I love the nightlife, I want to boogie

...well, maybe not. But I did have some fun a couple of weeks ago when my Greek friend, Kimon, asked me to join him one evening at the Buddha Bar. He was friends with the DJ (of course) and was trying to recruit the bartender to come consult for him at his hotel in Thessaloníki. Given that we weren't supposed to get there until around 10PM, I was a tad reluctant (since we did have class the next morning), but Kimon is Greek! No problem! We never go out before 10PM! We always work the next morning!

Perhaps if I had accepted a little more training from the inimitable Stephan W., I would have been better prepared. You see, when I go out to dinner or grab a drink back home, it's one glass of wine - or if I'm going crazy, maybe two. Going to the Buddha Bar with Kimon, it's a glass of wine, followed by a Long Island Ice Tea (that Kimon so thoughtfully ordered for me), followed by a vanilla vodka shot (that Kimon so considerately arranged for us w/his new bartender friend), followed by a rhubarb shot (quite delicious and graciously called for by...ummm...what's his name?), followed by the cucumber shot (lovely and soft and...no...wait...it's Kimon, right?), and some other something or other thing I...uh...what was I saying?

Man About Town

During my sojourn here, I've been trying to capture a little of what the experience has been like walking around Paris and visiting the countryside (which, so far, I've only done once, thanks to Pierre and his mother, Stephanie).

Thanks to a turn in life 20 years ago when I lived with some architecture grad students in Ann Arbor Michigan, I have long been interested in and have appreciated architecture - not only for how it looks, but what images and memories it can conjure, how it interacts with its surroundings and with the people whom it serves, how it plays with, focuses, and delivers light, and how elegantly it does (or does not, all too often) serves its purpose.

Doing residential projects in the US, I think about all of these things a lot. Being here in Paris, surrounded by so many beautiful buildings and structures, I can't help but think of it every day.

One of the things that I think about constantly here is how much craftsmanship was and is involved in many of these structures. While the trend for many years has been towards a minimalist form of modern architecture, with extensive use of steel, glass, and concrete, I have always found these structures cold and impersonal. Not 100% of them, but most. Through the use of geometric qualities like sharp angles (Louis Kahn) and huge spaces (the new American Airlines terminal in NYC), I feel that much of this architecture is impressive in CAD and when viewed as an abstraction, but while some of these structures have played interesting games with light and form, the loss of connection to human scale and to a connection with the earth or with people has disturbed me.

The grand architecture of Paris, realized in edifices like the Petite Palais (see photo) and the Grand Palais, the bridges across the Seine, the cathedrals, and the thousands of 16th, 17th, and 18th century buildings also suffer, at times from a crisis of proportion - they were meant to impress - but unlike the huge expanses of steel, concrete and glass that are found in modern structures, the human touch is to be found in every square inch of these monuments to craftsmanship. The detailed carved stone, mosaics, leaded-glass windows, light fixtures, ironwork, and sculptures each call out for your focused attention and alert you to the human touch that went into crafting each little part. The big modern slab concepts could just as well have been formed in a factory by some machines, transported by other machines, and put in place by yet other machines. The human is not evident.

Walking around town, appreciating craftsmanship by sculptors, stonemasons, iron smiths, and mosaicists at every turn, I feel connected to them through their work, appreciative of their art and skill, and connected to the past in which they lived and crafted their works. This tangible connection to a distant past is something most Americans don't generally get to experience (outside, perhaps, for some parts of New England. Heck, in San Francisco, we consider anything built before 1911 historic. In Paris, London, Rome, Athens and Jerusalem, among other places, that's downright modern.

Unlike the grand monuments, when it comes to the functional buildings of Paris - the apartments, the restaurants, the offices - the focus is definitely about human scale. A typical 1BR apt here is usually about 30 sq. metres (about 300 sq. ft.). The restaurants pack the tables in tight - you usually have to pull the little 2-tops out into the aisle to get in and out of the seat by the wall. Older shops tend to be very intimate - it helps to walk in sideways ;^)

While our first impression is often that these places are too small, as Americans raised on large spaces (think Wal-Mart or Target or even the typical Il Fornaio), the intimacy forces you to forego unnecessary "stuff" in your apartment and gives you a good reason to strike up a conversation with those people at the next table whose elbows you keep bumping against. Paris hs t

Basque-ing in the Light of Mon Ami

A little while ago, I went back to one of Katy and my favorite restaurants...Chez l'Ami Jean. This little Basque gastro-pub out in the 7th at 27 rue Malar is crazy popular. My chefs at the Ritz knew about it. My friends in Paris go there regularly.

