Dijon Roots Begin to Dig Down
Le Cave Se Rebiffe, my favorite place in Dijon
The past couple of weeks in Dijon has let us know we did the right thing by moving here.
The first couple of months here felt like prison sentences for us. The brutal heat waves that hit France and then the terrible fires kept us locked up in sauna-like conditions, the shutters to the apartment kept closed, the rooms dark and depressing in an anemic effort to to keep them cooler, even with ceiling fans set to propeller force. We finally received our portable air conditioning unit, which took weeks to arrive because they were sold out across Europe. It’s a split unit, which has a compressor that we put out on our balcony connected by a thick rubber hose to a cooling unit which comes indoors through our French doors, and blows glorious ice-cold air. It can actually cool down two rooms pretty quickly if we close off the hallway doors to the rooms and leave open the connecting door between them, those rooms being the living and dining rooms. We just set up camp in there and used the dining room table as a desk for our laptops. No complaints; while the rest of France cooked in their own juices of denial and refusal to admit they needed AC, we have done just fine. But we haven’t really got out much, only when forced to go on our sweaty marches to buy food.
Recently the weather has turned. Cool air from the north pushed into our area and we tasted what normal was for our area for the first time, and let me tell you, it tasted minty and refreshing. Freed from our comfortable prison cell, we have made it a priority to get out there. Leafy Dijon threw its shadows down for us like red carpets and we began to wander the streets looking up at the historic architecture instead of hunched over to avoid the penetrating sun. Dijon is medieval in some places, especially the city center where we live, its bowing cross-timbered beams sagging under centuries of history and in other places buildings with ornate mason flourishes, lion’s heads, gargoyles, unknown faces, and my favorite, enormous bunches of grapes, their tendrils and vines reaching upwards towards massive windows. This is, after all, the heart of Burgundy where wine has been the premier business for hundreds of years.
Beyond the architectural discoveries, we’ve also found shops, restaurants, bookstores, and second-hand treasures calling from behind old glass shop windows. Of course, there are uncountable bottles of local wine, hundreds of cheeses, loaves of bread, and piles of buttery croissants. The fruit, the vegetables, bright colored piles with their small price tags beckoning. It’s exactly as you imagine it. We were walking home one morning with a box of pastries in hand and a couple crossed the street towards us looking frazzled. They asked us in French where we found the pastry. It was a Sunday, so many shops are closed, but we assured them that they, too, could hit the mother load if only they kept walking another block or two. It was as if I had directed them to the only oasis in the Sahara desert. “Merci! Merci, beaucoup!”
This city is old and it reminds you constantly with its cracked sidewalks, broken pipes, ancient stone garden walls, and centuries of soot blackening a few remaining buildings. They stand in stark contrast next to all of the others that have succumbed to pressure washers and now gleam white, their limestone façades as fresh again as the day they were built in 1700. It’s magnificent to see and feel. I remind myself often that I actually live here.
Before we moved away from the US, we would daydream out loud together about how great it would be when we lived in Europe and we could spontaneously decide we wanted to go someplace, jump on a cheap train, and just go. We finally did just that two weekends ago when we took a day trip to the small town of Besançon, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) away. At 10:00 a.m. we were sitting at the dining table in our apartment unaware we were going anywhere and by noon our butts were in second class seats as the train pulled away from the gare Dijon Ville. Besançon is located in the foothills of the Alps on the way to Geneva, Switzerland. We’d heard it was a quaint town and well, even if it wasn’t, who cares? We could just go explore it and make our own determination.
We passed miles of flat farmland on the way. Every time I take the train across France I am reminded that this country is primarily endless farms punctuated by villages, towns, and cities. Paris, the enormous hedonistic paradise, is the exception, an outlier. In my opinion, it’s the greatest city in the world. Besançon, however, it’s a gritty fighter holding onto its place between an undulating river and the mountains that climb to Lake Geneva. There are some similarities to Dijon, the trees, the relative age of the buildings, only it is considerably smaller, and it is a hilly little town, whereas Dijon is flat. There are Roman ruins there, an old theater where one can still see the columns that held up the proscenium above a long ago destroyed stage. Honestly, Besançon felt a little bit run down. It’s shopping area not nearly as upscale and inviting as Dijon’s. It’s river front somewhat industrial, still. Nevertheless, we enjoyed exploring it and I made some decent photographs there. We found a terrific little shop with local artist’s work.
The best thing we found there, and perhaps the best meal I have had in France in a really long time, was a restaurant called Casinne. A small place with perhaps ten tables specializing in 100% fait mason (house-made) food. From the bread to the dessert and everything in between, its all made by chef Etienne Bellot and his small team. I started with a local tomato salad that was so deeply flavorful that it made me laugh. I was just shocked by how good it was, the simplicity, the intensity, the pure tomato-ness of it. Accompanied by crunchy fresh cucumbers, olives, pungent feta cheese, and rich, fatty olive oil. Clearly Bellot had a source for stunning summer tomatoes and he just let them take the stage and perform. I asked him when I met him at the end of the meal where they came from and he told me from somebody’s backyard there in Besançon. Amazing.
