Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) (25 page)

In the morning, we wake up early and starved, but there’s nothing to be had for breakfast—no cereal, milk, or even bread for toast. The nearby store doesn’t open until seven. I search the pantry and realize that we have maple syrup, and that if we substitute half-and-half for milk, we can have pancakes.

And when I relay this information to Matt, he offers to make them.

“Sure,” I say, already back in bed. “If you insist.”

My first-ever culinary hero, Kenny Shopsin, has a chapter in his cookbook (
Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin
) dedicated to pancakes, in which he explains that if you heat the griddle properly beforehand, and if the griddle is well-oiled, and if you pay attention, not undercooking or overcooking the pancake, “you could use boxed pancake mix or Aunt Jemima frozen pancake batter, and your pancakes would turn out just as good as mine.” (A few sentences later, he then admits that he actually uses Aunt Jemima frozen pancake batter at his restaurant.) In other words, good pancakes are all about how you handle the batter, not the batter itself.

On that early morning back in Los Angeles, I’m reminded of this while eating the ones Matt has cooked quite perfectly.

Pittsburgh is a beautiful city, which, for better or worse, is responsible for much of my constitution. But after our recent trip, I can’t say I’m ready to pick up and move there; I can’t say it would be a solution to my career problems or that life there would be any easier.

All I can say for sure is that for the moment, it feels really good to be home.

F
riends of friends have a one-bedroom apartment in Paris, which they occasionally rent out to people they know for the extremely reasonable price of $400/week. Back in September, Matt and I did the math. If we bought our tickets six months in advance and I used the frequent flyer miles I’ve had saved up for years, we could afford to go for two solid weeks.

And so, at the end of March, almost six months to the day from my thirtieth birthday, we board a nonstop flight from LAX to Charles de Gaulle. We’re going to Paris! Is there a better sentence in the world? Or a better feeling than that of the beginning of a vacation? Of leaving your regular life behind, of becoming someone else—someone a little more cultured, a little more Parisian—for a bit?

It’s a six p.m. flight that arrives in Paris at two-thirty p.m. the following day, though of course we’re still on Pacific Standard Time, so it feels like four a.m. We’re tired, but I really want to take public transportation from the airport to our apartment, which, in my previous travels, I always found to be a great introduction to the city. We take the RER train into Paris, but instead of switching metro lines and getting off at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, we decide to get off at Saint-Michel.
On the map, it looks close enough and we figure it will be nice to walk a bit. And it
is
. It’s sublime. The sheer history of the city hits you right away with its architecture, although our excitement begins to wane about fifteen minutes into the walk (as we’re doing it avec two suitcases on rollers and two large duffel bags).

The place we’re renting is located in the 6th arrondissement, on Rue Guisarde, a street so tiny it’s more of a passageway. It’s an attic apartment reachable via five flights of the oldest, most narrow spiral stairs I’ve ever seen. The landing in front of the front door is barely big enough for Matt, me, and our two suitcases, but when we open it, it’s love at first sight. The 345-square-foot one-bedroom apartment is both charming and modern, with ancient wooden rafters along the ceilings and views of rooftops from almost every window.

We drop off our luggage and immediately head back out. We pick up a pair of ham and cheese crêpes and do a small grocery run. But by seven p.m., Paris-time, I can’t keep my eyes open. I know I should stay up longer, but I’ve been dealing with a recurring case of insomnia for the past few months—some nights finding myself not able to fall asleep until five in the morning—and so when that feeling I’ve been longing for, that straightforward sense of falling asleep naturally and without a racing heartbeat, comes, it’s irresistible. I take it. (Of course, I also wake up at two a.m. local time, ready for breakfast.)

Our first few days are a blur of unpasteurized double-cream cheeses, wine,
crêpes sucrées
, booking dinner reservations for later in the trip, and long, meandering walks to museums.

And by the end of our first week, I’ve come down with a specific brand of nausea. All of a sudden, my body wants
nothing to do with butter, cream, or cheese, aka the building blocks of French cuisine. When it first hits me, dry toast and tea are the only things I want, though the following day, avocado, rice, and hot sauce sound appealing. We seek out a Korean restaurant in our neighborhood, where I happily eat
bibimbap
with lots of chili paste mixed in.

Unfortunately, the next night we have dinner reservations—which we’d made the previous week—at Les Papilles, a very French restaurant that came highly recommended. It’s a place where you’re not given a menu. You simply show up and are served that night’s specific three courses. This sounded awesome last week, but now it seems much less so. But Matt is really excited, and I know that if we cancel, we most likely won’t be able to get a table another night.

So I put on my boots and we circle down the five flights that spit us out onto Rue Guisarde. It’s chilly and slightly raining, and our route takes us through the Luxembourg Gardens. It’s so Parisian and beautiful that by the time we arrive at the restaurant, I
almost
feel like eating. It’s a tiny place (though every Paris restaurant seems tiny compared to our American standards), and the same man who took our reservation last week walks us to our seats. Once seated, he explains that they serve wine by the bottle only, and whatever we don’t drink, he kindly says, he can cork and we can take home to enjoy. I know we should choose a red, but a crisp, citrusy white sounds like a cure-all to me, and so from the wall to our right, we have this kind Parisian gentleman help us choose a white wine that will go with the night’s menu.

I take a sip, and it seems to work. I think I’ll be OK.

Our first course is beautiful. The waiter serves us two wide shallow bowls with crisp lardons, golden croutons, and
chopped asparagus steamed just to al dente resting in the middle. He then sets down a soup tureen filled with a creamy kelly-green broth and ladles it into our bowls. Though I know that everything is cooked to perfection, the aroma is that of butter, cream, and bacon, and I’m not even tempted to taste it. Matt, on the other hand, goes back for seconds.

