CAFE DE LA GRILLE, CAPESTANG: RESTAURANT REVIEW

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I lived 50 miles from New York City for most of my life and I never visited Liberty Island, home of the Statue of Liberty. I've seen that green lady in the harbor hundreds of times on visits NYC. I've just never taken the time to take the ferry and check her out up close. Familiarity breeds contempt? Who knows? Do I regret the omission? Only a little. There was always something else worthwhile on the agenda. Maybe next time, when...if...I'm back in the neighborhood.

It's been at least two years, maybe three, since we've lunched at Cafe de la Grille. I have no idea why it's been so long. We've had coffee there dozens of times on visits to the market in the square in Capestang that the Cafe de la Grille faces. We just haven't stopped for a meal. That changed last week. Spur of the moment. We were passing through Capestang. It was just past noon. Let's have lunch.

We're glad that we did.

The covered patio was bustling on a late summer Thursday afternoon, a comfortable day after the summer heat had broken and you could begin to feel autumn in the air. It's a pleasant space, nearly full with families, couples, and the guy who manages the cave cooperatif. We think that the folks next to us might have been boat people, two couples whose conversation moved seamlessly between English and French. That's Capestang for you.

Cathey ordered from the menu of the day. She started with a small salad accompanied by a bit of quiche Lorraine. Cathey puts together a fine quiche herself, so her obvious enjoyment was an important endorsement. For the main, poitrine porc, pork belly, with frites. I've said before that one of the joys of eating in France is that the food tastes just like it's supposed to. Do you like pork? You can't get much porkier than good pork belly. And this was good pork belly.

I ordered the Assiette de la Grille, an assortment of charcuterie that delighted this carnivore. The picture tells the story, a full plate and a varied assortment. My side order of frites was, like Cathey's, fresh-cut and substantial.

With a demi of rosé, the bill just topped €34, a fair price for a filling, wholly satisfactory meal.

You can read more of my restaurant reviews HERE. 

 

WINE TASTING FOR PLEBS

I don't know a darn thing about wine. So I warn you. Don't listen to a word that I say. Why? I'm an American, born in the Northeast USofA, not exactly a hotbed of boutique wine making even today when the folks in places like the Finger Lakes of upstate New York have been trying to establish their creds for generations. All that I knew of wine as I was growing up came from my experiences with my grandmother's concord grape wine. Oddly enough, straight out of the barrel in the basement it wasn't too sweet. If you liked sweet wine, though, Nana didn't mind. She'd just add a dab of maple syrup to the carafe and shake it a bit.

See what I mean? Don't listen to a word that I say.

Like many of my fellow English-speaking expats, I have come to enjoy sampling the great variety of wines available to us in here Occitanie. We live in the midst of a terroir that is transforming itself from a region known for sheer quantity to a region dotted  with an ever-increasing cohort of quality producers of light and sunny rosés, clean and subtle whites, and hearty and complex reds. Signs dot every two-lane blacktop directing travelers to domaines with wine for tasting and for sale, often along with olive oil, honey, saffron, or other bounty of this ancient land.

We all have our favorites, from affordable but reliable standards to bottles laid in for special company. Domaine Pain de Sucre, with vineyards just down the road from us along the Canal du Midi, supplies us with an inexpensive rosé that has sweetened our sunny summer afternoons ever since we moved here.full-time several years ago. Laurent Miquel's Cazal Viel estate, another early discovery located between Cazouls-les-Beziers and Cessenon-sur-Orb, produces a range of viognier and chardonnay-viognier to suit any taste. And we're learning to navigate the reds, sampling and/or laying down bottles from Domaine de Pech-Ménel, Domaine Moulin Gimie, and Domaine Saint-Georges d'Ibry among several others.

