Reims dreams

Can you believe last week was my one-year anniversary with Jules? Me, who looked most likely to die alone eaten by Bobby (the cat)? I know, me neither. It's been a great year, although obviously complicated by my moving to another country two plus hours away. Which sucks, but has some upsides. Like, with summer around the corner, I've decided to pretend that weekends in Luxembourg are me going to my rural retreat (it helps that Jules's apartment is awesome and has a huge terrace I'm dying to be served cocktails on). Who doesn't want to be cool enough to have a little pied à terre in an exotic European country? I can merrily pretend to be rich enough to be engaging in a little light tax evasion in my Luxembourgish pad, much fun.

So we decided to celebrate this milestone in style with a trip to that most festive of regions, Champagne. We took Friday off work and made a beeline from Luxembourg to Reims on a beautiful sunny day, to have an anniversary lunch at Le Foch, the restaurant I dined in with my sister when we visited back in 2011. In fact, Le Foch was really why we stayed a night in Reims - I had initially thought of doing two nights in Epernay, but I wanted to have lunch there and I didn't want Jules to have to worry about driving afterwards. It turned out pretty well, since there's not all that much to see in Epernay other than champagne houses (which are pretty cool) and we also had a nice drive between the two cities - but more on that next time.

In front of an unfortunately-scaffolded Reims cathedral - not a cloud in the sky

A row of different animal gargoyles

Beautiful arches recede into the distance inside the cathedral

I don't have anything appropriate to say about this. Let's just say you wouldn't get into a white van with this on the side (it says "Don't be afraid" by the way)

We had a more modest five courses this time (plus amuse-bouches and petits fours - there was also a cheese course but I didn't put a photo of that because it just looked like cheese), as opposed to the seven or eight of the full dégustation I did with my sister.

Amuses-bouche: foie gras and apple pannacotta, parmesan sablé and the most delicious tuna (? tasted like hamburger but I think he said tuna) with a pickle gêlée on top

Rabbit cannelloni - weirdly tasted nothing like rabbit, more like tuna (tuna confusion all round) but tasty

Red mullet

Venison with puree and acidic turnips - you wouldn't think a turnip would be so delicious, Baldrick would have a field day

Chocolate feuilletine with spun sugar: soooo good and crunchily delicious

After the cheese course, a pear wine smoothie

Not looking awkward

Lunch lasted about three hours, then we still had some time to walk around Reims a bit and visit Le Vergeur museum.

Le Vergeur museum

This 13th-16th century building houses the collections of Hugues Krafft, the rich scion of a champagne-cultivating family who owned the house in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was a keen traveller, photographer and artist who was passionate about both preserving Reims history (he salavaged many pieces from the ruins after WWI) and collecting items from his travels in central and east Asia. Surprisingly, from the limited number of his own works on display in the house, he was also quite a gifted photographer. I suppose you always think these types will be a bit dilettantish and do these things because they have the leisure and money to, not because of any particular talent, but I was impressed. The house was left more or less as it was in his lifetime, at his request, so it offers a different perspective than your traditional museum. It's accessible (I think) only by guided tour. We were the only ones on the tour, which was nice, and our guide was very informative and knowledgeable.

AND there's a collection of some 50 original Dürer woodcuts and engravings. My favourites, the Apocalypse series, were taken from a book printed in 1511, but which was subsequently unbound so that you can see all of the woodcuts at once. It was incredible that these were 500 years old but looked just like new, and they were actually presented in a normally-lit room, not the semi-darkness you often find with old books and manuscripts. They reminded me a lot of the Apocalypse tapestries at Angers. No photos were allowed inside the museum, especially of the woodcuts of course, but there's some photos on the website here and I would recommend checking it out if you're in Reims - not too big either, so you don't get exhausted!

PS I know "Reims dreams" only rhymes if you mispronounce Reims. Or dreams.

Reims videos

I tried to post these with the post below (a thrill-a-minute account of days 2 and 3 in Reims, don't miss it!) but it wasn't working properly for some reason. Anyway, here are some very short videos of the light show at the cathedral. Unfortunately, now I have uploaded them, I realise you can hardly see anything (on my computer, they look a lot clearer and they are also rotated the right way up). So, they weren't great to begin with and they are even less impressive posted here. But anyway, I've uploaded them now, so if you want to get a very vague idea of it, it will only take up about 1 minute total to watch all of them. If you don't have that long, #5 is probably the best.

Where there's a Reims part one, there must be a...

