Pleasant Surprises, or allons-y a la creperie

In recent weeks I've been bumbling around with my filthy, scratched up glasses barely able to stay on my face and a devastating case of hat-head from bundling up to wade through snow banks (but at least I think I have a fairly cool hat). So I decided to do something about a couple of those problems and get a haircut and maybe replace my rather $@*%'ed up glasses, which involved a bit of stomping around downtown on a bitterly cold morning trying to figure out where the hell Moss Optical got off to since my last visit. Eventually I had to conclude it was too cold to search for anything without the use of a St. Bernard and I started the long, icy trek to the theater. But as I pushed forward, blinking away the blowing snow and burrowing my face further into my woolen scarf, like Lucy Pevensie plowing her way through mothballed furs in a wintery wardrobe I made a rather fantastic discovery.

Just as I was trying to think of an excuse to duck into a warm shop for a moment and desperately hoping there might be a warm shop where I could make some pretense of browsing and not the barrette and Christian bookstores that seem to crop up in every forlorn retail space during an economic downturn, like a clown wig at a funeral. But as luck would have it I noticed a doorway nestled next to the entrance of a large building, a doorway marked simply "La Belle Crepe". For a moment I doubted my senses to have stumbled on something so unlikely and so timely that it could only have been conjured by the Hogwarts Castle Room of Requirement, but I rushed through the door to find a jovial and engaging Frenchman whose persona I can perhaps best describe by asking you to picture him tugging fine, blonde hair off his chef's coat from last night's (or this morning's) lastest tryst, offering delicious crepes stuffed with ham and gruyere and countless other delights in little more than an entryway. It was a perfect little nook, just big enough to tease and please but not large enough to lose its focus, become infatuated with deep chairs and fireplaces and succumb to becoming a Starbucks.

I watched wide-eyed in wonder as like turkish delight emerging from a snowbank my fresh crepes took shape on the grill in the icy window looking out on the windblown snow, and as we discussed the surreal quality of such a place in the windswept plazas of Nicollet Ave and how it came to be, the proprieter cheekily confessed to me the secret ingredient to making fine French treats was cheap Canadian beer. A slight chill from the outdoors crept into me at this moment in a manner no doubt reminiscent of something from one of the children's series I just re-read, but as fear's raspy fingers danced up my spine like the Little Prince's rake across the starlit baobab roots of his lonely cold asteroid I found my mouth and my instinct to annoy people with running jokes had both gone dry.

I have always refused cheap beer, not out of snobbery towards the delights of the lower classes, but because it just so happens there are certain plants of the earth that cause so much alarm and confusion to my immune system that brother turns against brother, blue cell against grey cell, and the worst of these is the sinister climbing cones of the humulus lupulus plant. The last time I tried a deodorant that cheerfully advised me it was "Now fortified with extra hops!" it descended on my skin with the same terrible wrath of Mr. Fitzgibbon's plow on the rats of NIMH's rosebush and I vowed to never let that terrible plant near me again. At the very memory my skin began to crawl as if threatening to make an escape down the road with the dish and the spoon calling back over it's broad yet floppy shoulders "Count me out pal... and a little vitamin B once in a while would've *%&#'ing killed you?" (My skin is surprisingly less eloquent than my literary left brain but generally on a par with the furiously twirling stumbles of my right brain... which is unfortunately the part I seem to talk with.)

But just as you can't put fucking onions in my fucking omelette (like they do every time I eat at Key's) without breaking a few eggs, you can't make really delicious crepes without the particular yeast that brewers use to make their foamy golden poison, and once I've caught the smell of certain pleasures I'm lost... I had to have it. I took my crepe back to the theater where I reminded the stage door attendant of my extension and to please, please send help immediately should I call 911 from that phone because it would mean my throat was closing. And while my gamble paid off and I did survive the experience with only an almost certainly psychosomatic tension in my neck, I still think I still would have been licking the berries and cream off my lips as the paramedics burst in to jab me with epinephrine.

So La Belle Crepe is highly recommended, for both the fresh-made crepes and the rush of cheating death, and unlike Narnia you can return more than three times. Le Patron assures me that in the summer he will be offering outdoor seating and adding a fresh delight for pedestrians on an avenue that really needs a lift, and expanding to Uptown as well. But for me I'll always treasure the memory of that day when in the middle of winter I discovered there lay within Nicollet Mall an invincible summer.

La Belle Crepe

825 Nicollet Mall #100
www.labellecrepe.com

P.S. Of all the authors from whom I have stolen shamelessly to elicit groans from my loyal readershop, I apologize only to M. Albert Camus for nicking "Au milieu d'hiver j'ai enfin decouvert qu'il y a en moi un etait invincible" from Retour a Tipasa.