Early on, we discovered vrac, bulk wine. Our English-speaking friends know of it. But our French friends are the ones more likely to buy it. After several years standing in line, waiting to get my hands on the stainless steel hose from which pours that cheap product in bulk like petrol into the tank, I can scarcely remember hearing English spoken. (Yes, I said petrol. Life among British expats...) I can't think why not. After a pleasant evening of sips and nibbles, and more sips and nibbles, and an extra sip or two, when all of the chilled bottles of rosé in the fridge have met their maker, we have on occasion been forced to pour from an unlabeled bottle of local vrac. No one has seemed to mind, although at the point that we bring it out, taste buds have already been dulled beyond repair. Of course, 95% of the time, our guests don't get anywhere near vrac rosé. But it's what we drink for dinner when we're by ourselves. And for us, it works.

Does this mean that we cannot discriminate one wine from another? Pas de tout! Three of the local cooperatifs offer vrac at prices averaging about €1.50 per liter, the caves in Capestang, Cebezan, and Argeliers. We periodically sample each in turn to check out which pleases our naive palates best at the present moment. Our current choice is Argeliers. We have a sneaking suspicion that the taste is dependent on how carefully they separate the snails from the grapes as they are unloaded. But they're not talking and we're not asking. 

So there you have it. 10 liters at a time for €15. Ah, France. Ya gotta love it.

 

THE CELEBRITY BOOK CLUB

My summer reading list...





Pride and Prejudice by Donald Trump: An autobiography.
  
What Kind Of Fool Am I? by Jeremy Corbyn: Speaks for itself.

The Animal Firm by Rudy Giuliani: Lawyers challenged by truthiness.

Eat, Drink, Comb by Boris Johnson: The zen of scalp maintenance.

Norwegian Wood by Madonna: Searching Scandinavia for the right man.

How Brown Was My Valley by Scott Pruitt: He tried.

The Pussy Monologues by Donald Trump: It'll grab you.

King Leer by Harvey Weinstein: Absolute power corrupts. 

Flowers in the Attic by Bill Clinton: Where else would he put her?

The Mitch in the Willows by Senator McConnell: Public service leads to Toady Hall.

The Lyin' King by Donald Trump: A political procedural.

Where the Child Things Are by Betsy DeVos: Searching to understand education.

The Magic Bus by Nigel Farage: Who?

Eat, Drink, Comb by Donald Trump: See above.

The Moose Trap by Boris and Natasha: With props to Agatha Christie.

SOUPY SALES, FACEBOOK, BREXIT, AND TRUMP: WHAT'S REALLY IMPORTANT - AUGUST, 2018

If your family in the USofA owned a television in the early days of broadcasting and as a child you were given the opportunity to watch it, you had many shows to choose from. They're considered classics now. Generally shown during late afternoons or on the weekends, kid shows included Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Leave It to Beaver, Sky King, The Lone Ranger, Father Knows Best, Zorro, Make Room for Daddy, and a bunch more. Simple tales for a simpler time.

I didn't really enjoy the most popular kid shows that featured puppets. I was too young for Kukla, Fran and Ollie and too old for Lamb Chop.  But there was one show that featured puppets and a couple who lived in a pot-bellied stove and giant talking dogs and a guy with a big bow tie. That guy was Soupy Sales and the show was Lunch with Soupy Sales and it was positively revolutionary. Check out this clip. It's eight minutes long. Settle in for some silliness.

Other than the fact that this clip always makes me laugh out loud, there's a good bit of gentle subversion going on here. This was the mid 1960s. Did you notice the offhand dig at the military draft at the time of the Vietnam War? And Soupy was a great lover of jazz. Most folks outside of Detroit don't know that at the same time that Soupy spent his days entertaining kids (and their hip parents) on local TV when he was just starting out, at night he hosted a comedy show that featured all of the great jazz artists coming through Detroit, at the time a true jazz mecca. Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Stan Getz, Milt Jackson, Charlie Parker, and Clifford Brown were among those who appeared. I've read that Miles Davis was on Soupy's show five times. So in the above clip, on a kids show, you have an Oscar Peterson jazz piece kicking off a sketch and a John Lee Hooker blues tune finishing it off. In the middle, a pun about the draft. Heady stuff for network television back in the day.

