on this blog and know that, if nothing else, I had a great time eating my way around Paris.
Hemingway said “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” Paris is magical, there is no doubt about it and I feel like I got out of this experience with a new appreciation for the Euro and the delicate complexity of Paris's sometimes wonderful, sometimes disappointing, but always interesting food culture.
Look out for my next food blog when I chronicle my eating experiences though out the romantic world of Vassar's dining hall! Just kidding. Merci encore (je adorerai toujour mes lecteurs)

A bientot!

A horse is a horse of course of course

It is finals time and I am stressed. I have to write five essays totaling 25-30 pages, in French, by the 14th of December. So yeah, I am busy and that’s why I haven’t been blogging much.

Of course, some times when I get stressed I need a distraction; so during finals I like to cook. I know a lot of people like to bake cookies or brownies (or at least get baked/eat baked goods) when they are stressed, but I tend to envision elaborate meals that would make the chefs at Per Se and El Bulli jealous. So I decided to have some friends over from my program who I haven’t cooked with and who haven’t seen my apartment (or the big freaking Chateau de Vincennes three blocks away) and cook. Now besides a recipe for pumpkin and duck curry I was planning to make (the curry is really excellent by the way), I wanted to realize a dream I have had for a very long time.

I want to try horsemeat. I know this may be off putting, but I pride myself on trying every thing culinary at least once. I have eaten some weird meat before (alligator, bear, scorpion fish, turkey heart, you know, that kind of stuff) and since the French are really the only people in the western world who still have (or maybe ever had) a taste for horse, I figured this would be an essentially French thing to eat. To my surprise the super market I go to about 15 times a week sells horse. It’s called “Viande Chevaline” and somewhat inappropriately has a picture of Pegasus on the cardbord box. I don’t know why that freaked me out: we see whole dead chickens, fish and a lot of packaged beef meat in France has cartoon cows of in, but something about eating Pegasus seems very weird to me. There are a lot of famous horses (think Mr. Ed, That horse that was appointed to the Roman senate by Caligula, Bucephals the horse of Alexander the Greats, or the mythical Esquilax, the horse with the head of a rabbit and the body…of a rabbit) but there are no famous cows or chickens, something that may ease our minds when we feast on their flesh.

I bought the horse anyway and planned to serve it at my dinner party. Sophia, a friend who was coming over, loves to travel and has eaten some equally weird stuff and was very excited to try horse. I was thinking about marinating it in lime juice, garlic and herbs and then broiling the horse and serving it with maybe like a fresh salsa of tomatoes, onions and cilantro. Then, as I walked to the store where I buy my vegetables (its waaaaaay cheaper than the supermarket), I started getting very uneasy with what I was planning to do. I haven’t had any great horse experiences, but they are majestic and smart creatures and my friend/intellectual soul mate Caroline is an Olympic level horse back rider and would never speak to me again if I ate horse. Also, it’s not my house, it’s Gisele’s, and I don’t know if it’s polite to cook ethically dubious meat in someone else's house (“Don’t bother cooking tonight Gisele, I made enough Panda for everybody!”).

So I chickened out. I threw the horsemeat away and prayed for forgiveness. Maybe I still will try horse at some point, but anyone who likes to cook will tell you there is a big difference between eating something weird and cooking something weird. I just couldn’t cook the horse. I couldn’t imagine how awkward I would feel on, ya know, my next handsome carriage ride had I just a few weeks before prepared my own horse meat. Plus, I have a really great bit about why my parent’s should buy me a horse for life in downtown Philadelphia, and I can’t imagine telling it knowing what my ride tasted like.

Some things, like eating horsemeat, Barack Obama or white skinny jeans, are sort of better when we keep them as romantic dreams rather than experience them up close and realize that make us uncomfortable, probably need more experience in the Senate or make you look like a hipster douchebag.

Oh shit! I gotta get back to work!

Christmas overload: a Swedenish oddysey

Oh my god, I have just returned from the most ridiculously Christmas-y experience of my life. This weekend I visited Gothenburg; the second largest city in Sweden, and it was as if Disney, Santa Claus and the Republican Party had engineered a land that is so cute and wonderfully festive that Scrooge McDuck himself would shit out a freaking tree ornament.

My old friend Kate Fussner (she appears as a supporting character in my last blog post) and I flew up to Gothenburg from Paris and were picked up at the airport in a spanking new Volvo (of course) by Kate’s father’s friends Hans and Ninny Hjalmers. Hans and Ninny, like all Swedes, speak fluent English in adorable British accents. If I could imagine Kate Fussner as a Swede, she would have come from these two. I began to suspect I was only invited to give Kate an excuse to overdose on the famous Swedish Christmas spirit.

Christmas time is of course as wonderfully Swedish as a race to an Ikea on a snowy pine tree flanked road between to equally ancient Volvo station wagons to the music of ABBA, Ace of Base or death metal (however, anyone who has ever driven or been in a Volvo station wagon knows that while racing is dangerous, Volvo station wagons are so bottom heavy that they could not possibly reach a high enough speed to make racing dangerous). In covering the five main Swedish stereotypes (sorry Saab, Ingmar Bergman and Jens Lekman), you probably didn’t notice that I left out anything food related; that’s because Americans, while the have strong images of Swedish products and culture, if pushed would probably guess Swedes only eat snow smeared with Lingonberry jam. However, the food we ate in Sweden, whether it was traditional Swedish, Thai or Turkish was without exception good to excellent.

My first day in Sweden began with our host Osa asking us if we wanted to go to the fish market. Anyone who knows me knows that asking me that question is somewhat like asking Charlie Sheen if he wants to go a whorehouse in Bogotá. We saw the coolest fish at this market, big shiny salmon, massive white flounder and a fish they called “a catfish”, that which its buck teeth and massive googly eyes was without a doubt the ugliest fish I have ever seen for sale. We then toured Gothenburg and got some lunch at a café in a 17th century dockside warehouse: I had a cheese and ham pie, because I though it sounded very Swedish. The cheese was gooey and salty, and the ham was the perfect level of smokiness. The dish somewhat resembled a quiche, and with some pesto on top it was a very hearty and delicious way to begin a day that would be marked by its total food diversity.

