Outrageous Food Day

Melissa and enjoy food a great deal. We enjoy cooking it, eating it, talking about it, reading about it. It is our mutual belief that food is one of the few truly great pleasures in life, and we try and make the most of it. However, our exploration of the food world has been limited in no small part by money; we’re hardly wealthy now, and we’ve been pretty close to poor for several years. So we know cheap Indian food well, but about other cuisines--French, most notably--we’re pretty ignorant.

So when we found out that Melissa’s cousin was getting married in Provence this summer, we started planning to have a blowout, no-expenses-spared, damn the torpedoes meal here. We recruited Melissa’s aunt and uncle Meredith and Jim, who know France and French cuisine well, and we knew would not shirk from the responsibility of ushering us into high-falutin’ eatin’. We requested that Jim find a great restaurant in the vicinity of the wedding, and he tackled the task with gusto, locating a two-star Michelin place in Les Baux De Provence called Oustau de Baumaniere.

Two-stars doesn’t sound like much, right? The Michelin guide (yes, that Michelin company--the Michelin man is even on the cover, in an incredible display of jarring incongruities) has been around for something like a hundred years. It designates French restaurants with one, two, or three stars. Not all restaurants, of course; the vast majority get no stars at all. As the guide describes it, a one star is “interesting”, a two-star is “worth a detour”, and a three-star is “worth a journey.” You must understand that the French take food very seriously. Surely their most worthy trait. And the Michelin rankings are of critical importance to this. People go insane over the finest details of the silverware of a restaurant in order to move from two stars to three. To gain three stars, a restaurant must not only have truly exceptional food, but also must have ambience to match, the absolute best of everything. As Jim put it, a three-star restaurant they ate at recently was “like a total immersion into the mind of the chef”. And they charge for it. We didn’t really have the option to have a three-star meal here, and I don’t know if we would have. There are only 25 three-star restaurants in the whole country. Two-stars is stunning enough.

And expensive. Before I get into the details of what we ate, I’ll just tell you up front that a meal for five people, with two bottles of wine, cost nearly one thousand dollars.

The Oustau is also a hotel, so we were sitting on the patio of the restaurant. It’s very hot in France this summer, so it could have been unpleasant, eating outside. But actually it was quite nice and shady. Beautiful.

But the food. Mon Dieu!

We started with glasses of champagne. This wasn’t Andre Cold Duck, either--great, great champagne. Truly great champagne is a rare pleasure, at least for us. It’s a lousy celebratory liquor, for my money; my experiences with it have generally involved consumption after drunkenness has already been reached, and the aftereffects are hideous. But a nice glass of cold champagne before a meal? Luscious.

Ordering was a trial. How does one choose between heaven and heaven? We could have ordered the preset eight-course meal, but it didn’t afford the dessert choice I was looking for. So we had to make our way through a stunning array of possibilities, ranging from several kinds of seafood to a steak with olive pate and capers cooked in sheep fat. I nearly opted for this last, but followed the advice of the waiter, who was funny and helpful. And he absolutely did me right, as it were.

The French are big on this thing called “Amusement De Bouche”--that is, Amusements For the Mouth. So every course had a little bit of something or another designed to be a small treat for the palate. Our first one involved some sardine and anchovy biscuits, which managed to be awesomely salty and light without being fishy. Then we had little bowls of gelled consomme with river trout, and great bread with olive oil. Nice, cool stuff.

We ordered two spectacular bottles of local Provencal wine--a fruity white and a hearty, earthy red. These started next, and as we were enjoying the white, our first courses came. I had a salad with a red snapper-like fish sandwiched between thin aubergine (eggplant) planks in a lemon sauce. It was light, the least fishy fish I’ve ever had, and the lemon positively exploded in the mouth. I was blown away, absolutely, and this was just the start. Melissa had a ravioli stuffed with sweetbreads (pancreas) and leeks, and covered in shaved black truffle and butter sauce. Quite possibly the richest single thing I’d eaten up to that point. The butter sauce was a revelation. Jim also had the ravioli, Meredith had a brilliant stuffed zucchini, and their daughter Laura, Melissa’s cousin, had a gorgeous tomato soup.

We had a little break at the conclusion of this course--there were lengthy breaks throughout, which is why the meal took over three-and-a-half hours. We were plied with more bread, which I scarfed willingly. The main courses were a welcome sight. From left to right:

Jim had pigeon. It had some sort of nut on it, and was cooked to a fantastic red color. Obviously, one couldn’t gain this sort of incredible flavor from a street pigeon in the states, but this distant relative really packed a punch. It wasn’t gamey in the slightest, and the juiciness was overwhelming. Melissa called this her favorite, and it was incredible, but it wasn’t my favorite.

