The following conversation may well have taken place in an office somewhere along New York’s Madison Avenue. Just maybe...
“Listen Harry, I know you’re the new kid here, but I’m going to tell you something from the get-go, I don’t give a damn if what we’re tryin’ to sell is not “really” French food, ’cause Harry, tell me who in the hell’s gonna know the difference…some schmuck in Toledo? We’re calling this stuff French Toast!” They’re gonna buy it and think they’re in Paree or wherever it is!
It never fails that when I’m in Paris, I’m given the opportunity to observe some interesting behavior from my compatriots. Usually, the consternation is over food and those crazy menus, you know the ones that should be in English but are in a foreign language, as if who doesn’t speak American these days? My compatriots have confided in me that what they find quite irritating are the menus scribbled in chalk with a couple of Euro signs slapped here and there and making it look quite like the day’s currency exchange market. They added that in some restaurant, the menus were written on mirrors! Nice mirrors too.
The Restaurant
I believe, in large part, it’s the French food and dining experience that helps so many American tourists long for home and “real food.” With heads bowed, they sadly walk the streets of Paris in quiet desperation looking for something that is recognizable (and edible) from back home in Duluth. Some of my compatriots would return from their first visit to Paree (I saw France thank you) and over a chilly hot dog, cherry cobbler and a diet Sprite, complain and complain and yes, complain some more. If it wasn’t about the bathrooms and showers made for midgets, it something else but the food experience usually followed along these familiar themes. Why those awful waiters, surly and nasty they were and I don’t care how nice they looked in their little outfits. They ignored us even when we snapped our fingers and very nicely calling out “Garkun.” We almost had to trip our waiter just to get any kind of service and then, mind you, the worst was about to begin: the menu. A couple of menu’s land on your table, hopefully with pictures, and you find pages of suggestions – all in French- with daily menu prices, special menu combinations and a seemingly never ending pages of “a-pear-ree-teefs” which is French for drinking alcohol. It’s awful and not at all like that little place back home, Jack and Joan’s Bistro on the corner of Elm and Main. Once you have your menus in hand, the nice little waiter disappears again, gone, left, partis! I don’t think the waiter was French anyway because he spoke with an accent. So we need to wave him down again, “oh Garkun over here, dammit, Harry our little man’s gone can you get him?” When Garkun finally returns, pen in hand all ready to scribble our request “alors on a décidé?” You point to the only real words you understand, Steak and salad please and French fries (yesss veree gouud), et pour vous Madame?? Tick-tock, tick-tock… el hamburger please. The waiter is not finished with us just yet, he takes a menu and impatiently flips to the next page and points to the deserts and then looks at you the way one might look at a well trained dog, puzzled that you haven’t learned your new trick. Menus picked-up, he disappears into thin air. You relax, wipe your brow having survived the awful French waiter experience. But, no, Garkun returns, smoothly maneuvering through the corridor of little tables, he looks generally annoyed and you pray its not because of something you did. He points to a selection of drinks on the menu and then offers a uniquely in-country suggestion: “Coca Cola?”
The Baguette
The French bread, is not the sliced spongy variety that we know and love and the hallmark of any good hot turkey sandwich, smothered in turkey gravy; non Monsieur, the baguette is not ever to be destroyed in that fashion. If you are running short of ideas and decide on buying a baguette, lets say, to take home and show the relatives in Muncie, please keep in mind that in a day you will have a lethal weapon in your possession that will, as all the ones before, get confiscated when entering the United States. American expats in Paris quite often use day old baguettes as bats when playing a pick-up game of baseball in the Bois de Boulogne. In France, hardly a day goes by without someone getting hit over the head with a baguette – usually a slow husband who’s hard of hearing. It’s never pretty and the police no longer interfere with Madame and her weaponized baguette, smart flics.
The Baguette Goes Postal
Speaking of baguettes, several years ago I was in Brittany with my grown children when my son informed me that, as a joke, he wanted to mail a baguette directly to his office because whenever anyone from the office was overseas they shipped something equally clever and smart. No further explanation on that point. So, with baguette in hand, we marched into La Poste and, as the interlocutor on this sensitive assignment, I explained to the young lady what we wanted to do. A strange look came over her face, best described as the kind of look you get when they realize you are on 24hr leave from the asylum. The rest of the waiting customers slowly shook their head in disapproval. The young lady immediately went to Madame the supervisor and heads huddled together, brows furrowed, both heads repeatedly turning back and forth in our direction when finally they approached us with a look that screamed “just how stupid are you?” Monsieur, the supervisor politely explained, we cannot mail the baguette to America because (and here I was waiting for a reference to the Napoleonic Code) because Monsieur the baguette would not be fresh when it arrived chez–vous! Impossible Monsieur! Case closed, the state had spoken. Putting my best foot forward and oozing as much charm as I could possibly muster, I explained that I recognized the importance that the State placed on baguette being served fresh -why more than one village baker had been run out of town for having sold weaponized baguettes. I assure her that “freshness” was not an issue and that I would sign whatever papers were necessary to hold the post office, the bakery, the village and the State, harmless. Wrap it up and mail it, that’s all we silly Americains would ask of the State. Once both parties agreed that the baguettes’ freshness was no longer an issue, it seemed as if the entire Post Office got into the act. We watched as the postal team Bretagne got to work with much giggling, smiling, whispering and head shaking (ahhh que voulez-vous, les Americains.) And so, bit by bit, the baguette slowly disappeared from view, wrapped in sturdy brown paper half of which was covered in French document stamps. Fresh or not, the State wanted its share of this noble experiment.
When the French hit our shores, do we see them upset and fusing with a burger that’s bigger than them? Of course not. When you look back they are already up the ladder and carving our their dinner. Do they puzzle at our iceberg lettuce and wonder how the Captain of the Titanic even thought he could outmaneuver the bergs? No, they willingly pick up a jack hammer and attack the lettuce. Nor do have I seen them holding up their noses at a pile of hungry jacks pancakes with a handful of eggs on top and held in position by several encrusted sausage links and doused in strawberry syrup – everywhere. Nope, they love it and it’s everything they hoped it would be and more. We must be doing something right because they keep coming back time and again for more of ‘yo Mama’s roadside diner serving hot (sort of) roast beef sandwiches with mashed potatoes and gravy and washing it down with Root Beer. Ahh, le sweet life!