Travel Archives — Being John Curtas

Spanish Inquisition, Part Dos – Madrid

April 12, 2024April 16, 2024

(Dinner at 7? What are we, savages?)

If Barcelona was a failed first date that makes you question whether there will be a second, Madrid was an inscrutable beauty who revealed just enough of herself to leave you lusting for more. One week was hardly enough time to get to know her seductive neighborhoods, and hidden delights, and as with her rival city, we barely scratched the surface of her culinary wonders. But, as we do with most large cities when first we experience them, we sought out the new and the old, the better to get a sense of the restaurant scene. But before we dove into the Spanish new wave, we thought it best to start with a sense of history. And aside from Botin (the oldest restaurant in the world, which we will get to), dining in Madrid doesn’t get more historical than at Horcher.

Gustav Horcher started catering to the carriage trade in Berlin in 1904, but a small disagreement between Germany and the entire western world caused him to re-locate to Madrid in 1942. During this little dust-up, Nazis used Spain as a playground, and Horcher became their favorite canteen, retaining its cache (and customers) from its Berlin days, and staying afloat partly due to the largess of the Nazi High Command. After they were Nuremberg-ed, it remained a haunt of the rich and famous, despite the ghosts of some of its more infamous patrons continuing to haunt the premises.

Not being one to let a little Hermann Göering get between me and some jugged hare, appointments were made for our first dinner in Madrid, and it was a doozy.

A meal as irrepressibly old school as Horcher was just the antidote to the inventive gastropubs and formulaic Catalan food of Barcelona. Walking in felt like entering a time capsule. The thick linens, baroque place settings, and decor straight from the days of “continental cuisine” felt almost like a stage setting for women in Lillian Russell bustles and men in muttonchops.

The surroundings may have been dripping with old money vibes, but the tuxedo-ed staff was a mix of old salts and eager youngsters, and from gueridons to the duck presses, you knew you were about to be as coddled as a Faberge egg. Those staff were warm and welcoming, everyone with a twinkle in their eye; and the menu couldn’t have been any less modern if it had a tassel attached to it.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1724734393632092530

Terrine of goose foie gras kicked things off, as did some “Russian style” marinated salmon. From there it was on to two soups, each superb: a sherry consommé and Consommé “Don Victor” — the latter utilizing a press to extract every bit of beef juices from a couple of roasted cuts.

Artichoke hearts were suffused with mushrooms and lobster, and our main courses ran the gamut from beef Stroganoff in Pommery mustard sauce, to the Horcher hamburger (which single-handedly revives the glories of the “Hamburg” steak) to my “Hare a la Royale” — this version being thick rounds of rabbit sausage, so enriched by blood and wine they should’ve been served with their own tax return.

The pommes soufflé were flawless and the baumkuchen (resembling a small tree of layered pancakes, sliced and served mit shlag), was a showstopper — every bite a study in old world richness matching the setting.

One must be cautious in overpraising Horcher. Its style is about as hip as a pillbox hat, and the menu more geared to the stolid appetites of a German trencherman than to those seeking pointless pointillisms or culinary cartwheels. There are no chef visions at work here, and zero tweezers in use. Only classic recipes rendered with care and top-shelf ingredients. Horcher has been doing the same thing so long it would be easy to dismiss it as a culinary relic, but when the food is this toothsome, the service this precise, and the setting this elegant, you would be denying yourself one of the great restaurant experiences in the world.

It’s also a relative bargain, our dinner came to $447.00/couple including three bottles of wine from a list with plenty of great Spanish selections for under a hundred euros.

Horcher was just down the street from our palatial digs (Hotel Wellington) — perched between the tony Salamanca neighborhood and the museum district, was the perfect jumping off point to stroll the city from the El Retiro Park to the Plaza Mayor. It was also convenient to the far trendier Calle del Dr. Castelo, where the joints were jumping (and crowds spilling onto the streets) late into the evening, which is how we found ourselves shivering on an outside table at La Castela late one night to see what the cool kids were noshing on these days.

(You…lookin’ at me?)

We were freezing, but still wowed by the attentiveness to detail in the dishes flying forth from the kitchen to an eager gaggle of customers waiting patiently for the cooks to catch up with them. Keep in mind, entering these cacophonous tabernas at peak times (which seems to be the millisecond they open their doors until well after midnight, is like trying to order food in a rugby scrum on the floor of a stock exchange. Catching someone’s eye and begging seems to be the way to order, and woe to the tourist who doesn’t know exactly what they want they moment they get their seat.

(Not seen: me waving frantically)

Somehow we managed to corral a waiter, and the plates that finally appeared were pretty nifty….such as this asparagus/bean stew (lower left) which was so dense with flavor it missed not a thing by containing no meat:

(Bean there, done that)

Others also held our attention: teeth-testing chicharrónes (bottom center), croquetas bursting with béchamel (not pictured), the mandatory anchovies, the best clams of the trip, and an octopus paella (top row right) which were just the rib-sticking ticket on a blustery night.