When a different waiter comes to take away our plates, he must see the relief on my face.
Yes, please take away the stunning bowl of soup!
“You don’t like?” he asks in English.

“No, I did,” I say, nodding, unconvincingly.

“We
loved
it,” Matt says.
“Parfait.”
(Matt and I are both the type of people who hate to make others—particularly strangers—feel uncomfortable. When Matt is handed a sample of something at the grocery store, I always laugh at his over-the-top response: a thumbs-up coupled with, “I’m going to shop around but I’ll definitely swing back and pick this up on the way out.”)

In between courses, the warmth and coziness of the restaurant starts to feel stifling. I ask Matt to hand me his phone so that I can pretend to take a call outside just in order to breathe in the cold fresh air for a bit.

The next course is even prettier. It arrives in individual-sized oval copper pots. And when the lid is lifted away, we discover a crispy-skinned chicken breast and leg topped with a few sprigs of thyme. Underneath are more perfectly handled vegetables and al dente ziti in a pale green pesto-cream sauce.

Pasta and chicken sound OK, but the sauce is so rich that I can’t eat more than a few bites. I transfer some of my portion to Matt’s copper pot so that this time the waiter is less suspicious when he collects our dishes.

The next course, the cheese course, is enough to make me
want to cry. In my regular, non-nauseated state, I dream of cheese courses, which evoke a different way of life—a less practical, more indulgent, kinder one. So when, on a rectangular piece of slate, from left to right, we’re introduced to a slice of soft Brie-esque cow’s milk cheese with a delicate white rind, a quenelle of house-made orange and fig fruit paste, followed by a red stripe of ground chile, I do my very best to enjoy it. Unfortunately, I can only show my appreciation by taking a photo of it with Matt’s iPhone.

Our last course is ice-cold chocolate mousse—the kind of chocolate that has all sorts of notes to it. It’s rich but clean-tasting, sweet but bitter, chocolate with a touch of vanilla. (All this I get from my one spoonful.)

I’ve never experienced a more beautiful meal, and I’ve never been happier to get the check.

To add insult to injury, that night my insomnia returns, and with it all of the anxieties I’d hoped to leave in Los Angeles—you know the ones, e.g., my career prospects or lack thereof, this book proposal I’m working on, and, of course, my newly ticking biological clock.

And so, instead of lying there in the dark with negative thought after negative thought just like I would at home, I get out of bed and move to the couch, where I can turn on a light, read, and not resent (quite as much) the way Matt just falls asleep and stays asleep.

I pick up one of the books from the apartment’s collection. It’s one I remember the owners recommending when they’d given Matt and me the keys, Adam Gopnik’s
Paris to the Moon
. It’s a memoir that focuses on the five years Gopnik lived in Paris with his wife and young child. And perhaps because the very first sentence mentions rue Saint-Sulpice and I can
actually see the top of Saint-Sulpice from the living room windows, I keep reading well into the dead of the night.

As I recover from my bout with what I can only diagnose as a case of too much French food for my typically Southern Californian/Mediterranean-fed gastric system, Matt comes down with a horrible cold. It’s so bad, I turn to Rick Steves’s guidebook to find out how to say the words cough and fever so that I can explain his symptoms in French to a pharmacist.

We are supposed to leave that afternoon for a day trip to Reims, where champagne is produced and where you can take tours of the production process and, you know, drink lots of champagne, but Matt is in no shape for travel. Instead, he spends the day sipping miso soup made from a packet and nonironically reading Dan Brown’s
The Da Vinci Code
. As for me, I walk to our neighborhood café, laptop in hand, and enjoy checking my e-mail and reading the Wikipedia pages on Saint-Sulpice, Josephine Baker, Musée de l’Orangerie, and everything else I’ve wanted to look up for the past ten days. We spend a few days like this—not really touring the city, just living in it.

Once Matt is feeling better, we make it to Versailles, which we love, though our tour is so crowded with other people we find ourselves rushing a bit through each room and are almost relieved once we realize we’ve seen everything and can go back home. On the train back, we discuss what we should do that night. We still have a few restaurants we want to try.

“Or we could pick up stuff at the grocery store, I could make huge bowls of pasta, and we could watch the end of
Ronin
?” Matt says in a way that makes clear that he knows
that that’s probably what we
shouldn’t
do. Because, well, we’re in Paris, and we’re both finally feeling better. We should probably do something we can’t do in Los Angeles, right?

There’s a paragraph in the beginning of
Paris to the Moon
I go back to again and again. In it, the author seems to almost warn the reader about what his book is really about, that though yes it’s about Paris and a specific five-year period—from 1995 to 2000—it is really mostly “about life spent at home.”

“Life is mostly lived by timid bodies at home,” he writes, “and since we see life as deeply in our pleasures as in our pains, we see the differences in lives as deeply there too. The real differences among people shine most brightly in two bedrooms and one building, with a clock ticking, five years to find out how and why. Not just how and why and in what way Paris is different from New York, but how [one] might end up feeling about the idea of difference itself—about the existence of minute variations among people: which ones really matter and which ones really don’t.”

On our last day, I type up a list of my favorite moments from the trip so that I won’t forget them. Our first fancy dinner at L’Epi Dupin, and specifically their carrot ginger soup, makes the list. The dance exhibit at the Pompidou (and our impromptu snack at the museum restaurant where we accidentally ordered an apple tart with ice cream when we thought we were ordering French fries) makes the list. Our evening walk down to the Seine to see the Eiffel Tower lit up makes the list. And, surprisingly or not, our pasta night “with the
exciting conclusion of
Ronin
” makes the list. (For some reason, we found
Ronin
, which is decidedly
not
a comedy, to be hilarious.)