Reims part two! I thought I'd better do this today because my friend Amber is visiting this weekend and I'll have that to blog about next. As I think I've said before, it is easy to lose the motivation to blog about "part two" of a trip - there are usually tons of photos to go through, you feel like you're rehashing stuff and/or just presenting a mundane list of things you saw and did - and that only increases the more time that passes between the event and the blog. That's why I made a real effort to blog in "real time" as it were in Ukraine.

Anyway, on Saturday Jess wanted to go and watch the France-New Zealand rugby match. I am not *at all* a rugby fan, and to be fair Jess isn't really either, but she thought it would be fun and a cool atmosphere to experience seeing a game in France. After all, it's not very often that the French remember we exist. The game started at around 10.30, but I was up and ready a bit before that, so I decided to head out early to see some sights and meet Jess at the pub we had scoped out the night before.

I headed to the cathedral, which was pretty much empty at that time of day - which was nice, it was already starting to fill up with coachloads of tourists by the time I left. To be honest, it's not the most impressive inside of all the cathedrals I've been to (a lot!), most probably because it was gutted by fire in WWI. Reims was the coronation cathedral for the French monarchy, dating back, as we know, 800 years. It was built on the site of the basilica where Saint Rémi baptised Clovis, the first Catholic French king, in 496.


Reims cathedral


Bizarre camp dinosaur-looking gargoyle on the cathedral


This statue looks like a right moody so-and-so. Pretty sure she'd punch you if she wasn't missing her hands


A chap who lost his head (and got some sort of weird neck growth in return?)


Allegedly famous "smiling angel" statue. Kind of creepy. Also kind of inspecting his/her nails


Bum!


Inside the cathedral


Stained glass windows by Chagall

When I got to the pub, I found Jess sitting with two strangers, one of whom was in an All Blacks shirt and thus presumably Kiwi. They turned out to be a couple who were roadtripping around Europe before planning to do a year working in London - very typical Kiwi stuff. They were really nice & it was fun to watch the game with them. Much more knowledgeable about rugby than us, especially the guy! I didn't pay all that much attention to the game, but it was good that we won! There seemed to be some All Blacks supporters somewhere in the back of the pub at first, but then I think they left for some reason, and you would just get silence punctuated by some "woohoos" from our table (at which everyone turned round and stared, every time) when the All Blacks scored a try. After the game, we moved outside into absolutely blazing sunshine and had a pub lunch with the Kiwi couple. I got to have some proper fish and chips for the first time in a long time, yum!

Jess wanted to head back to the hotel for a rest after lunch, and I wanted to find somewhere to watch the F1 qualifying - the pub where we watched the rugby was showing a replay of the same game. I found a different pub but they told me the qualifying was on in the middle of the night, which it wasn't, and explained to me that Singapore was in a different time zone, like I was an idiot. Yes, Singapore is in a different time zone, but Singapore is a night race! Anyway, thwarted in the attempt, I wandered out of town to the basilica of the aforementioned St. Remi, where he is buried. Again, it was nice enough, but not particularly interesting to blog about.


Tomb of St Rémi


I thought these unusual late 13th/early 14th century lead engravings were pretty cool




I finished off the afternoon by visiting some Roman ruins - a 'cryptoportique', the subterranean remains of a grain storage markety thing. Basically just a big underground room, but it was free! I always forget how far the Romans got and that they actually had real, functioning settlements all over the place.


Cryptoportique

When I got back to the hotel room, I found a bottle of Dom Perignon chilling in the bathroom sink, packed in with a couple of packets of frozen potato bites (cheaper than ice, apparently). We enjoyed our champagne out of the plastic cups they leave on the side of the sink, which is probably such sacrilege that we would have been run out of town had we been caught in the act. Jess had also bought a packet of the allegedly famous pink biscuits of Reims, which my friend Liz had insisted we try (never having had them herself, mind you). We tried eating them straight out of the packet, only to find they were hard and dry. I read the back, and you're supposed to dip them in champagne or a sweet wine like port, kind of like biscotti and coffee I suppose. We gingerly tried it out with a small amount of champagne. Turns out they're even worse dipped in something - mine instantly turned to complete sugary mush, thankfully not in the champagne glass though, that would have been even more criminal!

On Saturday night, we had our Michelin meal, which has already been blogged in loving detail. After that, we just went back to the hotel room to bed.

I forget the exact sequence of what we did on Sunday... We had lunch at the same pub where we watched the rugby (chicken burger for me this time, and flammenkeuche for Jess) and just enjoyed the sun. Ah, I miss the sun already! It really was fabulous, hot weather, we were really lucky. We visited the Palace of Tau, the old bishops' residence adjoining the cathedral, where its "treasures" are kept. This was a bit disappointing, since the vast majority of said treasures seem to have disappeared in the Revolution - no crowns or sceptres to be found. There were some nice tapestries and some of the original statues from the cathedral, and that was about it. One really cool thing was some gargoyles that looked like they had metal tongues - turned out that during the fire, the lead pipes had melted and run out of the gargoyles' mouths and then cooled in place, so it looks like the gargoyles are spitting out lead.


