Food & Other Stuff

I'm backlogged with photos, Susanne is taking many more than me & time is running out...we leave a week from tomorrow.  I'm not sure what I'm going to do with all of that except carry on & see what happens.

Back to food for the time being.  We've done alot of parteger meals.  The reception has varied from downright hostile (the Moroccan restaurant last year) to a bit on the snide side (the one place mat & napkin lady) to an enthusiastic embrace as seen by the cheeseburger properly parteger'd here.

Yesterday for lunch we went down to Paris' Chinatown just southeast of Place d'Italie looking for Indonesian food.  Was not successful.  Indonesian is an culinary ethnicity that hasn't caught on well anywhere.  Amsterdam has great Indonesian food but that's because of their colonial history.

What we did find was that Vietnamese restaurants have taken over the place.  I'd say half to two-thirds of all the eating places are pho joints.  We switched our phood desires to pho.  We chose this place because it was the busiest, most crowded & we couldn't see any non-Asians in the place.  Turns out there was one man in the back but he looked like a local.














Anyhow, we parteger'd the beef pho (the house specialty, what everyone else was ordering) & weren't disappointed.  The thinly sliced beef was served raw but cooked in the very hot broth.  Those little red pepper slices were HOT!

To me, this is pure Phappiness.  The bowl in front of my right arm has very thinly sliced onions...don't see that in the U.S.

Today we returned to Montreuil to try the South African restaurant.  It's just off the main drag but the neighborhood runs down very quickly.  Here is the place, not even marked by a sign.  From the outside, it doesn't seem worthy of even entering.

The interior is a bit more inviting, almost South Africanish.

Ahhh, some African decor.














We ordered a plate of borewors (pronounced "boor eh vors", think South African bratwurst) and pap chakalaka .  Chakalaka is the topping, a spicy dish of onions, tomatoes, black beans & pap is the grain, both a staple of the black South African diet and a requirement at any South African braai (outdoor BBQ).  To me the borewors were dry & overcooked and when I asked the South African server, she said the owner comes from Cape Town where they're cooked that way.  We've hung around Johannesburg where they're alot juicer.

For dessert, we shared a slice of malva cake, also very South African and absolutely delicious.  Again we dug in before I took a photo but here is a pic cribbed from the internet.  Our wonderful server wrote out the recipe for Susanne based on what her grandmother baked.







OK, let's go for some street art, then call it quits for this post.