Like most cooks, I suppose, I have a good memory for meals. Today, I remember a salad. This was over 20 years ago on my first trip to Europe. My company, bless their generous hearts, sent me to a sales meeting outside Amsterdam. After a brief performance at the meeting, my wife and I drove down to Brussels and to la Grand-Place, the old square in the center of town. It was February, cold, snowing lightly and the plaza was beautiful in the late afternoon. We drank a Trappist beer (maybe a Chimay) in a warm pub, explored a bit, found a cheap hotel and started looking for a restaurant. We found one on the Petite rue de Bouchers just off the Grand-Place.
I was primarily interested in a fish stew and the salad was incidental, or so I thought, to the main course. Only this one was special. It was an extremely fresh mix of very tiny leaves of greens topped with gorgeous white pink sliced figs and a sweet, delicious and complex blue cheese. The chef had prepared an amazingly light vinaigrette that did the subtle work of improving and setting off the sweet of the figs and cheese, lifting the flavors of the greens while never really existing as a separate taste. You didn’t taste it – you tasted the result. It was absolutely stunning.
The photo, by the way, is an approximation. I didn’t have my camera for the real salad.
The rest of the meal? I don’t remember. The fish stew, the wine, a dessert, I don’t know. But the salad. Perfection, a peak moment and a wonderful memory.
Walter, Three of us, from your same generous employer, stopped overnight in Brussels as we traveled by car between meetings in Dusseldorf and The Netherlands. Like you, we drove into the old square, where it was raining so hard that one could hardly stand up in it. We found a nice hotel – the Amigo – about a block off the square, checked in, got the concierge to make us a reservation at a good restaurnat for mussels, and hit the bar. The bartender asked what we wanted and we said "beer" not realizing that Belgium has over 200 breweries – this was about 25 years ago, and I know better now. He was kind and humored us, first asking a few questions, then prsenting the first Chimay I had ever seen or tasted. We each had two. I know we went to that restaurant, but I can't remember the meal, salad or otherwise, for the life of me. I do remember the Chimay, though, and now that we have brought Alabama into the 20th century, I'm glad we have some good Belgian ales right here – perhaps to accompany something you might create for us to eat.