Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [39]
“Yeah, on a winter’s eve in Paris,” Bill replies. “The same for the main courses. Grilled tuna steak with mushroom risotto and bacon cream? Beef tournedos Rossini? Pork loin wrapped in Parma ham served with truffled potatoes?”
The Texas Grill presents the strangest of the specialty menus we find. Billing itself as “The National Cowboy Restaurant,” it allows customers to lasso a herd of unlikely Lone Star starters such as beef carpaccio, an assiette (plate) of smoked salmon, and mozzarella salad. The main-course steaks climb the scale in size to the “350 gram! Entrecô te de Cowboy,” by Amarillo standards a rather puny twelve ounces of meat. The desserts range from poached pears “Abilene-style” to ice creams named Rio Grande, Fort Alamo, Fort Worth, Santa Fe, and Billy the Kid. “I wouldn’t even expect a menu like this,” Cheryl says, “at the Paris Disneyland.”
A couple of the semi-ersatz places lure us in with mixed results. A cheerful Tex-Mex café on Baie des Citrons, La Paillotte advertises fajitas, enchiladas, tostadas, nachos, tequila sunrises, margaritas, and more. Cheryl orders a combination plate with a chicken taco and a beef burrito, both fairly credible except that the fillings are minced almost to a paste in each case. On the side, she gets a chopped tomato and avocado puree topped with crème fraîche, a fanciful French interpretation of guacamole. Bill’s ceviche bears no resemblance at all to the real dish, but the strips of raw tuna and bell pepper taste good anyway. The owner stops by our table during the lunch and Bill asks, “How did you come up with the idea for the restaurant? Have you lived in Texas or Mexico?”
“No, I’ve never been near either place. I moved here from the south of France and opened a sandwich shop originally, but business was slow. My main cook knew a little about Mexican food so we decided to take a chance with it. It’s definitely the best Tex-Mex food in New Caledonia because no one else does it.”
The San Remo, near our hotel, claims in its name and a big sign to an Italian bent. Again, the proprietor is French and so is his sandwich-board pizza chef on the sidewalk, holding aloft a pie topped with a sunny-side-up egg, common in Nice but not in Naples. Whatever their nationality, the pizzas come straight from a hot oven deliciously crisp, enough so to draw us back for an encore. The salads offered on the other side of the menu, such as the warm goat cheese with lardons and greens, make no pretense at an Italian heritage, and neither do any of the wines available by the carafe or bottle.
Our best meals come at small restaurants with more faithful specializations. One is a mom-and-daughter Vietnamese operation in a strip mall around the corner from our hotel. While the middle-aged daughter handles the cooking in the kitchen, the elderly mother serves the patrons, seating us at one of the two simple tables on the sidewalk, actually more atmospheric than the brightly lit, larger tables inside. For starters, she brings us a platter of delightful fried crab spring rolls, which we wrap in lettuce leaves with pickled ginger and then dip in fish sauce. Bill moves on to a spicy fish preparation, with cubes of the day’s catch stir-fried with vegetables in a piquant sauce that gets his nose running again. Cheryl opts for a vermicelli salad with grilled bits of pork and pork balls, served with lettuce leaves, carrot strips, ginger, and peanuts to bundle together for eating.
L’Astrolabe, on the Baie des Citrons, reminds us of numerous seaside bistros on the French Mediterranean, in its menu as well as the alfresco setting. For our lunch, Cheryl chooses the plat du jour, a seafood carpaccio combination. Paper-thin slices of giant clams, salmon, and tuna arrive with seasoning portions of astringent green olive oil, coarse sea salt, black pepper, and lime, all arrayed around a mound of garlicky slivered crudité salad. As terrific as this is, she really swoons over the accompanying vegetable side dish. “It’s the sweetest pumpkin I’ve ever