Coldstone It Ain't

Friday night.

People took off early from work.

Club flyers are plastered on the cars.

Well-dressed suburbanites are rushing to the metro for drinks, dancing, and god knows what else.

And here I am, in my hotel room, tapping away on my keyboard.

It's a sad existence, this living-in-a-suburban-hotel gig. But worthless American dollars be damned, I was on a mission to do something. So I walked the streets of Clichy, searching out a restaurant. It's payday after all, so I can afford to splurge a bit, n'est-ce pas?

I walked around in a huge circle, finding nothing but shitty faux Chinese traiteurs and the same dingy, fluorescent-lit brasseries I did last time around. For the umpteenth time, I walked by a place called Fire & Stone Grill, a place that - no matter how many times I saw it - I've avoided like the plague for the name alone. But this time, I went in. Drawn in by the fantastic smell of grilling steak and the reasonable menus, I couldn't help but be seduced by the prospect of meat.

The atmosphere was jovial, but it depressed me. Enveloped by the sound of my favorite kitschy 80's tunes, I felt much rather like dancing with someone I loved than sitting down to what might be a questionable meal. And by the looks of it, it was date night in Clichy. An old couple - apparently regulars - next to me. A middle-aged married couple who seemed to be having a make-up dinner across the dining room from me. A young, interracial couple - so obviously in love - across from me. With my place-setting for one.

I immediately ordered a bourbon. A big, fat tumbler of it to drown my sorrows.

As the distilled spirits made their way into my bloodstream, I looked around and smiled. It won't be long before my honey is here, and we can have date night every night. I hit the bottom of my glass and felt all warm and fuzzy. Then I ordered steak.

But first, the buffet. While not the most appealing spread ever, there were enough cold fish and meats and cheese to make any viking happy. I went straight for the vegetables.

Huh!?

In my scrimping and saving and scrounging, my stomach has shrank. And even though I stood before a Texas-sized spread of appetizers, I now have a French-sized appetite. I decorated my little plate with beets, lentil salad, tomato salad, some red radishes... all the hallmarks of some hippie vegan meal.

All the better. My meat arrived, a big, bloody hunk of rumpsteak, sitting atop a superheated marble-slab. Apparently, at Fire & Stone, your steak is always cooked to order. Because you cook it. I let it cook for about a minute on each side, and dove in. Nice and blue. A few minutes later, it was perfectly à point. Midway through, it was the American version of medium rare. Alas, I ate too slowly, enjoying my side of potatoes and abundant bread, and my last portion was criminally medium. But I enjoyed it nonetheless.

The price? Not including the bourbon and obligatory after-dinner coffee, €15.50. For the first time in a week, this expression entered my mind: Tremendous value.

If I ever get my American-sized appetite back, I'm coming back here to lay waste to the buffet. They're open for dinner from seven 'til midnight, meaning I can sit and stuff my face for five hours solid. But in the meantime, having a reasonable portion was enough to fill the gaping void inside of me.

Eatin' On the Cheap: Part I in a Series

Let's hope it's a long series.

So I decided to forgo having a sit-down meal, or even opting to hit the American Embassy (you know, the one with the golden arches) and went uber-cheap for dinner tonight. With a trip to the Casino.

No, no, not a gaming joint. Casino is a supermarket chain here. And while this goes against the whole über-European ideal of buying little things from the local bakery, cheesemonger, deli, etc., you have to keep in mind that until I find an apartment, I'm in Clichy.

Being in Paris while actually staying in Clichy is like... being in San Francisco while actually staying in Daily City. Without the awesome dim sum... Like being in Los Angeles while actually staying in Van Nuys. Without the killer Mexican food... Like being in New York City while actually staying in Jamaica/Queens. Without the cheap crack...

Ok, enough badmouthing Clichy. I did that on my last trip here, and one of these days after some gentrification and real estate speculation, I'm sure it'll be an affluent suburb with wonderful things like Outback Steakhouse, PF Changs, and Elephant Bar. Er.. maybe not.

Back to dinner. So I went to Casino and picked up some chips, a few apples, and a whole shitload of Badoit.

Badoit is my favorite mineral water. I blame the evil bitch waitress at San Francisco's Le Zinc for getting me hooked on it. At $9 a bottle, it may as well be a mild form of heroin. Lightly effervescent, smooth-tasting heroin. Then I started buying it for $3 a bottle at a French restaurant supply place in Brisbane. But you know how much it is here? Fifty mothaf***in' cents. Even at our godawful exchange rate, that's barely 75 US cents a bottle.

This is all due to the economies of scale. For as environmentally progressive as Europe is, Parisians drink a shitload of bottled water. And as you may well know, bottled water is one of the most evil things for the environment. The wasted bottling materials, the polluting transport, the billions wasted on marketing - all for stuff you can just get out of the tap and be hydrated just the same. But here, they drink it like it's going out of style. The bottled water consumption here makes those pony-tailed MILFs toting litres of Evian at LA gyms look like utter lightweights. France may be all about green transit, green construction, green spaces - but the ultimate institution here is the green of a bottle of Perrier.

