It was a small restaurant in Paris, somewhere in the district of Montmartre, where I finally realized how crazy some people could get about cheese.
And that was just one of three odd things I realized while dining in this restaurant.
The first thing was that a restaurant could be located on the second floor of an otherwise nondescript building.
“How does anyone ever discover this place?” I asked the friend I was traveling with as we climbed up the stairs.
“The same way we did,” she answered. “They look it up in the Michelin Guide.”
Once seated, I studied the menu. This was probably not the moment to mention that I was no big fan of cheese. Which meant that I was in trouble because this restaurant was all about cheese and everything on the menu contained it, one way or another.
Finally, I ordered a quiche and sat back to take in my surroundings.
It had been a few years since my college French classes, but I still retained enough of it to try listening in on the conversation at the table behind me.
It seemed pretty one-sided. It was clearly a couple on a date — but the girl could hardly get a word in edgewise. What was going on?
I turned around.
The young man was reading to his date from the newspaper, and she was writing things down. Then she handed her paper across to him and he started marking it up.
In fact, what I had stumbled across, in its native habitat, was the much dreaded “dictée,” or dictation quiz, that I remembered with loathing from French class. Except these folks did it for fun! It was actually printed in the newspaper, just like we have crossword puzzles. So that was Strange Thing Number Two.
But the strangest thing that night came as the grand finale at the end of our meal. Instead of dessert, the waiter brought a large basket of different types of cheeses: round ones; square ones; flat ones; even one shaped like a tall skinny volcano, covered in dried herbs.
The odors ran the gamut from “bearable” to “gym-sock. Why would anybody eat those, I wondered? Who would consider this place a treat? And why, oh why, had I ever agreed to come here in the first place?
The truth is I have never been fond of anything in the dairy family — except ice cream, of course.
My mother only got me to drink one glass of milk a day with the help of chocolate syrup. My school cafeteria never offered chocolate milk, so I had to tote my lunch box and thermos to school and back, every single day.
One terrible day I opened the thermos to find: white milk. Oh no! I had accidentally switched lunch boxes with my brother. Worse yet — by the time I got to his classroom to switch back, he had already drunk my milk. “Didn’t you think it was odd that Mom gave you chocolate milk?” I asked him.
“I just thought she wanted to treat me,” he responded. He got two thermoses of milk that day.
When I went away to camp, I knew what I had to do. I told them I was allergic to milk —which worked until one chilly morning someone caught me drinking hot cocoa. Busted!
Back at school, I trained myself to tolerate at least enough cheese to eat my slice of pizza at slumber parties, which in turn prepared me for college.
Then I moved to Manhattan.
There were staff parties, brunches and gallery openings — all of which seemed to require knowledge of wines and cheeses.
It got so that I would walk into Dean & Delucca — the gourmet emporium of the day — and inhale the intoxicating mixture of roasting coffee, baking bread and ancient cheeses. “Ah, can you smell that? I feel so sophisticated,” I told my husband.
“Wow!” he said, straightening up from whatever he was investigating. “You mean you can actually tell the dark from this semi-dark chocolate?”
“No, silly — it’s all the exotic cheeses.”
“But you don’t like cheese.”
“That’s true — but it makes me sophisticated.”
“Well, who cares about that, if you don’t even like it?”
He was right. I quit fooling myself and went back to regarding all the cheeses and salamis hanging over deli counters as quaint ethnic decorations.
Until now. Nowadays, when you might have to wait a week or more for the groceries you’ve ordered to be delivered, it is good to have something that can feed you and keep without spoiling, for all of that time.
It turns out those quaint old-timers were on to something.
