Category — Village Life

I was horrified when I first heard that restaurants in France don’t do takeout. One of the truly great amenities of life in California is that almost any restaurant will let you pick up food to go. We were completely unaware of this amazing phenomenon before we had kids. But take-out became a regular event at our house when the girls were little and it was hard to buy the food, let alone cook it. We formed a bad habit that won’t be easy to break.

It turns out all is not lost. Our village in Provence has Ivan Des Pizza, the pizza truck.  They drive to a different village each night, parking the truck in the village square and cooking the pizza in the truck. He comes to our village on Wednesday and parks about a five minute walk from our house.

A Lovely Walk to Get Pizza

Ivan is the owner and chef.  The name is a play on words. In French “Ivan” sounds like “il vend” which translates to “he sells”.  So when you say “Ivan des Pizza” in French it sounds like “He sells pizza”.

Ivan is a character. He is young – probably 21 or 22 since he graduated from high school 3 years ago.  He started his business earlier this year. The name was inspired from being teased about being called Ivan in school. So he turned that around and used that experience to make it work for him. Gotta love it!

The Village Pizza Truck

Ivan is happy to share his views. Of course he realized immediately that JM was Canadian (I do hope one day my French is good enough I can recognize the accent too!) but we told him we were living in California and the first thing he wanted to know was if Schwarzenegger was still governor. He’d seen him do a part in a recent Sylvester Stallone movie and assumed you couldn’t be governor AND act in a movie. We clarified that for him.

He’s never been to the US or Canada, but he’d love to travel there one day. His thinks that the houses look very flimsy – which considering everything here is built out of rock and a lot of it has been around for centuries, is probably true.

He was curious about how a Canadian family from California ended up in this particular village.  Turns out he’s lived about 20 miles from here his whole life and but he didn’t know our village existed until he started his pizza business.

We are looking forward to seeing a LOT more of Ivan and eating more of his excellent pizza acheter viagra 50 milligrams.

UPDATE:  Turns out we were mis-informed about takeout in France. While it is certainly not as common as it is in America, you can get plat à emporter from many of the more casual restaurants.