Last Lunch in Paris

In the middle of our marathon last day in Paris, we practiced the skill we most appreciated acquiring over our nine months in France: dropping everything to enjoy a leisurely lunch.

One last time, we visited Le Baratin, the celebrated gastro-pub conveniently located a block-and-a-half from our apartment. I'd been for lunch with my mom and Cathy; Maggie and I had been to dinner there once (Mo and Héloise's treat!); but Maggie and I had somehow failed to hit up Le Baratin for their super-economical lunchtime menu.

The whole restaurant is tiny, but we sat in the tiniest section, up a few stairs from the bar and next to a food-and-art library that we could have spent the next nine months working through.

To eat, a few staples of Le Baratin, starting with whitefish and a simple green salad.

Maggie's first course was artichoke au jus. I had some delicious braised oxtail over chickpea-carrot stew. For dessert, we shared the by-now-familiar strawberry soup and a slice of strong cheese.

When asked what we miss most about Paris, we tend to talk a lot about the food culture. It's not too hard to see why. That Le Baratin takes such care in arranging wine bottles above a bookshelf full of reference works that reinforce the professionalism of even the tiniest of out-of-the-way, hole-in-the-wall restaurants - well, that says it all.

A Taste of Home

Straddling two cultures, leaving one kind of culture shock for another, sometimes the best way to feel at home is to eat like you did at home. While we were in Paris, this meant home-made bagels and tacos, granola bars, banana cakes, mac'n'cheese, baked French toast, and especially cookies. Back in Somerville, this means reproducing some of our favorite dishes from the past year, and making as many French-flavored recipes as possible.

We started with a palate cleanser we enjoyed at Hidden Kitchen, adapted to suit our tastes:

That's farmers market-fresh strawberries and mint from our own garden over home-made strawberry sorbet over limoncello jello. We served it as a dessert, and will definitely make it again - maybe adapting it differently to be peach sorbet over raspberry liqueur jello, or kiwi sorbet over orange vodka jello . . .

Our next flurry of cooking and baking took inspiration from one of our favorite Parisian food bloggers, Clothilde Dusoulier. Her blog and eponymous cookbook, Chocolate and Zucchini, provide English-language recipes that cover a wide range of French cuisine, both traditional and modern.

Here are some of the things we made:

"Papillote de bar aux asperges" - "Papillote" is the technique of cooking something wrapped up in wax paper; we substituted turnips for bar fish.

"Chicken and cashew mini-quiches" - so many substitutions in this one, they don't deserve their name. Basically it's flour, milk, and egg, with whatever else you want to throw in, cooked in muffin tins. Perfect for an appetizer or brunch, and crust-less, so not terribly time-intensive.

"Zucchini carpaccio with raspberry vinegar" - didn't have raspberry vinegar so we had to improvise a little, but it tasted as pretty as it looks.

"Bulgur-stuffed round zucchini" - again, lots of substitutions, but you get the idea. Adjectives we'd use to describe this dish include "filling," "healthy," "seasonal," and "Halloween-y."

Not pictured: super tasty gougères (cheese puffs) that we've now made a few times, all thanks to Chocolate and Zucchini.

One of the souvenirs we picked up months before leaving Paris was a cookbook called Rilletes à la folie. Rillettes are usually meat-based salads, kind of like tuna fish, but made with goose and duck and pork. We were almost never without rillettes in our fridge, since they're perfect for a snack, a picnic dish, an apéro or something to go along with a meal. The cookbook we found provides recipes not only for the meat-based rillettes, but also for veggie and dessert options. 


Craving rillettes a few weeks after we moved back, we started out trying to make a strawberry-lavender-cheese version, but realized we didn't have the right cheese, and turned it into a sorbet instead. Influenced by Dimi's spice-inspired approach to food, we topped the sorbet with espresso sugar-encrusted banana and served the ensemble in shot glasses, for something different.

Turns out that it's hard to miss Paris too much when the scent of French cooking fills your apartment a few nights a week. Come on over, we'll treat you to something fabulous!

Hidden Kitchen

After a restaurant has been gushed over in the New York Times, on various foodie blogs, and by a random friend-of-a-friend who happens to be in Paris and comes over for dinner, it's perfectly reasonable to want to go to there with every fiber of your being. This was the case with Hidden Kitchen, which isn't really a restaurant at all - it's a private supper club run by two twenty-something Americans in Paris. Thanks to all the buzz, its existence isn't so hidden anymore. But the address has been kept a careful secret, and it's so hard to get reservations that Hidden Kitchen has remained mysterious and tantalizing. Somehow we managed to score three spots for Saturday, May 22 (one extra for Dimi), and the 10-course tasting menu did not disappoint.

