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!