Late last summer, a young chef from Seattle wrote to tell me about his underground restaurant project: Hidden Kitchen was to be set in an apartment somewhere in Paris, where he and his girlfriend would serve a tasting menu with matching wines to twelve diners each week. The price would be reasonable and chef friends visiting from out of town would be invited to cook there on occasion, too.

He had the vision, the name, the funding, the location, and the nifty cut-out cards, but he wanted to reach out and ask for a local’s thoughts.

And this local’s predominant thought was: yay! (I may have offered a bit more insight — I forget.)

The concept of an underground restaurant is common enough in some countries to be documented on Wikipedia and to have been written up in the press, but I have heard or read very little about similar initiatives in Paris — of course, they may be so underground as to fly below my radar –, so I was excited to learn about this one, and to be in the front row as it made its debut.

It took the team a few months to pull things together, renovate the apartment, set up the kitchen, and decorate the dining room, but the chef wrote again in the spring to announce that things were just about ready: the first official dinner would be held on June 24, but would Maxence and I like to come and lend our taste buds for a proof of concept dinner a couple of weeks before that?

My reply was: see above.

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Not quite a vegetable but not quite a seaweed, salicornia must have gone through a tough identity crisis as a teenager. And that’s not even taking into account the multiple names it has to answer to — sea bean, sea asparagus, glasswort, or marsh samphire in English, perce-pierre, salicot, cornichon de mer, or criste-marine in French.

Whatever the moniker, salicornia is a wild, succulent plant that grows along the seashore and in salt marshes. It comes in bushes of crisp and juicy twigs that are harvested in late spring to early summer (i.e. now) and can be eaten raw, cooked, or pickled.

Pickled salicornia is easy to come by in Brittany, and in fact this is where I first encountered it as a child: my family vacationed on the coast for a week every spring, and we would buy the occasional jar of softly pickled salicornia to add to the salads my mother made in the awkward kitchen of whatever house we rented.

I was already fond of the sour/salty combo at the time so it was a treat for me, but I suspect that part of my appreciation came from the fact that the word salicorne is so similar to the word licorne (unicorn), which is very cool by any standard, whether you’re an eight-year-old girl or a fan of Blade Runner or both.

The above-pictured salicornia, however, is not pickled. Its bright green color, starkly offset by the fish market blue of the plastic bag, indicates that it is raw: Maxence and I bought it fresh at the poissonnerie last weekend, happy to stumble upon this relative rarity a mere two days after having it at the British ambassador’s house.

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The June/July issue of Régal* has just been released, with its fresh batch of inspiring ideas**, and it was my reading material of choice when Maxence and I went out for a drink on a terrace on Saturday afternoon, to bask in the fine weather.

And in the midst of the section on farmed vs. wild fish, a ray of sunlight fell on a recipe for barbecued herring served with chermoula.

If this is the first time you and chermoula meet, let me give you a brief introduction: in Moroccan cuisine, chermoula is the magic wand to deal with fish. It is classically a mix of fresh cilantro (a.k.a. coriander), garlic, and spices, bound together with lemon juice and olive oil***. The combination of spices varies depending on the cook’s preferences, and fresh parsley, fresh mint, or chopped onions may be added, but the basic idea remains the same: to form a thick paste that will be used as a marinade before grilling or baking the fish, or as a condiment at the table.

In Moroccan cuisine, chermoula is the magic wand to deal with fish.

I had purchased a whole dorade that morning, and chermoula seemed like the perfect foil for it; I bought a bunch of cilantro on the way home, and got to work. I used the printed recipe as a starting point, and modified a few things: I took the opportunity to use a Meyer lemon and the aleppo pepper I had brought back from the US, I used smoked paprika instead of regular, I added whole coriander seeds and a good pinch of saffron, and I decided to grind the ingredients together in my beloved mortar, instead of chopping them by hand or in a mini-chopper.

I will note here that it is not a difficult recipe (grind, pluck, grind again), but that one should not underestimate the time that is needed to pluck the leaves from the bunch of cilantro. However, this task is executed in a divine cloud of cilantro smell that makes it all okay — unless you’re one of those people who loathe cilantro, in which case you can just use flat-leaf parsley, but it’s not quite the same.

And the resulting emerauld green condiment accomplishes its mission remarkably well: its fresh, tangy, earthy notes, and its lingering heat make it flamboyantly flavorful, yet respectful of the fish’s sensibilities. Other uses include eating it by the spoonful, spreading it on thin slices of baguette, or mixing it with good-quality canned tuna for a mean tuna sandwich.

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* Régal is a French bimonthly cooking magazine that was created three years ago. They don’t have a website (I know, I know, don’t get me started), but French residents can subscribe online here, and you can enquire about foreign subscriptions by writing to: abonnements [{ at }] uni-editions [{ dot }] com.

** And, I might add, an amuse-bouche recipe by yours truly on page 10.

*** [Wow, asterisks are flying low, today!] The name chermoula is sometimes given to spice rubs that combine a similar mix of spices with dried herbs and dried garlic.

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Where were we? Ah, yes: last time we spoke, I had just arrived in Seattle. I am now home, tired but happy, and I thought I would share a few more thoughts and highlights from the final week of my US book tour, between Seattle and San Francisco.

Sharpie. In under two weeks, I managed to go from not knowing what a Sharpie was — this brand of marker doesn’t exist in France — to being very particular about the Sharpie that I used: if it’s a fine point, I need it to be brand new, otherwise the line is too thick; if it’s an extra fine point, I need it to have a bit of mileage, otherwise the line is too thin.

Bookplates. Before I left New York, my publicist gave me a bundle of bookplates, a.k.a. ex libris — in my case, just blank stickers with a small Broadway Books logo at the bottom. This turned out to be a smart move (unsurprisingly so, for my publicist is a smart person) because we usually ran out of books to sell at the different events. The last people to arrive would look disappointed that they couldn’t get a copy, until I whipped out my stack of stickers and said, in my consolation prize voice, “Would you like me to sign a bookplate for you?” To which most people responded with a vigorous nod, and asked if I could sign one for their sister-in-law and their best friend, too.

A chef’s take on my recipes. About half of the events of the tour were booksigning dinners or lunches, i.e. meet-the-author events hosted at restaurants, during which our guests could eat, drink, and mingle. The chef could — but didn’t have to — plan the meal around recipes from the book, and a large part of the fun for me was to see what they’d done with them. They all did a great job, obviously, and after my initial feeling of relief (1- the guys in the kitchen do not smirk at me; 2- the food tastes great), I relished it when they took creative license with the dishes and made them their own.

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