Peppermint Not Included: A Dispatch from Roselis
MAY 17
WRITTEN BY SAMUEL PICCOLO
It was somewhere around the fourth or fifth course of the tasting menu at Roselily, lately Roselis, that I gave up trying to retain my cutlery from dish to dish. I thought this would be easy after the first course, a raw oyster topped with an apple compote of a pleasingly tart tang, since I touched nothing but the oyster’s rocky shell as I tossed it down the hatch. But our server at the bar, where we were seated because even on a Tuesday evening in January the place requires reservations as most venues in town need only six weekends a year, snatched them before I could mouth words of protest. After the second plate, a salade Niçoise sans anchovies, but avec shallots grated so tenderly they resembled grains, I had a new strategy: keeping my hands hovered protectively over the cutlery. That didn’t work either. By round three, when I had eagerly used my knife and fork to split the grilled scallop into as many pieces as possible, mopping every trace of the cauliflower purée from the corners of the shell on which it was served, I tried saying something aloud about the utensils, which disappeared anyway. “Just let it go,” my companion said. “They want to replace them.”
And so I did. We were there to celebrate after all, though we couldn’t have said whether the celebration was for our own accomplishments or for the generosity of the relative who had gifted us the certificate we were using to pay for most of the meal. We went deliberately several days before the three-week “self-takeover” of the place, from haute-American to French brasserie. “It has been the busiest time in our history,” said our waiter, in between taking my things. “Busier than football weekends, busier than graduation. We wanted to do something special in January for us, so that we wouldn’t be sitting in an empty restaurant. But it’s been so busy that we’re looking forward to it being over. On Saturday night, we have some steaks the kitchen is going to cook just for the staff, and bottles of nice champagne. It probably won’t be until one in the morning. But we’ll do it.”
Flush with the first glass of wine with which we had followed those courses, we were feeling conversational. “Do you think,” began my companion, “that somewhere in France, right now, there’s a little brasserie where the staff was similarly hoping to spruce up their January, and settled on Indiana cuisine?” Our server laughed, either genuinely or with the practiced caw of one who spends too much of his time forced to be polite.
“What would they serve there?” I asked.
“Probably smoked meats,” said the server. “We really do smoked meats in this part of Indiana.”
“Surely some sort of corn dish,” I said, “Cream of corn, cornbread, cattle corn.”
“Or fair food,” said my companion. “Fried Oreos, elephant ears. Even better: corn dogs.” Our server laughed again and retreated to the kitchen. Everything is on full display at Rosalis; from the bar you can watch the cooks chop and crush, sear and char. They worked with weighty pans on gas ranges that coughed up surges of flame every few moments, the staff speaking over the din to each other, shouting “corner” as they carried trays back to the fridges and dishroom, taking great pulls of ice water from the plastic containers from which all restauranteurs drink.
To our right at the bar, there was a man who had been finishing the final courses of his own pass at the tasting menu, and reading articles from FiveThirtyEight on his phone. “I admire the confidence,” I said to my companion. “I don’t think I could spend a hundred dollars on a meal and eat it all by myself.”
“Me neither,” she said. “The thought of eating alone in a restaurant makes me want to disappear. It’s what I hate the most about travelling solo. You’re wandering around in a strange city, tired, probably lost, half-starved, and you just can’t work up the courage to say: ‘table for one.’ He doesn’t have that problem.”
Just then the man stood up, enormous on his feet, towering over us. He gestured to our plates.
“You have a lot to look forward to,” he said excitedly. “It peaks at course seven. But they’re all so good.”
“Have you done the regular, non-French tasting menu?” I asked.
“Oh yes! Four or five times at least,” he exclaimed.
“Experienced!” I said.
His enthusiasm only intensified as he told us more about his love for the restaurant. The chef probably has the best restaurant in the state, he told us. He’d lived in a lot of places, he said, but finding this restaurant in a little city like South Bend had been thrilling. He only wished that he could come more often. But, he explained, some personal history had meant he didn’t always want to.
“But then the chef texts me when to come,” he said. “And it’s nice to be on texting terms with the chef, especially in a restaurant with a three-star sommelier who can tell you about every wine imaginable.” He pointed to our server.
The server indeed explained our wine selection at length, and then, several courses later appeared with two more empty glasses and poured from one of the official tasting menu wine pairings that we had neglected to spring for. When he started describing the wine I tried to ask a follow-up question, feeling much like a surveying ship that has sailed far beyond its coastal shelf and is trying desperately to send sonar soundings to map the terrain below, and when the signal returns finds that its instruments are utterly incapable of deciphering the code from such depths.
