Category: france

I don’t do drugs, I am drugs: Montmartre and l’Espace Dalí

My only obligation as of late—and this is a testament to how low-key my life has been recently—is to make sure that my dear M’s plants don’t die while she is gallivanting around the United States like a regular jetsetter. I normally don’t take such obligations very seriously (“They were alive the last time I was here!”), but she was such an attentive nursemaid to my little window box herb garden when I was island-hopping on the Mediterranean that I feel kind of guilty.  So I’ve been making regular trips up to Montmartre, where she lives on the more residential side of Butte Montmartre.  You know, the mountain with Sacre Coeur at the top?  Perhaps you remember this little gem from a much earlier entry:

Anyway, I don’t love the hoards of tourists that frequent Montmartre, recreating scenes from Amélie and taking in overpriced burlesque shows at the Moulin Rouge. But the views of Paris from up high can’t be beat. I also really enjoy a stroll around the neighborhood that surrounds the Abbesses métro, especially if it involves ducking into the Librairie des Abbesses (30 rue Yvonne Le Tac, 75018 Paris), a smart and well-stocked bookshop with a drool-worthy selection of novels and poetry from small presses, books on psychoanalysis, and cookbooks. I know that list isn’t everybody’s bag, but man that bookshop gives me butterflies whenever I step out of the métro at Abbesses.

Frequent trips to Montmartre also increase the likelihood that I’ll be making an ill-advised stop at A.P.C. Surplus (20 rue Andre del Sarte, 75018 Paris), the outlet store of the iconic French brand with markedly lower prices than the main stores (and an accordingly odd selection of sizes). Barring such retail indulgence, a trip to M’s will usually involve a stop by Au Relais (48 rue Lamarck, 75018 Paris), a 106-year old café and restaurant that serves solid takes on classic French bistro food.  The food isn’t particularly remarkable, but the staff is always friendly, and Au Relais’s location on the corner of rue Lamarck and the San Francisco-evoking Mont Cenis is a lovely break from the tourist circuit just a few blocks up the hill. Their cheeseburger is delish and their crisp yet pillowy fries can’t be beat.

B and I have been on a quest to visit some of the smaller museums in Paris, and decided that watering day would be a good excuse to visit l’Espace Dalí (11 rue Poulbot, 75018 Paris, Métro Abbesses or Anvers), a small museum just a stone’s throw from Sacre Coeur that houses a permanent collection devoted entirely to Dalí’s work. Here we arrive at another installment of “another museum you might not be visiting on your trip to Paris.”

First of all, this is not St. Petersburg, Florida, and l’Espace Dalí houses mostly minor works in bronze and glass as well as a handsome collection of lithographs, engravings, and other original works on paper. The visitor is quickly made aware of what a hustler Dalí was in his lifetime, often producing or commissioning large numbered editions of each individual work, some of which seem rather rushed or glib. The space itself is rather funky and could use a serious paint job.  I’d been wondering who buys all those stick-on mirrors at Ikea, but now I know. The kitsch factor is high.  The museum includes a gallery with works for sale (mostly poorly-executed limited edition prints of Dalí major paintings), a gift shop with an assortment of Dalí perfumes and knick-knacks, a plaster trompe l’oeil reproduction of the medieval church that used to be on the site, and a delightful Dalí photobooth that allows you to insert your head into works from the museum or mustachioed portraits of the master himself.  There is also a small collection of Dalí’s furniture and home furnishing designs, including the iconic couch modeled on Mae West’s voluptuous lips and a swoon-inducing set of exquisite silverware.

Okay, so it’s funky and filled with minor works.  Why bother?  Well, if you’re a literature buff, you’re going to love looking at the many works on paper that Dalí produced in response to or to accompany classic texts, including the Old and New Testament, The Quest for the Grail, Alice in Wonderland, Tristan and Isolde, Ovid’s Art of Love, Romeo and Juliet, Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Freud’s Moses and Monotheism.

There is also a terrific selection of original photomontages that Dalí created for his tarot series (real enthusiasts can purchase a working Dalí tarot set in the giftshop for 79€).  I particularly enjoyed the 1971 gouache series entitled “Memories of Surrealism,” a wonderful mishmash of textbook art history images and the surrealist imagery that Dalí made the stuff of many college dorm rooms.

I’ve been reluctant to like Dalí in recent years, probably because his work has become the stuff of pop culture cliché. But his deep interest in allegorical texts and his nuanced reading of Freud were news to me, and I found the many works on paper at l’Espace Dalí to be serious and fascinating.

