Eat Out
A mile away the signs begin. Burger du Stand, orange and yellow paint on rough-cut board. At the edge of Prades signs shout like a crowd of demonstrators Big Altar! Garnet Workshop! Intermarche! and Burger du Stand nudges in as a mini map.
I bend my bike off the roundabout onto broken black tarmac lined with polytunnels. Vines by the track loop loosely around a telegraph pole framework. A yellow smiley says one hundred and forty metres then another one says one hundred and ten. Already I’m pleased. Away back on the right showing above the vines is a lonely turret house with Dutch curves to its roofline, upper storey empty looking.
I had seen a flyers for this place but had never quite figured out where it was until today. I had been out that morning up into the hills and had turned down coffee at Marquixanes station bar as if I’d known I’d find Burger du Stand.
At the end of the broken black tarmac the telegraph pole vine framework morphs into tables and chairs, some plastic, some wood, collected from here and there. The place is an assemblage. As I lay my bike against a fence I spot a worker broad of chest with apron, shorts, bandana and beard. In a dark hatch cut out of a caravan elbows flash, someone is busying. Food is on but what is going on here, is it a collective? In the dark hatch a broad cheeked girl turns and looks down at me. Are they social cases finding their way to full employment?
There are diagrams of burgers with lists of choices. I point at the simplest and as I do so she points down at my middle and says do you speak french. Another helper comes up in a black and white uniform with what used to be called a “mob” cap, her face more wizened than the age of her eyes. She points too.
I look down and see their system, rubber stamps ranged on a tray with legends like Undercooked, Goat Cheese, Burger Classic, Mayonnaise, Small Portion Chips, Rye Bun. It is a participative restaurant, you build your order by stamping on a sheet of paper and hand it to thru the hatch. Maybe it is because writing throws some of them? The wizened worker guides me, reminds when I forget to choose the cheese.
I order a glass of wine, the late summer wind pushes me into the shelter of the telegraph pole vine framework, a medley of tables and chairs. A gust knocks over an umbrella, as I catch it someone calls, let it fall, let it fall. I find a spot from where I can see my bike. Behind me is a pool-table. Verily this is some kind of heaven I’ve stumbled on. The serveuse comes over, they can’t break into a bottle of wine for just a glass. Coffee? The machine is broken. I order beer.
Slowly people come. It is still before mid-day. A gang of four assorted in their twenties come from the direction of the farm. Workers? A modest motorhome pulls up and lets out mum, dad, son, daughter. I slug my beer and wait. A young man comes from the direction of the farm — fat legs, bushy all-round beard and glasses, carrying a sheet of paper. I quickly turn him into a supervisor and paste do-good onto him. He goes back to the farm with his sheet of paper.
My hamburger comes in imitation newspaper, the chips in their own wire basket. All is fresh and good, I rasp off sections and dip the chips in a tiny ceramic pot of Algerian sauce. The son and daughter of the motorhome family have got hold of the pool table behind me, the father walks by with a spike carrying a ticket labelled 1. Perhaps they call out numbers and I didn’t get one because I was first and it could only be me.
I am chugging the beer, I don’t have far to get the bike home, I order a second. I am sitting there chomping and chugging in full hazy complacency when something picks at my gum. A piece of blue grey wire two centimetres long, something given me to do with what I will. I decide to report it rather than pocket it. Behind the till at the dark hatch the man throws up his hands and takes the wire. Five minutes later the wizened one comes to my table — it can’t have come from them, they have no wire like that, it must have sneaked in with the bun. I treat it as amusing but she doesn’t unbend.
Thru the grape spangled framework I see other customers settling at the odds and sods of tables and chairs, two strapping women suck pop and a quartet of bearded chin waggers send up smoke. I pay and leave with a thumbs up to the chin waggers. I swing onto my bike and up the broken tarmac to the main road home.
