Last Call for Pancakes

I'm not a native New Englander, so I don't know much about maple sugaring. I do know that the sugaring industry has been struggling recently, as seasons grow shorter and shorter and the sap line* inches ever northward. Something about the earth getting warmer, I think. Apart from that, I'm a rank amateur in all things maple-sugary. It was just this year, for instance, that I learned that not all maple syrup is real maple syrup - I first cottoned on to what is, apparently, a fairly widespread conspiracy when I noticed brunch places in the Valley charging extra for "real maple syrup." What, you mean Aunt Jemima's isn't real? I thought. Then what the hell is it? Corn syrup, it turns out. I can sense all you natives out there smiling at my naivete, but I assure you I had never even considered the possibility that the syrup I'd been consuming for most of my life was anything other than real until I noticed this. And then I felt betrayed. Used and betrayed.

Well, so what? We can't all know everything about everything, right? I know quite a bit about a whole lot of other things, so what's the harm in not knowing a lot about the maple sugar industry? Well I'll tell you what the harm is, Mr./Mrs. Smartypants. I'll tell you right here in this very blog. Listen carefully.

The most significant other thing that I didn't know about maple sugaring until very recently is that the sugaring season usually begins around late February and comes to an end around early to mid-April. Or at least it did this year. This is significant in itself, of course, but its significance for me lies in a further fact. This is that during this very short period, dozens of little sugar shacks all over New England open their doors to visitors. They sell these visitors freshly bottled syrup, maple-related trinkets and doodads and gewgaws, and breakfast. That's what I said: breakfast. Here I've been, wandering all over the Valley in search of The Perfect French Toast, eating in greasy diners and getting all crunchy-organic with the Suburu-driving bourgeoisie, when I could have been eating french toast in rustic little sugar shacks, surrounded by boiling drums of syrup, taking in the sounds and smells of one of the only truly local regional economic activities we have left in this country. Bah! Humbug!

You will have gathered that I only learned about this phenomenon after all the area sugar shacks had closed for the season. Well, almost all.

Yesterday Kate and I set off for the far northwestern corner of Massachusetts. Our mission, for once, was not specifically french-toast or even breakfast-related - it was to meet up with Dr. and Mrs. D. (and toddler D.), have a picnic in the sunshine, run around chasing rubber balls and frisbees, and check out the Henri Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, which was coming to an end yesterday (the exhibit was coming to an end, not Williamstown). We were also looking forward to driving down Route 2, also called the Mohawk Trail, a ridiculously scenic road named for the Indians who once traded and raided along it and not for the hair styles of the many bikers who prowl along it when the weather's fine (although one could certainly be forgiven for believing the latter).

And we did all that. The Mohawk Trail, one of the earliest designated scenic routes in the country (it was so designated in 1914), has lost none of its scenicness, although some of the route's roadside attractions have clearly seen better days. I'd always wanted to dawdle along the trail, poke around in its souvenir shops, peek in the windows of the little red schoolhouse that dates to 1828, get within touching distance of the eponymous "Big Indian" that towers above the Big Indian Shop and the bronze elk statue that guards the optimistically named town of Florida, and so this was my chance. I took a few photos, some of which are below, and most of which are here.






We also had our picnic in the sunshine, did a bit of running around, enjoyed catching up with the D.'s, went to the museum (the Clark is, I believe, one of the best small art museums in the country) and contemplated the sexual abandon of fin de siecle Paris, and generally made the most of what was a very beautiful day.

But before all that happened, we stopped in what is probably the last sugar shack still open in all of New England: Gould's Sugar House. In fact, this was the last day that Gould's itself would be open until next season, as we learned after some careful eavesdropping. The Gould's story is a long and proud one - at least I'm assuming it is, since a book promising to tell us the Gould's story was on sale in the gift shop for $15. I didn't buy the book, so I don't really know the Gould's story, but I did learn that this was their 50th season of operation, which means they got started right around what was probably the peak of the Mohawk Trail's early glory - if the postwar, car-culture roadside kitsch of the other establishments along the trail is anything to go by. We were also able to learn that Gould's smells very strongly of bacon and maple (which is not at all a bad thing); that the elderly Mrs. Gould, though getting a little dotty, is still quite spry as she welcomes diners at the hostess stand; that Gould's does not serve french toast, but that they do serve several other things, including blueberry pancakes and something called Sugar-on-Snow; and that on this particular morning they were all out of snow, and so there was no Sugar-on-Snow to be had. This last fact made me quite sad.

