Writing

"Is there a perfect tempo for restaurant soundtracks?", The Takeout, November 2019

Googly-eyed for Gaglioppo!

Gaglioppo! Probably my favorite (nearly) all-purpose, single-varietal red right now.

Gaglippo's (pronounced guy- oh- poh) traditional home is Calabria: the toe of the Italian boot. Calabria starts from the toe, and extends to the arch of the foot-- Calabria, when highlighted on a map, almost looks like an adult person accidentally tried to put on a child's sock. Calabria is not as famous as other Italian regions (Tuscany, Piedmont, etc.), but it's certainly one of the most ancient: Calabria was originally called Italia, which, as you may have guessed, spread as an umbrella term for the region and became the Italy of today. Besides producing the inventor of the Georgian Calendar, and Gianni Versace himself, most people don't know much about Calabria. Today, Calabria is rampant with corruption and mafia ties, and doesn't have much of a tourist economy, comparative with its regional peers.

But what it does have is the Gaglioppo grape.

Gaglioppo is by far and large considered one of the more ancient red grapes (read: wines) in Italy. To start, Gaglioppo is a native Italian grape-- many Italian grapes we consider Italian are not native grapes. For example, Zinfandel/Primitivo (the respective American/"Italian" counterparts) is actually Croatian in origin.

Tasting wise: Gaglioppo is fruit-driven and approachable, and almost qualifies as being truly poundable and quaffable. However, Gaglioppo is also dry, and has an edge of depth and sophistication, which can probably be explained by its very famous parent, Sangiovese, and its mountainous terroir. Its other parent is Mantonico di Bianco.

When I used to sell Gaglioppo in a restaurant I was working at, I used to say that this particular wine made me feel like I’m having a picnic in 1st century Pompeii. I said this ignoring Vesuvius and ignoring the fact that Calabria is distinctly south of Pompeii-- advertising and emotional effect only. That line, for me, communicated that Gaglioppo is hot, distinctly Italian, and tastes ancient. Besides being rumored to be the wine of choice served to athletes during the original Olympics, Gaglioppo was served during 1968 Mexico Olympics during the athlete's meals.

The subjective best expression of Calabrian wine, and Gaglioppo, is the DOC Cirò. Cirò was established as a DOC in 1969. The wine must be 95% Gaglioppo, and 5% or less Greco Bianco or Trebbiano-- both white grapes.

The most famous estate from Cirò is Librandi, but I also recommend another one label/producer from Cirò: iGreco.

The Grecos made their start as olive oil producers, and them moved on to wine making. True Italians! iGreco is a solid, entry-level, approachable choice to the grape. Plus, the label is modern, neat, and has a pseudo-eye staring right into you. In short, it's delicious, and a must try for anyone looking for a medium-bodied red in a varietal out of their comfort zone.

I brought an iGreco to a blind tasting wine group I go to last December-- no one guessed the grape, but it was pounded quicker than any other wine there.

If you’re trying to get someone else to try Gaglioppo for the first time, maybe skim over the fact that Gaglioppo means “good foot”...you know, unless they like that sort of thing. Or that they like that Gaglioppo is grown on the sole of Italy's foot. It's not stinky, though, I swear.

Some good bread

When serving, making solid recommendations is the baseline of the gig. The biggest question I have to ask myself when selling a certain dish, is not “Do I like it?” but “Would I pay money for this?” It’s easy to like something; it’s harder to invest in something. Even If I were a cynical judge on Shark Tank, I would put up $100,000 in the bread service. Jesus. Simple on paper, simple on plate, complicated to explain. The bread service comes as a trio of breads: the Parker House rolls we make are made in house (duh, but also the name derived from a mythological angry baker at the Parker House Hotel who threw his bread at a wall, leading to the ridges in the final product). The Parker House Rolls are pumped full of dairy, getting dangerously and deliciously close to pastry territory. The other two breads are Publican Quality Bread’s honey oat and seeded rye, which are more rustic… and, my favorite word “toothsome”. There are six possible shmears: chicken liver mousse, bone marrow butter, green tomato marmalade, honeycomb creme fraiche, miso butter, and plain ol’ butter. Even though it sounds like a terrible word problem from high school, trying each of the 18 possible combinations makes for a surprising and delightful culinary experience, experiments of taste and texture. I’m partial towards the miso butter, which is fermented over a period of 3 to 4 weeks, and finished with honey before it hits the table. But hey, skip the bread because you’re on a diet.

