A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [18]
Le stade muncipal (the stadium), where we’d watched the young men from the town chase and be chased by bulls, and la forêt (the forest), where the menacing hermit had lived, appeared to be housing developments now. The vacation homes with their summery names like Le Week-end and La Folie were shuttered and forlorn-looking in their emptiness.
We walked down the middle of rue Jules Favre, turned a corner, and found the boulangerie still open. Entering with the customary ‘Bonjour, madame,’ we were greeted with a warm, sweet-smelling waft – brioches, and baguettes baking. We bought a bag of pain raisin – the sticky raisin Danishes we’d had so often as kids – a baguette, a croissant, and a brioche, eager to try it all, to see if it tasted the same.
‘The same,’ said Chris, exuberant.
I was not so thrilled. Something was holding me back. The baked goods, after all this time, were identical in taste and appearance. The shop smelled just as it had twenty-eight years ago. But something was missing.
There was once a little café around the corner called Café Central. It had become our default dinner of choice on those nights when my mother had not felt like cooking or when we’d been unable to agree on where to go or what to eat. It had been a simple neighborhood joint with chipped plaster and whitewashed walls, football posters, a few local fishermen drinking vin ordinaire in the small dining room. I had fond, maybe overly fond, memories of their dark brown soupe de poisson, their clumsy but delicious crudités varìes, their bavette à l’échalote (flank steak with shallots) with limp but tasty frites.
It was called Le Bistro now, and it had been decidedly gussied up. There were candles on the tables, tablecloths, framed paintings of oyster boats on the pastel-colored walls, furniture that didn’t wobble. But the fish soup was the same: dark brown, flecked with shreds of fish, milled bone, redolent of saffron, garlic, and anise; it was accompanied, just as I’d remembered, by little fried croutons, grated Gruyère cheese, and a little crock of rouille, the garlic and pepper mayonnaise. It was delicious. My first taste in almost thirty years of a soup that had seriously inspired me in my professional life. As a young chef, I had toiled mightily to re-create it, again and again, chasing the recipe, fooling with ingredients and amounts and procedures, until I’d finally gotten it right. Fact is, however wonderful the soup might have been, mine is better now. I use lobster. I roast the shells. I garnish mine with hunks of claw meat, making, finally, a heartier, more luxurious version. It may have tasted the same, but, like visiting an old girlfriend and wondering, What the hell did I ever see in her? I guess things had moved on.
Desperately seeking epiphany, I ordered oysters – which couldn’t have been better – a plate of rouget, the tiny, bony but delicious fish from the Med, fried sardines, a pan-roasted magret de canard (duck breast) in green pepper sauce, and a bavette for good measure.
But it still wasn’t happening for me. It’s not that I wasn’t happy. It was great to sit at a table in France again, to look up from my food and see my brother again, to watch him unrestrainedly enjoying himself, bathing in the normalcy, the niceness of it all. Compared to most of my adventures, this was laudable. Gentle. Sentimental. No one to get hurt. Waste, disappointment, excess, the usual earmarks of most of my previous enterprises, were, for once, totally missing from the picture. Why was I not having the time of my life? I began to feel damaged. Broken. As if some essential organ – my heart perhaps – had shriveled and died along with all those dead clumps of brain cells and lung, my body and soul like some big white elephant of an Atlantic City hotel, closed down wing by wing until only the lobby and facade remained.
We walked off dinner by the port. ‘See that dock over there?’ I said to Chris, pointing out a sad-looking wooden structure collapsing slowly into the water. ‘I remember sitting on that dock when I was fifteen. Sam