After the cheese and ham pie we went to Liseburg, which is the largest amusement park in Scandinavia. The place was in a beautiful 1920’s art-deco style and with millions of Christmas lights it was genuinely gorgeous (If you are wondering if we saw Ace of Base performing there, we did: Rolf was running the Ferris wheel, and I think I saw Fjlayla cleaning the bathroom). I had three awesomely Swedish things to eat at the amusement park that are pretty different than the stale popcorn and nausea from massively obese people in bathing suits tends to fill your stomach at American amusement parks. First was Glügg, which is the Swedish Christmas drink. It tastes somewhat like hot mulled wine, but is apparently made with potatoes, spices, yeast and something Ninny described as “a not as good Swedish coca-cola”. We you add raisins and almonds it was so sweet and warm you could forget that it was pitch dark out and only 4 pm. We then found a stand selling salmon. Listen up Six Flags: I want gravlax at your amusement parks too. To finish our culinary tour of Liseburg, we had reindeer ham. Kate felt more than somewhat conflicted about eating Donner or Rudolf, but I just enjoyed its salty woodsy quality.

Over the next twenty-four hours Kate and I had genuinely spicy Thai food and genuinely tasty Turkish food. Paris has a lot of poor excuses for Thai food (it’s too close to the bad Chinese food and the French cannot stand any level of spice) and Turkish food (I am recalling numerous memories of drunkenly eating grecque sandwiches with dry meat and not enough sauce blanche at 2 am and wishing I could wipe my tongue off with a napkin). While ethnic food and Swedish breakfasts (lots of cheese and a weird fish-paste in a tube that was surprisingly good) were nice, the best moment of the trip came our third night there when we joined the Hjalmers for a family dinner. The Hjalmers all speak beautiful English, are either blonde or blue eyed and are just as unbelievably friendly. Their boyfriends are friendly! Their granddaughter is friendly! God I love Sweden!

Anyway, we started the evening by baking ginger bread cookies with the family. It was somewhat like a bizarre version of my family: friendly blonde people not discussing Hitler or Alec Baldwin and celebrating Christmas. Is there a word that means scary and attractive? A yes- Maureendowd. Very Maureendowd. Anyway, the meal started with some wonderful home made Glügg. We then had an appetizer of green beans with shallot vinaigrette and cured reindeer. It was really good and I am excited to now have a reindeer and a green bean recipe (if Campbell’s soup ever makes a reindeer flavored soup I will send in the recipe). We then had seafood chowder with curry that was very hearty. Finally for dessert we had a wonderful tort with berries from the Hjamlers backyard and an ancient Swedish dessert (in English its called Beasting Pudding) that is the milk from a cow that just gave birth: it was somewhat like a panna cotta and while it wasn’t amazing it was good to taste it. The great food, good wine (Hans is a wine nerd) and all the discussion about socialized medicine (something I gather the Swedes LOVE talking about) made for a wonderful final night for our trip.

The next day we went to the airport to fly home and I had a Swedish hot dog that was so good I went back and had another. The sausage is lighter and fluffier than American Hot dogs and is served with a honey mustard sauce and little pieces of fried onion. Delicious! They should just serve hot dogs on airplanes. In any case, I really loved my time in Sweden, and I totally recommend everyone finding your own insanely friendly Swedish family to stay with. If only as soon as I flew back to Paris I didn’t start freaking out about finals…

Zenks-geev-eeng

Happy turkey day! Okay I am not posting this on thanksgiving, but it is the holiday weekend and I thought you would all be interested to know how I am celebrating the day and how the Parisians pay tribute to everybody’s favorite religious zealots: the pilgrims.

The French certainly have the opportunity to “fêter” (celebrate) thanksgiving. The Marais, whose praises I have already sung, is filled with restaurants serving special thanksgiving meals. My friend who lives in the extremely fancy Sixteenth arrondisement tells me that there is even a store there called “Thanksgiving”, somewhat like those creepy Christmas stores off of desolate state roads in the forests of New Hampshire (just speaking from personal experience here people). Apparently, they were importing extremely expensive fresh cranberries for the 30,000 Americans who are in Paris at any given moment (I’m not kidding; that’s actually the real number).

While un-traditional, your humble bloggist had a lovely thanksgiving. Rather than eating a turkey and pumpkin pie, my friend, her father, whom I adore, and I went to a steak house in the Seventeenth. Steak? For thanksgiving? “Do they even do that in Texas?” You are no doubt asking yourself. Trust me, this meal was so good that it may have ruined turkey for me forever (insert witty joke about Ataturk here).

We went to a restaurant called Le Relais de Venise on Boulevard Perier. The restaurant, a beautiful room unchanged since the twenties had simple formula: salad, steak, French fries, red wine and dessert. The salad was nothing special, but I am sure it was only there to convince customers that they weren’t plugging their arteries with fat. The steak that came was a thinly sliced entrecote and was superbly juicy with tasty little burns from the grill; plus, it had just enough fat to keep in moist but far from fatty or gristle-y. The French fries were good but nothing special. So if the steak was good but the fries and salad were so-so, why was this such a great thanksgiving meal? The sauce it was served with! We asked the waitress the recipe, and she laughed saying it was a secret, but that it had “a lot of parsley, butter, some lemon and some garlic”. It was amazing. It may have been sort of Restoration Hardware green, but was an amazing mix of buttery, garlicky and meaty flavors. Big burly meat eating men must cry like little girls on a glue factory tour when they taste this kind of sauce. That pared with a serious apple strudel, which had a perfect touch of cinnamon, and a cake that my friend ordered which was more chocolate than anything else made a great end to the meal.

So what if I didn’t eat turkey? Thanksgiving is mostly about good food (mmmm, that sauce…) and good company (the Fussners!). Strangely though, one essential element of thanksgiving was missing; the official beginning of the holiday shopping season. The Christmas ad blitz has no starting gun in France because they obviously don’t celebrate T-day. Clearly, I am going to miss the ordered chaos of American Christmas shopping season more than turkey and stuffing.

La greve

It was like a scene from a fifties horror movie: the man, clearly not French but perhaps from a sunnier part of the European Union, was pressed up firmly against the woman who had been breathing on me for a few minutes. His gut rested on all three people surrounding him, keeping the man from being able to reach either the center pole or the side poles for balance. His last hope was to place his splayed fingers on the brightly lit panel showing the metro stops. Sadly the laws of physics would not let his girth be supported by five pudgy fingers and as the train sped up his fingers slowly slid down the plastic, as if it’s crisp lines and the neatly ordered structure of the Parisian metro, which was now as reliable as a Polish Submarine, was smacking this modern day Daedulus back down to the masses of aggravated and squished passengers.