A Exacting and Personal Analysis of French Culture From a Whole Two Months Studying and Teaching Abroad

Today, you can buy Belgian beer in Prague while speaking with a German bartender while discussing Hungarian refugee policies with The Beatles blaring in the background. Many European countries like The Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany embrace this new G-0, non-polarized globalization.

But while Berlin, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen spring far-flung into the future, embracing Western homogenization, France comfortably, stubbornly rests in the past, cigarette and pain au chocolat in hand. The French don’t care about economic power. The French don’t care about global (read: American). In fact, they scoff at it. Hell, the French don’t even care about Belgian beer. The French seek to preserve French culture at all costs (damn to hell modern globalization).

Two values dictate the French: pleasure and dignity.

Pleasure

Pleasure is often conflated with hedonism by America’s Puritanical interpretations. The mere word pleasure is reserved for descriptions of orgies, or maybe too many Krispy Kremes. But pleasure comes from the Latin infinitive placere: to please. Pleasure pleases not only the primitive parts of ourselves, but also our intellectual, mental, and emotional sides.

So perhaps pleasure can really be redefined as experiencing the highest quality of life.

Croissants for breakfast, foie gras for dinner. Prada suits. The breathy, gutteral, throat-rolling Rs of the Gaulic tongue; mud black espressos with a single sugar cube. Lush, rich vineyards in the Bordeaux regions; Celtic storms in the North, the Edgar Allen Poe-esque stormy gloom of Paris; Mediterranean sighs and seas in Marseille. France and its people are classic pleasing beauty incarnate, eliciting every sense and intellect with visceral satisfaction. Everyday is filled with marvelous quality. Pleasure– in all is gastronomical, aesthetic, linguistic, and daily manifestations — is conserved with UNESCO heritage site-like care.

I’m convinced that even though all of France smokes like a chimney in winter, they live some of the longest lives because of how happy they are. Stress– not nicotine– is the biggest killer. The pleasure (overused word, but really the only universally applicable word here) of a cigarette must make up for the 3.4 seconds lost by potential lung cancer with each nicotine stick. The social interaction that accompanies wine defends against fatty liver disease. There’s no other explanation.

How can you begin to discuss the French pleasure without discussing the food? Even in the Middle Ages, the French valued the power of meals. Royalty asserted their glory and wealth with divine buffets; gold and silver leafs adorned the table. Today, every ingredient in every meal is of the highest quality, local, and procured. Government regulations call can only call a baguette a baguette if it contains only wheat, water, and yeast. Add sugar? It’s no longer bread. You cannot buy pre-packaged, pre-cut fruit. The importation of American meat is banned. The TGV whips through the French countryside, and while the nature is beautiful, my favorite part was the happy cows and goats prancing around open green fields. The French do not only respect their meat, but they respect their animals. Lyon, France’s gastronomical capital, has the most Michelin star restaurants in the country, and farmer’s markets happen every day. I would start my mornings with a walk through the local markets, and every cheese was the “best cheese I’ve ever had” (according to texts to my mother).

Dignity

It is not only the quality of food, but meal timing and approach, that is decisively French, and decisively dignified.

Restaurants open between exactly 12 and 2, and exactly 7 to 9. Hungry at 4? Bon chance. Snack like a pudgy American.

When you walk into an American restaurant, you must scream to be heard. Drunken, boisterous voices clamor about every establishment like it’s the Superbowl every damn day. In France, the soundtrack of a cafe has the soft lull of white noise, maybe rain. The decibels are presumably half those of American restaurants, a whispered blanket laced with femininity, sensuality, and wine. For whatever anthropological reason, volume control did not evolve in England and its Anglican and English-speaking children. The juxtaposition is particularly jarring in France. The French value silence. The best sort of noise.

