Just Angling for June 24^th, 2004

By Donald Millus

Fresh Local Seafood Great, Paris or Here

I went looking for king mackerel at Three-Mile Reef last week, but had to settle for a pair of Spanish mackerel and a two-pound bluefish, caught by trolling Clark and Hopkins spoons just off the Garden City surf. Back at the Murrells Inlet launching ramp, I threw a net for twenty minutes and ended up with a pound of 4-inch brown shrimp. I grilled the fish and Pat sautéed the shrimp with green peppers for our most economical seafood dinner of the month.

My wife had treated us to a week in Paris for D-Day’s sixtieth anniversary. (We tour Europe every thirty-five years, whether we need to or not. In 1970 I was on my way to Vietnam, so we did Germany, Italy, and Belgium, leaving France for another day.)

I missed the three-piece-suited gentlemen anglers we had found in Italy. The Seine, at least at Paris, didn’t look very fishable. However, the seafood was excellent, never overcooked as the seafood of Horry and Georgetown County sometimes is, even in the pricier restaurants. (I was surprised to discover that Paris is not one of the top-five most expensive cities in Europe, since we rarely got off much under a hundred American for dinner for two. I felt like a third-worlder with my weak dollar. Twice, Paris beggars even gave them back to me! As an American, I was embarrassed that it cost me a buck and a quarter to buy a Euro dollar!)

Speaking of overcooking, a waiter at La Cupole cautioned me about the steak Tartar, wanting to be assured that I knew what I was ordering. I soothed his Gallic concerns by assuring him that I had been eating raw hamburger with onions in my mother’s kitchen from the age of six. When I pronounced the raw double-hamburger-like dish superb he smiled as if he had just though of his great-grandfather derailing a German freight train in 1943 and announced that he had prepared it himself. The steak was accompanied by the best fried potatoes that I had ever eaten. By the way, salt was rarely found on the table, and the three beautiful young ladies at the next table ordered the same main course, only dumping their hot fries on their cold beef.

Lucy Griffith, Conway High School’s majestic French and Spanish teacher, had suggested we stay at Villa Des Artistes, within walking distance of everything, including thirty bars, restaurants, and cafes less than five minutes away. Le Bar a Huitres, The Oyster Bar, has a branch just across Rue St. Michel, and we enjoyed their boiled shrimp, oysters, clams, whelks, and sea snails—at least that’s what I think they were, tiny delicacies that needed a pin the size of a needle to be extracted from their black marble-sized shells before being dipped in vinegar with garlic and shallots.

All shellfish were served raw, of course but the steamed Mediterranean spider crab was o.k., and the grilled lobster was superb. Best fish dish, however, was the grilled Dover sole for two that Pat and I enjoyed at Alice Abeng’s EBN restaurant specializing in Franco-Africaine specialties. The in-the-aisle—it’s a small restaurant—Cameroon dancing on Friday and Saturday nights was magnificent, as were her ginger flavored hush puppies. Around midnight, she took some of her home-brewed fruit liquor out from under the bar and treated Pat and me to a taste of heaven. Fortunately, we had only to walk next door to the hotel, where we spent the next two hours chatting with a Scotch foursome of retirees who looked like they came from BBC central casting. They agreed that the French were smart to surrender Paris, rather than let it be destroyed.

Honorable mention goes to the grilled salmon and sea perch that Pat and I enjoyed for lunch on our chilly first day in Paris—the only day without bright sunshine—in a café on Rue St. Michel. Huge slices of rhubarb tart topped off lunch. I was disappointed that the first waiter we met and all the others did not live up to the traditional image of Paris waiters: Ours were unfailingly polite, as were all the Parisians, even the paratroopers who ran by Pat as she sat under the Eiffel Tower waiting for me to come down from the top. (They were chasing a suspicious foreigner whom they caught without firing their machine guns.) Oh, yes, excellent duck and rabbit at the Polish (“Wadja”) but very French restaurant just across the street from our hotel.

Highlight of the trip for me was the opportunity to salute at the tomb of the unknown soldier underneath the Arc de Triumph on the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day. That was for my brother, wounded in Germany toward the end of the war, and all my fellow soldiers, living and dead, of Vietnam and all our other wars. And, by the way, Vince in “Pulp Fiction” was right: a quarter-pounder with cheese is a “Royale” in Paris. However, I’d stick to the fish and shellfish if you go there!

P.S. My fishing neighbor, Dr. Joey Sanders, patronized the same MacDonald’s on the Champs Elysee as I did. Small world.