As we prepared for the Department of Architecture’s first foreign study experience — the landscape program hadn’t been established yet — we met several times to discuss the audacity of what we were about to do. I recall at one of the early sessions the sort of counsel that made Elliott the go-to-guy when virtually any problem reared its head. Remembering that there was no downtown campus then and that students were disinclined to set foot beyond Twelfth Avenue North, he advised:
If you can’t walk from campus to downtown Fargo and see something new or see something old in a new way, then you’re not ready to go to Europe.
In other words, being a tourist doesn’t consist of what you’re looking at; it constitutes the simple act of looking. So many years have passed, I can’t recall how we reacted to such a simplistic notion, but in hindsight I wish he’d challenged us to actually do it.
When Elliott arrived mid-year 1975, I knew little more than he had come from Detroit and that he’d taught architectural history. I had been doing that since the fall of 1971 and was still unsettled in the job fate had dealt me. The jig is up, I thought; he’ll see through me in short order.
I recall one afternoon in the coffee room at the end of the hall in our shoebox on campus, the home we quickly outgrew. Cecil and I were talking about travel. “My ideal retirement,” he admitted, “would be a combination bar, bookstore, and travel agency,” at which point I knew there was a future for me at NDSU. And that future became borderline rosy when we spoke of our favorite travel destinations and the Napoleonic truth that all great armies travel on their stomachs.
London. We agreed on London — at least the London of the 1960s, a very different city than it’s become in the last half century — as the place we most enjoyed all round: architecture (Hawksmoor), bookstores (Foyle’s), museums (the V&A), parks (Hyde and Kensington), music (The Albert Hall for live performance; Tower Records, otherwise). And then there was food. Someone just reminded me of Blackfriars, for pub lunch and a pint. [Thanks, Mr Hulne.] But I have in mind another place on the other side of the city.
The first of my several trips to London had occurred in 1971, the summer before my arrival in Fargo. And quite by accident rather than design, I had stumbled upon a tiny restaurant while on my way to the V&A: exit the District & Circle line at South Kensington, proceed to the principle exit, bearing right and right again, onto Thurloe Street. Proceed past the shop fronts to the last of them on the right, #20, and enter Daquise, a French-named Polish-themed restaurant that had been a watering hole for expatriate Poles since the end of WWII. I thought immediately to tell Cecil about it, hoping I might have a scoop. “You know, (dramatic pause) my favorite restaurant in London is near the V&A just outside the tube stop,” I offered. And his immediate reply? “Oh, you mean Daquise.”
Family-owned and operated, the Daquise ambiance was simple, like the food, and the staff spoke their English with more than a hint of Central Europe. I happened on the place just after the lunch crowd and settled in for the one meal dictated by my very limited budget. Probably the most authentically Polish item on the menu was (and still is!) szrazy, a piece of beef pounded thin, rolled around a combination of bacon, pickle and prunes, and then poached in heavy cream; the French would call it a roulade. Traditionally served with buckwheat and beets, this is Polish comfort food — the kind I’d been deprived by a Polish grandmother who hated to cook. And now to discover that what had grown to legendary proportions in my recollection was the favored restaurant of my new department chair was the foundation of a relationship I could never have imagined.
Elliott was the kind of person who could derive as much pleasure from reading a recipe as eating the completed dish. Our conversations often turned to food, especially the foodways that brought us to interesting and exotic places like Budapest and Prague and Stockholm — or, for that matter, Kansas City or Milwaukee or Chicago. Food (and drink) and the travel it punctuates were the mainstays of our relationship for more than twenty years. And for each of us I think, it became a refuge from the routine of teaching and the rigor of administration at a place where the food was, frankly, pretty unremarkable.
