Soleil's menu looks so French it's Fransh, as Tater might say--y'know, escargot, pâté maison, meat with sauce. I used to eat escargot with the Finn, but that was part of her mission to "civilize" me 20-odd years ago. My sense of snails is tempered now by the multitude of them that swarm over and under the candytuft in the back yard. I make the LAW deal with them--so much for butchness. Les escargots dans mon jardin sont vraiment terrifiants!
And what can I say about pâté? I have a longstanding aversion to organ meat. I don't even like my own guts. And yet, after a number of fine pâtés de campagne in France, I've embraced my shameful desire for the innards of little feathered beasties. Still, after traipsing about in food cities like Portland and New Orleans in the last month, I feel the need to recover a sense of my, hmmmm, "ludic Buddhism." While that means that I can take delight in my physical body and the fun things one can do with it, I shouldn't eat other animals.
However, as Sarah Turnbull says in Almost French: "France has this effect on foreigners. It turns your eating habits and food principles upside down so that before long you're rhapsodizing about the delicate silkiness of foie gras entier without a thought for the fat content, let alone the poor goose or duck who was force-fed through a tube down its throat. The damage is irreparable--there's no turning back to muesli after flaky pastries filled with ribbons of dark chocolate" (257). I don't know if that's true, since the LAW still maintains a healthy interest in muesli after a number of flaky-pastry tours of France, but I do know that my opinion of pâté changed somewhere outside of Rabastens (that's the walled city, below).
But that's French pâté. The last pâté I had was a generous serving at Chez Loma (on Coronado Island), and there was just this whiff of, I dunno, wet dog to it that put me off. So. No more squished-innards-on-crackers until Paris.
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