Though somewhat confused by my inability to order french toast, I eventually settled on the blueberry pankcakes, as did my charming companion. And golly but they were good! They weren't all cakey like so many pancakes are, and the blueberries were real, whole blueberries (not the blueberry-flavored corn syrup mush you'll find elsewhere) that performed a vital thermodynamic function for the pancakes as a whole: they kept them hot. If you've ever microwaved a jelly donut, you know that the jelly inside will stay nice and piping long after the encasing dough has cooled - well, something like that was happening with the blueberries and the pancakes, and this made them wonderfully warm and melty. The syrup was pretty good, too.

Here's what the place looked like:




So have I become a pancake convert? Will I abandon the search for The Perfect French Toast in order to locate The Perfect Pancake (it's got a slightly better ring to it, you have to admit)? No, no, patient reader, worry not. Although this unexpected detour was indeed quite delicious, I'll remain steadfast in my original quest. For one thing, I don't like to leave things unfinished and I suck at multitasking. And for another, I already know where The Perfect Pancake can be found - and it's nowhere near the Mohawk Trail, NoHo, or the Valley. It's in Nashville - where I, too, will shortly be. As will Kate.

Yippee-Kai-Ay!

___
*I just made that term up, but I think it conveys my meaning nicely.

Pardon Me While I Briefly Shift Tone

Many of you are going to hate me for saying this, but I just can't help myself: apart from two more lunches next month and a dinner gathering that may or may not happen, my academic duties are officially over until August. Yesterday I gave my last (of two) presentations to the other fellows and faculty, and it was a nice, informal discussion that actually got me pretty energized to finish this article I've been mulling over about when and why British troops/policemen shot at rioters in Victorian Ireland and India. Heady stuff, I know, but if rioting is my bread-and-butter (and it is), then excessive state violence is my raspberry preserves, and the flavor combination really gets my mouth watering. Even if it means I spend the next half-hour picking seeds out of my teeth.

Which is probably why I've been following the recent flood of torture revelations with such keen interest. I've long been aware of, and troubled by, what the Bushies did to detainees in all those secret prisons, black sites, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, etc., but I hadn't become thoroughly sickened until I read the first of Mark Danner's two articles in the New York Review of Books about a classified Red Cross report of interviews with prisoners held by the CIA at Guantanamo. It's a long article that makes for harrowing reading - details of prisoners forced to stand for extended periods with their hands shackled to the ceiling; prisoners stripped naked, kept in cold rooms, and periodically sprayed with cold water; prisoners kept in small boxes in which they could neither crouch nor stand for days and weeks on end; prisoners with towels wrapped around their necks and beaten repeatedly against walls; the infamous waterboarding - but I'd highly recommend reading it, and, if you've got time, read the second one, too.

Since Danner's articles came out, of course, there's been a flood of information coming from the Justice Department and the Senate, and lots of great reporting and analysis from the NY Times, etc., and I'm not sure how much I have to say on the topic that hasn't been said earlier and better by others. I will say, however, that I'm overjoyed that we're finally having this discussion in this country. For the last few days it's even pushed the economic news into second place, however briefly. Maybe it's asking too much of the American public, but if we could perhaps get up in arms about this issue in the same way that some folks recently got up in arms about the prospect of a 6% tax hike, then I'd say we had, indeed, turned a corner. I'll confess that I'm not just terribly optimistic about that, but it's nice to hope.

