L'Ecailler du Bistrot

One of the few French pop songs I truly like is Vincent Delerm’s “Tes parents.”  In it, the singer envisions how his girlfriend’s parents might be and describes a few different familial scenarios, each more horrifying than the last.  The happy ending is that Vincent is willing to put up with a lot—slideshows of vacation photos, slobbering dogs, opera music—to make things to work out with his lady.  “Je suis prêt à faire des concessions...manger des huîtres au Reveillon,” he sings (“I’m ready to make some concessions...eat oysters on Christmas Eve”).

My first glance at the dozen raw Belon No. 5 oysters staring glossily up at me from a bed of root-like seaweed last Friday night made me understand why Delerm might think of eating oysters as making a concession.  I was eating one of my last meals in Paris (and, if all goes according to plan, one of my last meals as an omnivore) at L’Ecailler du Bistrot.  I had been tipped that this seafood restaurant on rue Paul Bert served oysters farmed in  Southern Brittany that were not to miss. 

I had never encountered an oyster up close, and the ones in front of me looked like slimy alien mushrooms.  Once I worked up the nerve to disengage one from the grip of its shell and put it into my mouth, its flavor was a shock of pure salinity—nothing I’ve ever eaten has tasted so much like the ocean.  I didn’t think that I really wanted to eat all twelve if each was going to feel like the equivalent of an unintentional swallow of seawater.

I went for a second, though, and a third, and these had a pleasantly sweet dimension that the first had lacked.  By the time I got to the sixth, I had hit my oyster stride and was letting them slide down with pleasure.  With a spritz of lemon, the flavor improved even more, and I began to enjoy the slick pop of unsuctioning each animal from its shell with my miniature fork.  By the time I swallowed the last I was feeling a nice clean buzz, as though I had downed a black espresso or other mild stimulant.

If my dozen Belons got me high, my main dish, homard frites, brought me back to earth.  No meat I’ve eaten has looked so much like the animal it once was as the half-lobster curled pathetically on my plate, its legs limp and easily snapped off, smothered in rich hollandaise sauce.  I thought of a short, charming essay Sam Sifton recently wrote for The New York Times Magazine about how to cook and eat lobster for “a weekend of simple excess.”  The author urges, “Don’t consider the lobster.”

So, as is par for the course for me these days, I stopped considering the lobster.  Unfortunately, actually consuming the lobster took a bit more effort.  The waiter had given me two shiny, cryptic tools—a cracker and a pick—in addition to my fork and knife, but I had no idea how to use them.  I ate the delicious, loosened bits of flesh that were easily extracted with my fork, then I turned my two mystery utensils about in my hands, occasionally grasping a section of the lobster’s red shell with the cracker and poking at the flesh with the pick.  The yellow hollandaise sauce was starting to  smear.

Eventually, the two men on a dinner date next to me could no longer pretend to ignore the increasing volume of the utensils clacking at their neighboring table.  With some kind instruction on their part, I managed to extract and devour all the butter-tasting lobster meat I could find.  Still, the claw remained intact.

I think that the middle-aged couples who made up the majority of L’Ecailler du Bistrot’s clientele were staring at me as the waiter (who maintained a stoic look on his face that made me think that this was not his first intervention between a lobster and a diner) finally cracked open the lobster’s claw for me and told me how to pull out the meat.  I can’t be sure, since I was keeping my eyes on my plate.   It was the most embarrassed I’ve been in a restaurant in recent memory. 

But my sheepishness was worth every bite of the lobster, which lived up to Sifton’s description:  “sweet and buttery, packed with protein, succulent, rich as bosses.”  (The evenly golden frites served in a trough-like plate as an accompaniment to the lobster weren’t bad either.)

While my companion went to the restroom in between the main course and dessert (a rich fondant au chocolat that was twice as good as it had any right to be in a seafood restaurant) an elderly man with a lumpy face at the table adjacent to ours asked me a question mostly in English:  “Was that your first homard?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Did you like it?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then you’ll eat it again,” he declared.

“Maybe,” I said, laughing. He told me not to be afraid of dismembering it with my hands. 

