Eat Club Med Cruise, Day 11:
Wednesday, June 3, 2015.
Monte Carlo.
Last year, Mary Ann and I celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in Belgium, where we went on our honeymoon. Afterwards, we met with some of her family for a cruise, mostly around Italy. The day we were in Monaco, the four sisters rented a car and drove around the area, having a time so grand that she has talked ever since about doing something like it again. Today, she did it. She is off the ship first thing in the morning. She rents a convertible in Monte Carlo with the idea of tooling around all day in some swank places on the Mediterranean.
Eze-Village. barely in France.
The only problem with this plan is where I fit into it. MA’s idea was to work her way east, stopping in a series of charming Riviera towns. The first was in a magnificent hotel and restaurant in Eze-Village, 1401 feet up in the mountains overlooking the Mediterranean. A lot of restaurants are there–mostly small cafés, but also one large, expensive dining room in a very spiffy hotel. We walked around the grounds of the place and felt the luxury and beauty soak in. I have no doubt that Mary Ann will return here to spend the night someday.
Villefranche-sur-Mer, as seen from the beach.
Our next stop along the stunning road (lofty mountains on one side, blue Mediterranean on the other) is a town where we have some history. In the Eat Club’s first Euro-cruise, the ship put in at Villefranche-Sur-Mere, a little French town with a beach and a large marina. But our memories of the place are not vivid enough for us to find it easily this time. We drive back and forth along the waterfront, falling into absurdly narrow dead-end streets, not finding any of the many restaurants that I recall seeing on our first visit.
Suddenly, while an argument rages among us as to what to do next, we find the place we remember. It has changed. We pull into a large pay parking lot and take a fateful ticket from the machine at the entrance.
The Marys walk down to the beach and take a dip in the cool blue waters. About half of the other bathers are at least partially unclothed. That’s how it was last time, too, say the Marys–although I never saw it myself. Then and now, the Marys kept their covers.
La Caravelle in Villefranche-sur-mer, France.
Meanwhile, I walk along a row of restaurants. Many years ago, the Frenchness of the menu interested me. The eats are still quite French, but they seem less exciting. The high points on the menus I peruse are about at the level of Cafe Degas and La Crepe Nanou–very good, but lacking the far-away quality that I was hoping to find. I guess that’s the trade-ff one makes in a restaurant where the staff speaks fluent English.
The restaurant I choose for lunch is La Caravelle. “The pirate.” Most of the tables (and all of the ones occupied by other diners) are on a side. I don’t like Al Fresco, and I sit inside, where I am the only customer in the house. The sole waitress is working with a young chef. When they are not busy cooking or serving, they keep up a heated conversation in French. It seemed a little discordant. Or maybe it came across that way because MA and I have been speaking the same tones to one another today.
Mussels with a butter-and-herb sauce at La Caravelle.
La Caravelle’s menu is that of the standard French bistro, but a little diluted. The menu du jour, for example, is set in stone on the colorful menu. It is not a sheet of paper with the day’s specials written by hand. You get the same list of the restaurant’s most popular dishes. Pick one each from three courses.
I begin with a half-dozen mussels in a garlic and herb butter, hot enough to sizzle, and therefore something like escargots. I gobble these up, along with half a loaf of baguette and all the garlic butter it can soak up.
Now a filet mignon au poivre, with a creamy sauce riddled with crushed peppercorns. Frites on the side, of course, complete the classic French bistro entree. Creme brulee about half and inch deep and covered with a crusty caramel for dessert. I drink a glass of Provencal red, taking my time, trying to tune in the staff’s palaver, and removing from my list the need to finally dine in Villefranche-sur-Mer.
The Marys have a fine time in the water and join me just as my two-hour lunch is done. MA is ready to move on to the next French Riviera town. We point the convertible towards the gate. I am the official parking-ticket holder for our family, because I have never lost one. I hand it over to MA, who pushes it into the slot at the gate. She follows it with her credit card.
And then the trouble begins. Not only does the gate remain down, but the machine keeps both the ticket and the credit card. She tries to make something happen as cars back up behind us, honking ever more loudly. But the electronic box offers no Plan B.