It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and if you’re after the popular oil paintings that everyone knows and loves, your time and money would be best spent on plane fare to Florida. But if you’re in Paris and looking for a different angle on the artist (and have a high threshold for kitsch), l’Espace Dalí might be worth a visit.

Oh, and the photobooth is lots of fun, especially if you’ve always had mustache-envy like yours truly.

Clarence Trolls J-Date: Getting Your Deli Fix in Paris

B has been working hard on learning Hebrew the past few weeks with the eventual goal of reading the Old Testament. I’ve been working less hard, spending my time buying books that relate to my dissertation and putting them in stacks, working on my origami, and marveling at B’s capacity for filling notebooks with lists of words and conjugations for hours on end. I spent the last few lazy afternoons reading Mary McCarthy’s The Group, which my mother loved when it first came out in the 60s and I’ve been meaning to read for ages. It was pretty great, though it made me thank my lucky stars that I wasn’t born in a different generation. As I have a penchant for loving jerks in literature, my favorite character was Norine Schmittlapp, the nemesis of “the group” and the closest thing to a real radical that McCarthy’s 1930s New York has to offer us.  Even so, her portrait is terribly bleak, if surprisingly funny. After her first marriage fails, she marries a wealthy Jewish banker whose family has changed their name from Rosenberg to Rogers, a fact that she shares with “a particular kind of relish” with her aghast acquaintance Priss.

In fact, Priss’s chance encounter with Norine near the end of the novel was one of the best and sharpest parts of the book.  Priss meets Norine in the park, where Norine is pushing her infant son Ichabod (“‘Aren’t you afraid he’ll be called ‘Icky’ in school?’ she asked impulsively. ‘He’ll have to learn to fight his battles early,’ philosophized Norine. ‘Ichabod the Inglorious. That’s what it means in Hebrew. No glory.’”) around naked in his expensive stroller. Norine casually pats her son’s penis, a practice that scandalizes Priss, who is terrified of arousing her own toddler son and would almost rather “he be dirty than have him get an Oedipus complex from her handing him.” Norine insists that Priss come over to her lavishly furnished but disheveled home that nevertheless the site of a well-regarded bohemian salon. There, Norine recounts to Priss her affair with another woman’s husband and is brashly matter-of-fact about her sexual proclivities and experiences. When Priss attempts to describe her (or more accurately, her husband’s) behaviorist theories of child-rearing, Norine condescends the poor woman.  “‘You still believe in progress,’ she said kindly. ‘I’d forgotten there were people who did.  It’s your substitute for religion. Your tribal totem is the yardstick. But we’ve transcended all that. No first-rate mind can accept the concept of progress any more.’” When Priss accuses Norine of having abandoned her political radicalism, Norine declares that she leaves politics to her husband Freddy:

“Being a Jew and upper crust, he’s profoundly torn between interventionism abroad and laissez faire at home.  Freddy isn’t an intellectual.  But before we were married, we had an understanding that he should read Kafka and Joyce and Toynbee and the cultural anthropologists. Some of the basic books. So that semantically we can have the same referents.”

According to Norine, Freddy tolerates this curriculum requirement because

“Freddy’s philopregentitive; he’s interested in founding a dynasty. So long as I can breed, I’m a sacred cow to him. Bed’s very important to Freddy; he’s a sensualist, like Solomon. Collects erotica. He worships me because I’m a goy. Besides, like so many rich Jews, he’s a snob. He like to have interesting people in the house, and I can give him that.”

In her own self-diagnosis, Norine’s only real problem is “her brains”:

“[I was] formed as an intellectual…Freddy doesn’t mind that I can think rings around him, he likes it.  But I’m conscious of the yawning abyss.  And he expects me to be a Hausfrau at the same time.  A hostess, he calls it. I’ve got to dress well and set a good table. He think it ought to be easy because we have servants. But I can’t handle servants. It’s a relic, I guess, of my political period. Freddy’s taken to hiring them himself, but I demoralize them, he says, as soon as they start in the house.  They take a cue from my cerebralism. They start drinking and padding the bills and forgetting to polish the silver. […] I’ve been trying to turn over a new leaf, now that we have a new house. I start out with a woman who comes to massage me and give me exercises to relax. But before I know it, I’m discussing the Monophysites or the Athanasian Creed or Maimonides. The weirdest types come to work for me; I seem to magnetize them. The butler we have now is an Anthroposophist. Last night he started doing eurhythmics.”