As Danner points out, the principal argument now - and Dick Cheney has been making this case quite loudly - will revolve around whether these tactics actually worked. Torture may be unseemly, runs the argument, but if it helps prevent Americans from another terrorist attack, then it's worth it. Cheney's been insisting that the CIA release all the "actionable intelligence" that was garnered from these harsh interrogations, and many Americans, weaned on the terror-porn of shows like 24, will undoubtedly be willing to believe any scrap of evidence showing that something a tortured prisoner said may have prevented some future attack. Never mind that study after study (as well as this guy, formerly of the FBI) has shown that torture doesn't work - or that common sense alone will tell you that a tortured prisoner will likely say anything to make the pain stop, and his/her information will therefore be highly suspect, at best. And never mind that what went on at Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and the black sites did more to foster anti-American sentiment worldwide, and thereby to make future attacks more likely, than almost anything else we could have done. For some Americans, the ticking-time-bomb scenario, in which the interrogator knows that the prisoner knows where the bomb is, and has no choice but to keep turning the screws until he tells the truth, is just too appealing. It's also a handy way of avoiding looking ourselves in the mirror, of preserving the good-guy / bad-guy story that we like to tell ourselves about war, law enforcement, and our national character. If we torture, it's for some greater good, like preventing the deaths of thousands of people. If our enemies torture, it's because they're depraved and sadistic. The idea that we might be just as morally compromised as the people we're torturing (and I won't deny that many of the detainees were quite nasty guys) is one that most Americans will only accept with reluctance, if at all.

And so I expect the debate will continue along these lines, with one side upholding abstract principles of justice and morality and the other insisting on a brutal pragmatism along the lines of the Marines' fabled motto, "Kill 'Em All and Let God Sort 'Em Out." The rule of law vs. the utilitarian, the sheriff vs. the outlaw, the rule-bound police commissioner vs. Dirty Harry: thus has it ever been in this country, and thus will it continue to be.

What's happening now is that something we all knew (the fact that the US tortured prisoners isn't exactly news) but preferred not to think about is suddenly being hauled out into the light of day. Torture, apparently, is okay as long as we don't have to see it happening, but once we're forced to confront it in all its ugliness, will we still want our government to do it? I'm afraid that over time the answer will turn out to be yes. After all, we've been through all this before: it was five years ago that the Abu Ghraib story broke, and, despite an initial flurry of handwringing, things eventually settled down, the folks who did the torturing were effectively defined as "bad apples" and duly punished, and their superiors kept their jobs. Now most of those officials are no longer in power, a new administration is reluctantly but effectively coming to grips with our past misdeeds, and the national mood (if there even is such a thing) has shifted. We're not as fearful as we used to be of a terrorist attack - thank you, media, for helping to redirect our fears toward the stock market instead! - and we're not as likely to give the Bush administration a free pass as we once were. But I'm still not optimistic.

In my ideal world, the whole lot of them - Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Tenet, Rice, the lawyers who gave the torturers legal cover, the CIA agents who did the torturing (even if they were reluctantly "just following orders") - would be thrown in jail. It would be a very comfortable jail with lots of televisions and cushy chairs and vegetarian options. There would be ping-pong tables, pilates lessons, picnic tables, and a puppy room. And once a week, for only an hour or so, they would be forced, not to feel like they themselves were drowning, to but to watch a videotape of someone being made to feel like he is drowning. Then they would be sent back to the puppy room to think about what they've done. The bastards.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Esselon Cafe

I knew this would happen eventually.

It's been about a month and a half since I initiated my search for The Perfect French Toast, during which time I've had eight different french toasts (nine, if you count the Memphis French Toast in Oklahoma City) and reported the experiences to you as diligently and entertainingly as I could. And now the inevitable has begun to happen: I'm running out of ways to write about french toast. This is not at all the same as saying that I'm growing tired of french toast - quite the contrary! - but it is to say that there are only so many adjectives you can use to describe french toast, only so many variables you can isolate in how it's prepared and presented, only so many hyperbolic superlatives you can employ before your readers start to grow testy and suspicious.

