23 juin 2007
Après le whooping cough
The cough is almost over. A little fit once in a while, particularly at night; I try not to laugh and not to eat chillies, but the nightmare is behind me. The situation I described on May 18 is now far away.
To celebrate, I took a walk across the damp Tuileries garden (it rained repeatedly today) around 9 PM, when night falls slowly through thick moving clouds. For me, this is a fine month of June, because I hate the Parisian dry heat and I like rain.
As I walked South from the centre of the garden, along the wall that separates it from the Seine, my eyes were caught by a thick bush of hollyhocks. This is an unusual flower in such a place. The Tuileries is as urban a garden as they come. A French-style garden of utter purity, strict and geometrical. The light is splendid, because the large sandy alleys reflect the skies. There are few places in Paris where you can be so aware of the sky above you; this is a very mineral garden. So, the hollyhocks: behind them, I discovered a green mess, even more unusual than the flowers. It was a herb garden shaded by a few trees. It was enclosed by a wooden fence, but the gate was wide open, so in I went. I found tomatoes and a profusion of aromatic herbs: rosemary, spearmint, thyme, savory, lavender, and some harder-to-find species like oregano, marjoram, pimpernel and even a large hyssop bush. I was not aware that hyssop could grow so well in Paris, having tried for years to make it thrive on my balcony. A goldfinch took flight a few steps before me and sat a few yards further. There, between the rue de Rivoli and the traffic-laden voie Georges-Pompidou, I felt very far away from Paris, as far as Brie or Vexin.
I left the herb garden, closing the gate I had found open, as if it had been open just for me (which is an absurd thought, naturally). Nearby, in the civilized part of the garden, on the short, velvety lawn, a family of ducks has fallen asleep in the shade of a small hornbeam, their beaks nestled in their feathers. The air carried a smell of fresh, damp growth. A blackbird was singing himself high in a horse-chestnut tree. A huge bird flew slowly and heavily above my head. It was a grey heron. In the very center of Paris.
20 juin 2007
Disinformation: TV show caught red-handed
The fact that there is one food-oriented channel on French cable TV is, unfortunately, not enough to make this channel worth watching. If, when I zap channels, I sometimes stop on Cuisine TV, out of sheer goodwill, I am not long in deciding that there is a limit to heroic behavior and I can't squeeze the remote fast enough, hoping to land on a corny French film from the '60s, or on anything by Jean-Pierre Melville, or on any other watchable cinematic media.
To begin with, few things in this world are more worth slapping than the cheap dubbing system used on food shows bought by French TV from Britain or Australia; I do not know the exact technical term used to describe this calamity, but roughly it is done by toning down the hero's voice and overdubbing it with a silly, exceedingly cheerful French voice trying to sound "natural" by using a vulgar tone, filled to the gills with translating errors and factual blunders, and always out of sync (long enough for you to hear a tiny bit of the original speech and realize that the translation sucks big time). Add to this a few colloquial expressions so misplaced that after a while you no longer know whom you'd like to punch their head in the most — the cook showing off on the screen or the team in charge of the translation. What makes it worse is that you're watching one more leek blowjob from a famous culinary sexbomb (and then the world realized that men loved TV food shows, how wonderful!) or, once more, a lispy young chef stirring the arrabbiata sauce right after taking the wooden spoon out of his mouth. If the show is from the French-speaking world, things are not much brighter. Chef hosts look real chummy but I'm not sure our popular culinary culture will fare better from absorbing the wonders of pâté chinois, streamlined poutine or yet another bolognese-lemongrass-marshmallow fusion with shredded red bell pepper on top. I will not even mention the French shows. Out of pure charity.
Except today. I'll mention them just a tiny bit. During one of my absent-minded zapping sessions, this is what I saw on the food channel.
I didn't make a note of this nice young gentleman's name. But what I'm interested in right now is the products. I do not know if you recognize them, at the bottom of the photo: green things. They are fennel bulbs, with the trimmed stalks and small tufts of young leaves that normally the vegetable comes complete with.
And then, I see the cook cut out one of those young shoots, shred it and sprinkle it onto his dish. What is he doing? Shredding young fennel shoots, as you will answer. Even if you didn't major in botany, that is likely to be your conclusion.
Well we are wrong! His comment leaves no doubt: once taken off the fennel bulb and sprinkled on the dish, fennel shoots become "little dill leaves".
Congratulations, this is even better than badly dubbed French on English: badly dubbed French on French.
Zap!
