That night, long after I had left Tahrir Square, protestors marched on the Israeli Embassy, an act of infamy. Three Egyptians were killed by security forces, and the scaredy-cat Israeli ambassador fled the country. (Moshe Dayan, Israeli war hero, would have wept.) I never was in danger from the embassy riot, didn’t even realize it had occurred until the next day. And while this was not the first Arab Spring event to turn violent, it did set a standard for senselessness.
I never stopped enjoying Cairo. At no time did I feel uncomfortable there, no matter where I wandered, and I went everywhere in search of a good meal. I was often lost. Away from the primary thoroughfares, the city is a jumble of unmarked or badly marked streets. Maps aren’t much help.
Walking around means constantly dodging cars as you cross streets. No drivers stop willingly for pedestrians, although they do honk incessantly. As I walked along sidewalks, I was splattered with water dripping from leaky overhead air-conditioners. I splashed through puddles of staggering biological implications—they were certainly not water, not when it hadn’t rained in a week. Much of Cairo is like any other poor city—tiny shops, some no larger than one-car garages, pressed up against each other; concertina wire protecting empty lots; plastic tables and chairs set out on sidewalks so friends can eat, drink, play cards and smoke the hookah. (Non-validated tip: Ask for your hookah ‘Egyptian’, and you might receive a sprinkling of hash.) I always feel alive when I walk along streets such as these. Maybe it’s because I’m usually alone in my travels and the crush of pedestrians is a substitute for company.
The unpredictability and diversity of the restaurants is unquestionably fascinating, although I am wary when I visit a city and find restaurants that offer foreign food primarily for one reason: they’re safe havens for tourists who distrust the cuisine of the countries they’re visiting. Egypt certainly meets that criterion. Nevertheless, I was eager to try La Trattoria, owned by Tarek Sharif, son of the famous Egyptian actor Omar Sharif. I had heard that he ate there frequently, but he wasn’t on hand the evening I showed up. In fact, only one table was occupied.
The décor was minimalistic, stark, very Ingmar Bergman. The one bit of art was a mounted poster promoting Italian wines, although the restaurant offered none. A young, dour waiter glanced at me, picked up a menu, and shuffled to the rear of the room, not even looking back to see if I was following. He silently pointed to a seat. I took it, feeling as though I had been relegated to detention hall. The space was airless. And peopleless. I sat, waited. A few more tables filled up, near the front. I remained alone.
The waiter ultimately returned and placed a knife and fork in front of me. They pointed in different directions. He put a cloth napkin in front of a different chair, one where I clearly wasn’t sitting. I ordered a selection of appetizers. Vitello tonnato—roasted veal with a creamy tuna sauce—was the highlight of my meal. It almost convinced me that the cook had knowledge of Italian food. The skewered baked shrimp were crunchy. The mozzarella was impossibly hard, but excellent compared to the spaghetti pomodoro, which was tragic.
I understand why Omar Sharif is a steady customer. The despair of Doctor Zhivago, his greatest film, is mirrored in the bleakness of his son’s restaurant.
Less ambitious than La Trattoria, but even more disappointing, was Lucille’s, subject of a 2007 story by Time magazine with the headline, ‘The World’s Best Hamburger Is In Egypt’. I wanted very much to believe. Lucille’s is very Johnny Rockets. The menu is plasticized, a facsimile of the kind found in chain restaurants. It has photos and a credo: ‘… we mix and grind our own ground beef to give you the best quality there’s no better way to do it!’
Friends and I ordered burgers, of course. The buns were oversized and spongy, and dwarfed the miniature portion of meat within. The meat itself tasted like the kind you get in supermarkets when you buy chopped meat on special, cook it, and wonder why it doesn’t taste much like beef. I’m not saying Lucille’s has the world’s worst hamburger—I’m not as impetuous as Time—but it’s in the running for the title.
The concierge of my hotel kept urging me to try a nearby pizzeria, Maison Thomas. When he gave me the address, I realized it was the same as two other restaurants already on my list of places to try. That was puzzling until I realized that all three were attached in different ways to the same building, a monolithic relic of old Cairo that was so huge, so spread out, so battered and so gnarly I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn it had a root system. It even had a name, Baehler’s Mansions, after a hotelier and developer prominent in Cairo in the early 1920s.
