Oui Oui Cleveland
The economy has clipped the wings of frequent fliers like my boyfriend, a salesman, and me, a recent college grad changing careers, so he was surprised when I suggested a springtime trip to Paris — my treat. But as we later wind our way past India, Estonia and Latvia, flanked by Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard’s 1.5 miles of cultural gardens, he senses something is amiss.
“This isn’t the way to the airport,” he says.
“Look!” I exclaim, pointing at a green stalk sprouting a tiny pink bud. “Une fleur!”
He shakes his head, but what can I say? Tough times call for creative traveling. For the remainder of our two-day trip, I play tour guide, enumerating a few of University Circle’s French influences.
The adventure begins at our boutique hotel, the Glidden House Inn, or “the house that paint built,” according to our concierge, Dwayne. Walking us across the first floor of the former Glidden home, he tells us that the French Gothic mansion was built in 1910. Bookshelves decorated with stained glass owls, the stone fireplace, and the ornately engraved woodwork of the dining room, library and foyer are all original and European. The filigree of every other ceiling beam boasts a “G.”
Though interesting, this is not enough to entertain my boyfriend for long when he expected by now to be roaming a city brimming with Brigitte Bardot-looking blondes, baguettes in tow. So we walk a tenth of a mile around the corner to L’Albatros, award-winning chef Zack Bruell’s French brasserie, where he enjoys a frisée lardons salad — “lardon is French for bacon,” I tell him — and tender escargot soaking in a tub-shaped pot with sautéed fennel. I scarf down slice after slice of French sourdough bread, foregoing dry Dijon mustard for olive oil.
Two full filets of trout prompt him to say more than he’s said in days. “It was absolutely cooked to perfection,” he tells our waiter, Eric, who stays on top of the water and Sioux City root beer situation like he’s dousing a fire. “The crust on the outside of the fish was wonderful,” he says.
My bianco pizza with rosemary, garlic, Parmesan and fontina is equally flavorful, but our desserts — frozen lemon soufflé and crème caramel — surpass everything, eliciting moans with every light and creamy bite.
Slightly over two and a half hours later, we’re back in our suite above the Glidden’s sun room, sharing our queen-size bed with seven pillows, which seems a little excessive, so we toss five onto the chairs at our sides and slide into dreamland.
The next morning we walk to the Cleveland Museum of Art, which itself is a work of art created in the Beaux Arts style that originated in Paris.
Inside the museum, I reintroduce my boyfriend to French masterpieces by Rodin, Monet, Cézanne and Renoir that have been tucked away since the museum closed its east wing in 2005 for an expansion project that, when finished in 2013, will add 200,000 square feet.
Before the expansion, prim and proper paintings like young, white-bloused Marie-Yolande de Fitz-James were forced to share space with Rubenesque nudes a la Gauguin’s In the Waves, not unlike cramped houses on a city street. Now, with the East Wing phase of the expansion complete, they reside on sprawling estates of walls in muted shades of gray and blue, allowing museum patrons the breathing room to enjoy them.
As we come upon one of my boyfriend’s favorite pieces — Jacques-Louis David’s Cupid and Psyche — he dons the same comical smile Cupid wears, telling me this vacation wasn’t as bad as my ESPN-devoted guy thought it would be. Now I just have to figure out how to stretch this French thing until May 14 to get him to the Cleveland Orchestra’s performance of Symphonie Fantastique.
Story:
Miranda Miller
May/June 2010