Duck and Bull Stories

May 6-8

I think we were starting to wear down on Saturday morning. I went out for coffee. Joanna stayed in. I brought some yogurt and croissants back with me.

We didn’t get out till after 3, and then decided to stay near the hotel. We prowled those touristy lanes near the river.

Most of the places in that neighborhood are cafes promising that their food is traditional French. But there are also gyro shops, Greek and Italian restaurants, a Tunisian bakery, an Irish pub or two, and even a ’50s-style American diner knockoff.

Joanna had a craving for won-ton soup. So of course we found that (I think not too far from the Church of St. Severin, whose name is on at least two bars). 

It is spelled “wan-tan” in the English part of the menu. In French, it’s raviolis chinois.

The won-tons contained shrimp, along with the ground pork, which gave them an unusual, almost sweet flavor. I tasted the broth and found it all right.

I didn’t try the noodles because I was down to my last vest and had to make it last for a few extra days. Joanna says they weren’t very good.

We’ve eaten at a couple of Chinese restaurants in Paris, and neither of us expected Chinatown, so we weren’t sadly disappointed. But for me (an admitted late-comer to the genre) I’ve had better Cantonese at several places that Joanna has shown me in New Jersey. 

Joanna believes, though, that the dishes we tried in Paris contained little or no MSG. At least, she hasn’t had any of the bad reactions she gets from eating doped-up food.

Anyhow, that was the soup course.

We wandered up and down some narrow streets, including a few that may have been residential. What would it be like to live in this crazy neighborhood? 

It could be a hell of a lot of fun. First off, you could go out to dinner every night and not have to eat in the same place for months.

We stopped at a deceptively sophisticated looking place called Le Lutece. “Lutece” is derived from the old Latin name for the Roman colony here, Lutetia, which I expect is feminine. How it got the masculine article I don’t know.

We ordered more Bordeaux and had snails, which are always good, and then lamb shank to go with it.

I dunno. The wine was fine, so for the most part, I was OK. But the lamb wasn’t quite right. The meat broke up with a fork and came off the bone easily, but it was also dry and the texture was wrong. I wonder: Did they reheat it in a microwave oven?

Larry told me there are French fooderies (can’t call them cafes, brasseries, bistros, or restaurants) that have begun to do that, and it made my heart sink at the time.

That took care of the entree and plat.

We next went to a brasserie on the Boulevard St. Germain. I had seen it from the bus several times, but this was the first time we had gone by on foot. So we stopped at the Boul Mich.

Why it’s named for the Boulevard St. Michel when it’s on St. Germain, I don’t know. Maybe it used to be around the corner. 

Anyway, why not?

We wanted something not sweet to end dinner. In France, that means cheese. Claude, for instance, always wants cheese at the end of a meal, and we enjoyed quite an array of cheeses when we were at the Chabrans' house.

As he pointed out, it can be an endless meal in itself. 

I have bread and cheese, but I’m running out of wine. I’ll take more wine. 

I’m running out of cheese, so I’ll take more to go with the bread and wine. 

Now the bread is running short, so I’ll take some more to go with the cheese and wine. 

Now my wine is almost gone, so I’ll pour some more. 

The cheese on my plate is almost gone …

Anyhow, I expected a modest Euro portion and asked for the selection of cheeses. 

For some reason it was American portion. There could have been at least a half pound of cheese on that plate. 

There were four of the creamy cheeses with the moldy crust. One may have been Camembert and another Brie. I have no idea what the other two were.

There was a blue cheese also full of wonderful mold.

Joanna tried them, but she is just not a mold eater, so she focused on the other three selections, which were hard yellow cheeses.

We put away as much as we were able. I ate far more than I should have. But no regrets. The stuff was just wonderful with Bordeaux and Cotes du Rhone and slices of baguette. 

I would have been happy to have made that my dinner—with a few snails, mind, as an entree, of course.

Sunday morning I forgot it was Sunday till we heard the church bells ring. There was no time to go to a service because we had a noon checkout time and, besides, had asked to have a car pick us up at 11:30 to take us to Charles de Gaulle airport.

My last trip to that airport was one of the worst travel experiences I’ve had. We stayed at a place in the boondocks, St. Witz, in an isolated neighborhood that didn’t even have decent food. 

We stayed there because it was supposed to be close to Charles de Gaulle.