When Priss asks if Norine really regrets the Vassar education the women shared, Norine declares “ ‘Oh completely…I’ve been crippled for life.’”

Of course it’s obvious to both Priss and the reader that Norine’s real problem is not her cerebralism but her narcissism and anti-Semitism, which become apparent when calls her own husband a “Yip” and asks Priss with more than a touch of anxiety if she thinks that “Ichabod looks Jewish.” Norine is the great satirical monster of the text, a totally unsympathetic character that is an ingenious cipher for the other women’s anxieties, be they about housekeeping, sexual prowess, education, or parenting. But in her own right, she is such a riveting mess, with the neck-rings on her blouses and her dirty polar bear skin rug; her theories about underlying lesbian drives, oral gratification and penis-envy that are coupled with her brassy declaration that “Freud is out of date”; and her ad hoc parenting cues taken from anthropological texts about the Pueblo Indians. She wears little Ichabod in proto-Baby Björn to a funeral and declares that it serves the same function as a papoose, allowing her to give Ichabod the experience of death early, rather like the mumps.  She serves enormous wedges of chocolate cake to the children for lunch. I rather loved her.

Anyway, I don’t know if it’s my boyfriend’s newest obsession with acquiring Hebrew or reading about old-school New York and the dangerous shiksa Norine for the past few days, but I’ve been longing for some serious kosher deli food. I usually get my fix in Paris with a quick trip to Florence Kahn (24 rue des Ecouffes
at the corner of 19 rue des Rosiers, 75004 Paris, Métro St. Paul), a fabulous Jewish traiteur in the Marais with one of the best tile mosaic storefronts you’ll ever see.

Inside, you’ll find an amazing selection of fresh bread and pastries, pickled herring and other smoked fishes, blinis, pickles, goulash, latkes, and pierogis, as well as house-cured and smoked pastrami, corned beef, and tongue.  My go-to choice:

The Big Pletzel Sandwich. That’s really what it’s called, meaning ordering it always feels kind of silly:  “Je voudrais un Big Pletzel Sandwich, si’l vous plaît.”  For about seven euros, you get an enormous fresh bun filled with layers of homemade pastrami, pickles, roasted red peppers, fresh tomatoes, and some kind of unidentified special sauce. You can get it warmed up and take it to go, or you can sit in their lovely outdoor seating and watch the rue de Rosier hoards line up at L’As du Falafel. Florence Kahn is a great alternative to falafel if the lines at L’As are daunting or if you want a real carnivore fix.  It’s also a lovely place to buy the fixings for a picnic or an easy dinner, like this one I made earlier this week:

I bought the blinis and the glorious lox at Florence Kahn. I gave the blinis a quick shake in some melted butter in a pan, and added some crème fraîche, capers, and red onion that I had in my fridge.  Much fancier and more delicious than it had any right to be, especially given how easy it was to prepare.

The one thing I hesitate to buy and reheat, however, are latkes.  Somehow preprepared or frozen ones are never quite right, even if you fry them in oil. Ever since I saw a soggy tray of them at Florence Kahn, I’ve had proper latkes on the brain. Today I pushed up my sleeves and got to work. I’d never made them before, so I got some ideas from Epicurious and the food section of the New York Times online.  I settled on this compromise recipe (based on what I had on hand):

9 all-purpose white potatoes, peeled, grated, and drained

½ of a white onion, grated

1 shallot, grated

3 eggs, beaten

¾ cup of baguette breadcrumbs (you’re supposed to use matzo meal, but all the kosher stores are on vacation, just like the rest of Paris in August)

Salt and pepper

Canola oil for frying (I used extra virgin olive oil, because my kitchen is too small for ingredients I rarely use)

Applesauce and sour cream for serving (crème fraîche if you’re on this side of the pond)

After peeling and grating for what seems like forever, incorporate your potatoes, onion, shallot, and eggs together.  Then, add breadcrumbs (or matzo meal) gradually to soak up the excess liquid.  Salt and pepper to taste.

Heat up about two tablespoons of oil in a deep frying skillet. When crackly, add a heaping tablespoon of the batter to the oil, patting it down with the back of your spoon to form a thick pancake.  Fry each side 2-3 minutes or until golden brown and lacy at the edges. I was able to fit three latkes in each batch, and each batch took approximately one Róisín Murphy jam to cook. I incurred only two minor splatter burns in the whole process (the cost of doing business if you ask me).  I may or may not have been pretending to be Polly, the most sympathetic member of The Group, who cooked grandiose meals every night for her publisher lover (scandalous!) on her tiny hotplate.