We pull out of line to let people through, and try to figure out what they do right and we did wrong. MA tries to find someone who can finish the transaction and let us get on with our tour. Nobody seems to have any authority or knowledge of who to call to get the gate working. I’m thinking, as always, “How will we get back to the ship?
A few people come over to offer ideas, none of which work. One particularly crazy-looking guy speaking mostly French swears to us that if you pull under the gate, with the steel pole a barely in front of your windshield, and then just sit there, the gate will open. We’ll try anything now. Not only does the gate open, but the credit card spits right back at us. Yes! But then our spirits sink again. There is another gate to pass, and it is down. We try the trick a second time. And. . . I’ll be damned, the thing rises and lets us out! Must have been the language problem. Or maybe it’s the mystery of French mechanisms.
After that very unsettling episode, whatever pleasure we enjoyed in Villefranche-sur-Mer has been trashed by the tension of this modest but very problematical malfunction. We extricate ourselves from the absurdly narrow streets and get back on the main road.
The Marys turn their attention to me. The next idea from MA seems to be that they have to get rid of me. She knows that I will be anxious about getting back to the ship on time and that this will drive her nuts, which in turn will make me further nuts. She suggests that she let me out of the convertible in Villefranche-sur-Mer, where I can walk to the train station and take the next run back to Monte Carlo.
I know this train well enough. I have traveled on it three times before, from Montecarlo to Nice. But how often it runs and where the station is are mysteries. I am hesitant about being abandoned in a small French town with no clear plan as to how I will make my way back to the port.
In the long quiet that follows, I realize how much I have changed in the past five or ten years. I am a guy who did all sorts of semi-dangerous things on my own for decades. When I was thirteen I frequently bicycled up River Road to the spillway and back solo. I bicycled to Chicago from New Orleans in 1986, again all alone. Long hikes in the Big Bend desert with just my canteen, with nobody else knowing where I was. Now what Mary Ann is suggesting is anathema to me. I can’t figure out how to get somewhere on a train? Have I really become such a gimp? No wonder MA finds me boring.
So they decide to drive me back to the famous gambling capital of Monaco. The Marys let me out of the convertible, then resume their tooling around. The ship does not sail until around ten–a very late night for a cruise ship. They are thinking about taking two of our regular Eat Clubbers to one of the fabulous restaurants in Monte Carlo, but the couple is too tired for it. So am I.
It is now around four. I catch a nice long nap, then at seven head down to Deck Two for Tom’s Pre-Dinner Cocktail Club. I continue to be surprised by the inability of the bartenders on the Queen Victoria to make Negronis. For most of my cruising career, I found that the floating bars usually handle that classic cocktail without flinching.
We have a widely varied but still less than wonderful dinner. The vegetable cream soup with pesto grabs me away from the consomme with barley. I have talked several people–Mary Leigh among them–into sampling the goodness of consommé. Tuna sashimi seems the best appetizer for me, with seaweed salad and rice.
My entree repeats that of the first night, but prepared much better: sirloin strip, trimmed out twice to make it tenderer. It comes with “Pont-Neuf” potatoes, named for a bridge over the Seine in Paris. They look like scaled-down wooden beams, very regular in their cut, and very good. I realize that there has been a lot of steak being served in Britannia. And that I have eaten two steaks today. The menu is getting boring as rapidly as I am.
A lot of good desserts tonight. I somehow miss out of the Florentine basket with strawberries and orange mousse, going instead with dulce de leche and pistachio ice creams.
I join the Giancolas in Commodore’s Café after dinner. I have a gin and tonic, mainly because Barb has turned me on to a variation on the theme. It’s a martini with bitters and muddled cilantro. Better than it sounds.
Eat Club Cruise, Day 12.
Thursday, June 4, 2015.
The Best Dinner, In Genoa, By Train.
Today’s port is, unlike yesterday’s and tomorrow’s, a new one on me. And a new one on the Queen Victoria, too. Rapallo is a charming but unshowy little town in a cove off the Italian Riviera. It’s new enough to cruising that the ship must disgorge its passengers from its offshore anchorage by means of a tender.