I was telling my classmate, Kimon, about it since he arrived in Paris, and he was eager to try it. Since I could only get us in at 10PM, we did what we had to do and waited up for it.

I won't waste your time w/a lot of frivolous text here - just enjoy the photos (that's the caille [quail] on the right, 3 sauces- olive oil&garlic, orange, lemon sauces, and on the left, the sardines with tête et pied de veau). I should note that we ordered entrées and main plats and happily waited with our carafe of wine for them to come. After a while, the waiter looked at our clean table and, with a face of consternation asked if we had received our entrées. We said "no". He then ran off to the kitchen and brought us back an extra entree of the fromage de tête de veau to share.

The Magret de Canard (duck breast, right) was fab-u-luss and their presentation belies the pub-like setting. So if you see other notes from people that talk about the lack of service in restaurants - don't think that that's a universal axiom. It doesn't apply here.


Although it kind of sounds like Groucho Marx or W.C.Fields not wanting to join a club that would accept people like them, I should note that the restaurant was half-filled with les Americains. I refrain from a "ptooey". Not 3 weeks after Katy and I went to l'Ami Jean last year, the NY Times published a half-page article on the restaurant on the front of the Travel Section. No more "secret little find". Nevertheless, the cooking has not suffered and it is still a top destination for me every time I'm here.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Over the last 6 weeks, we've crammed a lot in. Being a basic cuisine class, we learned about the basic pastries, the basic sauces (orange, hollandaise, bernaise, bechamel, anglaise), the basic stocks (veal, chicken, fish), and how to prepare, cook, and serve fish, meat, vegetables and desserts.

Some of what we've done has been very Good. Like learning how to:

1. Fillet fish and prepare or remove the skin
   
   Filet o' Fish
2. Poach and pan fry fish
   Getting that Nice Pattern and No Curling in the Pan!
   
   
3. Tie up poultry to roast or cut up poultry into parts
   
   
   Threading the caneton (small duck) up tight
   
4. Season while cooking
5. Appreciate Wine
6. Not be anal about recipes and use taste and judgment along the way
7. Make all the basic sauces
   
   
   Crab Bisque or Shellfish stock or sauce - all from same base
   
   Hollandaise
8. Make preserves
9. Prepare chocolate truffles
10. Utilize tools like metal rings and chinoise and spiders (like a wire-mesh slotted spoon)
    
11. Tap the awesome power of rich stocks to make sauces great
12. And a little bit of technique for presentation...
    
    My Noix St. Jacques (scallops) turned out lookin' purty durned decent
    
    My Carribean cake needed a little piping practice, but overall, not too shabby
    
    I really like how this salad w/cold-cooked fresh salmon roulades turned out
    

But...not everything has been so useful.

Most of the recipes that we've made are very old French recipes - many of which result in meat or fish that's overcooked, heavy butter and cream-laden sauces that, while saying "old school", also seem to say "Please call my cardiologist. NOW!". Surprisingly, many of these sauces, which the chefs thought tasted good, resulted in me and Susie looking at each other with wrinkled noses and thinking "I don't think so". They were just plain Bad. Many of these recipes came out looking bland and/or tasting bland or overly rich, but underly flavorful and left me thinking that I'd never ever make those at home.

But I'm not one to let a few bad apples spoil the cart.

I tried to do as much as I could to learn. I feel like I'm taking quite a lot away from the experience...from things like Fish Stock - that we made enough times that I could almost make one blindfolded (aside, perhaps, from the part where I use the cleaver to chop up the fish bones) to turning vegetables and steaming them with aromatics in the water to impart flavor without fat (imagine that!!!).

I've spent a lot of time on plating and feel that I'm much improved in terms of making presentable dishes, but, sadly, that was not so evident in my final exam.

The exam was last Thursday night. It was a 3 hour affair where you're handed the names of two recipes and you have to make them from scratch doing all prepping, cooking, plating, and cleanup - without recipes. Although I am renowned the world over for my poor memory, I did manage to mostly remember the 6 recipes that they told us might be on the exam. For that, I feel like I accomplished something that night.

I felt good about how I was doing with my prep - everything cut the way it was supposed to be and in neatly separate prep bowls...until I started carving the chicken. I was cutting it up into several pieces to make Poulet au l'Estragon (tarragon) when I got a piece that didn't look right. I thought I needed to cut off a certain part when one of my chef instructors, Chef Christophe, came through the kitchen, looked at what I was doing and said "Please don't tell me that you were in my class. Please don't tell me that you were my student." O..U..C..H.

