Lunch in Paris

In the hours before the Musee d'Orsay, Jen and I took some tips from Ditte and headed to the Bastille station with an appetite for escargot. We stepped into the first cafe we saw, a little place with dark wooden doors and a green awning. We settled on sharing a dozen escargot, a cheese plate and a carafe of red table wine. They brought out a basket of flaky bread and the wine sloshing in a rustic brown ceramic pitcher. We toasted 'Salut!' and carefully cut into our meal.

I clamped the silver tongs around the first steaming shell dripping with butter tinted herb green, poked the two-pronged fork in and retrieved the dark muscle from within. It had the texture of a portabello, the chewiness of squid, and the succulent garlic butter that would have made a rubber tire taste good.

Next - the cheese plate: brie, of course, roquefort and camembert. The roquefort was my favorite. It had heavy blue veins, solid and salty, it spread in creamy perfection, pleasantly grainy over soft white bread. Every bite was a savory explosion. We chewed slowly, sucked every bit of sauce from the shells, sopped it up from the silver plate with bits of bread.

We were drunk on the food, intoxicated by Paris, tipsy on the wine. We sat back and smiled at each other in euphoric silence. We bid 'Au revoir' to the fat, friendly matron, lifted the heavy red curtain and stepped back into the world.