Drain on papertowels.

Keep the earlier batches warm, either in a low oven (aren’t you a fancypants!) or in a covered pan.

Serve with sour cream and applesauce, preferably to a bewildered student of Hebrew, who will likely seem very impressed at your labor-intensive weekday lunch.

 

Hungerdome! The Macaron Battle

The idea: Two men enter, one man leaves. Need a refresher course?

You remember now. Man, I miss Mel Gibson circa 1985.

Today in the Hungerdome, three Parisian macaron stalwarts go head to head in a pseudo-scientific tasting battle.

The contenders:

Ladurée (16 rue Royale, 75008 Paris, Métro Madeleine). Ostensibly the inventor of the double-decker macaron that we know and love, the Ladurée bakery first opened its doors in 1862 and is undoubtedly considered the purveyor of classic French macaron. With the largest selection of our competitors, Ladurée sprinkles in seasonal offerings (lily of the valley, Granny Smith apple, grapefruit rose) with the classic macaron battery of flavors (lemon, chocolate, vanilla, coffee, pistachio, and rose). Long lines cue outside of the various pastel-signed Ladurée locations for cookies, chocolates, and massively overpriced brunches.  Most guidebooks would call Ladurée a must-do Parisian experience. The décor is totally over-the-top, with baroque brocades and gilded everything. The kinds of women I don’t particularly like make a point of eating here. Not for the claustrophobic or sociophobic. Definitely not for the overweight tourist phobic.

We chose: lemon citronella, pistachio, salted caramel, mimosa, cassis violet, and rose.

Fauchon (24-26 Place de la Madeleine, 75008 Paris, Métro Madeleine, though if you need to take public transportation, you probably can’t afford to shop at Fauchon). Operating in Paris since 1886, Fauchon is perhaps the most rarified of the fancy food markets in Paris, though for my money overpriced and overplayed (I would recommend real foodies go to La Grande Epicerie instead). The smallest selection of flavors of our competitors, Fauchon keeps their macaron selection tight and mostly classic (apricot and lemon mint were the most adventurous flavors available today). Fauchon is worth a gander if you enjoy looking at food that is too beautiful to eat or if you need a gift for that one person you simply can’t figure out a souvenir for.

We chose:  lemon mint, coffee, bourbon vanilla, apricot, salted caramel, and raspberry rose.

Pierre Hermé (4 Rue Cambon, 75001 Paris, Métro Concorde).  The newest kid on the block, Pierre Hermé (the pastry chef) defected from Fauchon in 1996 to start his own mecca for the sophisticated sweet tooth. A particular favorite of He Who Will Not Be Named and No I Don’t Want to Read His Blog Dammit, Pierre Hermé has wowed critics with his adventurous flavor palate. Much-hyped seasonal flavors in the past have included ketchup, foie gras and dark chocolate with gold leaf, strawberries and balsamic vinegar, strawberries and wasabi, white truffle, jasmine tea, and olive oil vanilla. Pierré Herme stores are clean, minimalist, and much easier on the senses than our other competitors.

We chose:  lemon, praline hazelnut, olive oil and vanilla, peach apricot and saffron, chocolate, and rose.

A few caveats:

I’ll ‘fess up. If I saw someone doing this exact same thing on the internet, after I stopped being jealous I would immediately be inclined to tell him or her to get a job. Or a hobby. So let me defend the decadence for a moment. It’s my boyfriend B’s birthday and we decided to do this in lieu of getting a cake. He doesn’t particularly like cake, and this was more suited our love of competition, grid-making, and egg white based cookies. I would never spend this much money on macarons otherwise. No matter how you slice it, these little buggers are expensive (around 1.50€ apiece). And there’s no savoring your booty. Macarons turn stale remarkably quickly – most purists will tell you that macarons must be eaten the day they are made. I made a point of giving horrified looks to all the tourists that were buying dozens of macarons that would be stale in 24 hours. Thinking about the fact that we spent 30€ on cookies in one day is kind of making me nauseous. Or maybe it’s the 15€ worth of macarons that are sitting in my gut.

