Many years ago, a friend and I spent a week in Paris, bumming around cathedrals and fountains and cafés. One cold and rainy morning, we walked across the Pont Neuf to the Ile de la Cite, the island in the Seine on which Notre Dame Cathedral sits. After touring the breathtaking church, we began scouting around for a place to have a quick lunch.
The Ile de la Cite is mostly commercial, with few restaurants or eateries, but we managed to find a small, unremarkable brasserie wedged in among the dozens of shops selling tourist knick-knacks. In that café (whose name I never even knew), I had a bowl of French onion soup that I still dream about today.
I’ve had plenty of bowls of onion soup over the years in pubs and restaurants. Some were reasonably tasty, and some were just bland cups of broth with a blanket of rubbery cheese, but that bowl of soup I sipped while watching the tourists mill about the plaza wasn’t even in the same league as those poor imitators. The broth was rich and thick, as if it was flavored with homemade beef and veal demi-glace instead of store-bought stock. It contained perfectly caramelized chopped onions and croutons of hard, crusty, rye bread. Of course, the best part of onion soup is the cheese, and this bowl had a latticed canopy of delicately shredded Gruyere that had been meticulously toasted under a broiler, not just haphazardly melted under warming lamps.
If I ever make it back to Paris, that little café on the Rue du Cloître Notre Dame will be one of my first stops. That is, assuming I can remember which café it is.
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Photo courtesy of wEnDaLicious (cc)
