Offbeat Eats

Well, after a bit less than a week in France spent in Grenoble and Paris, it was time to catch a late morning flight home. Wanting to avoid the miasma of an airport breakfast, I decided to grab breakfast on my way to the airport. I was staying near Gare du Nord and Gare de L’est, an area not particularly known for French bistrots and cafes, much of it being more of the cell-phone-cover, beauty supply stores, and coiffures district, but right next to my hotel on the corner of the busy Boulevard de Magenta and rue de Chabrol was a nice little cafe that showed some potential: P’tite Bougnate (“Bougnate” means a woman from Auvergne, in a word that has a most interesting etymology, but that’s a story for another time and place).

There are few London traditions of mine as sacred as going out for a good old-fashioned fry-up: a “Full English” breakfast, with at least bacon, sausage, eggs, beans, and toast, and I usually like to add even more to that (at a minimum, tomatoes, and usually black pudding as well). In the area around Pimlico, there’s exactly one place that anyone should even consider for that, and it’s the classic greasy spoon, The Regency Cafe. Virtually every trip of mine to London, even short ones, involve a trip to The Regency, except for holiday trips where they are closed. Indeed, one of my earliest reviews here in 2007 was for The Regency.

Porto as a city has certainly had a lot of ups and downs in its history, but much of the actual downtown area is a product of the 1920s, when the inter-war period was actually quite good for Portugal. The city had some major redevelopment, including the city hall and the Avenida dos Aliados grand boulevard lined with all sorts of great Art Deco and Streamline Modern interiors, nicely blended with some traditional architecture. And that’s also the era when the café became one of the great parts of city life, with all sorts of politicians, writers, artists, communists, students, and the like all gathers over cups of coffee topped with tall piles of whipped cream; at one point there were literally dozens of these throughout Porto, and a handful survive more-or-less intact; one of these is The Majestic Café.

After a morning of wandering around Porto, including some spectacular sightseeing from the Torre dos Clérigos, we were ready for a light lunch. This lead us to the nearby Universidade do Porto district, which has a nice selection of small cafés and bars that cater to the students of the University. It’s an interesting part of town to hang around, since Portuguese universities have a strong set of traditions (called “Praxe”), part of which is still maintaining an academic wardrobe. So several of the places by the University have a lot of students roaming about in their distinctive black cloaks and dresses. In a jokingly referential manner, one of the cafés in the neighborhood, Café Piolho, is named after these students (the name mean “louse”, so they literally are saying the café is infested).

After closing out our stay in the Douro Wine region with a pleasant breakfast, winery tour, and a tasting session at Quinta de la Rosa, it was time to head back to Portugal. Unlike our trip out from Porto, this time the trains were indeed running and strike-free, so we had a very scenic train ride down the Douro river valley until we arrived back in Porto at São Bento station in the early evening. After hauling our luggage back to our hotel room and exploring more of the town, we needed a light dinner, and decided this was a good time to try one of the local well-regarded cafés, Café Santiago.

After an 11 hour flight, we arrived back in Paris. We took this as an opportunity to explore more of Paris, this time with my brother and sister-in-law joining us from London (I still think the Channel Tunnel is a rather cool invention). Despite the somewhat drizzly weather, we decided to do a walk around Montmartre, enjoying this fairly hilly part of the city, included a tour of Sacre Coeur (my first since Junior High) and looking over the city from the terrace. But it was also time for lunch, and we settled on a fairly nice café near the metro station, Café Le Saint-Jean, where I had another chance to indulge in one of my simple pleasures: a basic steak frites. Like uncountably many cafés around Paris, this one has the basic Parisien Café look pretty much nailed: tiny round tables, wooden chairs, black-and-while tile, and robed waiters dashing about with trays of food, coffee, wine, and beer. We quickly found ourselves seated by the window, and after a short perusal of the menu, I decided that their bavette avec frites was the way to go.

Two weekends ago, we did another day trip to New York City, courtesy of the Dartmouth After Hours program. This time, we were unabashed tourists, and decided that the best way to spend our morning was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which we rather enjoyed, and this was my first visit there in 30+ years). After a morning at the Met, it was decidedly time for lunch, so we headed across the street to the Neue Galerie. The Neue Galerie is a neat little museum featuring early twentieth-century German and Austrian art and design. And, more imporantly, it’s home to two Viennese-style cafes: Cafe Sabarsky (upstairs), and Cafe Fledermaus (downstairs), both serving up the same menu of Viennese coffee and German sausages. This time, however, Cafe Fledermaus was closed for a special event, so we had to wait in line for Cafe Sabarsky.

Our eighth day exploring the Ring Road of Iceland was a rather impressive day, including stops at the famous Jökulsárlón(the “Glacier Lagoon”) and Svartifoss (the “Black Waterfall”, an impressive waterfall in front of a backdrop of basalt columns), along with plentiful hiking and a stop for Jöklaís (“Glacier Ice”) ice cream. It was yet another busy day of sightseeing, hiking, and driving, and we ended up pulling into our destination, Kirkjubæjarklaustur (whose name is ponderous even by local standards, we noticed that most folks call it simply “Klaustur”), at a fairly late hour looking for dinner. Well, Kirkjubæjarklaustur doesn’t have a heck of a lot to offer. While having some nice features in itself, like a waterfall, and some really interesting basalt columns), Klaustur’s main attraction is location: it’s pretty much the only settlement on the southern coast between Vík and Höfn which offers services, including the ever-present N1 station, a few modest hotels, and the like. Heck, there’s basically three places to eat (the hotel, the gas station, and the cafe). After perusing the menus of each, we ended up choosing the cafe: Systrakaffi (if you were hoping for the N1 gas station, don’t worry, I’ll get to them in a few reviews).