Yes, there was a strike in Paris. It just ended on Friday, but it was an essentially French experience. “La grève” as it is known to even the Anglophone community, has been going on for a week and seems to be testing the length of my sanity. I know it’s not food, but this blog is about my life in France, and no French life is complete without running in fear from the Parisian equivalent of Godzilla: The French Railroad Workers Unions. As any good liberal, I secretly long to be a communist, and as a boy while others (republicans, mostly) imagined themselves winning the world series or fighting the terminator, I imagined myself growing a pointy goatee, getting small wire rimmed glasses and shooting dissidents while fulminating over the excesses of the capitalist state (~sigh~). It is this exact sentiment, the fascination with the scary aspect of people power that seems to be deeply entrenched in the French mind. They LOVE a good populist protest. 1789. 1848. 1968. Think about it; if your country hadn’t won a war since Napoleon (at least one against an army who fought using guns and tanks rather than fish balls and banana leaves), then any dramatic show of nationalist might would be thrilling. The other day I was having a conversation with Gisele, my lovely French host mother, and she was telling me about the excitement in1968 during the student riots and all the violence she saw. When I asked Gisele, who was born in 1954, what exactly she was doing rioting at the age of 14, she just sort of looked off into the distance and said to herself “I was there…I was there”. Since the revolution, the French, for better or worse, have clearly considered themselves as revolutionaries. That’s why they couch the terms of their grèves in these lofty and ridiculous republican terms. That is why French strikes last so long, and frankly, suck so much.

A proper French strike is somewhat like a good, stinky French cheese: It smells repulsive (winter coats and a tightly packed train in fucking FRANCE do not mix), it may have come from the garbage (every bum in Paris loves that the metro is free during the strike) but some how you just keep eating it and experiencing it (I have to take the metro to get anywhere). So yesterday I walked to the metro from school, expecting only the mildest of Comptés or Brébis and got the most rotten and runny of all Camembert’s (okay it’s a food blog, I have to use that analogy).

Theoretically, to take the 4 line 8 stops through the heart of the Left Bank should take 15 minutes; just long enough for me to put on some pretentious indie music, tire of it, and switch to something produced by Timbaland. But as I knew going in to it, this ride would be anything but typical. The train became insanely crowded (we’re talking 150 people in a space designed for maybe 80) almost instantly. I was sandwiched in between three middle aged French woman, which is always preferable to a sweaty Pakistani and a guy with a skull you only notice is truly bizarrely shaped from twenty minutes of intense study at a distance of 2 inches. The women surrounding me began to joke and laugh, and as we pulled into various stations, the attempts of others to get on board the dangerously packed train only made these woman laugh harder. One turned to me and said, “You’re too young to ride the metro, how about you walk somewhere?” I told them this was my first real French “grève” and each one happily told me horror stories of the 1995 or 1968 grèves “There was only one train an hour, and you weren’t even allowed to smoke on it!” “No there were no trains, but the French were so much thinner and prettier then so no one cared” “In ’68 I walked 18 kilometers in the snow to see Johnny Hallyday perform at the Stade De France. I would go anywhere for that Belgian!” And so on.

Then we had our Kursk moment (what, too soon?). The train, in between the last stations, stopped in a tunnel under the Seine. All but two lights went out and almost instantly the crowd began loudly cursing in French. I know it doesn’t sound too scary, but when I realized that if anything went wrong Sylvester Stallone was not going to come rescue us, I got a little freaked out. As the train sat for a few minutes, the nervous laughter began to die down. Finally, the large African woman to my right asked, “How long do you think we can survive down here?” That killed the party. People were quieter than Strom Thurmond at the Apollo Theater; I mean dead silent. Finally, the conductor announced we would start moving, and the train lurched forward much to my relief.

We pulled in to Chatêlet station, and as I got off the train I heard a scream. About 15 feet from me a woman had fainted. Her friend was screaming as people, either unaware of the woman on the floor or because they didn’t care, tried to step over unconscious woman. The cops directing people’s movement ran over. One put his hand on my back and pushed me in the opposite direction of where I wanted to go, but I basically decided it wasn’t worth fighting. Finally, as I walked to the stairs, I saw a man forcing his way on to the train with his unmuzzled German Sheppard (large dogs are required to be muzzled on the subway).

This to me was the icing on the cake: this man who was too selfish and dumb to think maybe he was putting people in danger by bringing his guard dog to a huge metro station, was forced to take the most crowded train in town. Someone was going to get mauled, and the unions wouldn’t think they were culpable because they are the populists, fighting for the people’s rights. Except do you know what they are trying to protect? The right to retire at 55, when the government wants to move the age to 60 because France is aging and retiring at 55 is unrealistic. In Germany the age of retirement for rail workers is 68, and they are complaining about 60? The grève may be over for now, but they are threatening to bring it back any day.

So like I said, this whole experience has been somewhat like a horror movie. But I am just one little tourist. The real horror story is for the French government and the French working population: it’s called “The Invasion of the Old People”. It’s the story about a continent where people live so long that maybe, if the state funded medical system keeps you alive until you are 85, maybe you should not retire at 55 and leach off the state for three decades.

Here’s hoping I get out of the country before they start the strike again…

The shakes

Wow. So it’s been a really long time since I have posted on my beloved blog. I am sure you guys are all in deep withdrawal, having night terrors about my musings on the difference between French and American ketchup bottles. I suggest you watch the film “Trainspotting”, it should really explain how to deal with those feelings. Give my best to the dead baby on the ceiling!

So where have a been for the past few weeks and what have I been eating? Oh man are you guys in for a weirdly European treat…



PS-I am having some trouble posting pictures, so for right now just use you imaginations, k?

The land of chocolate

Belgium! Doesn’t the word just conjure thoughts of Hercule Poirot or Angelina Jolie solving dangerous exotic mysteries among its many villainous characters and breath taking scenery? Oh, wait, that’s Istanbul. I guess the word “Brussels” tends to inspire more the European-farm-subsidy-committee community than Hollywood.

Yes, I was in Brussels for a lovely 36 hour jaunt. To my surprise Belgian cuisine has evolved since the last time I studied it: the cuisine of world war one. No machine gunning horses or drinking from the skulls of decapitated German teenagers here! The food in Brussels was, without exception, delicious.