Pull out a laptop in a coffee shop to work? God forbid. Sacre bleu.

The French don’t work in coffee shops. Bad American. Rather, the French spend hours with friends,. When I was in Cahors– a small working city in the wine-producing Bordeaux region– I strolled the streets on a sleepy Sunday morning (rather, around 11– European circadian rhythms dictate late to bed and late to rise). A gaggle of girls giggled at a cafe, whispering and gossiping over espresso. Around 3, I walked back, shockingly found the same girls whispering and gossiping over salads. Meals are a religious, pagan-like ritual that can span over many hours. God forbid you find a man wolfing down McDonalds’s in between work shifts. Even the McDonald’s in Paris have finesse and class and customer service. You better enjoy every bite of that Big Mac.

The French are so comfortable doing nothing, at peace with being. Formal Spanish siestas are not scheduled, perhaps because rest is integrated throughout the day. One of my fondest memories was taking a walk in the St. Germain district in Paris, and finding couples, families, old men, and puppies, all sitting at cafes enjoying one of the last sunny days of the year, sipping coffee, reading newspapers, and purring in silence.

In Seattle, yes, you find people at coffee shops on weekend mornings– in fact, I am at one right now. Sixteen people sit at Caffe Vita right now: six people are working on laptops (myself included), five people on their phones, four people talking, and one, singular, elderly woman sipping a latte, reading a book and looking out the window. There’s the secret Frenchwoman.

The first time I bought dinner at a French hostel, I was floored. In Dinan (a town that Germans agreed not to bomb during World War II because it’s too cute) the hostel dinner was roughly 15 euros. I was expecting traditional Bretagne grub, maybe a buckwheat galette with vegetables. Instead, we received a five course meal, homemade by the workers from 2 PM that day. Local ingredients, eclairs, decadent cheese plates. Every hostel (I cannot even imagine hotels) treats dinner with the same reverence and respect. The best duck I ever had was at a “cheap” hostel dinner spread.

Food is communication, culture, love, and hospitality.

Curiously, the only exception I found to the traditional slow-food movement was Parisian women gobbling down entire baguettes on their bikes. Maybe to preserve the aesthetic of Paris, or maybe because freshly made baguettes are worth the inconvenience. Native Parisians seem to be actors hired by France’s Department of Tourism. Women ride Vespas in red lipstick and heels; posh men stroll around straight off the pages of Vogue, head-to-toe in what is presumably Gucci, or vintage Louis Vuitton.

The light in Paris is a different color. You cannot draw Paris in charcoal, nor your plebian graphite pencil; you must draw Paris in pastel beige. Despite the fog and rain (Paris and Seattle are on nearly the same latitude– 48° N and 47° N respectively), the city is cloaked in undertones of warmth, as if Monet colored the buildings from scratch.Architecture reflects accordingly. Paris maintains strict limitations on development; you cannot build a haphazard apartment building next to the Seine. There are height ordinances (you must be able to see the Eiffel Tower from the whole city); the Louvre dates back centuries; they imported an entire oblisque from Egypt to stand in the Place de La Concorde. For the aesthetic, of course.

Not to say that France is encapsulated in just Paris. The “rednecks” of the northern Brittany coast are more rotund, and they love cider and sailing. Marseille and Nice, in the south, is populated by North African immigrants and rich summer vacation homes. The German-Alsace region is filled with polyglots: people speak German, French, Alsacian, and usually English. And yes, they eat both croissants and pretzels. What unites these cities is slow-time and wine and most importantly: French pride. It's a pride that's appropriately conflated with sheer arrogance.

I stayed at a monastery in Cadouin, a village of 600 people. There were no ATMs, no grocery stores, and best of all, no English speakers. (France has one of the lowest English-speaking ratios in Europe. There is a movement in France to reclaim the language from anglicization, led by the Academie française. Workplace language is required to be in French. English words, such as e-mail, that have permeated the language are readily replaced by French equivalents, such as courrier.)