Maison Aribert, Uriage | My Last Restaurant of 2020, A-/B+

December 3, 2020

Maison Aribert - Facade of hotel and restaurant @ STUDIO PAPIE AIME MAMIE

Maison Aribert - sign @ STUDIO PAPIE AIME MAMIE

During the year without restaurants, it turns out the last one I would go to in 2020 was the Maison Aribert, a Michelin two-star table in the operetta-set-like little spa town of Uriage-les-Bains, which is a few miles outside of Grenoble in the Vercors.

In retrospect, I wonder if we weren’t guided by some sort of subliminal prescience, since the weekend after our trip away, France entered its second lockdown of 2020 on October 30. Once again, all of Gaul’s restaurants and bars were required to shutdown; as of this date, they are expected to remain closed until at least mid-January 2021. One way or another, we were itching for a change of scene after having spent most of the year in our house in a village outside of Uzes in the Midi after the first lockdown ended in late May.

Maison Aribert = Christophe Aribert @ Alexander Lobrano

I’d read a lot about chef Christophe Aribert, too, and having previously had an only dimly remembered experience of his cooking from the short stint he did as chef at L’Opéra Restaurant, the hapless restaurant now known as Coco at the Opéra Garnier in Paris, I was curious to discover his food. So we left home on a beautiful sunny day when the vineyards surrounding our village had turned into a sweeping bronze-colored carpet rolling off in every direction, including to the distant violet-colored Cevennes mountains on the horizon, and drove north to Valence. The idea was that we’d dine at Maison Aribert and spend the night there, and then visit the Musée de la Grande Chartreuse in Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse and then Chartreuse liqueur aging cellars in Voiron and Chocolats Bonnat, one of France’s best chocolate-makers, in the same town.

As is my predilection, the French countryside read en route as a succession of delicious foods and wines and remembered meals. The Rhone Valley resonated with the names of many of my favorite wines—Chateauneuf du Pape, bien sur, but also Cairanne, Gigondas, Vinsombres, and Beaumes-de-Venise, among others. A sign indicating the route to Sisteron brought back the best lamb I’ve ever eaten, a succulent slow-roasted shoulder of spring lamb from that town at La Bonne Étape, while the exit to Romans, made me want its tiny cheese-filled ravioli, and a sign for Saint Marcellin brought on a desperate craving for one of my favorite cheeses. More discretely, the road leading from Valence to Grenoble was lined with plantations of walnut trees, which produce the best of these nuts to be found anywhere in the world (F.Y.I., French walnut producers in the Dauphine have had a hard time of it in the face of competition from California and China, but their more expensive product, which has an Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée, has an infinitely better flavor and texture).

I also found myself eagerly looking forward to eating a meal I hadn’t cooked, since as much as I love to cook, I’ve never cooked more intensely in my life than I have this year. And recently I’ve been missing restaurants, and not just for their food, but as the most vital social fixture in my life and places that have fascinated and delighted me ever since I was a child.

Maison Aribert - Zucchini @ STUDIO PAPIE AIME MAMIE

Before puberty lit the fuse of sexuality, food was the vector for sating whatever awkwardly self-conscious sensuality I may have had, and restaurants offered stages for cameo performances that brought self-affirmation and the hope of a larger and more glamorous existence than those of the adults who surrounded me. To be sure, there actually were some rather glamorous people in our town, but most of them had sort of accidently washed up there after the drama of storms and battles elsewhere made them grateful for its silence and primness, a quality they were also wryly amused by.

So I’ve always loved restaurants, beginning with the homely ones that were only occasionally available to me growing up in southwestern Connecticut. I loved Howard Johnson’s—one of America’s original quality- casual restaurant chains, for its terrazzo floors, fries, burgers and peppermint-stick ice cream drowned with hot fudge sauce; the Apizza Center, which produced some of the best ‘pies’ in the pizza belt of pizza-loving Connecticut; and West Lake, a Cantonese restaurant with exquisitely good food we most often ate spooned out of white-paper takeout containers with little wire handles. Even today, thinking about West Lake’s egg foo yung, shrimp toast, egg drop soup, egg rolls, and shrimp in lobster sauce makes my mouth water.

