Restaurateurs, too, had a different relationship with wine. How vividly I remember the Sancerre at Allard. The bistro’s list of Burgundies was impressive, but the signature wine was the Sancerre, cold, sharp, and green-gold in color. Who supplied it, I never knew; there were no labels, no promotional materials, just an endless succession of icy green bottles.
Allard was a friendly place. Once I watched a young American couple order half a bottle of Sancerre and then protest when the waiter brought a full bottle. “We only serve full bottles,” the waiter said. “Just drink half.” At the end of the meal, the couple admitted sheepishly that they’d finished the entire bottle. “Good for you,” said the waiter. “A full bottle for half price.” Allard is still there on the rue Saint-André-des-Arts, but after Madame Allard sold the place, all the old waiters, who knew everybody in Paris by name or face, quit.
Those were thrilling times for wine lovers in Paris. On the rue du Marché-Saint-Honoré, old Léon Gouin was serving such good Beaujolais at Le Rubis that the lunchtime throngs—bankers, firemen, saleswomen—clustered around upturned barrels on the sidewalk outside the café to enjoy a plate of charcuterie and a ballon of Juliénas. Gouin would survey the crowd. An imperceptible nod to the bartender meant that a regular was up for a refill on the house.
I remember in 1976 when a young Englishman named Steven Spurrier startled the wine world with his famous Académie du Vin tasting, at which a group of prominent French wine figures judged several California wines to be superior to some of the most famous Bordeaux names. The Académie du Vin, along with Spurrier’s wine shop, Les Caves de la Madeleine, and his delightful restaurant, Le Moulin du Village, was in a little street called the Cité Berryer, just off the Place de la Madeleine. With its outdoor market and absence of motor traffic, the Cité Berryer was an astonishing bit of old Paris that managed to survive almost into the twenty-first century. Almost, but not quite. Developers found it, stole its soul, and rendered it banal at great expense.
To savor each day and still revel in the past is a rare talent. Except in Paris. Sitting at one of my favorite cafés, like Le Viaduc, on the avenue Daumesnil, or even back at Le Rubis—still there, even if it’s not the same without Gouin—I can pull it off with ease. Every time.
December 2002
THE BISTRO SCENE
HOME AWAY FROM HOME
Joseph Wechsberg
Having settled on a hotel, travelers must turn their attention to food—especially in Paris. One solution is the bistro, but what exactly is a bistro? The trouble begins with the definition. Even the spelling is controversial. Is the word written with or without a final t? It depends on how one feels about the word’s history. According to legend, its origin goes back to the Cossacks who came to Paris with their then-allies, the British and the Prussians, in 1815. They camped in the Place de la Concorde and under the trees of the Tuileries and the Champs-Élysées. They were hungry and thirsty and ran into the nearby cafés and restaurants asking for something to eat and drink, mainly to drink, and shouting “Bistro, bistro!” (quick, quick). No one knows whether the story is true, and some eminent French-language experts don’t like the foreign sound of a cherished French institution. They have come up with several alternative etymologies. One holds that the name goes back to the French word bistre, the brown shade reflected by the bottles behind the bar on the traditional zinc counter. Personally, I prefer the French spelling to the Russian one, though many dictionaries do not bear me out.
Actually, the Frenchman who speaks of his bistro doesn’t think of a restaurant but of the small, often shabby café that is his home-away-from-home.
Foreigners rarely understand the importance of the bistro-café in the life of the average French citizen. At the bistro, the small place at the corner or down the street, he spends much of his leisure. There he sees his copains—they are pals, not friends—whereas he sees his relatives at home. He invites you, the foreigner, to his bistro but rarely to his house. When he is late for dinner—the average Frenchman eats at home—Maman sends her son to the bistro to fetch Papa.
To Frenchmen the bistro is more than a little café. It is the hub of democracy, the last remnant of what older people nostalgically call la vieille France, the final refuge of le vrai individualiste. The bistro resembles another civilized institution, the English pub. In such places a man may speak his mind and be listened to. After he has made his point and drinks up, the other fellow speaks. In pubs and bistros there is still genuine conversation. It can’t be interrupted, as happens all the time in New York bars.
