Christophe; brains on rue Descartes

Beige, beige. Beige.

Rosa: Lunch started so well. Ben had been listening to Biggie on the metro, and I was stoked with cold parisian air and felt high as a kite. I should have known something was wrong when I saw the font chosen by Christophe. Very curly. I think it's called Curlz Desdemona. Anyway, it's what year 8s use for their first essay. And it was orange on green. Bit Irish for me.

I should have appreciated them more because these were the only bright colours I saw chez Christophe. We plumped for the 2 course luncheon for 16 euros. Both of us took the cream of lentil soup. To be fair, it fulfilled that soupy stereotpye of being a hug in a bowl. It was essentially double cream which had met a lentil on the street once and said 'hi' but didn't really even shake hands. But there was a porridgey element to it, which was important to me because porridge is important to me. I set up a group dedicated to it on a cool social networking site called Facebook. It is called PAN, which is clever because it stands for Porridge Appreciation network AND, unless you use that sachet shit, you normally need a pan to cook porridge. I'm not sure how I came up with it. Anwayz, back to our friend Christophe: his bread was copious and excellent, the burnt edges had a woody raisin tang to them.

Grey was understandable for lentil soup because lentils are grey and it wouldnt do to jazz them up with food dye. A quenelle of something bright like beetroot wouldn't have gone visually a miss though, but whatevs. Forgive and forget. But then the mains came out. Not only was mine - mackeral fillets on seigle spaghetti - the colour of a Velib, so was Ben's. No flotsam of salad, or jetsam of punchy sauce. Just Velib grey; stoney, steel, sad.

My main was alright. Mackeral is very fishy, I forget this. The pasta was wet with something that wasn't sauce. I think it may have just been water. Salty water atleast - kind of like the sea that the mackeral had come from - so it was not strictly unpleasant. But it didn't leave me wanting to write poetry, or even dance.

Most importantly, Ben had brain. For me, it was like loose, wet souffle.

Ben: Oh man.

I'd heard good things about this place. I'd read about it in Gourmet, see, which has a special place in my heart. Where some needy children steal their mother's Vogue, I would store copies of my dear ma's Gourmet. I'd intercept the delivery, grab the mag, and run like buggery to sift through those silken pages. Such vivid memories. Probably cuz I last did it a month ago. Ran like an excited school girl to sift through the pages, nearly broke the sofa as I belly flopped onto it.

This was one special Gourmet, a Paris issue all about inexpensive restaurants. And guess who happened to be there, Christophe and his brand of hearty, traditional French fare, with a twist. That twist happened to be brain.

I chose it, I ate it, I ingested 400% of my daily cholesterol (http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-veal-brain-i17190). And it wasn't really that bad, at first. But then that mushy, gloopy texture just took over, and the crust started peeling and you could see the individual brain bits. And the thing about brain is that it looks like brain.

So I ate it, and finished it, and wont be having it again. That lentil soup was good mind.

To end, a few words from Biggie:

" When it comes to sex, I'm similar to the thriller in Manila
Honeys call me Bigga the condom filler
Whether it's stiff tongue or stiff dick
Biggie squeeze it to make shit fit"

Couldn't put it better myself.