All of it enjoyed in an atmosphere resembling a subway car at rush hour. La Castela convinced us that Spaniards must love crowds the way a Swede loves solitude, since jostling to get served seems to be their favorite indoor sport.

Our late night snack, which ended up being at least six courses plus wine, ended up costing $80/pp.

(Spaniards enjoying lunch, at dinnertime)

By the time we got to lunch at La Maquina Jorge Juan we were firmly acclimated to the Spanish gustatory customs — which, in winter, treats the midday meal as something to enjoy as the sun is going down. So it was late one afternoon when we whisked to a corner table in a restaurant packed tighter than a conserva tin, and started eating around 3:00 pm.

Unlike most of our other destinations, there was no advanced planning for this meal; we were simply hungry and it was right in front of us and looked good. And boy was it. La Maquina is part of a local chain of “The Machine” restaurants specializing in fresh seafood, and we were happy we stumbled upon the crispiest pan con tomate of the trip:

(This delighted me from my head tomatoes)

Among other things like extraordinary olives and anchovies, spicy sobrassada chunks, gorgeous, fork-tender artichokes, those langoustines (below), and a snowy halibut fillet quivering between slightly underdone and perfection. It was our most unexpected meal of the trip, and serendipitously one of the best.

(p.m. not a.m.)

All served by a harried staff who nevertheless were friendly, helpful and on their game. As a side note, over two weeks of eating in Spain, in establishments ancient and trendy, large and small, cheap and wallet-bending, we didn’t have bad service, anywhere.

When the dust settled, the damage was $191/couple, the tariff mainly increased by those scrumptious, fresh-from-the-sea Norway lobsters.

As you can tell from these travelogues, when we are in any gastronomic capital, we tend to toggle between trendy restaurants and those dripping with tradition. Which is why we booked it later to that night to Botin since it can lay claim to being the oldest continuously operating restaurant in the world.

Botin’s cooks have been slinging roast pork and lamb at customers from the same antiquated ovens since before the United States was even a twinkle in Ben Franklin’s eye.

The food is very simple and mostly pretty good. The star of the show — roast suckling pig — comes out as crispy and meltingly soft as you’d expect from some place that’s been doing it for three-hundred years. But the bread is pretty basic (the Spanish have nothing on the French when it comes to baking); the tripe stew was gloppy, gummy and bland; and the roast lamb more bones than meat. The garlic and egg soup and scrambled eggs (Revuelto de la Casa) were nothing to shout about, either, and as we repeatedly found in España, salt, pepper and spice seem to be anathema to these kitchens.

In retrospect, we had a ton of fun, the wine was reasonable, the servers were great, and a bucket list check-mark was dutifully applied. But I wouldn’t return for the food.

Our bill (with sherry and two bottles of wine) came to $165/couple.

After dining among the ghosts of Goya and Hemingway, it was time for a youth movement. And a tasting menu (something we swore to avoid on this trip). Which is how we ended up sampling ten courses of Canary Island-inspired cuisine at Gofio – an envelope of a space tucked into a narrow street (C. de Lope de Vega) in the Barrio de Las Letras (Literary Quarter) neighborhood, a few blocks west of the Prado.

(From the sardine can school of restaurant design)

The room is tiny (see above); and the food as modern as the streets are ancient. A succession of small plates, each highlighting a series of flavors central to the islands’ identity, frame the chef’s philosophy. But to Chef Safe Cruz’s credit, most things worked, contrivances were few, and the meal proceeded seamlessly from one course to the next.

One website described the menu as envelope-pushing. There certainly was a fair amount of twee this, gelled that, and platings where perhaps an excess of punctiliousness was employed. But the progression held your attention, which is often the failing of many of these meals in less skillful hands..

Gofio stands for the stone-ground flour used in tortillas on the island(s), but we didn’t see a lot of that, or carbs for that matter. That said, most of our dinner was a delight. But if you’re looking for a course-by-course dissection of the meal, with dishes described in granular detail, you’ve come to the wrong place. (Besides: by the time you read this, everything will have changed. To a bite, though, everything clicked, the flavors were suitably bite-sized, compelling and vivid.)

(So. Many. Small. Bites.)

And the Canary Island wines were a revelation: a white Malvasia Volcania — aromatic, bracing and citrusy — a perfect foil for the small bites of seafood, while the red — a Taganan Tinto blend — was elegant and ripe, putting one in mind of a slightly herbaceous Central Coast Pinot Noir .

Restaurants like this is rely on so much plating and technique, you leave slightly dazzled but also dazed: What did I have? That seafood soup (bottom center above) was intense, but what was the seasoning? Oh yes, remember course number four….was that the little pasta in a dashi-like broth? The skirt steak draped with crispy jamon (bottom right) was fabulous, especially with that dusting of what was it? And what were those mojo sauces came with the raw tuna? Where did they come from again? And what was that orange jelly made of? And so it goes.

Slowly but surely, you lose the plot on everything from the sauces to whatever was in that exquisite little dumpling.

