Chocolate, Sichuan pepper and Portuguese wine on the eve of Bastille Day

Bastille Day is tomorrow: the closest thing France has to a national day. As it falls on a Thursday, most of the country will take Friday off – the bridge day, le jour du pont – making it a four-day weekend. Geri and I took advantage of the beautiful summer evening to walk up to the Arc de Triomphe to absorb the magnificent sight of the huge tri-colour French flag that flies through the arc on major holidays. It’s a stunner. On our way, we stopped in to say hi to the owner-chef of our favourite local restaurant: Evelyne at Le Verre a Soi. We meant to make a booking for Saturday night, but Evelyne told us that she, along with the rest of Paris, was bugging out of town for the weekend. We let her know we were disappointed, not least because we had intended to bring an eight-year-old with us to dinner, and we knew there would be rapture at Evelyne’s chocolate desserts. Not to worry, she said. She would have dessert leftovers she would need to get rid of before she left for the weekend. Come back later and we could take them off her hands. You have to understand: we’re talking dark chocolate mixed with egg yolks and Sichuan pepper and sugar. This is not your cousin’s mud cake. And, to be honest, that's the smallest part of what is sticking with me as I write this. In that moment that she told us we could have the desserts out of her fridge, we felt like family. This felt like our neighbourhood: like we’ve made this, in its odd way, home for now, and like this home has adopted us. We did go on our walk. And we did return to Evelyne’s later in the evening. We showed up at about 10:30, and a couple of customers were still in the restaurant. But we hadn’t come empty handed. We brought a bottle of Portuguese wine that we’d collected on a recent vacation, and offered it up to mark the beginning of the long weekend. Geri and I left after midnight. In the intervening hours Evelyne and the pretty young sommelier, Clothide, closed the kitchen early and turned away customers as the four of us made short work of the wine. (It was a Mouchao from Alentejo. Wonderful.) And we left with four chocolate desserts under our arms and holiday wishes and kisses all around. In future, when I think back on the big national celebrations surrounding Bastille Day, I’ll most likely remember tonight, just sitting around in a closed restaurant with our friends in their kitchen clothes, talking about wine, French beaches, and cute firemen. Tomorrow we'll watch the parades, but tonight was full of the richness that living abroad is really all about.