Although Parisians seem to refer to "La Crise" in the past tense, it is still much easier to get a table in most good restaurants than it was a couple of years ago. As you would expect, at most of the restaurants where we dined, the chefs incorporated seasonal delicacies in their menus. Most memorable to me are the white truffles, the mushrooms (especially the cepes), the oysters, and the grilled, stuffed pigs' feet.
Yesterday and the second day of our stay, we ate lunch at L'Huiterie Regis, which is on the Left Bank near the covered food market just off the Boulevard St. Germain. At the same location, this wholesaler of oysters to other Parisian restaurants also has a very simple restaurant that can barely hold its seven tiny tables, each with two seats. The menu consists primarily of the types of oysters that have arrived that day; the wine list has a Muscadet and several Sancerres. On one of the days when we ate lunch there last year, the menu also offered sea urchins; I have not had a chance to eat sea urchins often, but they were by far the best that I have had. This year, there were bright orange, flavorful, wild shrimp on the menu on both occasions; and yesterday, there were also Belon oysters-- the big ones, Belons No. 00, not the smaller Fines de Claire and the Speciales de Claire pictured in my previous blog entry. For some 30 years, I have carried the memory of Belons No. 00 that I ate at Prunier, the famous seafood restaurant on Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris. The Belons that I ate at L'Huiterie Regis yesterday matched those of that memory.
I didn't realize until this week that sports fans in the United States are not serious. Algerian soccer fans are serious. Algeria played Egypt on Wednesday in Khartoum, Sudan, after having lost to Egypt in Cairo last Saturday. Before Saturday's game, Egyptian fans had stoned a bus carrying the Algerian players, inflicting bloody head wounds on three of them. In the ensuing riots, 32 people were injured, and Egyptian-owned businesses in Algeria were attacked. For the re-match in Khartoum on Wednesday, the Egyptian and Algerian fans were housed miles apart, with 15,000 riot police patrolling the streets. I had no idea that so many Algerians live in and around Paris until the streets of Paris were mobbed with cars and pedestrians waving Algerian flags following Algeria's victory on Wednesday. We were caught in a taxi during the melee. Although our taxi was hit on the windshield by a wet projectile, we were merely inconvenienced and never felt in danger. (Why should there be any danger? Algeria had won!)
Later Wednesday night, France was playing Ireland in Paris. Ireland, which had not won in France since 1938, was leading 1-0 until late in the game, when a French player "handled" the ball in passing it to a teammate who then scored. The referee missed the impermissible "handling" of the ball, and the tie put France in next year's World Cup finals. As we tried to fall asleep in our hotel room, the raucous Algerian fans were joined by the more decorous French fans in the streets of Paris. European newspapers yesterday were filled with coverage of the outrageous result. They referred frequently to a similar situation in the 1986 World Cup, just four years after the Falkland Islands war: Argentina's Diego Maradona won the match by punching the ball into England's goal. Maradona referred to his bit of cheating as "The Hand of God." London's Daily Telegraph promptly dubbed this French incarnation the "Hand of Gaul."
