Today is our La Rentrée, The Return.
A number of years ago now, I was in France at the end of August for my brother’s wedding. We landed in Paris and spent a few days in the city before the wedding. Every news report was obsessing over La Rentrée, the great migration of Parisians back to the city in anticipation of the end of the summer holiday. News reports spoke of apocalyptic traffic and crowded trains.
La Rentrée is more than the reopening of schools. It marks the start of the business season, of cultural openings, of book releases.
The time has come for our own La Rentrée to New York City. Summer holidays are over and by the time you’re reading this I’ll be grinding away in bumper-to-bumper traffic on I-95 in Connecticut.
And what better time than now to reflect on a summer of eating.
Our summer began in Tuscany, traveling around wineries with my in-laws. By the end, our four-year-old was asking “can we have another tour?” Here we ate plenty of pici pasta, a long, vermicelli-style handmade pasta. There was plenty of wild boar on offer, and cured meats. And a stop in Ostia where we ate beach pizza.
As summer progressed, we transitioned to staying with my parents on Cape Cod where the four-year-old attended day camp.
I ate less lobster than usual. I didn’t have my first lobster roll of the season until late-August. Lobster prices are sky high this year, and with the economy souring, everyone is cutting back. That was evident in how empty the restaurants on the Cape felt. The short summer high season here usually means long lines, but from my anecdotal observations, fewer people were eating out this year.
The summer growing season produced some tomatoes that we turned into a flaky tart and another week, I turned into a light tomato sauce for pasta. Sadly, our broccoli never really grew beyond a stalk, either because of slugs or overwatering. (I did roast some broccolini from the supermarket). The lettuce we planted for salads and sandwiches went rogue, turning into tall stalks, while our Brussels Sprouts stalks withered and died. We grew two peppers from four plants. Not a very good ratio. The tarragon has established itself as the king of the herbs.
Meanwhile, we sat next to Julia Stiles and her husband one night at a restaurant in Wellfleet. The star-struck staff forgot to bring us our drinks. This was not the worst dining experience of the summer though.
That honor goes to Brekkies, a new restaurant in its first last season. The restaurant replaced the Fox and Crow, which expanded from a spot closer to the center of town to the larger space next to Route 6 for two seasons before noise complaints and a fire shuttered it. Brekkies took over the large bar and restaurant space, offering up diner-like breakfast menu until about noon.
The food was good, once it came. But the service was the sort of quality that you might tolerate on the first day of summer, but wonder how it gets to be the last day of summer without anyone understanding how to operate a restaurant. The mostly empty restaurant mismanaged table service so badly two couples left while waiting for their orders. We almost left after sitting for an hour with our four-year-old who started losing the narrative. It felt like we were living through an episode of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares while I watched food sit under hot plates and the owner chat up friends instead of clearing tables.
I closed out the season with a big plate of oysters. The weather had turned cool on the Cape and I ended up shucking them into kitchen sink rather than off the deck. The garden is beginning to fade. The leaves yellowing and wilting in the cool night air. The last of the tomatoes are just turning pink. A single eggplant flower has blossomed, and I wonder if it will be too late to fruit.
But now it’s time for the Return.
Public schools start on Thursday. Aftercare starts next week. What’s on the menu? A full day of work. After three months of partial childcare, returning to a full day schedule seems like a bit of heaven.
The return means time to restart routines. The return means a fresh morning bagel, an afternoon slice of pizza, a grocery store filled with hot sauce and gochujang.
Soon it will be time for root vegetables, for long braising stews, for soup. Pumpkin spice season? No, Negroni season.
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