À la recherche du pain perdu

I had dinner at the Mercer Kitchen with my two birthday friends last night. Somehow the people milling about the corner of Prince and Mercer and flowing in and out of the ground floor of the Mercer Hotel and down into the Mercer Kitchen all look like movie stars, record moguls, and models--yours truly excepted. And some of them probably actually are those things.

I started with the pea soup and for and entrée I had the barramundi--which I didn’t know was a fish until last night. I had only previously thought of it as a Lower East Side bar--whose name always struck me as implying a pun of something. The barramundi came with lentils. That was probably a healthy meal, in addition to being delicious.

The dessert menu listed “banana pain perdu.” Even with my limited French I can figure out that “banana pain” is “banana bread,” but perdu? Something idiomatic was going on (surely not “lost bread”). I turned to my friend R. G. Sand, who explained that “pain perdu” is what the French call French toast--yes, bread burning in hell.

So, R. G. Sand, the boulangeries of Paris await! (And, yes, kaseumin, I will be thinking of you.)