That front door grille is all we can show you of the exterior of the apartment building in which you'd find Hidden Kitchen. Isn't it pretty? What we can tell you is that the supper club is located in the 1st arrondissement, and that we were stunned to learn that such a centrally-located apartment could fit such a long dining table in its salon.

Upon arrival, Laura (one half of the HK team) handed us champagne flutes, each with a single, submerged lychee infusing the apéritif with the flavor of fresh fruit. We chatted with the other diners - 16 in all, most American, a few Italian, a few French. Then, it was time to sit down for our amuse-bouche.

Braden, the chef, came out to introduce each course, and luckily I took notes as this one wasn't on the printed menu (which you'll see below). We started with this black pepper cracker topped with green apple and watercress, served beside chilled watercress and nutmeg soup. This resembled one of our amuse-bouches at Le Cinq back in February, and portended great things for the rest of the meal.

Next, spring vegetables, poached quail egg and Green Goddess dressing, presented niftily in a rye butter cookie over a spicy fava bean base. We were also served our first wine pairing, a 2008 Domaine de Villargeau, Coteaux du Giennois. If you notice the picture quality degrading gradually through the end of the post, it's because of rapidly fading exterior light, and rapidly increasing intoxication on my part. I'm such a lightweight. Professional pictures of all these dishes can be found here.

This homemade semoulina linguini with radish leaf pesto, pickled white asparagus, and ricotta salata unleashed a fiery debate on the best way to make your own pasta. The Italians had a few things to say about that. But no one debated the excellent taste and presentation of this dish. We were impressed that - in what turned out to be a tiny kitchen, and with only one server helping - they were able to prepare and plate a dish like this such that it arrived hot. Wine pairing: 2007 Domaine de la Pépière, Muscadet Sèvre et Maine.

Behold the beauty of this salmon with hibiscus bay leaf sauce and fingerling potatoes. Too bad the low light prevents us from appreciating the rich color of the sauce, and the way it complemented the salmon's pink hues. Wine pairing: 2010 Château de Roquefort, Côtes de Provence.

For a palate cleanser between the "entrées" and the "plats," we were offered lime sorbet over bourbon jello (!!) with a sprig of mint. They call this the "Mint Julep Cleanser,"and you can find the recipe on Hidden Kitchen's blog.

Braised artichokes with chicken liver mousse ravioli, fennel sautéed in a white wine sauce, and preserved lemon coulis - how many elements can you incorporate in one dish? We love our raviolis, though, so we certainly weren't complaining. Wine pairing: 2009 Domaine Chaume-Arnaud, Marselan.

Meat-time: Cumin encrusted flank steak with skillet polenta and smoked eggplant. Another interesting plating, the meat was perfectly cooked (read: on the rare side of medium-rare), and who doesn't like smoked eggplant? (Actually, I would be shocked if anyone has even heard of smoked eggplant.) That garnish on top is deep-fried eggplant skin - very clever, not to mention striking. Wine pairing: 2008 Clos de l'Anhel, Corbières.

If this were a regular meal and not a tasting menu, the white bean, dill, and beet salad seen here would be a side to the flank steak, but we're glad we got to appreciate it on its own. Braden used bucca soison, a distant cousin of Lima beans, and roasted them in garlic and thyme.

Finally, we made it to dessert. This strawberry shiso sorbet with a puff pastry and rhubarb was the perfect, super sweet complement to a remarkably light meal (considering the number of courses). Wine pairing: 2008 Château Pierre-Bise, Carbenet d'Anjou.

And of course no French meal would be complete without coffee - which in this case arrived with a distinctly American twist: glazed doughnuts.

Towards the end of the meal, Braden and Laura let loose their French bulldog, Tati (named for the discount clothing store), whose presence only underscored the curious nature of the evening - we were served dinner in someone's home, at a big table with a bunch of brand new friends...


. . . which isn't to say there weren't a few formal notes to the evening. At the beginning, we were provided with simple but elegant menus as a souvenir of the evening. And at the end, along with coffee and doughnuts came a request for a "donation" to cover the cost of the meal. Hey, whatever it takes to keep this thing going.


Over the course of the evening, we figured out the reason why the only thing Hidden Kitchen has been able to keep secret is its address: there's no hiding the satisfaction and enthusiasm of people who have just eaten one of the best meals of their lives.

Flying the Colors

There's no reason why we can't be both patriotic and Francophilic (that's not a disease, just in case you were wondering). So here's our attempt at an abstract American flag photo collage.







I never was very good at collage. It would have been so much easier to just save this post for today. Oh well - Happy 4th of July!