It is also becoming clear to me that I'm using this french toast quest as a narrative crutch. (I just did a quick Google search and confirmed that I am the only person on the internet ever to have written those words.) That's a roundabout way of saying that it's making me lazy. Back before this whole thing started, I'd spend many of my waking hours on the alert for something to blog about - several times a week I'd come across something and think, "Ooh! I must blog about that!" and then proceed either to do just that, or to forget about it as soon as I got home. Lately, though, I've been retracting my antennae, blithely and inattentively moving through life in the smug assurance that the next blog post would probably be about french toast, as would the one after that, and the one after that. Sure, I've interspersed some non-toast posts in amongst the others, but just think of all the fantastic, earth-shattering things I've experienced and decided not to blog about, or, worse, failed to experience altogether, so wrapped up have I been in this french toast thing. The mind boggles! (bloggles?)

Does all this mean I'm abandoning the search for TPFT before it's reached its natural end? Absolutely not! Does it mean I've accepted that the best french toast I've had so far - the challah french toast at the Lone Wolf - is, indeed, the perfect french toast? Not on your life! Does it mean I simply don't have a lot to say about my most recent french toast excursion and have decided to pad this post with some verbose, slightly tongue-in-cheek introspection? You might be onto something there.

The Esselon Cafe sits out on my favorite, love-to-hate-it highway: Route 9, between NoHo and Amherst. It's in a standalone building on the Hadley Common, a pleasant ribbon of land that cuts perpendicularly across the highway and is lined with modest but stately old homes whose leafy trees look stunning in autumn and will probably look quite pretty in the spring, if spring ever arrives. The cafe itself is a family-friendly place that looks like an antique, slightly overgrown Starbucks (you order at the counter, the servers are hemmed in on all sides by hulking and hopelessly complex coffee-making contraptions, the color palate is all muted, soothing earth tones). They've got a covered porch with tables and chairs, an uncovered porch with a few picnic tables and a hammock out on the lawn, and a carved (or possibly cast-iron) ceiling that reminds me of the ornate ceiling at the Crown Liquor Saloon in Belfast, a gorgeous early-Victorian pub that's owned by the National Trust and whose west-facing windows have the misfortune of facing the Europa Hotel, at one time the most-bombed hotel in Europe. I didn't have my great big camera with me, so I was forced to use my BlackBerry instead - these pictures aren't great, but you'll get the idea:





Esselon's french toast, like that at the Lone Wolf and the Green Bean, is made with challah bread, and it can be ordered with fruit or without. Kate was with me and, as we had done at Amanouz, she ordered the fruit while I did my Gandhi imitation and went for the bare-bones version. It came out all covered in powdered sugar and served with real maple syrup - hers with strawberries and blueberries on top, mine with a single red strawberry and a green mint leaf. Both of them were tasty and sweet, and, though the bread was just the slightest bit chewy, they easily entered the top ranks of french toast in the Valley, if not quite coming up to the level of near-perfection achieved by the Lone Wolf.

And that, as they say, is that.

The Tale of a Vacation, in Six Meals

I swear I'm not turning this into a food blog, but I just can't help myself. I've tried to think of a pithy way to tell you about my recent road trip out to Toronto and back without organizing my post around the meals I ate along the way, and I've concluded that it's simply impossible. If it's any consolation, in what follows I don't mention french toast once. I was on vacation, after all, so I was determined to leave my work at the office, as it were.

(Photos of the excursion are here.)

1) Day One - The Moosewood Restaurant, Ithaca, NY.



Have you ever heard of the Moosewood? If you're a vegetarian, or if you've ever spent much time browsing the cookbook aisle at Borders, you probably have. The Moosewood Cookbook is to vegetarian cooking what What to Expect When You're Expecting is to childbirth - a sort of holy text that simultaneously informs and soothes. "It's not so bad," it says, "Here's how we're gonna get through this." Well, it turns out the Moosewood Restaurant is in Ithaca, which is kind of on the way to Toronto. And Kate, my road-trip companion (the Neal Cassady to my Jack Kerouac, if you will), is a vegetarian. And Camille, one of my former fellow Fellows from Philly (a former Philly Fellow, a Philly former fellow Fellow) lives in Ithaca. So... we went there! And we ate vegetarian food! And it was great, if a bit like eating something someone had prepared for you from The Moosewood Cookbook. And then Camille took us around Ithaca to see the gorges, which get quite dark at night, so I'm pretty sure we saw gorges, but I can't be positive.