Melissa had gone into this meal saying that she wanted to push the envelope, to eat some of the seemingly gross meats that the French thrive on. So she ordered sweetbreads--as I said, the pancreas. This takes the cake as the richest thing I’ve ever eaten. It was like eating velvet. I liked it a lot, but couldn’t have ordered it--not because of the visceral reaction one has to the thought of eating pancreas, but rather because it was just too much--too rich, too velvety, too big. But it was prepared exquisitely, seared nicely and in a great sauce, the contents of which I‘ve already forgotten. Meredith also had the sweetbreads.

Laura had lamb with dried fruits--prunes and raisins and apricots. I’m unsure if I’ve had lamb like that. It was perfectly pink, and very mild. Juicy and perfectly complemented by the fruit.

I ordered tuna--it’s odd for me to order so much seafood, but it was highly recommended by the waiter, and with good reason. Juicy, light tuna steaks cooked exactly right, covered in an olive-oil and basil pesto sauce. The fish rested on a bed of roasted red peppers, which in turn rested on a black olive pate. It is frankly surprising that I survived the consumption of this dish.

Let me linger here for a moment and remember the tuna. Oh, my.

After another lengthy break, during which we talked endlessly about the fantastic flavors we had just experienced as we finished our red wine, the cheese course began. The French offer a cheese course before dessert. French cheeses are smelly and softish, and are great, for my money. The cheese cart comes around, and the eater simply points to the cheeses that he would like to try. Melissa (and, presently, Jim and I) put ourselves in the hands of the server. Melissa said she wanted cheeses that were plus fort and tres dificil (very strong and difficult). When she said this, the server--literally--reached into the nether regions underneath the cart, where the Challenging Cheeses live, unseen by all but the brave and the foolish. Here, the cheeses lurk, waiting to clobber those who dare to confront them head on. These are the brutes.

It was an innocuous-looking, slightly runny Camembert-type cheese. The first bite? Positively exquisite. Salty and runny and chewy and absorbing. The second bite? Absolutely DISGUSTING. Vile and rubbery and smelling of rotten death. I immediately gave it to Meredith, who laughed and neglected to touch it.

We enjoyed the cheese, and were reaching a stupor, when phase one of dessert started. Dessert was a two-course meal. The first phase involved pre-prepared tarts and cookies and such, some with caramel, some with fruit, some with chocolate. All were extraordinary. After another brief break, our actual desserts arrived. Meredith had an exceptionally creamy crepe souffle. Melissa had a strawberry gazpacho soup, chilled and served with a scoop of olive oil ice cream on the side. This was a dessert worth killing a stranger to reach. Jim opted for peaches, marinated in a fennel syrup, with red currants and a red currant sorbet. The red currant sorbet sent me into hysterics, nearly. Laura and I had raspberries in a sweet syrup with crème fraiche and a chocolate cookie. Stunning, positively.

There are many details I’ve skimped upon, ranging from the incredibly impressive knowledge of the wait staff to the superb setting in the Provence hills. The point is this: it was a singular experience. The greatest meal of my life to date, and beyond that, a phenomenal event. Almost a G, and worth it.

Here’s the rub: this fantastic meal we had was lunch.

Sure, we ate from 1:00 to 4:30 PM. But it was lunch, nevertheless. And the evening was already booked for a larger family meal, beginning at 8:00. This was at another fine restaurant, hosted by Melissa’s uncle and aunt David and Graham. They have exquisite taste, so it was sure to be something remarkable. But we’d already eaten not only a staggering quantity of food, but also a staggering quantity of incredible food. We all spent the entire car ride back to the hotel moaning about how full we were, and how much we wished this dinner were another night. About how we couldn’t hope to eat anything. I said that I would only be eating a light salad and drinking water.

Is it any real surprise that this prediction turned out to be foolish? That we ate until stuffed--again? That we were floored by the quality of this food? I won’t give you the full blow-by-blow, because I doubt that there’s that much interest in the giant prawns served on pears with a vanilla bean sauce. Or the foie gras. Or the perfectly cooked baby duck. Or the dessert. Or four of the best wines I’ve ever had, flat out.

In the end, it was like we had about an eighteen course meal, with a three hour break in the middle, and two desserts, with endless wine. The richness never stopped, the quality incredible. We were sated.

The dinner was really just great. Just great. One of the top ten meals of my life, beyond question, and perhaps top five. Nevertheless, during dinner, I was speaking to Melissa’s aunt Faith, who said exaggeratively that “This is the best meal of my life.”

I retorted with “This is the second best meal I’ve had today.”