THE HUNTSVILLE TIMES

Saturday, April 8, 2000

What does an American in Paris want? A view of the Notre Dame's spires. A starry, starry nighttime boat ride down the Seine. A good bottle of Bordeaux and some crisp French bread.

Oh, and maybe some peanut butter. Make that crunchy peanut butter.

At Thanksgiving, a combination market-restaurant in the chic Marais district, any shopper can find peanut butter, as well as fat-free lime Jello, Quaker instant grits and Bisquick pancake mix. But why would anybody want this stuff in the land of haute cuisine? Why eat macaroni and cheese when you can dine on foie gras?

The answer, according to Judith Bluysen, who co-owns Thanksgiving with her French husband, Frederick, is that sometimes people want what they can't have, and, until recently, it was hard to find these American staples in French markets. They represent a little taste of home, and when the taste buds are tired of heavy sauces, it's good to have a tuna fish sandwich. People especially want a taste of home on holidays. Hence the birth of Thanksgiving.

When Bluysen and her husband started their business 10 years ago, it was hard to find any traditional Thanksgiving food in the city. In fact, Bluysen says there wasn't a turkey to be found in Paris. So the enterprising couple hired farmers to raise the birds, then they cooked them, offering them for sale in the grocery store and restaurant.

They also began serving other Thanksgiving staples such as sweet potato pie and pumpkin pie. They use an old Texas recipe handed down through the family of Houston-born Maurice, a Thanksgiving waiter and "our adopted son," as Bluysen calls him. He describes his great aunt Novalene's sweet potato pie as his favorite. "People love it," he says, in his French-tinged Texas accent. "It's a hit."

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It must be. The restaurant is booked for Thanksgiving by September very year, and it serves more than  hundred turkeys a season.

Aside from holiday fare, most of the food served in Thanksgiving's dining rooms are Louisiana Cajun and Creole-based dishes. After a trip to Louisiana some years ago, Bluysen, a native New Yorker, fell in love with the cuisine, the culture, the music and the people. She concedes she used to have a negative view of the South, though she'd never been there. Now, she's revised that view.

She and her husband proudly serve file' gumbo, crawfish boil and oysters Rockefeller, and cook to the beat of Clifton Chenier and the Zydeco rhythms of New Orleans. Posters of Professor Long Hair and Dr. John grace the walls of the dining room, where Japanese tourists look over the English menu, wondering aloud what blackened swordfish might look like.

In the winding streets outside, it's rainy and cold, with trees just beginning to think about budding. April in Paris. In the cozy restaurant, they're serving up spicy Cajun and making pitchers of iced tea. A blues beat punctuates the clatter of cooking and serving.

Bluysen looks like a woman who loves her work. she says her restaurant is like one of the bayous she's visited in Louisiana. It's a place where le bon temps roulez - the good times roll - and not just on Thanksgiving.

Huntsville resident Beth Thames is a free-lance writer and an English instructor at Calhoun Community College.