American restaurant culture really blossomed at the same time that I became more and more interested in food, too. If I discovered my passion for restaurants during a first teenaged trip to Europe in 1972, they became a regular part of my life when I went to college. There were modish places like Fitzwilly’s, the first puckishly hip restaurant in Northampton, Massachusetts with its exposed brick walls, spider plants hanging in macrame holders, cheeseburgers in baskets lined with sheets of waxed paper and then elegant restaurants like the expensive Café Budapest in Boston. Moving to New York City after college, I discovered myself and the great metropolis through its restaurants, including places like
Ruskay’s, the supremely bohemian chic restaurant on the Upper West Side with candles that guttered over glass-topped tables and live musicians in a mezzanine, holes in the wall like the Latino-Chinese Flor de Mayo (www.flordemayo.com) and magnificent but wiltingly expensive French cooking at restaurants like Lutèce.

Maison Aribert - dining room @ STUDIO PAPIE AIME MAMIE

And then I did it again when I moved to London—discovered a city through its restaurants, and another time when I arrived in Paris in 1986. Now with dusk falling on an October day, I was ready to take on the best table in Uriage-les-Bains.

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Why I Miss American Supermarkets

November 2, 2020
Chez Carrefour @Alexander Lobrano

Checking out at my local Carrefour supermarket in France

 

Day three of the second lockdown of the year in France, and I’m really missing American supermarkets.

As a food writer who’s lived in Paris for more than thirty years, I understand why Americans go weak in the knees for all things French. The bakeries! The cheese shops! The outdoor markets! Yes, France is a food-lovers paradise. Except when it’s not. And if you wonder what I’m talking about you might visit a Franprix or Leader Price supermarket the next time you’re in France.

Every summer since I’ve lived in France, I’ve returned to the U.S. to see family and friends. Why? I’d never describe myself an expatriate. Rather, I’m an American who lives in France, because my career grew up there, and I’m very happy living here. But I didn’t reject the United States. I chose the world instead, because I love to eat and I love to travel. So as soon as I understood that the world map on the wall of my elementary school in Connecticut was wrong—it implied that the Americas are in the middle of the world, I wanted to live in Europe. I’m insatiably curious about the Old World’s food ways and cultures, and it’s an easier base from which to travel to other places that fascinate me, like Africa and Asia.

An essential foodstuffs delivery during the second lockdown in France

 

Grounded in Europe this year, because my French spouse can’t enter the United States, I miss my friends and family. I also really miss American supermarkets, because this institution of daily life has come to reflect the quality I love most about the United States, its human diversity. American supermarkets also mirror and accelerate major changes in the American diet, like the growing number of Americans who are eating organic, vegetarian or Vegan.

This is why when I return home I can happily spend hours in the aisles of a Publix, a Stop & Shop, a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe’s shopping for things I can’t easily find in France, if I can find them at all. The sad little truth is that French supermarkets are often mediocre. To be sure, they’re things travelers love picking up to bring back to the U.S. with them—sea salt, jams, bouquet garni, and mustard, but otherwise they reveal the fact that the middle-class French diet is generally less adventurous and diverse than it is in the United States, and this is a reflection of the society itself.

Oh, and by the way, of course I have been to La Grande Epicerie in Paris, which just may be the best supermarket in France. In fact, I lived about ten doors away from it for many years, and yes, it’s good, but not that good, and it’s also very expensive. It’s also very much the outlier when it comes to French supermarkets, too.

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Assa, Blois | A Sublime Restaurant on the Banks of the Loire, A-

October 7, 2020
The Loire @Alexander Lobrano

The Loire as seen from the dining room at Assa in Blois.

