Dov Charney and Foie Gras

With my former boss, Dov Charney, once again in the spotlight (I usually say ‘former boss’ meaning that I no longer work at American Apparel, though in this case it could be interpreted as a reference to his current displacement as said boss) I have been mulling over whether this blog – whose very existence is based in the arguably least contentious experiences of an overlong three-year career working for Dov – should chime in to the media frenzy surrounding subjects of which I actually have some first hand knowledge. In due form, I decided I would write a post that was as related to Dov as this blog is related to food: which is inconsequentially.

The First Pâté de Foie Gras

My first introduction to foie gras was in Montreal just two years ago at Alexandre’s on Peel Street. Directly across from Les Cours Mont-Royal, where American Apparel has its Canadian offices, French-owned Alexandre’s has carefully captured the Parisian brasserie look with its dark interior, mirrored walls, red front, and the old men that have spilled out from the upstairs cigar lounge, sitting so comfortably on the terrace chairs - cigar in mouth - they look as though they have been sitting there since the restaurant’s opening almost forty years ago. And they very likely have.

Chez Alexandre, Montréal

At the end of the summer, Dov would come to Montreal to get a feel for the looming cold weather and put his mind to planning the business’ upcoming winter season. We worked long hours on marketing projects, the fall ads, the assortment and allocation of product, along with whatever particularity on which Dov was currently focused (I believe this was the year of reducing the aging inventory and improving the efficiency of our shipping routes, or maybe it was watch standards). This work came in addition to our regular positions – at this time mine was the managing of five stores, located in five different cities, none of which were Montreal – so I gleefully looked forward to the almost nightly offer of French cuisine that came well over twelve hours into my work day, despite the delay it might cause to my shift’s end.

Watch Standards

It was on the first of these occasions for me, in a midnight meal so indulgent – with oysters, steak tartar, and lobster – that I dove into the foie gras without a single thought for the cruelty in which it was created. As a French-Egyptian, perhaps I can feign cultural loyalty to a French delicacy adopted from ancient Egypt, but I do believe that would be an embarrassing stretch of an argument to make. I was a vegetarian for most of my life on the principle that I did not need to consume another living animal, raised in ghastly conditions, for my own survival; but as the popularity of local, free-range farm-to-table restaurants increased, so did my ability to justify eating meat. On a parallel plane, on the notion that I was promoting fair-wage labour, I had gone from an outspoken aversion to consumer culture, to climbing up the ranks of a corporate ladder based on my previously undiscovered ability of getting people to buy more stuff. The symbolism, then, of eating foie gras for the first time with Dov Charney is not lost on me now, though I am certain it was then.

A tired meal at Alexandre's, likely eyeing the foie gras.

The Foie Gras Saga Continues

I am not well versed in the rules of etiquette, but I do have a healthy fear of social impropriety, as arbitrary as my understanding of that category of behaviours may be. Thus, in these shared meals (meals with Dov almost always consisted of sharing plates chosen by him for the whole table), I was careful to consume just shy of my fair share of the portions. On one occasion, however, at a late night staff dinner at L’Express on St. Denis – another Montreal-French bistro – I watched painfully as the foie gras, from which I had already consumed my self-calculated due ration, was neglected by everyone else at the table. As the bill was being paid and my colleagues stood up from their seats, my eyes darted around at them, certain that someone else would see the madness of leaving such a large serving of fattened duck liver behind. No one, however, did. I had to think quickly, and in moments of panic where food is concerned, matters of etiquette become dwarfed by my gluttonous nature. Standing by the table with my jacket already on, I took the whole of the buttery pâté, carefully arranged it on a piece of delicately toasted French bread, and furtively placed this rather large combination into my mouth, raising my eyes to meet the downcast glare of the head waiter. I turned away to avoid this judgement only to meet Dov’s inquisitive look as he paused his cell phone conversation to ask me “What are you doing? Are you still hungry?” to which all I could reply was “I didn’t want it to go to waste” if only my mouth had not been too full to do anything but grimace sheepishly.

