Paris Journal 2002

July 21

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On the Place du Tertre on Montmartre, there is always a crowd on weekends.  Artists by the dozens line the square, offering to draw your portrait.  There's an outdoor café in the middle of the square, and shops all around the sides.  Throngs of people wander through, including a chanting group of Hare Krishna zealots, at left. The view is impossible to capture on the camera.  Here's just a small part of it, looking toward the Georges Pompidou Center.  The towers to the left of center are the Mitterand Library, and the towers clumped in the middle of the view are all the way out on the banlieu. The evening seemed sunnier than it appears to be in these pictures.  The clouds were welcome because the temperatures hovered near 80 - somewhat unusually warm for Paris.   Very few places here have air conditioning. My friend Bob on Sanibel tells me that I wrote too much about food in my journal of two years ago.  But this year, Nicole told Tom she wants to read about food.  So I'm going to write a little about food.  Bob, you might want to skip this part.  When we were walking yesterday evening on Montmartre, we swore that we would not have a large meal.  That's because the night before, on Friday evening, we had a 7-course "menu de degustation" at L'Os a Moelle (The Marrow Bone) in the 15th.  We ordered sauvignon blanc and a big bottle of sparkling mineral water to help us through this meal.  It was only 13 euros for the wine and 3 for the water. The meal began with a small round pastry that had a delicate taste of cheese and pepper -- just a little something, a "mise en bouche," to get the appetite going. Then came a cool cream of vegetable soup, poured over a smattering of homemade croutons, the tiniest, tastiest mushrooms you can imagine, and very finely minced chives.   The soup was not rich or heavy -- it was light and delicate. The next course was foie gras -- not a terrine, no sir.  This was the real thing -- goose liver.  It was light and smooth and creamy tasting.  It was served with ache, wild celery (water parsley) - a little salad of minced and marinated root and the leaves of plant as well - in a very light coating of vinaigrette.  The foie gras we ate with the bread that came in little baskets.  There were two types of bread - both country style. One was brown, and the other was like a sourdough baguette.  Foie gras like this is heavenly, and very rich. Then came the next dish -- a small serving of St. Pierre, a fish that is also called doré.   The fish was perfectly done, and nicely spiced with herbs. And then came, believe it or not, a roasted half of a pigeon.  Pigeon tastes like duck, only it is richer (redder) and less greasy.  This dish also came with a tiny salad of tiny greens. The next course, le fromage, was a bit of chèvre (goat cheese) and more bread. And finally, the dessert.  Mine was called a marquise au chocolat.   It was a firm slice of wonderfully refined chocolate pudding, very rich but somehow light and smooth, on a pool of crème anglaise.  Tom had something called a truffle that was a ball of vanilla cream on a bed of chocolate with wafers attached. You think this was expensive?  Not really.  It was 38 euros per person ($38), and you don't have to add any tax or tip to that. So, back to our walk on Montmartre.  We left the crowds and walked down the hill a bit to a charming little cul de sac we've visited before, called Villa Leandre.  The St. Joseph tile, at left, was embedded in the wall over one of the doorways. Around the corner on Avenue Junot, we examined the real estate listings in a realtor's window.  We do this everywhere we go in Paris.  By the end of the summer, we'll know the Parisian real estate market well. We walked by the Lapin Agile, where all those famous writers used to get drunk.  I was charmed by the house next to it -- off white stucco with a tile roof and light blue-green shutters.  The place was dripping in ivy - Virginia Creeper is what we call it, but the French must have another name for it. Across from the Lapin Agile is a small park where one often sees painters at work.   Here, one artist draws a scene and includes the other artist in his picture. We found an appropriate place to eat, Les Temps des Cerises (The Time of the Cherries), on rue Lepic.  This small, friendly place had all of its front window/doors opened so that we had a nice breeze through the restaurant.  It was the kind of place where I could just have a salad for dinner.  I ordered the salade caesar, but first asked madame what was in the salad.  I knew there was something more than anchovies, because the price was higher than the salade nicoise price.  Indeed, the caesar was made with nice little slices of white chicken meat and, surprise, sardines instead of anchovies.  I must say that the salad greens one gets in Paris are so good.    It never seems to happen that one gets a salad with limp, old lettuce.     Standards are high for produce. Tom had pasta provencale, which may not sound light, but compared to the big dinner the night before, he wasn't doing too badly.  The pasta was homemade.  Yum.   His starter course was asparagus, and he was surprised that it was white asparagus.   I had seen so much of that in the stores that I wasn't too surprised.  Montmartre is a zany place.  You never know what you'll see.  We started to make our way down to the Abesses Métro station to go home and a young man with a hand drum passed us.  Then we heard him playing the drum in Place Gondeau, behind us.   We went back to hear him -- Tom said he was getting the sound of a full set of drums out of that hand drum.  The guy was really talented.  He was providing background sound for a couple muscular torch jugglers.  The torches were not lit -- yet. Continuing on our way, we passed a shop that had, of all things, ships lights and show lights.  It also had this little sculpture of the Michelin Man, sucking exhaust from a bomb or tank that he was straddling.  Weird.  Those colored things next to him are dice. Looking up, I was impressed with how the formerly ugly side of a building had been dressed up with a set of three pink stucco circles.  Aesthetics matter here. Finally, we made it down to Abesses.  The church isn't that old, but it is interesting because it was one of the first uses of reinforced concrete, making its interesting arches possible. <Previous Next> Back to b2cool.com