Food Wine Burgundy Updates

Change is the nature of the edibles-and-potables business everywhere. In Burgundy the region’s symbol is the snail. Change comes slowly. But the snail, like the tortoise, defeats the hare in the long run—or the long slide.



Cuppa? Change-resistance is part of the Gallic gene pool



The down-slide first: reliable fellow gourmets who scour Burgundy for great food and wine confirm that Amaryllis, the discovery of a few years back, is being spoiled by success. Michelin rewarded this unlikely candidate with a star after only a few years of operation, and crowds and crowns of laurels soon followed. So too did a precipitous move from funky quarters in an unattractive highway-side location in a nowhere village – part of the discovery experience – to fancy-dancy, flower-filled premises: the former home of stuffy-but-likeable Le Moulin de Martorey. This reconverted millhouse complex is at San Remy, near Chalon-sur-Saone. Now Amaryllis and its still-very-young chef-owner Cédric Burtin is becoming staid, in a beautiful, mainstream setting… another one-star Michelin place serving elaborately plated, microscopic portions of France’s notorious silly haute food.

The good news is much more abundant.



Burgundy has great wines and ancient chestnut trees too. That's me, the tree-hugger


Start with the new wine bar at Le Cellier de l’Abbaye in Cluny , one of southern Burgundy’s best bottle shops. Owned and operated by Alice Brinton, a transplanted American wine guru, flanked by an eager, young local expert, Le Cellier finally got permission to put out tables on the sidewalk on the abbey-side of the street – we’re talking Cluny’s famous, 1,100-year-old-abbey – with other tables on Cluny’s main square. On offer: the region’s finest wines, from bargain local bottles (Macon-Bussières by J&P Saumaize, for instance) to Domaine de la Romanée Conti (no, DRC is not sold by the glass, ever, and if you’d like to buy a bottle you need to reserve a year ahead). To go with the wine: hams, salami, cheeses from the likes of Alain Hess (the finest cheese-maker in Beaune). The success of Le Cellier de l’Abbaye so far has surprised those who thought Cluny was too conservative to showcase a place like this.





More good news: at Bourgvillain, a compact village in Lamartine country, near the lake at Saint-Point due south of Cluny, the good-ol’ fashioned Larochette Aubergiste has returned from the dead and is again serving succulent regional fare. This restaurant has a great outdoor terrace and two handsome, totally redecorated dining rooms—contemporary classic, quietly chic—and serves fine, rustic salads, Charolais steaks, freshwater fish (the pike-perch can be excellent), and appealing if unaesthetic housemade desserts. Chef-owner Eric Bonin took over from a tired, semi-retired Parisian who’d gone to seed at Bourgvillain. The menu is ultra classic—no fancy or silly food here. The clientele is strictly local. Noteworthy: the wine list is short but very good, largely because Le Cellier de l’Abbaye helped Bonin put it together. All in all, for about 30 to 40 euros per head you get a great meal from egg to apple, including wine (unless you order something extravagant) served in unpretentious, charming, relaxed surroundings, with friendly service.



Here's the beef... Burgundy on the hoof...



At Cluny, one of our longtime haunts, Hostellerie d’Héloïse (next to the Pont de l’Etang), gets better all the time. The prix fixe menus featuring market specials and terroir classics are excellent value: snails; rumsteak sautéed in a red wine sauce with shallots; fresh local farmstead cheese with cream (or a choice of regional cheeses), and housemade chocolate mousse or other antebellum delights. The seasonal menus range from French classics (Ile Flottante the way someone’s great-grandmother used to make it…) to modern, pneumatic, vertical fare for trendy diners. Local bottlings are the specialty, and the prices are amazingly low. This is a professional, classy operation, but manages to avoid the kind of persnickety attitude that so often plagues the French eating experience.

We always love eating at l’Auberge de Jack, a bouchon-style country bistro, and have been back many times of late. Since I just wrote about the auberge for Gadling.com (the AOL travel website), I’ll simply suggest you click to read about that.

