Category: food and drink

Readers’ wildlife photos

March 4, 2024 • 8:15 am

Contributor and reader Athayde Tonhasca Júnior has a batch of themed photos and an informative narrative. The topic: coffee, otherwise known as java, joe, or mud. Athayde’s words are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

But first, coffee

Charles II (1630-1685), king of England, Scotland and Ireland, had a reputation for benevolence and learning – the Royal Society came to be thanks to his auspices. But the good king wasn’t happy at all about the gossiping happening in coffeehouses. Londoners from all walks of life would get together in one of the city’s dozens of coffee establishments to socialise, enjoy their pipes, comment on the news and, alarmingly, discuss theology, social mores, politics and republicanism. The king, anxious about potentially seditious blabber, issued a proclamation in 1672 aiming to ‘Restrain the Spreading of False news, and Licentious Talking of Matters of State and, Government’ because some folk  ‘assumed to themselves a liberty, not only in Coffee-houses, but in other Places and Meetings, both publick and private, to censure and defame the proceedings of State, by speaking evil of things they understand not, and endeavouring to create and nourish an universal Jealousie and Dissatisfaction in the minds of all his Majesties good subjects.’

Nobody paid much attention to the king’s gripe, so two years later he came down hard on the miscreants with another proclamation: merchants were forbidden to sell ‘any Coffee, Chocolet, Sherbett or Tea, as they will answer the contrary at their utmost perils.’ But Charles had underestimated how much his subjects cherished their coffee: the proclamation triggered a huge outcry, and there were signs of public disobedience. Perhaps thinking of his father, who lost his head (literally) for being inflexible, the king quickly backpedalled. The proclamation was abolished within two weeks, and Londoners could go back to their chatting, reading, and sipping strong, bitter coffee.

Charles II, who was concerned about Fake News. Portrait by John Riley, The Weiss Gallery, Wikimedia.

Coffee made its way to Europe from Turkey in the mid-1600s, and the new drink quickly became popular and fashionable. The first British coffeehouse was opened in Oxford in 1652, and soon others popped up all over the realm. No alcohol was served, so sober and caffeine-boosted patrons could exchange and debate ideas or do business: Lloyd’s of London and The London Stock Exchange trace their origins to coffeehouses. In Oxford, they became known as penny universities: for one penny, the cost of a cup of coffee (the admission fee), any man – women’s presence was not encouraged – could rub shoulders with learned patrons and find out the latest on science, literature and philosophy. John Dryden, Isaac Newton, Samuel Pepys, Alexander Pope and Christopher Wren were some of the famous coffeehouse fans.

A 17th century London coffeehouse. Image in the public domain, Wikipedia.

Eventually, as the British empire expanded through the East India Company‘s endeavours from 1720 onwards, tea became the country’s most popular hot beverage. Coffee began to make its way back to the top position in the late 1990s and early 2000s, helped in part by the arrival of mass-market coffee chains. Britain is not alone: coffee has become one the most popular drinks around the world, and consumption is increasing.

The expanding coffee market is good news to millions of small farmers and land holders in about 80 countries, who supply the bulk of the internationally traded coffee. Brazil accounts for ~40% of the global trade, followed by Vietnam, Colombia, Indonesia and Ethiopia. Coffee is the most valuable crop in the tropics and a significant contributor to the economies of developing countries in the Americas, Africa and Asia. Arabica coffee (Coffea arabica) makes up 75-80% of the world’s production, and the remainder comes mostly from Robusta coffee (C. canephora), which is easier to cultivate than Arabica but produces an inferior beverage.

The Brazilian Empire (1822-1889) showed its gratitude to the two addictive drugs that sustained the county’s economy by displaying them on its flag: coffee (on the left) and tobacco © Almanaque Lusofonista, Wikimedia Commons.

Arabica coffee has long been understood to be an autogamous plant, that is, it fertilises itself. This reproductive mechanism has the obvious advantage of doing away with pollinating agents such as insects. On the other hand, self-fertilising plants lose out on genetic diversity, so that they are more susceptible to unpleasant surprises such as novel pathogens. And autogamy does not guarantee fertilisation for species as finicky as C. arabica. Plants bloom a few times during the season, but flowers come out all at once and don’t stick around: they wither and drop off in 2-3 days. And if it’s too hot, too cold, too dry or too wet, flowers don’t even open. A coffee plant produces 10,000 to 50,000 flowers every time it blooms, but almost 90% of them fall without being fertilised. So, Arabica coffee bushes could use a little help with their pollination.

