This nostalgia came out of a friend’s collection. 

I fall into the first double spread on page two and three — the chartreuse tablecloth, Faience crockery, imagining the weight of the silver in hand, the jar of macerating cherries on the lunch sideboard alongside two tourtes and a platter of steak with bone marrow, a glazed terra cotta urn topped with a basket of oranges, paint puddles of yellow and white light through the June Plane tree. Dining in a lovingly restored Provençal windmill.

An OG of Entertaining books and a snapshot of 1980’s French Riviera. If I see it in your collection I like you more. Roger Vergé looks like he had fun. The son of a blacksmith, he was raised in a culture of craft. The words Le Moulin de Mougins taste like chilled rosé. So many other French chefs from that region and time leap to mind. I staged with one. I can see Richard Olney and Lulu Peyraud in it. 

The book’s production is Flammarion, and the design team is five people deep besides Vergé. It reads like they enjoyed working together. I could write at length about the people and the art in it. 

Learning the book was picked up in America by Stewart, Tabori, and Chang made me smile. Immediately I thought of Martha Stewart’s Entertaining. The two books are iconic-symbiotic — Stewart published in 1982 and Vergé in 1986. Both are lush with the spirit of the times. I imagine Martha looking like a star on the patio at Le Moulin de Mougins. 

***

​I walked on the shoulder of a hilly winding road up to his restaurant. I could not afford to eat. It was my first trip to France. This is part of how I spent my one day off during the Festival de Cannes. I don’t know why I wasn’t on a local bus that day, maybe I was thinking exercise. I’m sure there’s an easier route than the one I took. I don’t recall having a water bottle. 

I bought Le Moulin de Mougins Calisson in the gift shop and I’m still glad I did that. I was an early international stagiaire and had enough for a six-week stay. I was cared for, but I wasn’t eating at a hit parade of 3-star restaurants. I did the same thing with Louis Outhier, walked east on the Promenade de la Croisette, the Mediterranean rolling in to my left, a good long way toward L’Oasis. I have made other pilgrimages on subsequent visits. Eating is ideal, but sometimes you can’t do it for an arm’s-length number of reasons. Then, I was on a pan bagnat budget. Everything was still ridiculously delicious.

I made those journeys because I wanted to be near the chefs and restaurants I’d read about. As a young woman, I came into restaurant kitchens full of hope and dreams. André, Mark and I talked for hours about chefs we admired and meals we wanted to eat. One of the many gifts of the early years.   

***

Jeni Glasgow has joie de vivre and a thoroughly unique and seductive way with food and hospitality. She chefs at a writers’ retreat in the Luberon at La Gonette. It’s on my bucket list. I can hear my friends say, ‘Inshallah,’ in unison.

***

New music week.  

On Friday night, I was invited to a Whole Animal Dinner at Beast. Nathan and I have been friends for a while, and we share a love of French food. He wanted me to taste his quenelle de brochet à la Lyonnaise, a fish mousse made from pickerel, shaped into a large quenelle, poached and served with sauce américaine and in this case, on a thin layer of savory mushroom custard. It was tender and rich, and If I closed my eyes I was in a bouchon in Lyon. 

Half of his kitchen team are women — their white button-up shirts are spotless. Thanh is from Bà Ria-Vũng a southeast coastal province in Vietnam. The City of Sagamihara in the prefecture of Kanagawa near Tokyo, Japan is Yuri’s home. Two dishes carried the imprint of their spirit and talent. They brought them out to me, leaving the kitchen for the first time, and explaining in detail the ingredients.

Lobster and American cheese were some of the ingredients in Thanh’s spring rolls and were so good I ate it before I got a photo. *laughs* The wrapper is from her family in Vietnam and was the thickness of a butterfly’s wing. I have never tasted a brighter nuoc cham — a crystalline pool of fish sauce, chilies, palm sugar, and acid.

And then there was shrimp sausage the precise texture of boudin blanc. Nathan likes the French chef technicians. He has gone through many of their recipes mastering the sausage’s texture. It was sliced and set on a pool of beurre blanc. Yuri came out with a small pot of something dark and mysterious, a fermented Amazake spicy sauce, that included sansho pepper, ginger, garlic, konbu, and star anise, and put a dollop in the tart beurre blanc. The three elements of the dish had the same harmony as the three cooks in the kitchen. 

Thanh and Yuri are full participants in an environment where they can shine. Learning and practicing are core kitchen values, and the team is playful with ideas and execution. Nathan doesn’t take himself too seriously. He has never underestimated me. I can’t tell you how refreshing that is.

Thank you Mel for entertaining my Ken Watanabe obsession. And to Jan, Brandon, Stew, and Scott. The hospitality was outstanding. My autograph is on the wall twice. Between two visits, someone drew a strand of flowers beside it.

***
 
This week there was news that Georges Blanc lost a star. The response from the family expresses savoir-faire:
 
“We'll make do with the two stars... maybe we'll be less elitist and a little more accessible.”

The Blanc legacy began with Elisa, who taught her daughter Paulette, who taught her son Georges. A family métier passing through three generations over almost one hundred years. All the twinkling stars in an indigo night sky are not enough. A restaurant that endures is spéciale.
 
Elisa Blanc was among a small group of women awarded stars from Michelin in 1933 — 2-stars for her cooking at the inn at Vonnas. Then and now, there’s poetry in the ratings symmetry. Some of my most memorable meals in France have been in Michelin 2-star restaurants. 
 
***
 
I am working on an interesting project and after I hit send, usually on Thursday, I still want to write. I switch into ‘today’ mode. I wrote the piece above on the Bathurst streetcar in my Notes app heading south toward Beast. A young woman offered me her seat on a busy Friday night. I embrace all that comes with grey hair. It felt like a good omen for the evening. 
 
