A Flying in Nancy

The heavy rain stopped as we arrived in Nancy.

We were very impressed with Nancy and have resolved to take a longer visit there, we only saw part of it. Like many French towns it looks a bit dusty and unkempt in its suburbs, but the main square, Place Stanislav, is a fantastic World Heritage Site – quite rightly so. We sat at a bar for a drink in the square and then as it seemed a fair number of people were choosing that place to eat, we thought we might too.

Our waiter was a large man, perhaps in his twenties, with a neatly trimmed beard and a huge belly. I spoke to him in French but then when I struggled a bit with something he asked us he switched to English, which he spoke quite well. He wanted to know where we came from. When we said the north west of England he said, ‘May I ask a stupid question’.

‘Please do’.

‘Does in rain in north-west England as much as people say’.

‘Yes’, we both replied firmly and in unison.

For starter Hilary had a foie gras de canard, liver fat of duck. Foie gras is said by some to be cruel in its production, which may be so, but it is an extraordinary taste, like no other. A kind of delicate meaty, grainy butter. Meanwhile, since we were in the capital city of Lorraine, I had Quiche Lorraine, which is a posh way of saying egg-and-bacon flan.  This one was much moister than many you find in the UK and the bacon pieces were like Italian pancetta, little cubes. Very good.

For main course we had a kind of upmarket version of steak frites – we always eat steak frites in France. In this version the steak was rumpsteak done in pieces on a skewer, fairly raw as we had asked it to be done, served with chips and salad on a black rectangular plate. The waiter came to ask us how the dinner was going and as he did so Hilary yelled, ‘eeegh, oh gawd!’, for a beetle, possibly a cockroach, crawled sleepily from under her pile of chips.

Alexandre the waiter played this very professionally, he immediately took her plate and marched off to the kitchen with it. He returned a few moments later and said in English, ‘It was a flying that had fallen from the ceiling. They say they will re-make your plate’. 

And so it was that we each had near-on one and a half portions of rumpsteak each, since Hilary had nearly finished her meat on the first plate. Thus we could not manage a dessert, just some coffee which after Italy is always a relief, as the cup has a proper drink in it and in France coffee is pretty-much invariably good.

During the interim of the kitchen re-making the plate, we noticed a couple on a table nearby, a couple with nothing to say to each other. Couples in restaurants often have nothing to say to one another but these two were extreme examples, she sat for much of the time with her chin in her hand, her elbow resting on the table, while he jiggled his leg. Occasionally she removed her face from her hand in order to yawn a few times, then she put it back again. At length they decided each to fiddle on their smartphones.

‘Why do they stay together?’, asked Hilary, ‘It’s so painful. If we ever get like that, promise me we’d part’. In saying this, of course, we find that we do have something to say to each other, so this is one of those self-referencing conversations, a bit in the class of ‘This page is blank’. The couple were not very old, perhaps in their forties.

The bill for our dinner came to nearly €110, which is about double what we would expect to pay for a decent meal for two in our part of Italy. A third of that was taken up by a bottle of local red wine, served on ice, which was very nice, though we’re usually equally happy with the local plonk. At the Taverna Santa Vittoria a litre of red wine served in a recycled bottle comes in at €4, and the total bill for dinner for two is around the €25 mark. And is the steak in Nancy classier than what you get in the Taverna? Probably is, but we’re fond of the Taverna, and we’ve never yet discovered a bug in our chips, partly because we don’t buy chips there, but we’ve never discovered a bug in our corata either, though possibly you would be less likely to notice (corata is scrambled egg with chopped lamb’s heart – a Marche speciality).

And then of course you have the location. The World Heritage Site. But even so, still a bit steep, France does tend to be expensive for food.