Coffee plants in bloom ©FCRebelo, Wikimedia Commons.

It turns out that the autogamous label is not quite correct for Arabica coffee. A growing body of observations and research have shown that fruit size and overall yield increase when flowers are visited by insects, especially bees. The proportion of well-formed, uniform berries also increases, resulting in a better-quality beverage. These results demonstrate that Arabica coffee relies on a mixed mating system: some flowers are self-fertilised, others are cross-fertilised by insects. And the data support this view. On average, insect pollination increases fruit set by about 18%. The naturalised European honey bee (Apis mellifera) is one of the most important contributors to this service, but several other native bees visit coffee flowers, attracted to their abundant nectar and pollen.

The stingless bee Partamona testacea is one of the many coffee pollinators in Central and South America © John Ascher, Discover Life:

There could be more to the pollination of Arabia coffee than the abundance of bees. Some studies suggest that having lots of bee species around also helps, possibly because a range of pollinators provide greater temporal and spatial flower coverage, thus reducing the chances of a receptive flower going without pollen transfer. If it’s proven to be the case that bee diversity makes a difference (the jury’s still out), the conservation of forest remnants that typically border coffee fields would be a judicious crop management practice, as they are home for many native bees.

Shaded coffee plantation, a habitat favourable to native bees © John Blake, Wikimedia Commons.

When you are in the queue for your over-priced double espresso, long macchiato or cortado, you may have a negative thought about greedy coffee barons. In fact, for a £2.30 cup of coffee, the retailer keeps £1.70; five pence (~2%) goes to the grower. Fairtrade estimates that 125 million people depend on coffee for their livelihoods, but many of these small growers can barely scrape a living (World Economic Forum). Boosting productivity is one sure way of increasing farmers’ income, and here bees have much to contribute. Higher productivity also reduces the pressure on natural habitats, as  coffee is often planted in areas previously occupied by native forests.

Typical coffee plantation in low or mid-elevation areas adjacent to native forest remnants © CoffeeHero, Wikimedia Commons.

The Arabica coffee story exemplifies the reach of pollination services. The income of small farmers, revenues of developing countries, the conservation of tropical forests and related matters such as carbon storage and global temperatures, let alone your morning caffeine kick, are all linked in different degrees of relevance to the diligence of bees, some of them poorly known. Keep that in mind while you enjoy your next cup of coffee.

Ad for A Brasileira, Lisbon’s oldest coffee house. Selling Brazilian coffee since 1905. Image in the public domain, Wikipedia.

A Persian dinner

January 20, 2024 • 9:30 am

Last night we went to an unusual restaurant: Stand Up Kebab, located in South Davis. It’s open only on Friday and Saturday nights, and the rest of the time the owner runs a car-repair garage (attached to the restaurant) as well as a used-car lot.

It’s an unprepossessing place. You order outside and they bring you your food inside.

The long table below had three people who were either tired, drunk, or dead. They may have been workers at the garage, but they eventually returned to life and left.

But the food was good, and here’s what we ate.  Beers first, of course:Persian (Iranian) ones:

We started with an unusual Persian soup called Ash e Reshteh. I discovered the ingredients from Wikipedia:

Ash reshteh or ash-e-reshteh (Persian: آش رشته) is a type of āsh (Iranian thick soup) featuring reshteh (thin noodles) and kashk (a sour dairy product, made from cooked or dried yogurt) commonly made in Iran.

It was absolutely delicious:

This was followed by a typical Iranian meal: kebabs. We had both chicken kebabs and lamb/beef kebabs, served with sauce, pickle, and plenty of rice. I’m not sure why there was a pat of butter on my plate

Lamb and beef kebabs:

And for a postprandial treat, we repaired to a store in downtown Davis that sells boba tea and mochi donuts. We had green-tea donuts; specimen below:

A Burmese dinner in Davis

January 19, 2024 • 8:45 am

Last night I took my host out for Burmese food, since there’s a fairly new Burmese restaurant in Davis called “My Burma“. And of course since neither of us had had Burmese food (there isn’t a single Burmese restaurant in Chicago, though there’s one in the suburbs), we had to go.