Other thumbs-up commentary: Le Relais d’Ozenay (between Tournus and Chapaize on highway D14) continues to be one of the northern Maconnais area’s best tables. And nearby La Table de Chapaize is also turning out to be a favorite among upscale gourmets: artfully plated mouthfuls that follow the seasons and the chef’s inspiration, a very very short menu with table d’hotes-style yes/no choices, aspirational décor (as in, Michelin, please notice!)… not a terroir place, but an up-and-coming hotspot. If you liked the old Amaryllis, or the current Aux Terrasses in Tournus, you’ll love La Table de Chapaize.

I could go on and on, but Google tells me I’ve already overshot the optimum word count. Why not pick up a copy of Food Wine Burgundy for more, and consider signing up for our April tour to Paris and northern Burgundy (featuring Chablis and Vézelay)?

We also create custom tours to Burgundy and Paris and Chartres, Rome and the Italian Riviera. But if you’ve been following this blog you already know that…

In case you’re looking for our custom tours website, click here. We offer tours of Paris, Burgundy, Chartres, Versailles, Rome, the Italian Riviera and Genoa.

To buy Food Wine Burgundy click here. To visit my author website, click here.

Booking Now: April in Paris, Paris

Heavenly cherries in flower alongside Notre-Dame



Eiffel's tower: quite an erection...



The view from on high: we visit the Eiffel Tower together (and it is an eye-full!)








Each April we partner with tour operator Tuscany Tours on a week-long Paris tour that also features a day in Chartres, and another in Chablis and Vézelay in northern Burgundy (tour participants also visit Monet’s garden at Giverny).




Chartres cathedral: inspiration!



Pisces anyone? The most gorgeous stained-glass windows in Europe... at Chartres


The world's most astonishing flying buttresses... Chartres again



Chablis: not only barrels of fun...



Vezelay in the spring... magnificent!




Vezelay's main street: atmosphere, charm, shopping, wining and dining...


This is an exclusive jaunt with limited space available. It always sells out months ahead. So if you’re interested, we advise you book now. Here’s that link again with details:
http://www.tuscanytours.com/tour_paris.cfm?tour_id=91

Read my travel feature about Chartres in the San Francisco Sunday Chronicle.

Order Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light to get yourself in the mood for our Marais walk and other adventures.

We look forward to seeing you in Paris, Chartres, Chablis and Vézelay next spring!

Bon voyage!!


If you’re looking for our Paris Paris Tours website please click here

Catch as Catch-22 Can: Joe Heller’s Daughter Erica Writes a Hell-er of a Memoir

Erica Heller and Lola, or is it the other way around? (Photo copyright Alison Harris)


In a bottom-line world where under-researched overstatement is the norm, Erica Heller’s unputdownable new memoir, Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller was Dad, the Apthorp was Home, and Life was a Catch-22, seems revolutionary. It quietly distills a lifetime, and the life of Heller’s perplexing, high-octane family.

Like her famous father, novelist Joseph Heller, the younger Heller’s alembic can be mirthfully wicked. Its vignettes bubble up and coil down the carpeted corridors and gilded living rooms of the Apthorp, the celebrated, self-adoring Upper West Side building complex on Broadway where the Heller family began residing over half a century ago. Erica Heller continues to live at the Apthorp. Her book is in many ways a paean to what she calls “Apthorpia.”

This love affair begins early. When still a child, on a trip to France, Heller visits Versailles with her family and later remembers that, “We were shown through the Royal Apartments, the Hall of Mirrors, and the Queen’s Apartment, and it was amazing, but I kept thinking of the Apthorp…”

Upon returning she kisses the sidewalk on Broadway.

Given the literary qualities of Yossarian, the younger Heller may well earn celebrity status in her own right, joining the Apthorp’s roster of Great and Good.



Summer reading... the jacket is so beautiful we removed it to protect it from predatory magpies

As the book’s title and subtitle suggest, this is a hybrid. A biopsy of the building, its history and residents, the real focus of Yossarian is Joseph Heller and his long-suffering wife Shirley, Erica’s mother. Erica plays a supporting role in the Hellers’ Bermuda Triangle; her younger brother Ted makes cameo apparences and remains an enigma. The bittersweet tale of this over-achieving, angst-ridden family’s rise in postwar Manhattan, its wrangling and tragicomic fall, is at turns laugh-aloud funny, brilliantly observed, somber, obsessive and depressing. If it were a movie, it could be co-directed by Mel Brooks and Alfred Hitchcock.

