AN AMERICAN IN (VICHY) PARIS

What is left to tell you about my home town, Greenville? Twenty years ago, its downtown was a foreboding moonscape. Ten years ago, Mayor Heller, a Viennese Holocaust survivor, resurrected it.

Nightlife on Main Street has become the signature of downtown’s vitality. Successful new restaurants have sprung up. On weekends, sidewalk cafes jam the traffic.

Linda and I love to stroll the downtown streets, and enjoy cuisine that ranges from pizza to Thai. After all, how else would someone weighing 220 kg judge the quality of downtown?

Ah, but where were the French? Only one French restaurant in the entire city.

I am inclined to say, “Who cares?” My disdain for the snooty French is equal to that of any self-respecting Jew. Yet, consider my foray into Greenville’s only French restaurant an exercise in morbid curiosity.

My first clue was that it was the only restaurant up-and-down Main Street that wasn’t full of patrons, despite its welcoming name, “An American in Paris.” Perhaps, we thought, the potential diners who walked by the place knew something we didn’t. Of course.

The cuisine – consciously or not – was a clear-cut case of anti-Semitism:

The tea was an anemic, tepid green. It was nothing like the robust, boiling, honey-brown Swee-Touch-Nee that honorable Jews use to wash down a heavy Shabbos lunch.

Linda ordered a salmon sandwich and made sure that it contained no pork. Out it came garnished with slices of bacon. Upon questioning the server, she protested, “bacon is not pork.”

Meanwhile, I opted for salade au saumon fume, which arrived as salade au babeurre of lettuce piled six inches high and two shards of lox, decorated with crabmeat. Again, we were told, “crabmeat is just like fish.”

The accompanying roll looked like barches, until the first bite hit my palate like mush. Finally, we ordered a Sacher torte, filled not with delectable Viennese chocolate, but with gooey pudding.

Yes, the menu was a clear exercise in anti-Semitism. No wonder no one was there, for the restaurant’s name in tiny letters read “An American in (Vichy) Paris.”

Shame on them for the deception. But we should have known better, on the night we went to see “I Am My Own Wife.”