Not eating pizza

[shewhomust]

I 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? 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.

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*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.

Comments

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

I ended up watching the entire video. Yup. Brilliant.

I'm continually amazed and amused at how well-traveled you are. You likely know people who are more so and so don't think you are. But you certainly are to me. (and I likely am to someone else and so on...)

[sovay]

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?

I love that it's in Brittany. That's very eleventh-century of it.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Why, thank you. Yes, I know people who are more widely travelled than I am, and certainly people who have travelled further (we don't do a lot of long-haul). But I enjoy going to a lot of different places, and I enjoy writing about it.

You know, living in Europe gives me an advantage: I can visit several different countries within a distance where you'd still be within the States. And you'd probably have seen as much variety (of scenery and of culture!), but wouldn't regard it as being well-travelled (or traveled, you American, you!).

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Where else! But - eleventh? You've lost me...

[sovay]

But - eleventh? You've lost me...

Er. Isn't that the last time any of the Stewarts-who-would-become-the-House-of-Stuart were actually in Brittany? I bet I've screwed up somebody's family tree . . .

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Oh, I see. No, I'm sure you're right. 'Marie Stuart' in France usually means the Mary Stuart the English think of as Mary Queen of Scots: she was married to François II of France - and since by now Brittany came under the throne of France, that's not entirely irrelevant. But not entirely relevant, which was what appealed to me about the name in the first place...