Brussels really doesn’t have a whole lot to see, except for some nice architecture, the Grand Place and spectacular carved wood pulpit at the church of Saint Michel and Gudule (note to self, name one of my children Gudule). But the food! We started the day by going to a very good sandwich place, where I had a portugese tuna salad (loaded with olives, tomatoes and pickles) with buffalo mozzerrella on a fresh baguette (very E.U). After walking around for a while and checking out some very cool Belgian clothing stores, we had classic French fries with mayonaisse. The fries were good but the mayo was excellent; creamy with roasted garlic, almost good enough to make you forget you were eating straight mayo (don’t worry, I have sent you all some in the mail!).

For dinner we went to a tapas restaurant. Why did I go to a tapas restaurant in Brussels and not some place that serves chocolate covered mussels or something else terribly Belgian? Because I am a sucker for a food gimmic. Like some sushi restaurants in the U.S and the U.K, this restaurant served its tapas on a conveyor belt. Colored coded (indicating whether the dish was “porky”, “garlicky”, “fishy”, “desserty”, etc-y) individually sized plates would rotate past, which was great at first but once you reached your sixth and final individual plate it became an intense game of strategy to figure out which pork dish would finish the meal. The tapas was fine, nothing terribly special, but the place was fun and would be a good place to take an easily distractible person you don’t have anything to talk about with on a date. We then got Belgian beer, but the one I had was terrible. I know I said everything was good, but, well, technically it was just all the food that was good. The charming “L word” looking bartendress advised me to get this beer that was to my surprise Robatussin flavored. Okay maybe it was cherry but I would have rather chugged a bottle of cough medicine and hallucinated than drink that saccharine beer.

The next day we went to a beautiful Art Nouveau café called “Le Perroquet” for brunch. I had a pita with grilled chicken, honey, yogurt, sprouts and raw vegetables that was exactly what all brunch food should be: sweet, creamy and satisfying (the fact that the bill for the three of us came to like 14 euros for three pitas and three espressos was also great). So then, of course, we went and bought some chocolate. Chocolate shopping in Brussels is somewhat like shopping for clothing in the rest of the world: the high end stuff with icy beautiful sales women, the low end stuff, hell I think there was even an H&M chocolate store (this is Europe you know). So I bought some chocolates at the Neuhaus store, a Belgian favorite, and tried to forget King Leopold’s Ghost. Thankfully the chocolate was so good I didn’t even feel any post-colonial guilt. You hear that Vassar’s English/Poli Sci/Sociology/Film/Women’s Studies/Physical Education department??

All in all I ate way better in the 36 hours I was in Brussels than the 5 days in Prague, Vienna and Bratislava. So from now on whenever anyone calls Brussels boring, I am going to defend the Belgians, because, well, they don’t exactly have the greatest history of defending themselves…

Journey to the east

Woo! Spring break Eastern Europe! Okay, technically it was fall break and I was in central Europe, but I did get to see a lot of glorious Hapsburg palaces and crumbling soviet architecture on my trip to Prague, Vienna and Bratislava.

Prague is a city of beer. Czech’s drink more beer than any other people in the world (so take that the pledge class of Xi Pi Mu at Southeastern University, you lose), and a pint if beer in that city is like one euro. Now for someone coming from Paris, where the price of a pint of appears to be the same as the price of a barrel of oil, the cheapness was shocking (and made me oddly furious at OPEC…). Prague is also home to some very hearty bohemian food: each meal has meat, meat, more meat and of course a delicious helping of cabbage. Even dessert. I know cabbage and chocolate cake may sound bad, but the acrid smoke of every restaurant in Prague tends to help overcome the nausea.

No actually the food was good in most places. We actually had a great meal one day where I had not one but FOUR types of meat in one dish: roasted pork shoulder, roasted duck, bohemian sausage and some other type of pork deliciousness. It was worth signing the contract before I ate it agreeing to never be an Orthodox rabbi (there go my school girl dreams…). Basically I have decided that cabbage is wonderful, and when I get back to the states I am excited to be that guy at the Vassar Vegan stir fry station frying up a bunch of cabbage and getting stared at by normal people.

Next we went to Vienna, which is actually famous for its food. The first night we went to a place with, of course, more dark wood and beer. I had this liver dumping in a salty broth that taste like the world’s most delicious matzo ball. I ordered it again at the same restaurant two days later at 2 am, and got some weird looks, but trust me it was more satisfying than any other late night liver dish I ever had at the Llanerch diner.

I guess you are picturing me in lederhosen running around eating weinerschnitzl and stuffing my face with viennoiserie like liberal arts New York Times reading Hansel, but I can’t say that was the case. We ate some very good sushi and stir-fry at this big market and had excellent street kebabs. Austrians are all right with having three Turkish kebab places on each street, but not letting the people working there become citizens, because, as it says in Austrian law, you can only become an Austrian citizen if you are related to an Austrian (i.e. if you are tall, blonde and weirdly polite). It’s depressing.

Speaking of depressing, who wants to hear about my sojourn to Bratislava! Actually Bratislava was nice. It’s only an hour and a half from Vienna, and was a cool trip because my grandfather was born in Slovakia. Well technically it was Hungary, but the history that area of Europe’s borders are about as loose as Dennis Hastert’s layers and layers of neck. We arrived in Bratislava to see this terrifying city the communists built of about 200 identically ugly high rises. At first I thought the town would be depressing and communist, but then we drove by a mall with what looked like the largest Zara is the former communist world and I felt better. We ate in this weirdly dilapidated section of town, which was strange because we read that there was a beautiful Baroque section, we just couldn’t find it. Eventually we did and it was very pretty and charming. We went to a café called Café Meyer and ordered 6 different types of cake. I don’t know why we thought we could eat that much but despite our better instincts we ate all of them and they were all very tasty. The best by far though was a chestnut cake with cream and chocolate mousse that was, as the Slovaks say “z agshii xoroskijjl majsh!”. In case you don’t speak Slovak that translates in German to “supercakendeliciousnessflaffenguttenneuntyneunluftballons”. It’s all here in this pamphlet.

We finished the trip to Bratislava with a lovely bottle of Polish champagne. What does Polish champagne taste like? Well, I haven’t been to jail, but I imagine somewhat like Dimetapp fermented in the tank of prison toilet plus some sprite tastes like.

