October 31: A French countryside Evening

I have been inspired lately by Mara Grimm’s writing about Paris and the elusive je ne sais quoi of city life. What speaks to me is not simply where she tells us to eat or what belongs on the table. It is the idea that a city can reveal itself through food, style, habits, small rituals, and the people gathered around a table.

My world happens to be divided between two cities.

Denver is home. Omaha is work.

I spend enough time in each that neither feels entirely separate from the other anymore. There are restaurants discovered with colleagues, museums waiting for a quiet afternoon, lunches squeezed between the responsibilities of the workday, and places worth remembering because my family was there.

Perhaps that is what I want these stories to become. Not a guide to the best places in Denver or Omaha, but a record of the places that become part of our lives.

And on October 31, those two worlds came together.

Chef G came to Omaha, and we began the holiday weekend with a date night at Sur La Table on Pacific Street for French Countryside Evening.

We could have treated it as a cooking lesson. We decided not to.

There are times when knowing your way around a kitchen means demonstrating what you know. This wasn’t one of them. We kept our skills mostly to ourselves, poured our attention into the evening, and simply enjoyed being there together.

We shared the experience with another couple who had received the class as an anniversary gift. That somehow made the evening even nicer. Four people arriving for different reasons, sharing a kitchen and a table for a few hours.

Our lead cook, Alena, brought something equally important to the evening: enthusiasm. She shared the pleasure she finds in cooking as a hobby, and that warmth carried through the class.

The menu felt perfectly suited to the evening.

A light frisée salad dressed with vinaigrette made from scratch. Acorn squash risotto. New York strip finished with compound butter. And finally, vanilla soufflé.

Nothing needed to be extraordinarily complicated.

That may have been the point.

There is something wonderful about good food when it isn’t trying too hard. Butter, vinaigrette, squash, steak, a soufflé rising in the oven. Technique quietly doing its job while conversation becomes the more important ingredient.

The evening was light, festive and warm, the kind of night that quietly announces the beginning of the holiday season.

And somewhere during dinner I realized that Omaha felt a little less like the city where I work.

For an evening, it was simply where we were together.

When your life is divided between cities, you begin measuring distance differently. Miles certainly matter. Airports matter. Calendars matter. But so do dinners, museums, Saturday lunches and unexpected discoveries.

Maybe the secret isn’t trying to make one city feel like the other.

Maybe it is allowing each city to give you something different.

Mara Grimm searches Paris for that mysterious je ne sais quoi. I think I am beginning to search for something of my own between Denver and Omaha: the places where food, family, work, travel and curiosity intersect.

October 31 gave us one of those places.

A kitchen off Pacific Street.

A French countryside menu.

Four people around a table.

And one more holiday memory made somewhere between home and work, Denver and Omaha.