Travel

Alas it was time for my vacation in France to end with the new year in full bloom and my duties back in New York City calling. I had a farewell dinner with my father at a little bistro run by a very young chef. My father is a voracious reader of all the Parisian publications and came upon a review of the burgeoning restaurant Jadis. Various newspapers have lauded it as the best of its kind in the fifteenth and possibly the city. The meal was very good in a classic bistro fare sort of way though I feel it is a stretch to call it one of the best in Paris let alone the very best. The food offered was mostly updated classics and reinvented French conventions. The cuisine could be called new wave French I suppose, archetypal though innovative.

The food was mostly game oriented and incorporated every part of the animal from kidneys and entrails, to feet and brain. My father ended up being the bolder of the two of us, ordering two dishes that I loved tasting but would rarely order myself. He began with the pied d’agneau or lamb trotter. The round white bowl that appeared contained a strange looking soupy ragout with chunks of lamb foot meat, snails, button mushrooms, and sliced cardoons. It sounds more like a bizarre sorcerer’s potion but those were in fact the ingredients and they worked surprisingly well. The lamb trotter tasted like fatty pieces of roast leg of lamb and the saltiness of the sautéed snails matched well with the texture of the mushrooms. My father was overjoyed with the dish; naturally a big fan of organ meats given his French heritage. I tried two or three bites and would have gladly accepted my own serving.

I learned to eat the year
I starved in Paris.

Like so many American kids, I lived the cliché of being a poor, broke, foreign exchange student there to lap up some culture and meet some romantic French men.

All the myths came crashing down the first month. The guys were scruffy, unwashed and uninterested. The universities went on strike. The dollar crashed against the franc, sending Paris food prices beyond the reach of U.S. students.

I was 19 and living in a 12th century building on the rue Seguier and I refused to go home. 

A fascinating journey can be made driving through the narrow, winding streets of Verona and onto the busy auto strada. Past AGIP gas stations and tessellated pylons contrasting with the verdant countryside and the endless rows of vines upon which tiny grape buds soon would appear. Almond and cherry trees with pale green leaves beginning to decorate their elongated arms, and ancient farmhouses painted in faded pinks and umbers seemed not to have changed since Romeo and Juliet pranced in the sun stroked fields. In the distance smoky purple hills, unperturbed by the comings and goings of travelers and my group of voluble giornalisti, watched over peaceful vistas, till we arrived at the Villa Quaranta.

Set in sculptured gardens, this lovely Villa became a wonderful setting for a very special dinner orchestrated by the chefs of five restaurants from the surrounding areas of Venice, Treviso, Padua, Verona and Vicenza, together with many wine producers of the Veneto. Before the grand scale dinner began, a classical concert was performed by members of the New Italian Percussion Group. A most unusual concert using bottles as instruments: long, tall and thin bottles; fat, round and bulbous bottles; bottles made from green, blue and plain glass and goblets of red and white wine on multi-level shelves producing varied musical tones, all blending into a cacophony of sound.

Tucked into the tiny village of Meranges, high in the Pyrenees of Spain and a stone’s throw from both France and Andorra, is Can Borrell. In Catalan, the home language of Meranges, Can means house. This little treasure of a house is a very old inn with 6 rooms for guests and a restaurant that turns out fantastic breakfasts and dinners. We got to Can Borrell the hard way – taking a 5-hour drive with endless switch backs on a cliff-hugging road. This is deep in the Pyrennees, home to Catalan, French, and Spanish speakers in miniscule stone villages, lots of cows and sheep, and granite faced cliffs in the distance. We learned too late that there is a 2 hour drive from Barcelona complete with a tunnel that literally cuts through the mountains. For scenery, the long way is better viewing, but 5 hours of constant vigilance on mountain turns can be nauseating and exhausting, so I suggest the tunnel.

We saw only about 8 of the reported 75 residents of Meranges when we were there for a 4 day stay. There was the old woman with chickens and roosters living on her front patio which was just a few steps down from her bedroom, and another woman sweeping the steps of a small café which never seemed to be open when we wanted it to be, a farmer repairing his tractor alongside his wonderful loping spaniel that accompanied us on a morning walk, and the family that runs Can Borrell, Oliver Verdaguer, the chef, his wife Laura Forn, the manager who spent summers in Meranges as a child, and their 3 adorable and sturdy young sons.