THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 16, 1994 TAG: 9410130038
SECTION: FLAVOR PAGE: F1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ALEX MARSHALL, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 111 lines
Staff writer Alex Marshall toured Europe this summer for 10 weeks, on a fellowship awarded by the German-Marshall Fund of the United States. His purpose was to study suburban and urban development in European cities. Along the way, he found time to catch a few bites and record his impressions.
IT'S HARD TO say what makes a great meal. Certainly good food is an essential ingredient.
Just as important is the company you're with, the state of your stomach and disposition, and the decor and how you mesh with it.
Although food wasn't my principal focus on my recent travels through Europe, I knew I would eat out a lot and I kept a journal of my more memorable meals. Here are some of the highlights:
Copenhagen: Thin-skinned boiled potatoes the size of golf balls topped with a dressing of chopped garlic and parsley in olive oil, accompanied by cold slices of beef tongue.
Doesn't sound too memorable, perhaps. But after the sometimes overdone glories of France and Italy, this simple meal was welcome and good. It worked. I ate it at an open-air bar/cafe in Copenhagen for lunch, when I was very hungry. Most of the food I had in Denmark was like this meal. Simple, satisfying, good. It went against my expectations that Danish food would be humorless and boring.
Barcelona: Spinach sauteed with pinenuts and raisins, followed by monkfish topped with a burnt garlic sauce. A dessert of a lemon-chiffon mousse topped with raspberry sauce.
The moderately expensive restaurant, L'Olive, was recommended by a hotel clerk who said I could find true Catalan food there. I had lived in Spain 10 years ago and came away singularly umimpressed with the food. But I had never been to the region of Cataluna, where Barcelona is located.
The restaurant impressed me and surprised me. The dishes were imaginative, yet simple. The spinach was rich, but light. The sauce of burnt garlic was poured over a hunk of fish cooked just right.
Florence: Taglatini al pomadoro - pasta with garlic and fresh tomatoes, followed by salt cod, also cooked with tomato and garlic. A dessert of biscotti with a shot glass of sweet Vino Santo for dipping.
Eating in Italy is a problem. You know great food is all around you. When you eat a meal that isn't wonderful, you feel denied.
I asked someone on the street where I'd find a good cheap restaurant, after the one in my guidebook turned out to be closed.
I walked a few blocks and found the recommended establishment, with its butcher-block tables. The businessmen at the table next to me ate great hunks of roast lamb that the waiter tore into pieces in front of them.
After this meal, I didn't have a digestif, but I often did in Italy.
I enjoyed so much the variety of brown, yellow, red and other colored liquors that served as digestifs and aperatifs. I loved this custom of consuming some sweet or bitter liquor before and after a meal. It fit my fancy that meals should be ceremonial, theatrical, with a variety of flourishes, scenes and curtain calls. I tried out the cherry red Campari, the brown Cynar made from artichokes.
Perhaps the best was Fernet-Branca. It's well known in Europe, but I had never heard of it. It's an intensely bitter shot of brown liquor that churns all the way down and really does seem to help your digestion.
Lyon, France - Country pate garnished with thin strands of clear gelatin. It was followed by grilled fish, and accompanied by four side dishes of an asparagus omelet, ratatouille, scalloped potatoes and finely chopped cauliflower.
This economically dynamic city is known as the gastronomic capital of France. Expensive restaurants abound, offering a variety of unusual pork parts prepared in many ways.
I couldn't afford them, and that wasn't my focus. But I was impressed with how good the meals were at an ordinary tourist restaurant I entered, not expecting to eat well. Each dish was obviously prepared fresh, from the pate to the dessert. The restaurant owner threw in a glass of homemade sweet fruity wine, a digestif for a final course.
On the train between Paris and Brussels. - Smoked salmon salad, broiled beef, a cheese course and chocolate cake.
Eating on a train, with white tablecloths and silverware, while the French countryside passes is probably pretty special for a European. But it's particularly so for someone from America, where it's difficult to ride a train, much less eat on one. It makes you feel indolent, pampered and luxurious.
What I remembered here was the cheese course. Chunks of camembert, chevre and some kind of blue cheese offered by a waiter in a white coat.
As I ate this pungent array, it struck me all over again how amazing French cheese is, and how nice that such an array of strange-tasting products is so easily offered.
Wine bar La Tartine, Paris - Two glasses: Migneret-Robelin, Bourguns, 1986; Bordeaux, Chatour Patache c'aux Medoc, 1989. Accompanied by a plate of ``Charcutrie,'' French cold cuts.
The bored-looking waitress in this ancient-looking bar perked up when she saw I was interested in wine. She helped me choose glasses of red wine with a certain solemnity and attention, and put up with my clumsy French. The cold cuts she recommended with it had a sharp taste that made me realize not all ``cold cuts'' are pedestrian fare. As I ate and drank, businessmen walked in and stood at the white marble-topped bar and picked wine off the list scrawled on the blackboard. The wine was sharp, red and good. The waitress placed the glasses before me carefully, and navigated through my French to explain what was good about each glass.
A memorable food experience, it seems, must include something of the unexpected. With perhaps the exception of the meal in Barcelona, the restaurants I visited were not fancy.
I ate at a few upscale places, but the meals didn't impress me enough to write about them. Perhaps it was the element of surprise that was missing. In a fancy place, a dish has to be truly outstanding to make it past one's high expectations. ILLUSTRATION: KELCEY NEWMAN/Staff
by CNB