So it goes, for a couple of hours and then you’re done with nothing but a blurred memory of tastes which lose their uniqueness in the blizzard of flavors before and after they hit the table. Of course you loved those starters (the crunch, the freshness, what was that?) but four plates later, who remembers them? Tastes memories quickly fade when faced with savories in rapid succession.

Do people eat like this anywhere but precious, Michelin-chasing restaurants aimed at bored gastronomes and award whores? This is chefs cooking for chefs, like jazz musicians playing for each other. In Spain, in 2024, it remains in full flower, and if you insist on eating slightly exotic food in tiny portions, Gofio is the way to go.

There are two tasting menus (95 and 125 euros_ and we opted for the larger one, which, for cooking this precise of ingredients this special, is a flat-out steal. Not to sound like a broken record, but the wines were a bargain, also, and the kids running the joint were a treat.

(“Oh no, there’s a Boomer approaching!”)

Arima Basque Soul is one of those taverns catering to an in-the-know clientele in a trendy neighborhood (Chamberi) jammed with bars and restaurants, all of which are far too hip for silver-haired Boomers simply looking for a good plate of grub. Its owner is from San Sebastián and the inventive tapas are firmly rooted in the Basque catechism which holds there is not limit to what you can do with small bites of finger food.

A long, narrow bar leads past a wall of pickled vegetables to a modern, spotless back room with a giant photo mural of an elderly lady overseeing the proceedings at only five tables. We didn’t order the txuleta (T-bone) steak and probably should have, but the small bites we did get (charred, piquant piquillo peppers, Beasain black pudding, and some intriguing anchovies served with a green chili emulsion and olive oil beads (below), which is basically a de-constructed “Gilda” — the ubiquitous olive-pepper-anchovy pintxos named after a Rita Hayworth movie – wherein she plays a character who is by turns salty, spicy and sassy.

Concluding with some beautifully aged Manchego, hauntingly subtle cheesecake) were probably the closest you can get in Madrid to a San Sebastián tapas crawl.

(Deconstructing Rita)

It was also where more reverse sticker shock over sherry occurred: when what we thought was a glass of expensive manzanilla resulted in the entire bottle being placed on the table. As we were waving to our well-meaning waiter, it slowly dawned upon our non-Madrileño brains that the price (around 25 euros) was for the whole bottle. And with that, we had no choice but to congratulate ourselves and polish off the whole thing.

That’s the thing about Madrid; Everything was delicious and quite the bargain. I won’t concede gastronomic supremacy to Spain over France and Italy, though, since it cannot compete with Italy’s breadth of ingredients or France’s depth of technique. But there is no doubt that the gourmet revolution of the past thirty years has taken firm hold here, and Madrid is a playground of traditional tabernas holding their own with cutting edge cooking.

When I mentioned this to several fellow gastronauts (who bought into “Spain is the next big thing” gastronomic mantra of twenty years ago) they were quick to point out to me that “You didn’t go to the right places” and “Wait til you get to San Sebastián.”

Fair enough, but from where I stood, as wonderful as they are, you can’t build a great culinary legacy on anchovies, ham, potatoes, bread, Manchego and Tempranillo. Perhaps the Basques will change my mind. In the meantime, there are no real losers here, and the delectable debate will rage on.

Viva España!

Hail, Britannia! Part One

January 18, 2023January 31, 2023

For a Francophile like moi to admit he was enchanted by London is quite a leap.

“London? Really?” numerous friends smirked, questioning my sanity.

“Somehow I can’t see you hanging out in a Hugh Grant movie, quaffing down warm ale by the pint,” one of them scoffed.

“What are you gonna eat? And drink?” others intoned with eyes narrowed (and a concern usually reserved for discussing chemotherapy).

So strong are the biases against British food, I can’t say I blamed them. But anyone who knows me knows I could find a good restaurant on the moon. And London, my foodie friends, is full of them, if you know where to look, and if you have a secret weapon. And I had both.

Knowing where to look is easy. Stick with the classics, is my mantra. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. In London, that means booking tables that have been around since the 19th Century (at least). Spice things up with a modern meal or two, and luxuriate in some old-school imbibing, and you’ll almost forget there is more refined cooking, and much better wine, 300 miles to the south.

Not to dwell on the differences between London and its gastronomic neighbor, but as a casual observer, I would say the Bulldogs are less food-obsessed than the Frogs, but that doesn’t make their grub inferior, just less in-your-face. Paris assaults the senses with its eating and drinking options. London, like the British people, takes a while to get to know.

Perhaps it is because the catechism of classic British diet (from meat pies to mushy peas) is so boring that the really good stuff (seafood, astonishing veg, cheese, and superb beef) get short shrift indeed. This is not the place to explore three hundred years of English eating habits, but I can say with confidence that (most of) the cliches are all wrong, and classic Brit cuisine will knock you over with its simplicity and succulence. Leave the frou-frou to the French — London will bring out the trencherman in you.