Certain topics are always discussed at bistros: sports, especially the preceding week’s soccer games and, in summertime, the Tour de France, long before it starts and long after it is finished; politics, either on the national or local level; and the cost of living, which goes up all the time. The bistro remains the ideal place to gripe. There are experts who remember vintage years for gripes, just as others remember vintages of wines.
The neighborhood bistro is petit bourgeois, unsophisticated, and very French. Often it consists of two rooms, the front room with the bar, where the counter is still called le zinc even when it is made of plastic. There may be a few marble tables and simple chairs and there may be a sidewalk extension, but it isn’t as important as in the big Champs-Élysées cafés with their large sidewalk installations, where people sit to watch the world go by. In a genuine bistro no one watches; everybody talks. There may be a small back room, with banquettes and brass rails on top of wooden partitions, but it is rarely used. The bistro is not a place where one sits alone in the back. People stand together at the bar. The smell of the bistro is as dearly familiar as that of the Paris métro. At the bistro the smell is a mixture of beer, white wine, Pernod, and the smoke of Gauloises. The clients like it better than their wives’ perfumes.
I explain all this at great length because we foreigners have little hope of being admitted to the inner circle of a genuine bistro. For some time I believed I’d almost made it—that wasn’t in Paris where the bistro exists mainly in the workingmen’s districts—but then I noticed that the patron never dried his hands to shake hands with me, as he always did when a client, a Frenchman, came in. The patron is not just the proprietor; he is the soul of the bistro. He looks around with a permanently suspicious expression on his face, he knows everything about everybody in le quartier, and he enjoys death and disaster as much as the concierge in the buildings where the copains live. I have often wondered how a Frenchman stopped being a customer and became a client, an insider. It’s hard to say; there seem to be unwritten laws. Apparently he must conform to the standards of the establishment. He must come regularly, and in the beginning he should be seen but not heard, like a freshman senator. He should be conservative in his drinking habits. The real apéro is out of fashion. When a client comes in for petit déjeuner because no one at home will make it for him, he has un petit vin blanc. People who sit down in the rear and want coffee and croissants are considered voyageurs, here today, gone tomorrow. They don’t belong.
Once a man belongs and is accepted, he need never be alone. He may break into the Banque de France—how nice that would be—and his copains will rally to his aid. The bistro remains the citadel of camaraderie.
About 1900 some foreigners discovered informal neighborhood restaurants where the food was more important than the décor; they called them bistros or bistrots. No one was quite sure what a bistro was, and people began talking about a bistro-type restaurant, which left matters pleasantly ambiguous. After World War I, people in Paris began collecting bistros. As in the case of Impressionist paintings, most collectors were foreigners. They started the bistro (or bistrot) trend, and Frenchmen followed. The French won’t admit it today. They still collect bistros, and if they find one that is really good they keep the address to themselves. In that respect nothing has changed.
Still, what exactly is a bistro? The definition has expanded to include quite a range of small places. Price is not the crite
rion; there are bistros now that are very expensive. Even the décor is not the measure. Most experts agree that the food matters more than the ambience. The Guide Michelin, which listed bistros in former years, said: la table prime le cadre (food takes precedence over the setting). That is true but not the whole truth. Bistro purists agree that what matters most is who runs the place. A bistro is a family affair: the husband in the kitchen, the wife in the dining room, or the other way around. The young man or the girls who work in the kitchen are relatives, and so are the waiters and waitresses, even though they may be cousins twice removed. As a rule the service is fast—bistro—and the tables are sometimes occupied three times during a meal.