The trip was a success. I head some lovely meals and a very fun time. Of course when I got back to Paris I immediately went to the supermarket and bought and prepared something I hadn’t eaten in a week: vegetables.

Also, the next night I had my second interview with “A Chef’s Table”, which I will post a link to when it goes on the radio. Ooh how people listening the Guam public radio are going to freak out when they hear me talking about how much a cup of coffee costs!

Channeling my inner old lady

Okay, I am not usually one for pomp and circumstance. I don’t know why people like Princess Di so much, I don’t think silver wear placement is critical to a meal, and I don’t believe that not wearing “pants” to a “mandatory court hearing” is “inappropriate”. But my experience at Ladurée, the most famous and fanciest patisserie in Paris, was an amazingly impressive whirlwind of marble, $10 cups of tea and pastries that were emasculating-ly delicious.

The Ladurée I visited is on the Champs Elysée. I hate the Champs Elysée; it’s like if Fifth avenue and the French part of Epcot had an over priced badly-dressed-Spanish-tourist filled baby. I literally only go there to buy phone cards at the world’s fanciest Virgin megastore. I would only recommend taking a visitor there if you didn’t think that they could handle the intellectual rigors of taking the elevator up to the top of the Eiffel towers (“what are all them buttons for? Say, I think I can call my ma from up here. Hey ma! Get off the dang toit!”). This Ladurée, one of there three branches, was opened about five years and is covered in fake second empire French furniture and decorations. Fortunately, it’s a beautifully designed interior, and while not really from 1870, it looks nothing like the awful fake French schlock filling the McMansions that I learned to drink cheap vodka in when I was in high school.

My friend Brooke’s mother and grandmother, who were so unbelievably friendly and good natured you’d think they were about to tell you about a guy named Jesus, took me and some friends out to brunch Sunday. First of all, the menu of Ladurée is just shorter than War and Peace, and when one girl told another that the teas were on page 14, she genuinely tried to find it because, well, there very well could have been a page 14. It took a solid hour to decide what the have, but finely a manned up and ordered the Ladurée brunch special. I guess eating petit fours and viennoiserie isn’t necessarily manning up to anything, but if a “vrai mec” orders a steak anywhere that serves meat, then a “vrai mec” should order the pastry in a patisserie, too.

What came were three tears of sugar, sugar, and for good measure butter and more sugar. There was nice red currant jam, and perfectly salty butter for the rolls. Next was maybe the best thing I ate the whole time: a mini croissant filled with apple jam and glazed with sugar. It was basically a high-class crispy cream and was just really delicious. I then had their famous macaroons. The lemon one was filled with lemon cream and was so good it hurt. There was also a coffee one that was very tasty and a chocolate one that had basically a chocolate truffle inside that was so good I am sure it’s illegal in the states (well, everywhere but Hawaii). There were some macaroons that weren’t great though; the strawberry was dull and the violet-cassis, while nice sounding in a 1920’s French prostitute kind of way, didn’t taste like either violets or cassis (God damnit I sound effete!).

So then I had my eggs (yeah that’s right, I will save my masculinity through protein talk!). I ordered scrambled eggs with smoked salmon. The smoked salmon came in tiny little orange jewels of flesh and was sweet, salty and just the tiniest bit smoky, so basically just the way I like it. The eggs were a little runny, which was cool because the liquid was almost orangey, indicating to me that they were as fresh as an egg could be.

Brooke’s mom, grandmother and a girl at the table ordered a smoked salmon club that was also really really good. The table then split more macaroons, of which the cinnamon, grape, and raspberry flavored were the best. I finished the meal with fruit and orange flower flavored oolong tea.

It was, without a doubt, the best breakfast I have had in years. I can honestly say that I have come a long way from eating tater tots and granola in the Vassar cafeteria and watching hung over people awkwardly eat breakfast with last nights hook up.

Now if only I could find a damn New York Times to read I would be set brunch wise…

Hey sorry I havent updated in a while. My parents and my friend were in town. Who knew people liked visiting Paris?

There's an article after this and I am writing some new stuff now. Oh its just so hard to be too busy eating and going to museums to blog.

Chanterelle? Shoot cuz I know her...

When one hears of a semester abroad experience involving someone buying some “sweet ass mushrooms”, it is natural to imagine stoned Americans in Amsterdam falling into canals and doing wildly inappropriate things in the Anne Frank house. But actually I am talking about the less fun but more delicious edible mushrooms.

Fabulous mushrooms here are dirt-cheap! The cheapest is chanterelles, which at whole foods (I mention whole foods not as the basis for any rational price but just because Path-mark and the Piggly Wiggly tend not to sell the worlds finest chanterelles) in America sell for about $20-$25 a pound, but here they are 10-15 euros per kilogram! Okay so that means nothing to a lot of you who both hate the metric system, the European union and mushrooms without psilocybin, but that’s about a quarter of the price. Also, you can by fresh porcini, black trumpet and blue mushrooms here for about half the price.

Mushrooms were about the only thing that grew in ex-soviet countries during the communist era that weren’t some how socialized. Of course, when Borya and Vika aren’t drinking straight sterno and watching their democracies disappear, they are happily foraging for mushrooms and selling them to the French and Italians to make into great cuisine and to the British to boil them into a fine snot (anyone reading this who has had breakfast in the dorms of University of Edinburgh will understand how the Scots can take an innocent mushroom and make it look like an alien fetus). So, in a rare bit of news something is truly cheaper here than in the states.

Basically, when I come back from France and hand you a kwanza present that is brown, mushy and smells like the forest, you’ll know what it is…

La Viande Rose!

Mmm, meat.

Meat is good. I am sure that that was the first sentence ever uttered. I guess I respect vegetarians and vegan’s for thinking about where meat comes from and rejecting it; but on the other hand that’s stupid. Really stupid. Meat is literally the most important part of your diet. Animals, including humans, have for billions of years spent countless hours of effort trying to get meat. People love meat; all cultures, even majority vegetarian ones, have meat dishes. When the Greeks offered sacrifices to the God, do you think they burned tofu and kale? No! The offered huge joints of meat! If Marie Antoinette had said “let them eat meat” instead, the French monarchy would still be around.

I have had many varying experiences with meat in France that I feel like writing about. One was delicious. One was a horrifying example of how people like meat so much that they will make the grossest food I have ever tasted. With that in mind, enjoy these two meaty updates.

