Le Jardin des Plumes

Ohhh wow! Thursday was totally surreal for me [M], a special insight into Monisha’s past life for me [N], and truly fantastic for both of us. We spent the day in Giverny, the town where Monisha did her two month internship cooking in a fancy French restaurant / auberge: Le Jardin des Plumes.

We started out almost missing our train. Which would have actually been quite bad because the restaurant’s lunch hours are quite short, and we would have missed them had we gone on the following train. The last train leaving from Giverny back to Paris is before the restaurant’s dinner hours, so we wouldn’t have been able to stay for dinner. Anyway, we made it. Phew.

Now, when we say the train from Paris to Giverny, we actually mean the train from Paris to Vernon, the neighboring town. There are no trains directly to Giverny, so there’s a bus that goes between Vernon and Giverny. However, the bus wouldn’t leave for another hour after we got there…again, we would have missed lunch had we taken that bus. The walk would also have been over an hour long, also causing us to miss lunch, so what do we do? Open a page from Monisha’s Giverny days, and try to hitch a ride. We walked through Vernon until we got to the road that goes straight to Giverny, and stick out our thumbs. It was the coolest thing: the very first car that came our direction pulled over for us, and we hopped on in! He was a nice old man (85 years old) who chatted with Monisha in French for the 10 minute ride and dropped us off right next to the restaurant! First hitchhiking endeavor: total success.

Okay, so we get to the restaurant, Le Jardin des Plumes.

Monisha

Gorgeous, still. I see Nadia for the first time in five years and talk with her a little about the restaurant, what all has changed, who is still there, etc. She is one of the partners of the restaurant and the person I felt most comfortable with during my internship. Nadia and Francesco, the sommelier, are the only two people I worked with who are still there today. Francesco seats us for lunch and starts us off with a red wine. It’s totally crazy being there again. So many memories are coming back. It’s hard to believe I actually lived and worked here for an entire summer. My life is so entirely different. It was before Nolan and I even started dating, when I barely knew who he was. And here we were together, at my old restaurant. It’s really special to get to share it with him, to retell him some stories he already knew and share new ones. I get to put visuals to all of the little things I’ve told him about. He gets to eat all the food that I used to be a part of making. But now it’s even better. Ever fancier.

Okay, so the food we ate! The amouse bouche, which used to be one delicious bite, is now two places of three different elaborate yummy bites on each…1: marinated salmon, a little bun with mushroom puree inside, and cod infused mashed potatoes, 2: sweet potato puree with cumin seeds, something else with fenegreek (?), and little cumin rolls. As entrees we got carpaccio (topped with cheese, plum swirls, peanut bits, and some sort of spice crumble) and quail over green beans with marinated melon, goose(?) berries, quail egg and quail egg yolk. And for the main course we both got a delicious lamb dish. The sides of the lamb dish were also more fancy than the sorts of things that flanked the meats before: interspersed fig pieces, rose infused egg white fluff or something, ricotta, galletes, and greens. And then we had a delicious fromage plate and a crazy elaborate dessert: strawberry puree, strawberries, merengue pieces, strawberry ice cream, olive oil ice cream, custard… they really go all out on presentation and elaborateness. And with our bill? An additional assortment of three different little sweets: lemon cake, chocolate cookie with almond chocolate cream, and pistachio cake with cardamom cream ontop.

  

After our meal, I show Nolan around the kitchen and the patisserie. Again, totally surreal to be back there again. Everyone from the kitchen is gone, but I speak with a bunch of the servers, none of whom I know anymore. There are many more females than when I was there, and they pretty much all live at the house I lived in – Nadia’s house. When I was there only 1 or 2 others from the restaurant lived there, now there are 11 or so she said. Anyway, it was a really amazing experience.

Nolan

It was amazing to get to see the place where Monisha worked in France.  I’ve heard her talk about working there many, many times since we’ve been together, so it was wonderful to finally put a real place to the stories. The food was incredible, as anticipated. One thing I didn’t anticipate was how beautiful the restaurant is, along with the rest of Giverny.  It was fun to imagine a younger Monisha living and working here. While I didn’t get to meet any of the more colorful characters from Monisha’s time here, I did get to meet Nadia, her wonderful host and sort-of ex boss.  I also got to meet Francesco, although we talked with him significantly less than Nadia.  I’m so glad that we got to return here together and spend some time in this place of Monisha’s past. 

After Le Jardin des Plumes, we went to Claude Monet’s house (which Nadia gave us tickets to go to for free) and walked through the gardens. In these gardens are the water lilies that he so famously painted (and that we got to see in L’Orangerie just one day ago).  This place is GORGEOUS.  There are so many different types of flowers, trees, and other pretty foliage.  There were lots of tourists too.  It’s funny to think that people coming here are the reason that Le Jardin des Plumes can exist. 

  

After an hour long stroll through the gardens and the house we headed back to Le Jardin des Plumes and Nadia gave us a ride back to the train station.  The ride back was much less eventful; it only required one train straight to the center of Paris.

Upon our arrival back to Erica’s flat, we cooked up some ravioli for dinner and wrote a blog post (not this one). We also settled a bet that we made in Belgium.  Nolan thought that Brie was effectively a liquid at room temperature, and would take the form of its container.  Monisha believed that it would soften but still hold its shape.  Welll….we ran a little experiment (left a small bit of Brie in a glass overnight) and… Monisha is right! Brie is a solid at room temperature. Her prize? A one time decision made by Nolan at her request (sometimes we have a lot of trouble making small decisions).