Knowing my proclivities for the ancient and iconic (restaurant-wise), my secret weapon (Marina O’Loughlin — for five years the restaurant columnist for the London Sunday Times) — weighed in with a baker’s dozen suggestions, of which we hardly scratched the surface. One week, as intrepid gastronauts know, is barely enough time to sample the hors-d’oeuvres of a country’s cuisine. But we did our best for eight days and here’s what we found:

(Tiny tables, quality cooking)

“Unmissable” is how Marina described The Quality Chop House, so to it we repaired for our first evening’s repast. The Food Gal® and I have become ardent urban hikers over the past decade, so the 2.5 mile stroll from our hostelry on Trafalgar Square to the Clerkenwell neighborhood was a breeze, even if we were a bit wooly-headed from ten hours on Virgin Atlantic.

Described as a “19th Century ex-working man’s eating house revamped into a modern British dining room,” TQCH will put you more in mind of a pub than restaurant at first glance, until you see the menu and discover you might be in the coolest little meat emporium in all of London. That revamping is purely menu-focused, as the stiff, narrow benches in the front room look like they are only fit for the emaciated physique of a chimney sweep. The second room boasts actual bentwood chairs (above), but also tiny, over-matched tables barely up to the task of containing the wave of tasty vittles soon to be crowded upon them:

(Small table, big flavors)

As we came late, and were exhausted from both the flight and the walk, we were interested in comfort food served quickly, and the restaurant came through. Service was extraordinarily friendly to a couple of strangers wedged into the last table of the night. The wine list was the very definition of “eclectic” and we loved perusing every odd-ball bottle.

(British beef)

The setting may be old school neighborhood eating hall, but the menu has new-school gastropub written all over it. Marina had raved about the steaks so we dutifully tucked into a Hereford sirloin and found it mineral-rich, fatty, tender, and flawless — even after our weary bones had already polished off half a loaf of tangy sourdough with good butter, pâté de campagne, salt cod brandade, pastrami-cured salmon, and chicken liver/foie gras parfait hidden blanketed with shredded black truffles.

(British spuds, French technique)

Our waiter chided us for forgetting to order the layered, buttery potato confit (resembling a mille-feuille of shaved spuds), and set them down on the table (with a wink and without charge) as soon as the steak appeared. He also insisted we end our feast with the olive oil ice cream and it was a show-stopper as well. I was too exhausted to drink much, but dimly remember a couple of glasses of a recommended French red I had never heard of going splendidly with the steak, and a bill that clocked in at around $200 American for small meat-fest fit for the gods.

If the test of a great restaurant is whether you can’t wait to return and try everything on the menu, then The Quality Chop House qualifies in spades.

(Tastes like hazelnuts, not salty, stale fish)

If the Chop House felt like the grooviest steak pub in London, Caviar House and Prunier represents the other end of the spectrum: a posh champagne and fish egg boutique where its nutty, subtly saline sturgeon eggs are a far cry from the fishy and salty stuff they throw on everything in America from desserts to Doritos. We couldn’t resist dropping a bundle on these and some smoked Balik Norwegian salmon — accompanied by warm blinis and tangy creme fraiche of the sort we can only dream of on this side of the pond.

Gird your loins if you wish to wallow in sturgeon eggs, because quality this high doesn’t come cheap. A few small bricks of salmon, two glasses of house bubbly, and the tin you see above set us back a cool $275. And no, our hunger wasn’t cured but our lust for quality oscietre was.

From the toniest seafood digs in St. James it was back to workingman’s London — specifically the Smithfield Market — where Fergus Henderson’s St. John has held sway for three decades. No self-regarding epicure travels to London without putting this notch on their belt, so here we marched, thirty years late to the party, to the holy grail of nose-to-tail.

For the uninitiated, Henderson was not the first chef to serve tripe, headcheese and kidneys, but when he took over this bare bones, inauspicious space (in 1993) next to London’s famed meat market, and converted a former smokehouse into a whole animal-focused restaurant, his influence was felt world-wide. In effect, he discovered a market no one knew existed: boomers in their prime, eager to break out of the steak, fish and chicken template that had defined western menus since the 1950s. The success this restaurant saw in the mid-nineties (and the publicity it garnered therefrom) is partially responsible (or to blame) for why you see pork belly on every upscale restaurant in the world.

You can also lay the ubiquity of short ribs and bone marrow at his doorstep. So far though, despite the best efforts of Henderson’s acolytes, no one has been able to do the same with sweetbreads, pigs ears, and kidneys. Hope springs eternal.

Fergus deserves further credit, or opprobrium, for foisting the inexplicably popular industrial restaurant look on the world — defined by hard seating, minimalist decor, and lighting less flattering than a hospital waiting room. The look may be overdone elsewhere, but in its original incarnation it works, since the food is as spare and uncompromising as the surroundings. There is nothing fancy about the joint, from your first bite of crispy pig’s foot, to the bare bones oleaginous marrow to be spread on the exceptional house-baked bread, to a mountain of deviled lambs kidneys that would defeat all but the largest lover of “variety meats” as these organ innards are often called.

