France, part deux, a bit on food
Food was the main reason we chose to vacation here. S has a huge respect for this cuisine. It’s certainly one of the hardest to muster. Thus, having surveyed book after book, she figured the best way to appreciate it besides another dinner at Rover’s would be to come here. Here are some notes from our experiences eating out.
French cookbook cuisine and French cuisine are two different things. Brasseries are very popular. They serve simple fares: steak frites, salads, etc. We have yet to find one with French onion soup on the menu. For take-out lunch, baguette sandwiches are the norm. Unfortunately, the options don’t include paté de campagne but saucisson-beurre, fromage de chèvre, etc.
“A Vietnamese restaurant with a Thai chef that makes good sushi.” People here, like elsewhere, enjoy the cuisine of others: Asian, Döner Kebab, Italian, Tex-Mex, Irish pubs, and North-African cuisines are well represented. Since I’ve never found a rotating spit in Seattle, I was happy to satisfy my kebab craving. True, most Asian restaurants combine multiple cuisines, which shatters their credibility for us. While I’m sure there are plenty of very good foreign-cuisine restaurants, guide books tend to keep their tourists in the touristy parts of town.
What saved us from eating Pho one night in Avignon was the hotel receptionist who happily referred us to a tourist joint on la Place du Palais des Papes with a great French onion soup. That’s when we gave up and decided that the French cuisine of S’s cookbooks would be found, in towns, only in the same place other tourists would go to, and pay a premium for. While she still complains that these meals are not quite as good as what we eat at home, we have generally not been disappointed since. Her plat principal for last night was a leg of duck.
The pink stuff is everywhere. I understand it is cheap and flavorful but we did not come to Provence to eat farm raised Norwegian salmon. Especially when the fishing season for Alaska’s wild salmon on the Copper River started one week ago and Seattle is going gaga over it. Given that we are driving next to the Mediterranean Sea, I was surprised and saddened to see so few of the local species advertised.
It’s not like we live in Texas. We ate fresh local seafood twice. The first was paella and a fricassee in Nice at Chez Freddy. The meal was reasonably priced by our west-coast standards and had us wondering why, oh why, we can’t find decent paella easily in Seattle. Our second was bouillabaisse at the Brasserie des Catalans in Marseille. Their fish stock in the bouillabaisse was mind blowing. Being shown the fish we would eat before it went off to the kitchen was a nice touch, reminiscent of eating crab in a Chinese restaurant.
Wow… that takes guts. As I mentioned, we’re not the only tourists. We’ve heard a fair amount of French Canadian, Italian, German, Mandarin, Japanese and some of those Scandinavian languages that I can’t distinguish between. There is a shift though from a few years ago: we’ve seen large groups of Chinese but twice now we have encountered 2~3 young Japanese women traveling together. Even without a guide, you’ll find them poring over menus outside restaurants. While the waiter at Le Fetiche last night appeared to cherish teasing the young women at the table next to us on their use of broken English instead of proper French – a sarcastic humor that was lost on them – they successfully ordered bouillabaisse, white wine and crème brûlées. They seemed a bit dumbfounded as to why they had to ask for spoons, which the waiter conveniently forgot to bring, to eat the soup and were surprised when a second dish of fish showed up afterwards. S and I, probably like a few of the other tourists near that table, left wondering what warnings the Japanese travel books include for France.
Anyways, more later.