L'Express, Montréal

The Last Foie Gras

Enamoured with foie gras as I was, I could not pass up the opportunity to order it whenever it was an option on the menu, and perhaps I inclined my restaurant choices based on this infatuation, but who can really say. I was happy to be travelling either alone or with a rotating cast of coworkers that could not keep a count of my foie gras consumption. This love affair reached a pinnacle of opulence one night in France, when I found myself staying at the Cour des Loges, a five-star hotel converted from four Renaissance homes in the heart of vieux-Lyon. I was still dazed by the glamour of my room and its ensuite complete with Jacuzzi, when I stumbled across the alleyway (is it an alley or a street? It’s hard to tell in these old European cities) to La Nef des Fous. Luckily my senses had been primed by the lavish décor of the hotel so as not to be too offended by this restaurant’s eccentric interior, which even featured a claw foot tub as a pond basin, goldfish and all. I was eating the best foie gras in a city where foie gras comes standard on every menu – and the fall-off-the-bone sugar glazed orange infused duck legs were not bad either – as I discussed my future at the company with the sous-boss, tempted by potential positions of power and importance. Yet something did not sit well with me. It wasn’t the foie gras - that went down with ease and not a trace of hesitation, and was likely coating my stomach sufficiently to ignore the anxious malaise my work was otherwise causing me. But a month in the foie-gras-less regions of Scotland sobered me up to my reality and I vowed off of foie gras – and sales – for life. I am proud to say I am four months clean, and it looks as though I quit it all just in time.

La Nef des Fous

La Nef des Fous

Be Sure to Pay Homage to Paul the Octopus Next Time You're in Oberhausen

In the span of a month I had been to Brighton, Nottingham, Lyon, Aix en Provence, Rome, and Milan, amongst other handsome and vibrant European cities, when I was called on to help with the opening of a new American Apparel in Oberhausen. To that, I think most people might wonder – after settling upon a presumed pronunciation (I chose oh-burr-how-zin) – where?

Oberhausen is a city in Germany only twenty minutes north of Düsseldorf by train, which covers less than thirty square miles, and has a population of barely 200,000. In many cities, where it takes more than twenty minutes just to drive through the downtown area, I think Oberhausen would qualify as a suburb at most. Once upon a time it was an industrial centre, generating strong oil, zinc, coal, iron and steel revenue. However, the synthetic oil plant was bombed in 1944. The Altenberg zinc factory – which was a big deal in the zinc world – closed in 1981. The last coal mine closed in 1992. And, finally, the last iron and steel mill closed in 1997, leaving the city with absolutely no industry.

The next thought one might have after learning a bit more about Oberhausen is most likely: why? Well, like any municipality decades past total collapse would do, Oberhausen decided to convert its former industrial park into Europe’s largest shopping centre, which is aptly named CentrO. CentrO includes a 130,000 square foot mall with 220 retail stores and 33 fast food joints, 20 restaurants along a “promenade” outside the mall, a movie theatre, a nightclub, a sports arena, the Gasometer (literally a gas holder, now an exhibition space), an amusement park, a LEGOLAND, and a SeaLife aquatic centre that is home to the memorial shrine of Paul the Octopus, famous for predicting national football matches by choosing between two correspondingly-marked boxes of food. Though these attractions may seem awfully similar to the contents of a Toronto suburb (except perhaps for Paul, he’s an unparalleled match-predicting octopus, I’ll give him that much), Europe is not as riddled with this American model of overpriced remotely located shopping and entertainment packages, and Europeans flock to CentrO from surrounding cities and countries quite literally by the bus load.

In the middle of this fun haven, in the middle of nowhere, American Apparel decided to open up its two-hundred-and-something^th location, and I came along for the last forty-eight hours of this endeavour. Now, my metabolism requires that in a forty-eight hour span of time I consume at least six meals fit for a large adult male human. Of the first five of these meals I had at CentrO, four were Starbucks lattes and one was a MacDonald’s bacon cheeseburger, none of which I believe is food fit for any kind of living being, let alone a lanky woman whose body starts to eat itself when it hasn’t been fed something recognizably digestible in more than forty-five minutes. Finally, on the night before the grand opening, as the store had moved reasonably further away from a rainbow flag manufacturer’s warehouse robbery scene towards identifiably being a retailer of some kind, we decided to venture out to the promenade restaurants for a proper meal.