I had a fleeting vision of what it might be like to eat lobster without embarrassment in an idyllic American setting, perhaps during a weekend of simple excess at the beach with friends.  Then I had a thought of what it might be like to eat oysters on Christmas Eve, when they’re plump and really in season.  And I wondered what kind of concessions I was willing to make.

Image © E-person | Dreamstime.com

London: Not a Wasteland

Even though the rest of us have long recognized that England is not a culinary wasteland, the French seem to hold on rather desperately to outmoded stereotypes.  “In London, in England, what do they have?  They have nothing.  I mean, a gastronomic heritage.  No, but anyway, apart from pudding, biscuits, there’s not much, you know?” said Gilles Ajuelos, chef of Paris’s acclaimed La Bastide Odéon, told me late last year without a trace of irony.

With all due respect to Chef Ajuelos, there is actually quite a bit apart from pudding and biscuits in London.  I hopped on the Eurostar this past weekend, and, in addition to excellent Spanish, Swedish, and German food (London’s international restaurant scene is far better than Paris’s), I enjoyed a couple of excellent traditional English meals. 

The first was at Chimes, an English restaurant, pub and (unexpectedly) wine bar in Pimlico.  The weather was behaving decidedly non-Englishly on Sunday afternoon, so my companion and I avoided the slightly glum interior and enjoyed the sunlight at a table on the sidewalk.  We skipped the wine and instead started with a pitcher one of Chimes’s five tap ciders, which proved dangerously drinkable.  For lunch, we ordered a stew of cod and haddock that appeared, on first glance, gray and gluey. A few cheerless croutons strewn on top did not raise my hopes.  However, the stew, whose broth had been enlivened by the addition of cider and cheddar, was rich and flavorful, and the steamed potatoes, zucchini and red cabbage served alongside provided a nice light counterpoint.

My second English meal, in a much more downscale setting, was at the Covent Garden location of a U.K. chain called The West Cornwall Pasty Company (and please do click on that link; their overwrought pirate-themed website is worth seeing).  My Londoner friend Ralf, a pasty enthusiast and veritable fount of trivia, told me that pasties were first created for tin miners, who, to avoid inadvertently consuming arsenic on their lunch break, ate the meat-and-potato interior of the pasty and threw away the crust.  Not the most propitious recipe origin, perhaps, but The West Cornwall Pasty Company has done its best to outstrip its working-class heritage.  Though the upstairs seating area has a fittingly dark and gloomy ambiance, the pasty menu includes such untraditional fillings as curried chicken and cheese-tomato-basil.  I went for a steak and stilton “oggy,” as they’re sometimes called, and was discouraged by its Hot Pocket-esque appearance.  But the pastry was flaky, the beef tender, the cheese savory but not too strong.  Its solidity was perfect after an afternoon of overindulging in cider, but I still wasn’t able to finish the whole thing. (Ralf happily took over the job for me.)

English cuisine is modest and homely, not sexy or showy like its French counterpart.  But behind its humble exterior lie character and comfortableness.  In short, English food isn’t pretty, but it’s got a pleasant personality, especially after a couple of beers.

And no, I’m not going to draw the obvious parallel between English food and English people.  There's no need to hold on to outmoded stereotypes.

Salmon Woe

I so enjoyed my sushi on Friday that I ordered even more last night, this time from Matsuri.  The phase of squeamishness about fish had passed; qualms about eating animals didn't even enter my mind.  I just enjoyed the surprisingly tender texture and mild taste of raw salmon and the smug knowledge that it was providing me with a good deal of protein and omega-3s.  I felt great.

And then all my good energy was quashed this morning when I got to work and looked at nytimes.com:  Taras Grescoe, the author of the cheerfully titled Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood, had written an op-ed listing all the reasons for which it is evil to eat salmon.  There are a quite a few:  the approaching extinction of wild Pacific salmon after decades of overfishing; salmon's high price; overcrowding, disease, and parasites on salmon feedlots; unregulated nerve-deteriorating pesticides in supermarket fish...you know, complete and utter unsustainability.

Eating animals seems more and more to be a losing game.  Either the moral weight of killing an animal seems too heavy to justify the benefits of animal protein, or, in the cases in which it seems difficult to muster much moral concern for the welfare of an animal—the case of salmon, for instance—the environmental consequences are inexcusable.