What keeps you turning the pages deep into the night is Erica’s skill at spinning the yarn. In her hands, the Heller family’s self-lacerating irony and wit is eau de vie, sending down a variety of horse pills.

Comic relief is welcome. After her parents’ acrimonious divorce, Erica visits her nonogenarian maternal grandmother. “I suddenly realized that every photograph containing my father, her ex-son-in-law, had been cut apart,” she writes. “And that in each one, instead of a head or a face, in its place was now stuck a cotton ball.”

What’s in a name?

Do not be daunted by the title: Yossarian might well win a National Book Award for the most cryptic, insiderish tag of 2011. Think Napoleon or Lord Byron, who famously slept everywhere. Then recall that Yossarian was Joe Heller’s doppelganger, the heroic antihero of Catch-22.

Before it became one of the most frequently misused expressions in modern English, Catch-22 was a bombshell novel about the random craziness of World War Two, among other things. It was published in 1961. If you missed the novel, you might remember the movie (1970). If you missed both, you are fortunate: read and view them now. They may well change your life, and also entice you to read Erica Heller’s memoir.

Both it and Catch-22 are bleakly hilarious. Yossarian is a testament to the destructiveness of narcissism; Catch-22 was deeply, riotious anti-war and joyously absurdist. The right book at the right time in the right place, as the 1960s progressed, Catch-22 became the literary talisman of anti-Vietnam youth. It sold millions, and is still in print.

Catch-22 certainly shaped the outlook of this reader. Like many of my generation I devoured it when I was attending high school. Might Joseph Heller be indirectly responsible for this blog? It would be impossible to calculate how many lives were shaped—in some cases warped—by Joseph Heller. He was much more than a consummate stylist. His world-view seemed to my adolescent mind to merge with a peculiarly American genius Dostoevsky, Conrad and Camus. His descriptions of World War Two also rang true: my father had fought in Italy in the same places as Yossarian-Heller, in eerily similar circumstances.

Curiously, Erica Heller reveals in this memoir that she has never read Catch-22. Whether she inherited her knack for pithy prose from her father is impossible to know without genetic testing and exhumation. They were both advertising copywriters and shared a mordant, irreverent, at times sardonic wit.

An unforgettable instance of this revolves around a family trip to Italy in the 1960s. Erica’s brother “opened his mouth to ask a question that I still love to recall: ‘So who’s the guy on the t in all the churches?’ After clarifying his question, my parents explained to him about Jesus Christ.”

Genetic science may one day tell us whether talent may be transmitted down the generations. More likely, Erica Heller’s skill and her personality were branded and bruised by the hammering and fire of her father’s forge. His was a relentless demand for perfection.

Students of Joseph Heller’s life will be well served: the memoir skillfully reveals countless details about him and his rituals, shedding light on the mechanics of how he wrote. He “dreamed and scratched and scrawled his slow and carefully chosen, spidery words onto index cards and yellow legal pads,” she notes. “He then typed them onto his rickety machine, hunting-and-pecking his way to more opulent times.”

Complex and troubling, Joseph Heller was clearly not your run-of-the-paternal-mill presence in the lives of his wife and children. Charm and literary skills aside, what comes through when reading this self-effacing and at times self-depricating story is that Erica was spared the genes carrying her father’s less admirable traits.

A fabulist and philanderer, Joseph Heller appears in these pages as lusty, brash, funny, and sufficiently self absorbed to alienate even his most devoted friends and family members, including Erica. She loved and revered him but, “Suddenly it was open season,” she writes about the beginning of hostilities. “I had sailed from the gentle, protective cloak of my father’s kindness over to the other side, the angry side filled with sharp-edged antagonism.”

To her credit, she forgave him more than once for emotional injury, and out of her experience has crafted a heartfelt, moving memoir.

Highly recommended.