(Quite the pisser, these bad boys were)

“It’s quite a lot of one thing, isn’t it?” our sympathetic waitress observed as she laid the outcropping of offal before us. James Beard once wrote that kidneys derive their appeal from the “faintest tang of urine” left behind as one masticates through the rubbery morsels. Anyone describing the flavor notes on these bad boys as containing “undertones of urethra” though, would be guilty of serious understatement. The uric acid tang was there all right, side-by-side with enough rough-hewn wild gaminess to stop any carnivore in their tracks. And we loved it. Not enough to eat the entire batch, mind you, but sufficient to give us bragging rights in any organ-measuring contest in the future.

Like everywhere we ate in London, service was friendly, informed and fast. I’m at the age where almost all waiters look like teenagers to me, but in every place we tried, from the fancy confines of the Connaught Hotel to an industrial borough like Smithfield, we had nary a complaint to make. Our bill– lunch for two with a couple of glasses of cru Beaujolais — was also the cheapest of the trip: around $150 at the current exchange rate.

Straightforward food, served without adornment, is the mission statement of St. John. It no longer needs to proselytize about whole animal butchery and cookery because the whole world has picked up the chant. Or at least part of it. When lamb kidneys start showing up on American steakhouses, Henderson’s revolution in how we eat animals will be complete…but I wouldn’t hold my breath just yet.

(No humbuggery here)

Compared to St. John, Rules is positively antediluvian. Some may call it ossified eating, better suited to Victorian tastes in haunches of venison and fresh-killed birds (which come with a warning to watch for buckshot), but at Christmastime the place is magical. We met Marina and hubby David there, and truth be told, the conversation was so lively we paid scarce attention to the food.

What no one can ignore is the gorgeousness of the place. The walls could double as a mini museum, with portraits, cartoons and articles spanning 200 years of catering to the carriage trade. The wine list isn’t much (“If I’m going to drop 200 quid on wine, it won’t be here”), but the leafy, Victorian second floor bar (you have to be escorted upstairs) is so captivating you’ll be tempted to while away your mealtime sipping on good British gin or a Pimm’s Cup. Resist mightily these imbibing urges, pilgrim! Because a meal at Rules is timeless and one for the ages, and unlike any other in London.

(If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding!”)

Consider for a moment that you are eating in the same restaurant where everyone from Winston Churchill to Benjamin Disraeli once sat. Then concentrate on your food more than we did.

What you’ll find is a menu of rib-sticking standards that have withstood the test of time. What we did notice was Marina’s gorgeous Devon smoked eel, and David’s pheasant disappearing quickly, and once we broke through the suet crust on our steak and kidney pudding (above), we discovered the most meltingly toothsome of beef stews, enriched with the flavor of (you guessed it) more kidneys (urine tang not included). This bastion of ancient Englishness has been around since 1798, and how you take to it will depend on your taste for no-nonsense dishes like potted shrimps, Dorset crab salad and whatever game is in season. But no matter what you order, you’ll find a kitchen not resting on its laurels, but deeply-steeped in the classics and doing them proud.

Quote of the evening: “Sancerre is the U2 of white wines.” Yes, we are soooo stealing it, and henceforth, intend to claim proprietary rights to this juicy putdown — humiliating white wine sheeple on both continents with David’s all-too-true bon mot.

Also too true was this sticky toffee pudding — the last word in English desserts:

Rules is a splurge, but not as dear as you might think. Even with two bottles of wine (one champagne and one Burgundy, natch) coming in at around 300 pounds sterling, the food bill was about the same, meaning we ate like King Henry VIII for under $100/pp American.

Like St. John, Rules is a place I had always wondered about, and longed to try for decades. Would it be as good as its history and hype? Is English food going to be one big blandburger? And what’s the deal with all the meat? And so few sauces? Do they even know what seasoning is, or what a green vegetable looks like?

Seek and you shall find, the saying goes, and what we found was straightforward cooking with little of the cartwheels in the kitchen invoked in American gastronomic restaurants, where the chefs seem duty-bound to strut every trick they’ve ever learned in culinary school (or have seen on Instagram). There was an unapologetic honesty (and a purity of flavors) to the food we encountered that only comes from confidence. Confidence in oneself as a cook, confidence in your ingredients, your culture, and in what the restaurant stands for — be it a small, modern steakhouse in an antiquated setting, or an icon of British gastronomy. Most of all, these places evinced a trust in their customers to appreciate the labor and the traditions behind the food being served. Aside from Marina and I doing our duty as serial restaurant chroniclers, I didn’t see a single person snapping pictures of their meal in any of them.

Hail, Britannia, indeed.

This is the first part of a two part article on my recent eating adventures across the pond. Part Two will drop in a week or so.

Free Man In Paris

February 18, 2022February 22, 2022

I was a free man in Paris

I felt unfettered and alive

There was nobody calling me up for favors

And no one’s future to decide – Joni Mitchell

American writers have been rhapsodizing about Paris since Ben Franklin’s powdered wig was peeking down some bustier. There’s not much I can add — literary-wise — to the musings of everyone from Henry James to Ernest Hemingway, but I can share a few pointers on what to see and where to eat, along with some musings of my own about what makes the City of Light so compelling, one-hundred years after Ernest & Friends fell in love with it.

