I repeat moments like this, with Claude, at Aux Amis du Beaujolais, at least once or twice a year for almost thirty years, and it is at these moments—in this workaday establishment, devoted to nothing more than the consumption, in reasonable haste and marginal comfort, of ample quantities of dependably good food and wine in the pure French bistro style—that I feel most vividly and undeniably as if I am in Paris.
I do love dining in the city’s temples of gastronomy—Robuchon, Guy Savoy, L’Ambroisie, even touristy old Maxim’s and La Tour d’Argent—and I love sitting in cafés on the place Saint-Michel or the boulevard Saint-Germain or the rue de la Paix, nursing my double espresso or my cheap calvados and watching the city pass by. I get goose bumps when I come upon the place de la Concorde at night, or watch the multicolored lights flickering on the Seine from the pont des Arts. I can happily prowl the Louvre or the Centre Pompidou for hours, and I duck into every open church I see, just to look at the stained-glass windows and the paintings of Saint George, Saint Peter, and the Madonna barely visible in dark little chapels along the outer aisles. Merely walking the streets and boulevards here makes me happy. But lunch with Claude at Aux Amis du Beaujolais is Paris to me, and always will be, though both he and the bistro are now gone.
CLAUDE CASPAR-JORDAN. Where to begin? I met him in 1966, on my first night in Paris, when I’d left Martin behind in England and taken the boat-train down to the French capital. On the recommendation of a friend, I’d checked into a tiny Left Bank hotel called the Esmeralda, just across the river from Notre-Dame. It was the perfect place for a young romantic on his first trip to Paris. I liked the name, to begin with—Esmeralda was the ill-fated gypsy girl in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame—but the hotel’s appeal was much more than literary: The building was ancient, with broad, rough-hewn ceiling beams and stone walls. A narrow, winding wooden garret staircase led up four stories, with three or four rooms on each floor, minuscule, furnished with flea-market antiques and dusty bedspreads. The only amenity was a small sauna off one of the landings, with a framed faded color photograph of a slender, naked, sauna-taking blonde on the door. Out the casement windows, you could see not only Notre-Dame but also, just across the street, the Gothic walls of the oldest church in Paris, Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. It didn’t hurt that there always seemed to be a couple of pretty, willowy young girls coming or going in the low-ceilinged lobby (French Vogue apparently liked to put up models there), and that there was a man staying in a room on the top floor who would practice his flute, sitting by the open window, several times a day. (I recognized him on the staircase one day: It was the English actor Terence Stamp, an Esmeralda regular.)
I remember perfectly my first day in Paris: I arrived midmorning from London, left my suitcase at the Esmeralda, then followed the sidewalk above the quais along the Seine, walking west past an endless line of bouquinistes, the used-book sellers hawking everything from old Life magazines to illuminated first editions of Le petit prince to reproductions of naughty nineteenth-century postcards out of their dark green wooden storage bins. It was June, and the girls were wearing light, clingy skirts; the faint breeze was perfumed with Gauloises smoke and the scent of damp stone; the plane trees were thick with luminous green leaves. Light bounced off the river, as long, slow tourist boats glided by and seagulls (I was surprised to see) swept past. I kept saying to myself, “I’m in Paris! I’m in Paris!”
By two in the afternoon, I was getting hungry. My ability to speak French didn’t extend much beyond bonjour, merci, and un through dix. With no experience of Paris, and no idea of how much English the Parisians might speak, I seriously wondered whether I’d be able to communicate well enough to get anything to eat. Then I had a bright idea: Consulting my map, I crossed over the pont du Carrousel, then took the rue de Rivoli to the neighborhood of the U.S. Embassy—in those days a hospitable symbol of a proud country, not a fortified bunker. Surely the waiters in the cafés around there would speak English, I reasoned. I ducked into a little place beneath a black-and-white-striped awning on the rue Boissy d’Anglas. The place was nearly empty. A waiter greeted me with a none-too-friendly “Yes?” while looking at his watch, and then begrudgingly showed me to a rickety marble-top table, where I ordered my first meal in France: a thin, chewy T-bone steak with pommes frites, a bottle of dark Alsatian beer, and a sliver of strawberry tart.
After lunch, I trekked back the way I’d come, wandered around the streets of the Quartier Latin for an hour or so, then returned to the Esmeralda and took a nap. That night at half past seven, by previous arrangement, Claude and his wife, Pepita, came to pick me up and take me out to dinner. Claude was sixty at the time, and I was twenty-one. When he saw me standing on the sidewalk waiting for him, he told me much later, he recognized me at once. “I could have been looking at your father as he was the last time I saw him,” he said. That had been in 1930, in Chicago.
