Eat! Eat!

DICK SAYS: The other day I had an interesting experience involving food. It transpired at a popular quasi-chain restaurant that features dishes from the southwest of France that Liz and I visit a couple of times a month. It's not a fancy place. But the food is good  and reasonably priced and the portions are more than fair. Vegetables appear in many of the dishes, too, which is not a given in France, despite the presence of large open-air food markets in neighborhoods rich and poor. Hot peppers flavor a number of dishes as well, which is a given only in certain ethnic restaurants and in restaurants that dip into the cuisine of a clearly defined region of southern France. (If I knew the full history of hot peppers in France, I'd get into it. But I don't. I imagine that involves Saracens, which is to say that involves
issues that are still very hot hereabouts.)
      Anyhow, I ordered a simple Basque dish of chopped veal and peppers as an open-face sandwich--or tartine. In the tartine version, a thick application of cheese is also toasted on top of the meat, so one would not call this "light fare" by any means. But it's tasty and filling and the price is right.
      Unfortunately, despite having pedaled there from across the river,  I was not up to the task of putting away both halves of this prodigious sandwich as well as the big bowl of simply dressed green salad that came along with it. Okay, so what? In some places in this world, the waiter or waitress might shoot you a look while clearing a plate that's still heaped with food or perhaps ask if the food wasn't to your liking. But this is France. And save for some of the employees at the most jaded touristic places,  people in the restaurant business really do care about food. They might not know as much about it as they think they do. They might not serve the perfect omelet or offer up the ripest tomato, but they care. They really do. That was abundantly clear when the grand dame of this restaurant swooped in to clear
my plate that fine afternoon, expressing a combination of concern and displeasure in a torrent of rapid-fire French. "Did monsieur not like the food?"  "Monsieur might have split the portion with Madame if he had such a small appetite." "Does Monsieur eat like this at home, Madame?" Well, you get the idea. I won't run through every phrase I understood--or half understood.
        At first, I was embarrassed. I'd made a good stab at consuming, say, 1200 or so calories of bread, meat and cheese and that was plenty. (In fact, as it turned out, it was the only meal of the day. I tried.
I failed. Why was this lady giving me such a hard time? Then, as she persisted, with Monsieur this and Monsieur that--most of the comments directed at Liz not me--I realized she was joking. Or sort of joking, even while delivering a lesson in the French notion that if one is eating at a restaurant, one clears one's plate. And, then, should a bit of sauce be left on the porcelain, the polite customer grabs another hunk of baguette and mops up with gusto. This applies to impossibly thin ladies as well. I have no idea where they put it, but if the order something at a restaurant or a cafe or a salon de the, they finish every morsel. Maybe they never eat again that day or that week. But in public, they keep up their end of prepared food bargain.  I doubt I ever will, but then, I'm not French. Come to think of it, that was the other part of the lesson.
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