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Not eating pizza
Dec. 9th, 2009 10:17 pmI know there is a recurring theme in my holiday posts of the pizzas we have eaten in incongruous places (ie not Italy nor England*), but I don't seem to have tagged the relevant posts. Anyway, we didn't eat any pizza in Brittany this autumn; perhaps because in Brittany when you fancy a light meal consisting of dough with a tasty topping, you can eat crêpes, and that's what we did.
There was a pizzeria in Josselin, where we spent our first night. It was called - presumably in an appeal to Breton patriotism - 'Breizh Pizzas', and it was closed. We would still have gone to the crêperie next door, even if it had been open, and we enjoyed our meal there, though I admit I don't remember much about the crêpes. What I do remember is the floor show, which was provided by the young woman whose job it was to write the menu of the day on a blackboard. She was taking great care over it, with plenty of flourishes and curly capital letters: velouté de potiron aux châtaignes, échine de porc aux deux purées (poireaux, carottes) - when an elderly gentleman dining alone began to heckle her: No, that's wrong, it should be 'au' not 'aux'... There was a reason, which I don't now remember - possibly it was that the word following didn't begin with a vowel? - but she found it convincing, and began rubbing out the 'x's**. At which point the debate became more general.
We didn't eat pizza in Roscoff, either, despite the appeal of the Pizzeria Marie Stuart - why would you call a pizzeria after Mary Queen of Scots?![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
durham_rambler suggested it was the Rizzio connection.
A year earlier, we had failed to eat pizza in Bogny, on the Meuse. We found ourselves in a small town which was closed on Sunday evening, and our hosts at the B & B recommended an Italian restaurant in the next village. It was an odd-looking place (some sort of post-industrial, or post agro-industrial, conversion?) - we had a fine view of it on our walk the following day:
but inside it was a classic Italian restaurant of a certain era. One wall was decorated with a mural of an Italian scene, with the inevitable fucking gondolas, and the wall facing it with a mural showing the Ardennes: the forest, the boar, the river...
Instead of pizza I ate escalope milanese as they used to serve it at the self-service restaurant at the Porte Saint Denis in Paris forty years ago: well, I could have had pasta as an accompaniment, but I admit I chose chips instead (the chips were excellent). There were rum babas for desert, the kind shaped like an outsized cork which you buy in a jar of syrup; they were served with ice cream and spray-on whipped cream and that red sauce the local kids call "monkey blood". The wine was Sicilian, and very good.
*I accept that it wouldn't be particularly incongruous to eat pizza in the US, but I'm sure I haven't posted on the subject.
**He was wrong, of course. She had been right in the first place.
There was a pizzeria in Josselin, where we spent our first night. It was called - presumably in an appeal to Breton patriotism - 'Breizh Pizzas', and it was closed. We would still have gone to the crêperie next door, even if it had been open, and we enjoyed our meal there, though I admit I don't remember much about the crêpes. What I do remember is the floor show, which was provided by the young woman whose job it was to write the menu of the day on a blackboard. She was taking great care over it, with plenty of flourishes and curly capital letters: velouté de potiron aux châtaignes, échine de porc aux deux purées (poireaux, carottes) - when an elderly gentleman dining alone began to heckle her: No, that's wrong, it should be 'au' not 'aux'... There was a reason, which I don't now remember - possibly it was that the word following didn't begin with a vowel? - but she found it convincing, and began rubbing out the 'x's**. At which point the debate became more general.
We didn't eat pizza in Roscoff, either, despite the appeal of the Pizzeria Marie Stuart - why would you call a pizzeria after Mary Queen of Scots?
durham_rambler suggested it was the Rizzio connection.A year earlier, we had failed to eat pizza in Bogny, on the Meuse. We found ourselves in a small town which was closed on Sunday evening, and our hosts at the B & B recommended an Italian restaurant in the next village. It was an odd-looking place (some sort of post-industrial, or post agro-industrial, conversion?) - we had a fine view of it on our walk the following day:
but inside it was a classic Italian restaurant of a certain era. One wall was decorated with a mural of an Italian scene, with the inevitable fucking gondolas, and the wall facing it with a mural showing the Ardennes: the forest, the boar, the river...
Instead of pizza I ate escalope milanese as they used to serve it at the self-service restaurant at the Porte Saint Denis in Paris forty years ago: well, I could have had pasta as an accompaniment, but I admit I chose chips instead (the chips were excellent). There were rum babas for desert, the kind shaped like an outsized cork which you buy in a jar of syrup; they were served with ice cream and spray-on whipped cream and that red sauce the local kids call "monkey blood". The wine was Sicilian, and very good.
*I accept that it wouldn't be particularly incongruous to eat pizza in the US, but I'm sure I haven't posted on the subject.
**He was wrong, of course. She had been right in the first place.