14 juin 2007
Life in blue
While I hadn't yet had much time to play with my new toy (a D80 Nikon reflex meant to celebrate the end of my whooping cough and my birthday), I went to the Fooding d'été in Vitry-sur-Seine. Normally, since this camera has a slight tendency to overexpose, I set the white balance on "cloudy", with good results. Except that the night before, at a Sichuan restaurant (while all other diners were turning around with a scared look in their eyes to watch yet another one of my spectacular fits of coughing), one mysterious individual had found it amusing to set the white balance of my camera on "tungsten" and had not set it back on its previous position. Furthermore, the next day, in Vitry, it was so hot and sunny that I could not see the pictures on the display screen. So, for a couple of hours, I shot the Fooding in deep blue. It's a style.
"I meant to do that." (Pee Wee Herman.)
I haven't said my last word. You just wait until I've de-blued the whole thing and I'll tell you all about it. The chromatic dominance that will stop me hasn't been born yet. To be continued.
02 juin 2007
Grrrrrrr — tiger veal!
Just before I touched it: iced tomato soup, croûtons, brocciu quenelle —
or how a careless waiter can spoil a lovely plating in a few seconds.
Chef is not to blame: the soup is delicious.
How do you know you are having lunch in the XVIe, halfway between the place Victor-Hugo and the Porte Maillot? Well, easy — you are surrounded by the inimitable XVIe crowd: business types — role models: Devedjian, Nay and Pécresse —, Palais des Congrès suits-and-ties, bored rich kids a.k.a. nappies (I kid you not, this is the Neuilly-Auteuil-Passy - NAP - term for underage yuppies), loose-Rolex guys who don't apologize when they nearly bump you off your chair with their bottom when sitting down — to sum it up: the France that won. That's it, you couldn't be anywhere else except Deauville or Saint-Tropez, or maybe a yacht off the Malta coast. The posh whorehouse décor, also, could hardly be found elsewhere. So, naturally, when you have built a reasonable awareness of the surroundings, you expect to have a bad meal. When you see the tall, model-like waitress giving a bored look at her watch, you can no longer doubt you will. And yet.
The little tapenade rounds of toast given as an amuse are, well, tapenade toast. There is a small can of Terra Rossa olive oil on the table. Poured on a piece of bread, it tastes very green, slightly acrid, impersonal, therefore perfectly adapted to the modern, undeveloped taste; it could come from anywhere in the world — but I will not begin to rant because there is no serious reason to. Indeed the first course (iced tomato soup with croûtons and a brocciu and herb quenelle) is surprisingly delicious, with a good taste of tomato, slightly sugared, the right amount of vinegar and the contrasting creaminess of the brocciu. The bored waitress, when pouring the soup onto my brocciu and croûtons, does not even look at the plate; she (gasp!) zeroes down on the quenelle, drowns it hopelessly, and pours some on the rim of the plate, too. Nevermind, for I know by now that there is actually someone in the kitchen, even if there are a few brain-deads among the waiting staff.
The main course - veal stufatu with grenaille potatoes and green olives - is admirable. It is rare, in a XVIe restaurant above the bistrot range (there are excellent bistrots in the XVIe but that is another story), to be served a stew with any good taste, if you are ever served any. The potatoes and olives are good, but the veal and the sauce are remarkably tasty. The meat is, so it says on the menu, "veau tigré de Jacques Abbatucci", i.e. Jacques Abbatucci's tiger veal. Now what is tiger veal? It does not come from a calf you chase down riding elephants, but of a local tiger-striped bovine breed. I have not been able to gather much information on that fabulous animal (fabulous in taste as well), no more than I have been able to gather much on the Terra Rossa olive oil (the website is laconical in a typical Corsican way), but suffice it to say that the general manager was quite proud of the former. This seems to be the hardest-to-find meat around, three-star chefs try to get it, Bocuse tries to get it, but to no avail. Face it — for some things, you have to be Corsican, or write at Gastroville. All the more since, in Corsica, breeding animals is one thing, butchering them is another thing. Long ago, during one of my visits to Corsica, my host took me to the tiny butcher shop in Muratu. "Two pounds of veal", she asked. "Sorry, the butcher said, no veal today, we weren't able to catch it. We'll try again this evening, so come back tomorrow."
Nice desserts - the pâtissier spent some time at the Crillon - based on the usual Corsican apparatus of chestnut, brocciu, citrus and particularly citron, plus a little chopped black olive in the financier batter that was the only really successful attempt at including olives in sweet dishes that I have witnessed so far.
So maybe the waitress looked at her watch one second time and the dark red plush and velvet décor might not be anything to write home about, but the inner volumes are quite beautiful, the 25-euro lunch menu is a good deal, the management is really nice (which compensates for the sometimes infuriating clientele) and the food is suprisingly good for "that kind of place". As you sit down you are dead sure you'll never be back, but after the meal, well, you're not so certain anymore...
La Villa Corse Rive Gauche, 141 avenue de Malakoff, Paris XVIe. Métro Porte-Maillot or Victor-Hugo. Tél. 01 40 67 18 44. Not a destination restaurant, but worth a try.