Save Me the Plums - Ruth Reichl Page 0,87

He stopped talking to stare, transfixed, at a menu tacked to a bright-green shutter.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A three-course menu for only twelve euros.”

I headed for the door. “We have to try it.”

“No!” Bill hung back, reluctant. “You know it’s going to be like the hotel I just left: too small, too noisy, and very uncomfortable.”

“What do we have to lose? It’s barely noon. We can always have a second lunch. And a third.”

As we stood outside arguing, the waitress pounced. “Venez, venez, vous ne le regretterez pas,” she said, herding us inexorably into the small restaurant.

She handed Bill the wine list. He handed it back. “Just water, please.” I watched as a curiously avid expression crossed the woman’s face. What could it mean?

“Je vous propose…” she began, with the French waiter’s classic opening line. Mid-sentence, she stopped herself and snatched the menus from our hands. “I will bring you lunch,” she announced. “You will be happy. Ça va?”

It was not really a question.

“Accras de poisson!” she sang out, setting fragile little fish fritters on the table. “I brought also the compote of tomatoes.” She set another dish down. “You must, simply must, taste this. The chef makes even the balsamic vinegar himself.”

Next she offered a plate containing two fluffy clouds. “Cervelle de veau.” She said the words with great pride and watched us take the first bites, her mouth turned up in a small, satisfied smile. It seemed impossible that anyone had managed to coax calf’s brains into this airy substance. “Christophe seeks out his own special suppliers,” she said proudly. “He uses nothing but the best. You know he used to work with three-star chef Anne-Sophie Pic.”

“Are you sure the menu said twelve euros?” I whispered to Bill; the waitress was now heading toward us, bearing a platter of hanger steaks. Setting it down, she forked meat onto our plates, then added a pile of chickpea pancakes. “Nobody, but nobody, makes panisses like Christophe,” she said happily.

I looked at Bill. “Have you ever read the M.F.K. Fisher story that begins, ‘That early spring I met a young servant in northern Burgundy who was almost fanatical about food, like a medieval woman possessed by the devil’?”

“No.”

“It’s about a waitress who takes such pride in her chef that at one point she says, ‘Any trout is glad, truly glad, to be prepared by Monsieur Paul.’ The food is superb, but as course follows course, Fisher begins to fear for her life.”

The restaurant was starting to fill up, and Bill looked over at the waitress as she stood at a nearby table, decanting a bottle of wine with quick economical gestures. “I think,” he said speculatively, “that she watched us arguing over the menu and decided we must be impoverished tourists, counting our pennies. When we declined wine, she knew she was right. She’s proud of her chef, proud of French food, and this is a private act of patriotism. She’s trying to seduce us with food. I haven’t had this experience in years, but it used to happen all the time when I was hitchhiking around Europe.”

“I remember that!” I was thinking of a meal in a small restaurant in Florence when I was twenty and another in Tours a few years later. People would lean in to tell me what to order and to share their favorite dishes. And every once in a while a chef would simply start feeding me, a point of pride because I was so new to the food. It was a generosity that was not reserved for restaurants. Once, stranded at Heathrow because of a canceled connection, the girl who’d been sitting next to me on the plane took me home to stay with her family. They were lovely people with a large house in Wimbledon, and I ended up staying a few days. Those things never happen when you travel on the excess express. The more stars in your itinerary, the less likely you are to find the real life of another country. I’d forgotten how money becomes a barrier insulating you from ordinary life.

Later, as I was writing about Paris, I wished there was some way to tell that waitress how her generosity had changed our trip. She’d opened the door to the Paris we’d forgotten, reminded us how it felt to be young, hopeful, and open to possibility. Reminded us how exciting it was to abandon security and run toward the life that is waiting.

After that lunch, Bill threw