The Lunch Report: Women Who Stare at Goat Cheese

Around 11:30am today, I was distracted by hunger pangs. Given that I’d be on conference calls through 1pm, I had too long to anticipate lunch.

By 12:40pm my stomach had settled on the perfect lunch: a salade de chevre chaude prepared by that petit bistro on rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile on Ile St. Louis in Paris. The goat cheese patty would be dusted with bread crumbs and herbs before being sautéed in brown butter just long enough for the bread and butter to form a thin crust around the warm and softened cheese. I would wash it down with a petit chablis and top it off with Maison de Berthillon* cinnamon ice cream.

I had had this lunch before and it had cheered me on a rainy day in Paris right after a brutal negotiation session. By 12:55pm I knew that no other lunch could satisfy me. Tough realization when you're on the 23rd floor of an office building in NYC, 3600+ miles from Ile St. Louis, and so low down in the corporate ranks that you don't even have access to a private plane.

Goat cheese salad is a staple in many NYC restaurants, but why order one here? The cheese—probably Alouette "cheese product" whose consistency can’t withstand sautéeing—would remind me how superior goat cheese is in Paris. That Parisian lunch and its lingering memory had spoiled me.

Permit me a fairly abrupt and gratuitous tangent, but all of this made me consider the frustrations of any long distance relationship ("LDR") whether with food, people or climates (trust me, I have LDR experiences spanning England, Portugal, France, various African countries and certain of the United States—I know my stuff).

Modern technology—email, IM, texts, Bloombergs, tweets—has the power to transform an LDR into a seemingly present relationship. Yet just as often, even in the most well-intentioned LDR, all that texting begets no more than additional texting. So query whether the R in LDR is real, virtual or imaginary.

*Your LDR is only as good as your last email. If it was a bad email, or the sarcasm didn’t translate (like light refracted through water, sarcasm never comes out the same on the other side), life will be flatter until a better email comes along.

*An LDR steals you away from your present and carries you to a promised land, where life could be or was (at least the last time you were together) better, but possibly never will be again—“The Past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”*

*Being casual is not an option in an LDR. Casually texting, sure, but casually stopping by Boston? I don’t think so.

*An LDR infects your own city with memories of the object of the LDR, like that restaurant that you shared. If you're lucky, you'll go back and forget how much fun you had together giggling at the waiter's open fly or savoring the plat du jour. But maybe you won't. Maybe when you return, even if you order a different dish from a different waiter, your present will compete with the past or an illusory future, and lose.

By the time I followed this tangent to exhaustion, I was even hungrier, yet strangely wiser (studies have shown that fasting can sharpen concentration). Fixating on my goat cheese salad was a capitulation to the grim and pessimistic conclusion that life insists on a preferred path to fulfillment.*

That just can’t be. So, in the spirit of “love the one you're with,” I put the goat cheese salad right out of my head, marched myself to a local diner and ordered something that NYC does better than any Parisian bistro: a grilled cheese,* followed by a diet coke chaser (aspartame, yum!) and saltines (manna).

Ironically, a slim, distinguished and altogether delicious gentleman was seated in the booth next to me. An obvious melancholy clouded his eyes as he gazed at his gyros. Maybe there was a Greek lover he couldn’t shake? Poor thing. He probably should have ordered a peanut butter and jelly and sat with me, but maybe he wasn't ready yet.
Penelope Frost

Notes
*As Parisophiles amongst us know, Maison Berthillon ice cream is made only on Ile St. Louis, although, as a result of certain corruptions in its distribution system, it is now offered “hors île” (off the island) in other parts of Paris.

*The opening sentence of Leslie Poles Hartley’s most famous work, The Go-Between (1953).

*Note that I am far too PC to suggest that happiness or fulfillment should be a life goal. For a compelling discussion of the tyranny of happiness in modern American culture, please see Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (2009).

*Critics would be misguided to compare the grilled cheese with the Croque Monsieur, also a byproduct of cheese mating with bread, which is more properly placed within the toasted (and not grilled) cheese genus.