The Bizarre Truth (15 page)

All day under a hot sun with nothing but warm, soggy sandwiches for fuel and you haven’t even had a nibble. “Ya should a been here yesterday,” his mate calls to you from the gunwale as you putt back to the lodge, and you are reminded that this syndrome has reached epidemic proportions in the life of people who travel like you do. You finally score a table at some white-hot restaurant in another city, only to discover upon arrival that the chef whose food you are dying to eat is doing a charity dinner halfway across the country. It’s hard to manage expectations when you’ve had your heart set on something for months, years, decades. You finally get to some remote corner of the world, only to find that whatever it is you’re looking for just wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. And there are many restaurants and food stalls, eateries, even types of dishes that have lived off of twenty-year-old reputations and are, as my friends in Texas like to say, “all hat and no cowboy.”

Of course, when an experience lives up to the hype, it is truly a wonderful thing. Prowling through the dumpling shops of Taipei, deep-sea fishing expeditions off the coast of South America, strolling through Tsukiji Market in Tokyo, touring the caviar vault at the Grand Hotel Europe in St. Petersburg, Russia (where I was able to take a horn spoon and literally feast out of one-kilo tins of the best beluga caviar in the world), were some of the most notable eating experiences of my life. However, if you held a gun to my head and made me pick one food day as my all-time best, I’d without a doubt say it happened on my second-to-last trip to Paris. Imagine a one-day period spent hustling around the City of Light, stuffing my face all over town in some of the most famous eateries in the world. From a quality, variety, and sheer level of brilliance standpoint, the food purveyors and chefs that I encountered that day were simply mind-blowing.

Paris seemed the perfect place to create a phenomenal
Bizarre Foods
show. Many people thought it would be a tough sell. Unlike Asia and Africa, where a lot of the food is exceptionally strange to most Westerners in terms of recognition and sex appeal, Paris seems so tangible for any traveler. But I thought it would be the perfect spot to showcase what this show is all about. It’s not about shock value or eating
Fear Factor
style. It’s about exploring a city or region by experiencing the culturally significant foods that you find real people eating when you get there. I knew in my heart of hearts that so many things in Paris were bizarre (and I use that word on purpose, because I like to broaden its definition at every turn) because of the level of excellence and the brash boldness of chefs who create dishes that, from an intellectual standpoint, are incredibly challenging for people to wrap their heads around. And let’s not discount the classics.
Tête de veau
, a potted calf’s head in its own gelatin, is a staple of the Parisian
traiteur
and is certainly as crazy as any of the bits of rotted flesh, bugs, or entrails I’ve eaten on the show. Paris, with its culinary greatness as the main character, made a fantastic story.

We started out the day at six in the morning, heading around the corner from our hotel to the basement baking and proofing rooms of Poilâne Bakery, buried deep under the ancient streets of the city. Poilâne has been a Paris staple since it opened its doors in 1932. The French can argue forever about who has the best bread, the best croissant, the best pastry for hours on end. There are so many good ones, I’m not sure how you could begin to conclude which one is the best. But Poilâne’s history gives their bakery more clout. So do the awards. And the claim by so many others about its greatness. Frank Sinatra and Lauren Bacall were members of the Poilâne fan club, and Robert De Niro loves to pick up a loaf at any opportunity. In 1969, owner and baker Lionel Poilâne was summoned by Salvador
freaking
Dalí to create sculptures made of bread. However, their biggest bread devotee is an anonymous New Yorker who coughed up a whopping $100,000 to Poilâne, requesting that his children and grandchildren receive a loaf a week for the rest of their lives. Seriously. It’s one thing to be great for a couple years or a decade; it’s another thing to achieve greatness for the better part of a century, to the point where hungry carbohydrate addicts regularly make a pilgrimage from all over the world to worship at the culinary altar of what they are baking at Poilâne. Now, that’s something to brag about.

I may have had a better almond tart, pain chocolat, or baguette in my life, but I couldn’t tell you where. I think that says a lot about Poilâne’s greatness. Poilâne has three bakeries scattered all over Paris, but the original is located on Rue du Cherche-midi in the artsy Saint-Germain district. We rolled up to the shop and went inside. It took some time for our crew to set up, during which I found it painfully difficult, coffee cup in hand, to resist the temptation of snacking on all of the warm breakfast pastries and breads coming up from the basement kitchen. By the time I finally got to go downstairs, I must have looked like an elephant that hadn’t had a drink in a week, such was the madness in my eyes—like I was on the verge of diving into the ovens. They didn’t speak English, and
I only speak kitchen French, but I’m certain that when my chin dropped to my lap with my tongue splayed on the floor it was the international sign for
feed me, s’il vous plaît
. The building had to be a thousand years old, with the giant granite stone floor even older. I couldn’t help but think about all the bread that’s been pulled out of those ovens and the folks who ate it, the famous and the ordinary. How many lives had this bread touched? Amazing.