It turns out that Burmese food resembles a hybrid between Indian and southeast Asian food, with some unique items like tea leaf salad. We had a largish meal, and I’ll show it below. (The menu is here.). It’s a modest restaurant but the food is excellent. Here’s the interior:

The appetizer: Platha and coconut chicken curry dip, described as “handmade multilayered bread served with coconut chicken curry.” With a couple of good beers, this was an excellent start.  You can either dip the bread into the chicken curry or pour the curry over the bread and eat it with a fork. I oped to use my hands.

The restaurant’s most famous dish is the tea leaf salad, described as “fermented tea leaf dressing, lettuce or cabbage, peanut, fried garlic, tomato, sunflower seeds, fried yellow chickpeas, jalapenos, sesame seed, and lemon.  They bring it to the table looking like this, with the green tea leaves on top (picture from the website)

. . . and then mix it thoroughly until it looks like what’s below (I would have preferred to sample it unmixed).  Our version seemed to lack the tomatoes and jalapenos.

It was very good, with a melange of flavors, but the flavor of the tea leaves wasn’t evident, which was disappointing.

Then two main dishes, the first being chili lamb, described as “diced lamb tossed with chili sauce, garlic, onion, basil, jalapenos, and chili flakes.” The server asked us how hot we wanted it on a scale of 1 (mild) to 5 (fiery), and I said “3.2”.  It turned out to be a tasty dish but not very hot, with the scale probably ratcheted down for the American palate:

Second main: Burmese eggplant curry, described as “Burmese curry made with garlic, onion, tomato, and tender eggplant.” It was very good, and yes, the eggplant, while keeping its form, was tender and delicious, in a lovely sauce.

With it I ordered Basmati rice. Rice should really come with the meal rather than requiring a separate order, and I eat a LOT of rice with a dinner like this. Sadly, we got only a small dish that was grossly insufficient. It was good rice, but I needed a HUGE bowl of white rice to sop up all the sauce.

All in all, it’s a good restaurant, especially considering that Davis, for a college town, has a dearth of decent places to eat. If you go, see if you can get a huge portion of white rice, and eat Chinese style, putting the ingredients atop a bowl of the rice. (They don’t use chopsticks, and I guess they don’t in Burma, but I would have preferred them.)

After dinner we went to the David Food Coop, a hippie-ish grocery store that’s been going her since 1972. Like Austin, Davis is an island of Sixties-ness surrounded by a desert of agriculture, and many old hippies are still to be found shambling along the streets of town. (There are also a fair number of homeless people, something I haven’t seen here before.)

And in this cool town, heavily invested in recycling and other green efforts, the Food Coop is the epicenter. It has pretty much everything you want, from loose grains to Dr. Bronner’s soaps, although prices are high because most stuff is organic, and the coolness surely exacts a surcharge.  Here are three characteristic items.

In a place like the Food Coop, sugar is demonized. When I did my postdoc here and my parents came to visit (this was probably about 1980), I took them for brunch to a hippy-ish organic restaurant, now defunct, called the Blue Mango. My father ordered coffee with cream, and noticed that there was no sugar on the table. He asked for some. The waiter looked at him with a stinkeye and said, in all seriousness, “Sorry, we don’t have White Death. But we might be able to dig up some honey in the kitchen.” My father, an old-school Army guy, took a pass on the honey.

At the food coop, the Satanic nature of sugar is clear. All items in bins have a four-number numerical code, but it used to be just three numbers. At that time, white sugar was given the Devil’s Number: 666. Now that they have to use four numbers, they simply expanded it, keeping its Satanic qualities:

And they also had this. WTF? What was it recycled from?

One thing that’s always bothered me about the food coop, which prides itself on selling healthy and organic food, is that it also has a whole aisle of homeopathic products, which of course is pure quackery: high-priced water containing not a molecule of the “curative” substance. They should stop selling this useless stuff. Here, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends, is a big scam:

But we took a pass on the fraudulent cures because we were there for dessert, and bought bean-curd-filled mochi covered with sesame seeds. They were great (no photo attached).

Paris: Day 8

November 20, 2023 • 11:00 am

I had to leave Paris before I could post about my final day, which consisted largely of lunch and packing. I’ve one more post to go—about the antisemitism and antiracism demonstration—so be patient.