I couldn’t have been more pleased with this discovery — an unusual post-catastrophe eating place. Was it before or after the beer that I decided to host family there the following week? I made the bet that it would be crowded enough to give them a taste of more informal frenchness than the high class restaurants they were used to. It might even, depending on the crowd, be a little dangerous. I asked the serveuse if they were open Monday nights. She looked at me, “…decidedly, we are open every night”.
They loved it, the girl had a soppy Alsatian to play with and auntie taught her pool. My daughter did justice to a half a plate sized steak. I topped us up with an extra demi carafe of generous and simple minded red. A mini thunderstorm sent us giggling into shelter, a flash of lightening showed a bendy bus on wooden blocks — staff accommodation. At the next table a loud extended family went thru their play list. It was a place for modest incomes to eat out of an evening, piquant and surprising.
Frankly I’m not a restaurant man, I don’t like being served and spending all that time choosing. And (tho I say it myself) only once or twice have I eaten better than we do at home. The run of summer visitors has found me testing the local eateries and if you come by Prades down by the eastern Pyrenees I’m giving a star to share between Burger du Stand & Restaurant Vietnam.
(that piece is a bit short for my followers so I’ve hitched on the following, translated back from the french with Deepl)
Here, in Prades, even the flies see that it’s better to live together in a sophisticated spirit of tolerance than in an all-out fight — they let you push them gently with your hand. In the café run by a family of Moroccan origin I taste a mint tea as delicious as the one I drank at sixteen in Tangier. At the next table, two elderly couples, well tanned and with a solid pension, give off a colonial perfume — but nicely.
Prades is remarkable for its cleanliness, with squads of municipal employees in their flamboyant outfits making the rounds with curious, even fascinating equipment — for example, the one who goes around like an insect looking for honey twirling his motorcycle skillfully, vacuum cleaner in hand.
Fortunately, we don’t all come from the same traditions and for some, as everything is in the world to be taken, everything can be left for others to take (I am tempted to believe that this point of view will become dominant). Little by little one learns to live more cleverly with waste — each his own ragman. Between the rubbish dump from where it is forbidden to take stuff and the recycling center that only takes whole objects there is room for a set-up that takes, sorts and cleans raw materials to be re-used within the town.
The mix of cultures and micro-cultures that circulate more or less peacefully struck me when I arrived. In the fascinating turbulence of La Place there are also more solid figures, the Catalan speakers who deliberate together on market day and who sometimes wear clothes that you would see in the black and white films of the sixties.
The fact that everyone can be identified by their clothes makes me think of the Middle Ages with its coded dress. Visitors are identifiable by the over obvious choice of outfit, by their sometimes hesitant steps and their looks turned towards the tops of the buildings, looking for magic ornaments.
A puzzle I have not yet explored, Prades does not suffer from a civic disease found elsewhere, where shopkeepers are greedy and cynical at the same time. Politically, Prades is an island in a harder landscape. One can say that this small town speaks of the need to live in several dimensions at once and that there is something special about its location between mountain and plain, filtering the passage between the mysterious and closed landscape of the Cerdane and the burgeoning and booming metropolis of Perpignan. It is a burg of young people, and it is comforting to see that they are not shy about animating the large square in front of the church. One doesn’t ask where their other hiding places are, the sensitive chrysalids so important for that age.
I must say that despite a newfound spirit of tolerance cultivated to live here, I still have blocks of resistance from my English culture. I am bothered by cars that purr while their drivers are away or waiting for someone. I’ve been told it’s for the air conditioning or clim — really, yes, for the clim indeed! I have the idea that this habit comes from the cheaper gasoline sold to farmers, an easily counterfeited signal of belonging to a tribe, individualistic male power. The luxury of waste is at hand for everyone, in short, waste equals power.
But what to do? It is easier for several people to block a road to protest concreting farmland than to enter the private world of another to stop the waste fuel and polluting noise. This individual barrier is very strong and protects (for better or for worse) individual freedom. Put your paw in the inner world of the individual? Normally it is the police officers who are used to (or use) this existential brutality. Between leaflets and repressive regulations there is perhaps a theoretical space in which citizens can invent ways to intervene so that pollution reduction habits become generalised. To be discussed…
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