I get swept away with stuff like that. We build memories around foods because of the romantic relationship that we have with them. I love the idea of going into an ancient building, staffed with sixty-five-year-old ladies who have worked there since their teens, and eating bread that comes from a bakery whose sour starter still has the essence of the bacteria from decades ago, or longer! The sum of the parts here is greater than the whole. If you don’t think that is true, then bread is just bread. But for me, there was no better place to start the morning than merrily chomping away on a baguette at Poilâne Bakery, watching the ballet of bakers deep in the bowels of the building as the world of Paris began its day a hundred feet above us. Sweep to the proofing box, trays in the oven, rotate the bread, adjust the racks, pull bread, cool, lather, rinse, repeat.

Next, I moved on to what the French like to call
léche-vitrines
, which literally means “window licking.” And there is no better place to window-lick than the Place de la Madeleine, home to some of the greatest food shops in the world: Caviar Kaspia, Maison de la Truffe, Fauchon, Maille Mustard. Quite frankly, I really didn’t know where to start. Luckily, I had a bicycle. When in Paris, window licking by bike is the way to go.

I decided to start at Kaspia, a tiny café that offers up caviar to eat in the café or take to go. I opted to eat in the shop, standing like a dork with a horned spoon in hand. After my carbohydrate feast at Poilâne, I couldn’t imagine eating more bread, but when a plate of delicate blinis, miniature toasted bread crackers, and brioche toast points arrived with assorted caviars of all sizes and salt ratios (along with some hand-cured smoked fish), I thought I had
died and gone to heaven. It was my third visit to Kaspia, and for me, a trip to Paris is not complete without stopping there. These folks know how to do caviar right. And the customer who wants to suck the most out of the experience ought to go big or go home. The gorgeous silver service, as expensive as caviar is, is best served in a luxurious manner. The silver platters, the paper-thin vessels holding the caviar, the crushed ice to keep it cool, the funky little forks, spoons, and paddles to scoop and dress each and every bite—it’s a beautiful way to eat. If you’re not going to go all out, what’s the point of pressing those delicate eggs up against the roof of your mouth to begin with? You can’t imagine what a treat it is to start off the day dining on some of the world’s best caviar, including the increasingly hard-to-find Iranian caviar. Shopping for anything Iranian in the States is a delicate political issue; however, the French have an ongoing relationship with the former Persian empire, and God bless them for it, because it allows me the opportunity to eat Iranian caviar. I had only a few minutes to spend at Kaspia, but I made short work of four ounces of quality salted and cured sturgeon eggs.

Luckily, I didn’t have far to go when I left. I moved two doors down to Maison de la Truffe. This restaurant and fine-foods shop has amassed a global reputation for not only supplying its customers some of the greatest truffles from Italy and France, but for its truffle-infused goods. Truffle butter, truffle oil, truffle salt, truffle cheese, and if you take a seat at one of their little tables, you can feast on truffles with scrambled eggs, gravlax of salmon cured with truffles—really anything you can imagine. I tried a fabulous black-footed cured Spanish ham rubbed with truffle paste, the meat shaved paper thin by hand and placed on little toasts schmeared with triple-cream-truffled cheese. If there is a truffle that should be paired with a food item, the folks at Maison de la Truffe have done it.