 

On the overcast autumn day I went to lunch at Assa, I became so mesmerised by the mirrored view of the low gray sky on the skeining waters of the Loire river that my curiosity about the meal to come had sort of gently drifted downstream by the time the first complimentary hors d’oeuvres came to the table. I was here at this Michelin one-star table because I was hungry and hoped, of course, to eat well, but the spare serene Ryokan-like atmosphere and decor of the dining room had me pleasantly day-dreaming and enjoying the calm and new luxury of being in a quiet attractive place that felt safe during these tumultuous times.

This year, for obvious reasons, I’ve been to many fewer restaurants than I’ve frequented in many years. After the lockdown ended in Paris, we migrated south to our house in a little village outside of the beautiful town of Uzes in Le Gard, and though they’re some wonderful restaurants there, we didn’t go out that often. Instead, we cooked. And cooked. And cooked. Since after the year-long renovation of our house, a trio of linked together 15th century stone houses in the heart of the village, we received a voluminous rotation of visitors, including Bruno’s sister who lives in Florence and her two sons, one of whom lives in Rome as a film student and the other who’d repatriated to Italy from Colombia on a humanitarian flight organised by the Italian government, his mother from the north of France, his sister from Paris with her partner, and friends from Paris, Switzerland and the nearby Luberon.

Assa - dining room with view of Loire @Alexander Lobrano

Assa menu September 30, 2020 @Alexander Lobrano

It was lovely to share our new nest with all of them, but it also meant an enormous amount of, well, cooking. So by the time I ended up on my own at the table at Assa, I was rather glad of my solitude and the fact that someone other than me would be wielding the pots and pans in the kitchen. In these tumultuous and trepidatious times, being in a restaurant also felt like a very sincere luxury, too, since I love the ritual of sharing a meal with strangers and discovering a new chef. Or in the case of Assa, two chefs, Anthony Maubert and his Japanese wife Fumiko, who run this old riverside auberge they’ve so artfully reinvented for a new century.

Assa - Loire Valley fish amuse bouche @Alexander Lobrano

When the complimentary hors d’oeuvre that began  the four-course lunch menu I’d ordered arrived, it was so brilliant my attention was promptly summoned back to the table and intensely focused on the beautiful and surprising dish presented on a round slice of tree trunk. Two different types of Loire River freshwater fish were presented, one in a spoon as a little dumpling topped with a coriander leaf and the other in a bath of white miso with pickled turnips and puffed rice. The contrast between the garnishes and the firm gently flavoured white fish was fascinating, because it constituted sort of a compass to follow during the meal to come. Using seasonal Loire Valley produce as its anchor, the Mauberts’ cooking was a vivid set of dishes with elegant but occasionally playful melodies equally inspired by France and Japan. It was also consistently beautiful to behold and plated with a keen aesthetic that heightened the pleasure of the palate.

Assa - Foie gras, shitakes, champignons de Paris @Alexander Lobrano

The first course of my meal was the most profoundly satisfying dish I’ve eaten so far this year. A seared slice of foie gras sat on a gelee of dashi and was topped with grilled shiitake mushrooms and raw button mushrooms, with a sprinkling of matcha adding color and a pleasant whispering astringency to this umami-rich dish, a perfect expression of autumn in the French countryside.

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My Mom, the Culinary Cultural Appropriator

September 8, 2020
Mom at the Trevi Fountain @Alexander Lobrano

Me, my mother, and my brother John at the Trevi Fountain in Rome, 1972

 

My Bostonian mother, who died last Fall, was a cultural appropriator in the kitchen, and this was a good thing. Her English and Scottish ancestors had left her with only the most meager of gastronomic legacies. The totemic foods of her Boston upbringing included B & M Boston baked beans; canned brown bread, which is pretty much inedible and must be descended from some sort of sailor’s rations; frozen codfish cakes; little tins of Underwood’s Deviled Ham, a pink sandwich paste of a mysterious provenance doubtless best left unknown; and the traditional English Christmas puddings that in America are mostly only eaten in New England— but she inflected our meals with her curiosity about the world and other cultures. My father often teasingly disparaged her culinary daring, but I loved it and so did my three siblings.