Vegetarian food is by no means wholly without bad consequences, but it seems (except in a strictly literal sense) less thorny than meat.  Sure, there are pesticides and migrant workers and GMOs and greenhouse gas emissions to worry about when it comes to plants.  But somehow these problems seem dwarfed by the aggregate evils of eating animals, and somehow they seem more easily avoided by conscientious shopping, too.

Grescoe, perhaps to avoid being seen solely as a bearer of bad news, suggests putting slightly more sustainable sardines on one's bagels instead of salmon.  It's a kind offer, but I think the next time I'm at Absolute Bagels on Broadway, I'll stick with cream cheese.  Maybe even Tofutti.

Sushishop

Even fast-paced offices encounter the occasional slow period, and employees unexpectedly faced with little to do are prone to daydreaming about lunch.

Today, during a stretch of hours during which we did nothing but make coffee and friend each other on Facebook, my colleagues and I decided to change up our midday meal by ordering in from Sushishop.  Samar, who sits at the desk catty-cornered to mine, claims that theirs is the best sushi in the city.  “I ordered from there once, and I was still thinking about it three days later,” she said.

Sushishop, of which there are twelve branches in and around Paris (and which is in the process of expanding to Bordeaux, Marseille, Montpelier, Reims and Luxembourg), has a gorgeous website whose near-pornographic close-ups of lustrous slices of salmon daubed with cream cheese were enough to occupy bored underlings for a good half an hour.

Unfortunately, the site’s sleekness doesn’t extend to its online ordering feature, which flat-out refuses to work.  Picking up the phone is the better option (calls cost 15 centimes per minute, but if you’re calling from your office line, it’s on the company tab).  Service is decent:  Less than forty minutes after the phone was returned to its cradle this afternoon, a helmeted delivery man buzzed up to our office on rue Scribe and good-naturedly accepted the many euro coins of our combined contributions.

Though Sushishop’s menu includes such novelties as Tuscan spring rolls (crab, pine nuts, mesclun, and truffle mayonnaise) and sushi topped with porgy tartare, diced mango, and vanilla-scented oil, we opted for the lunch formule—eighteen pieces of maki, in various combinations, served with a salad and soup, for 12.50€.  It sounded like a deal, but the salad that arrived was a disheartening mix of white cabbage and flavorless vinegar, and no trace of miso’s complex flavor had survived in the insipid soup.

The sushi, however, had what it took to brighten our afternoon.  The salmon at the core of a roll of sticky maki dissolved slowly and gratifyingly on the tongue.  A crab-avocado California roll, coated with cheerfully orange masago roe, boasted a sturdy texture and saline tang. And, though they weren’t technically sushi, avocado-cream cheese spring rolls wrapped in translucent green rice paper had the same dense, rich mouth feel as their seaweed-wrapped cousins.

My coworkers and I were rescued from our ennui after lunch by a sudden influx of emails to be answered and tasks to be completed.  But, even if we don’t hit another slow patch on Monday, we might still be thinking about Sushishop three days from now.

The Pescetarian Phase

Old habits die hard. 

After grandly declaring my conversion from vegetarianism, I have spent the past five days as a pescetarian.  As I had suspected, eating fish is not that difficult, as long as it doesn’t have bones in it.  It can actually be quite enjoyable.  I enjoyed the quinoa and salmon salad from Cojean (which I’ve previously rhapsodized over) I had for lunch the other day.  The curried quinoa was moist and dense, the salmon fatty and pink – a lovely shade of pink I haven’t seen on my plate in years.  It was strange to have to use a knife to cut the flesh, which sometimes came apart easily and sometimes resisted.  I guess I haven’t had to hone my knife-wielding prowess much over the years.  But, despite my poor motor skills, I finished my salad.  And I enjoyed the feeling of protein-laden fullness it gave me – a fullness peculiarly different from that attained from eating plants alone. 

I don’t have the same moral qualms about eating fish as I do about eating other animals.  As a pescetarian friend said when I saw her recently in Madrid, “I know I can kill a fish without feeling too depressed.  But I think that if I killed a cow I’d feel really, really depressed.” 

