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.