Lead-mouth gargoyles


A necklace supposedly taken from Charlemagne's tomb


There was a display of pieces made by people training to be master carpenters or something. Some of them were actually pretty good, but with all due respect to this guy, you do kind of look at this and think "300 hours' work, REALLY?"


A sort of storage room for bits and pieces of statues. Just kind of liked this photo

Later on, we went to the art gallery, which was okay. I was disappointed that only 2 out of their collection of Cranach engravings were on display at any one time, but oh well, preservation and all that.

We had time for a glass of wine or two before the train, then a smooth journey back home & Jess went back to London the next day, while I went to a workshop on copyrights and the ethical diffusion of information (thought rather than taking the day off I may as well get paid to sit around doing nothing and get a free lunch into the bargain. Plus it's good for the old CV).

Miam miam Michelin!

I had my first experience dining out in a Michelin-star restaurant in Reims at Le Foch restaurant. This is definitely not the sort of dining experience I'm used to, but our parents had very kindly sent some money for us to have a special night out together, and my sister generously pitched a bit in as well. As for me, I mostly shut my eyes because I wouldn't have dared order anything otherwise! Jess wanted to go for the dégustation menu - she's a pescatarian (fish-eating but otherwise vegetarian) and it was her lucky day since there was only one non-fish course of all the seven on the dégustation menu. We had read a review saying they were very unwelcoming and rude to vegetarians, but while I imagine there were few options if you didn't eat fish, they were actually very accommodating in swapping the meat course for us. In general, I was a bit nervous of rude waiters and having to be very formal, but it was absolutely fine. The waiters were all nice and helpful, and we even had a laugh and joke with some of them, and got them to take photos for us, so there was really no standing on ceremony. As for the meal - amazing! It was really a memorable and unique experience for me - who knows when if ever I'll be eating in a Michelin-star restaurant again - and great to share that with my sister! I don't know if taking pictures of all your courses is the classy thing to do in a fine dining establishment, but what the heck, I did it anyway!

All good things start with champagne! We went with Taittinger, in honour of our visit the day before. I'm clearly sitting up straight on my best behaviour here!

Before our official 7 courses even began, there was the amuse bouches. 1) Cold cauliflower velouté. I'm not generally big on cold soup, but this had a really nice flavour and smooth texture and wasn't ice cold. 2) Cheese with ham. We had already explained that Jess was a vegetarian before this turned up, but I suppose the message didn't get through to the amusing department. They made her a new plate with no fuss though. I'm not big on ham but this had that strong cured flavour and was very nice. 3) Mini brown shrimp tart. Seafood is not really my thing, so this was my least favourite of the three, but still not bad at all.

Not a bad photo except for THE CLAW which has taken up residence in my lap.

First course: Carpaccio de langoustine avec caviar d'Aquitaine. Langoustine carpaccio with Aquitaine caviar.

Sorry, I forgot to take a photo before I started eating. I assure you it turned up in a perfect circle looking much prettier! As I said, seafood isn't my favourite, so raw langoustines weren't going to be the biggest hit ever with me. The flavour was okay, but the texture was a bit weird to my taste. This was the only one of the 7 I didn't finish, but Jess took care of that.

Second course: Galette de légumes croquants, homard bleu, parmesan. A galette (in this context, basically a fancy way of saying "round thing") of crunchy vegetables, blue lobster and parmesan.

This definitely looked very visually appealing, although Jess and I tut-tutted (not seriously) that our plates didn't look identical, which Top Chef and the like has taught me should be the goal. I'm not sure whether I've had lobster before or only crayfish, but either way, this was nice and there was a generous amount of lobster too! In fact, all the way through the dishes were a good size without of course being huge (and trust me, with 7 courses you do not need huge!) I think we all have the concept that you will get a millimeter-sized cube of food at these fancy places, but it was not the case this time. I think this was virtually the only vegetables all night though!

Course the third: Saint Pierre roti, haricot cocos de Paimpol, émulsion de crustacés. Roast John Dory with beans that I can't find a translation for but I think we thought at the time were butter beans and a shellfish emulsion. I actually thought while eating this that it was a tomato foam, guess I don't have a great palate. Anyway, this doesn't look that special on the photo, but it was definitely my favourite course and I think Jess's as well. The emulsion was full of flavour, the beans were meltingly soft, and the fish was fresh, firm and delicious! Total foodgasm!

