Paris Journal 2010 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com
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A few days ago, when we walked up the avenue Suffren in the evening, I had noticed a nice looking restaurant – Chamade – that was open and looked good, and said that we’d have to give it a try. Yesterday evening, we tried to give it a try, but when we got there, we found it closed for vacation. Here I was going to reward them for being open in August, but no, they don’t deserve that reward after all. Actually, we will give them another chance, but I’m not sure it will be this summer. We went back down Suffren to another place I’d noticed that I thought we should try: Vin & Marée, or “Wine and Tide” in English. This is one of the few names that sound better in English than in French. It is a seafood restaurant, of course, and Tom was a little bit hesitant at first, until he saw the 18.50 euro menu, which included salmon as a main course. Salmon seems to be the one fish he’ll eat these days. Another reason he relented was that the 18.50 menu includes café gourmand. We went in. I like the décor, but I wasn’t sure about the service. The two young women who were serving did not seem to be very professional. But it was clear that the food and wine are taken very seriously by whoever is in charge of the kitchen and the menu. The menu had lots of choices. A number of them were large plates of various combinations of seafood, meant to be shared by two or more people. The usual size appetizers and main courses were offered, too. I reasoned that since Tom would be ordering an appetizer, main course, and dessert (café gourmand), I really didn’t need anything more than a main course. And for that main course, I decided to splurge: I selected the sole meunière, at 35 euros. We spoke nothing but French, of course, but I was impressed by one thing about the servers: their English. When a group of four well-dressed and well-coiffed east Asian tourists came in to dine, they asked to have the entire blackboard of specials explained to them in English, and the servers did that very well. First, we were given a mis en bouche consisting of a small dish of mussels cooked in white wine and butter. Yumm. I consumed most of those. Tom only ate a couple. Tom was unsure what to order for an appetizer, so he just selected the friture de l’éperlan without knowing what it was. I struggled to remember what éperlan is, but all I could think of was that it is some kind of fish that we don’t normally have. So these would be some kind of fish fritters, I thought. Éperlan is smelt. Tom received a big pile of fried smelt, heads and eyes intact, with a homemade mayonnaise on the side. I helped Tom eat the smelt, and they were good, but we couldn’t eat them all without ruining our appetite for the main courses. (The photo above was taken after we’d consumed a good part of the smelt pile.) Tom’s salmon arrived with a tangy butter sauce called a beurre acidulé. The color of the sauce was lurid yellow, but Tom said it tasted very good. My sole meunière was to die for. It was, without question, the best sole meunière I’ve ever consumed. I was excited as soon as I saw it. I must tell my friend Maddy about it – she’s a connoisseur of sole meunière like I am. Our server asked if I wanted her to prepare it – i.e., to take it off the bone. By that time, I was convinced that she wasn’t very smart, because of things she’d said and done, and she certainly was very young. I reasoned that I would be far better at the delicate task of removing the filets of fish from the bone than she would be. I told her I would do it. She looked a bit surprised (Americans don’t know anything, I guess), but it was the right thing for me to do. I did it expertly, leaving not one tiny little bone in the fine fish flesh. I doubt she would have done it so well, especially the small bones at the top and bottom edges of the sole. The sole was served with a little side dish of the most perfect beurre blanc sauce I’ve ever experienced. And the fish was cooked to perfection – just right. It was delightful. In a small round, white-porcelain, covered side dish were creamy, smooth puréed potatoes. We like Joel Valero’s puréed potatoes best (at Oh! Duo restaurant), but these were mighty fine. We shared the purée. It was a heavenly dinner. If you love sole meunière, this is definitely the place to order it in Paris. Tom’s café gourmand came with a teeny weeny little tart, a cookie, a pistachio cake, and an orange pot de crème. Very nice. Vin & Marée also prides itself on its wine, as the name would suggest. The wine list is extensive. I had a small carafe of Muscadet white wine, which is a dry wine in France, believe it or not. It was probably the best Muscadet I’ve had. The restaurant also sells wine as a take out (pour emporter), which is somewhat unusual for Paris. While we were dining, Tom could look out the window at a lovely courtyard. Across the garden, he could watch a couple making a serious dinner for guests, in their seriously nice looking American-style kitchen. Inside, I could watch the lobster tank, in which there was the largest lobster I’ve ever seen. This monster was not the same as a Maine lobster. It was some kind of spiny lobster. We listened to jazz CDs again when we arrived home after dinner. Today I think we are going to take a major walk, involving Montmartre and many things between here and there, including a drum store. Sign
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Saturday, August 14, 2010
Fried
smelt with homemade mayonnaise, the Vin et Marée restaurant on the avenue
Suffren, sole meunière, and pavé de saumon à l’unilatéral, beurre
acidulé.
Notre
Dame.
Our
table at the back of the restaurant was near a window that faced a nicely
kept garden/courtyard with a beautifully maintained apartment building that
had another staircase like this one, with the slanted windows giving the
illusion of a non-flat façade, on the Closerie des Lilas building. So I guess it was just an architectural
technique of the time.
If
we can get free tickets again this year, we will probably go to the big
Antiques Biennial show in September at the Grand Palais. We object to paying for tickets to go to a
place where they are trying to sell you big-ticket items. |