The photos of the dishes of our final meal are unsatisfactory as I used my point-and-shoot camera, but it was so dark in the restaurant that I had to use shutter speeds as slow as 1/8 of a second, which makes for blurry photos. I should have used my iPhone. But so be it.

Three of us dined at one of Paris’s most famous restaurants, Chez Dumonet, sometimes called Joséphine or Joséphine Chez Dumonet: it’s in a house owned by a woman named Joséphine, but the owners were Dumonets.  It’s an upscale bistro, perhaps the most expensive of the ones we dined at, but it’s absolutely worth it.  We had reservations at the front of the house, as sometimes foreigners get exiled to Siberia, in a small two-table alcove walled off from the rest of the diners off the kitchen. That is unsatisfactory, for a large part of the eating experience in Paris is watching the other diners, seeing what they order, and often speaking to them. In Paris you don’t dine before you go out for entertainment; eating is the entertainment.

As you can see from the many reviews of Chez Dumonet (see for example here, here, here, and here), it’s universally lauded, and I have never had a meal less than superb here.

Here’s the restaurant from the outside; many treats wait within (it’s a short walk from the Duroc Métro stop):

The menu in the window (click to enlarge). Some dishes you can get in half portions, and I’d recommend that for the famous boeuf bourguignon with fresh homemade noodles. Portions are large:

A view looking towards the rear; I’ve put an arrow pointing to the table where we sat. This photo was taken from Our French Impressions:

And our view of the front of the restaurant:

A gratis amuse-bouche: cauliflower puree:

A really bad photo of one appetizer not on the menu: sauteed morels (mushrooms). Oy, am I ashamed of this photo!

My appetizer: a half portion of the house-prepared smoked salmon (i.e., LOX) with a little pot of crème fraîche and ample bread on the side. I put the salmon on the bread with a tad of the crème. It was terrific, and filling.

Winnie’s entrée: roasted langoustines with lemon butter. I turned down an offer of one but now much regret it:

Winnie and her friend Marie both had the same plat, and it sure looked good: Millefeuille de pigon et ses cuisses confites, or a layered “pastry” (made of potatoes) containing rare-ish pigeon breast with its legs (preserved in fat) on the side. Both ladies affirmed that it was delicious:


There was a d*g at the table next to us (they are permitted in French restaurants), and it looked up hopefully as Winnie ate her pigeon:

I was starved, so I had the cassoulet maison—the only cassoulet I ate this trip. It was of course huge, with tons of beans, sausage, fatty pork, and duck confit. I managed to finish all the meat, but the beans defeated me:

The ladies were too full for dessert, but I ordered the restaurant’s most famous dessert, which has to be ordered with your entrée and main course so they can prepare it in advance: soufflé with Grand Marnier. I don’t know how they time it so it arrives after you’re finished, but they must watch the table to see what stage your dinner is at.

The soufflé, which is light but delicious, comes with a glass of the orange liqueur Grand Marnier. You simply make a hole in the soufflé and pour in the booze.  An excellent dessert!

A little plate of treats comes after dessert, including a madeleine, a chocolate, and some other unknown but tasty goodies. Tasting the madeleine immediately conjured up remembrances of my childhood.

And so endeth our Big Feed in Paris.  Will Paris remember me? I think not, though I’ll remember it.  Once again I quote Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa, because it always reminds me of Paris when I leave it:

“If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?”

And so I strolled back to the Métro, pleasantly sated, passing along the way the café Au Chien Qui Fume (“At the dog who smokes”):

There will be one more installment of the trip, with photos of the demonstration. À la prochaine!

Paris: Day 5

November 11, 2023 • 9:30 am

Another rainy day with just a food report.

We finally went to the restaurant that had cancelled our reservations a few days ago, and also happens to have won the Pudlo Trophy for the Best Bistro in Paris in 2023. Would it live up to that award? Sadly, no, though it was good.

