Salads can be enjoyed in winter too; a plate of refreshing salad brightens the winter dining table.

I went to Paris last November, and after coming back I still couldn't stop thinking about that trip. A friend said I must miss it so much because I ate big meals every day, and I laughed and said that eating too well when traveling alone gives me a guilty conscience, so I kept things simple: a croissant for breakfast, the conference venue for lunch, and a small bistro for dinner. Of course, when I passed a few pastry shops along the way I would still go in and buy some little treats, but that was limited to two or three macarons.

What I kept thinking about over and over was a plate of salad. I still remember it was the third day of the conference. Following the original plan, I listened to the forum, ate lunch, and then got up and left the venue. My time in Paris was short, and it would be too much of a pity to stay cooped up at the seminar the whole time. That is what I told myself. But precisely because my time was short, I had done no homework at all before setting off, and had only saved a few cafes I had seen introduced in magazines to Foursquare, thinking that if I got the chance I would drop by. These cafes were not Cafe de Flore, not Les Deux Magots, not Cafe de la Paix, just a small coffee shop with its own roasted beans.

I got off at Saint-Francois-Xavier and stood at the intersection not knowing which way to go. Winter in Paris was very cold, and the bleak north wind rustled the fallen leaves into the corner of the wall beside me. Ah, this way, Rue De Babylone. I think I had never been to this area before. The street was very small, the apartments on both sides looked like they belonged to a certain class, and the lunch set at the cafe at the mouth of the alley looked delicious. I was desperately afraid that I would accidentally miss the shop I was looking for. I even worried that I had gone the wrong way.

Then, I saw it, Coutume Cafe.

Standing across the street, I looked at the decor of Coutume Cafe and thought that it would not be surprising if this shop opened in Taipei. Wouldn't it? Wooden frames, floor-to-ceiling windows, a tile bar counter, industrial pendant lights, whitewashed walls, wireless internet. I began to guess that hipsters all over the world must share one common "spatial code," just like an airport. If I had to say what was different about this shop compared with the coffee shops I had been to in Taipei, it was probably the "warm salad" I ordered.

Yes, warm salad. That was actually an accident. Before the staff handed me the menu, what I had originally wanted to order was dessert, since it was three in the afternoon and I still had to go eat crepes in the evening. But just as I turned to the salad page, my eyes fell on that row of unnamed salad written as "potato, zucchini, pattypan squash, beetroot, lettuce whose name I cannot say." I tried hard to guess what these vegetables would taste like tossed together with dressing, but no matter how I imagined it, I could not picture it. So I decided to order it.

Anything else? Espresso, please.

Coutume Cafe's espresso really was excellent, with a thick crema, a mellow body, and a full finish. I drank it in one gulp, and then the salad arrived. "Warm?" That was my surprise when I took the first bite of lettuce. I had never eaten a warm salad. To me, salad should be a mouthful of cool, crisp texture, but this plate was not like that at all. Another thing that surprised me was that the flavor of those unnamed lettuces combined together was so rich and multi-layered, sweet and bitter, with a little sourness occasionally pulling it back. What moved me even more was the moment I cut into the potato. I licked the moist mashed potato sticking to the knife, and a sweet feeling welled up in my heart.

I know travelers in big cities are always especially lonely and fragile, but I had never thought that a plate of warm salad would bring me such a strong sense of happiness. I think this was partly because winter in Paris was too cold, and the conference lunches were all cold sandwiches, so I became so easily moved. But it cannot be denied that precisely because travelers are at the intersection of excitement and exhaustion, their intuition about food becomes more sensitive. That sensitivity strips away overly decorative plating and cloying seasoning, and sometimes all it wants is the flavor and impact of the ingredients themselves. A head-on clash of "bang! bang!"

A clash like this is something I sometimes want to encounter while living in a busy city like Taipei, but it is very hard to find in coffee shops. To me, most coffee shop food in Taipei either tries to dazzle people with gorgeous plating, or tries to intimidate people with the origin of the ingredients, and the reason behind this is probably not something that the two words "hipster" can explain clearly.