Once we realized some years later that network television had settled into its rightful place as the home of police procedurals and reality programming, we turned to the internet. Facebook. It was new. It was hip. The kids were into it. So, like a granny wearing skinny jeans and high-heeled sandals to the beach accompanied by her Speedo-attired husband with his gut hanging out over his junk, we pretended that we were hip, too. And in the process, we chased out the kids who were the ones who made Facebook hip in the first place. They've gone elsewhere. But we're still on Facebook, posting videos of our cats, of our grandchildren, and of the signs that we waved at that march last week against (or for) something or other.

And with the onslaught of adults, politics are taking over Facebook. And like Bexit and Trump, lots of what's being said doesn't make much sense. For instance, I'm an old-fashioned liberal Democrat. I don't know what a neo-liberal is. Every time that someone tries to explain it to me, it comes out sounding like a neo-liberal is really a conservative. On one Facebook post, Margaret Thatcher was described to me as a neo-liberal. I can hear her laughing. About the only thing liberal about Thatcher was her liberally-voiced contempt for liberalism. So you can call me what you want. I'm a liberal. Period.

And that's what's really important. You can say anything about anything or anybody on Facebook and the only filters are the comments, ranting for and against, often hidden from view. A red bus proclaiming that Brexit would add £461 million per week to NHS funding found its way all over the internet, seen by millions more people than could ever have seen that bus in person. Does anybody today really think that, after Brexit, the NHS will suddenly find itself fully funded? Trump showed up at a factory in Indiana during the Presidential campaign and told the workers that he would save their jobs. I saw a clip of his speech on Facebook. The company moved operations to Mexico anyway. Do those workers get to change their vote?

Let's be clear. As much as we enjoy Facebook, as much as it has enriched our lives with videos of kittens wrestling with parrots, it has also been used by folks with less benign motives. In fact, even the most well-intentioned among us have been known to disseminate incomplete, confusing, or downright false information. But there are those of us, completely taken with this new communal toy, who will believe without reservation that there's a pedophile ring operated by Hillary Clinton located under a pizzeria in Washington DC. I understand from some of my English friends that there are those who would be perfectly happy with Boris as PM. What are we going to do with people like that? Just yesterday, Trump's lawyer said, "Truth isn't truth." That's straight out of 1984 or Animal Farm.

Look. I get it. It's not Facebook's fault that people believe lies and that pernicious governments, our own or those of our enemies, take advantage social media for their own ends. But seriously. What are we going to do about it? I don't know. Do you?



 

LA TABLE DE MEL, THEZAN-LES-BEZIERS: RESTAURANT REVIEW

Not everyone visits restaurants regularly. Not everyone enjoys driving to get to a meal or the drive to get home after a meal. Not everyone enjoys eating in public. And not everyone is willing (or able) to pay for someone else to do the cooking. But many of us don't mind the drive, don't mind eating in a room full of strangers as long as their kids behave, and don't mind paying for the experience as long as we receive value for dollar...or euro.

I have to tell you that I'm getting tired of eating at the same restaurant. I don't mean the same restaurant at the same address. I mean the same, typical French restaurant with a lunch special that gives you value for dollar...or euro...and throws in the occasional surprise. We've eaten at dozens of them. All slightly different, but all with a thing or two to recommend them. The latest? La Table de Mel in Thezan-les-Beziers.

I chose La Table de Mel as the meeting place for friends in for a visit to their holiday home in Magalas because of a picture in an online review, a picture of shrimp and chorizo in cream sauce with a nice little basket of fries and a side salad. I like shrimp and I like chorizo and I like cream sauce and I like fries. I'll even eat salad now and then. Combining them all seemed like a good idea. Thezan-les-Beziers is about halfway between our two houses. Why not?

Nestled between a hair stylist and a veterinarian, across the street from a warehouse entrance, La Table could be just another workman's lunch joint. It's not. It's a nicely appointed space, clean and new, with outside tables under shady sails. You can hear the main road a hundred yards or so away if you choose to sit outside but the noise is by no means distracting. We were among the first in on a sunny Friday and we were the last out, friends catching up. My guess is that most others were lunching from work.