Here it is again: Au Moulin À Vent (“At the Windmill”), located near the Sorbonne on the Left Bank.  (I forgot my camera, so these are iPhone photos):

The menu, a veritable encyclopedia of French bistro classics:

It was cozy inside, with tables jammed near each other (a good way to see what other people have ordered and what the food looks like). Here’s a view from another site, Restaurants Paris:

The most popular entrée seemed to be bone marrow, which came in two huge beef bones served on a wooden plank. I wished I liked the stuff (I had it once and was almost sickened), for people were scarfing it down

My starter, however, was pâté en croûte. It was tasty, but there was not enough of it—a bad sign. It was pretty, though, and by eating a lot of baguette on the side I managed to get enough food to begin with

Winnie had fresh frog legs with parsley, also a popular entrée. I had them years ago in another place, and didn’t much care for them: they tasted like slimy chicken with overtones of fish. Winnie liked them, though, and they were in a pool of parsley and butter:

We both had the same plat—their speciality, “poitrine de veau confit 15 heures, gratin”. This was veal belly cooked in its own fat (15 hours, they say), along with gratin dauphenois, potatoes cooked with cream, milk, cheese and garlic. It was good veal, though quite fatty, and overall a very good dish. Again, though, the portion was small (remember, I eat one meal a day here):

My dessert: profiteroles, or cream puffs, with ice cream and chocolate sauce. I was disappointed as not only was there just one small puff (other places, like the Auberge Pyrénées Cévennes, give you three), and the chocolate sauce was thin and not that fudge-y.

Winnie skipped dessert (she stopped by a patissierie on the way home) and had a dish that they added to the menu while we were there: leeks with smoked herring:

All in all, I’m mystified why Pudlo found this the best bistro in Paris. The service was okay, but not that attentive, the food was good but not great, and it was a bit noisy. Oh, and the portions were small.

Perhaps if you eat three meals a day this would be okay, but my criteria for a good French bistro is that, as well as the food being good, it’s also copious: you can just have lunch there (with perhaps coffee for breakfast), and you don’t need to eat after that. On this trip so far such places have been thin on the ground, perhaps because of the increase in food prices accompanying the pandemic. But I’d rather pay more and leave full. There’s nothing more dispiriting than leaving a bistro and thinking that you might stop by a nearby patissierie to fill the crannies in your stomach.

It was raining, so I hustled to the nearby Jardin des Plantes to see the Exposition of Félins (cats) at the Natural History Museum, open only until January 7. I missed it twice before so this was my chance. But—catastrophe! It was closed, and there were cops all over the place. I have no idea why it was closed, but there was a sign that it was closed for the day, giving no reason:

The only cats that were seen yesterday were these on a jigsaw-puzzle greeting card that Winnie saw on the way back:

Oh well, tomorrow is another day, another restaurant (this time Le Trousseau d’Or).

Paris: Day 4

November 10, 2023 • 9:30 am

Once again there is only food to report, this time because I drank too much wine at lunch and was incapable of doing much beyond getting home on the Métro.

The restaurant for today was an old friend, the Auberge Pyrénées Cévennes, again in the 11th near Republique. I heard it had new ownership, and was anxious to see whether it had gone downhill. The answer is “a bit,” but it’s still a worthy bistro. Unfortunately, lunch was somewhat disturbed by the arrival of what seemed to be a tour busload (around 40) of young Americans, who were LOUD (fulfilling the French stereotype), making it hard to talk. The food, however, is still good, though the famous cassoulet no longer appears on the 39€ lunch menu.

En suite, the restaurant and its food:

The APC, as we call it, is on a dreary street about a five-minute walk from the Place de la République, the site of many demonstrations (some happening these days). If you didn’t know the restaurant was there, you’d overlook it:

Somehow it’s connected with the wonderful liqueur Chartreuse, and there’s a big display of bottles from various eras and of various types:

The restaurant, but full of noisy tourists. That sounds snobbish, as I’m a tourist too, but these young Americans didn’t know the custom of keeping your voice low so that others could enjoy the meal (the French stereotype is that Americans are loud, and having observed many in restaurants, stores, and on the Métro, there’s a lot of truth in it.) The main rules for getting along with Parisians are 1) don’t be loud, 2) when you enter a store or restaurant, greet the owners, and say goodbye when you leave 3) don’t assume that every Parisian speaks fluent English; ask in French first 4) if a Parisian (or French person in general) doesn’t understand you, they won’t understand you better if you keep raising your voice. Loudness doesn’t equal increased comprehension.