But you know who the asshole is here? Me, that's who. Not because I should know better than to buy bottled water, but because tonight, I was that guy. The culturally unsavvy bastard who did the unthinkable: Hold up the grocery store line.

The checker rang up my armload of water, my chips, and then she got to my bag of apples. She machine-gunned something at me in French. I tried my hardest to answer the question. "Euhhh... les pommes? Elles sont les pommes.. uhhh.. Gala?" She shook her head, obviously not asking what kind of apples they were. She machine-gunned again. This time I caught something about a tag and the weight. Instead of dumping the apples, though, she was patient - despite the huge queue behind me - and allowed me to go back to the produce section to figure out exactly what I had to do.

So with a mob of frustrated Frenchmen behind me, I went looking for a scale. Or those little tags that you use at the bulk bins at hippie grocery stores. Neither were anywhere to be seen. Then I saw some contraption where you lay your produce, punch the button bearing the picture of what you're buying, and it spits out a little barcode ticket. I did a little victory dance and laughed as I slapped the ticket on my bag, oblivious to the fact that the line of Frenchmen was growing larger and ever more disgruntled. I came back all proud of myself, beaming that I'd somehow figured out how to buy a bag of apples in France.

The checker looked at me like the idiot that I am.

The apple I had for dinner was absolutely delicious, by the way. And blissfully cheap.

Rockin' the Suburbs

I seem to have made a habit of this in Paris: Walking around at a late hour, trying to find someplace to eat, and repeatedly striking out.

Only I'm in Clichy, a suburb a few kilometers from the official border of Paris, so instead of this happening at midnight, it happened around 9:00 pm.

I finally started feeling hungry again, then realized it was 8:00. On a Sunday. I'd best get to walking around and hunting down some dinner. To my surprise, there were a good number of places open during my hour-long walk. Unfortunately, most of my choices seemed to be things under heat lamps, kept warm on steam tables, or presented by the enemy of gourmands everywhere: Menus in English. Mostly at crappy-looking hotels.

At one point, I approached the périphérique where the darkness of the suburbs started to give way, the glow of neon signs and open businesses luring me like the siren's call. But this trip's all about avoiding the obvious. (That and, umm, work.) So I headed back another way toward my hotel. Things looked ever more depressing as I trudged along. To quote an email from one of my co-workers here, "Don't stay all the week-end in Clichy ! (it's so sad)"

Well, it's not fully sad. The nearby Allée Léon Gambetta and the city hall are gorgeous when lit up at night, the trees covered in tiny white lights and casting long shadows across the boulevards of grass. But all the night time beauty in the world won't feed me.

An hour had gone by. I'd about given up when I noticed the Turkish kebab shop right by my hotel was still open. I went in and ordered a platter of shawarma to go - no sauce, no drink, the mixed salad, and a plastic fork, please - quite a feat when mixing my heavily accented French with the shockingly more accented French of the guy behind the counter.

This was the best decision I made all day. Being closing time, he hooked me up with all the meat remaining on the skewer. The rice had time to steep in whatever grease it sits in before being served. And he also gave me some extra bread. And it was all fan-frikkin'-tastic. A gorgeous meal, all wrapped up in a styro box to enjoy in my little hotel room. Now you might think, "What's the big deal? You got a kebab platter to go." You don't understand what a feat this is back at home. In San Francisco, there's plenty of good falafel. Something about a huge vegetarian hippie population. But you can barely find a decent kebab to save yourself. This shit is the domain of Europe, Australia, and most likely the Middle East.

Speaking of the Middle East, it's been entertaining watching the news here - something I've been doing a lot. It looks like Nicolas Sarkozy (a.k.a. Sarko l'Americain) is mimicking his hero Bush, as they're both doing little tours of the Middle East. While CNN here is full of sensationalistic reports about US sabre-rattling toward Iran after the patrol boat incident in the Strait of Hormuz, the European media is treating it with a bit more... let's say... incredulity.

Don't get me wrong - they skewer Sarkozy quite a bit. But it seems the hatred of the Bush administration is even greater now that it holds sway over France's current president. Obi-wan Kenobi once wisely said, "Who's the more foolish? The fool? Or the fool who follows?" Obviously, the French place more emphasis on the progenitor of the foolishness.

The French news is also blissfully devoid of hoopla about the US presidential campaigns. They make some mentions whenever actual news come out, and people here are following it closely, but I've yet to see a clip of Hillary crying like a bitch or Huckabee selling his evil-wrapped-in-a-nice-guy package.

Anyway, the ten o'clock hour is approaching, and it seems like a good time to get out and have a drink at a bar.

Only looking out the window, everything is closed.

What a difference 4 kilometers makes.