We've moved on to some yummy Sancerre rosé.

Fourth course: This was the only course we had to swap on the menu to suit Jess. It was meant to be veal, but instead we got monkfish with crispy leeks and I think a tomato compote. I'm not vegetarian, but I liked the sound of monkfish better than veal as well. If they had been serving chicken or something, I would have been all over it though! This was also very nice, again great texture to the fish, nice and flaky. Oh and in that little copper pot is potato purée. Very cute!

Very nice photo of Jess

The amazing cornucopia of cheese on offer!

Fifth course: My selection of cheeses, half eaten again. The big bit in front is Brie - I wouldn't have gone for something as "boring" as Brie, but the waitress told me it was very good, and it turned out to be incredibly different from the supermarket version, this actually had strong flavour and character. It was also practically oozing out of its skin, which doesn't sound appealing at all when I put it like that, but it was just ripe and lovely. I forget what the others are, not sure if the one on the right is a Port Salut or just something like a Port Salut, and I think on the left is a goat's cheese. All very tasty though, and served with different condiments selected to complement them.

Course Six: Macaron rhubarbe-framboise avec barbe à papa: Rhubarb-raspberry macaron with candyfloss. This was divine! Unusually for me, I think I liked it better than the chocolate dessert that followed. I ate the candyfloss separately, not too teeth-achingly sweet like a fairground version, and then underneath was a raspberry sorbet, rhubarb compote, fresh raspberries, a touch of cream, and finally the macaron. It really tasted like raspberries, which I adore, and the macaron was really soft, not chewy like they often are (I enjoy a chewy macaron too though). The cream was just right as well - I don't like too much, but it just added an extra softness to it all.

Another view of the macaroon minus its candyfloss hat. Looks kind of like a crimescene photo with the raspberry coulis escaping!

Sugar rush!

Concentrating - this is serious stuff!

As you can see, everyone else in the room (we weren't in the main dining room) has left by this stage, including people who arrived after us! No-one else was doing a dégustation, and our meal took a total of around three and a half hours to munch through!

Wahey - I managed!

Seventh course: Moelleux au chocolat de Saint Domingue, Paris Brest à boire. Chocolate fondant pudding (I assume the chocolate comes from Santo Domingo and is not associated with an actual saint?) with a liquid Paris Brest. A Paris Brest is a kind of doughnut-shaped dessert (it was made in honour of the Paris-Brest cycle race, so it's wheel shaped) made of choux pastry and praline cream. So basically it was a sort of praline milkshake. I don't really remember how it tasted, but despite preferring the macaron, I can tell you that the moelleux was very rich, cocoa-y and delicious. I even finished off Jess's! That's a real testament to my determination to hoover up any chocolate on offer, since as you can imagine, our intestinal fortitude was being severely tested by this stage of the evening!

Me and my Paris-Brest

We started off with an unheralded amuse-bouche, and I can only assume this was to really really make sure our bouche had been amused. I actually said to the waiter "you're going to kill us" when he brought this out, as I think both of us were full to bursting! We took one for the team though, and enjoyed the soft little cake at right (I think it was just a plain madeleine or something, not too sure, but it was light and pleasant), the wee little tarts and of course the chocolate, which again, was really cocoa-tasting rather than being just all fat and sugar.

One last photo, well and truly stuffed and ready to stagger home to bed!

Reims part 1

On Thursday evening, Jess and I headed out to dinner with my friend Liz to a local place called Mama Bigoude's. It's pretty much your standard crepe restaurant, except every room has a theme - you can eat in the living room, bedroom, laundry room etc. I chose the bathroom. It was a lot of fun - it's sort of clichéd but true that fun and playfulness are sometimes rather absent in the French ethos - and the food was actually pretty good as well. Often with these sorts of gimmicky places, that gets put to one side, but I was pretty happy with my duck crepe (confit and magret in the same crepe yum yum) and salted caramel and chocolate sundae (with amazing caramalized pecans) and I think the others enjoyed it too.


Me and Jess dining in the bathroom


Liz and Jess

Afterwards we ended up at a tiny little wine bar. It was nice to be out somewhere for once where I didn't feel like the oldest in the room (Tours has a pretty studenty scene, after which I think the majority of people go off and have babies and dinner parties or something) but the flipside of that was getting periodically bothered by middle-aged men, one of whom stood right next to me and said "we can say anything we like in front of them, they don't speak French". My sister was right, I should have waited to see what they would say before disabusing them of this notion, but let that be a lesson to all of us that just sometimes, people can actually speak more than one language. I'm sure I'm sometimes guilty of saying things a bit louder than I should, but it never fails to amaze me whenever I hear English-speaking tourists in France having what they obviously think are private conversations right in the middle of the bus or metro or whatever. Funny how they forget the (mythical) idea that "everyone speaks English" as soon as they feel the need to whine about how everyone on the metro stinks (usually true, but keep it to yourself).

