Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [122]
For our main courses, Cheryl goes for the daube with panisse (chickpea fries) on the side. Our favorite style of beef stew, shaming all Anglo-Saxon versions, daube must be cooked for hours in an ocean of red wine, as Dominique Le Stanc does artfully. Bill’s sausage with lentils features a fresh pork saucisson, fragrant with fennel and garlic, served a touch soupy in a shallow bowl with plump green lentils simmered with chard. Finishing with cheese—goat for Cheryl and sheep for Bill—we stagger out happily about 9:00.
The next morning we resume our vigil on the balcony, watching a half-dozen swimmers brave the frigid water. Although we’ve never been here at Christmas or Carnival, even colder periods, some residents reportedly celebrate those occasions by skinny-dipping in the bay. These polar bears today wear regular suits, which they deftly slip off their legs when leaving as they pull on warmer clothes over their heads. The beach promenade is far more active at this early hour, lively with joggers, bikers, Rollerblade enthusiasts, and plenty of walkers, many of them tethered to a dog. Our strolls around the city frequently lead us to the busy promenade, but we seldom go below to the uncomfortable beach, formed by rocks instead of sand.
Six mornings a week, including this one, a big pedestrian boulevard in Old Nice, cours Saleya, hosts an open-air market, with produce and prepared foods at one end and flowers at the other. Ambling over, we find it noticeably slower at this time of the year than in sunnier months, with fewer vendors and visitors both. At least the invincible Thérésa shows up, looking as striking as ever even bundled up for the weather. Chez Thérésa has been a mainstay of the market, and a Nice icon, since the 1920s. She’s not that old herself, being the third Thérésa to run the business, but she upholds the legacy with regal pride, selling socca, pissaladière, pan bagnat, and tourta de bléa like they’re her crown jewels. Her name isn’t really Thérésa—it’s Susy—and she’s not from Nice—lived much of her life in Israel actually—but no one complains about food fraud.
A local man, whom we take to be her husband, does the cooking a couple of blocks away. Our last time in town, we were watching him work through the window of his small storefront kitchen when he waved at us to join him inside. He showed us his wood-burning oven, more than seventy-five years old, and demonstrated how he makes the socca. A biker pulling a cart transports the food to the market and Thérésa keeps some of it warm on the top of a big barrel that sits over a charcoal fire. She stations herself most of the time right behind the barrel, smiling and showing off her socca with the coy conceit of a new mom.
For lunch, we wind up right across the street from her booth at another Chez, named after Freddy in this case. Both of us yearn for local seafood and the restaurant provides gargantuan plates of it. Cheryl gets oysters on the half shell and moules frites (steamed mussels with French fries). Among a variety of paellas, the house specialty, Bill picks the one with the most goodies, including shellfish, fish, rabbit, chicken, and chorizo. The waiter plops it on the table in an iron skillet so loaded with the promised provisions—as well as a thick stew of tomatoes, onions, and garlic—that Bill can hardly locate the rice. It’s far from a Valencian version, but this is Nice, not Spain, and everything here is distinctly Niçoise.
Isabelle and Michel Vernaud always guarantee that at Lou Pistou, our dinner restaurant this evening. Next-door neighbors with La Merenda—at the same physical address