gastropoda

Wanna feel like a rube? Walk into the P.J. Clarke’s across from Lincoln Center around 10 and ask for a table. The host will smugly inform you that “the kitchen will only be open another three hours.” What he clearly didn’t realize when four of us dragged in out of the brutal cold was how often we have been turned away by Manhattan restaurants at the same hour in the last year. Not in Kansas anymore, my ass. But we were so happy to be welcomed at all that we sat down and I tried not to consider how much the place looked like one pane in a hall of mirrors. Eight years into a fresh century, why were we in a newish bar that could be either the Ginger Man or T.G.I.Fridays? But our friend’s recounting having shot the original for New York magazine back in the day did inspire me to pull down the first Britchky collection I ever bought, from 1980-81, to revel in his takedown of the prototype. Steak tartare was “spread across the bottom of dog bowls,” salmon “should have been poached sooner or caught later,” steaks “needed salt and pepper the way a peanut butter and jelly sandwich needs peanut butter and jelly,” and all of it was dispensed from “what looks like a small prison kitchen.” Could there have been a less likely candidate for cloning?

Some things I saw in Eutopia: Villeroy & Boch toilets, seatless by design, at a rest stop in Provence. Salmon steaks grilled over blazing grapevines in a very formal dining room in Nardonne on a blazing hot afternoon. A chef in Montpellier, at a restaurant where the food had come slowly and been cooked erratically, sporting a black eye. A 200-year-old wood oven in continuous use in Nardonne (even day-old on the road, the croissant and pain au chocolat from it were outstanding). Tiny saucisse wrapped like little candies on the plate with the olives at Le Jardin du Manon in Arles. Chamber pots used as planters at Osteria Delle Grotte in Singalunga in Tuscany. A waitress at a cafe in Montpellier tying the tricolor flag around her dog’s neck on Bastille morning after delivering us a perfect croissant and cafe creme. Cats ready for the Apocalypse with a pup tent and stockpiled food, in a park in the Aventine in Rome. And, best of all, box wine poured from a crystal decanter in Languedoc — talk about style trumping substance.