A Meal Observed

park at the corner of the rue Balzac and the Avenue de Friedland, and the instant I cut the engine I become aware that I am nervous. Performance anxiety, butterflies, a mild version of the racking nerves I used to suffer, as a freshman and sophomore in high school, before a wrestling match. The fear that I would be humiliated, outmanned, before the eyes of my coach, my teammates, and a girl whose name I had shoveled in the snow, on the frozen Hudson River, in letters visible to passing aircraft. In the car, I glance quickly over at my wife, who smiles gamely but a little uncomfortably, and we sit for a long moment in silence, not moving, in a kind of feigned, mutual optimism, as if bracing for embarrassing news. I try not to think it through, because I know that analysis will only make it worse, and that I am here, we are here, to enjoy ourselves. I glance at the car clock, then my watch, and their un- expected synchronicity provides a flush of paramili- tary satisfaction. I slip my cell phone out of the inside breast pocket of my jacket and check the time in the upper right-hand corner of its miniature screen. All three! A good omen, and proof, despite the state of my front bumper, creased into an awkward V against a black Mercedes' tow bar in Brugge, that my equip- ment and I are essentially on the ball. According to these three chronometers, it is 8:15 in the evening on Tuesday, July 13, 1999, the eve of Bastille Day. We are early.

I glance again at my wife. Erin is thirty-two and beautiful--stunning, really--and for this I'm grateful. Her beauty is the one sure thing we have on this world we are about to enter, the thing no waiter or sommelier or maitre d'hotel at Taillevent--a Michelin three-star restaurant considered by many critics to be the finest in France and thus the world--can wrest from us with a patronizing glance. In hours of need, one can remind oneself that beauty, more even than youth, its reckless twin, has ever been a fortune before which wealth, sophistication, and intellect will bow.

We are also prepared to spend between twenty-five hundred and three thousand francs--four to five hundred dollars out of our own pockets--on a meal for two. This is something we have never done. Not only because we are often nearly penniless, given the vicissitudes of my work, but because we are not, truly, gourmands. By and large, that is not where our money goes. For reasons fiscal, temperamental, and psychological, we eat out rarely, and when we do we often bring it home. Furthermore, though we have bought the odd issue of Gourmet or Saveur, we have not yet subscribed to such magazines. We are not, in short, "foodies." I object to the very word "foodie," not only for its inherent ugliness as a sound, but for its cliquishness. "I'm a huge foodie," a woman told me recently at a dinner party, with that mixture of false shame and childlike enthusiasm that accompanies nearly any public revelation of sensual preference, and it struck me as surprisingly intimate, even indecent, as if this near-stranger had slipped off her Roman sandals, stretched her calves across my lap, and asked if I would like to eat her feet. I later admitted that if this particular foodie had been more attractive her confession might not have troubled me. In that case, it might well have conjured the agreeable image of her nude and reclining in a bathtub of mashed banana.

Our status as nonfoodies notwithstanding, my wife and I both like to cook, and even more than that we like to sit and eat at a comfortable table for long hours. And that is one reason we are here, at this moment, at the corner of Balzac and Friedland. For there are few moments more existentially harmonious than those that make up the latter half of a good meal in a hospitable restaurant, in the company of one or two people--rarely more--with whom one feels almost entirely safe, and by whom one feels at least partially understood. I had such a meal at an underrated one-star restaurant named Julien, in Strasbourg, on the quai des Bateliers, with my wife and her mother some six years ago. By some turn of fate for which I shall always be grateful, I have been blessed with a mother-in-law who is excellent company. I would never have imagined, as a bachelor, that I might take some of the best trips in my life with my wife and her mother, but there it is. The fact that she is a good deal younger than we are in spirit certainly helps, and there is always the vague sense that we are traveling with a mysteriously greying niece. In any case, the near-perfection of such a meal has less to do with the food, with the procession of well-wrought dishes, than with that gathering condition of bien-etre induced by wine and victuals and companionship in a warm, preferably unfamiliar setting, all the while under the care of sure-handed and anonymous strangers.