Aren’t you excited???

J'aime faire du noshing

Florence Finkelsztajn is a god. If it hadn’t gone badly before, I would be seriously tempted to round up the Jewish community (I know, never a good way to start a sentence), take all their gold (again, not helping) and build a giant golden statue to her à la the Ten Commandments.

Florence Finkelsztajn was the creator of the famous Finkelsztajn’s deli in the Marais section of Paris. The Marais is the best section of Paris; it’s a fabulous mix of cool clothing stores, art galleries, gay people, wealthy bobos, 20 something French hipsters, and orthodox Jews (kinda like Brooklyn without the smell). A trip to the Marais however would not be incomplete without getting lunch on the Rue des Rosiers. Like moths to a light bulb (you know what Jewish mother moths always say: No turn out the light bulb, its okay, I’ll sit in the dark like a dawg. I’m on your mother, I don’t need light), hundreds of hungry locals and tourists, both Jew and non-Jew alike, prowl up and down this small cobblestone street seeking out some seriously good food. Of course there is the crowd favorite: L’As du Falafel, which with out a doubt, and with the endorsement of Lenny Kravitz, makes the best falafel in Paris, if not the world. But I am not here to talk about their falafel. I wanna tell you about a sandwich I got at Finkelsztajn’s deli.

First of all, it was 7 euros, which is about $9.88. Too much for a sandwich, I know, but this was worth every centime. It came on a freshly baked egg roll with poppy seeds and cook onions baked in. Inside the sandwich was what makes grown Jews cry. First, a creamy layer of baba ganoush (eggplant caviar), which was just the perfect level of garlic-y. Next was a layer of house cured pastrami that was pepper without being hot, and just salty enough to make you salivate but not beg for a coke. Next was the house made pickle, which is French for corned beef. The meat was bright red, much rarer and less fatty than American roast beef. Finally, the topped this Ashkenazi orgasm off with pickles, roasted red peppers and tomatoes.

Oh my god. SO GOOD. One of the best deli sandwiches I have ever eaten. I love deli food in the states, don’t get me wrong, but if you could taste this sandwich you would consider flying 6,000 to buy a platter of these cold cuts.

And while this was an intensely delicious (and Jewish) experience, some meat experiences in Paris have been intensely horrifying (and sacriligious)...

The horror, the horror

Sausages, along with being hilarious, are a hallmark of European cuisine. Preserving meat was terribly important before refrigerators were invented and the creation of the sausage changed our world. Think how much poorer our society would be without kolbasa, chorizo and slim jims. But not all sausages are good. Some reveal the most disgusting extremes which people are willing to stretch the word food.

Indeed sometimes they can be pure unimaginable grossness. Woe unto the unsuspecting traveler who tries Andouillette sausage.

Now, to appreciate the following story, you have to imagine me with that distant look veterans get when they talk about Da Nang: I was fresh off the airplane from Bordeaux to Paris, at the very beginning of my long and strange journey that would be my semester Paris. I wanted something hearty and filling, so I stepped into a café and ordered “le saucisson Andouillette”, assuming it would be some big golden log of comforting pork products. The thing showed up looking gorgeous, slathered in hot mustard with fries and salad; basically exactly what I wanted. But to my horror the first bite tasted like a mouthful of sewer. Well, maybe not sewer, maybe more like strange pig organs that I, the ignorant American Jew eating pork subconsciously trying to piss off my mother, didn’t know what I was tasting. So I went back for another: worse. Really just like eating piggy sewer. It was like licking Divine’s face, or perhaps the after taste of an hour-long make out session with Britney Spears. Really just nauseatingly awful.

So I tried to avoid strange pork products for a while, until, like a sucker, I bought andouillette again. To be fair, it was a duck product called andouillette and looked like a tasty duck sausage, so I just wasn’t that concerned. However, the second I cut into the sausage a foul smell of uncooked grossness and brimstone emanated out of the meat. I threw the things out and went on wikipedia the next day determined to figure out what andouillette was and why the hell any French person would eat it. That is when I made my shocking and horrifying discovery.

Andouillette is tripe and chitterling sausage. DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT IS??? Tripe is intestines! Sausage is intestines! Worse than that CHITTERLING IS COLON! I WAS EATING INTESTINE STUFFED INTO INTESTINES WITH A DASH OF COLON!!! TWICE!

No wonder it taste like a sewer. I’ve tasted tripe 3 times before, time foolishly assuming I’d like it, and each time finding it beyond revolting. Even writing this makes me ashamed to have and use my intestines. The colon part though was just unacceptable (I could make a really crude joke here at the expense of a certain population at Vassar college, but I think I will let you connect the dots...)

The French clearly like meat so much that they will combine any edible piece of meat with another. Cassoulet is a delicious example of this; andouillette is a horrifying example. I know rustic french cuisine has a certain charm, but this is one of those things like black plague and the comedy of Jerry Lewis that are better left in the past.

Domo aragato Mr. De Gaulle

I really like doing this blog. It gives me a good excuse to do things that would otherwise make me look like some weird effete glutton. So, with this excuse in mind, I have just completed a deep and complex study of a new area of the French culinary world: French sushi.

I came to France wanting to taste common American ethnic foods and how they were adapted to the French palate. Now, I guess I imagined a sushi experience in France to go something like this: I would walk into a local sushi joint, where everything on the inside, like most stuff in Paris, would be sort of weird and glowing post modern boxes. Then I would stand there for twenty minutes, trying to get the attention of one of the waitresses, who would be too busy testing John Galliano or appeasing the Germans to notice I was there. Finally, she would notice me, but her icy Medusa like stare would turn me to stone. I would never get to plunk down 140 euros to taste raw duck liver, horse meat, frogs legs or what ever else the French choose to eat because the rest of society shuns. This would then all be placed, not on top of sushi rice, but perhaps on top of The Stranger by Camus.

Well it wasn’t quite like that. First of all, apparently all sushi restaurants around the world are required to have dark wood interiors, cheap bamboo and overly laminated menus (no doubt an imperial decree). In three different places I ordered the same sort of nigiri/maki mixed sushi plate, which ranged from 12 euors to 18 euros, about what you’d pay in America. They gave me about pieces of typical salmon, tuna, white fish and a california roll and all of these sushi joints.

