Celebrating With Snails For Supper at Bibou

I know that Memorial Day is coming up and everyone (cooks and hookers excepted) is happy for the impending day off. But you know what else ought to be a national holiday? May 24th–National Escargot Day. There should be cards. There should be gifts exchanged (ideal presents for your National Escargot Day celebrations: tiny forks, liquor, garlic presses and psychotic-looking snail puppets), fireworks displays and parades with snail-shaped floats. Everyone should get the day off and be able to sit around on sun-drenched cafe patios, drinking cool white wine and eating snails to their heart’s content.

Unfortunately, I am not in charge of deciding which days the American people get to take off work and why (because, under my benevolent reign, we would also celebrate Cheesecake Day, Cheeseburger Day, Hug A Journalist Day, Milkshake Week, National Barbecue Awareness Month, and Festivus). But if you’re looking for a way to celebrate your love of delicious gastropods (and happen to have a couple hundos to drop on the festivities), you could do worse than heading down to Bibou on Tuesday the 24th for their National Escargot Day prix fixe.

Former Le Bec Fin chef Pierre Calmels is doing a five-course, reservations-only dinner for the 7pm seating which will include a soup, snails-and-waffles (which, I guess, is what the French eat when they’re drunk instead of fried chicken and waffles), scallop and snail cannelloni, snail bone marrow (it’s getting the bones out of the snail that’s such a bitch…), quails stuffed with snail, foie gras and red rice, and, finally, a dessert course (fig and goat cheese tart) which has no snail in it at all. The price tag for this escargot-rama is a bit steep ($90 a head, not counting tax and tip), and there are only 32 seats available. Reservations must be made by email through the Bibou website, so if you’re into it, I’d get there quick.

Because unlike the featured protein, this one is probably going to go fast…