Can't a Man Get a Decent Salad Around Here?

Dateline: Paris, France, July. We were looking for that unique, elusive culinary experience, Carrie and I, in the Marais neighborhood--hoping to stumble off the beaten tourist routes. We'd been walking for hours. A warm evening, we strolled the quieter streets of stone, whiff of urine reaching us from alleys and doorways, narrow art studios and shuttered shops. The wind drifted us this way, that way, until we located on a slow side street a hip, shiny, busy restaurant, "Glou". Pairs of diners gabbed and laughed within steel, glass, soft pastel painted walls, smoked on sidewalk tables over gleaming salads and grilled succulent steaks. A tad pricey, but we plunged ahead and tiptoed in. Paris swarms with beautiful people, and the young and urban and rather local and professional frequented the place. We felt a bit frumpy, but felt at east when given menus by a pretty, vapid young server. How shall I say this diplomatically? We were afforded ample time to peruse the menu, me glancing over my shoulder occasionally scouting for the server. The retro menu offered new French cuisine, along with stalwart classics. For starters, I picked a salad of octopus, fennel, and arugula. Sounds promising, yes? Perhaps, I imagined, it would look something like this: Glimpsed in mind: arugula, fennel, and sea creature splashed with, say, champagne vinegar, Brittney Coast sea salt, fresh pepper, this initially tossed, then a light drizzle of virgin olive oil, tossed once again, then a festive dousing of fresh lemon juice followed by a light rain of lemon zest. The image came as a divine blessing; I saw the ingredients and concocted their harmony. What finally arrived was a poor imitation: the whole was drenched in olive oil (why would you do that? You, hey, idiot, I'm talking to you; put the, will you put the damn iPhone down and answer me? No, look at me!). If there lurked even a hint of sparkling lively vinegar it had been maliciously kicked to the side like a groggy parolee shuffled onto a Greyhound bus with a one-way ticket to the exburbs of nowhere. Where the arugula should have had a peppery herbal bite, oil; where the fennel could offer a delicate root sweetness, oil; when one should have tasted the octopus's recent memories of floating in an ocean wilderness, oil. One-dimensional, criminal, hopeless, and bloody inexplicable in a pricey restaurant in the Marais neighborhood in Paris, France, one of the queens of the culinary world (addendum: I have since been chided by a few friends who shook their heads and pointed out that I was still in a tourist area, that the French are not known for salads so why would I order one etc. True, and beside the point). Doubly criminal, I actually foolishly ate most of the salad--at least the arugula, a bit of octopus, the fennel--before realizing how bad it was. Note what a romantic imagination/expectation can wrought? The wooden tables, the carefully arranged lighting, the vibe of a side street culinary find that sizzled the air and buzzed the street all conspired to make me believe I was experiencing a delicious salad, bewitching my very own knowledgeable salad taste buds. As I peered down miserably into the pool of oil in which bits of pink octopus bobbed like sunburned Englishmen in the viscous Mediterranean sea, I felt betrayed, wronged, the cheek of Jesus stinging from a traitor's kiss. I called the waiter over. "This is the worst salad I've ever eaten," I announced. Not really true, come to think of it, but I was heady and pissed and over the line. She called the manager over. I patiently explained to him--who should know better--how this salad should have been orchestrated. After I'd pointed out the oil puddle on my plate with accusing finger, manager weakly replied "Oh, you do not like that much oil in your salad?" My head twisted like Linda Blair's on a bad night: dude, I brazenly offered, there IS too much oil in the salad, and it's ruined; this is objective fact, not a flutter of personal preference (I mean hello: there shouldn't be an oil spill in the plate, period). Who, I wondered, was the rookie who created this mess? A wiry fugitive from a banana boat bent on self-destruction? Was he on his iPhone the entire time? When the check finally arrived (note the continued adjectives modifying time duration) we found the salad had been comped, small but welcome mercies. We walked into the warm Paris evening uninspired, a little wiser, and then it hit me: the enchantment had dissolved. I needn't pilgrimage to Paris for a fine meal--though fine meals could be had in Paris, and we had a few (not many, but a few spectacular ones). No, let me get to that place where I will cook the fine meal myself. Perhaps then the beautiful people of Paris will come to me.

Thanksgiving It's Friday!

