Encore en France

Eastside Road, October 14, 2011—

I CALL THIS SITE Eating Every Day, and for nearly 1200 days now I've been pretty faithful. But I find I've forgotten last night's dinner, and that's too bad, because it was particularly delicious. It involved a salad with tuna and greens, and then gnocchi alla Romana, which is not the usual gnocchi at all but rather a sort of polenta. Well, I'm sorry: you'll have to take my word for it. It was upstairs at Chez Panisse, and it was delicious. Afterward we went to Aurora Theater to see A Delicate Balance, and I'm afraid the play drove the details of dinner out of my memory.

Afterward I spent an hour or two in one of my favorite cities, Grenoble, with our two daughters, who seemed to have been in their 'teens, and the man who later became the husband of one of them. Lindsey was not there. We spent a bit of time driving, then walking, then riding trams; we were in cafés and restaurants and a particularly interesting musée de la cinéma.

I woke up speaking French for a few sentences, then dressed and walked a block or so — we'd been spending the night at a friend's in Berkeley — to get caffelattes and croissants. Later, we stumbled on a promising boulangerie* in San Francisco: lunch was a jambon-beurre, than which nothing is more French; and at teatime we had a couple of canalés. (Dinner, at home, was sort of French by way of the southeast: polenta, an egg, mushrooms.)

In the remote past I've been described, from time to time, as a francophile. I don't think I am, really, though I certainly respect the French intellectual and cultural heritage. My culinary allegiances are more toward Italy, as you may have noticed. But it may be time to get back to France for a while — though I'll have to put the actual physical transport off for a few months.

*Alas, the bread from that boulangerie turned out to be not as good as it had smelled.