Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [120]
When Christine arrives with the cheese cart, we’re still drinking the red wine we had with the beef, a local 2000 Château Romanin that combines Grenache, Syrah, Mourvèdre, and Cabernet Sauvignon. To match the wine, she picks for us two aged sheep cheeses and an Alsatian Muenster. Dessert is sautéed pears with a pine-nut praline and intensely fragrant lavender ice cream, dribbled again with olive oil.
Bill takes a glass of Armagnac back to our room, and we relive our dinners of the last three evenings, concluding that the food is as satisfying to us today as most of what we’ve had at three-star restaurants in France in previous years. Although the style of the meals is less elaborate, the attention to detail, the overall quality, and the pacing reflect the same seriousness about dining well. The conversation leads to a momentous decision that both of us take an oath to uphold: as soon as Bill wins the World Series of Poker, which he says will be any year now, we’ll retire permanently to La Riboto.
The next day, we return to Nice, stopping first at the open-air market in Saint-Rémy, the town where Vincent van Gogh committed himself to an asylum after cutting off his left ear. The artist painted many landscapes here, often depicting the local trees that still form a canopy above lots of village streets. Today, gnarly but elegant plane trees, cut back in winter, cast shade and shadows over the downtown market area.
You can buy most anything of personal use from one vendor or another: stocking caps and coats suitable for the weather, ladies’ lingerie less heedful of the cold, shoes and boots, books, CDs, Laguiole knives, diminutive grapevines, even roses and tulips. Among the numerous food booths, we find one selling only kiwis, another specializing in oysters and mussels, and a third just roasting chestnuts. Other stands boast loads of leeks, turnips, and other root vegetables, chickpeas dried and fresh, walnuts, hazelnuts, eggs, hearty breads, honeys, and sausages flavored with herbs, fennel, and pepper. As usual at a Provençal market, a man stirs a huge paella pan full of rice and seafood, an Asian stand offers spring rolls, samosas, and other fried treats, and spits loaded with chickens and meats spin at a rotisserie truck, where the proprietor watches distractedly as he bites off chunks of a baguette to wash down with red wine.
In Nice, we drop off our rental car and check in at La Pérouse, a seaside hotel in the old center of town where we’ve stayed several times before. When Bill made the reservation, he requested one of two specific rooms that enjoy the same great view, and the accommodating reception staff—generally cheery young men and women fluent in many languages—oblige. Our preferred rooms are small, but feel almost spacious because of the expanse of glass on two sides. A big shuttered window opens fully toward the city, and French doors gaze out to the Mediterranean and lead to a standing-room-only balcony that overlooks the whole of the bay, the beach, and the hotel pool. The higher of the two rooms, where we land today, abuts the top of La Colline du Château and offers exactly the same perspective on the town and the water, a view that virtually every tourist pays to see for a couple of minutes. While they come and go, we sit and stare at the vista for hours at a time.
The hill (colline) and the remains of its château beside us figured prominently in Nice history. In the fourth century B.C., Greeks routed Ligurians living in the vicinity and established the trading post of Nikaia (the basis of the city’s current name), placing the town on the plateau as a natural vantage point for protecting the port. The residents had built a cathedral on the site by the eleventh century, and next to it, the ruling counts of Provence put their castle, eventually razed in later battles of succession.
Control of the strategic city changed