Text 2712, 86 rader
Skriven 2013-07-22 09:13:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: Williamsport 914
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Parisian night at the Herdic. The guest chef had been
a French teacher at the local high school and then spent a
year in Paris taking cooking and language classes, getting
divorced, and coming back to town only to find there was
no longer a French teacher position at the high school.
We stopped in early for a cocktail (Manhattan for me, beer
for her) and got to talk to her. It turns out that she is
Dorothy's (the one with the broken leg) niece and a former
resident of Annie's neighborhood. Small world.

Most of what everyone but Ann ate was from the special
guest menu - in fact, I had the menu up and down.

The starter was cream of mushroom soup with chanterelles
and black trumpets - very tasty but made with insufficiently
rinsed dried reconstituted mushrooms, so there was a ton of
grit in the bottom of the bowl.

Duck foie gras on brioche was what you'd expect. I doubted
they could make any money on this even though the portion
was not much more than half an ounce. The liver was underdone,
which was fine with me, not a perfect specimen, with a little
liver gristle. The brioche, made by Liz, was excellent
(we'd seen the dough resting during our visit) and toasted
just so. A blob of peach jam was more tart than sweet and went
very well. The bulk of the plate was made up by a frisee salad
with raspberries in vinaigrette - luckily not raspberry
vinaigrette.

The special main was duck a l'orange, which usually these
days means a sauteed half breast sliced and fanned out on a
plate so as to look bigger. I asked for mine rare, others
asked for medium-rare. Presently the waiter trotted out with
the news that they were all well done. Whatever; we all
accepted that. It turns out that each serving was enough for
two, a preroasted half duck on rather mushy thyme-scented rice
with nicely cooked green beans on the side. The duck was okay,
a blast from the past - I haven't had duck well done in years
- with a not-too-sweet sauce that was rather like the stuff I
made for our duck at the picnic, only she used Cointreau where
I used sherry, and mine had a touch of soy.

Cotes du Rhone, which turned out surprisingly to be a
relatively rare blanc, was the wine pairing for the duck, so I
had that: floral, pineapple-mango, dry enough to cut the grease.
I didn't catch the maker's name.

The dessert of the day was a "tarte tatin" with peaches and
blueberries (instead of apples), as fresh peaches and
blueberries were in. The crust was a little unflaky, almost to
be expected in this hot humid weather. The peaches were cooked
down to almost a nothingness, and the blueberries were raw and
strewn on top. My guess is that the tarte had come out soggy
and unsightly; perhaps the liquid content of the peaches was
underestimated the way I underestimated the amount of whey
left in the bocconcini for the picnic carbfree pizza, and the
blueberries were an effort to hide the unbeauty of the crust
and the collapse of the peaches.

Annie's meal started with escargot from the regular menu. (As
a child, she was dragged out to French restaurants all the
time, as her mother could not cook and her father was well
off. She acquired a lifelong fondness for escargot and frog
legs, and all through her childhood that was her standard
order when eating out). This was followed by a distinctly
un-Parisian crabcake, which was said to be good.

The only other deviation from the specials list was Jill's
filet mignon rare, which looked pretty good, charred on
the outside as if by an open flame, nicely red inside.

Oh, Ann ordered some kind of chocolate mousse cake for
afters; it was rich and steakhouse normal, if you will.

The bill was high, though they weren't making a mint off
us; if I were Mystery Diners or Restaurant Impossible or
something I'd diagnose too high food costs as well as too
specialized an offering. Williamsport is just not ready
for French food, even French food from the 1960s. I wonder
how the town will respond to even the homogenized Malay
stuff I propose to serve. At least the bar was not set
beyond my reach, speaking of high.

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