Senior year in college when you think you're hot shit and ready for the big city, we would drive downtown for dinner on Saturday nights (via Lake Shore Drive south from Evanston, always going local Clark Street back up north for the scenic route). This is how we found places to eat: we would log on to Citysearch (pre-Metromix, pre-Yelp, pre-Time Out Chicago, pre-Twitter days, if you recall - or not) and check off the following search criteria: "Lakeview/Lincoln Park," "$", "alcohol"). Then methodically, we visited each of the search results and felt quite grown up that Saturday night stopped meaning dinner and a movie at Old Orchard.
The best part about this Mary Tyler Moore-style gastronomic process was that I continued to frequent most of these restaurants we discovered years after I'd graduated to "$$" in dining criteria. Such as Matsuya, that Wrigleyville bastion of cheap, filling and decent sushi and Japanese rice bowls with the leery chefs behind the counter and Penny's, great for Sunday night pajama pants pick-ups. And then there is La Creperie, with its garden and summer jazz and larger-than-life crepes bursting with all sorts of French concoctions and desserts that instigate 10-minute long internal battles just deciding which ones to have for dinner. Since 1999, to stay at peace with myself, I have stopped looking at the menu - it would always be the Boeuf Bourguignon and the Banana Sara and either Goose Island Summertime or 312; as dining budgets got a little more indulgent, the Assiette de Pate to start.
Me and Banana Sara at La Creperie.
Although these are all regular haunts, La Crep never feels like just another stay-in, snowed-out fallback in the 'hood. Even if it was just Friday night before a movie across the street at Landmark Century or on the way home from work, knowing I was headed there was as exhilarating as the prospect of four softball games on Sunday - it had the sabbatical quality of a crepe cathedral. Some extremely important occasions took place here: birthdays, first dates (the crepes have nothing to do with these not working out eventually), and July 23, 2004, my last day at Ketchum, where Banana Sara Christensen (the crepe and the person are inseparable in tribute) took me to dinner after she picked me and my boxes of five years of agency life up from the Aon Center.
Sara Christensen grew up in the La Crep garden and her mom, Joanie, and Sara Roignant, half of the team that opened the little bistro, were best friends. Banana Sara (wheat crepe with bananas in a brown sugar caramel sauce, topped with rum and vanilla ice cream) was named for Mrs. Roignant and these days, Ms. Christensen rightfully claims it to be hers. I met Banana Sara playing softball, and I don't remember if the La Crep connection cemented the friendship, but I'm sure when we are 75, I will remember it as such. When we recently were deciding where we would go for five days in France after Paris, it wasn't too difficult settling on Bretagne, where the crepe was birthed to bring the world so much joy. The more intriguing question: How many crepes will we eat a day?
Saint-Malo on the northern coast was our first stop, and this is exactly where you'd imagine the crepe was invented: a lovely, understated seaside town with a gorgeous historic area settled within ramparts. The crepe doesn't barge into your consciousness like foie gras or demand your attention like duck confit - it's simple, honest, and happy to lay flat. Breton crepes are served open face, folded over at the four edges, so that a "peephole" in the middle salaciously reveals what's within your buckwheat beauty. There were lots of crepe lessons to be learned in its native land: for example, we understood our very first crepe in Bretagne, at La Petit Malouin, to come with a country sausage, but we didn't think it was going to be on the crepe, rather than sliced up and inside. We would also learn that the assortment of crepes at Breton creperies is astounding - galettes are the basic set-ups (egg, Emmental, mushroom, ham, and so on) and spécialités are the complex ones with several ingredients. While all savory crepes are made from buckwheat (at La Crep, they are a mix of buckwheat and wheat - I assume to be more endearing to the American palate as buckwheat can be overpoweringly hearty), some dessert ones may be made with plain wheat. If the selection of crepes at La Crep was a B.A. in Creponomics, we were approaching a Ph.D. in Quantum Crepostromy in Bretagne.
