Fast food in Paris: an oxymoron

One might say only a dumb American would go to Paris and eat fast food, but sometimes you have no choice. For example, you might have underestimated how long it takes to get from one place to another, and you really want to get into the Arc de Triomphe before it closes for the night, and realize there's not enough time for a leisurely dinner. So, you find yourself on Champs Elysees (a street that ends at Arc de Triomphe), looking for a fast food restaurant. There's a McDonald's. But you think you should stay true to the local flavor. You see a chain called Quick, that sells sandwiches and salads. You don't have them in the U.S., so it will count as local flavor.

Bad decision. Quick turned out to be anything but. There are 3-4 people working at the counter, and the lines are 2-3 people deep. At any U.S. fast food place you'd be able to order and probably get your order in 5 minutes. Here you notice that in 10 minutes they've served just one customer in your line. Now there's still another customer ahead of you, a young woman. She proceeds to chat with the guy behind the counter for maybe 5 minutes. It doesn't look like flirty banter, or old friends catching up. Their facial expressions are intense and businesslike. What could they be talking about? Is she questioning him about the place of origin of the meat Quick uses, how ethically the animals are treated, or if the farmers were paid a fair wage? Without knowing French, you'll never know. But yes, it takes another 10 minutes until she is finally served. No, this isn't an exceptionally slow line. The situation is the same at other lines. And it's not because the employees are sluggish. They seem to be busy and moving around at all times, just like at any U.S. fast food place. So there are no outward clues for slowness. But you start thinking that maybe you should have tried to go to a restaurant with waiter service -- the result might have been the same.

And the restrooms might have been nicer too. The ones at Quick were dirty. There were shreds of toilet paper all over the floor, and no toilet paper in some stalls. Not only that, you had to pay to enter women's restroom (only 20 euro cents, but still). But men's restroom was free! Go figure.

We ate in time to make it to Arc de Triomphe, but we were cutting it close. So much for "quick" food. Maybe we should have gone to McDonald's, assuming McDonald's is able to maintain consistent customer service standards across different countries, even in high pedestrian traffic places.

Mandatory post about food in Paris

Back to "what I did on my summer vacation" series. It would be unthinkable to go to Paris and not try the food, but being on a tight budget, we got to taste very little of French cuisine. We lived mostly on my mom's cooking, which is not any worse than in a typical Parisian cafe or bistro, if the two we sampled were any indication. That's not to say they were bad, it's just that my mom is an excellent cook. :-) In both places we tried, the food was good, just not extraordinary. One thing that stood out was the popularity of mussels, served with fries. I saw this combination at several restaurants, just peering into the window to see what the people were eating inside. Mussels are yummy but not filling, and even a huge pile of them isn't very much once you throw away the shells. So a side dish is necessary, but I didn't expect fries to be served with such a... noble food. I always thought of mussels in the context of paella or risotto.

Croissants, another mandatory thing to try in Paris, are also not that different from the ones in Austin. I am, however, not an expert on any kind of flaky dough pastries, because they are too calorific to eat often. So all those cosy little boulangeries and pattiseries (bakeries that bake bread, and those that specialize only in pastries) on every corner got little more from me than wistful sighs. But French people, they love their bread. The city streets after work are full of people with fresh baguettes sticking out of their bags.

They also like rabbit meat, it seems. Every butcher shop has whole, skinless rabbits on display. The first time you see those little monsters, staring with their sightless eyes at the ceiling, it may give you a pause. Nor can you immediately tell what it is. So Ray did a little skit where he loudly wondered, in an exaggerated Texas accent, whether this was a possum. The shopkeepers successfully ignored him.

A possum.... uh, a rabbit in a Paris butcher shop.	Tagine (or tajine) (left) and vegetable stew at a Moroccan restaurant.

In addition to two French cafes, we also went to a Moroccan restaurant in the Latin Quarter to eat some yummy tagine. By the way, Moroccan cuisine is so common here that you can easily conclude it is to French as Mex is to Tex. Many mainstream restaurants have Moroccan dishes on the menu. Years ago, when I made a superficial attempt to study French, there was a dialogue in my textbook where two friends went to a restaurant and ordered couscous. I was surprised -- is couscous so popular over there that it made its way into textbooks? The answer turns out to be yes.