The culture of Paris insinuates itself into your soul if you let it. Americans love to talk of snooty Frenchmen and various un-pleasantries, but those are the carpings of the intentionally uncomfortable — the sorts who arrive in any foreign environment looking for something to bitch about.

All you have to do to enjoy yourself in Gay Paree is give in to the Parisian vibe (by turns energetic one minute, and insouciant the next). Leave your American expectations at home, relax, stroll around a bit, and say “bonjour!” and “s’il vous plait” about thirty times a day. Do that and they are almost as nice as Italians.

As I was somewhere over the Atlantic, coming back from ten days walking the streets and haunting cafes from Montparnasse to Montmartre, it occurred to me that this might be my writing future: travelogues for those who might wish to follow in my footsteps in the coming months/years. My covering the Las Vegas food scene has reached its natural end; there are no more mountains for me to climb here, and frankly, it’s more fun these days to see the world rather than wander around (again and again) in my own backyard.

(If you’re dying to hear my mellifluous tones pontificate on where best to exercise your palate in Sin City, tune in Fridays to What’s Right with Sam & Ash — where we whoop it up about food while recapping my eating week.)

Unshackled by the bonds of servitude to Sin City, I am thus free to eat the world, where, quite frankly, the food, wine, and scenery are better (and often cheaper). Consider this a combination of food diary and love letter to my favorite city in the world, where the sights and smells never fail to astonish me, and where eating and drinking well is as easy as rolling out of bed.

But before you can embrace all the picturesque wonderfulness, you first have to get there, and sad to say, that will be more annoying than anything you encounter once you arrive.

News flash: Flying remains a pain in the ass.

Air France is a shell of its former self. A country’s airline — be it SwissAir, Lufthansa or whatever — used to tickle you with anticipation (“As soon as you board, you feel like you’re almost in the country,” I used to tell my kids.) Now you’re on an airbus in more ways than one. They throw some cardboard food at you a couple of times and wheel a shitty beverage cart up the isle twice (first, an hour into your eight-hour transatlantic haul; then again six hours later), and that’s it.

No cans of soda, no mixers, nothing but water, crappy coffee, tepid tea and supermarket wine. Pro tip: load up on snacks and beverages at the airport. What’s become an insult to passengers has been a boon to SmartWater and SlimJims. None of this applies if you fly business- or first-class, which we never do, preferring to save our $$$s for the food and wine which lie ahead.

Enough negativity, let’s get to the fun stuff.

Traveling is living intensified. – Rick Steves

Paris the “Being John Curtas” way means you literally lose yourself there; park your worst instincts back home and drink it all in, every waking moment. I become more sanguine, taciturn even (about everything but the ubiquitous dog shit).

Every time I see Paris’s low profile and history-drenched boulevards, I feel like I’m an awestruck ten-year old seeing a big city for the first time. Rick Steves’ quote is no more true than on the streets of Paris, where your senses are excited on every block, and awesome architecture defines every corner.

The French invented blasé (the word and the mood), but no matter how many times I’m in the city (this last trip was my tenth), that’s the one feeling I never have. I’m too busy picking my jaw off the pavement…when I’m not using it.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast. – Ernest Hemingway

(When I’m in Paris, I’m on a seafood diet: when I see food I eat it.)

The Food. The wine. The seafood! (sea above) The size of the brasseries and the sheer number of cafés means you’ll never go hungry, no matter what the hour.

It’s really one of the most impressive things about Paris: the mind-blowing number of places to feed and refresh yourself. They’ve always been in abundance, but the patisseries/boulangeries (technically not the same thing, but often combined) seem to have doubled in number over the past decade.

The Style: men in snappy coats and women being worn by heroic scarves. No t-shirts or cargo shorts, please. Someone asked me what the French don’t like about Americans and the answer is simple and understandable: the way we dress.

Finally: awesome architecture and history envelops its iconic restaurants. The sheer beauty of them should not surprise (the French invented the modern restaurant, after all), but the stunning interiors (and how well they’ve aged) are still enough to take your breath away:

(Le Grand Colbert)

If you can’t enjoy yourself walking around Paris, you need to have your pulse checked.

My advice to anyone traveling to France or Italy is to always find a café to call your own, preferably close to your hotel. Stopping by every morning will start to make you feel like a local, and by your third visit, even the frostiest waiter will start to smile when he sees you.

Walking, smelling, sitting, sipping cafe au lait. “Encore, s’il vous plait” we say.(“please bring another”)…and your favorite waiter will let you sit there all day, diddling your phone, reading a book, or planning where next to eat — which is the surest way to make you feel like a Frenchman.

Amazingly though, we actually lose a few pounds on every visit. Five-to-ten miles of walking each day will do that, no matter how many baguettes or soufflés you inhale. Sage advice: use your mornings to plan your pre- and post-dejeuner walks.