I told him what I thought I needed to do next, but he repeated his chide. I went on and did some other things first since I had lost some confidence about my meat-cutting skills when chef Christian returned...and then proceeded to show me what I needed to do...doing exactly what I had told him I thought I needed to do...but now I looked like a loser. It was so sad.

So I made my two dishes - Oeufs Meurette (eggs with a red wine sauce) and the Poulet. Burnt a little toast here...broke one of my poached eggs there...failed to sufficiently reduce and thicken the sauces...and finally, although I got both plated and warm to the table, the chicken was insufficiently cooked. Quelle désastre. Well, I thought, at least I can say that I went here even if I don't get my diploma the next day:^( I was actually OK the next day, but I was seriously depressed after I finished at 9PM that night...especially since my classmate Susie's dishes looked like they were right off the table from Gary Danko or Bouley. OK, OK, but she had worked in the kitchen at the Four Seasons in Thailand, so I don't want to pound myself too hard for this. Nevertheless, it would have been nice to have ended on a slightly higher note.)

Didn't really help that it was raining, either.

Ultimately, I did pass...not with flying colors, perhaps, but I passed. I now have a shiny new diploma to show for it and a little of my confidence has returned. Perhaps the fact that I gave the chefs a bottle of Koehler Pinot Noir improved my fate. Or not. Regardless, this has been a wonderful experience so far and I'm blessed for having had the opportunity.

I'm glad I came and I've gotten much out of living in Paris for a spell. My French, I fear, has deteriorated since I've been here, but I think that if I could stay for a year or two, I'd get the hang of it.

All in all, Paris has been beautiful. Heck, it was almost 60 degrees last Friday night (even though it was nearly 30 degrees last night). The architecture at night, lit up with lights, is just inspiring. The Xmas decorations are starting to appear (though not so much on the Rue des Rosiers - the main the Jewish quarter) near the Ritz and out in the 7th, near La Tour d'Eiffel. That whole "magic of the season" is definitely happening.

Living here has been extraordinary, if relatively brief. It's been great to settle into a neighborhood, find my way around the city a little better, explore the arrondissements, and not feel like I have to rush to this museum or that shop or get that perfect restaurant reservation every day, the way you do on a 1-week trip.

My ability to form a coherent sentence in French seems somewhat better, and although I'm still struggling with verb tenses, my vocabulary is improving. Frankly, I think that I won't get to sound much better than a 2-year old until I get to live here for a few years.

Sooooo....honey? What do you think? :-)

Procrastination...alright, it's a part of me

Well, I know it seems like these posts are getting farther and farther apart...well...I guess they are getting farther apart. I think the huge backlog of things I've wanted to write about have created a bit of a block for me. But today I clear the backlog. Prepare thyself for the torrent.

TRADITION: COOKING

Let's get in the wayback machine and take a look back at last week. When we last left our hero, he was enjoying a lovely pork chop over at Le Temps au Temps. Since there wasn't enough fat in that pork chop, apparently, I decided to make my first attempt at making a foie gras terrine, back at my apt. I bought the whole foie, found an appropriate ceramic terrine just around the corner at Simon A. cookware (great toy store for cooks!) , and had some Sauternes-like Jurançon in my fridge.

Seemed pretty simple...you just de-vein the foie, shove it in the terrine mold w/the wine, cook it at a low temp for quite a bit of time, then put a cutout of cardboard with heavy weights on top to squeeze all the melted fat to the top. What I hadn't really counted on was how hard it would be to balance the cans on the cardboard - think of it like a surfboard - floating on a sea of deliciousy foie gras fat. I think I can hear a whole cardiologist's convention breathing either a heavy sigh of sadness for our future or of relaxation at knowing that their future business is assured.

How did it turn out? Well...looked great. Texture? Not so much. I think I failed to weight it down properly. We'll see if I try again...I do still have the terrine mold, after all.

TRADITION: BISTRO

What worked out a little better was the lunch excursion that I and my classmates took last week to Aux Lyonnais. This 19th century pub had fallen on hard times when the famed Alain Ducasse bought and refurbished it just 3 or 4 years ago to it's original glory. Unfussy, this very warm and traditional bistro is affordable (~28 euro for a prix fixe lunch) and always packed due to its classic lyonnais cuisine. More country than high cuisine, we enjoyed a variety of fish and meat dishes, from classic entrecôte (steak) to veal liver to rillet to pan fried fish.