2) Day Two - Niagara Falls Snack Bar. Buffalo, NY, has given the world one great culinary item and kept another one for itself. To the world it has given the Buffalo Wing, and we all know what the world has done with that. For itself it has kept a sandwich called the beef on weck, a roast beef sandwich that is dipped - bun and all - into a thin, salty juice that turns it into one of the tastiest and grossest sandwiches in the history of sandwiches. I had one a few months ago and it changed my life (while also nearly ending it), but I figured on this trip I would defer to the vegetarian sensibilities of my companion and try to find somewhere in Buffalo that might serve a vegetable or two. It was a fool's errand. After touring some of the most profound urban blight I've ever seen, trembling in horror before the Buffalo City Hall, getting lost on something called the Skyway, and spotting an okay-looking Brewpub just as we drove onto an interstate ramp that took us flying past it, we decided to pass on Buffalo and head up to Niagara Falls instead, where we were bound to find a quick sandwich or something. We did not. Turns out April is still the off-season at Niagara Falls. And by off-season I mean the spray from the falls is still frozen on parts of the park, nobody is there but a handful of dazed-looking South Asians, and there are no - and I mean no - places outside the park to buy lunch apart from a shabby Punjabi restaurant advertising "The Best Indian Food in America." Enticing as that was, we decided to take our chances on the grounds of the park, and what we ended up with was a $6 PB&J sandwich and chips (for her) and a $7 shrinkwrapped ham-and-cheese sandwich (for him), which, when you add in a bottle of apple juice and tax, cost us something like $17. We ate them outside in the windy cold, and it was all Kate could do to keep me from hurling myself over the ledge and into the falls.

3) Day Two - Byzantium. Things got much better once we crossed into Canada. Toronto, you must know, is the "gayest city in Canada," as a free newspaper I picked up put it, and it has a wealth of gay bars, clubs, and cafes - so many, in fact, that "Queer as Folk" (which, I believe, is a television program about gay people) was actually filmed there, although it was supposedly set in Pittsburgh (which is not a very gay city at all). With our Valley-sharpened gaydars in prime working order, we zeroed in on the principal gay district without much trouble that evening and landed in a place called Byzantium. And that's where I had one of the best meals of my life. Kate, working from the assumption that ostriches are vegetables, ordered the ostrich steak (I'm being glib here - she's okay eating meat, so long as she knows where it came from, and so long as where it came from isn't a horrible factory farm) and I ordered the rabbit stew. Have you ever had rabbit? It's a cliche to say that it tastes like chicken, but cliches are cliches for a reason, and in this case that reason is this: rabbit tastes like chicken. But the sauce - oh, the sauce! And the vegetables - oh, the vegetables! And the ostrich - oh, the ostrich (I maybe helped Kate out a little)! They made me very, very glad that I hadn't hurled myself into Niagara Falls earlier in the day. Terribly, terribly glad.

4) Day Three - Fran's Diner.



Of course I couldn't resist going to at least one diner on this trip, and, in fact, I actually went to two diners, though they were the same diner. What I mean is this: Fran's, a Toronto institution whose original location is rumored to have never locked its doors since it opened in 1940, actually has a few locations around the city. After eating here on our first morning in town - a decent-but-not-fabulous meal of poached eggs and english muffins for me - we accidentally stumbled into another Fran's on our last day in town. That second meal was equally shrugworthy, but the setting was pleasant retro-dinery and the service was impeccable.

5) Day Three - Kensington Market.