Moreover, let me make it clear (as I’m anticipating all the heated responses): macarons are a highly subjective affair. Within an hour of my posting on Facebook that I was doing a macaron face-off, a half dozen different opinions from various corners of the globe arrived on my status update. From what I can tell, the real armed camps are between Ladurée and Pierre Hermé (the classicists and the avant-gardes, the oldest story in the book). Nobody really seems to assert Fauchon as their favorite, though the Fauchon store certainly has its fair share of admirers. For the sake of full disclosure, I’ll admit to being a die-hard Ladurée fan in the past. I like buying myself a few Ladurée citron macarons when I’m having a lousy day. Despite excellent word of mouth, I’d never stepped foot in Pierre Hermé until today. On the contrary, B is a big Pierre Hermé fan and avoids Ladurée as waiting in lines makes him want to unzip his skin and run. Neither of us had braved the terrifyingly slick world of Fauchon before today.

Finally, it’s important to note that the freshness and selection of flavors vary from day to day, even in the same stores. Macarons are fragile, temperamental little beasts! Moreover, sometimes these companies make horrible (but hopefully short-lived) mistakes, like MESSING WITH THE CLASSIC CITRON MACARON. I’m looking at you, Ladurée. I think this whole thing could have gone down differently on a different day, or at a different location, or with a different set of flavors.

You might ask then, why do it? Why did man go to the moon? Because it was there. Why sample eighteen different macarons in a single sitting and spend the next few hours tabulating and calculating highly subjective results and contemplating the onset of type two diabetes? Because we can. And because it was my boyfriend’s birthday wish.

As we were both avid science fair competitors in our youth, we tried to introduce some standardization to the proceedings. We sampled the lemon and rose flavors at all three locations (although the aforementioned MUCKING AROUND meant that at Ladurée we sampled the lemon citronella and at Fauchon we sampled the lemon mint and the raspberry rose). Moreover, B and I do differ a bit in our macaron preferences (he would argue I like the stale ones), but our combined scores should counteract slight differences in predilection.

The setup:

Each macaron was scored by each judge in four categories: looks, flavor, mouthfeel, and inspiration. By “looks,” we mean the aesthetics of the cookie, which is as absolutely important as anything else when you are dealing with this überfussy whatsit. “Flavor” encompasses taste, smell, and fidelity to the original concept (meaning a mimosa-flavored macaron should taste like an actual mimosa). “Mouthfeel” is an excellent word that beer connoisseurs use to describe how something feels when it’s in your mouth. Here, we mean the texture of both the cookie and the filling, that is, how tender and pillowy the combination. Finally, by “inspiration” we mean a variety of things, including creativity, originality, execution, and the generally ineffable “wow” factor of the macaron. Each category could receive up to five points from each judge, thus each macaron was scored out of 40 possible points.

After about an hour and a half of careful tasting, discussion, consultation with M over Skype, and rolling around on the couch moaning in agony about how much sugar we had eaten (okay, maybe that we just me), we arrived at this:

The verdict:

B’s scorecard:

My scorecard:

The final tally for each macaron:

Our individual favorites were the cassis violet and salted caramel at Ladurée, the rose, praline hazelnut and peach, apricot and saffron at Pierre Hermé, and the apricot at Fauchon. I spit out the olive oil and vanilla flavor from Pierre Hermé and the lemon citronella (WHY LADUREÉ, WHY?), as I thought they tasted respectively like handcream and mosquito repelling candles. I discovered that my boyfriend will happily eat my regurgitated cookies in lieu of wasting a buck or two. While the Ladurée and Pierre Hermé macarons were both consistently well-textured to our tastes, we really disagreed about the Fauchon texture. I found their slight crunchiness a welcome contrast from all the pillowy gooeyness, but B thought they were stale.

If you were just a simpleton like me, you’d be content to tally the six scores for each contender, add up to 10 bonus points for in-store experience (retail space, macaron packaging, wait time, staff kindness, general claustrophobia induction, etc.), and call it a day.  So for all the simpletons out there, that would mean the following:

Ladurée: macaron score 127 + 1 point for in-store experience = 128

Fauchon: macaron score 121 +  3 points for in-store experience = 124

Pierre Hermé: macaron score  133 + 9 points for in-store experience =  142

Taking additionally into account that Pierre Hermé won each of the individual flavor battles (lemon and rose), Pierre Hermé is the clear winner.  Can we have a cocktail now?

Unfortunately, my boyfriend is no simpleton.