This group insisted on drinking for well over an hour before ordering food, and the alcohol consumption raised the volume. Most of the French diners sat in the other room:

But onto the food, I had the 39-Euro lunch menu, a bargain (but without cassoulet, which I didn’t want anyway), while Winnie order à la carte

My course was a delicious “Frisée salad with bacon, croutons and organic poached egg.” This, at least, hasn’t changed, and there’s a LOT of bacon. Plenty of freshly sliced baguette is on the side to help with the bacon:

Winnie had the pan-fried porcini mushrooms (Boletus edulis) with “sparkling juice and ham shavings”:

Winnie didn’t drink, so when I ordered a pot (60 cl bottle) of the house Brouilly, I knew I had to drink it by myself. That was my downfall. The sparkling water behind it is Chateldon, also known as “the king’s water” as it was favored at the court of Louix XIV. It emerges from the earth naturally carbonated, and the supply is limited. As Wikipedia notes:

Châteldon is known for its naturally carbonated mineral water. It was the first mineral water exploited in France and transported by bottles to the Court of Louis XIV in Versailles. This water is used for its diuretic and digestive properties. It is also rich in potassium, sodium and fluorine. In France, one finds the water of Châteldon in the large hotels and restaurants, and in delicatessens. In 1650, the first doctor of the king, Guy-Crescent Fagon, praised the virtues of Châteldon to Louis XIV.

Les plats:  I had an old French bistro classic, which comes from French home cooking: blanquette de veau, or veal stew with cream sauce, served with grilled basmati rice. It was rich and delicious, with large hunks of veal, mushrooms, and vegetables.

Winnie, who eats three meals a day, went lighter, choosing the “roasted scallops, venerated black rice, sparkling juice” (the latter means “foam”, a sign that this restaurant has gained some modern food.

I wasn’t familiar with black rice, also known as “purple rice” as some varieties turn purple when cooked. The flavor isn’t supposed to differ from that of regular rice, but it sure is attractive:

Winnie decided to have as dessert the same salad I had as an entréee (see above), but I chose a real dessert, the Paris-Brest, a traditional dessert best described as “a big pastry donut filled with cream.” Or, as Wikipedia describes it,

. . . a French dessert made of choux pastry and a praline flavoured cream, covered with flaked almonds.

And it has a sporty origin:

The round pastry, in the form of a wheel, was created in 1910 by Louis Durand, pâtissier of Maisons-Laffitte, at the request of Pierre Giffard, to commemorate the Paris–Brest–Paris bicycle race he had initiated in 1891.  Its circular shape is representative of a wheel. It became popular with riders on the Paris–Brest–Paris cycle race, partly because of its energizing, high-calorie value and its intriguing name, and is now found in pâtisseries all over France.

Well, it was quite tasty.

As soon as I got up to leave the restaurant, I realized that I was tipsy, having consumed more than half a bottle of wine. That usually wouldn’t faze me over the course of a 2¼-hour lunch, but I reacted strongly (half a regular bottle is 37.5 ml, but I had 60 ml). There was nothing to do then but go back to the hotel and have a nap, but since I had to make several Métro connections, which involved long walks, it wasn’t easy. I even fell asleep on one subway ride!

Fortunately, I made it home, and avoided the dangers experienced by Sérge the Métro rabbit in this sign that I was sober enough to photograph:

The proper English translation is “Do not enter after the signal sounds, as you risk by that act something very bad.” (Serge doesn’t pull any punches.) The English translation below is lame, I’ve been bodily pinced this way before, and it is not pleasant!

And so home for a nap under the duvet, which lasted longer than I thought, and it was too late to do anything afterwards. Still, I slept like a baby, and am ready for my next lunch: a the place where they’d previously lost our reservation, the Restaurant Au Moulin à Vent (“At the Windmil”). This was voted the best bistro in Paris in 2013, so I’m looking forward to a good tuck-in.

Paris: Day 3

November 9, 2023 • 9:00 am

Today’s post will be short as it reports just two activities, only one of which is photographed: eating and walking. The eating was at a bistro near Republique named l’Angés du Canal, and the walking was afterwards.

Once again I’d planned to go to the Exhibition of Félins at the Museum of Natural History, but subway work and rain diverted me. (I wonder if I’ll ever get to see those cats!) The weather finally broke and I walked a long way from the Bastille to central Paris, one of the world’s most beautiful walks in the world’s most beautiful city.

But back to nourriture. The bistro l’Angés du Canal is indeed close to the Canal Saint-Martin, one of the small waterways in northern Paris, has a good-looking lunch menu (here), and is highly regarded (here and here).  A short walk from Republique takes you over the canal, where there are MALLARDS as well as cormorants. The water isn’t that clean, but they look to be in good shape, and I watched a cormorant catch a fish.

