Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [121]
Shortly after we arrive, we find ourselves on a street named in honor of the heroine. It descends from La Colline du Château into Old Nice, where the population gradually expanded around Ségurane’s era. It’s always fun to walk the maze of narrow pedestrian lanes in this neighborhood and that’s what we do on our first afternoon, after making an initial stop at La Merenda to secure a dinner reservation, which is always necessary despite the restaurant’s refusal to install a phone for that purpose. In the heart of the old town now, we wander aimlessly, admiring the historic architecture, browsing a few stores, and absorbing the food aromas.
Almost equally split between local and visitor appeal, the mix of shops fascinates us. At one we buy a toddler’s backpack for our granddaughter Chloe, engraved with the French spelling of her name with an accent over the last letter. Just a block or so away, we gape at a boned whole, head-on suckling pig resting in a case in front of a boucherie. It’s known as porquetta, a trademark dish of the area stuffed with ham, artichokes, mushrooms, and other vegetables, and then roasted until the skin is crackling crisp.
Other Niçoise food specialties abound as well, most of them seldom found elsewhere. Cheryl gets a pissaladière snack to go at the same storefront eatery that Calvin Trillin once raved about in a Gourmet article for its local pan bagnat. Resembling a pizza, pissaladière is flatbread covered with onions cooked down slowly to their essence and then topped with a smattering of black olives and anchovies. Pan bagnat consists of a split loaf of round bread rubbed with a garlic clove and then filled as a sandwich with tuna canned in olive oil, lettuce, tomatoes, hard-boiled egg slices, and maybe radishes, scallions, celery, artichoke hearts, or anchovies. Made simply with chickpea flour and olive oil, socca looks like a giant, thin pancake, and the equally unfussy tourta de bléa features chard and pine nuts in a savory pie. The original mesclun, in contrast to salads that go by that name in the United States, brings together greens gathered mainly in the hills of Nice, particularly dandelion stalks, purslane, arugula, small bitter lettuces, and chervil.
By dinnertime, we’re eager to eat. La Merenda raised eyebrows in the French food world when it opened years ago because chef-owner Dominique Le Stanc quit a prestigious haute cuisine position heading the kitchen at Chantecler, in Nice’s grand Négresco hotel, to start cooking the kind of food he personally likes to eat. He has dubbed it “family cooking,” but that doesn’t translate well in American terms, since few families in the United States sit down to such regular menu dishes as tripes à la niçoise, andouillette (tripe sausage), and stockfish (pungent salt cod soaked for days and cooked with onions, tomatoes, and white wine for a couple of hours). The restaurant also stirred a little indignation at its inauguration by doing two seatings for dinner, at 7:00 and 9:00. Normally in France, when you book a table, it’s yours all night. At La Merenda, they pace the service to get you out within two hours. Dastardly.
Promptly at 7:00, the early shift arrives, including us and all the other two dozen patrons who can fit knee-to-knee and elbow-to-elbow in the tiny space. Tonight, as we know is usual from past visits, the blackboard carte offers six appetizers, a similar number of main courses, an optional cheese course (the server just asks whether you want a goat, sheep, or cow variety), some desserts, and water or house wine to drink. The