Hamburger was Mom’s medium, because it was economical when she had four kids and a husband to feed. It could also quickly be conjured into a dish that dispatched us from suburban Connecticut to Cuba, China, or Italy. Sautéed with chopped onions, canned tomato sauce, sliced green cocktail olives, pimientos, and paprika, it became her version of Latin picadillo. Simmered with a small can of La Choy water chestnuts and another one of bean sprouts, plus chopped onion, celery, and soy sauce, it ferried us down the Yang-Tse to dinner. Another day, we’d have hamburger “pizza,” the meat patted into a square baking pan, topped with spaghetti sauce, a can of mushrooms, grated Romano, and oregano.

At our dinner table, we made virtual visits to Hungary with Mom’s stuffed peppers, looked forward to the Viennese rhapsody of her wiener schnitzel with an operatic flourish of fresh lemon slices and capers, and became regulars at a cozy little imaginary bistro in Paris with her Beef Burgundy, aka boeuf bourguignon, which she made with Holland House red cooking wine, a jar of onions, canned beef bouillon and a roux.

“Sometimes it would be nice to have a piece of meat that’s just a piece of meat,” my father would often say in response to a new recipe, to which she always had the same reply. “In a nation of immigrants, we get to know each other by eating each other’s foods, Sandy.”

Mom had her standards, too, once looking up from an issue of Woman’s Day to remark that pineapple alone did not make something Polynesian and another time (rightly) scoffing at recipe for clam chowder in Family Circle that rather insanely suggested you could substitute canned tuna for clams, fresh or canned.

A busy and very intelligent woman, my mother spent her years as a suburban mother—she went back to work very successfully after getting divorced when we were in college, insisting on her twin passions for racial justice and art history. She designed a volunteer-staffed program to bring art history to the elementary schools of a nearby industrial city, because she looked askance at the well-educated women in our leafy suburb who did nothing but play tennis and bridge all day. “They were privileged to have had their educations, and they should be using them,” she said.

As a child, she also scared me witless during the sixties by threatening to go south and join the Freedom Riders, the volunteers who worked with the Civil Rights movement. Ultimately, my father persuaded her to stay home but she drilled her fierce passion for racial justice into our heads the same way she shared her fascination with the cooking of other countries.

Were the dishes inspired by other kitchens authentic? Of course not. In the seventies, she couldn’t get the ingredients in a New England supermarket to make them so, and no one had ever taught her to cook ‘real’ Mexican, Greek—she also made moussaka, or Chinese food. But aside from gustatory variety at the table, these feints at other kitchens were meant to provoke our curiosity and remind us that the world was a vast and culturally rich place beyond the confines of whatever might be found on the shelves at our local Stop & Shop supermarket.

If you’d suggested to that she was being disrespectful of other cultures and food ways with the dishes she made, I know she would have been mortified, because her goal was exactly the opposite. By introducing us to foreign flavors, she was attempting to fight the homogenizing centrifuge of white middle-class American culinary culture, the edible emblem of which is probably Velveeta, the processed orange cheese of no little taste and no provenance.


Curiously, though, she was often skeptical and even a little exasperated when the seeds of culinary curiosity she’d sown in our childhoods bloomed when we became adults. “When did you kids become so fancy and fussy at the table,” she asked once when I brought her some expensive fresh white asparagus from a greengrocer in New York City. The arugula I loved made no sense to her when there was iceberg lettuce to be had, because this cannonball-like green kept longer and could quickly be sliced into wedges and then slicked with bottled salad dressing; Mom drew the line at washing salad greens. And what was the point of a quart of black currant Haagen Dazs when you could get a gallon of Sealtest chocolate ice cream for less money? Her bread habits never evolved past supermarket white in a plastic sleeve, and she had no interest in wine, keeping one gallon of Carlo Rossi red and another of white in her front-hall coat closet for those occasions when her wine-drinking children visited. We joked among ourselves about these bottles of wine as only being a last-resort emergency-landing delivery system and always brought our own wine, knowing enough to pick off the price tag before she went anywhere near the bottle. She remained a convinced customer of supermarket pies and cakes, and was a loyal customer of Saucee shrimp cocktail in pressed-glass tulip-shaped flutes—just pry off the lid and you’re ready to go; Progresso bread crumbs; the canned whipped cream we referred to as Jiffy Lube; and plain old supermarket-brand American baloney.