I tried to be as good as I could be - starting off with a light root vegetable dish cooked - steamed mostly - en cocotte. If you don't work hard at it, it's all too easy for there to be nearly no vegetables in a typical French meal - or at least nothing other than some form of fatty potatoes (fried - frites, scalloped - dauphinoise, or whipped - almost always with a healthy (ahem) dose of cream). Nevertheless, I prevailed! Certainly a classic French lunch experience.

TRADITION + EXPERIMENTATION

This week, I took a few very different routes. Whenever I'd traveled to Paris or elsewhere in Europe in the past, I was only there for a few days, perhaps a week. As a result, I always stuck with regional cuisine. Now, for the first time, since I've been here a month, I set out to look for something different. I walked all over the neighborhood checking out innumerable french bistros with their confit, magret, entrecote, and foie gras but decided I had a hankering for something I-talian.

Fortunately, one of the closest restaurants to my apt, Terre et Soleil, with a warm and cosy atmosphere, had an extensive Italian menu. The "classics" that we would expect at any American Italian restaurant, aside from the Penne all'arrabbiata, weren't really there, but they had Osso Buco, various pastas and sauces, so that'll do (, pig).

I really wanted pasta, so I passed on the Entrecote, Escalope de Veau, and Osso Buco and perused the pasta list. Making my way through the unusual options, there were familiar pastas and sauces combined in ways I hadn't really seen, like the Carbonara, but with a tubular pasta called Sadoni that I'd never heard of and familiar pastas with unusual sauces.

What to have?...what to have?...

Ah...wait a minute...THERE you go! Yeah...that's what I'm talkin' about...boyyyyy.

Amongst the primaveras and arrabbiata's were a couple of real gems. The cavatappi with foie gras and figs and the rotelle with confit de canard and apples. Italian...yet French. Oh yum.

I wasn't hungry enough for both, so I went with the cavatappi. Good choice. VERY good choice. I may even have to see if I can talk Delfina or A16 into serving it!

Finishing the evening off with a little poached pear with sabayon was just the ticket.

TRADITION: BRASSERIE

Since the dollar is so damned weak, I do try to conserve my ducats at most meals. The odd 30 euro prix fixe lunch or dinner is fine, but not every day. So I take advantage of the ubiquitous crepe stands and the simple but delicious 5 euro tartine sandwiches available at Paul right around the corner. I also decided one evening to follow the advice of my lovely bride and try out a very old and traditional (and cheap) brasserie - Chartier. Tucked away behind an interior courtyard in the 9th, this place looks the classic brasserie. Bustling and packed with the black and white be-decked waiters running to and fro, it had a great energy.

And the menu? All the standards are there...and they are chee-eep. Where else can you find a 3 euro salad? Wow. Unfortunately, the couple right next to me turned out to be serial smokers, and the food, while inexpensive, was just adequate. My waiter? Ornery old guy - took quite a while to come by and then just stared at me waiting for my order without a word. When I ordered my food and hesitated about the wine...off he went. I guess with small bills and service included in the bill, there's not much to be enthusiastic about while working there.

My lamb chops were overcooked and a little dry, but the frites were hot and crispy and the Lyonnais salade was decent if not dee-licious. Those and a half bottle of Cote du Rhone totaled just 17 euro. Overall, a decent deal. Will be even better starting in January, when the restaurant smoking ban comes into effect.

TRADITION: SOUFFLÉ

On a different end of the refinement spectrum was a lunch I got one day on my own when I stopped off at a restaurant near the school for lunch.

Using the Pudlo guide that Katy had so thoughtfully provided me, I found a little restaurant called, simply, Le Soufflé. Now, having made soufflées in class, I was curious about a good restaurant's take on that dish. Also - I had mostly enjoyed classic soufflées in my life - Grand Marnier, Chocolate - but not many others. So I endeavored to experiment. For 28 euro, they had a nice prix fixe lunch with a choice of savory soufflé, sweet soufflé, salad and choice of a glass of wine or a demi-bouteille of water.

I went with a scallops and pétoncles soufflé as my main and a noisette (hazelnut) soufflé for dessert. Wow. I didn't think that you could make a soufflé with seafood or heavy nuts and have it be delicate and light. I was wrong. These guys were good. Everything - even the simple salad, was great. Now I'm looking forward to experimenting more at home!