The Spiral Staircase

Top Ten Meals in the Dordogne Valley and Barcelona

L and I stayed in Barcelona a few days, then rented a car and drove into France, staying a night near Carcassonne, then a night in Saint-Emilion, and a week in a cottage in the Dordogne Valley, just outside Sarlat.  We drove back to Barcelona before flying home.  What bliss!

My favorite meals...

10. PICNIC LUNCH, WALNUT ORCHARD IN THE PERIGORD

Omlette sandwiches with cepe mushrooms (porcini), tomato, shallots, and purple basil
Brebis (sheep cheese)
Prunes from Agen
Stolen walnuts
Water

Midway through an 8km hike, L and I sat down in the shade in a walnut orchard and ate the egg sandwiches I'd made that morning.  All the groceries were from the farmer's market in Sarlat.  Nothing tastes better than food on a hike.

9. LA FONDA, BARCELONA

Green Salad
Cod in Goat Cheese Sauce
Seafood Fideo
White Penedes

Thanks to S. for recommending this joint, which was the best value of the trip, I think under 20 euros per person.  The cod and goat cheese was a weird combination that really worked, and fideo is just scrumptious.  I wish I'd taken notes because I can't remember what this crisp, aromatic bottle of white was, some blend of local varietals including Muscat d'Alexandrie. 

8. LUNCH, CHAI PASCAL, SAINT-EMILION

Warm Goat Cheese Salad
Mixed Charcuterie
2006 Château Peyrou Côtes de Castillon

After we visited my inspirational friend M, who Is making her own wine in Montagne-St-Emilion, we stopped in at a wine bar in town she recommended.  What a great meal!  Their salad was huge, with fresh beets and chunks of warm, ashed goat cheese smeared on rustic toasts.  The charcuterie plate had ham from the black Perigord pig, house-made terrine, pork rillettes, and dry sausage, and we washed it down with the juicy red Côtes de Castillon, made by Catherine Papon-Nouvel, which they poured by the glass.

7. STEAK DINNER, LA MUSE, LABASTIDE-ESPARBAIRENQUE

Local Entrecote with Red Wine Pan Sauce
Mashed potatoes and turnips
Sliced Tomatoes
Cheeses
Cahors and Minervois

I made us a yummy dinner in a farmhouse kitchen at this wonderful artist's retreat in SW France.  If you're an artist and you need some space and inspiration, you should really check out La Muse.  It's in a spectacular, isolated mountain villiage in the Black Mountains, just outside Carcassonne.  The landscape is almost medieval with a cool mystical vibe thanks to the Cathars.

It's hard not to eat well in this part of the world.  We shopped at a tiny general store in the neighboring village of Mas Cabardes, a trip during which we got lost finding the store and finding our car afterwards. 

The entrecote was from cows just down the road, sliced fresh for us by the local shopkeeper.  I rubbed it with olive oil and garlic and sauteed it rare.  Three firm Pyrenee cheeses: a brebis, a cow's milk, and a great, cheddary goat, plus a bloomy-rinded chevre that L said smelled like manure but I loved.  It went great with the 6-euro bottles of Cahors and Minervois.

6. TAPAS, BAR BOQUERIA, BARCELONA

Octopus a la Plancha
Chorizo
Grilled Shishito(?) Peppers
Grilled Mushrooms
Grilled Shrimp (the kind with their heads still on)
House Rose

Barcelona's Boqueria is a serious contender for the title of Best Farmer's Market in the World.  We had lunch at one of the bustling, informal countertop restaurants there. The lines were too long at Bar Central so we went to Bar Boqueria, which I think was even better.  Everything was delicious, and ordering was an adventure.  We drank lots of cheap rose out of tumblers.

5. LAST SUPPER, OUR COTTAGE, VITRAC

Bean soup
Watercress salad with garlic dressing
Cheese
Roast quinces with chestnut honey
2005 Domaine de l'A Côtes de Castillon

This was a let's-eat-everything left-in-the-frig supper.  The stock from the head-on chicken I'd roasted the night before was better than the roast itself - I've never before gotten so much flavor out of a single bird.  I threw in some giant white lima beans, carrots, leeks, pumpkin, and served it with garlic croutons.  The smell of roasting quinces filled up the whole cottage.

The merlot-dominated red was made by Stephane Derenoncourt and purchased at a great wine shop in Saint-Emilion called Terres Millesimees.  It was a fabulous value - silky and powerful with jammy black fruit and that special vibrancy you get in natural wine.  Wish I'd brought some home!

4. LUNCH, BISTRO D'EN FACE, TREMOLAT, FRANCE

Escargots
Salad of duck gizzards, Jerusalem artichokes, radicchio, and endive
Some weird and yummy herbal aperitif
*
Duck confit in port wine sauce
Potatoes Sarladaise (i.e., fried in duck fat)
House Red (Bergerac)
*
Chocolate Mousse
Espresso

We decided to take down some serious duck fat at this charming bistro, which is the dressed-down sister of the Michelin-starred Vieux Logis across the street.  The salad was one of the best dishes I had on the whole trip.  I'd tried to make duck gizzards once, and they were ghastly, and so I was afraid to order this dish, but oh boy am I glad I did.  The gizzards were like little chewy duck sausages, and the Jerusalem artichoke was tossed in some kind of tangy, creamy dressing, and the bitter greens cut sharply through all the richness.  It was superb.  Other things were less fabulous, like the snails, but basically this was what you want a bistro to be.