For our mains, I had roasted eggplant, chickpeas, garlic, chili, coriander, and labneh, a perfectly Mediterranean dish that I might have just eaten in Nice before we moved, only this was so much more superior, and here we were up in the mountains. Chien-hui had a dried cod and sun-dried tomatoes with chickpeas dish that was equally impressive. Nothing visually overwhelming, but again the depth of flavors and the freshness of the ingredients were doing the heavy lifting. Dessert was house-made strawberry ice cream that was just ridiculous. Straw-berr-y times a hundred. A small list of carefully curated and natural French wines rounded out the offerings.
Bellot obviously was a chef that respected good ingredients and his ego was in check enough that he didn’t need to “elevate” anything to demonstrate his culinary training. I saw nothing that came out of a pressurized canister, no tomato foam, no deconstructed meat fibers. There are times and places for this type of food when you’re in the mood, but my gosh, if I lived in Besançon, I would have a table at Casinne named after me with a plaque affixed. I would be a serious regular.
Etienne Bellot, chef of Casinne in Besançon, France
We were back on the late afternoon train to Dijon and walked into the apartment about 6:00 p.m. richer for the experience. There are a hundred more places we can get to surrounding Dijon in just the same way, spontaneous, or with little planning. Our birthdays will be here soon in early September and we’re heading to Basel, and then Bern, Switzerland, for a few days to celebrate. It’s a new country for us both and I’ll certainly write about those places next month.
The other root we have sent down is that of community. Chien-hui found an expat group on Facebook here in Dijon that does a regular meetup, so last weekend we attended that. We met some terrific people from the US, Australia, and New Zealand, all living here now. There was even one French woman who grew up in Dijon, but lived in New York for nearly twenty years, and had just moved back. She said she feels like an expat in her own country and hardly recognizes Dijon now. She said it’s nothing like it was when she grew up here, which I took to mean uneventful. We really enjoyed meeting her.
Two of the people I spent most of the time talking to were a couple of American men my age, one from Los Angeles and the other from Bend, Oregon. Both have been here just a bit longer than me and they had already met at a previous meetup. One of the guys is here with his wife, who was missing this particular meetup, and the other was also married but his wife was still back in California finishing up her work before she makes the permanent move. They told me about another meetup group taking place the next evening. That group was a broader mix of people, mostly younger than we were, some were grad students, some were local French, and they came from everywhere, Russia, China, India, and the US. So, we hit that one up the next evening which was at a local bar called Brutale, a new building with industrial, concrete, steel, and glass softened by salvaged wood tables, old books, and hanging houseplants. It had a 90s New York loft vibe.
The bar stretched the entire width of the room and featured hundreds of protruding taps running the length of a handwritten chalkboard above, listing available artisan beers and even a cider or two.
We took our places at a long table that eventually filled up on both sides with at least thirty people and around us even more folks grabbed chairs and got in as close as they could. We met a lot of new people and everyone seemed to connect, regardless of age or where they came from. One of the regulars of this meetup was a bright eyed, smiling, young woman in her late twenties who exuded a positive energy in that impenetrable way, where nothing was ever going to bring her down. I envy those kind of people when I meet them even if I intellectually know she has bad days just like the rest of us. Everyone was there to say goodbye to her, as it turned out, because she was moving back to Austin, where she was from. She had been in Dijon for school and she was finished. The University of Bourgogne is here. She even brought her own cake, made in a small pan with her own loving hands. I thought, selfishly, to myself there was no way everyone was getting a piece of that cake, but I was proven wrong when she cut it up into what seemed like a hundred pieces and passed then down the line on small paper plates. Jesus and the fishes? All that positive goodness had turned the cake into food for the masses. It was freaking great cake, too. Too bad she was leaving. But I learned that in this group, where the people were younger, people came and went. That was the value of the group. It provided a home away from home until it was time to return to your actual home.
We met so many good people at the two meetups. In fact, we ended up getting immediately close to one of the American guys I mentioned above. We hung out one night at Le Cave Se Rebiffe, my favorite wine bar. We also got close quickly with another really terrific young man from India who has just finished up his Ph.D in math. He told me he was earning some extra cash this week doing the harvest at a vineyard south of Dijon in the heart of Burgundy. I tried to join him down there just for the experience but I was not allowed to by the domain, unfortunately, because I don’t have the kind of visa that allows me to even volunteer here in France. But he did send me pictures from there all week, which was super kind. The gave him rosé at 10:00 a.m. and fed him a hearty boeuf bourguignon for lunch because I think he worked his ass off, bent over all day picking grapes. Maybe I got the better end of that deal, although he was getting paid.
Both of these guys had previously met and were already friends and now they had befriended us. We’ve decided to host our first Dijon dinner party tomorrow night and the two of them will be our first guests. We were at Les Halles, the large indoor market, this morning and we ran into one of them. Chien-hui even shared a hug.
Dijon is already shrinking, yet expanding as we find our place here. The temperatures continue to fall, the leaves are beginning to turn golden outside our windows, and I bought a Swiss-made stick blender today so I can make soup soon.
Roots down.