If The Food Gal® is lucky, I occasionally agree to a little shopping, just to buy some marital harmony. (Poor thing has always operated under the illusion there is something to do in Paris other than eat and drink.)

Breakfast, you ask? Fuggidabadit. In France, breakfast (aka “petit dejeuner”) is good for only one thing: thinking about lunch. Some coffee and a croissant is all you’ll need to fuel you for the first few hours of the day. From then on, it’s Katy bar the door/calories here we come, as temptations await on every block.

THE RESTAURANTS

(97 and still cookin’)

Straight off the plane, still groggy from jetting the ocean, we staggered into L’Ami Louis (above) perhaps the toughest bistro ticket in Paris. It was worth the wait, which for me had been twenty-five years — a quarter century of hearing about its allure to ex-pats, celebs, and galloping gourmands, followed by a revisionist decade of how gauche and “not worth it” it was. It is the one bistro critics love to hate. Especially British critics, as you’ll see below.

Founded in 1924, they only things that have changed in ninety-seven years are the prices and the dress of the patrons. Some have called its interior “museum-like”, others, like the late, great, splenetic A. A. Gill described it as a “painted, shiny distressed brown dung…set with labially pink cloths which give it a colonic appeal and the awkward sense that you might be a suppository.”

All nasty Brit-lit gymnastics aside, what you find when you enter is a classic, narrow, well-worn bistro that feels as comfortable as a pair of well-worn Wellingtons. Where Gill found “paunchy, combative, surly men” waiting tables, all we saw were affable-if-brusque, seen-it-all pros.

Gill (who died in 2016, and whose hemorrhoids must’ve been acting up in ’11 when he wrote those words) also savaged the food. As much as we were a fan of his knives-out style, we found ourselves silently pleading with his ghost throughout our two-hour lunch. Au contraire, mon frere, we muttered continually. From an ethereally silky slab of foie gras to our deviled veal kidneys to the famous roast chicken (above), this was Parisian bistro cooking at its most elemental and satisfying. True, the recipes probably haven’t changed since Bogart was wooing Bergman, but that’s part of the charm.

Where Gill found the foie to be “oleaginous and gross”, our bites were of the smoothest, purest duck liver. A mountain of shoestring fries came with our oversized bird, and better ones we had trouble remembering. Ditto the escargot, brimming with butter and electric green parsley — shot through with garlic in all the best ways.

No fault could be found with the wine list either (pricey for a bistro, but not off-putting), or a baba au rhum the size of a human head.

“Brits love to bag on the Frogs,” is what we thought as we were paying the bill and thanking the staff. The prices (for solids and liquids), are high but not enough to put you on our heels, especially if you’re used to Las Vegas. (Our lunch came to about 400 euros/couple, with about half being wine.)

Gill concluded his hatchet job by calling L’Ami Louis the “worst restaurant in the world.” It may not be the best, old-fashioned bistro in Paris, but it’s a long way from deserving such opprobrium. I’d call it a must-stop for our next visit, for that terrine de foie gras alone:

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans. – Ernest Hemingway

Le Dôme remains le ultimate seafood brasserie in a neighborhood swimming with them. All gleaming glass and brass, it has become a de rigueur to stop for oysters whenever we get to town. Montparnasse is chock full of good restaurants, many of which, like Le Select (1925), La Rotonde (1911) and La Cloiserie des Lilas (1847), are haunted by the ghosts of Gertrude Stein, Hemingway and Henry Miller.

These cafes formed the social hub of Roaring Twenties Paris, and, amazingly, continue to hold their own today, one-hundred years after they became American-famous.

Like many of its equally famous neighbors, Le Dôme is huge, so don’t think twice about dropping in on a whim for a douziane plates and a glass of Sancerre.

Classics like Breton lobster and Dover sole (above), are prepared so perfectly they remind you why these dishes became renowned in the first place, and if you want to hunker down for a full meal, LD dazzles with best of them. The freshness of its cooked seafood is legendary, even in a town known for legendary fresh fish and shellfish.

For dessert: don’t miss the mille-feuille Napoleon (sliced from a pastry the size of a rugby football) — which elicits ohhs and aahs for both its appearance and taste.

A note about the supposed insufferable French: this was our third visit to Le Dôme in the past four years, but we are hardly “known” to the management. On each visit, whether as a walk-in solo or with reservations and guests, we have always received a friendly welcome from the solicitous staff — who couldn’t be more helpful in either guiding us to the best oysters of the day, or which wine to pair with them. You get out of restaurants what you put into them, and if you walk into Le Dôme with happy heart, it will only make you happier.

A walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of life. —Thomas Jefferson

From Montparnasse one day, we trekked up the hill to Montmartre the next, to visit Le Coq et Fils (formerly Le Coq Rico) — Antoine Westermann’s paean to poultry.

