French Fries Without Gravy

When I was in Montreal, most available food items would be listed in French, not English, so you do take your life into your hands any time you try to be adventurous. When I saw two different food court restaurants depict french fries with what appeared to be a delicious glazed honey mustard sauce, I figured it must be some special Canadian delicacy. I could imagine friends and family saying, "You went to Canada, did you taste their world-renowned honey-mustard French fries?" So I ordered it. Well, apparently it was not a delicious honey-mustard like substance at all, but ... well, I think it was gravy. And cheese curds. This seemed strange to me. But even now, I'm surprised to report it isn't "bad." After all, there's no reason why french fries without gravy is any more normative than, say, chicken mcnuggets without barbeque sauce. When I visited Rome years ago, it floored me that most pizza-like food items had either dough with sauce or dough with cheese, but precious few seemed to combine them in substantial quantities--if it was primarily a dough item with sauce, they might throw a few stray bits of cheese, at best. So someone from Italy could come over here and say, "What's with all this pizza that has sauce on it? What are these stupid Americans thinking?"

One of the hazards of ordering items in Canada is that you risk looking stupid. Scorning the American chains I saw there (like Subway), I ate at a place called "Harvey's." When I asked the person at the register what the difference was between a "combo" meal and a "trio" meal, the person explained that one was in English, the other was in French. One of the cool features of "Harvey's" is that it's actually like a Subway's--you can watch as your burger is being made, and the person will ask you if you want relish, onions, lettuce, tomato, mustard, or ketchup added to your burger. He will ask you this in French, but happily the lettuce etc. is more recognizable as being lettuce than the honey mustard sauce is at being gravy.

Another hazard of ordering items in Canada is that you risk ordering something you don't want. I'm a big smoothie fan, and happily, the French word for "smoothie" is something like "smoothey." But then the French word for "smoothie flavor" is evidently not spelled "strawberry" or "banannaberry blast" or anything like that, so you have to hope you get something good. I realize I could just buy soda, but I figure, if I'm going to have to pay for drinks, and by pay, I mean get departmental reimbursement, I'm going to have some nice fruity drinks. I also like water ices (kind of like slushes), and when I visited Italy over a decade ago, I learned that granitas were basically like water ices. Well, here in Canada, I saw a coffee shop advertising "granite." Since the picture was of a green thing that looked fruity and not stone-like at all, I figured it must be the same thing as a lime-flavored granita, just that they spelled it wrong. It turns out that "granite" ACTUALLY is "green tea." So, if any of my readers ever want to do a French-Italian-English pun on this thing ("I thought I was ordering a stone!" "I thought I was ordering a water ice!") go right ahead.