Some months ago my son and I met up in Amsterdam and made our way to Barcelona, via Brussels and Paris, to meet up with his mom. We are generally, in my opinion anyway, pretty good travel partners. We both enjoy exploring and hanging out in cafés and restaurants, catching local performances, and photographing the culture around us. Like me, he seems to place a greater emphasis on enjoying and learning about the culture and people than on tourist sites.
After a morning of photography in the Tuileries (which was after a fun never-to-be-forgotten breakfast conversation with Nigeria’s Goodluck Jonathan), we found a great out of the way café near the Sorbonne where we proceeded to have an amazingly Southern (as in God’s Country, home of the Auburn Tigers and Crimson Tide, Southern U.S. ya’ll) lunch.
Growing up my uncle had engendered in me a lifelong love for the southern tradition of raw meat and it was this café’s tartar (or tartare) that attracted me. My uncle, by the way, is an internal medicine doc and heart surgeon.
My son perused the menu with his ever improving French and ordered. The waiter looked at him, placed his hands on his stomach, and asked in his best English “tripe? You like?”. My son nodded his adventurous assent.
OK, so tripe and chitlins are about an inch removed from each other, but I’m going to call it close enough. Personally I prefer good haggis or black pudding to either. And if you think none of this is for you, have you had any andoulie sausage lately?
So there you have it… Chitlins in Paris.