A suggestion that herbs and spices had best-before dates for a reason, which was that they faded or became acrid, was dismissed as unwanted and unconvincing bad news, and even after the canned vichysoisse made by the Bon Vivant soup company in Newark, New Jersey gave several people botulism, she clung to the cans lurking in the back of her kitchen cabinets (“Bon vivants, no more! My father guffawed the night we heard this news on the radio). Tomato aspic would always be a perfect summer lunch, and the most expedient form of garlic was powdered.

Living alone, her diet regressed to her childhood favorites as she grew older. She actually liked frozen peas and carrots, made omelettes with pennants of American cheese, and renewed her ardor for Gorton’s frozen fish sticks. And yet Mom never stopped surprising me. One of the last dishes she ever cooked for me before moving into an assisted-living home was chicken yassa, a savory West African favorite of chicken cooked with lemons and onions. She’d found the recipe in a magazine, of course, and it was absolutely delicious. “I would so have liked to visit Senegal,” she said when she came back to the table with dessert, Bisquik biscuit shortbread with frozen strawberries. “You know, there’s a huge African imprint on Southern cooking,” she added.

My mother’s gone now, but if she was still alive, I’d insist that she would have been a valuable addition to the test kitchen of any major food magazine. She knew that it was the unselfconscious culinary pastiches of other culture’s kitchens like the ones she cooked for us as children that made us Americans. For many people, these were the essential gateway which induced the culinary curiosity that often led to a sincere desire for more knowledge and authenticity about the foods and cooking of other cultures and countries. And you might want to try her hamburger pizza before you knock it, because with all due respect to the brilliant pizza makers of Naples, it was actually pretty good.

Le Vivier, Le Grau-du-Roi | A Great Fish House in the South of France, B+/A-

July 30, 2020

Le Vivier - Facade @Alexander Lobrano

This year, the meals I’ve enjoyed most in France have been at Le Vivier, a charming, relaxed, reasonably priced and very good seafood restaurant in Le Grau-du-Roi, a busy beach resort that’s also France’s second-largest Mediterranean fishing port on the short shoreline of Le Gard. This French departement is west of the Rhone and bound on the south by the Mediterranean and the North by the Cevennes mountains, and it’s to this beautiful quiet green peaceful place that Bruno and I moved as soon as the arduous lockdown in Paris was lifted.

Heading south from Paris to our house in a little village a few miles west of Uzes, the highway was empty, and we exulted in the enormity of the toast-colored wheat fields, vineyard-covered hillsides and sweeping forests, which came as both a relief and a shock after having lived in 140 square meters (1500 square feet) for ten weeks. During le confinement, as it was called in France, I only left the apartment two or three times to do those errands that required my actual physical presence. Bruno would duck out to buy bread, but otherwise we bought almost all of our food and wine online, and our apartment became our tiny continent, with every room becoming a different country with a different mood and personality, and the kitchen, as always, being the heart of our home and the place we met twice a day for lunch and dinner and to do a huge amount of cooking.

Le Grau-du-Roi beach @Alexander Lobrano

At the beach in Le Gra-du-Roi in Le Gard

 

We cooked boeuf bourguignon, we cooked pot au feu, we roasted chickens, we made Marcella Hazan’s ragu for pasta and lasagna, we indulged ourselves in chef Jacques Maximin’s sea bass recipe, which is in my book HUNGRY FOR FRANCE, with a fish delivered directly to us by a fisherman in Brittany using Chronopost Fresh, France’s brilliant cold-chain-guaranteed overnight shipping service. We made mapo tofu, we made red bean curry. My main recreation was online food shopping and recipe hunting during the longest time that’s ever passed since I moved to Paris in 1986 when I didn’t go to a single restaurant. Every day, I worked as hard on our meals as I did on any of the articles I was writing, because the pleasure of good food had never been more important to me. With our worlds turned upside down, we needed nourishment, comfort and pleasure.