The best crepe ingredient ever is the andouille Guéméné, a sausage made from chitterlings, pepper, onions, wine and spices - 20 to 25 large intestines of a pig are needed for each sausage, which is wrapped in beef casing, then slowly cooked in broth stock flavored with hay. When we entered La Brigitaine for dinner, I picked up this amazing aroma - it was like everyone in there was eating the same thing, but they weren't - it was just that brawny, assertive, a nothing-like-it fragrance that packed a power punch straight to the palate! Since the andouille Guéméné was the only thing I didn't recognize on the menu, that's what I ordered, and 10 minutes later, I was engulfed in that scintillating scent as wafts of it emanated upwards from the la Guéménoise. It was a karmic link.
The andouille Guéméné, sausage king.
An affair to remember - the Surcouf (caramelized bananas, chocolate, grilled almonds, cinnamon ice cream and chantilly creme.)
The next night at Cafe An Delenn, where the husband-and-wife owners (why are the best creperies run by a married couple? Is it because crepes are a match made in heaven for everything on earth?) are "very sympathique," as our hotel host Francois told us. We tried hard not to play favorites with crepes, but theirs definitely superceded la Brigitaine's. I had thought the ones from the night before had been left on the griddle for just two heartbeats too long - these were perfect. My smoked duck breast with Emmental was a genius equation, and it was Banana Sara's turn at the andouille Guéméné, and it was such a pleasure to be eating another crepe combination while engulfed in the scent of my favorite sausage.
The next night at Cafe An Delenn, where the husband-and-wife owners (why are the best creperies run by a married couple? Is it because crepes are a match made in heaven for everything on earth?) are "very sympathique," as our hotel host Francois told us. We tried hard not to play favorites with crepes, but theirs definitely superceded la Brigitaine's. I had thought the ones from the night before had been left on the griddle for just two heartbeats too long - these were perfect. My smoked duck breast with Emmental was a genius equation, and it was Banana Sara's turn at the andouille Guéméné, and it was such a pleasure to be eating another crepe combination while engulfed in the scent of my favorite sausage.
My Perigord - classy French tater tots, so sassy like the Dominique Strauss-Kahn of potatoes.
Pig tales: the andouille Guéméné.
Revolution Road: the Route de Rhum (caramel ice cream, banana, rum, and sea salt butter caramel).
When we got to Rennes, the capital of Bretagne, we quite literally stopped in our tracks when we saw a stand selling hot dog crepes and ham-and-cheese crepe roll-ups. Sold. And devoured in five minutes without moving an inch from the same spot where we felt the animal magnetism of these street crepes.
Crepe with street cred.
The next night - also our last on the trip - we had money from Joanie Christensen to have dinner, and Banana Sara chose Creperie Ste Anne in the middle of the city's most bustling plaza. Banana Sara hits a lot of home runs, but this might be one of my favorite ones - I had to have the andouille Guéméné once more, and the la Forestiere crepe suited the theme of the day, since we had gone hiking/gotten lost in the Foret de Paimpont during the day. We did not encounter any of Merlin's magic that the forest is famous for, but that crepe was the Excalibur of buckwheat. For dessert, the la Rennaise. Chocolate. Caramel ice cream. Salted butter caramel. Jesus Crepe.
Gutted.
If I'm ever salty, it's going to be sea salt butter caramel salty.
In Singapore, I have made earnest attempts to uncover worthy creperies and the first time I visited Entre-Nous, I unfairly based it against the stratospheric standards set by La Crep. This time, with a better appreciation for Breton crepes, I went again, lapped up all the pictures of Saint-Malo and Mont-St-Michel on the walls of this little place run by a couple (again!) from the province itself, and had a much better time appreciating the buckwheat. There was homemade sea salt caramel, and all the ingredients are imported from Bretagne.
E! - Egg and Emmentaler.
But Creperie Des Arts, where I went last Friday, took the crepe: the Popeye, a combination of spinach creamed in Roquefort (seriously?) was hearty and wrap-turous. Not to mention that the lovely Val de Rance brut cider that I first sipped by the beach in Saint-Malo, plus hospitality that rolls in right from the shores of the Plage de Bon Secours. A lovely evening on the patio, lanterns above, a cinema across the street... if Germaine Roignant had come by with his trumpet in his striped waistcoat and hat, it could've been La Crep. Almost.
"I yam what I yam!"
However, still no sign of the andouille Guéméné nor Banana Sara. The pleasures of life that you can always rely on to make you happy - those don't come by too often.
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