We had asked for a car to pick us up. The driver didn’t feel like showing up. 

After waiting half an hour past time, I had the desk call him, and he wanted to know what plane I was on, so he could tell me when I wanted to be at the airport. 

The asshole couldn’t even find the right door to the terminal.

The airport itself is poorly designed and poorly run. It can even make Newark Liberty look almost good. 

But this time around, the experience wasn’t so bad.

The car showed up early at the Three Colleges. The driver met us in the lobby. He stowed our bags and got us to the airport in about half an hour. 

Yeah, in addition to everything else wrong with it, CDG is way out in nowhere and you can’t tell what traffic’s going to be like. this Sunday, though, was smooth going.

I think the airport’s in Roissy, the suburb where the sadomasochistic chateau is in “The Story of O.”

This time, in self defense, I had booked us a room at an airport hotel, The Pullman Roissy Charles de Gaulle. 

This was the first time that I’ve been able to get a room at this airport. I booked that first and then built the rest of the trip around it.

It’s generally not the best way to go, but it’s the best if you are flying out of Charles de Gaulle.

We got to the hotel around noon and had to kill some time before the room was ready.

We started by sharing a Campari and not soda in a couple of easy chairs near the origami red bull in the lobby. So far, I haven’t been able to get a Campari and soda in Paris. Maybe club soda is a banned substance.

I’ve had Campari with tonic, Aperol with Prosecco, and the latest, Campari with Perrier. They aren’t even close. Club soda is salty seltzer and is the only thing to go with Campari.

The color of the drink did, however, coordinate with that near-life-size red origami bull standing near the elevator bank.

The bull is an advertisement for the hotel restaurant. At first I guessed that it was made of metal assembled to look like giant origami.

But it seems in fact to be the real thing. There’s a video running nearby that shows how the artist assembled the huge sheet of paper he needed. It shows in fast motion how it was folded and then painted.

We drifted over to the bar because the restaurant was closed and shared a croque monsieur for lunch. It was OK, and the baguette they served with it was better.

I had a Pouilly Fume and a Sancerre. The Pouilly had a hint of smoke in the flavor. When Joanna took a sip, the flavor reminded her of an ice wine we once tasted on Long Island. 

The Sancerre was good, but I found it a little fruitier than the Pouilly.

After two glasses of wine with lunch, I was ready for a nap.

We went down to dinner around 7. Joanna had roast chicken and a side of rice. I had a duck steak with roasted potatoes.

The ducks, and maybe the snails too, are going to breathe a little easier when I leave the country.

Between the two of us, we went through four glasses of an Haut Medoc that was the best wine I’ve tasted in days. It had a strange edge, not too strong, but almost as if there was Cabernet Sauvignon in the mix. Maybe there was.

We went downstairs for breakfast on Monday morning. They wanted to charge us more than 50 euros. 

No, I can’t do that. I won’t pay that for coffee and a croissant. Then they tell us about the express breakfast—a cup of coffee and a croissant for 9. I expect to overpay at a hotel, so that seemed reasonable. 

I drank Joanna’s coffee and mine. She doesn’t drink caffeine, so she had a cup of hot water.

They brought two croissants. There were also two pastries made with chocolate, but we found them unpalatable and so left them.

We walked our bags to the airport shuttle and had no trouble at check-in. 

The bottleneck is at passport control, so there were no lines at security.

Joanna had an apple turnover and I had a small bottle of wine for lunch. 

Get this. Here we were at what is supposed to be the principal airport of France's capital city, and the wine wasn’t even French. It was a Tempranillo from Spain.

The plane got off on time. I drank some more wine.

God, everything went so well that it was boring.

I had a few glasses of red, and a shock with the food. I know there’s only so much they can do with food on an airplane. They have to hand it out to all those people in a tight space, so it has to be compact and portable.

But after all the great food in Paris and Provence, eating what United calls chicken curry was close to punishment.

The wine, especially by comparison to what I had been drinking for three weeks, was a bit of a letdown, too. But it kept me happy.

The plane landed in Newark more than an hour ahead of schedule, so we got to Joanna’s with plenty of time to wrap this message up.

I was expecting to rush out to catch the train to New York, but instead there was plenty of time to finish.

I’m headed for my old New York neighborhood. I have several bartenders whom I haven’t seen for months. Have to let them know I’m still getting around.

Be happy, everyone. 

Harry