beef? or salad? you order first.

One of the comic highlights of my recent trip to Reims came shortly after exiting the station, when we passed this restaurant:

You have to give them credit for choosing a theme and sticking to it. No Asian fusion or funny foams and reductions going on here. No oyster nights or "art" exhibitions or tango lessons on the weekend. I can just imagine having a business luncheon here among a bunch of provincial Frenchmen:

"Bon, qu'est-ce que tu prends, toi?"
"Bah, je sais meme pas encore..."
"Moi non plus. Soit le boeuf, ou..."
"Il y a la salade, aussi, ils en ont de la salade."
"Soit le boeuf, soit la salade, oui, c'est claire."

who wants to trade for some poached eggs?

For our staff meal after fashion week we had a choice of entrée: smoked salmon or poached eggs. Since the restaurant in question was a low-key destination for authentic French cuisine, I lumped for the eggs, thinking you can get smoked salmon pretty much anywhere, e.g. airports and nightclubs, and anyway it's overfished, etc.

But when I saw the actual oeufs poché I thought I might have made a horrible mistake.

The presentation here strikes a queasy balance between the scatological and the anatomical. In addition to being a rounded nugget of suggestive size, a poached egg also has kind of a scrotal twist on top, the effect of which is greatly heightened when you place two of them side by side, as here. Now imagine half the staff of a fashion company, whoever didn't order the smoked salmon, grinning uncomfortably, all thinking the same thing.

Happily, it was delicious. The sauce was red wine, bacon, and probably the entire day's steak drippings. You just needed a little bread to soak things up.