So how does it compare to American sushi. Sorry Sarko, but your sushi is just not as good. There isn’t as much fish per piece of rice and they don’t make interesting rolls. I know that this is hardly scientific, and that you may be saying that there is good sushi in Paris, I just haven’t found it. And while I am sure somewhere there is good sushi, these were places I just fell into off the street. But in America a random sushi place (hell, even the world famous Sushi Village in Poughkeepsie, New York, which is about as authentic and Hillary Clinton’s southern accent,) is going to have the kind of sushi I like: loads of raw fish, varied and tasty rolls, and that orange-carrot-ginger salad dressing that I would eat with a spoon were it socially acceptable.

This isn’t too say French sushi is bad. They use fresh mayonnaise on their California roll, which was surprisingly sweet and delicious, and they usually served a pickle cabbage salad first which is better than it might sound. But basically I have to give this one to America.

U.S.A! U.S.A!

Restaurant review: Cafe du Marche

Like an Italian sports car, Belgian chocolate or Swedish death metal played by people surgically altered to look like a 300 year old evil wood demon, some countries just do things better than other countries. The French have lunch. Follow me here for a second: What do people want for lunch? A salad? A sandwich? I mean, steak frites in my opinion is the best lunch money can buy and they are all frencher than an accordian made of baguettes. Americans may consider French food suitable for a special dinner, but without being fully conscience of it, we adore a good French lunch. There are thousands of restaurants across the United States that exist to give people the fantasy that they are having a leisurely hours long Parisian lunch.

So, being on a giant vacation, I was obliged on this beautiful sunny 82 degree afternoon to have a two hour long lunch at a lovely spot next to the École Militaire in the 7th arrondisement. We ate at a restaurant recommended by the TimeOut guide called Café du Marché (38, Rue Cler, Paris, 75007). The menu was a simple dozen dishes (5 salads, 7 entrées) and two specials written on a blackboard. The place was pretty crowded even at 2 pm, so I knew it was gonna be good.

The waitress was very busy, so we quickly ordered a salmon salad, a market salad and the roasted chicken. The salmon salad came with a Russian dressing that had a surprising and pleasant kick of horseradish. The market salad was a mix of French ham, silky terrine of foie gras, shredded carrots, yummy tomatoes, tabouleh, saurkraut and greens. The saurkraut was very lightly dressed in some French mayo and was perfect with the foie gras (further confirming my belief that cabbage is the cool new vegetable). The roasted chicken was pleasant but nothing special; however it came with fantastic mashed potatoes with a very herby hotel butter. The mashed potatoes were a beautiful almost saffron yellow and had a perfect balance of sweetness from the roasted potatoes, butter, and what tasted like some chicken broth. Finally, I was awakened from my food come by a café noisette (my new favorite drink- an espresso with a little milk).

Basically, I think the French look down on everybody or secretly consider them barbarians because, hey, if you lived and ate this well, wouldn’t you think everyone else was living wrong?

Yes Ralph? My cat's breath smells like cat food

So one the of the things that I wasn’t expecting to write about on this blog was cat food, which, unless I go broke or nuts, I will hopefully never have to really worry about from an eating stand point. However I noticed something really funny about French cat food.

I am living with a very sweet black and white cat named Gram, who, like all cats, only truly acts like he loves you when he wants dinner. Being a sucker, I went and got him some food. People feed their cats the same things that they are comfortable eating: my cats eat a lot of turkey, chicken, beef and fish flavored cat food because, well, those are the cat versions of the meat my family tends to eat. So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when I grabbed the closest can of cat food: it was rabbit flavored! The French love rabbit (they sell a lot of it in the supermarket at Monoprix, the French Target) so I guess their cats do to.

Should I be surprised when the cat demands cat sized Gauloise cigarettes and ignore when it dry humps someone in a public park like the French seem to enjoy?

Fig me, baby

Europe is a little place: apartments are small, cars are so tiny that I feel emasculated as an American man just by looking at them and elevators are as roomy as the average coffin.

So when I went to a Parisian bodega (here they are called the chic-er “épicerie” and the fourteen year olds buying cheap cigarettes and cheaper beer in them aren’t breaking the law), I was shocked to find nearly baseball-sized figs! Look at that thing! I mean I thought everything was bigger in Texas, but apparently that only applies to beef, hats and hair.

Not only are these figs huge, but they are damn good! The flesh is purple skin in thin and slimy and never hard, and the inside is bursting with sweet crimson figgy goodness and hundreds of those seeds that are so satisfying to crunch. It’s really like the perfect snack. I mean, I have been pushing for years for American movie theaters to serve cured pork products and fruit (for 75 cents extra you can get an extra large movie themed “Harry Pancett-er and the Sorcerer’s Stone Fruit Compote”!), but now I think with these huge amazing figs it has officially transformed from my hair (hare?) brained scheme into a marketable reality.

Overwhelmingly pretty, just like me

Okay so I haven't updated my blog in a while because I am in Paris. Wow. Seriously I walk around and think "am I on vacation or am I hear to learn"

Of course the answer is that I am on vacation. Paris is so gorgeous and you would be shocked by just how good looking alot of the people are on the subway. The people on SEPTA look, shall we say, some what less glamorous. Although I think I met a girl on the R5 named Glamorous once...

Anyway I am living with a lovely woman named Gisele and her two sons Virgile (18) and Leopold (16) in Vincennes, which is not technically in Paris but is just right out side. I am right on the high speed metro line so I am like 20 minutes from the heart of the city.

God its gorgeous here. I wish I had wi-fi (which the french adorably called "wee-fee") but I should be getting it soon.

A la prochaine!

Oyster challenge 2007

Jonathan Swift thinks I’m cool. He once wrote “he was a bold man who first ate an oyster” and just the other night I proved myself to be the Fonzie of the bivalve scene by eating my first oysters.

The Aquitaine region is famous for its oysters, and Bassin D’Arcachon, the main oyster growing body of water in France, is like 20 kilometers from Bordeaux. What does that mean? I don’t know, I’m an American and was raised to believe that the metric system was for communists (To quote Grandpa Simpson “My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!”). But basically it means its super close to Bordeaux so the oysters here are crazy fresh. I know its not a month with an R in it, but hey, its almost there and how much longer was I going to be in the right spot ready to eat some raw prehistoric sea creatures?