Long after I had eaten all the crumbs and begun complaining about my bellyache, B was still calculating how exactly he wanted to assess our raw data. After much talk of the importance of each category, in-store experience, and rankings in the individual flavor battles, he eventually settled on this equation:

(Ia(Fa+Ma)2+(La+S/2)+T+B)/P = likelihood of enjoying a random macaron from the store

where a is average, I is inspiration, F is flavor, M is mouthfeel, L is look, S is in-store experience, T is number of macarons in top 10 ranking, B is flavor battle wins, and P is price.

Using this (batshit crazy) rubric, Pierre Hermé receives a 7.6, Ladurée a 6.2, and Fauchon a 3.7. While the ranking is still the same, this illuminates the disparity between Pierre Hermé/Ladurée and Fauchon a bit more clearly (as in, don’t even waste your time with Fauchon for macarons). Finally, B notes that according to his calculations (and this is a man who just spent the better part of his birthday evening creating an ultimate Hungerdome macaron equation), Ladurée has better quality (that is, taste and mouthfeel) on average.

As we’ve now crossed over the 1500 word mark, I’ll leave it up to you what you choose to do with this information. I suspect that the classicists and short-timers will still be going to Ladurée, the avant-garde foodies will hit up Pierre Hermé, and everyone will continue to not bother with Fauchon. Me? Well, despite the close race between my old standby Ladurée and Pierre Hermé, my eyes are now open to the delight that is the latter. I’m on pins and needles in anticipation of the release of their white truffle and foie gras macarons. That is, if I’ve recovered from this stomachache and sugar high by sometime this fall.

LEAVING THE HUNGERDOME:  PIERRE HERMÉ!

Clarence Hates Mystery Meat: H.A.N.D.

First of all, I don’t even understand what I’m supposed to call this place.  H. A. N. D. (39 rue de Richelieu, 75001 Paris, Métro: Palais Royale) stands for Have A Nice Day, but I don’t particularly want to call a restaurant a conversational pleasantry: “Do you want to go to Have A Nice Day for dinner tonight?” At the same time, it feels odd to spell out a recognizable word: “Do you want to go to H. A. N. D. for dinner tonight?”  So I’ve been calling it Hand, which I also kind of hate, because who wants to eat a restaurant called hand?

So I was skeptical about the name from the very beginning, but my friend BC won me over with talk of a duck burger, slick interior design, and a good review in Le Fooding.  I love duck! I love burgers! I love slick interior design! And Le Fooding is how I plan my week! But our attempts to eat at H. A. N. D. were foiled during BC’s final week in Paris, as it seemed to be either closed or too far out of the way every night we contemplated going. I’ve been pretty fixated on going since then, especially since B and I walked by the restaurant on our way to see the Rose C’est Paris exhibit at the BNF (resounding “eh” and I haven’t felt this bad about my boobs in years) and the slick interior design was resoundingly confirmed. H. A. N. D. is really darling inside with indigo walls, bare bulb light fixtures, antique globes, and stacked Campbell’s soup cans. The menu, a spare list of yummy-sounding burgers and a few other French bistro and American diner classics, was intriguing.  I’ll admit that despite having eaten some good ones, I’m still on the search for the perfect burger in Paris. Despite their ubiquity here, burgers just aren’t quite what my good little American self wants them to be.  As an aside:  damn you, SoCal residents, for getting another location of The Counter within throwing range of my old abode.

All this is to say I had high hopes for our visit to H. A. N. D. on Tuesday night.  B and I had met up with M at the Palais de Tokyo to take in their newest exhibit Dynasty. I keep going back to the Palais de Tokyo because I bought an annual pass during my initial museum-pass buying frenzy when I moved to Paris.  We then discovered that if you have a student identification card and say you are an art history student, admission is free, a fact that never fails to piss me off when we enter the museum.  On Tuesday night, our entry went something like this:

Ticket office employee:  Eight euros.

B:  Actually, I’m a student.  An art history student.

Ticket office employee:  Really?  What kind of art history do you study?

B:  Medieval art history.

Ticket office employee: (sighs) Okay.  You’re free.  Next?

M:  I’m an art history student too.

Ticket office employee:  Oh really!  How convenient!  And what kind of art history do you study?

M:  (flustered)  Uh, the same.

Ticket office employee:  Are you kidding me?  You also study medieval art history?

M:  Uh, yes.  I mean, no.  Photography.

Ticket office employee:  Medieval photography.

M:  Yes.

Ticket office employee:  Okay.  Here’s your ticket.

Obviously technological development and art history are not strong subjects at the American Apparel College for Future Hipster Museum Employees.