Kensington Market isn't a market but a neighborhood (oh, excuse me, neighbourhood), and after our cute gay waiter at Byzantium recommended we check it out while we were in town, and after we realized that Good Friday is a public holiday in Canada, and after we further realized that this meant that all of the museums (musea?) we'd planned to visit that day were closed, we decided to spend most of the day exploring this area. If you've ever been to London, it's a bit like the Spitalfields/Brick Lane district on a Saturday. If you've ever been to Philadelphia, it's kinda like the Italian Market on a weekend. Lots of funky shops spilling out onto the streets, many lovely places to buy all sorts of food of varying qualities, lots of graffiti, and at least one bona-fide cannabis cafe. We bought some bread and cheese and apples (but no cannabis), stole two plastic knives from a coffee shop, and had a picnic in the park. Well, it was more of a sand pit with some dope dealers lounging on benches and sullen children playing on a swingset, but it looked like it may once have been a park. In any event, we then went to my new favorite place, a pie shop called Wanda's Pie in the Sky, which had just relocated to Kensington Market from Bloor Street, up near the university. I had sour cherry pie and Kate had ambrosia pie, and it was all I could do not to walk out of there with several more pies tucked under each arm, a few hot cross buns stuffed under my chin, and as many frosted cookies crammed into my mouth as I could manage without dislocating my jaw. Oh, Wanda's Pie in the Sky - if you were a woman instead of a shop I'd try really hard to get you to marry me.

6) Day Three - The Sultan's Tent. That evening it was down to the old part of town for some Moroccan food at the Sultan's Tent. The food was very good - I had sesame-crusted salmon - but the place was memorable principally for the bangles that all of the hostesses were wearing around their waists and the belly-dancing that was going on in the back dining room, which we were nevertheless unable to watch because we didn't want to pay for it. Oh, and then when we ordered some mint tea after dinner our waiter, who I'm pretty sure didn't like us, poured the tea out of a fancy Moroccan teapot by holding the tray of glasses waaaaay down low in one hand and raising the pouring teapot waaaaaay up over his head, so that by the end he looked like some sort of fancy tea-pouring fountain. It would have been better if he'd looked like he was enjoying himself, but he didn't.

7) And The Rest. Okay, this post is getting a little out of hand, and there are still several days to go. I think I'm going to wrap things up here, since the above meals really were the most interesting ones we had, and they give you a pretty good taste (ha!) of what we did during the trip. There were also donuts (Tim Horton's! Maple Cream!); Italian food in Chinatown (that's right); breakfast in a diner that looked like a doctor's office waiting room in Rochester, NY; delicious hot dogs (veggie and meatie) at a hot-dog place called Dogtown, also in Rochester, where all of the different varieties are named after dog breeds (I had the Bernese Mountain Dog - mushrooms and swiss); delicious sandwiches and a strawberry brownie in Albany; zucchini pancakes in a neighborhood of Toronto whose name I could never pronounce, but which starts with an R; a strange but tasty Ukrainian frozen treat on Bloor Street West; German easter chocolates; and lots and lots of grapes.

Now, sadly, vacation time is over, and it's back to the rat race, the nine-to-five, the daily grind - the search for the perfect french toast.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Miss Flo Diner

Florence, as you know, is a city in Italy. Michelangelo and Dante lived there and did some of their best work there. The Medicis had a palace and lots of shiny things there. The skyline is dominated by a gigantic domed cathedral, the streets buzz with hundreds of motor scooters, and the cafes serve some of the best ice cream and sandwiches (but not, to my knowledge, ice-cream sandwiches) in the world. If you go there, however, be prepared to share the city's quite compressed spaces with thousands of other tourists who've come looking for the same Renaissancey magic that you have. Because of the overwhelming presence of these tourists, you will have a hard time locating said magic.

For those of you looking for something off the beaten path, might I recommend another destination? It doesn't have a cathedral, no famous poets or artists call it home, and there's a distinct lack - perhaps even a total absence - of buzzing motor scooters, but it does have a pizza parlor, where you can enjoy authentic Italian cuisine; a coffee shop, that (surely) serves Italian-style espresso and lattes; an ice cream (aka, American gelato) shop called Friendly's (motto: "Where Ice Cream Makes the Meal"); and a vegan cafe called Cafe Evolution, two words which are the same, more or less, in Italian and English.