We talked to the elegant octogenarian at the table next to us, lunching with her niece.  The two were discussing the aunt's wartime memories.  She was happy to learn that I was Jewish and told me that during the war many of her neighbors had hidden Jews in their barns.  As a symbolic gesture of gratitude, I gave her a feather I'd found in the woods.

3. DINNER, LA TREILLE, VITRAC, FRANCE

Pot au feu of foie gras and vegetables
Lamb chops with wild mushrooms
Macaroon with salted caramel ice cream and strawberry sauce
Vin de Pays du Perigord

Our hostess from the gite recommended this excellent local restaurant.  The foie gras pot au feu was surprisingly delicate, with local baby carrots and turnips and potatoes cooked in a flavorful chicken broth.  I had never had foie gras in consomme before.  The dish was served, adorably, in a little mason jar.  It was sort of like foie gras potpie, minus the crust.

The lamb chops were delicious and the presentation was beautiful, as if every spear of asparagus and tendril of morel had been set in its right place.  Dessert was good, too.  The wine was rough around the edges.  I'd never heard of VDP Perigord before and maybe there's a good reason.  Best service of the trip from the solemn, deft waitress.

2. DINNER, AUBERGE SAINT-JEAN, SAINT-JEAN DE BLAIGNAC, FRANCE

Grilled foie gras with celery root mousse and apple sorbet
Pigeon with Roasted Tomato
Chocolate Square
2005 Saint-Emilion

The chef's cute pregnant wife ran the front of the house at this ambitious restaurant on the Dordogne that probably deserves a Michelin star.  The foie gras appetizer was L's favorite dish of the whole trip.  It was seared, meltingly tender, and the celery root showed up three ways on the plate (I think): in a mousse, a puree, and as a brunoise.  It was such a full experience of the flavor of the vegetable, and the apple sorbet tied it together perfectly.  This dish was really breathtaking and announced a certain seriousness emanating from the kitchen. 

The pigeon was very good, too.  The breast was possibly cooked sous-vide, perfectly pink and earthy.  The leg was falling-apart tender.  My dessert (some kind of brownie-like thing) was only okay, and I was very jealous of L's choice, which had a vanilla-poached pear in salted toffee sauce and caramel-chocolate wafer.  We splurged for a 2005 St-Emilion, which was great. 

Afterwards I asked for verbena tea.  It arrived in a teapot shaped like a hedgehog, which is what the chef's surname, l'Herisson, means.

 

Photo: Justin Bernhaut/acpsyndication.com

1. TAPAS, CAL PEP, BARCELONA

Mixed Fry of Smelts, Shrimp, and Squid
Cockles Steamed with Sausage and White Wine
Tortilla
Grilled Shishito(?) Peppers
Sweet Sausage with White Bean
Cod with Roasted Tomato and Potato
Gran Riserva Cava

The meal of the trip for me came on our last night in town.  I've tried to go to Cal Pep many times, but the line was always too long. 

This was a nearly-perfect meal, marred only by the fact that the line of people waiting to dine is right behind you, meaning that you can't linger over your food the way you want to when food is this good. The bottle of cava recommended by the waiter was flinty and refreshing and had a ton of character.  The salty, crispy fried fish, the opulent cod, the sausage - it was all fabulous - but the spanish tortilla, a custardy omlette of potatoes flavored with bacon and aioli, was the best dish of the trip for me.  Proof that simple food can be extraordinary. 

When I had to say "no" to the question "uno mas?" I was genuinely sad. 

 

 

Sophie Calle's Room and Gowanus Open Studios 2011

When I walked out of Studio Yada yesterday after yoga, I noticed a bouquet of green balloons on the railing.  A sign read "Open Art Studio," so I wandered back upstairs and found my way to the first of about twenty artists' studios I ended up visiting on what I discovered was a yearly event for Gowanus artists.  It was a wonderful way to spend a sunny afternoon in Brooklyn. 

Visual artists are endlessly inspiring to me.  I like to see their bookshelves, oil cans, stained fingernails, the postcards and anatomy books and maps they have taped to their walls.  I like to pet their dogs and eat their meager snacks and ask them questions about philosophy. 

I saw provocative work by, among others, Bethany Bristow, Joanne McFarland, David Schlegel, Waylon Tait, Kevin Cooney, and Joelle Shallon.

Dale Williams was showing dark, allegorical scenes that made me think of Max Beckmann and Goya and the brothers Grimm.  He was super smart.