When we are onshore, Mary Ann offers to let me do whatever I want–clearly to make up for what happened yesterday. But I know nothing of this port. We dawdle in the open market along the waterfront, and I buy a smashing new shirt exactly my size. (Bigger surprise: the shop accepts American Express!) We keep dawdling until MA decrees that I am incompetent for orchestrating a proper day’s activities. She takes over, and we march to a little pastry shop and café a few blocks into town, stopping to take a look at a modern church whose interior is composed of dramatic stripes of light and dark grays.
Rapallo.
MA gets the idea that we could go to Genoa on the train, whose station is only a few blocks away from the coffeeshop. She knows I like trains, and figures that will be a sop to keep me from causing too much trouble.
The ticketing is puzzling, but this is Italy, not France, and the timetable is comprehensible. We ticket ourselves to Christopher Columbus’s home town. The train runs along the coastline with stops at every significant town. We could have taken it all the way back to Villefranche-sur-Mer and beyond, or in the other direction to Florence and Sienna. Some of the trains through here have sleeping cars and café cars. This one is strictly a local, and feels more like a subway or a bus than a train. It is also filled nearly to capacity.
The track to Genoa.
At the first train stop, my eyes behold a familiar phenomenon that I haven’t seen in nearly fifty years. Its essence hard to describe. If I did, the result would be the most boring piece of writing ever to spill from my mind. Some readers would find it evidence that I am truly crazy. So I will keep it brief.
The main players are a pair of inward-folding doors through which passengers enter or leave the train car. Oval-shaped windows are in each part of the doors. They are almost identical to the front doors on New Orleans streetcars. Doors like these were standard in the final three decades of streetcar constructions, after which they appeared in electric trolley buses and then, finally, in the diesel buses that supplanted streetcars 1950s.
Something about the motion of those old folding bus doors, from the time I was a little kid until today, fascinates me. They open with an accelerating movement, slow down to a complete stop, then re-open slightly before finally opening all the way. Its rhythm is utterly unique, in the same way that the rods on a steam locomotive are. Come to an Eat Club dinner and I’ll tell you more, if you can stand heavy minutiae.
Anyway, the doors on these Italian trains look and operate almost exactly like the ones I remember so long ago. I watched them with relish a dozen or so times before we arrived in Genoa.
Downtown Genoa.
If the northern third of Italy were an independent country, it would be the most affluent nation in Europe. Remembering that from an article I read a few years ago explains Mary Ann’s feeling that Genoa is the least interesting Italian city she’s seen. While the architecture, style, and even the cuisine of southern Italy are way over the top in terms of showiness, enthusiasm, and flagrance, northern Italy seems polite and restrained. (Milan comes particularly to mind in this regard.)
Despite that, one part of our visit to Genoa is impressive. We are directed to the old part of town by a concierge, who adds that the restaurants there are very good. Which is what we are looking for.
The maitre d’ gets a big table ready at Zeffirino in Genoa.
We find this almost immediately. A restaurant called Zeffirino is welcoming to a degree we can’t ignore. The maitre d’ steps up as soon as he detects interest on our part. Inside is a much larger and substantial restaurant than we had in mind. Two of the tables in the center of the dining room are set for around a dozen people. When the party for whom this reservation was made arrives, they are the kind of people you’d find at lunchtime at Galatoire’s: well dressed, possibly politicians or businessmen, pillars of the community.
We have our own excellent table in a corner. The waiter comes over with welcome glasses of Spanish bubbly wine. Then another welcome gift of paper-thin slices of marinated octopus. The Marys stop our host in the nick of time before the cephalopods land before them. I eat my share of octopus and find it brilliant. I wish I had grabbed the girls’ rejected portions.
Pesto ravioli at Zeffirino: the best pesto dish of our lives.
Genoa is the home of pesto–the sauce of basil, garlic, parmesan cheese, olive oil and butter. We begin by having pesto tossed with thin pasta sheets of absolutely perfect consistency and flavor. The three of us agree that never before have we eaten its equal. Mary Leigh goes to the extreme of continuing the thrill by having cheese ravioli al pesto for her secondi.
Zeffirino’s seafood with spaghetti alla chittara. That’s a real scampo in the middle.