IN THE TWENTIES, the Daily News’s Paris bureau sometimes shipped young French newspapermen to Chicago for an immersion course in American journalism. One of these was Claude, then a fledgling reporter for the left-wing Parisian daily Le Quotidien. “In practice,” wrote my father in A Corner of Chicago, his memoir of his newspaper days in that midwestern capital, “this produced a passing parade of scapegrace sons whose prominent parents were being repaid for favors done to our correspondents overseas. Generally, they came with loud reluctance, and departed as soon as foolishly forgiving mothers sent return fare. But Claude Caspar-Jordan came because he wanted to come, and arrived prepared to scalp red Indians on State Street and spit in Al Capone’s eye.” The two became fast friends. My father liked Claude’s devil-may-care attitude and his taste for the city’s underbelly, and ended up, unexpectedly, being inspired by the young Frenchman. “After two weeks,” he wrote, “[Claude] knew Chicago like a book. I hadn’t turned the second page.” Claude’s example, he added, got him out of the office, out on the streets, into the grit of the city, and made him a better reporter—and a better writer—in the process.
In 1930 Claude got a telegram from France: He’d been drafted, and had to return home. My father and his colleagues gave him a going-away party, then poured him onto the Sunset Limited to San Francisco, whence he would sail back to France the long way around, through the Panama Canal. As the train pulled out, Claude promised to be back. “I never saw or heard of him again,” my father wrote in A Corner of Chicago. He’d assumed that Claude had been killed during World War II. When the book was published, in 1963, however, an old Chicago Daily News reporter wrote to my father to say that Claude was very much alive, and had had a good career in journalism, eventually becoming the administrative director of Associated Press France. The two reconnected by mail and planned a reunion when my father could manage to route himself through Paris on one of his trips to the Far East. When I told Dad that I was going to Paris myself, in 1966, he arranged for me to meet Claude first.
If I resembled my father as Claude had known him in Chicago, I could have recognized Claude, likewise, from my father’s description of him in those long-gone days: “The battered beak of a dissolute Napoleonic eagle hung crookedly in his pale, old-young face. His sparse blond hair stood up like the uneven bristles in a worn-out bathbrush.” All still true. Pepita, on the other hand, was elegant and stylish, with a finely sculpted face and a short crop of silky white hair. She spoke no English, but Claude spoke it with great enthusiasm, sprinkling in slightly mangled slang terms he must have learned in the 1920s in Chicago. (“Hell bells!” he exclaimed halfway through our meal, to emphasize his displeasure at our waiter’s slowness.)
We dined that night at Brasserie Julien, a busy bistro on the rue Faubourg Saint-Denis. I had steak frites again. After dinner, Claude and Pepita treated me to a tour of Paris by night. We drove up to Montmartre, where I saw the Sacré-Coeur washed in white light, as well as a few genuine Parisian prostitutes, mostly plump, with bleached or henna-dyed hair, wearing fishnet hose and garter belts, lounging with bored looks in doorways. We ci
rcled the Madeleine, then careered through the place de la Concorde, dodging taxis and motorbikes, Claude exclaiming “Salaud!” and “Espèce de crétin!” at various other drivers. Crossing the river, we worked our way to the boulevard Saint-Germain, found a place to park, and drank cognac at the Deux Magots. Then Claude and Pepita dropped me at the Esmeralda, and I collapsed on my bed.
At some point in the course of the evening, Claude and I realized that we got along pretty well together, connecting on some as yet undefined level that had surprisingly little to do, at least for me, with my father. Our meal at Julien turned out to be the first of what must have been close to two hundred lunches and dinners we were to share, sometimes with Pepita but mostly not, until his death in 1994. They had never had children of their own, and at some point I think I must have become a kind of part-time stand-in son for them. Before long, I had taken to calling Claude, only half in jest, mon père adoptif.
AFTER MY FIRST BRIEF VISIT to Paris and my summer on the Dalmatian coast, it took me about eighteen months to get back to Europe again. Once I did, I started making regular trips whenever I’d sold enough freelance articles or saved enough of my meager paychecks, flying across the Atlantic at least twice a year, usually going straight to Paris and installing myself at the Esmeralda and spending time with Claude. Later, as my travels extended into other parts of France, to Italy, and back to Eastern Europe, I’d still manage to route myself through Paris; sometimes just for a few hours, long enough for lunch, between planes.
