Dinner @ Brigitte
Serendipitous encounters have a special value. One such event took place last night as I met an old friend I haven’t seen in 10 years who noticed my LinkedIn post on my move to Paris and pinged me as he was in town. I asked him to pick the dinner place and we ended up going to Brigitte the 17th arrondissement. And what an amazing place this turned out to be. Great French cuisine coupled with one of the best wine cellars in town.
We picked 2 appetizers to start:
Consommé et ravioles de crevettes black tiger aux cacahuètes, and
Saumon mariné comme des harengs, pomme de terre tièdes
Brigitte Menu
It occurred to me while going through the menu that in France every line item is a paragraph. The French menus require some level of thinking. A menu item is a long sentence that makes choosing rather an exquisitely demanding exercise. My friend and I ended up going with 2 special of the day items. He had the “beef entrecôte” while I went with the St Jacques scallops with Truffle.
Truffle business is big business and as I watched the waiter add some shavings of a Périgord Truffle (supposedly the Rolls Royce of Truffles) to my plate, I recalled a story I read about a joint venture between the Chinese and Italian underworlds to fool American chefs and consumers into paying a premium for bad Chinese truffle packaged in Italy to give it the Italian cachet. It seems that unlike French and Italian truffles which are harvested by specially trained dogs and pigs, Chinese farmers have routinely unearthed truffles to feed to their animals. Learning that this ‘black fungus’ commended a fortune in Europe and North America led to some joint criminal enterprise between clever Chinese and Italian conmen who used some solid supply chain tools to execute their plan. The plan was fairly simple: get loads of tasteless truffles from China; ship them to Italy; package them in an Italian factory to be able to add a seal of “Made in Italy” and send them to unsuspecting American consumers.
It’s quite fascinating how much hard work and R&D goes on in the underworld!