Zeffirino’s specialty is clearly seafood. I order a platter of spaghetti alla chittara afloat in a seafood stock-based sauce, thick and throbbing with flavor from chunks of fish, shellfish, and mollusks. In the center is what looks like an enormous shrimp in its shell, with long, strong claws. This is a scampo, the Mediterranean crustacean for which American-Italian “shrimp scampi” (shrimp cooked the way scampi would be) is named. The sauce gets better the more I eat, with a superb assault of seafood broth, herbs and red pepper. The bowl is so large that my stomach capacity is exhausted before I get halfway through. . There is nothing to compare with this in New Orleans, with the possible exception of the occasional seafood pasta special at Fausto’s. It would be a good target for more of our local Italian restaurants to shoot for.
This lunch, so unplanned, will stand as the best meal we have during this entire European excursion. If it weren’t so unlikely that we will ever return to Genoa, I’d already have it on the Eat Club’s list of great restaurants for next time.
We hire a taxi to take us around the town. First landmark: the place (but not the building, which is relatively modern) where Columbus was born. Then a look around the center of the city, with its grand arch and big green meadows, surrounded by buildings of very substantial size but not much Mediterranean soul. We can’t quite put our finger on that, but we all agree.
The cab driver says he knows where the train station is, but he takes us to a different depot from the one we came in on. He assures us that this is the place, as does the señora at the information desk. I find a posted paper map of the train system. It concurs: Train 1-S will indeed take us back to Rapallo. The problem proves to be that this station is a couple of stations eastward of the one where we alighted.
Like the inbound, this train is full. I grab a seat at the end of the car, giving me a great view of the folding doors. One of the doors is a little out of sync with the other, but I still enjoy this visual treat–perhaps alone in the world. A little girl sitting next to me falls asleep, and her head lands on my shoulder. Her mother smiles at me and I smile back. The little girl stays there until it’s time for the family to exit through the magical folding doors. I still have my daddy skills.
The train takes about an hour to return to Rapallo. The Marys seem to have lost all faith in my ability to find my way back to the ship, something I will be doing alone. Theye want to do more shopping. And, of course, they must not board the ship until the last possible minute.
Tonight is the private party for the Eat Club, in the very handsome, lofty Hemispheres club on the tenth deck. This party was supposed to have happened six nights ago. But somebody slipped up and didn’t get the word out to me, even after I asked about it the day before. The party was held with drinks and appetizers and a full staff of waiters–but no guests. Why did nobody on the staff notice there was something wrong with this?
After a couple of conferences with the management, they re-assemble the event for tonight, and it is fine. I arrange for the ship’s photography staff to take a group picture. Some of the Eat Clubbers who had been keeping mostly to themselves showed up. That happens on every trip, but I have learned to leave them alone as long as they seem to be happy.
Even after they management cuts the drinks off at seven-thirty, we remain in Hemispheres until dinnertime a half hour later. The oddball dish of the night is “soused mackerel with fennel bavarois and sauce Viege.” I don’t see any orders of it come out. I began instead with a soup of asparagus and chervil. Mary Leigh and I once again indulge in the consomme du jour: madrilene, with a bit of ripe tomato added. It is especially good.
My entree is filets mignon of pork wrapped in bacon, and that’s what I have. Steak Diane is another popular option, with its Worcestershire-based sauce woing well with the filets of beef. Pont Neuf potatoes make their second consecutive nightly appearance.
The Queen’s ballroom, before the dancers arrive.
All of the Cunard ships have a large dance floor near the center of the ship. Here they program a big band most nights, the better the dancing. And many people do dance, very well. I wish I had learned how. But even if I had, would Mary Ann dance with me?
Sushi Alaska
This will sound like a crazy idea, but it came out better than I would have hoped. It’s standard nigiri sushi, presented with the cloudlike egg-white foam that covers the famous old dessert baked Alaska. I’m still waiting for the first sushi bar to attempt this. Remember where you heard it first.
