Spain may have captured the World Cup, but Bastille Day rolls around again, as it does every July 14th. The French simply call it their Fête Nationale and celebrate with stately parades and speeches. Americans, no strangers to displays of nationalistic ceremony, clearly side with the revolutionaries and their cry of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!
There's a corner of France along First Avenue, above the Pike Place Market, with two francophile restaurants offering Bastille Day festivities.
Le Pichet will throw its biggest party of the year. Run by French-trained chef Jim Drohman, creator of Seattle's best chicken liver dish, the iconic gâteau au foie de volaille Le Pichet will serve Parisian street food and feature two bands. Details at www.LePichetSeattle.com
A block away, at Campagne, they're offering a royalist dinner ($50 for five courses, starting with a coddled duck egg) in the cool and starched upstairs restaurant, and a populist fair in the Cafe Campagne alley down below (street food like garlic sausage and pommes frites for $5 or so). Details on the Campagne blog: www.campagnerestaurant.com/blog.
No class divisions in Ballard at the holiday's eponymous restaurant, Bastille. It starts with an outdoor charcuterie and oyster station. There's $5 beer and wine, music on the terrace, a chanteuses in the back bar, and a that most revolutionary experiences of all, an ooh-la-la burlesque troupe at midnight. www.BastilleBar.com
Curious about the song? As in Star Spangled Croissant, "Allons, enfants de la patrie!"
Twas today in 1900 that the Opéra-Comique in Paris premiered a patriotic opera titled "La Marseillaise," which melodramatically depicted how, on a spring night during the French Revolution, an army officer named Claude Joseph Rouget de l'Isle (counterpart to Francis Scott Key) wrote the words and music for the song (based on a theme by Mozart, of all people) which later became the French National Anthem. Compared to the bombs bursting in air, (based on an old English drinking song) the harrowing Marseillaise calls for irrigating the furrows of French fields with the impure blood of the enemies. A nasty past, long forgotten.
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