Climbing up to Sacré Coeur and exploring the nooks and crannies of cobblestoned streets of this “village inside a city” puts you in a mood to take down an entire yardbird accompanied by a variety of other Westermann signatures like poultry broth “shots” (perhaps the most intense chicken soup ever made), duck rillettes, and egg mayonnaise “Westermann’s Way” (a gorgeous puck of the best egg salad ever tasted):

But the undeniable stars of the show are the whole birds, and we opted for a four pound Bresse specimen of unsurpassed flavor:

(Poulet de Bresse-my-soul)

From the crispness of the skin to the fineness of the grain to the richness of the flesh, these are flocks which put to shame the universal putdown of “tasting like chicken.” Of course the olive oil-drenched pommes puree and straight-from-the-fat frites don’t hurt your enjoyment of this beautiful bird, either.

The birds are sized and sold according to how many you want to feed (e.g. a guinea hen and smaller birds are sized for two). The wine list was modest in scope but interesting and reasonable, and the service couldn’t have been better.

For dessert we took down an Ile Flottante (“floating island”) — a lighter version of this classic — with a softball-sized meringue so airy it seemed to be floating above the creme Anglaise beneath it.

I have been in Paris for almost a week and I have not heard anyone say calories, or cholesterol, or even arterial plaque. The French do not season their food with regret. – Mary-Lou Weisman

Watching your calories is the last thing you want to do at L’Ami Jean — the au courant favorite of Parisian foodies — a bistro which resists mightily the Brooklynization of casual Parisian dining.

As with L’Ami Louis, its slightly older cousin across the Seine, you enter something of a time warp when you cross the threshold into a crowded, narrow room — whose general appearance hasn’t changed since Maurice Chevalier was breaking into talkies.

Cheek-by-jowl everyone sits, the crowd being a mixture of internet-educated gastronauts and local trenchermen who’ve been expanding their ample bellies since the 70s. (From the vantage point of our sole, round six-top along the wall, the diners seemed to be running at about a 10-to-1 men-to-women.)

The effect is one of a raucous eating club in a cramped space where appreciating hearty, rustic food is the coin of the realm.

Having taken serious umbrage to Gill’s evisceration of L’Ami Louis, I must raise an exception in the other direction — in this case to the lavish praise universally heaped upon Stéphane Jégo’s ode to excess. We have nothing against wild boar stews and roasted pigeons drenched in wine. And we are hardly one to quibble with rough-hewn bricks of paté de campagne or nutty/puffy lobes of sweetbreads roasted with thyme. But when we considered our meals as a whole at this temple of bistronomy, what stuck with us was the textural, taste and visual sameness of our multiple courses — more cuisine bourgeois-than restaurant cooking — finesse-free food heaped into bowls…which is probably the point. Nothing wrong with any of it, mind you, but no standouts, either.

Service was the definition of “harried” but also almost preternaturally fast. They screwed up our white wine order, but brought the “wrong” bottle that happened to go beautifully with the food at the same price.

For dessert, get the signature rice pudding with caramel sauce, even if your ribs are pleading for something less to stick to them.

In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is freedom, in water there is bacteria. – Benjamin Franklin

If food is the body of good living, wine is the soul. – Clifton Fadiman

The same advice I gave about cafés above applies to wine bars. There is wine aplenty in the area — Juveniles, Le Rubis, A L’Heure du Vin — so calling the First Arrondissement a “target rich environment” for oenophiles is like referring to Le Louvre as a nice art gallery.

We’re more Right Bank than Left Bank these days, so it’s a no-brainer to make Willi’s Wine Bar our home away from home.

Oh Willi’s, how do we love thee? Let us count the ways:

Your wine (of course, specializing in Rhones both new and aged), either by the glass or bottle, always interesting at a fair price; the food (classic bistro fare but made with flair and good groceries by chef Francois Yon); excellent bread; exceptional cheese; and best of all, a friendly welcome (whether you are known or unknown).

English is freely spoken (it’s still owned by the Brit – Mark Williamson (below) – who founded it in 1980) and your staff is cheerful and knowledgeable, and their patience (with idiotic Americans who can’t decide what to order) is as long as the bar (above).

And then, of course, there are those iconic posters:

(Poster boy)

And finally: the location — just a block from the Palais Royale — in the heart of where-it’s-happening Paris.

In other words, Willi’s is just about perfect, whether you’re hungry for a full meal, or seeking a simple sip. It’s as much restaurant as wine bar, but no matter what you’re looking for, it will send you away smiling.

Paris nourishes the soul, is how Victor Hugo put it, and Willi’s nourished us, in more ways than one on this trip.

We always returned to [Paris] no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. – Ernest Hemingway

As the sunlight fades over the distance of the Left Bank, a Parisian day always seems to end quietly, but regretfully, like a sigh.

There are few magic spells left to be woven in the world and this city still weaves one of them. How many cities on earth can you say that about?

When good Americans die, they go to Paris. – Oscar Wilde

Something else occurred to me 36,000 feet over the Atlantic: I am my best self in Paris — engaged, entranced and relaxed like nowhere else on earth. Perhaps it will be where I end my days. Who knows? There are worse ways to go.

This is the first part of a two-part article. Next month we go big game hunting among the haute-est of the haute cuisine temples of French gastronomy. 🥂🍾🇫🇷

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