Life Is Too Short To Not Eat The Jambon-Beurre at Village Baking Co.'s Boulangerie

Against my better judgment and in solidarity with my soon-to-be wife, I have been doing Whole30 for the last 10-odd days. If you are good at math, you will realize that 10-odd days is not even half of the 30 days required for this long-term torture tactic.

Instagram has proven particularly difficult during this trying time. I follow more food accounts than I’d realized, and nobody is taking pictures of anything other than cheese and carbs. No, I don’t want another bag of dehydrated blueberries, I want some f*cking fries.

(If you have no idea what Whole30 is, consider yourself blessed. It’s a diet that removes pretty much all the good things from your diet. I’ve lost weight. It hasn’t quite seemed worth it.)

Of all the things that have tempted me — pizzas, cheeseburgers, pasta, etc. — the one that’s stuck in the back of my mind, tirelessly gnawing away at my will, is the jambon-beurre at Village Baking’s Boulangerie. France’s cultural answer to the burger, this deceptively simple sandwich requires only butter spread on a split baguette and thick slices of ham. Village Baking adds provolone and wraps the whole thing in a string. C’est si bon.

It’s challenging to imagine a purer distillation of everything verboten by Whole30, just four components, (three of them outright contraband) coming together in perfect harmony. There’s a reason the French, eternal snobs of both haute and rustic, buy these by the millions every day. Holding a jambon-beurre in my hands, I am transported back to the corner bistro in the 7th, the Eiffel Tour peeking out from over the buildings. It’s a decidedly happier state of mind than the one I am in now: Eternally hangry.

Go eat a jambon-beurre today. Or find the sandwich, the slice, the snack that makes you happy and hold on tight to it. You never know when it will be out of your grasp for 30 days.