"Chez Michel is the village bar of Cabrieres and the headquarters of the boules club, and not sufficiently upholstered or pompous to attract too much attention from the Guide Michelin inspectors. Old men play cards in the front; clients of the restaurant eat very well in the back." Peter Mayle, A Year in Provence








An orchestrated birthday visit by the five of us to Porta Bella Restaurant just off State Street Madison wasn't just a trip down memory lane but something more akin to bottling 30 years then taking a slow and easy sip. Porta Bella is one of those places that holds dream-like qualities; one of the first restaurants we had ever frequented going as far back as early undergraduate years when Jan

waitressed here and I had the great privilege of picking her up after shifts breathing in the deeply shaded and eclectic scenes that were the small pockets of barely lit seating carved into a restaurant.  So many years later -- and after having sporadically visiting over the years – we were able to celebrate Jan's 46th not by coordinating a massive travel plan but via a few texts in order to find the right hour when Julia had finished playing tennis in the Badgers big ten tennis venue, Abby out from under her most recent Theta meeting and Carly and I away from Monroe Street Days where chocolate

shop merged with bluesy street music and Art Gecko hanging lamps.  To have the five of us in one spot on a moment's notice was, in a sort of nutshell, the result of our hopes made real.  At a glance, to look around the table and to see that Abby is the same age as when Jan worked at the restaurant and Julia soon on the way is what they call in parenting time as a time warp, to say the least.  The restaurant was dark and quiet just as we always remembered it, with more Madisonians trickling in as the night got older.  Small homemade pizzas, pumpkin ravioli and chicken Caesar sandwiches rounded out the order, the old recipes and famous hand chopped Italian salad bringing us back to some of those flavors of old.  And just like parents, we couldn't help but bring up the prospect of filling Abby's dorm room with groceries; she accepted and we walked down to Fresh Market on

University Avenue and shopped the five of us for the first time in years, making sure there was fresh fruit, yogurt, maybe even a veggy or two to slip inside the mini fridge which serves as countertop for the kitchenette next to the bed.