Next: French fast food -- an adventure unto itself.

More pictures from my trip to Paris are in my photo gallery.

ArmadilloCon 2010: writers' workshop, and sandwiches that cost their weight in gold

Writers' workshop went as usual, which is to say, not bad. I workshopped the same story as in the ApolloCon workshop. I didn't have time to finish a new one, because the deadlines for the two workshops were so close. I had only 3 days to fix my story before submitting it to the ArmadilloCon workshop. The comments I got on my story at ArmadilloCon were different than the ones I got at ApolloCon. So my fixes might have worked, at least the ones that concerned point of view and character motivation. But some of the comments, addressing deep, structural flaws of the story, remained.

ArmadilloCon is in a different hotel this time than before. As before, the only two options for writers' workshop lunch were (1) buy food catered by the hotel, or (2) bring your own. Hotel-provided lunch cost... wait for it... $34.34. That's for a sandwich, cookie, and coke. No, the sandwich was not made with caviar. Naturally, many people, including me, opted to bring their own lunches.

Our previous hotel allowed people who brought sack lunches to eat in the workshop room with the rest of the group. The new hotel does not allow it. People who brought their food were told to leave the hotel, and walk far, far away from the hotel grounds to consume the food.

But here's the dilemma. The whole point of group lunch was that students get to hang out with the teachers (professional writers and editors who critique students' work), and talk about writing. This wouldn't work if those students who brought food went outside, and those with catered lunches staid inside. So, in each critique group (there were nine of them, 5-6 students each), if even one person brought sack lunch, the whole group had to go outside. Ergo, after spending $34 you still had to go out into 100-degree Texas heat and eat stuff you could buy for $5 from a sandwich shop nearby.

Fortunately, there was another option, to go into somebody's hotel room to eat. The hotel allows you to eat your own food in hotel rooms, just not in public spaces. My group went into one of our students' hotel room (she was from Houston, thus she was staying in the hotel). At least we didn't have to roast alive while eating.

But other than that, the workshop was pretty good. A big thank you goes out to its organizer, Stina Leich. She made the best out of ridiculous circumstances the hotel put us in.

Pictures from Armadillocon 2010 and writers' workshop are in my photo gallery.

Linucon 2005: Chupaqueso

This is what chupaqueso is described as in the Linucon program book: "The experts prepare cheese in a fried cheese shell, with extra cheese. The audience gets to eat the results. A favorite of Schlock Mercenary fans."

The story of chupaqueso invention

Chupaqueso was invented by Howard Tayler, the author of the Schlock Mercenary web comic. I'm not sure if I correctly remember the convoluted story of Chupaqueso's birth, but... At first there was a word. Howard Tayler was looking for a made-up word to describe quintessential cheap, greasy, Mexican fast food, probably for his comic strip, and chupaqueso suggested itself. It's composed of Spanish words for "suck" and "cheese".

Then, while he was on a low carb diet, and cheese must have been a major staple in his kitchen, he was flipping through a cookbook and saw a cheese crisp. That was the prototype of the chupaqueso. If I remember correctly, Howard improved on it by adding cheese filling to it.

How to make it

You cook it by spreading shredded cheese in a circle on a griddle (a pan would do too, I suppose). It melts and forms a pancake which will become the chupaqueso shell. You flip it over. Then you put more shredded cheese -- the same or different kind -- in the middle of the shell. Then you fold the sides of the pancake over one another, and the result is a chupaqueso.

Howard and Jay Maynard (a.k.a The Tron Guy) gave a chupaqueso cooking demonstration in the Con Suite. I ate a piece, and, well, it tastes just as cheesy and greasy as one would expect. That's not to say it's bad!

Click on the picture for YouTube video of the cooking demonstration.

Here are more pictures of making chupaqueso

Here are more posts and images from Linucon 2005.

Towards the end they even cooked a chupaqueso with a chocolate filling. I had to try that too, and even made a video of that, but must have accidentally deleted it. Or maybe my unconscious mind could not tolerate this level of disgust and made me hit the button. :-) It suffices to say chocolate didn't do much to improve the classic version.