Mom and I arrived in Paris in the morning, but not our morning.
I walked down to the grocery store and bought the most beautiful strawberries (looking unwashed, as they should be), little pots of whole-milk yogurt, and two croissants, and brought them back to our room. We ate our breakfast on our little balcony overlooking a side street in the Marais, the fourth arrondissement, and then I wanted to take a nap—but she’d have none of it. Having just finished the cookbook shoot and not slept while crossing the ocean, I was eager, in my heavy fatigue, to luxuriate in the cool sheets and give in to being prone for a while. And this was just the first of the trip’s repeating battles: I wanted to sleep in and then careen around the city in regular noncomfortable shoes without a plan. I wanted to pretend that I lived there, that I was just going to the corner café to get a glass of wine after work and watch the locals come and go, the women with their lace-encrusted bras that they dared to let show through their blouses, the men in their shiny shoes and slim-cut pants. She wanted to query the desk people at the tourist bureau for their recommendations, to ask the waitress, “What’s good here?” I wanted to order unfamiliar things, take indirect routes, and make my own mistakes. My mother wanted to eat croque monsieurs and tour-book us to a crisp.
As I look back on it, she had only flagged the requisite museums and cathedrals, perfectly amazing places I otherwise would have wanted to see, but I railed against her devotion to what I privately called her “demonic day-planner.” It was unreasonable, it was the tired part of me talking, and it was our generational gap, to be sure, and if I could gently seat-kick my younger self from fifteen years in the future I would.
Our first Michelin-three-starred stop was Restaurant Pierre Gagnaire, which the gracious reservationist from Bouley had called to reserve for me. Its formality was paralyzing, in the way that the fanciest restaurants in the world feel simultaneously welcoming and terrifying. I recall the first time that Aaron and I ate at Danube, and how spooked we were. By this time, it should have felt old hat, but this was Paris.
The parade of dishes was epic—delicate, precise, and manic with flavor. I struggled to unpack the various components and then just gave myself over to the dazzling artistry: the three kinds of protein used in so many of the courses; the pétoncles I’d just eaten that the slim French culinary dictionary I was sitting on translated as “barnacles.” With each course I grew ever more aware of the invisible hands of the cooks on my plate, and more impressed by the complexities at work. With its wild juxtapositions, this place had more to do with Aaron’s world, with conceptual art, than anything else.
This realization both rattled and soothed me at the same time; the extraordinary house wine we were drinking helped settle me down. As we ate, and ate, my belly swelling into a smooth rock, I prided myself on my growing stamina to put away a long tasting menu. My mom and I made small talk about our plans, voicing an occasional “ooooh” over the food but not dissecting it. On the sixth course, a crisp translucent disk of sweet-and-sour eggplant set on a pad of yellow sauce, my mother finally made a comment.
“This part, this yellow sauce, is too tart for me,” she said, surprised. Once she said it, I knew she was right. The yellow pepper sauce, infused with a bizarre amount of acidity, had slipped right by me. Embarrassed, I realized that the showmanship had blinded me. My enthusiasm for the industry had snowplowed my palate.
When the chef came out to greet the tables, tall and regal with long silver-blond California-beach-bum hair, I was totally star-struck. Meanwhile, my mom was struck with the bill.
“I knew it would be expensive, but four hundred dollars for lunch! My god, it’s only our second day.”
We promptly ordered two mint-green chartreuse digestifs, to ensure that we got our money’s worth.
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Trips to France were not littered throughout my childhood; in fact, I had never before been out of the country. But taking her daughter to her departed father’s fatherland to taste its delicacies was on my mom’s bucket list, and if she hadn’t been paying for everything, I wouldn’t have been there. Before we left she had told me, “I’ll pick up some prepaid calling cards for us both.”
The only one I wanted to call was Aaron. We’d rarely been apart in four years, and even less so since Matt’s death, and had never gone a day without talking, but I figured, Okay, maybe we could handle touching base just every other day, or every third.
But my mom kept a tight rein on the calling cards.
“Why do you need to talk to him? Let him miss you a little bit,” she said, mumbling something about making the heart grow fonder as she walked away. I held off until the fifth day when I grabbed the card from her wallet and folded myself into a phone booth. I reassured him that I was okay and that we were somewhere in the Savoie region. It was clear who held the purse strings on this trip.
We had good times, though, on our way to our second Michelin-starred meal. We dipped south to visit my mom’s cousins who had retired to a farmhouse outside of Marseille. We went to the touristy village of Chateauneuf-du-Pape and bought six bottles of the delicate red wine, the boxes for which we passed back and forth filled with Christmas gifts for years to come. My five years of strictly B-minus high school and college French grudgingly came back to me, and I was able to navigate the rural roads, get us into hotels, and even snag a recipe for apricot confiture from my cousin’s neighbor. If it had to do with food, I could muddle through.
My mother, not so much. It was clear that the simple French phrases she’d crammed on the airplane hadn’t stuck when she walked into a restaurant and brightly declared “Merci!” in greeting. It’s bonjour, Mom, bonjour! It quickly became the running gag we pulled out whenever we needed to break intergenerational tension.
Over the food, all our sharp edges fell off. We both loved the buckwheat galettes, the frisée salads with duck gizzard confit and walnut-oil vinaigrette, and the paté en cro?te, even the supermarket kind, and somehow managed to cram three full meals of these, our new favorites, and more into each day. Sitting on a sunlit terrace in Provence, in front of a milky half-orb of fresh chèvre with ni?oise olives and oven-dried tomatoes, we finally had to agree to disagree.
“How can you not like this goat cheese?” I asked. “It’s almost impossible.” The curd was so fresh the milk trickled out when I broke it, and the signature flavor of the goat milk laid down low in the background. But the woman who had introduced her kids to stinky blue cheese, dripping rare beef, and fresh coconut—whose tastes always pushed back against our small town’s collective conservatism—was sticking to it.