We’re going to somewhere called Sanary for a bit flower expo today, somewhere the other side of Toulon. Which I remember well as the first place I ever had a fondue bourguignone at the home of the sister of the best friend of my Niçoise penfriend Brigitte, to whom I haven’t spoken in far too long. Must dig out her e-mail address.
We had a soirée vigneron last night when the good and great give us all their money and we let them taste some great local wines. About 50 of them, who all had amuse bouches, starters (two plates), main course (two plates), cheese and pudding (a plate and a soufflée dish, chef doing his special raspberry soufflées for pudding). Which means 50 x 8 = 400 plates plus all the batterie, the saucepans and what have you to assemble all this. Busy night for me. I was reading a restaurant review the other day where I was invited to have pity on the poor plongeurs who between the three of them have to do up to 600 plates a night. Slackers.
The thing which takes most of my time is taking the cleaned pots and plates back out into the kitchen, especially difficult when the five cooks are working an assembly line to plate up those 50 dinners and you can’t get by them, but have to because there’s simply no room anywhere in the plonge for the next load of stuff that’s about to arrive. Luckily chef and his seconde and the new chef de partie are all professional enough to take an armful of stuff out with them when they pass by, which helps a lot.
The stagaires don’t, of course. We have a new one who Knows Everything – he explained his recipe which he’d invented by himself and which was his recipe and he had designed it all by himself and which was his recipe (etc…) for a dish which involves slicing a choux bun in half, sandwiching in a boule of glace vanille, putting it on a plate decorated with a little crème anglaise, adding a few more buns and then covering it with hot chocolate.
The silence which followed the announcement of this Great New Recipe was broken by Chef saying, “So, profiteroles then?”
And then he insisted on speaking English to me all night. Very, very bad English, presumably on the grounds that my French is so appalling only everyone else in the restaurant can understand it. So when someone arrives in the plonge with a hot saucepan they normally cry, “Chaud!” to warn me it’s hot. This one arrived shouting, “Cold!” I thought he was trying to make a joke, but it turned out he thought “Cold!” means “Hot”. He has an English exam on Wednesday, apparently, and offered me €100 to sit it for him…
Anyway. So I finished just before midnight, which was pretty impressive even if I say so myself; the last soirée vigneron saw me getting out of the building at 0130, which was far too late. And chef insisted I eat two of his soufflées which were, frankly, delicious. Choose them if they’re on the menu.