Maison Thomas was in the front, on the main thoroughfare, and easy to find. Abou El Sid, famous for traditional Egyptian cuisine, was toward the rear, behind a huge, black Temple of Doom door. La Bodega turned out to be above me, on the second floor. The building boasted an ancient cage elevator leading up to it, but the elevator didn’t work. I wondered when last it had.
I had lunch at La Bodega—such an odd name for a place serving French and Continental Cuisine. It looked more like a private club than a restaurant, one King Farouk might have patronized, although I later learned that it wasn’t quite old enough for that. The dining room was glamorous, with vestiges of grandeur. The walls were the color of oxidized white wine. The bar was mostly brass. The wood trim was painted black. The flatware was heavy.
I was the only person in the room at lunch, which I believed would guarantee attentive service. I was wrong. I asked my indifferent waiter for shrimp flambéed tableside, which was on the menu, but he shook his head. I never knew why, although it might be a dish not offered when the temperature outside reaches ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. He suggested beignet of salmon, which turned out to be a cross between a samosa and a spring roll, light and fresh but more like a snack than an appetizer in an elegant and expensive restaurant. For my main course, he was insistent that I have chicken tagine, served Moroccan style. The white meat was overcooked and served in a light, innocuous cream sauce. Couscous, the Moroccan touch, came on the side.
Maison Thomas offered a startling range of pizzas. Someone with considerable imagination had conceived them, given that both the Hawaii and the Monaco featured smoked roast beef, which I doubt is a staple of either locale. The mozzarella was impressively gooey, but the crust was so flat, pale and flavorless I was reminded of the unleavened bread that the Jews took out of Egypt when they fled a few thousand years ago.
The best feature of Abou El Sid, it turned out, was that magnificent door. If only it had remained locked. Inside, this classic restaurant resembled a haunted house, the mood enhanced by an occasional screeching sound, which was either a banshee or a blender gone berserk. I tried all manner of dishes, including a green soup containing mulukhiyi leaves (oddly medicinal), liver prepared Alexandria-style (overcooked and flavorless), and a pudding called keshk (reminiscent of cold, sweet, gooey cream of wheat). The wine, made in Egypt, was marked up in the manner of New York, which means four times its store price. I finished only one dish, the lentil soup, slightly too garlicky but otherwise without flaw.
I often imagined what dining in Cairo must have been like a hundred years ago, when the city was a place of grandeur. There isn’t much of that splendor left, except in the near-ruins of still-occupied residential buildings and in some of the better international hotels. By far the most refined meal I ate was a Turkish dinner at the Kempinski Hotel. Let others wonder how the pharaohs could have built pyramids using twenty-ton blocks of stone. I can’t understand how a people whose civilization predates all others couldn’t come up with tastier food.
I wondered if the centuries-long dominance of the Ottoman Empire had somehow muddled a promising Egyptian cuisine. All manner of culinary influences would have been introduced, and it’s possible that local cooks had the bad judgment to embrace the wrong ones. On the other hand, I might have expected too much from the food. Egypt is about ninety-five percent desert land. That doesn’t leave much space for growing crops or grazing livestock.
/> An Egyptian-American teacher and writer suggested to me that Egypt’s culinary descent was no different from what has occurred in all aspects of life there—the stifling of cultural, societal and intellectual standards. She said all had been stunted by the kind of oppression that led to the Arab Spring uprising. I can see why koshary, a profoundly simple dish that came into existence in the nineteenth century to feed poor working families, has survived intact. Its sturdy goodness is impervious to change.
JOSH OZERSKY is a James Beard Award-winning food writer. His work has appeared in New York magazine, Time, Esquire, Saveur, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in New York City.
