French chef delights locals with window treats

A chalkboard leaning in the window beckons strollers by Le Petit Cafe:

Delicious Things
Sold at this window
Saturdays 9 - ?

Underneath the flexible hours, a scrawled heart. Inside the window, the heart’s scrawler: Marina Ballor, chef and co-owner of Bloomington’s only exclusively French restaurant.

Every Saturday since the B-Line Trail opened, she sells delicious things: mushroom quiche, quiche Lorraine, fresh coffee and hot chocolate so thick it nearly clots on the spoon.

One Saturday in September, as Ballor bent down and reached into her warm oven, wisps of brown hair fell around her face. A green apron folded softly over her jeans at the knees. She peered into the oven and blew a strand of hair away from her eyes.

Ballor’s business operates with simple materials such as disposable plates and flatware, and she sells from a window that opens out onto the world of farmers’ market ramblers.

Marina sips her coffee like she serves it, a pouring of half and half swirling in a rich darkness. But don’t call her food fattening. Yes, she drowns her bread pudding in English custard – “My kitchen will never run out of custard!” she assured a customer in her sing-song French accent. More than one customer mentioned how richly delicious she found Ballor’s quiche, but Marina preferred words like decadent, creamy and even voluptuous, but not “fattening.”

“I don’t want the ‘f-word’ in my kitchen,” she said. “French food takes all the blame for the crap people eat elsewhere.”

She uses real ingredients and cooks food like she ate it in France, before she moved to the United States in the mid-1970s. She has cooked in the back of the restaurant she has owned with her husband for more than 30 years.

With the opening of the B-Line bicycle and walking trail this June, Marina watched as a graveled, unwelcoming side passage transformed into a paved walkway. It links downtown with the farmers’ market at her Sixth Street and Morton Avenue corner.

A crop of hungry passersby ramble past her window each Saturday morning and Friday afternoon for lunch. The window is Marina’s place, a place for meeting customers, a window for serving food and watching people love it.

Two women approached the window. Ballor chirped when she saw them and asked them what they’d like to eat.

“We’re celebrating my daughter’s birthday,” one woman said, nodding to the younger woman, who stepped closer to the window.

“Would you ever consider giving up the secrets of your quiche?” the younger asked.

“It’s my shortcoming,” Ballor said. “I don’t give up my secrets. It’s nothing magical, but it’s my secret. You won’t get me like this. I try those kind of tricks on my husband.”

The women laughed. They knew her husband, Patrick Fiore, too.


* * *


Fiore rumbles down the stairs that connect the house to the kitchen. He’s got a shock of white hair. He hops around, he shouts happily when he talks. He serves the diners in the restaurant on every day except Mondays, when he takes his wife out to eat.

That Saturday, the morning after a night of Lotus Festival, Fiore bounded into the kitchen and heard music. It was Leonard Cohen’s “Songs From a Room” playing on a CD player in the corner. A classic, he said. He walked to the table and picked up a wrapped croissant.

“D’ou vient ca?” he asked in French. "Where is this from?"

A boy who works at Scholars Inn stand at the market brought it for me, she replied.

As she glided between customers at the window, her warming oven and the table with the silverware, she sang, sometimes with Leonard Cohen, sometimes with her own walking beat.

Fiore looked through the kitchen’s refrigerators. He was looking for food, or for a reason to be with his wife at her window.

The window has opened a space for Ballor in the restaurant that has always starred her food and Fiore’s personality.

She and Fiore moved to Bloomington from France so he could study at IU with a Fulbright Scholarship in percussion. They married here and had two children: a daughter who is a sophomore at IU and a son, who is an IU graduate living in New York and also works at a little French restaurant.

That Saturday, only half the family was in the kitchen. At Ballor’s feet sat a basket with a roll of brown yarn. She worked the yarn between knitting needles and formed a neck warmer for Winston, her son.

Next to the knitting basket was a wooden wine box – Product of France 1982 – filled with CDs. Lightnin’ Hopkins, “The Best of Michael Bloomfield” and blues, blues, blues.

They also own TDs CDs and LPs music shop, a tucked-away record store inside Soma Coffee House. Ballor said she has too many favorite songs. She said she loves what her husband loves.


* * *

Fiore left to make his coffee. It was quiet at the window. Ballor looked puzzled. Why weren’t more customers trying her hot chocolate? It was the first chilly morning of fall.

“Come on people,” she said quietly. “I’ve got hot chocolate, too.”

Her Swiss drink is a mix of cocoa, milk, cream and sugar. It costs $1.50.

“I like to keep math simple like that,” she said. “Tax included and all.”

She leaned against her oven. She looked at the shelves by the window. On the top, glass jars and tins. The bottom shelves held beer, a bottle of Martini and Rossi.

A marketing idea struck her.

“I need someone to go out there and talk very loudly about my hot chocolate,” she said.

She wanted someone to make sexy noises in the farmers’ market. As in, have a verbal foodgasm. That made her laugh.

A customer approached the window. It was a woman holding a bouquet of colorful
zinnias. She was exactly who Ballor had been waiting for. She ordered hot chocolate.

“Oh! You don’t want a lid?” Ballor asked. “Perfect! Then I can put more cream. I don’t like to be restricted by lids.”

She pulled out a bowl of whipped cream from the refrigerator and plopped a huge dollop onto the cup of chocolate. The woman smiled and asked Ballor if she could adopt her.

Ballor then shared her market-moaning plot. The woman laughed. As she walked away, Marina called after her, “Don’t forget to make the naughty sounds as you drink my chocolate.”

The woman was already walking away, sipping her chocolate. She may have been moaning quietly. Who knows?

Marina filled another cup for herself and peered out her window.