Delicous Fecal Sausage: Chez Gladines

Last night, Josh L's friend Damon was supposed to come over for soup and a movie. The Vietnamese soup place was closed so we decided to venture over to the Butte aux Cailles to try a restaurant that many people, including a certain art history professor who claims to enjoy good food, have recommended. Chez Gladines is somewhat of a neighborhood institution. It is one of the few restaurants where French people will wait in line for a table to free up. They wait because you can get a HUGE meal for 10 euros. The food is basque, which means it's hearty and flavorful. The perfect kind of food for a cold, rainy Paris night.

So we get there at 7:15 and have no trouble getting a table. The menu is simple: there are huge salads, plates of sausage and cheese as appetizers, Basque chicken, stuffed peppers, tripe, steak, cassoulet, confit de canard. The wine list is cheap and wonderful. We got a bottle of red, Gaillac for 12.70. We can't decide what to order. I eventually chose the Basque chicken. Viktor goes for the andouillette. Damon gets the cassoulet and his friend gets a giant salade complete. The food comes. The giant salad is the winner for taste and presentation. It's gorgeous: a huge egg, generous amount of cured, thinly sliced ham, cantal cheese, lots of lettuce. My chicken is slathered with a tomato, onion, bell pepper sauce that I'm mildly intrigued by until I taste it. The sauce tastes like tomatoes and nothing else, the chicken is a bit tough. It wasn't the worst dish I've ever tasted but it was disappointing. The cassoulet was OK. The biggest surprise of the night was the andouillette.

Poor Viktor, the adventurous eater. It turns out that he got the famous, or infamous tripe sausage. If you look at the photo below, you can check out a cross section of this thing. They literally stuff it with tripe. And it smells. I have never seen Viktor not finish his dinner. He literally took one big first bite, then a smaller second one. Then he hid the rest of the hulking sausage under the lettuce on his plate. He would not tell us what it actually tasted like because we were still eating. He wanted to spare us the graphic metaphor. After the meal, he told us it tasted like shit. No literally. It's not a metaphor. Take a look at the wikipedia entry on andouillette; it's hilarious: "While some find that hot andouillette smells of feces, food safety requires that all such matter is removed from the meat before cooking. Feces-like aroma can be attributed to the common use of the pig's colon (chitterlings) in this sausage, and stems from the same compounds that give feces some of its odors." He is deeply traumatized.