The man went on, saying something about a menu item that he’d had trouble pronouncing. “I speak many other languages, but French isn’t one of them,” he said. He asked us where we were from, and when I said, “between Toronto and Buffalo,” he told us that he travelled there often, taking the Amtrak-Viarail route to Toronto.
“What brings you there so often?” we asked.
“Oh, I get invited to do lots of talks,” he said, “Lots of talks.” He bid us good night. Before he left, he stopped to confer with one of the kitchen staff, shaking hands elaborately.
In the midst of this, two more things happened: we were delivered a croissant stuffed with duck liver, topped with shaved truffle, and my rabbit-owning friend from Québec passed us with his fiancé as they left the dining room. We made eye contact and waved.
“That was one of the best meals I’ve had in South Bend,” the rabbit-owning Québecer said. “I’ve never been here before, but I knew they were doing the brasserie month and wanted to come.” His fiancé nodded. They had eaten the bouillabaisse, they said, and it was terrific. Lucky there was no rabbit on the menu, I thought. I had asked this friend not long before whether he ate rabbit, what with having two of them in his home.
“I don’t,” he responded at the time. “I’ve had rabbit in the past and liked the taste well enough, but when I got Mister Buns I swore I’d never eat it again.”
“The bouillabaisse was really good,” he continued. “I didn’t try speaking French here, though. I didn’t want to push my luck.”
I said that was probably a good idea. “You never want to offend the people who are handling something you’re about to put into your mouth.”
I once heard a story about Jacques Derrida, alternately hailed as one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century or one of its greatest charlatans, visiting a tavern in Princeton. He had just taken part in some event or another at the university, and then retreated with some courtesans to the faculty’s preferred watering hole. Derrida couldn’t or wouldn’t speak English to the horsey waitress, and the table carried on in French all evening. The waitress, evidently feeling that she was being treated with less respect than she’d have preferred, nobly carried out the rest of her duties, until Derrida looked to be finished with his plate. She came back to the table, surveyed the remainders, looked Derrida icily in the eye, and said “fini?” with enough derision that those present still remembered it forty years later.
My friend bid us goodnight and ventured out into Bronson Street. In the door walked a woman wearing a beret, which we ourselves had considered sourcing before leaving home. She sat to our left.
Our final courses were arriving with a fury. First a camembert ice cream, called the “homage to fromage,” then a chocolat with raspberries, which we washed down with the last of the wine. We were feeling funny, and tried another line on the server.
“Did you even consider,” we asked, “permitting smoking indoors during this month? For the real French experience, don’t you need cigarettes?” He laughed again.
“No no. I have to say that one never crossed our minds,” he said.
The beret-wearing woman spoke up.
“As a smoker, I appreciate that,” she said. “I don’t want to breathe in anyone else’s smoke.”
“Just your own,” I said. “No second-hand smoke. Just first-hand smoke.”
“That’s right,” she said. We asked her if she’d been to the restaurant before, and she said that she had, only once. “It was last fall, during the Morris one-hundred celebration.” We asked if she’d been involved in the events.
“Fire hula,” she said, and went on to explain how she’d begun fire hula-ing by asking for a fire hoop for Christmas, which her mother only reluctantly gave her. “And then I was on the ‘Buy Nothing’ Facebook group, and picked up some flame things from a woman, and when I was there she asked me if I would perform for the Morris. That’s how it happened.”
Our server delivered the ninth of the nine courses: three macarons. We felt as if each of the three macarons were piling on top of each other in our esophagi reaching very near the top of our throats. When I stood to leave, I felt my stomach turn over.
“You’re so pale,” my companion said.
“I need to go to the restroom,” I replied. And I hurried around the corner. Inside, I stared at my reflection and took deep breaths in between dry heaves. Was I really about to vomit one of the best meals I’d ever had? I’d had half the bottle of wine, sure, but that was over three hours, and I didn’t feel drunk at all. Surely not. I left the bathroom before my stomach could revolve again. The beret-wearing woman was still at the bar, mowing through her own courses, our waiter polishing glasses with a cloth behind her. The hostess gave me my coat.
Outside, in the parking lot, I blinked rapidly, gazing at the lights shining on the Studebaker Administration building’s honey-brown brick. I leaned against my car and sucked the cold air as deeply into my lungs as I could before opening the door and getting in. I took a tin of Trader Joe’s peppermints from the center console and put one under my tongue, letting it slowly dissolve. And it was only with this, the tenth course, that the others felt at ease.