I have no idea why they decided to call this haphazard amalgamation Dynasty, as all that unites the work is the fact that it is new work by emerging young artists in France. Moreover, I seriously think that the Palais de Tokyo is actually trying to make me hate contemporary art entirely. The last several shows there have made me to nothing more than hit my forehead with the palm of my hand in frustration. While B carefully made his way through the exhibit, reading each unnecessarily cryptic description of each unnecessarily obtuse piece (you should see this guy in a museum that actually interests him!), M and I turned into ADD kindergarteners, taking silly pictures and making fun of our fellow museum goers. I can’t believe she’s leaving me for a month.

After a frustrating visit, I convinced everyone that H. A. N. D. would be the salvation of our evening. What couldn’t a duck burger improve? So we strolled into the first arrondissement for dinner, something we really never do unless we are getting Japanese. At first, everyone was happy with our choice. The restaurant is so cute! The staff is friendly! The menu is on a chalkboard! I chose the Super Duck, an anatine patty topped with sautéed mushrooms and melted chèvre. B chose the Cheese + + +, a regular beef burger with three different kinds of cheese. M chose the steak tartare as she is leaving Paris for a month and wanted a final fix before she left.

I’ll start with the good news.

B’s burger wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t the best burger in Paris, but it certainly wasn’t the worst (that honor goes to Café Francoeur in Montmartre). H. A. N. D.’s burger was at least properly cooked!  The fries were soggy and the bun was stale, but hey, it was edible.

Less edible was my “duck” burger.  First off all, let’s be frank:  it wasn’t made of duck. Lamb, possibly. Or maybe a strange cut of beef. But waterfowl never even got close to that burger. The mystery meat was dry, dense, and strangely mealy. The cheese and the mushrooms were good, however, and after drowning the whole operation in mayonnaise, I got it down.

But then there was this:

Let’s just say I didn’t want to have to do this, H. A. N. D.

When we told you, H. A. N. D., that the steak tartare was “pas correcte,” what we actually meant was:  “This steak tartare was completely inedible.  It is at once mushy and sinewy, and it is dark brown!  Frankly, it looks like someone defecated on the plate! That this dish would be served at any restaurant in Paris is an insult to French food! You should immediately fire your chef and your beef supplier. Short of this, you should at least remedy the situation and remove this atrocity from our bill, as my poor friend only ate two gracious bites before turning pale, quivering slightly, and setting down her fork for the rest of the evening. Shame on you! Make this right!”

I have to say that here is a difference in ethos between French and American restaurants. You say something is gross or inedible in the States and you can pretty much expect that it will be taken off the bill. H. A. N. D. even shocked me by French standards, as saying something is “not correct” in France is basically the most significant objection you can make to a dish. I almost hit the roof when we discovered that they still charged us for the steak tartare.  I wouldn’t have even written this review if they had adjusted the bill properly. But they didn’t, so here we go:

Please don’t patronize this restaurant. They will lure you in with their kitschy décor and their cute typeface. You’ll make stupid American assumptions, like “How could they mess up a burger?” But something is not right here, people.  Something is not right with the meat. Off-putting meat is the place where even I, devoted patron of sketchy taco trucks and guys who sell things out of coolers outside of nightclubs, draw the line. One of the best things about France is that meat is of such better quality across the board (largely because Europe has outlawed such terrifying practices as the use growth hormones in factory farms). So a place like H. A. N. D. that should specialize in high-end beef comes as a complete shock and something that nobody should put up with (especially not for a 14 euro hamburger – at current conversion rates, that’s $18.26). Frankly, I’m surprised and relieved that no one got sick from our visit. You might not be so lucky.

Clarence Beats the Heat: Grom and Les Banquettes

I’m kind of tired of writing about our vacation, so instead I’m going to tell you about what I’ve been up to since I got home to sad old dreary Paris. I have a remarkably difficult life, what with this seemingly endless summer vacation and all. I’ve spent a lot of these hot days sitting in front of a fan with my feet in a bucket of ice water. B, in fact, has started referring to it as “bucket time,” as in, “Is it time to go home for some bucket time?”