The promenade features twenty wall-to-wall restaurants representing their cuisine’s origin as plainly as possible in their name, such as, “Don Carlos” the Spanish restaurant, “Tijuana” the Mexican restaurant, “Louisiana” the American restaurant, “Wok & Grill” the pan-Asian restaurant, “Franziskaner” the German restaurant, or “Teatro” the Italian restaurant we finally decided upon. To further ensure that customers were well informed of the possible menu options prior to actually looking at the menus posted out front, country flags were often featured as the establishment’s logo.  We stood for a moment in the entrance of Teatro, but as the servers made no move perceptibly like coming to seat us, and almost all the tables were free, we sat ourselves. Though the menus were in German we were able to decipher most of the options and made our choices fairly quickly. After struggling through the drink order with our waitress who spoke no English – and resolving to order Cokes all around as it seemed to be the only drink she understood from our various requests – we all decided to simply point to the menu to order our mains; all of us except one, of course, who had several questions to ask about his potential selection. As it is, this former co-worker of mine is not a native English speaker, although he does speak it very clearly. Still, this fact did not help the waitress who did not understand English no matter how distinctly the syllables were pronounced and thus did not catch the cue that she was to enumerate the available sides that could accompany a medium-rare steak. Frustrated, she put down the notepad in which she had successfully written down my order at least, and went to fetch another waiter who, as it turned out, spoke just as little English and as we had not managed to master German in the interim my co-worker had to settle for the same pointing technique the rest of us had used and hope for the best.

Since we had been working in a store that was still closed to the public, we hadn’t yet experienced much of what it was like to be an Anglophone in small-town Germany. We would get the full brunt of it at the store opening the next day when faced with customers’ indignation that there was such a thing as a non-German speaking person present in the country. I think it must be similar to the experience of being an Anglophone in France, although as a native French speaker I can’t say for certain. Regardless, if the Teatro staff had intended on acting as German cultural ambassadors when we arrived, they had thoroughly dispensed with any such hospitable inclination by the time the ordering was through. For the next hour we watched as other tables were seated, had their orders taken, and were served their plates all while we still waited for ours. Our orders finally came just as the time we had allotted for this dinner break had completely elapsed and we were forced to eat our meals rather hurriedly. If you care to know, the steak came with lightly seasoned baked potatoes and carrots, and my fettuccini alfredo – which, yes, I am aware, is basically macaroni and cheese for adults – was perfectly cooked and creamy without being heavy, and lasted me until I arrived in Amsterdam the following day.

I leave you with some TripAdvisor reviews of CentrO in the off-chance this post has somehow mistakenly inspired you to make a detour trip to the mall:

Shitty Starbucks Coffee

Not For The Anxious

Not A Place to Go if You Are Hungry or Need to Pee

"If you like shopping and don't mind spending hours doing it,
or walking between big amounts of people, enjoy your visit to CentrO."
Sarcasm?

The best place to be when you are overworked, underpaid, and nearing starvation: with Italians.