Now even though I had a marvelous time reading Mark Kurlansky’s novel The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/books/review/05royte.html ex=1299214800&en=e8625854ea39292a&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss)
I am pretty shamed to say that I had never eaten a raw oyster, so I was some what nervous. I had read that European oysters were slightly different from their American cousins, but when the waitress brought me my 6 huitres d’arcachon, the difference seemed to be as obvious to me as which one of the Olsen twins is the fat one.

So I took my fork, prayed I wasn’t secretly allergic to them, scooped loose the mighty Ostrea edulis and slurped it down. It tasted somewhat like a pleasant wharf. I then added the red wine vinegar and shallot sauce and a squeeze of lemon juice and low-and-behold they were pretty damn good. The tartness and onion-y flavor just went really well with the subtle salty sliminess of the oyster. Way to go France!

It was a good experience. I feel like I have now communed with the sea and can resume to eating things with faces. If you can’t tell, I am pretty damn proud of myself.

Like watching "Everybody loves Raymond" translated into the language of Moliere and Truffaut

So I went to a café with some new friends to get lunch. I was really impressed by the fact that even in the most touristy part of Bordeaux I could get a decent meal for only 8 euro. I got “un sandwiche jambon” which is a ham sandwich. It came with grilled bread and curly little endive, which was very nice. I lifted this perfectly toasted morsel to my mouth, ignoring the chicly dressed French businessmen and the rustle of the Plane trees, and dove right into what I expected to be French splendor.

Suddenly, I was shocked back into reality. Did I just bite into a cheese flavored Yankee Candle? I looked at the sandwich to find –quel l’horreur- a bright orange piece of American cheese style cheese laughing at me! Okay, maybe it wasn’t laughing, but while I expected cheese that Dean and DeLuca’s would sell for $45 a pound or maybe something made by monks in the Pyrenees through hours of careful cheese study and trying not touching themselves, all I found was a Kraft single.

At first I thought that maybe they were catering to the American tourists by offering me cheese that had in fact never been anywhere near a cow, but then I realized something that transcended my effete anger: the French are real people. While I love my stinky cheese, if at every meal I had to eat something that tasted like a reject demo of penicillin, I would maybe want something safe, simple and bland. After all, artisan French cheese is only special if it is balanced out against something that tastes like an effective patch for dry wall, right?

Frankly, it made the Camembert and blue cheese at dinner taste even more delicious. So what if American cheese, or its French incarnation, is idiotic? Some times you’ve got to watch a little Fox News to appreciate The Economist and sometimes you can find satisfaction in a cheese whose color is found nowhere in nature.

Bord-OH SNAP!

Getting ready to leave for and actually coming to Bordeaux was an exhausting experience. After spending a week hosting half of Vassar at my house, and then the next week in a mad dash to run errands, see friends before I leave, and basically get my life together, I finally managed to get all my belongings into my parents car for a pleasantly short four hour drive to Kennedy Airport. If you think four hours is far too long a time to drive the 100 or so miles to Kennedy Airport from Center City Philadelphia, you’ve never seen the distracting natural majesty that is the Raritan River, the New Brunswick Business Park or all of Staten Island.
When we arrived at the airport I was confronted with the same problem I face whenever I fly: Airplane food makes me want to kill myself and those sitting around me. Not only is it not great to eat, but I seem to always be near people who willingly order fish. I was once on a flight sitting next to my father and an ultra-ultra orthodox Rabbi. Unfortunately the Rabbi decided his Kosher meal wasn’t quite kosher enough for his standards and decided to eat canned salmon, which, I can only assume from the smell was either of the Friskies or Fancy Feast variety. In my book one of the most important rule for eating fish is to only eat it with both feet on the ground (here that, McFish Sandwich lovers? God never meant to eat fish on the run/in an airplane).
But after buying some beef jerky and water (lots of protein and liquids!) and drugging myself like Rush Limbaugh in a Mexican pharmacy, I actually had a nice flight.
I arrived in Bordeaux on Saturday (8/18) in the afternoon. The family I am staying with is lovely; they have 6 kids all with equally lovely French names that I have trouble remembering. They eat in a very French manner: tiny portions of fattening foods followed by tinier portions of even more fattening foods. Also, the don’t snack, except for a bowl of very nice ping pong ball sized green plums from Brittany that sit in their kitchen. Apparently, Americans are fatter than the French because while the French eat small amounts of things that are terrible for them, Americans eat a never-ending amount of food that is slightly less fattening but has way more sugar (and most American's wouldn't eat a plum for snack unless it was deep fried in salt and chocolate).
Bordeaux is definitely a gorgeous city. The whole center of the city is from the 18th century and is filled with extremely well dressed French teenagers on the last days of their summer vacation. If I can survive what will no doubt be an onslaught of wine and the roving gangs of Eleanor of Aquitaine impersonators, I should have a lovely time.

Que la lumiere soit!

Hercules had his 10 feats. Alexander had to conquer the known world. Tom Cruise was been commanded to destroy Xenu’s evil galactic empire by converting us all to Scientology. And once in a lifetime us mortals are given a great task, and this is mine:

This summer I worked as the intern for a fabulous show broadcast on NPR from WHYY in Philadelphia called “A chef’s table with Jim Coleman”. The show is about food and culinary culture (it can be found at http://www.whyy.org/chef); each week Jim interviews guests who discuss everything from deep-frying turkeys to table manners. Being their intern was a great experience, but alas I had to leave the WHYY studios to spend my semester studying abroad in Paris.
I know, my life is hard, right? What task could they possibly force that poor boy to do? Well, the producers of a chef’s table asked me, as a reward for being such a wonderful intern (I got carpal-tunnel and I’m not even going to sue!) to report back once a month for “A chef’s table” about my culinary adventures in France!

This blog will chronicle that mythically IMPOSSIBLE task having to find good places to eat in France. What’s that? Hercules had to kill the Hydra and I am just eating croissants? Well then I guess he was just a sucker.
In all seriousness though, I want to experience all that modern Paris has to offer: smell the stinkiest cheese, slurp best pho this side of Hanoi, taste the most decadent foie gras, and even wolf down some slimy garlicky snails. So come join me as I search for the culinary soul of this legendary city.

While I may gain 30 pounds or have to get a quadruple bypass heart surgery, I will accomplish my task, and I hope that you will join me in reading my blog and listening to my reports on “A chef’s table”.

Don’t you Wanna French (with Ben Grinspan)?