A MELANCHOLIC’S GUIDE TO EATING IN PARIS
Josh Ozersky
My father’s attachment to raw wheat bran was unnatural, yes, and in some ways even masochistic, but it made sense if you knew what his diet was like. Not that it helped any. He had strange ideals of austerity that had almost no connection with what was going on inside his body. An example: for my entire childhood, he insisted on making me drink sour, grayish-green grapefruit juice, on the basis that it was ‘less fattening’ than sweet, delicious orange juice. I was to find out years later that they were almost identical; it was merely the badness of the former that appealed to him. Bran was a similarly penitential agent. He consumed Chinese spare ribs, blackened steaks, salami sandwiches, sausage pizzas, and every kind of wurst he could get his hands on, generally while standing in front of the refrigerator, or over the sink. He also drank prodigiously. He was charismatic, loquacious, and unpredictable. So when I got the news that we were going to Paris, I wasn’t at all sure what to expect.
My father’s fascination with food was one of the few fixed points of my childhood. A gifted painter, he produced a long series of enormously expressive semi-abstract oil paintings of chefs; I still have them and they make me feel very happy, which would have pleased him, since he considered his daily life as more or less their waste products. A melancholy person, he was rarely cheered by anything, but food was one thing that could be counted upon to get him excited. He was never happier than when contemplating a take-out menu. For my part, an only child raised among depressives, these occasional flashes of light seemed like a much bigger deal than they were, but then, food and movies were just about the only things we were able to speak freely about. This was especially true in my teenage years, when we lived together, in a state of deep gloom interspersed with bursts of glee, in our Atlantic City apartment. I was eighteen when I first heard about the trip. Was it possible that he could stay happy for the whole time?
It wasn’t that far-fetched a possibility. My father had read Liebling as a young man, and loved to quote from Between Meals, much of which he had, he thought, committed to memory. The book is a rhapsody of gluttony, set in the Paris of the Lost Generation, although Liebling didn’t know it at the time. Like my father, he was primarily concerned with eating, and, like my father, so much so that he would spend hours pondering menus. I never read it myself, it being boring-looking, but I loved it vicariously through my father, who used to say, ‘Tonight, we’re gonna ring the gong!’ whenever he felt exceptionally excited about an imminent meal. The phrase derived, he said, from a story in Between Meals, when a young Liebling went into a fancy restaurant and used the phrase, an idiom he had learned in a book somewhere. Nobody understood what he was saying, and he later found out that the expression was one that hadn’t been common since the seventeenth century. My father fell in love with it in that random way of his, though, and the words, ‘we’re going to ring the gong’, persist in my own foodie patter, for reasons no one can understand. It’s something of a private joke I have with myself.
The prospect of going to Paris with my father was special for another reason: it would be the longest period I had spent with him since becoming self-aware, sometime around the age of fifteen. My father, a stagehand at Resorts International Hotel Casino, worked a four-to-midnight shift, so was almost never home when I got back from school; my exposure to him, his strange flights of humor, his movie quotes, his sad expressions, his hidden emotions and obscure past, all came pretty much a few hours at a time. He kept a small bottle of vodka in the egg compartment and refused to eat fudge. I didn’t understand him, but I wanted to be like him. I was curious what he would be like in Paris.
As it turned out, he was pretty much himself in Paris, only more so. While we did visit a few cultural touchstones, some of which even prompted a rare nugget of art history insight from him, mostly we were killing time between meals. I stood with him at the Rodin museum, contemplating The Thinker. He looked at it for a long time. I hoped he might say something smart and deep, something I could parrot in the presence of my friends. Instead, I got a predictable joke, one that made me laugh anyway. ‘Should I get the steak or the cassoulet?’ he asked in what he imagined would be the statue’s voice. Our hotel, the small but elegant Claude Bernard, with its phone-booth elevator sheathed by a spiraling staircase, was the kind of place a man might shoot his cuffs and meet his mistress. As a rube, I was naturally awed by it, but within fifteen minutes, our clothes were lying around, my father had a small bottle of vodka on the bedside table, and there was a box of bran in the bathroom. It wasn’t a bowl of bran, or a container of bran; it was the actual box, transported from our refrigerator, with a spoon from room service thrust into it. The idea was that we would eat so much rich food that the bran would provide the needed ‘roughage’ to keep our bowels in good working order. This was less than glamorous. It sat there for the whole trip. I felt that we were not a good fit in Paris. I told my father that there was a water fountain in the bathroom. ‘Women use that to clean their twats,’ he explained to me in that mordant way.