And yet eating cows is what normal people do.  “This is what normal people do,” I keep telling myself, trying to work up the gumption to take the grilled chicken salad from the shelves of Cojean.  Yesterday I took my usual pasta salad with grilled vegetables and mozzarella instead. Even the salmon doesn’t feel normal to me yet.

It takes constant vigilance to be a vegetarian.  Vegetarians’ minds must always be whirring when they are around food, their eyes always darting from plate to plate.  The surveillance was never a burden to me – I’d gotten so used to it that, until now, I wasn’t really aware that I was doing it.  It’s difficult to shut all that off, to relax, to just eat.

Crust(acean)

Though I went to the Fête du Pain (Bread Festival) by Notre Dame on Sunday in order to revert briefly to my old animal-free eating habits, I found myself face to face with the above.  It brings new meaning to the term "lobster roll."

Le Bistrologue

My first foray into eating animals takes place at Le Bistrologue.  I am running late, and it’s pouring, as it’s been on and off for days now here, as I get out of the Métro at Gare de Lyon.  People look at me as I hurry down Boulevard Diderot in my coral-colored dress, umbrella-less, soaked.  They probably think I’m going to meet someone for a date.  I’m not, but my nerves are at comparable levels.

My friend Ann and her father Robert, who’s visiting from Houston, are sitting in wicker chairs and drinking lager on the covered terrace when I arrive.  Le Bistrologue is one of those Paris cafés straight out of a textbook:  1950s movie posters on the walls, Art Deco chandelier, chalkboard menu that I have to stand up and move to a different seat in order to read.  The youngish, middle-class people eating around us are mostly French, but our waiter, Cédric, is eager to practice his English with us.

Ann orders a bottle of red Martillac—the weather makes it seem more fitting than something white—and I start taking frequent sips as we discuss our menu choices.  Ann, who loves Le Bistrologue’s confit de canard, is in the mood for a steak tonight, and Cédric advises Robert, who’s wavering between lamb and duck, to go for the former.  I’m not quite ready for farm animals, so I order a steak d’espadon—“Swordfish,” says Cédric, gliding over the “w”, as he makes a gesture with his hand to indicate a long nose.   I suddenly wish I had something stronger than wine in my glass.

Ann also orders an appetizer of escargots for us to share.  I like this idea.  Invertebrates seem like a good place to start.  I’ll work my way up the evolutionary tree.  Robert, who grew up in China, tells me that the Chinese word for snail translates literally to “spiral cow,” because snails are slow like cows.

Cédric is slow like cows, too, and I'm hungry by the time the six fat escargots arrive, drenched in garlic-parsley butter, despite Cédric’s line—his modus operandi for charming tourists, I guess—that “some of them are still alive.”  I grasp a snail with one of those utensils that look as though they’re intended for eye-gouging, dig around a bit with my miniature fork, and pull out something that looks the way I imagine a globule of raw petroleum to look, only doused in green sauce. 

Ann snaps a picture of me as I consume my first escargot, and I have a look on my face as though I’m smiling politely at a crazy person.   It’s not as chewy as I expected.  The butter is nice.  The escargot tastes like something mildly foreign—not so wonderful as to make me want to stand up and exclaim, “What have I been missing all these years?”, but definitely not bad, and not particularly strong, really.  I forget the flavor as soon as it’s left my tongue.  I wonder if the part of my brain that ought to be devoted to parsing the flavor of meat has atrophied from years of disuse. 

I wait a few minutes, dabbing at the pool of butter on which the shells sit with strips of bread, then I eat my second snail.  This isn’t hard.

At only one point during the meal do I silently panic. I’m eating my swordfish, which arrives upon a small mound of smashed potatoes, smothered in diced peppers that have been sautéed with lemon and dill.  The fish has a pleasant texture—flaky is never a bad quality in food, I decide—and I like the  way it squeaks between my molars.  But suddenly there is a bit of soft bone on my tongue, like the indigestible husk of a popcorn kernel, and for a moment it hits me:  This is part of a skeleton.  Not long ago, this bone was helping this fish maneuver through water.  My stomach hurts.

The crisis passes, though.  It’s like that moment on an otherwise fine first date when the person sitting across from you says something you just can’t wrap your mind around.  If you think you might like the person enough, you let it go.  And maybe you pour yourself another glass of wine.