***
 
Imagine you’re in a French nightclub.

Cellar Rat

Most people who do others dirty don’t bank on their victims landing a book deal. But that’s how it played out for Hannah Selinger. Cellar Rat, her first book, recounts in vivid detail a period in her twenties when she worked in several storied New York restaurants as a sommelier. Restaurant work is the filling in a sandwich—a period between completing an MFA in writing from Columbia University and eventually pursuing a career as a writer. 

The story has the cadence of a well-orchestrated Friday night dinner service. Selinger writes with candor and humor about events most people want to forget and has the backbone to put name tags on everyone present. Some details will rattle even well-seasoned restaurant employees. Her commitment to self-interrogation messes with the view that this is revenge-porn. 

Selinger demonstrates how her experience of childhood domestic abuse laid the groundwork for her attraction to restaurant culture. A business where there is no shortage of entitled men is alluring. As a young woman, the imprint of early abuse by her stepfather leaves her with weak boundaries, an inability to see red flags, and an attraction to predators. The pressures she writes about in the chapter, Theft, are heartbreaking. It’s hard not to burst into flames reading Fourplay and Chef Fucker. She uses a wide-angle lens to bring the enablers into focus. Among the many loathsome characters, this threesome is remarkable: 

“I imagined Tosi, Chang, Salmon, a rat pack of outright and internalized misogyny, gossiping about my dalliance with Johnny, aching to make some ill-timed joke at my expense. If the point was to cut me down so that I would know my place in the managerial hierarchy, the trick had worked.”

Cellar Rat is a forthright and progressive examination of addiction and restaurant culture. There are bottoms Selinger has to crawl out of. It’s a messy and emotional journey. “I began to understand that restaurant work might be hurting me,” she writes. 

Terrible events are eventually transformed by humility into instructive lessons. Selinger wakes up to all the ways restaurant culture denies women their appetites and agency. You will cheer when she retrieves what the Momofuku team tries to erase of her. You might wish she was putting the last nail in the coffin of celebrity chef culture, but as she writes, “Restaurants remain broken.”

In the end, Selinger grows up, takes the necessary steps to realize her dreams, and lays claim to her story. 

If you have the means, buy it for yourself in a local bookstore. A writer still gets dollars if you take it out of the library. It’s a book to put in the hands of young servers and cooks. 

***
 
Good peppers are often on the discount rack. Friday night, I roasted them with anchovies, garlic, rosemary, capers, olive oil, and seasoning as prep for Sunday night pasta. Then, I made a messy and delicious trout, crispy rice, watercress, carrot, and pickled beet salad with a ginger-sesame dressing. It was fresh and tasted like double happiness. 
 
A friend sent me a Beast Pizza gift certificate for my birthday—that was Saturday dinner sorted.
 
***
 
I had trouble settling on music, but these two songs fit the sentiment of this week. On Your Side came to me on Saturday from someone I follow on Bluesky. It’s lovely. 

The Catalpas in winter look like morel mushrooms. I stare out the window a lot.

Tree Writing by Aaron Walker.

***

Rebecca Solnit writing about Orwell’s retreat from London from An Inventory of Pleasures in Orwell’s Roses:

“Some called his migration to this remote location suicidal or masochistic, and many who have written about him seem to consider living in London an eminently reasonable thing to do and living out on a Scottish island unreasonable. They seem to assume that reasonability meant eking out as long a life as possible rather than living it as fully as possible. Orwell all along had tended to choose the latter over the former. And the air of London, filthy with coal smoke, was itself deadly in ways rarely acknowledged in his lifetime, particularly for someone with his underlying pulmonary conditions.”

“As the Rose-Hip to the Rose” is more beautiful writing.

***

This is how I describe what I’m doing right now. I spend most of my days sifting through the municipal-sized dump that is the internet, searching for small shards — photos, quotes, death notices, anything adjacent. Here’s what I’ve learned from sifting:

1.  The tech collaborators have turned Google into an Amazon mall.
2.  Image search is a vast wasteland, thanks to Pinterest and Alamy. 
3.  The app quenching my bibliography thirst is Zotero. 

That I have access to so much is a miracle. Tech is good up to the point of hyperbole. Those bros know how to write a press release. 

I’m grateful for what I can find online, but increasingly, it has limits. There is more out there beyond the reach of wireless. Who doesn’t like a library or archive? Or visiting a spot you’ve read about to add a geographic and cultural layer to your knowledge?  

The tip of the iceberg poking out of the water is the writing after. There are many days when I think I’m not doing any of it right. Sometimes for good reason. Still sifting for shards and my true voice. 

​***

I’m in my broccoli, pea shoots, oyster mushroom, sushi rice, and eggs phase of life, There’s an occasional can of tuna or sardines in olive oil and lemon from Spain with a side of Finnish crackers and a now-and-then bowl of pasta. I make Hooni Kim’s Chojang with extra garlic and ginger. It is capital F fresh. You want his cookbook. I’ve made enough from it to recognize a labour of love. I’m sure that has a great deal to do with the collaboration with Aki Kamozawa. 

It’s a healthy practice to purchase books and cookbooks through a local bookstore. Or test-drive it through a library. 
Step outside and go for a stroll. The first smell of spring is on the far-off horizon — still a few more storms to come.

​***

Nathaniel Rateliff and Gregory Alan Isakov sang me full of hope on Wednesday night — more roses. 
​
Thinking about American farmers and the Gulf of Mexico. A young John Cougar Mellencamp in what we call up here a Canadian tuxedo kicking around a butterweed field with a good band backing him.