Bistros became fashionable after World War II because of the idea that they were less expensive than more formal restaurants. That too is doubtful now. Some highly rated bistros have been invaded by refugees from Lasserre and La Tour d’Argent. Some even take telephone reservations, which was unthinkable in the old days. If you wanted to be sure of a seat, you came early, before twelve o’clock, or late, around two. In between the place was crowded with gens du quartier (neighborhood people). Even today the clientele is quite different at noon and in the evening. Strangers rarely come for lunch; they wouldn’t feel at home then. At lunch everybody seems to know everybody else, and often the waiters don’t even ask for an order, because they know what their clients like best. The atmosphere is friendly; people sit close together. At noontime most guests are men who like to eat and drink well—that is important—and at night there are often women as well, couples who don’t live in the neighborhood but have heard about the bistro and want to try it. At night the pace is more leisurely. People don’t mind sitting around and enjoying their meal.
I have to warn you: The real bistro is on its way out. I’ve been told by several patrons, “When my wife and I can’t do it anymore, we’ll close. Young people don’t want to carry on. Pensez-vous! They can make more money and have fewer problems working in a large place, with regular hours. We get up early to do the buying, and we close very late, and what with all the taxes and costs we discover at the end of the year that we’ve just managed to break even.”
There you are. A few celebrated restaurants will go on, subsidized by the super-rich and by people with expense accounts. But the quartier-type of bistro, the small, often quaint eating place, will not be with us much longer. In such a place the menu is still handwritten, not typed, with ordinary dishes in violet ink and special dishes in red ink and very special things written upside down, so you cannot possibly miss them. Such a bistro is not necessarily a workingman’s hangout.
There is one in the rue de Berri in the Eighth Arrondissement, not exactly a workingman’s district, called Aux Amis du Beaujolais, which is precisely what the customers are: friends of Beaujolais. Martin, the patron, is said to have one of the best Beaujolais caves in the neighborhood. He comes from the lovely village of Fleurie, in the hills of Beaujolais, and he goes there every year after the harvest, buys a few barrels of the wine he likes best, has them shipped to his restaurant, and bottles them himself. These are vins de provenance directe, wines that neither bottler nor merchant has played around with. When I was there, the vin du patron was a Chénas, another community in Beaujolais, and it was served in a plain bottle with neither label nor cork. I was charged only for the portion of the bottle I drank.
The front room with the bar was crowded with executives from nearby firms having a drink and masons from a building site around the corner having a beer. There was a disturbing detail, however. A few people, apparently in a hurry, didn’t sit down but had their plat du jour standing at the bar. That would have been unheard-of in the old days. No one in a bistro would eat standing up. Obviously, at a time when the bistro has to compete with pizza parlors and snack bars, Wimpys and McDonald’s, it has to compete with the standing-up school of eating.
Otherwise little has changed. I saw two bookish-looking executives, perhaps publishers, and a garageman sitting at the same table. At the bistro one doesn’t have one’s own table; one is glad to have a seat. The executives approved of the wine, offered the garageman a glass, and asked what he thought about it. He approved; it was a decent Beaujolais, quite fresh and fruity. You will admit that this nice little scene could take place only in a bistro in France.
The menu too had the structure of an old-fashioned bistro menu. The hors d’oeuvres were almost the same as I’d had in the old days: carottes râpées (grated carrots), pâté de campagne (country pâté), rillettes (spiced pork spread), thon à l’huile (tuna in oil), hard-boiled eggs with mayonnaise, jambon blanc (ham), terrine de foie de canard (duck liver pâté). Among the entrées were all-time favorites: pot-au-feu (boiled beef), paupiette de veau, purée de pommes (veal roll, mashed potatoes), andouillette de Chénas, purée (chitterlings, mashed potatoes), tripes à la mode de Caen (tripe with onions and carrots), jambon lentilles (ham with lentils), entrecôte grillée (grilled shell steak), escalope aux pms. frites (veal scallop with french-fried potatoes). There was an astonishing collection of cheeses—Brie, Cantal, Camembert, Boursin aux herbes, Crottin de Chavignol, and a few others—though not many, perhaps, if you think of the 480-odd ones made in France; but they were all very good.
In the upper left corner of the carte was the menu conseillé (recommended menu) for 25,80 francs. There were a few special wines listed, among them a Moulin-à-Vent at forty-four francs, the most expensive bottle, and there was a choice of desserts, from the familiar crème caramel (caramel custard) and gâteau chocolat (chocolate cake) to such innovations as tranche vanille cassis (vanilla ice cream with black currant syrup). I was pleased that most people waited patiently for a table. When they sat down, they studied the menu carefully. When the food came, they tasted it and nodded their approval. They knew what they were eating and they liked it.