My dad’s joke about steak vs. cassoulet was more relevant than he knew. Cassoulet was a familiar theme to me at the time, and one of the many disappointments of the trip. From my dutiful reading of Liebling, I had arrived in France ready for a cassoulet epiphany. I had even read in my father’s dank copy of Waverly Root’s The Food of France that there were not one, but three cassoulets that defined the regions of France, one from someplace that used only pork; another, from a place called Carcassonne, that also added mutton, which sounded great; and finally the celebrated Toulouse version, which had all that stuff, plus sausages and duck that had been simmered in its own fat. That sounded awesome, which made it all the more depressing when the reality turned out to be a dollop of tasteless white beans adorned with a few pieces here and there of sausage and salt pork. Cassoulet, at least in the form I got it, turned out to be essentially an unsauced version of franks and beans.
This discovery was part of a larger, more depressing reality that had nothing to do with my father. My problem in Paris was that, while I had thoroughly and eagerly internalized all his food propaganda about the place, I didn’t actually like anything there. It wasn’t simply, as with the grapefruit juice, his perverse preference for everything that was bad; it was simply that I had no point of reference for salads with raw eggs in them, or bony quails that required careful dissection to eat, or monstrous saucer-sized oysters like the one I was forced to eat at Vivarois. Everywhere I went I got steak frites, or something like it. I knew I disappointed my father, but there was nothing I could do about it. My upbringing had prioritized grilled cheese and bacon sandwiches, portly cheesesteaks, slabs of cake and, best of all, crusty, greasy hash browns cooked impatiently at the bottom of a pot. (Somehow, we had lost all the pans.)
Still, we did eat a lot. The Claude Bernard functioned as a staging area for our twice-a-day forays, from which we inevitably returned, bloated and woozy, by foot. These walks are my happiest memories of the trip. We were full, my father was in a good mood, it was just the two of us, and we enjoyed that special satori that only true gluttons know, of reconnoitering restaurants for the morrow while still full from dinner. ‘You could eat great for the whole trip without leaving the block,’ he would say, awestruck. We did in fact leave the block: we went to Mouli
n a Vent, on Rue des Fossés Saint-Bernard, a meatery with oil paintings of steak on the walls and a stout, butcherly looking waiter named Gilbert, who was amused to see us eat together. We went to the Select, to be like Hemingway, but it was just another coffee shop, although I had my first croque monsieur there, a French version of grilled cheese and bacon. We went to a more formal, less enjoyable restaurant called Chez Marius, which had an unctuous maître d’ who looked a lot like Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane. ‘Bob Crane wasn’t at his best tonight,’ he told me apologetically, after a disappointing meal. But the best of the big meals was in fact just a few blocks away, and a big reason I still like to go back to ‘the fifth’: a small family restaurant called Moissonier.
Lacking any French, I assumed Moissonier was some kind of technical term—maybe the kitchen functionary charged with making mousse?—but it was in fact a guy named Louie Moissonier, who ran a homey, countrified restaurant with his wife Olamp, who had the blackest hair I have ever seen on any person, before or since. Moissonier was the first restaurant in Paris that made sense to me, registering as it did as an analog of the mom-and-pop Italian restaurants that I frequented in Atlantic City, like Angelo’s Fairmont Tavern and The Derby. Every meal I have ever had at Moissonier, and I have had a lot, proceeded the same way. First came a cart filled with various cold things: garlicky sausages, potato salad and two dozen other items, none of which included vegetables. Then came an unmarked bottle of beaujolais wine from somebody’s yard, and that was followed by a huge plate of chicken in a creamy vinegar sauce, and—and get this—a giant black pan filled with crusty, cheesy brown potatoes. ‘There’s your hash browns,’ my father said, with an affectionate twist of mockery. I was oblivious to the comment, falling into the meal like a damaged airplane landing on one wheel. I still eat it whenever I can, and not just for nostalgic purposes. Those pans looked like they had been cast sometime during the War of the Spanish Succession; their craggy blackness was an unforgettable sizzling abyss.
A Fork In The Road: Tales of Food, Pleasure and Discovery On The Road (Lonely Planet Travel Literature) Page 13