Delfee - mixed media with collage on paper

At Justin Neely's groovy studio, I stood for a long time in front of an icon of Solzhenitsyn.  I had to ask who it was, because "Solzhenitsyn" was written in Cyrillic.  This painting had a rejuvenating effect on me, like a spa treatment. 

Солженицын est морт (Solzhenitsyn est mort) - acrylic, spray paint, and pencil on plywood

"I love transliteration," Justin said.

I told him about my favorite book from my high school years, Dictionary of the Khazars by the late Milorad Pavic.  This was a novel in the form of a dictionary, about a tribe of dreamers named the Khazars, and it came in masculine and feminine editions.

Pavic wrote in his essay "Beginning and the End of the Novel":

Long ago I came to understand that the arts are "reversible" and "non reversible." There are some arts which enable the recipient to approach the work from various sides, or even to go around it and have a good look at it changing the spot, the perspective and the direction of his looking at it according to his own preference, as is the case with architecture, sculpture or painting, that are reversible. Other non reversible arts, such as music and literature look like one-way roads on which everything moves from the beginning to the end, from birth to death. I have always wished to make literature, which is non reversible art, a reversible one. Therefore my novels have no beginning and no end in the classical meaning of the word.

I thought of Pavic again that night as I wandered through Sophie Calle's Room, an installation in a suite in the Lowell Hotel.  Room was an updated reperformance of a piece Calle had done at London's Freud Museum.  It was free and open to the public for three days, 24-hours a day, as part of the FIAF festival.  I got to the Upper East Side just before the show closed at midnight.  

The Lowell was staid and dressy.  A uniformed doorman waved me and two cute gay boys into an elevator to the third floor.  I thought it was cool how the elevator buttons and hotel hall were not specially marked for the show, so finding it was just like going to a friend's hotel room.  A sign hung on the closed door of the suite, instructing us to come in if the "Do Not Disturb" sign wasn't up.  I opened the door.

It was hushed inside Room.  A dozen visitors milled about the sitting area, bedroom, kitchenette, and bath, examining the artifacts and placards.  The vibe was sober and almost awkward.  I thought of walking into a home where people are sitting shiva. 

"Can I sit in the chair?" I asked the security guard, pointing to the armchair that did not hold the dead cat.

"Yes, that one you can sit in," he said.

Normally I chat up art security guards, but I felt shy about talking to anyone at this exhibition.  The hotel room was so intimate it was almost isolating.  Even the television was on mute.

Photo: Lucy Hogg

An open window let in a nice breeze and a view of New York at night.  Little signs hung everywhere, with numbers on them, and each sign had a story from Sophie's life, accompanied by an object positioned among the suite's furnishings.  You had to bend down to read some of the stories, which were beautiful little jewel pieces in the vein of Pavic or Calvino, but with a definite French, feminine twist.  I thought Colette was in there somewhere, and Nathalie Sarraute, and our post-post-modern obsession with memoir/fame/reality TV. 

A stroller sat beside a scathing account of how Sophie has never wanted children.

A pig snout mask sat on a windowsill with a story about one man's cruelty to her.

There were wedding dresses, bed sheets, a burnt matress, orchids from Frank Gehry, erotic photographs, love letters, stories of shame, love, suicide, and seduction.  Some of it was true, but you didn't know which parts, and you didn't know if the objects in the room were originals or facsimiles. 

Photo: Damien Saatdjian, courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, NY © Sophie Calle/ADAGP

The way Sophie wrote about her lovers made you want them, too.  I felt at the time that the whole thing was a little too pretty.  In retrospect, though, it had a very long finish, and it left me thinking about whether life can itself be art and about how time acts on us.

Sophie's stories were truly reversible, because you didn't need to go in order.  Characters appeared and reappeared, but the only important character was the artist herself.  As Pavic imagined, it was a story you could live in for a while, like a room. 

My nose was running - there had been a very strong scent of peaches in the lobby - so I took a tissue out of the holder in the bathroom.  While I read the story about the black bra hanging on the shower rack (Sophie's mother teased her daughter about her tiny breasts by calling her first soutien-gorge a soutien-rien), I discreetly blew my nose.  This was mildly thrilling: I was blowing my nose with art! 

I wish I'd thought to look for a mini-bar.

The artist herself came in and out a few times, talking French to her entourage.  She sat on the sofa and fiddled with her iPhone, put a bag in the closet, and went outside for a cigarette.  When I left, I thanked her for letting me visit her Room.  She smiled and kept smoking. 

Charles Bane Jr. On Writing

Taken from Patrick Pressl's great review.

I would never go to a movie because I thought it would be about cars

I was puzzled by the spike in my blog ratings three days ago.  What could have caused the bump from five readers per day (four of which are me) to an astounding 300? 

Apparently, a Michegan resident named Sarah Deming is suing the distributors of the film Drive, because she found the trailer for the film misleading.  Sarah Deming went to the movie thinking that it would be about cars, and it wasn't, so she wants her money back.  Also, she thinks the movie was anti-Semitic.  I am not that Sarah Deming.