A shaving of truffle is like the aroma of a musty basement stuffed with seven million pounds of the earthiest mushrooms.
Just one thin slice of these oversized mold spores packs that kind of punch. With good truffles, the aroma and the flavor are absolutely explosive and huge in scope. It feels as if the flavor literally grows funkier and deeper inside your brain. While many purists, myself often included, consider the only way to enjoy fresh white truffles is paired with one or two other ingredients at the most, some of the best truffle flavor comes from the great culinarians and their ability to coax more flavor out of the truffle by pairing it with certain items, then layering those truffle flavors. That bite of truffle paste rubbed on cured Spanish ham was one of the most intense flavor moments of my life. Tasting the complex variety of truffle flavor compares to looking at a great painting where an artist has painted a sunset, then sanded away a bit and painted over it, then sanded away some more and continued painting. It creates such a vibrancy of color, a depiction that so closely resembles a real sunset. Layered and nuanced. Not just reddish orange, but hundreds of versions of that color, many of which are almost close to being the same, but not. It was said that the impressionist painters painted only their vision of reality, not reality itself, with many of them adapting a style that was completely juxtaposed to how it actually existed in nature. I can’t help but look at Seurat’s
Island of La Grande Jatte
or Monet’s
Impression, Rising Sun
and think they’ve completely captured the way it looks in real life, despite the artist’s liberty with our reality. And that is how it was with those truffles. I know it wasn’t simple, I know it was a lot of ingredients, but those levels of truffle flavor still haunt me today. I nursed my tiny container of truffle salt, truffle mustard, and all my little truffle goodies that I brought home from Maison de la Truffe for months after I got home.

Of course, you can’t leave there without having some of their foie gras terrines. A nice fattened duck-and-goose-liver terrine complete with truffles infused every step of the way, the terrine studded with truffle lardons and a bit of vintage Sauternes mixed in for good measure, all cooked and chilled into a nice beautiful
block, sliced paper thin on toast liberally smeared with truffle butter—that is about as good as food gets. Talk about the ultimate food pairing! Feeling about 300 pounds heavier, I went back out onto the street and set out toward Fauchon. Ouch.

Fauchon is an overwhelming food superstore. It’s not quite as imposing as Harrods in terms of sheer grandness, but the food halls at Fauchon are remarkable. I’d already checked bread off my list at Poilâne, smoked fish and caviar at Kaspia, and truffles at Maison de la Truffe, so I headed straight for the pastries. I walked out with four tarts—almond, orange, wild strawberry, and custard—each about the size of a golf ball. The combination of egg, sugar, butter, and flour is nothing new, and yet when you taste Fauchon’s version, you can’t help but think someone in that kitchen sold their soul to the devil. The talent level of someone who can take the same simple ingredients the guy down the street uses and make something that is five times better is truly genius. It all starts with the quality of French ingredients. Butter and eggs—the French worship these things, and take great care to ensure a food’s integrity.

It reminds me of the way the Japanese treat food. There is just a level of respect for it not found in other cultures. I adore the Italians simply because they understand how to make food work in its simplest form. They are unapologetic about throwing a single piece of roasted fennel on a plate with a little grilled paillarde of beef. They do it so well and with such purity and innocence. They do stripped-down food as well as any Western country. I think the Japanese are their Eastern counterparts, where a single pickled plum works as a dish or a single cube of perfect tofu can stand alone in a meal’s progression of flavors. From a skill-set standpoint alone, I think the French are to Europe what the Chinese are to Asia. They have the chops to combine flavors in a way that is bigger, bolder, and stronger than anyone else in a single bite. As I write this, I can taste that custard tart. Eggy and sweet, but not overtly, combined with the custard texture effortlessly
disappeared into crumbly leaves of pastry. An ethereal experience, to be sure.

We licked our last window at Maille Mustard Shop. Maille has been pumping mustard since 1747. I say “pumping mustard” because they dispense it from a beer keg-like barrel. They always offer their classic Dijon and three or four
moutardes du jour
on tap. You can fill a specialty pot of mustard from the kegs or opt for prepackaged mustards, which are just fantastic. When Americans think mustard, they think yellow, and maybe a spicy horseradish variety. But Maille is like the 31 Flavors of mustard, offering up dozens of options, somehow coming up with more flavors to add to their repertoire every year. A preserved lemon and harissa debuted around the time I last visited, which might just be my new favorite. The essence of North Africa in a jar, you can just taste the saltiness and sweetness of the preserved lemon with that little hint of citrus and the zing coming from the harissa chili paste. The lemon-chili-mustard trifecta just smashed it out of the park. Like a madman, I tasted every single mustard I could, and bought a bunch of pots of Dijon for friends at home, as well as their tarragon mustard, which must be the best tarragon mustard there is. A great marc du Bougogne mustard was so complex that you could taste the fermented grapes through the mustard; it was just extraordinary. I carefully nursed those jars, using them with discretion to the very last drop. Before the mustard jars get rinsed out and put in the recycling bin, I make a salad dressing, actually shaking the oil and vinegar with the mustard. I want to use it all, including the dry little crusty bits on the inside of the rim. That’s how much I love Maille Mustard.