Most of them were habitués. The waiter shook hands with them and greeted them as old friends. In a bistro you will be liked only if you come regularly and indicate that you want to belong. In some bistros there is a pigeonhole rack for the regular clients’ napkins. The waiter hardly greeted me, but he brought me bread and an open bottle of red wine. I ordered the terrine de foie de canard. He didn’t write it down; rather he went over to a small table near the bar, cut a thick slice of the terrine, and brought it to me. He nodded his approval when I kept my knife and fork after the hors d’oeuvre, and for the first time he gave me a glance. He saw that I knew the rules. In the old days, bistros rarely changed knives and forks.
There were other people that day who did not belong, but they were treated like everybody else. They got their food in the same manner, large portions served on the plate. I had the paupiette de veau with the purée de pommes. The dish was well prepared, with a homey touch. The guests did their own seasoning. On each table were salt, pepper, and mustard. Many people peppered their food though few used salt. The bill was written by the waiter on a piece of paper. In old bistros it had been added up on the paper tablecloth. When a guest got up, the tablecloth was removed, a new one was put down, and the place was ready for another guest. No chichi, but good value.
Chez Pauline, at 5, rue Villedo in the First Arrondissement, is an entirely different sort of place, though it can be considered a bistro. There is the comptoir downstairs, which is necessary, and behind it two severe, elderly ladies keep the reservation book. The place is famous, and one needs a reservation. But there is a cheerful lack of formality; the bread is placed on the table and the pâté maison is put before you in a large container, serve yourself. Unless you order a special wine—and why should you—an open bottle of very good Beaujolais is put on the table with two glasses. No one bothers to fill the glasses, and the sommelier won’t sniff the cork. There is no cork and there is no sommelier, but the wine isn’t bouchonné (tasting of cork); it couldn’t happen here.
I also recommend Chez René, a good and genuine bistro at 14, boulevard Saint-Germain in the Fifth Arrondissement, just around the corner from
La Tour d’Argent, which is more elegant and also more expensive. Monsieur and Madame René Cinquin run the place from behind the bar. Already the younger generation, M. Cinquin fils and his wife, is working. Everybody employed at Chez René is related to M. Cinquin, as they should be in a bistro. The Cinquins come from the Beaujolais country and always have good wines. For years Mme. Cinquin did the cooking, genuine cuisine ménagère (home cooking). The waiters wear dark aprons and throw utensils and plates at you, but they never spill anything.
There is no heat in wintertime on the theory that the clients, sitting close to each other, will do the heating. After the third glass of the Juliénas no one cares. There are flowers on the tables and paintings on the walls. The tables are small but the portions are large. René is famous for andouillette du pays, a fine sausage filled with chitterlings. Please do not ask him whether the andouillette is good. Yes it is; he had it himself for lunch.
If you don’t like andouillette, there is poulet rôti (roast chicken), coq au vin (chicken in red wine), haricot de mouton (mutton stew), and a fine boeuf bourguignon (beef stew in red wine). There are good hors d’oeuvres, many fish dishes (an excellent lotte à l’américaine—anglerfish with tomato sauce), and wonderful mousse au chocolat (chocolate mousse). At Chez René you will not be received and served like a prince—if you insist on that, you must go around the corner to the Tour d’Argent—but you will eat as some princes wish they could eat.
There are a few rules you should follow if you want to be happy at bistros. First, be humble. In a bistro one doesn’t complain. At Lasserre the guest is always right (even when he is wrong). At a real bistro, only the patron is always right. Second, don’t ask for anything. In some bistros, they don’t bother to write a menu. They may bring you something, and you eat it, or else. Third, no praise. The patron knows his is the best place on earth; he doesn’t need you to confirm it. At a famous restaurant they are always glad when you compliment them. Not at a true bistro. They know they are good.
Remembrance of Things Paris Page 13