It was December 10^th and somewhere in the back of my mind (and the uppermost part of my gut) had begun to form the anxiety surrounding the question of whether I would be allowed to fly home for Christmas – an anxiety which would grow and have plenty to feed on for another ten days to come. Earlier that day I was in Rome, Italy. (I specify Italy in case someone might think I meant Rome, Georgia, or Rome, Indiana, or the one in Iowa, or Maine, or Maryland, or Michigan, or Minnesota, or New York, or Ohio, or Oregon, or Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin, or any of the sixteen cities named Rome that are not located in Italy). The American Apparel in Rome, Italy is situated at number 155 via dei Serpenti. Take a second to look that up on Google Maps, if you would be so kind. When you do, you will immediately notice that this American Apparel is 500m away from the Colloseum. The Colloseum. 500 meters. In fact, standing outside the American Apparel, I could see the Colloseum. For a second, I thought to myself: that can’t be The Colloseum – but a quick check on my iPhone assured me that this was the one. Having arrived in Rome close to midnight the night before, heading straight to the hotel, and ordering in room service, it was only in the light of day the next morning as I arrived at the store that I realized my good fortune. I had a train to Milan to catch at four in the afternoon, it was currently just before ten o’clock in the morning: I would get my work done as efficiently as possible and leave myself just enough time to stroll past the Colloseum on my way to the station. Now obviously if this story ended successfully I wouldn’t very well bother repeating it now. I am imparting this anecdote in order to give you a sense of my mood later on in this day, and that mood is not going to be a cheerful one.  I won’t trouble you with the details of the delays, suffice it to say that there were many and I finished work just in time to hail a taxi to the nearby Termini and catch my train without so much as stopping to take a picture of the historic site. It was on this train ride, I believe, that the Christmas-allowance anxiety began to form.

Google Street View of the Colloseum from the American Apparel store front.
(Because I literally do not have a picture)

 Another thought that might have been contributing to my anxiety, though significantly less so, was the fact that I had run out of money. It was one of those many times where my expenses were being processed and repaid at a rate extraordinarily slower than that at which I incurred them. It would be another three days before I was paid and as I was travelling alone I had no co-worker to cover my expenditures in the mean time.  This definitely posed a problem for my immediate wellbeing. Transportation and accommodations were already paid for of course, it was a mere matter of paying for food and the occasional taxi. As it happened, the train station I arrived at in Milan was a €50 taxi ride away from the hotel I was to stay in. As I watched the meter increase by what seemed like unusually large increments, yet my destination appear no nearer, I hoped I could rely on that grace period where my credit card company has not yet processed all the charges I have made and thus allows me for that time to go far beyond my limit. When we arrived at the Times hotel, I handed the driver my card to test this theory and he said something lovely-sounding to me in Italian, and I said something Germanic-sounding in English, then he said some more Italian things, and I tried saying some Spanish things; this was followed by louder Italian on his part, and then louder Spanish on mine.  I fully comprehended that he did not accept credit cards and that I was to procure €50 in cash for him at my earliest convenience, but as I had no means of doing so I decided my best bet was to continue to behave like an imbecile tourist until he realized the futility of the situation and sent me on my way to spare himself the breath. This, unfortunately, did not happen. He stepped out of the vehicle – a moment in which I admittedly ran more than a dozen harrowing scenarios through my mind – and failing all of these, he went into the hotel and told on me. 

Of all the possible outcomes of this situation, the result was one which I truly feel could have only occurred in Italy – or perhaps in St. John’s Newfoundland: the hotel concierge paid for my taxi, another staff member carried my suitcase up to my beautiful room, then the two of them insisted I come back down to the hotel bar for a drink on the house. The bartender rejoiced in practicing his English (which sounded remarkably like Italian to me), and told me he would make me a drink of any colour I chose (I was tempted to say ‘brown’ in the hopes of getting a Manhattan, but it seemed more in keeping with the spirit of the game to say ‘pink’). When I had to confess I was out of money in turning down the food menu, or having a second drink, the bartender insisted it did not matter and he would bring me some anyway.  Under any other circumstances this finger food and girly cocktail would never make it to the annals of any food revue, but on the conditions of this evening, they were absolutely exquisite.

My bottomless drink and snacks courtesy of the Times.

Hippy Cafés and 2-for-1 Pizzas: How to Survive an Extended Stay in Glasgow

I would usually spend 24-48 hours in any given city on my work travels; enough time for one or two meals, half a dozen coffees, and a partial night’s sleep. Passing monuments such as the Coliseum on my taxi ride to the airport without being able to so much as slow down for a picture was a painful experience to which I had become quite accustomed. My work trip to Glasgow – the last before I left American Apparel – inspired in me, however, precisely the opposite feeling.