Other recent “beat the heat” Parisian-style strategies include:

1) Hiding out in air-conditioned movie theatres. One of my recent favorites is Action Ecoles, as they have been screening a Marcello Mastroianni series for the past month. Le sigh. This is how movie stars are supposed to be. I get kinda antsy when actors like Clive Owen and George Clooney are described as movie stars in the Old Hollywood kind of way. Bullshit. George Clooney couldn’t polish Cary Grant’s shoes. Likewise, they just don’t make ‘em like Marcello anymore. Poor B has been forced to listen to both mine and M’s audible swoons during both Matrimonio all’italiana and Divorzio all’italiana – though I suspect Sophia Loren’s presence in the former helped cushion the blows considerably. If you haven’t seen either of them recently (or like me, if you haven’t seen them before), I’d really recommend you check them out. They are funny, easy summer fare. It was also a lot of fun for us to try and recognize various Sicilian cities that we had just visited.

2) Making damn sure that we know where to get the best gelato in Paris.  And I’ll tell you what, I’m a little bit conflicted after our recent visit to Grom (81 Rue de Seine, 75006 Paris, Métro Mabillion). This Italian chain is a favorite among Parisian foodie bloggers, including He Who Will Not Be Named And Yes I’ve Heard of His Blog And No I Don’t Want To Read It Because How Smug Can You Be, Really. But Grom is a pretty cool gelato destination.  Standout flavors include their Crema di Grom (a vanilla gelato speckled with Battifollo (cornbread!) biscuits and Teyuna chocolate chips), Caffè espresso (a super-bitter gelato made with Guatemalan Genuina Antigua coffee – not for the faint of heart!), and the flavor of the month, Fiordilatte all’amarena Griotta (a heavy cream ice cream ribboned with candied sour black cherries).  They take a lot of care in scooping out their gelato and the company seems to have an excellent track record with the environment. So I’m torn, a little bit, away from my beloved Pozzetto. But Grom is all the way on the Left Bank, and Pozzetto is only three blocks away, so I think you can guess who wins that fight on a sticky day.  Still, should I find myself in St. Germain I won’t hesitate to stop by Grom, especially when oyster season starts again and I find myself conveniently in the neighborhood of Huîtrerie Règis more often.

3) Boozing with our friends and trying new restaurants.  I guess this doesn’t really constitute a “beat the heat” strategy as it’s basically what we do year round. But a couple bottles of cold rosé and shaded patio on a tree-lined street don’t hurt matters on a sticky summer evening. One such patio is located at the delightful Les Banquettes (3 Rue de Prague, 75012 Paris, Métro Ledru-Rollin), my first three marmite restaurant! The occasion was M’s husband AC’s final evening in Paris after a visit from Washington DC, M’s hometown and a likely site of Clarence on Vacay in the next few years. AC is as fantastic as his wife, and we had a great time getting to know him better during his stay. The four of us had two terrific meals, one at a Senegalese place that I’m saving for its own (forthcoming) entry, and one at Les Banquettes, which M had read rave reviews about.  And woah, ho, ho, was it yummy.  AC, M, and I all took the entrée of the day, a shrimp and salmon tartare served over an avocado mousse:

Which was bested by B’s entrée, a foie-gras and Roquefort terrine served with a dark chocolate brittle and a currant chutney:

Have I mentioned that I’m recently cursed with some bad food karma?  Not too bad, of course, but I’ve definitely been on a losing streak ever since I brashly declared that B was a terrible orderer who was doomed to be jealous of my plate? Well, pride goeth before a fall, and ever since my declaration B’s plates are looking better and better compared to mine. I guess I deserved it.  Here is his dreamy lamb en croûte and roasted tomato main course:

Fortunately my karma wasn’t too bad that evening and I ordered this (quite terrific) risotto with tiny squids in a port wine reduction.  It was heavenly. Bad karma or not, I suspect it would be tough to order a losing dish at Les Banquettes.

M and AC shared this beautiful cannette (duck):

And this amazing sea bream (?):

I wish I had more details about what we ate, because man oh man it was delicious. But we had taken AC and M to a Corsican bar beforehand so that they could sample our new love of Pietra, and then we somehow managed to polish off two bottles of rosé with dinner.  So to be honest, I was sloshed. I’m sort of amazed that there are even pictures to start out with. B, AC, and M, feel free to chime in here and correct my faulty memories of an exceptionally lovely evening.  Les Banquettes serves really wonderful, interesting versions of French classics and the guys that run it are super-charming.  Best of all, an entreé and main course (or a main course and a dessert) will only set you back 28€, pas mal for a place that has the kind of culinary word-of-mouth that this joint has.  At lunchtime, the 14€ formule comes with an entrée, main course, dessert, and a quart of wine.  Be still my heart!

So that’s what I’ve got in terms of beating the heat, kids.  Get yourself a bucket, good food, ice cream, and some lovely friends, and you’ll be set.