My three table mates each chose the 14€ formula and each started with the salade chevre chaud, a well-portioned start with the gooat cheese on toast points and a generous slice of serrano underneath them. The ladies chose the fish for their main. David went for the steak/frites. Each plate was as advertised and as is usual in these places, a reasonable portion properly prepared. Plenty of frites with the French beef, a portion of yellow rice with the white-fleshed fish, and tomato provecale for all. My menu choice of shrimp and chorizo in cream sauce was one of those little surprises that I mentioned earlier, interesting and rarely seen elsewhere. With it's own little side salad, a basketfrites, and one of those tomatoes, worth the 16€.
of hot

The girls went for little portions of standard French restaurant desserts - one had tiramisu and the other red fruit in fromage blanc. David and I went for the other of the little surprises, brioche pain perdue with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Very nice.

With a demi of wine and two beers and a fruit juice, the bill came to about 17€ apiece. Thus, La Table de Mel is that same French restaurant with a reasonably priced lunch special and a couple of surprises. If we're in the neighborhood of this one again and hungry, we won't hesitate to drop in.

HERE is their Facebook page. I consolidate all of my restaurant reviews HERE.

The chorizo has a spidery look to it now that I see the pic. 

MEET THE MEAT, TOULOUSE: RESTAURANT REVIEW

You heard me. Meet the Meat. That's not a translation. That's its name. Meet the Meat.

Regular visitors to my blog are aware that I'm not enamored of French beef. The typical bavette or faux filet that appears on many menus as steak/frites is to this American's taste the equivalent of game meat, not appropriately marbled and a bit too chewy. That's why I was curious about a restaurant called Meet the Meat only a few blocks from our recent rental in Toulouse. I mean, you really have to think that you have meat figured out to put it up on the marquee like that. So we decided to try it.

On the way, we passed one of a chain called L'Entrecote, which translates loosely as Rib Steak. They apparently sell steak by weight and have quite a reputation. The line waiting for the first seating was out the door and down the block. Across the street, at Meet the Meat, we were the first to be seated. No line. No waiting. As our meal progressed, and as Meet the Meat filled up, we looked out at L'Entrecote across the street every now and then. After a couple of hours, a new line formed. More than one seating? That's not often the case in France. But in a chain where volume counts, I suppose that it makes sense. What didn't make sense to me was waiting in a long line on a hot night for chain-cooked beef to be eaten in a hurry to make room for the next wave. And amazingly, as we finished our meal and left Meet the Meat, a third line was forming at L'Entrecote!

I can't speak to L'Entrecote. Maybe, they are that good. But I did enjoy Meet the Meat. Best steak that I've had in France.

We started with a cold beer on a hot day, a very cold beer just the way that I like it. All three of us ordered the entrecote, fancy that. 350 grams (a bit over 12 ounces for the metrically challenged). It came with a salad. We all ordered the salad with duck gizzards. It's France. Get used to it. Good stuff.

The bread was crunchy and grainy.

The girls went to the house red. I continued with beer. The girls had potatoes in cream sauce for their side. I had frites. There were other choices, too. The girls tried herbed butter for their steak. I had a little cup of pepper sauce. All was just right. Cooked to order. Juicy and tender. I repeat. Best steak that I've had in France.

Chocolate cheesecake for dessert. Unnecessary but this is a restaurant review, after all. Adequate but New York has nothing to worry about..

Everyone was given a little kahlua-based digestif at the finish. Nice touch.

The bill came to about 30€ per person. For a decent steak with reasonably interesting trimmings, alcohol included, Meet the Meat's meat was well worth the freight for true carnivores.

Be aware. There are two locations in sight of each other. We ate at the more relaxed Kanteen. HERE'S the website for the more formal restaurant. Read more of my restaurant reviews HERE.

BLENDING JAMES TAYLOR, BONNIE RAITT, BOBBY DARIN, DICK DALE, AND MORE: IRA'S BLEND 134