 I won’t deny the rumour that the city’s lack of culinary variety, and my extended stay in it, contributed to my resignation from American Apparel (in fact, I just started that rumour myself with this very sentence). To be fair to me, I gave it a good running chance. For the first week, I stopped into a different beautiful old building every night on my way back to the hotel, each one offering a different foreign fare: Italian, Spanish, Thai, Indian. I thought, like in most metropolitan areas I was familiar with, that these restaurants had been independently established by someone originating from these respective places, here to offer Glasgow a taste of their home cuisine. Looks can be very deceiving, I discovered. Each one of these restaurants was actually part of a bigger chain, with commercially printed menus, and food that had likely arrived in their kitchens pre-prepared (or so it tasted). Between these and the TGI Friday’s, Hard Rock Café, Pret à Manger, and Starbucks, it seemed as though there were no local, freshly prepared options in Glasgow’s downtown area. I even stopped in at a place that had “Haggis, Neeps & Tatties” on special – whatever that means – thinking perhaps the Glaswegians save all of their effort in the kitchen for local delicacies. Well, let me tell you, they most certainly do not. I have no words to describe that meal, but I do have a photo of it and I think its physical appearance is accurately representative of its flavour.

The Atholl Arms' offer of the night

My coworker about to dive in to her "Haggis, Neeps & Tatties"

The next week, having lost all hope, I ate exclusively at the hotel (the Citizen M) – whose inviting lounge and friendly staff almost made up for the fact that I spent a month alone in a room clearly designed for a teenage couple’s weekend sexcapades. The first night offered chicken curry: not the kind you would find at an Indian restaurant, rather the kind you might cook for yourself at home, but an altogether fairly tasty dish. The next night the only available hot meal was once again chicken curry. The following four nights promised more chicken curry. On the seventh consecutive night of chicken curry I finally understood that the Citizen M was either initiating a New Age chicken-curry Atkins-diet-inspired cleanse, or had, as the room led me to believe, never intended its guests to stay more than a single night [of foodless sex] at a time.

What is that transporter tube doing in the middle of the perfectly king-bed-sized CitizenM hotel room?
Housing the toilet and shower of course. Right there with you in the room.
And that's the teeny sink to the left that couldn't fit in the pod with the toilet and shower in it.
Best of all: you can choose to light it with any colour you like, such as red, purple, green, blue,
or anything except regular light colour really. 

Just as my palette was preparing a counter-strike to this onslaught, I discovered in the same day the two near-daily stops that would allow me to survive the next few weeks in Glasgow. The first of these was Riverhill Coffee Bar on Gordon Street. From the day I discovered it, to the day I left Glasgow – barring the not too infrequent days I didn’t have time to eat lunch at all – I had my midday meal in this blue-fronted café. Twelve consecutive occasions, and not one bite was a disappointment. A different extensive variety of homemade baked goods, soups, salads, tarts, sandwiches, and wraps was offered every day alongside what is most certainly the best coffee in the city. I waited until my complimentary full English breakfast from that morning had completely worn off, around 4pm, and by this time could usually secure one of the five available seats in the café. My personal favourite choices were the egg and chorizo on bagel, spinach salad, and medium latte with a Nanaimo bar for desert.

After work at the store I would return to Gordon Street for my dinner break at the Republic Bier Halle, famous for its large selection of local microbrewery beers, often served cold, not a single one of which I tried because the taste of liquid yeast is not one that I find all too appealing, I’m sorry to say. What brought me back every night was the fire-oven baked thin crust pizza served with chilli oil; and the fact that if I arrived before 10pm I had a second pizza free of charge to last me through my night of computer work (let’s not forget I’m a gormandiser with a proclivity to penny-pinch). 

Nevertheless, I was very thankful to leave Glasgow when I finally did. Even I couldn’t have continued to eat pizzas and Nanaimo bars every day. If you do find yourself in the unfortunate circumstance of being both hungry and in Glasgow, I highly recommend you make a beeline for Gordon Street, just off Buchanan.