I was happy to see mallards, which must be all-year residents here. At the earliest, Botany Pond won’t be filled until June, which is late for mallard nesting season.

I believe these are cormorants from the way they dry their wings, but I’m not sure. A reader might provide an ID:

A cormorant (?) drying off:

The Canal-Saint Martin is about 5 km long and a popular wandering spot, lined with restaurants, bakeries, coffee shops, and other places to linger. It’s crossed by many pedestrian bridges: this one looks like the one we crossed to get to the restaurant (source of photo here). As Wikipedia notes:

The canal is drained and cleaned every 10–15 years, and it is always a source of fascination for Parisians to discover curiosities and even some treasures among the hundreds of tons of discarded objects.

The restaurant. They also serve cheese fondue, but you can eat it only outside because of the smell, and it was too cold for that

We were immediately served an amuse-bouche consisting of sausage slices and a cup of peanuts, as well as the local dark bread:

Althugh there’s a 24€ lunch menu, we decided to order à la carte to try some of the specialities.

Appetizers: Winnie had ceviche de crevettes crues de Madagascar, i.e., raw shrimp ceviche. Sadly, it proved to be mediocre.

But my foie gras, on the other hand (please don’t shame me; I eat it once a year!), was tasty, served with two slices of toasted dark bread and a glass of chablis:

The restaurant is known for its beef, so I decided to have it in a form I’ve never eaten in Paris: a hamburger, described as “Le burger au bœuf wagyu, pain Thierry Breton.” I doubted that it would be real wagyu, but I was curious to try a gourmet French hamburger. It came with a basket of freshly-made potato chips, served warm. I swear they were among the best chips I’d ever had, and Winnie couldn’t stop eating them. They were replenished constantly.

The burger was large but the patty was small, and I was supposed to eat it with a knife and fork.  I took one bite, and discovered that although I had ordered it very rare (“saignant”, or bloody), it was well done. (Horrors!) I sent it back, which gave me a chance to order a real steak instead.

The well done burger. There should have been two beef patties, but they stuffed the Thierry Breton bun with veggies.

It turned out, fortuitously, that a Frenchman at a nearby table had ordered a well done burger (how is that possible in France?) and I got his and he got mine.  But when I sent the burger back, I decided to replace it with a real steak instead, “L’entrecôte de bœuf Hershire maturée, chips à la peau, salade, sauce poivre ou béarnaise.”  I think this is beef from Scottish Ayrshire cattle, but I’m not sure, I got the steak saignant again (barely cooked), and with pepper sauce. There was no salad, but I got more chips, which were addictive. The nude steak:

And with the pepper sauce, which although thick was not overwhelming.

You can see below how rare it was; properly cooked and delicious. With it I had a class of  Côtes du Rhône (two glasses of wine was enough for me yesterday). I suspect that many readers would find beef this rare repugnant. . .

And more chips arrived; the wine was free because they’d screwed up my burger order, a double felicity:

Winnie’s plat is not on the online menu: it was salmon and pollack filets on a bed of black rice risotto with saffron foam:

Winnie skipped dessert, as she was meeting another friend later for sweets, but I had the “baba, du rhum et d’la chantilly, nom de Dieu !” (The exclamation mark is on the menu. This classic bistro dessert was the best version I’ve had, as I didn’t overwhelm it with the rum (it was served sans rhum and I did the pour), the cake was delicious, and there were copious amounts of good whipped cream to top it with.

Oh, and it was shaped like a phallus:

I wonder if eating a dessert with a “nom de Dieu!” (“name of God!”) title would erode my atheism. The Martinique rum, left at the table in case you want to pour more on the cake, was also tasty, unlike the cheap bistro rums they often give you.

Soaked with rum and ready to eat:

I enjoyed my meal tremendously, especially after I’d replaced the burger with the steak, but I’m afraid Winnie wasn’t as satisfied as I.

Later she sent me a photo on WhatsApp of what she ate with her friend, simply labeled “dessert!”.  I now find out that it’s cheesecake from a place called “She’s Cake”  The cup contains a latte .

Today we dine at an old reliable friend, the bistro Auberge Pyrénées Cévennes, where they have a terrific salad with lardons and croutons and the biggest cassoulet you can imagine.