Blauzac @Alexander Lobrano

Blauzac

 

 

Blauzac kitchen @Alexander Lobrano

First day in the new kitchen

 

On the way south, we ate a picnic we’d bought at Marks & Spencer–BLTs, shrimp-and-mayonnaise sandwiches, salads, and chips, in a highway rest stop and watched a farmer fitting a huge block of salt into a stand for the brown-and-white cows who were eagerly watching him through a scrim of trees. And finally we reached our house in Blauzac, which had been in renovation for the past eight months at the end of an eight-hour drive, cleaned up the beautiful new kitchen and made some pasta, put some sheets on the bed and fell asleep with all the windows wide open so that we could enjoy the sweet smells of the earth and the fig tree in the garden breathing during the night.

Market in Uzes @Alexander Lobrano

The market in Uzes

 

The next morning, we went to shop in the market in Uzes, and it was while browsing the stalls here that  I realized  how much my corona virus quarantine had changed my tastes in food. Not going to restaurants for almost three months, I emerged wanting food that was simpler, more produce-centered and less complicated. “The greatest dishes are very simple,” said the great French chef Auguste Escoffier, and cut off from restaurant cooking in Paris, I was reminded that this is so true.

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Peppe Pizzeria | The Best Pizza in Paris, A-

May 19, 2020

PEPPE Pizzeria - five pizzas @divinemenciel

 

Ever since I’ve had teeth, few foods have more reliably made me happy than pizza, and this is why the pizza at pizzaïoulo Giuseppe Cutraro new Peppe Pizzeria in the 20th Arrondissement not far from the Père Lachaise Cemetery made me ecstatic last weekend. With my appetite honed by the recent weeks of being locked up in my Paris flat, I was yearning for some really really really good pizza, because most of what was available through Paris food-delivery apps was pretty mediocre. And the inexplicable international popularity of several huge American pizza chains notwithstanding, there are few things sadder than mediocre pizza.

When I think about it, I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like pizza, because not liking pizza would be as life-threatening and pleasure-killing as saying you didn’t like flowers or kisses. But as a native of southwestern Connecticut, the original home of great pizza in the United States (I expect some cat calls and blow back for this assertion, but it’s true), I’m grew up as a pizza connoisseur, and that was long before I finally made it to Naples and had a first head-spinning experience of the real McCoy, the sultry and stunningly delicious Margherita–just dough topped with crushed tomatoes, mozzarella di buffalo, and a fresh basil leaf of two before a turn in the blister-inducing inferno of a Napolitan beehive pizza oven.

 

Peppe Pizzeria - kneading the dough @Divinemenciel

Peppe - in front of the Pizza oven @Divinemenciel

I’d been reading about this place in just before le confinement (quarantine) shut down almost every restaurant in Paris, and I’d decided I’d be willing to travel halfway across Paris to taste the pizza that had won Giuseppe Cutraro, aka Peppe, the “World Champion of Contemporary Napolitan Pizza 2019-2020.” (“The Art of the Napolitan Pizzaïoulo” has figured on UNESCO’s World Heritage list since 2017). To be perfectly honest, it sounded, well, strange. To wit, this pie was sauced with yellow Sicilian tomatoes, topped with mozarella di buffala and provolone, Tuscan ham aged for 36 months, almond slivers and fig jam. But before you conclude that I’m a hidebound purist, I’d quickly tell you that one of my all-time pizzas was and is the one served at Frank Pepe Pizzeria in New Haven, Connecticut, which is topped with little-neck clams from Rhode Island and is just stunningly good.

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