I’m thrilled to be traveling to France and Spain in a couple of weeks. After a long hard school year I can’t wait to relax in the country side and take in the sights, smells, and flavors of these beautiful places. One of my destinations will be the town of Lourmarin in the Vaucluse area of Provence, where my grandmother lived the last twenty years of her life. I’ve been thinking of her a lot recently, and when I saw this menu on the online site of San Francisco’s Paris Hotel Boutique I was especially struck by her memory. My grandmother and I were very close–she would spend hours telling me the stories of her life, occasionally with a prop or two. I hadn’t thought of it for years, but one of her favorite souvenirs was a menu card from one of her trans-Atlantic journeys on the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner when her grandmother took her to Europe as a young woman to get fine clothes in Paris and go to finishing school.
Nothing will match my beloved grandmother’s Queen Elizabeth menu card, but this one is pretty wonderful too:
Decorative French menu from the L’Hermitage Hotel, Monte Carlo, 1909