I see the red brake lights flashing like danger flares a quarter mile up, and my foot reluctantly slides from the gas pedal to hover over the brakes. I’m driving the I-80 freeway coming into Pinole, which is a suburb city about a twenty one minute drive from San Francisco’s Bay Bridge. I crossed over the Bay Bridge in pretty good time, I thought, cutting out of work a bit early to miss the Thanksgiving holiday traffic this Wednesday afternoon (I lived and worked in San Francisco at the time, working hard, always poor). I was looking forward to seeing my family in Sacramento, Mom, Dad, and younger brother, Jonn. Since I’d moved to San Francisco some years before, and worked on weekends, going to school during the week, I didn’t have many chances to visit family and old friends. So I was looking forward to a relaxing few days, eating, drinking, and laughing, frequenting my old haunts with friends who still hadn’t fled Planet Sacramento. Driving my white, square Plymouth, which looked like some government inspector’s vehicle, I sped past Emeryville, Berkeley, Albany, El Cerrito, and Richmond dreaming about a glass of good wine, my dogs romping around, my family all smiles. Then the red brake lights. Traffic. Must be a stall in the left lane. Happens all the time. We’ll crawl for a while, go around the poor shmuck with a flat tire, or the two clowns examining their fender-bender, then off we’ll go, KFOG blasting on the car radio, cool November sharp slant of sunlight in the air, the briny wind sifting off the Bay, and a few miles ahead the sunset in my rear view mirror; I’m rolling home at last. But there was no accident. No stall. No overturned big-rig. No police sting drug bust. From Pinole we crawled, and crawled, and crawled, brake lights flashing hotter as the night came on and the air cooled. Past El Sobrante and Rodeo. Past Hercules, Crockett, Benicia, Vallejo. We slithered and huffed and lurched all the way to the Carquinez Bridge. After paying bridge toll, suddenly the traffic lightened, and wide freeway opened up. We floored it, our cars roaring like rockets at lift-off, thinking angrily we’d make up for lost time. But then, no, not again: brake lights. The gods were toying with us. Traffic ground to a halt. And then we resumed the crawl. Past American Canyon and the turn off to the Napa Wine Country. The freeway by this time was four lanes heading east, and all lanes were clogged. This tragedy was made worse because highway 12 coming from Napa, Sonoma, Petaluma, and Santa Rosa poured more desperate cars into our choked freeway. My patience was gone, evaporated like dew under a Sahara desert sun. I cut over to the right lane—I may have cut some old lady off, didn’t care, out of my way!—and took the next suburban turn off, which connected to a road over the freeway and into a new housing development. I suddenly felt like the intrepid pioneer, an adventurer, carving a new path through the suburban wilderness, finding the secret passage up and over the Coast Range Mountains, some two-lane country road used only by farmer’s wives doing errands to the feed store, and wayward ministers driving their VW van en route to Wednesday night Bingo. Get me out of this suburban development, and I’ll be home free, dropping down into Winters in the Sacramento Valley, then speeding country roads all the way to Davis, and Sacramento’s only fifteen minutes away at that point. So on through the suburban development I flew, barely slowing for speed-bumps, and tearing up their freshly poured asphalt. The local road dropped me and my spitting out of range KFOG into a forested country road: eureka! This was an older road, roaring past nameless established towns. Just keep driving east, I told myself. Turn right. Straight. Slow down for the horses. Another right. Straight. This kept going for a half hour. I must be making good time! I told myself. Suddenly after a few more turns, I found myself entering another new suburban housing development. The old country road came to an end, turning into another freshly paved clean street with young trees and street names like “Dream Circle” and “Patriotic Lane”. What the binko? Up one street, down another. Up another, and another… No exit. There was no secret passage. I may have screamed. Cursed the gods. What I did was double back the way I’d come. All the way back. Having lost what would end up being an hour of my life, just to get back to the same place in the freeway, an hour later, and no closer to home. A few hours later I finally lunged into my driveway, 6501 Vernace Way, corner of 48th Avenue, South Sacramento, tired, impatient, gloomy, hungry, wild-eyed, and in desperate need to punch someone. Luckily, my dogs were happy to see me, and my Mom and Dad sympathized sincerely, lamented the traffic, was glad I was home, poured a fat glass of wine (my brother nodded from the TV; he didn’t give a shit if I’d arrived the following week). After I’d returned to semi-normal, smelling from the kitchen corned beef, boiled potato and cabbage meal my Mom knew I loved so well (Irish staple), I announced to my gathered kin that from here on into the future, I wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving on Friday. At first they all looked at each other as if I said I was moving to the Midwest to become an atheist trans-gender coal-miner. But then I explained that, remember people, I was the one driving from the Bay Area to share Thanksgiving with the family. I had to fight the traffic. Did it really matter what day of the week on the calendar we celebrated giving thanks for the food and being together as a family? Do we even know that the Pilgrims sat down with the Native Americans on a Thursday? We don’t even know any Native Americans, let along invite them to dine. Being teachers, both my Dad and Mom got Friday off anyway. My brother I’m sure couldn’t give a rat’s ass either way, as he only lived in an apartment a few miles away. So let’s shift Thursday to Friday. Same turkey, same mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, stewed greens, green beans, pumpkin and apple pie, but a day later. What do you say? They couldn’t say or do anything but assent: my logic was flawless. So from then on we had Thanksgiving on Fridays, and it worked out fine. Times changed. My father passed away, so it was just my Mom and brother (who’d matured). Then I got married, and my brother married, and the new additions adapted to the Friday Thanksgiving tradition at my Mom’s. We just had to bring out the extension for the table to widen for the five of us. But the food was delicious. My sister-in-law cooked amazing collard greens she learned from the Deep South. My wife found a recipe for winter vegetables baked in cream, heavenly. The wine flowed, the laughter rose. In the later years my wife and I would take our Thursday holiday and drive to Point Reyes National Seashore to gaze on the Pacific’s wild blue ocean, or walk out on the peninsula to whisper past the grazing, silent, proud mule deer. We’d lunch on fresh oysters from Tomales Bay and a crisp Riesling. Few people were out in the world (they were all stuck in traffic, desperate, brake lights burning into their eyes). We returned home blessed, retrieved the good china, and made a special Thanksgiving dinner, just the two of us. We clinked wine glasses, giving thanks, our cats curled up on the couch. The next morning we’d drive a freeway uncluttered all the way to Sacramento. House unchanged, the silver maple in the backyard taller, grander. The winter’s cool Delta Tule fog hushed over the quiet light. The dogs, older now, would jump around a bit. My Mom would smile from the chair, older too. My brother would rise to shake hands and give my wife a hug. We’d shop, no lines, and cook through the afternoon. My Mom would say a prayer, thanking the powers that be for our being together as a family. Then we’d raise our glasses for a toast. In another year or so my mother would also pass away, following my father across the San Francisco sunset, over the Golden Gate Bridge, to the western lands in another time. But for now we raised our glasses, feeling blessed, a family, here and now, together.