Have just looked back at the last two posts, and funnily enough, they are both about food. Again. So I might as well have thirds, and write another post about food.
Dan has put up a picture of Eric in Paris, but truly, we were there too…We had three and a bit days there before a work meeting for me, and made the most of trying out the amazing range of restaurants around the Montparnasse area where we were staying.
Adding on my few days for work meetings too, managed to truffle through Japanese, Moroccan, Vietnamese, French (restaurant, and bistro-style), and Breton (ie crepes). In a work culture where you have wine at lunchtime, lunch is subsidised at the office you are visiting, and the meal lasts two hours, it was all very pleasant.
Meanwhile, the b’stilla is a reference to the Moroccan restaurant we visited. B’stilla (or pastilla) is a dish I have wanted to try for a long time, and the restaurant happily had it on the menu.
It is essentially a speciality of the kind brought out for weddings – a very special chicken pie, or pigeon in the more traditional version. It is encased in very fine filo pastry, and has the sweet-savoury thing popular in the eastern Mediterranean and middle East. For the pie, this meant that the top was dusted with icing sugar and cinnamon.
The other attraction of the restaurant was the cat. As we arrived, we could see a waiter trying to catch a cat which was paused to run into the restaurant – and as we walked in, so did the cat. This is clearly not very hygienic, it’s true, but we happened to be given a table by the waiter’s stand where the bills were made up.
The cat was clearly well known, and ended up curled alongside the senior waiter, who laid on a saucer of something, while directing the other waiters.
The cat knew its stuff too, and proceeded to charm several other tables. I’m sure that there must have been some kind of truce between leftovers and pushing your luck, and the waiters seemed pretty relaxed about the whole thing.
The title is of course an attempt at a pun on a line from Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. The middle talky bit, that everyone thinks they know. Go on. You know you want to sing along.