pure perfection

The nights feel like summer.  Forget April in Paris.  We walk to the four corners of St. Germain de Pres. It's late, just starting to darken.  There's Cafe Flore and Les Deux Magot.  Just down a side street  from Leon Bruxelles is a little sliver of restaurant called Huiterie Regis.  It is perfect.  I'm proud to say we found it a few years ago exactly two weeks before the review appeared in The New York Times.  Twelve seats inside.  Six out.  Freshly white-washed walls.  Pearl gray lacquered rush-seated chairs.  And oysters.  Only oysters.  (They do offer a plate of cured meats, just in case...).  Fin de Claires.  Marennes.  Les Pouces.  Les Belons.  In the Marennes d'Oleron, an expanse of salt flats, they harvest these beautiful shell fish known for their green tint, somehow colored naturally this way because the algae they grow in is blue.  Something I imagine akin to the Green Flash at sunset.  This special algae, particular to this area in the north of France, gives them their particular flavor.  If the flats were on land, I'd use the word terroir.   Can I say marine?

We dine on a dozen each.  Six Fins de Claires and six Les Speciales. It is now a cliche, but they do, in fact, taste like the sea.  We have two glasses of slate-like and bright Sancerre, bread and butter.  We share a third glass.  Two of the owners, both men tonight, work the floor and open these fruits of the sea.  We hear voices cheering next door, really a roar.  A soccer game is on. We finish with an apple tart and two coffees.  Sublime.

I've worn my highest heels because it's Paris and it's dinner out.  I change into new tennis shoes on a dark side-street, so we can walk care-free the rest of the way home.

--Deirdre

la tourelle

Even though the evening is warm we dress for dinner, then take a long stroll to a little side street off the Place St. Michel where we've eaten many times, and with good friends.  It is a place for good friends.  Every time it is magic.  Down a quiet side-street in the 6th, you always arrive by surprise.  It is both closer and farther than you think.  But then there it is.

A 16th century building with a tower that looks more Medieval than Renaissaissance.  A narrow door.  On the bar, a vase of pale roses so open they resemble peonies.  Only two tables are empty.  A white jacket hangs on a hook.  Laughter, discussion, the music of cutlery on plates.  Last year, and the year before, and two years before that, there was a black cat, but the black cat is missing making dinner bittersweet.  Robert with his white and grey hair brings water and wine, and then our dishes.  One menu: chevre chaude on fresh greens, pork ribs, mousse au chocolat, Calvados.  Another menu: oeufs mayonnaise, beef steak with roquefort, rhubarb compote.  A third dessert for celebration: a thin layer of cake and crackled chocolate with spun praline sugar.  Cecilia, Robert's wife, who came to Paris from Hong Kong, moves around the dining room like silk.  Diners eat and then eventually leave, only to replaced by new diners.  And this on a Tuesday night.

Every year when we travel, an over-riding idea or philosophy or context seems to present itself.  Sometimes it is confined to scenes depending on how many places we land, how many acts there are to the story, and sometimes we follow a single arc from the day we leave to the day we come home.  When we arrived in Paris two days ago, we didn't know what Paris would show us this time for she is always surprising.  Would it be a continuation of the earlier days of this trip which has circled around notions of cultivation, terroir, and taste?  Or would it be some sort of new frontier in the city?  New tastes?  Something about the constant heat we've had suggests a tendency toward return.  Dinner at La Tourelle, the little bistrot in the building with the, well, tourelle, a restaurant we have returned to each spring for the past five years, seems to readily point us in the direction of revenir, to come back again.

--Deirdre

finally, off the road

We have been traveling for the last two weeks plus a few days.  In France.  It's been good.  We started out in Aveyron, staying in a hamlet the size of four houses called La Lavande not too far from Villefranche de Rouerge.  While the volcano in Iceland was trying to settle itself,we stayed put until we needed to pack up the car, lock up the house we had rented, and drive to Burgundy for my stage at the L'Ecole du Vins et des Terroirs.  The stage was in French and focused on the soil and plant life in the natural vineyard.  Really, it was an intensive on how to change the way you think.  Needless to say, I am still sorting through new vocabulary, new information, new thoughts, new philosophies and I sense this will all take a long time to filter.

Now, we are in Paris, one of our favorite and most frequented cities.  We have a dear friend with an apartment here and somehow, we seem to end up on her doorstep at the end of every April.  This will be the 5th year in a row that we've spent Caleb's birthday here which is today.  Not only have we been overwhelmed by the last two weeks of tasting and thinking, we are now confronted with the one big taste that is Paris.  We are a bit stupid with the same awe we feel every time we visit here.

We will try to both back-track and to move foreward now that we have a connection to the wider world.  But it's sometimes hard to go back in time while you are still being distracted by so many bright shiny things in front of you....

So hang on.  Here we go--

--Deirdre

Easter Sunday

Sun-bright afternoon.  The wind is occasionally fierce and we must anchor the sun umbrellas with big stones stolen from the stone wall in the sunken garden.  Rituals: hardboiled eggs from a neighbor’s chickens, pale blues, browns, greens, and pink.  A toast with a glass of our friend Fede’s sparkling Nebbiolo to those who cannot be with us.  Fede means faith in Italian, probably in Latin as well.  The taste of the salted egg.  Just like the first time we had lunch one spring in Sicily a week before Easter, the egg served with Zibbibo, a sweet sparkling white wine.  The green house is open, the lettuces all stretching to the light.  A child’s Easter gifts left on the floor of the porch.  The plates are full with a fresh ham, new potatoes with basil, a salad cut from the green house just before lunch, roasted squash and leeks.  We cut into a gorgeous round of local Roquefort, creamy and pungent.  And onion tart both salty and sweet.  Two morning doves stroll through the orchard then fly up into an apple tree.  Rosato from the north of Italy on the border with Austria.  White wine, a Blanc de Morgex et La Salle from  the Alps,  and we are back to Sicily with a light red Frappato.  Will we always double back to Sicily?

The pears have been poached in red wine and the sour cherry tart is very dark, but not brooding.  The remnants of last autumn’s harvest.  My husband says that Easter in our northern hills is always made up of the last of the winter’s bounty.  We cannot look to spring quite yet.  In the unusual heat, we dress in bright colors and short sleeves until the sun goes behind racing mares’ tails only to return once we’ve put our sweaters on.  Thick dark coffee served in cups bought  a long time ago in Paris and tea served from a white porcelain set flecked with gold.  A story about rabbits is read to a child.  We blow bubbles to remember that we too were once children who hunted for eggs in the hydrangea and lilac and refused our naps.  After everyone is gone, the glasses stand empty on the white tablecloth.  The interior of the coffee cups is painted with doe-colored dregs. 

The light filters through a dirty window and the impulse to wash it overcomes the impulse to sit down.  A vase full of shell pink double tulips open even wider.  Dusk washes the wall of old pale gray wallpaper  painted with the climbing dog rose.  A new pot of tea perfumes the end of the day.  The sun slips behind the ridge and the meadow is in shadow.  We are left with quiet.

--Deirdre