I'm speaking, of course, of Florence, Massachuessts, a village of Northampton (don't ask me how these screwy municipal boundaries work - I don't make the rules, I just abide by them) that also happens to be home of one of the most striking diners in all of New England: the Miss Florence Diner, known colloquially as the Miss Flo.



Good luck finding something like that in Italy.

Now, I'll not repeat myself on the general topic of diners. Suffice it to say that what I like about the Miss Flo has more to do with the ambience than the food. If any of my Boston readers are familiar with the Rosebud Diner in Somerville, you've got a pretty good idea of what the Miss Flo looks like, on the inside at least, as I'm pretty sure they were made by the same people. It's a dining-car style diner, which means that before it was tied to the earth with bricks and mortar it was, in principle, portable. Eating inside of it - even after the considerable remodeling that's gone on since the place was established in 1941 - one is reminded of what once made diners so revolutionary, the vaulted ceilings and streamlined chromework evoking an era in which mobility, speed, and cheapness in dining were all quite novel and, consequently, exciting.



When I visited the other day, most of my fellow patrons were old enough to remember when the Miss Flo was, indeed, at the forefront of dining technology. Which is to say, they were really old. Cracking open the menu, I noticed that the type of french toast served at the Miss Flo is called Texas French Toast. This confirmed my slowly building suspicion that french toast, like pizza and hot dogs, is subject to regional variations - never mind that I have never seen Texas French Toast in Texas itself, nor, for that matter, have I ever had Memphis French Toast in Memphis. Have you ever had plain old (i.e., non-French) Texas Toast? It's served quite often in Oklahoma and is a sort of garlic-and-butter extravaganza of lightly toasted white bread cut very, very thick but somehow also managing to be light as air. I couldn't wait to see what this might be like once it had been frenchified by the Miss Flo's chefs. I was also delighted to see that whoever had typed up the menu was clearly so excited by this particular item that he/she got a little carried away with the "p" key. Here's what it said, verbatim:

A true delicacy! Three one-inch thick slices of bread hand-dipped, toppped with cinnampn and sugar and grilled to golden perfection.

This was promising indeed, as was the motto I spotted emblazoned across the back of my server's t-shirt: "Ain't No Finer Diner." While Tammy Wynette sang "Stand By Your Man" on the radio and elderly couples filed in from church, I ordered my Texas French Toast in full confidence that this would be a memorable experience.

That confidence, I am sorry to report, was somewhat misplaced. The toast was indeed cinnampny and sugary, there were indeed three slices of bread, each sliced once again for presentation's sake (making for a total of six slices, if my math is correct), and there may well have been some sugar involved, but the meal as a whole was pretty uninteresting. It was, I suppose, pretty much your standard french toast: not too mushy, not too fancy, perfectly serviceable on the whole, but very, very far from perfect. And it was very far from what I know actual Texas Toast to be. Take a look and you'll see what I mean:



Yeah, that's what I said.

T-shirt mottoes notwithstanding, then, it's a reasonable certainty that there are, in fact, finer diners than the Miss Flo, at least when it comes to french toast. Nevertheless, I'll bet it's a good sight better than what you'd find at any comparable diner in the other Florence. The Italians are great at lots of things, but they really don't know squat about french toast.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - The Green Bean

Before I tell you about my latest french toast (mis)adventure, I've got a couple of items that I need to mention. First, it has come to my attention that sometime in the late 1970s a British band called Streetband recorded what may be the only, and is certainly the best, song about toast. It is not specifically about french toast, and, indeed, some of the song's percussion would have been completely impossible if it had been about french toast, but it still deserves a mention here.

Watch this and you'll see why. You'll also grin, giggle, and wonder how you've made it this long without this song in your life. That's a promise.



You're welcome.