We didn't have a big night, because on Friday it was up early to catch the train to Reims. Despite having two changes (shuttles from the TGV on both sides) everything went very smoothly and we got to Reims about 11.30, checked into our hotel, and headed out in the direction of the wine houses. I hadn't got around to booking anywhere, for various reasons, so we ended up going to Taittinger, one of the only houses where you don't need a reservation. Apparently this was one of the busiest weekends of the year for some reason, so most of the others were booked solid. We got there just before they closed for lunch, got tickets for the afternoon tour, and then traipsed around in the hot sun trying to find food. You'd think that there would be some options around a major tourist draw like that, but after being turned away from a fancy restaurant that was full, we opted for the other end of the scale and got croque monsieurs from a tabac. Mine was pretty nice, but the dude panicked upon being asked to make one without ham for Jess and just shoved 10 ccs of extra cheese in, so I think hers was a bit much.

The champagne tour was actually more interesting than expected. I learned of the existence of people called Riddlers (LOVE that) who have to turn the bottles in the racks over the course of months so that the sediment gradually gathers in the neck. Apparently they turn something like 60,000 bottles in an hour, if I'm remembering correctly. Can that be true? They must have the wrists of an 80 year old prostitute! (Sorry for that.) Once the sediment is in the neck, they plunge it into a very cold solution so an icecube forms around it, then open up the bottle, it shoots out, and they add a bit more sugar and something else I forget to get the bubbles back in it, then cork it up again. Who knew? The house are on the site of a former monastery, where the monks used to make wine, and the champagne is actually stored in Roman quarries excavated in around the 1st century A.D. We didn't know this going in, so it was an extra treat to have that special dimension to the tour. And of course the tour concluded with a glass of the main attraction, which we drank while chatting to a lovely mother and daughter from Los Angeles. Very nice the champagne was too, good flavour and nice fine bubbles. I don't get to drink champagne very often, but I would say that's one of the chief differences I noticed compared to other sparkling wines - you can actually really taste the delicate flavours as opposed to just getting the sensation of bubbles hitting your tongue.


In the Taittinger cellars

We had dinner at an Italian place, and then we were lucky enough to get to see a light show put on for the 800th anniversary of the cathedral. If you are in France and you possibly can, I would really encourage you to go see this! It is far and away the most impressive spectacle of this sort (including fireworks and lazers and so forth) that I've ever seen. It lasted about 25 minutes, and was more than just a projection on the front of the building, it was really tailored to the cathedral, with the lights tracing out individual features or giving special effects like projecting workmen lifting statues into place on the façade or showing the effect of a royal procession entering the cathedral, etc. I'm sure my photos don't do it justice (I also have some videos that I'll try to upload later, or you can look on their website http://www.cathedraledereims.fr/) but might give an idea of some of the different effects. By the way, there was a bush in the way on the lower left-hand side, so that's why there's a dark spot there. Definitely a memorable event and really pleased to have been able to be there while this was happening - it wasn't planned that way, I just knew Jess had been wanting to go to Champagne for ages, and I had realised on the way to Strasbourg that there was a TGV past there that didn't go through Paris, so it was fate. Especially since I just saw that if we had gone next weekend, there would have been no show!





I think this was meant to show beams on the cathedral as the workers 'constructed' it

The workers rolling the rose window into position etc.





These flags were 'lowered' down until they covered the whole façade (as you can see in the next photo)



I think this is meant to give an idea of how the cathedral may have looked in the Middle Ages, when the exterior would have been painted. My sister was asking how that could be true when she'd seen far more ancient preserved painted façades in Egypt. I was just having a look on the cathedral website, and according to them, it and other cathedrals have been cleaned over the course of centuries. It doesn't go into further specifics, but what I gather from other websites is that people's sense of aesthetics changed and even in Catholic countries they came to prefer gleaming white edifices to brightly coloured ones. Of course, even Roman and Greek statues were once painted (those creepy blank eyesockets weren't always that way) but to us it is really hard to imagine them any other way than pure white marble.

An impressionistic-style projection







All these lines opened up so it seemed like the cathedral was sort of unfurling from the centre


Bit hard to see, but this is the builders again, who sort of danced across the façade like in a ballet