"Avery, check this out. I've got it mounted on the wall so I'll always know where it is!" Ken gestured grandly towards his special, personally-installed wall-mounted corkscrew, a thing of true beauty for such a wine lover and an item of pure necessity for a home that hosts many gatherings for the wine loving friends of Ken and his wife Bonnie, two incredibly generous people who delight in sharing their home with friends, with friends of friends, with children of friends, and with friends of children of friends.
I met Ken and Bonnie through Julia Gibas, a friend from Pitzer, who was staying in their home immediately outside Paris for a few days before returning to her semester in Morocco. Julia's family is close with either Bonnie or Ken's uncle, I believe, and Julia and her mother had stayed with Bonnie and Ken several years ago.
As soon as we arrived Ken and Bonnie made me feel right at home, and it helped that Bonnie is from New York City and Ken from northern California. As it turns out, Ken went to Harvard and graduated about 4 years after my dad! Then Ken and Bonnie lived in Waltham for about 10 years before moving to Paris about 20 years ago.
"At my high school reunion recently, I won the 'farthest traveled' award. They gave me a bottle of Bordeaux wine. I said 'thanks, but you can keep this! I don't need it!'"
Ken's a joker. Ken also loves to give people food. And oh man, was there a lot of it.
The evening started when some friends of Bonnie and Ken's arrived. I confess, I don't know how to spell the man's name, (I think it's spelled 'Dijitte'), and I can't remember his wife's name but they were very interesting people. They're both artists; Dijitte works a lot in various media, and some of his beautiful paintings hang in the very living room in which we enjoyed phenomenal salami with sundried tomatoes, hearts of palm, and kalamata olives. A young sculptor from Ireland, Orlaith, was staying with Ken and Bonnie, too, and bonded with the man over their work. (She's having an exhibition tomorrow which I'm going to!) Dijitte's wife turned out to be the only French person at our little French party. She was very delightful and does work throwing pottery; a beautiful vase in the kitchen was her creation.
I was impressed to see when we moved to the dining room that we were moving to a second dining room, which had a second kitchen. The house is essentially two homes connected, one of which Ken and Bonnie usually rent out, or at least several rooms of it. Either way, they've got two kitchens, which excited me. As advertised to me by Julia, this was to be a wine and cheese party. And damn, was it a wine and cheese party. You know when you enter a room with a wall-mounted corkscrew what you're getting into. And so of course there was lots of wine. I played it pretty safe as I'd been sick the week before, and regardless, I'm cautious. But for anyone who so desired, the glass was never empty.
But what was for dinner? An endless feast of cheeses: camembert, roquefort, brie, gouda, cantal, chevre, and a sheep's milk cheese I believe. What else? A duck paté and a paté de campagne, which were two of the most transcendently delicious things I've ever tasted. As soon as I tried the duck paté all went silent in my mind and time slowed such that had an agent of the matrix tried to shoot me, I would've watched the bullet approach, slowly stepped aside, and resumed my position, a glass of wine in one hand and a fist full of duck paté in the other. I was in heaven. And all of this was accompanied by a variety of delicious breads.
The meal lasted several hours, conversations mostly taking place in English but dipping in and out of French intermittently. The cheese and paté feast was followed by salad and then an "American cheesecake" which Orlaith made using no American products; the normal Philadelphia cream cheese, seemingly impossible to find here, had been replaced by a combination of cottage cheese, fromage blanc, creme fraiche, and two other french cheeses. The standard graham cracker crust saw its french reincarnation in the form of crushed digestive biscuits, which I guess aren't entirely french, but hey, they were tasty either way. So what we had was a very tasty cheesecake that was not entirely American in that it relied on and succeeded through international cooperation.
The evening tapered out as people left, but not before Ken and I bonded over his stories of making theatre with friends in college and Dijitte told me about some of the best meals he's had at multiple-Michelin starred restaurants. I realized as we were talking that he was living my travel dreams: don't stay anywhere terribly fancy, don't splurge on foreign clothes or wares, but eat the best damn food in the world, every trip.
As I left, Ken let me know that if I got lost I could come back and I'd have a place to stay. "Don't worry about it. If you can't find the metro, head on back here and we'll watch Band of Brothers until 4 in the morning." I hope at some point I get to accept that offer!
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