The other thing I need to tell you also pertains to toast, naturally, and to french toast, specifically. Earlier this week I was in Oklahoma, and while there I went with my father to a restaurant called the Classen Grill. The Classen Grill is an OKC staple, one of the city's few non-chain restaurants that manages both to draw a loyal clientele and to produce some pretty tasty food. I'd been there several times before, usually to try one of their southwestern-inflected brunch items, but this time my french-toast antennae, in prime toast-finding condition, called my attention to a menu item called "Memphis French Toast." As someone who's about to move to Tennessee and who, moreover, hadn't yet considered the possibility that there might be regional variations in the manner french toast is prepared, I was intrigued. What if I were to go to Memphis soon and unexpectedly find myself forced to eat french toast? Would I be prepared? I already knew that I'd fare well if ever I got myself into a similar predicament in the Mediterranean, but in Memphis? I simply had no idea.

So of course I ordered it.

It's a good thing that I've been limiting my search for The Perfect French Toast to the restaurants in and around the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, because otherwise the Classen Grill's Memphis French Toast would have presented me with quite a dilemma. This is not because it is, in fact, TPFT - it's very good, but it's not perfect. What it is, rather, is The World's Most Ridiculous French Toast. Or at least I'm pretty sure it is. If I'd discovered it in Massachusetts I might have been forced to open up an entirely new category and scour the Valley for other potentially ridiculous french toasts. As it is, I'm under no such obligation, and thank god for that.

Unfortunately, I failed to take a photograph of this meal, so you'll just have to trust me. Memphis French Toast, apparently, is this: two large slices of thick white bread, dipped in a cinnamon batter and grilled. One of the slices is topped with banana slices, honey, and peanut butter, then the other slice is placed on top of it - like a french toast sandwich. The whole is then sprinkled with powdered sugar and served with maple syrup, butter, and a compulsory side of bacon.

It was deadly.

No, I'm serious. It was deadly.

It was also enough to get me excited about moving to Tennessee again (I've been afflicted with a bad case of ambivalence lately), assuming, of course, that they really do eat their french toast like this in Memphis. It's only like two hours from Nashville, which means this question can be pretty easily answered, once I've recovered sufficiently.

But anyway, on to the main object of this post, about which I actually plan to say very little.


The Green Bean

The Green Bean is a relatively new establishment that has quickly become one of the most popular brunch spots in NoHo. They serve locally grown, organic food in creative ways to ethically-minded diners, most of whom live on the gown side of the town-gown divide. I've been there quite a few times - it's one of the places I've spotted Dinosaur Jr frontman J Mascis - and always had a pleasant experience. The servers are friendly, the food is yummy, and they let you get your own coffee by choosing from an array of second-hand porcelain mugs that hang from an iron tree above the coffee pots. On this visit, I chose a souvenir mug from Gene and Jen's wedding, and event that took place in January of 2008 and which, presumably, was long enough ago for at least one of their guests to decide he/she could safely donate their souvenir mug to the Green Bean. The mug made me wonder how things were going with Gene and Jen, people whom I've never met but who have adorable taste in animals, and whom I therefore liked immediately. I hope they're doing well.



Unfortunately, the mug was about as good as it got on this visit. I'd had the Green Bean's 8-Grain French Toast before - in fact, it was one of the things that inspired me to go on this quest - but I'd never had their Challah French Toast, which I was intent to try after my transcendent experience of the same item over at the Lone Wolf. Kate joined me in ordering the Challah French Toast that morning at the Green Bean, and when it came out it looked promising enough - a little floppy, perhaps, and not nearly as glamorous as what the Lone Wolf was serving, but it was thick and it had powdered sugar and I was pretty sure everything was going to be fine.



It was not. The bread wasn't just floppy, it was soggy. Eggy and mushy and lacking in flavor, it was like the Lone Wolf's evil twin. Kate agreed, and we beat a hasty retreat just as soon as we'd eaten all we could (just because french toast is bad doesn't mean it shouldn't be thoroughly eaten).

If I, Streetband-like, should ever feel moved to write a song about the Green Bean's french toast, I'm pretty sure it would be a dirge.