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I didn't call him back, because that "saucy wench" has, at her tender age, a biography that she tells better than I ever could. She's too young to know that some revelations don't need to be repeated, a lesson I learned from my late grandmother Virginia, who was married seven times in the days when it was scandalous to have been divorced once.
Grandmother was a well-traveled lady, and later in life she looked back at her divorces with a very Parisian attitude. "Non, je ne regrette rien," she would shrug, referring to the Edith Piaf song about regretting nothing. Virginia knew little of the song's provocative lyrics (It is paid, swept, forgotten ...), but she liked the concept that at the end of a relationship, one simply went on and started life anew. Over the years, she kept copious notes about her travels, her clothes and her meals, but she couldn't remember the names of two of her former spouses.
"Why should I?" she said to me one night as she poured herself a glass of champagne. "I have so many more interesting things to remember."
That's the same attitude French-born Café des Amis owner Didier Combe has about his past romance, even though it was the impetus for opening a French restaurant in Parkville in the first place.
The handsome, tousle-haired, soccer-playing Combe gives his own little non, je ne regrette rien shrug when it comes to the issue of his former business partners. Two years ago, Combe's lover, Megan Sparks, and chef Emmanuel Langlade ran off together to open their own chic bistro, Aixois (and make babies, too). The story has never lost its fizz in gossip-loving Kansas City, though Combe has moved on. He has a new chef in the kitchen and a new Mexican-born girlfriend in the ... bar, where she sometimes works when she's not studying for classes at nearby Park University.
Visitors to the cozy Café des Amis will reap the benefits of Combe's latest import. Tall, dark-eyed Antonio Brocato studied the culinary arts in France, cooked in Hong Kong and Los Angeles, then somehow wound up in the tiny Café des Amis kitchen after a spin in the lavishly outfitted corporate kitchen at the Fairmont Hotel.
Half Spanish, half Italian, the soft-spoken Brocato has given a more cosmopolitan spin to the restaurant's menu since he took over the chef's toque from Liberty Olson (now living in Oregon) last winter. "I took the menu back to France," Brocato says.
Longtime fans of this restaurant will see subtleties in Brocato's menu changes rather than an overhaul. There is still an escargot appetizer, but instead of serving the snails in a bowl of hot garlic butter, Brocato gives the ugly little aphrodisiac a coating of jade-green sauce, liberally laden with butter, sherry, parsley, tarragon, basil and chives. Escargot never looked so chic or tasted so wonderful.
For a simpler hors d'oeuvre to go with a predinner apéritif, there's a salty duet of black- and green-olive tapenade ringed with crunchy garlic toasts. There's also a white china bowl overflowing with steamed mussels, the fragrant sherry broth at the bottom cloudy from a discreet splash of cream and coyly spiced with a hint of fresh tarragon.
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