1 lb. thick sushi-grade fish (tuna, salmon, yellowtail), thoroughly refrigerated
2 cups sushi rice, cooked and cooled
4 egg whites
1/8 tsp. cream of tartar
2 tsp. wasabi powder
1 1/2 tsp. soy sauce, thinned with 1/2 tsp. water
1 green onion, very thinly sliced
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
1. Slice the fish about half an inch thick
2. On a cutting board, press the rice into a layer about three-quarters of an inch thick. Cover the rice with the fish.
3. With a sharp knife, cut the pad of fish-topped rice into pieces about three inches long and one inch wide.
4. In a very clean bowl, beat the egg whites with the cream of tartar until it begins to peak. Add the wasabi powder and continue whipping till it gets stiff. Add the diluted soy sauce and stir in with a rubber spatula. Leave faint soy-sauce streaks in the egg-white foam.
5. Place the pieces of sushi, about two inches apart, on a ceramic or glass baking dish, or on one of those insulated baking sheets.
6. With a spoon, cover each piece of sushi completely with the egg white mixture, forming oblong mounds.
7. Bake the foam-covered sushi in the 400-degree oven until the foam browns lightly–about two minutes.
8. Using a small metal spatula, place two pieces of sushi on each plate, and garnish with green onions.
Serves four to eight appetizers.
Panneed Veal @ Peppermill
Panneed veal (or panneed anything, really), is hard to resist when it’s made well. The best versions are so tender and good with their jackets of bread crumbs, herbs, and parmesan cheese that they need no sauce or anything else. But most restaurants seem to have forgotten how to accomplish that. They either cut the veal too thick, fail to pound it out, slice with the grain, or grossly overcook the veal.
Panneed veal at the Peppermill.
The Peppermill’s recipes for such things go back a generation, and so do their cooks. They have the panneed veal technique down pat. And the pasta it comes with–with marinara sauce, bordelaise (a.k.a. aglio olio) or Alfredo–are fine finishing touches. Old-style restaurants are often the best places to look for certain dishes, and that is true here.
Peppermill. Metairie: 3524 Severn Ave. 504-455-2266.
This is among the 500 best dishes in New Orleans area restaurants. Click here for a list of the other 499.
June 17, 2015
Days Until. . .
Father’s Day 4
Observances
On June 19, 1910, Father’s Day was celebrated for the first time. The place was Spokane, Washington. It’s only recently that Father’s Day has become a serious dining day. This is because, really, nobody cares about pleasing Dad. If you forget Mother’s Day, that’s a capital offense. Forget Father’s Day? Eh. (You should have seen the cards I got from my family yesterday, all of which were hilarious but essentially insulting.) I think the reason more people are taking their fathers and grandfathers out to a meal on that day is that the wives and kids want to go out, and Father’s Day is a fitting pretext. I also believe that most fathers, given their true wishes, would stay home while everyone goes out, as long as nobody tells him what to do. For a change.
Food Calendar
Today is Eat Your Vegetables Day. Because it’s good for you, reduces incidence of mustache cancer, etc., etc. Most of us actually like vegetables. I could be a vegetarian if I didn’t like steak so much. It’s easy to understand why some people don’t like their vegetables. It’s because diners expect to get a vegetable side dish with their entrees at no added cost. Because it’s free, restaurants and cooks feel little pressure to give the sides much attention. This is true even in some expensive, allegedly gourmet places.
Some restaurants, fortunately, take a different tack. They buy unusual vegetables (baby turnips, salsify, broccoli raab, pea shoots). They don’t treat these with particularly more care than the neighborhood cafe does its peas and mashed potatoes, but it at least creates an illusion that they care. At the lower end of the prices spectrum, the few restaurant that try to make their vegetables special usually do so by melting cheese all over them.
If you don’t believe all of this, ask a vegetarian how tough it is to get a good vegetable plate in most restaurants. Such a thing is a collection of afterthoughts.
It is getting better. A few restaurants are going after locally-grown vegetables with much greater interest. But the problem remains: the typical diner is much more interested in the protein on the plate, which must be done well. He won’t pay extra for vegetables (except, curiously, in a steak house, where the vegetables are no better than in the places where they’re free). And so the pressure is down on the vegetables.