Yossarian has been reviewed in:
The New York Times (twice)
The Los Angeles Times
The Wall Street Journal
The San Francisco Chronicle
The Washington Post
Book List
Publishers Weekly
Kirkus Reviews

Glasnost-and-Sunshine Department: Erica Heller is a close friend of mine. We met thanks to her attachment to Paris, a city her mother loved, and into whose bosom—into the Seine, to be precise—her ashes were eventually scattered. In 2005 a mutual friend gave Erica a copy of the first edition of Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light. She was enthusiastic enough to become one of the book’s greatest boosters. We have since then exchanged thousands of emails, spoken on the telephone many times, and seen each other in New York at the Apthorp and elsewhere. My wife Alison Harris is part of this affectionate triangle, and took the portrait of Erica shown here. Anyone troubled by my methodology should consider my review a testimonial or extended blurb.

Burgundy: Grapes No Gripes

From Burgundy, land of emerald pastures, grapevines, giant white cows, and looping two-lane roads where tractors stop for crossing snails or lost chickens... no joke...








Somehow the wildflowers found their way into our watering can (made of plastic). We made about 10 bouquets for the house, and for friends, and put the rest in buckets and... watering cans...

This year is extraordinary when it comes to wildflowers. Whether the wine is also great is an open question: strange weather. Drought for 3 1/2 months then serious heat, then rain rain rain rain rain and damp... Lots of rot, not all all of it noble. But many of our wine and table grapes are fine. And we're growing them these days with our wisteria vines, hollyhocks and hydrangeas--the big old panicolata heirloom variety. These are the only hydrangeas I know of that are scented. Delicious...

So, if you were wondering why I haven't been blogging or playing with Facebook and Twitter... now you know. Busy in Burgundy, holed up in a place with no Internet access, no cell phone connectivity, just birds and cows and clean air and quiet... I have been here for many moons.

Moons? For proof, see the photos: the one with the golden pastures and trees was taken during the drought. The other full-moon shot, with a cow and Alison (taking a photo of the cow), is recent. Everything is wonderfully green!

Preparing for our next Burgundy private tour, checking out wineries, eating in great restaurants... more on that coming...

Happy summer!





Late bloomers like me and the panicolata, and second-bloomers… like the wisteria, flowering as the grapes get plump...





Healthy and happy grapes








When it rains... and, as the bard said, let it come down! Amazing rain storms this summer...



La vache! Actually the little white one is a heiffer, not yet a cow... moooo...




Annalisa, how lovely you are... and long lasting!




A fine year for hydrangeas...



No cotton but the hollyhocks are high








Coming up next: restaurant revelations, Chateau d'Igé, as great as always, better, even… and Bourgvillain, Laroche Aubergiste… impossible to find on the Web but just drive into the main and only square… plus Auberge de Jack on Gadling.com

Paris, Paris on 3QD and The Little Book That Could

Writer-chef-explorer extraordinaire Elatia Harris -- no relation to my wife Alison Harris -- interviewed me for a great website I did not formerly know: 3quarksdaily.com.

It's always jarring to be on the other side of the mike -- or keyboard. I've conducted hundreds of interviews over the last 20-odd years. I've given a few, too. Of them, this is outstandingly good (not because I'm such a fascinating person, but because Elatia is such a good interviewer and writer).

Here's the opening paragraph:

In 1986, San Francisco-born David Downie, a scholar and multilingual translator, moved to Paris, into a real garret -- a maid's room, in fact -- to write himself into another way of life. Fresh from Milan, his marriage to a Milanese finished, he was still young enough for years more of getting it right. A quarter century later, his authority on matters Parisian is acknowledged by Jan Morris, Diane Johnson, and Mavis Gallant, to name only a few illustrious admirers.

READ MORE

Happily the interview is also about Alison and includes many fine photos from Rome, Paris and elsewhere.



Photos such as this one (copyright Alison Harris)











Much to my surprise and delight, The New Yorker picked up the interview. The power of new media is startling.

Speaking of which, Paris, Paris is a surprise bestseller. It was released on April 5 and in under four months has gone through four print runs... This is astonishing, given the publicity budget (budget? what budget?) and the not-dumbed-down nature of the book.

Thanks to all of you for buying so many copies, and telling your friends! Merci mille fois...