It was Sunday evening at the French Embassy restaurant and bowling alley. A romantic tango caressed the main dining room to the muted accompaniment of bowling pins flying, and cultures clashing.
The bon vivants of the Sunday Night Mixed Bowling League-the Gutter Dusters, the Alley Cats and their spouses-had taken over the main room for their annual bowling banquet.
The apparel de nuit pour l`affaire ranged from evening ensembles to blue jeans and golf shirts. The banquet menu, selected by a vote of 57-3 among league members, was strictly province Americain: pork chops, fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, and corn.
”I normally just stick with the steak in here myself, but my wife likes to try all the different French things,” said Ron Smith, a bowling league member.
In the small dining room across the hall, the restaurant`s Francophile clientele was seated at tables clothed in white linen and served by waiters in white and black uniforms.
In here, selections are offered from a gourmet French menu and from an ambitious wine list. The 15 entrees, priced as high as $18, are written in French and Anglais and include saute de porc a la moutarde (pork in mustard sauce, $10.25) and supremes de volaille grilles aux crevettes (charbroiled chicken in shrimp sauce, $11.95).
Around the corner, it`s $1.85 per game, $1 for rental shoes.
Just west of Paris (Illinois), and southeast of La Place (Illinois), beneath a battery of towering grain elevators on the state`s flattest expanse of prairie, there is a Midwest rendezvous where bowling (jeu de quilles) meets bouillabaisse (fish soup).
But sacrebleu! (dadgummit!) the two haven`t always mixed.
”Usually our serious bowlers are not really interested in our French dining room, and not very many of the people who come to eat from our French menu like to bowl,” said owner and chef Jean-Louis Ledent. ”But we do have more and more who bowl and then come in to eat, and even those who come to eat, and then bowl,” Ledent said.
Gourmets and Gutter Dusters alike might think this a strange pairing of entertainment alternatives, especially for a town of just under 3,000. But Arcola is a quirky little hamlet.
Near its edge is the Rockome Gardens, a flowery folk village done up in quilts, country cutes and houses made of soda pop bottles. Arcola itself is a touristy flirt, offering annual festivals to celebrate broom corn, which once was grown here in greater quantities than anywhere in the world, and Raggedy Ann, whose creator, illustrator Johnny Gruelle, was born here in 1882.
The region is also home to a large population of Mexican crafts workers, who make most of the locally produced brooms, and an even larger settlement of Amish farmers and furniture-makers, whose black horse-drawn carriages punctuate the straight, flat roads that border Douglas County farm fields.
Culture clashing, then, is an everyday occurrence in this region; so why not a little post-bowling boeuf bourguignon to compete with all the Kountry Kitchens, Dutch Pantrys and Das Hauses?
”We think Jean-Louis, his family and his restaurant kind of fit right in and give us just one more unique attraction for our tourist business,”
enthused Arcola Chamber of Commerce President Linda Fishel.
In previous incarnations under previous owners, the plain, one-story, brick bowling alley and restaurant served Italian food or steak and potatoes in its dining rooms.
It did a respectable business, but it didn`t enjoy the current je ne sais quoi that has inspired articles in The Washington Post and People magazine, as well as the Decatur Herald and Review.
”When I bought it and gradually added French recipes, I started to see a different clientele coming in,” said Ledent, 33. ”I`m not sure we would have gotten all this attention with our old menu.”
Just a few days ago, the special assistant to the U.S. secretary of energy strolled into the French Embassy on a visit from Washington. With a news clip about the restaurant in hand, he sat himself down and dug into a heapin` country helpin` of saute de porc au vin de Bordeaux.
He took a pass on the bowling, however.
Stewing over the menu
Ledent, a native of Liege, Belgium, came to the U.S. in 1987 with his wife, Yvette, and two young daughters to work for another Belgian chef who owns a popular restaurant in Champaign. After about a year in the kitchen there, Ledent was sent to Arcola, where the boss had bought the bowling alley and restaurant as an adjunct of his Champaign operation.