Deft Dining Rule #52:
A restaurant with excellent vegetable side dishes probably does everything else excellently.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Peppertown, Indiana is seventy-five miles southeast of Indianapolis. It’s an unincorporated crossroads. About a hundred people say they live in Peppertown. In a delightful coincidence, Peppertown is in Salt Creek Township. It’s surrounded by gently rolling farmland, interspersed with patches of woods. There are no restaurants at the corner of Peppertown Road and Walnut Fork Road (that would be downtown Peppertown). But four miles north in Metamore, you can get a bite to eat at Have A Bite.
Edible Dictionary
chasseur, French, adj.–With a sauce of reduced beef or veal stock (demi-glace, if it’s a really good one), mushrooms, tomato, fresh herbs, and wine. It means “in the style of the hunter.” That’s a reference to the mushrooms, which hunters are supposed to find while they’re tromping around the woods looking for something to shoot. For that reason, the most common uses of sauce chasseur are with game birds, rabbit, or (less often) venison. The Italian version of this–also named for the hunter–is cacciatore.
Music To Eat By
Jimmy Buffett’s song Cheeseburger In Paradise hit its high point on the charts today in 1978 at only Number Thirty-Two. It gets played a lot more than bigger hits of the time. It’s the food reference, I tell you. . . On this date in 1972, the song Brandy was released by a one-hit wonder called Looking Glass. Brandy, I know you’ll recall, was a fine girl. . . The last major hit on the pop charts by a classic big band–that of Jimmy Dorsey, no less–made it to Number Two on this day in 1957. It was a song about how to cook a steak: So Rare.
Whiskey In The Funnies
This was the day in 1919 when the comic strip Barney Google premiered. It evolved over the years into Snuffy Smith, which is still being published. I hear that Snuffy lately has turned his skill at distilling “corn squeezin’s” into making small-batch bourbons aged in oak for twelve to fifteen years. But he still refuses to pay the “revenooers,” so it’s still illegal. I haven’t tried the stuff myself.
Famous Restaurant Names
Mumtaz Mahal died today in 1631, from complications during childbirth. Her husband spent the next twenty years and a lot of his wealth (he was the Mughal emperor, so no problem) building her tomb. It is the Taj Mahal, one of the most photographed sites in the world. Its name has been applied to hundreds of Indian restaurants, including one here in New Orleans. The Taj Mahal on Metairie Road serves good food, but gives no hint of its namesake’s grandeur.
Alluring Dinner Dates
While we’re in India, let’s ask Amrita Rao–model and actress–if she’d mind joining us for dinner at the Taj Mahal. She was born in Mumbai today in 1981.
Food And Wine On The Air
Today was the premiere, in 1942, of the greatest radio mystery series of them all, Suspense. The scripts, stars, and production were good enough that the shows still hold up today. It ran weekly for twenty years, until the last day of radio drama on CBS. For a long time its sponsor was Roma Wines, the biggest-selling wines in America at the time. It was generic plonk from California, made before California winemakers realized how good their wines could be. . . This is the day in 1994 that police followed O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco around Los Angeles. The chase was on live TV, and it wound up in a fantastic trial that we ran gavel-to-gavel on WSMB. It constantly pre-empted my radio show, but it brought many new listeners to the show who had never heard of me.
Food Namesakes
David “Stringbean” Akeman, who played the banjo and did corny comedy on “Hee Haw,” was born today in 1915. . . Actor Mark Linn-Baker stepped onto the Big Stage today in 1954. . . Jello Biafra, the lead singer for the Dead Kennedys on their album Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables, was born today in 1958.
Words To Eat By
“An onion can make people cry, but there has never been a vegetable invented to make them laugh.”–Will Rogers.
“Approaching the stove, she would don a voluminous apron, toss some meat on a platter, empty a skillet of its perfectly cooked a point vegetables, sprinkle a handful of chopped parsley over all, and then, like a proficient striptease artist, remove the apron, allowing it to fall to the floor with a shake of her hips.”–Bert Greene, American food writer.
Words To Drink By
“With small beer, good ale and wine,
O ye gods! how I shall dine!”–Unknown.
Recipes From Exodus.
Manna wasn’t his only specialty. Moses had a few other tricks up the sleeve of his chef’s jacket. Hey. . . does this work for hard-boiled?
Click here for the cartoon.
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