Ledent managed the new place for another year, but he had operated his own restaurant in Huy, Belgium, for six years before moving to central Illinois, and he decided in short order that he would rather run the Arcola restaurant his way, under his ownership.
So he bought out the boss, tout de suite.
”I bought it so I could do what I wanted with it,” he said.
”When I was just the manager, we had some French cooking, but it was strictly French country, and country cuisines are all the same. You have a stew, we have a stew. People didn`t see much difference between what they ate at home and what they ate here.”
Ledent set about giving the French Embassy its own national identity. Some of the changes proved to be, how you say? . . . gaffes terribles, Ledent admitted.
”In the beginning, I tried a French lunch in the bowling alley snack area, with a croissant bar and crab salad, but there was not enough business for this type of food,” he said.
So he shut it down, talked to his friends around town, and plotted a new strategy.
In January he ran newspaper ads announcing the reopening of his nouveau lunch counter featuring 99 percent American cooking (he kept the croissant pizza), and 100 percent Yankee cooks.
”I am not in the kitchen for lunch anymore, because I always want to put French spices on everything, even the grilled tenderloin,” Ledent said.
He also learned quickly, and bluntly, that his restaurant`s evening menu needed a bit of fine-tuning.
”One time in the dining room,” he said, ”a local guy told me that the filet mignon had a `chemical taste.` I got mad. I told him to tell me he didn`t like it, but not that it had the chemical taste.
”But from that I realized, maybe they want meat to taste meaty, so now, on the menu, I ask if people would like French herbs on their food.”
Ledent said he has had some great successes in introducing local folks to his native cuisine. One man has all but abandoned fried frog legs for sauteed frog legs, and lobster is fast becoming a favorite local dish.
Not that the cultural exchange has been all one way.
”Yes, it`s true,” Ledent said, ”I have become addicted to onion rings.”
He added that his family has settled into the small-town atmosphere quite comfortably. ”I got to know more people in a month here than in a year in Champaign. Here, everybody knew I was `the foreign guy.` One day I was walking down the street and a guy came up and asked, `Are you the new guy in town?` ” Ledent said he and his wife have no interest in returning to their native country. ”People here are really nicer,” he said. ”It is much more competitive in Belgium and Europe. We went to the park here one day, and they announced free Pepsi for everyone. I couldn`t believe that people just waited in a nice line, one behind the other. In Belgium, there would have been fistfights.”
Pinning down the sport
Some local residents have claimed to be intimidated by the foreign menu, but the Belgian diplomat has learned how to handle such problems. ”One guy said he could not come in to my restaurant to eat because he could not speak French, but I told him it is OK, I speak English,” Ledent said.
A larger problem in taking over the business arose from the fact that while Ledent knew a little English and a lot about cooking, he knew absolutely nothing about bowling, he said.
”We have bowling in Belgium, but I had probably bowled maybe 10 times in my entire life,” he said. ”I had to spend a lot of time learning about bowling here. I had to learn the rules.”
Ledent`s eventual mastery of the technical aspects of the sport has received nearly as much praise as his work in the kitchen. He bought new pins, resanded and treated the alleys, and brought new life to the town`s only bowling alley, his supporters said.
The French Embassy serves nearly 500 bowlers a week on its polished 12 lanes.
”I tell you, the guy has really helped the community by fixing that place up,” said local trucker Ron Smith, who bowls there three nights a week. ”It`s a nice place to bowl, and a nice place to eat, and since he has a lounge there, too, a nice place to watch the Cubs play the Cardinals, or whatever.”
Thomas ”Tim” Monahan Jr., president of the town`s largest broom and handle factory, has found the French Embassy also to be a nice place to put one over on his visitors from larger cities.
Monahan, who has visited many of the finest restaurants in France, said he takes particular delight in suggesting to his sophisticated clients and friends from out of town that they go out for some fine dining in Arcola.
”I just say, `Let`s go down to the bowling alley and get a bite to eat,` and they get this look on their faces . . . and then, we walk into the place and it bowls them over,” Monahan said.