When I was staying longer, I often dined at Claude and Pepita’s apartment near Père Lachaise, where Pepita prepared her excellent boeuf à la mode or blanquette de veau or some other classic of French cuisine bourgeoise. (Claude’s one specialty, which he made for me on several occasions, was homard au whisky, good Normandy lobster flambéed with scotch.) The three of us had glorious restaurant meals together, too, not just in Paris but in Provence, Burgundy, Alsace, and the Charente-Maritime, where they used to visit a friend on the Île de Ré, a monkey-wrench-shaped island off La Rochelle, famous for its shellfish. But Pepita drank little and ate lightly and preferred not to spend long hours at the table, and she recognized early that, however improbably, I had turned out to be one of the few people her cranky old French husband could actually talk to. Thus she was content, time and again, to send us off to dine without her.
Claude loved to eat and drink. He belonged to gastronomic societies with names like the Académie Rabelais, La Bedaine (The Belly), La Queue de Poële (The Pan Handle), the Académie des Poètes Chevelus (the Academy of Hairy Poets—the joke being that most of them were bald or balding), and Les Francs-Mâchons de Lyon (difficult to translate, but something like the Serious Eaters of Lyon). The last of these held its occasional meetings at various Lyonnais-style bistros in Paris at breakfast time, beginning around 8:00 A.M., and Claude took me to one of them. We ate platters full of pâté, ham, and saucisson, then boeuf bourgignon and assorted chèvres, washed down with plenty of Beaujolais. We were done by ten, and, no, we didn’t meet again for lunch.
Over the years, Claude and I went out to meals both classic and contemporary, good and bad, mostly French but with an occasional Chinese, Indian, Lebanese, Portuguese, or even American excursion thrown in. What we liked most of all, though, was simple, hearty, honest French stuff, as served in restaurants of a kind that achieve their apotheosis in Paris: the massive, perfect côte de boeuf in the bustling downstairs dining room at Ma Bourgogne on the boulevard Haussmann (better than Taillevent’s, as we once proved to our mutual satisfaction at lunch on two successive days at one place and then the other); the oysters and choucroute at Le Muniche or Le Petit Zinc; the fillets of mackerel poached in court bouillon and the roasted woodcock on toast at the now-defunct L’Artoise, a block from Aux Amis du Beaujolais.
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that most of what I know about eating in Paris—and about Paris in general—I learned from Claude. He knew food, not with the knowledge of the dilettante or the culinary professional but with the intimate, affectionate confidence of the genuine connoisseur. He took pleasure in the way the dishes he chose looked and smelled and tasted, and—the mark of a true food lover—he took pleasure in anticipating them before they appeared and then remembering them long after they had been digested. He was perfectly capable of enjoying the complicated contemporary fancies of the younger generation of French chefs, but he always approached such food with some measure of skepticism: It was guilty until proven edible. He preferred food—and restaurants—he could count on.
That didn’t mean that he was uncritical of the older places, though. His standard comment when I’d ask about various restaurants that had been around for decades seemed to be “Well, it’s not what it used to be.” One of the first McDonald’s in Paris—maybe the first—opened in Les Champs, a shopping arcade on the Champs-Élysées, not far from Claude’s office on the rue de Berri. One day I asked if he had eaten there. “Yes,” he said. “It was all right at first. But it’s not what it used to be.”
The conversations Claude and I had over our long, wine-fueled lunches and dinners, meals often quite heroic in proportion, were never exclusively about food. One night, as we were polishing off one of Pepita’s excellent home-cooked dinners, Claude casually mentioned that he had been part of the evacuation of Dunkirk as a cavalryman attached to the British army. He escaped across the channel on a boat belonging to the North Western railway line, a boat usually used to ferry passengers between Ireland and the north of England. “The soldiers weren’t given berths,” he said, “but were told to make up their sleeping bags in the dining rooms and salons. In the morning they were given breakfast—and then presented with bills! There was consternation all around, as few of us had any British currency, but eventually everybody paid, borrowing money if necessary. We left Dunkirk around midnight, and arrived in Dover late the next morning. There, in the bright sun, beneath the castle, there were officers in white playing tennis. The soldiers onboard taunted them, and the officers couldn’t understand why.”
Another time, we were dining at the Moulin du Village, next door to Steven Spurrier’s wine shop in the now-vanished Cité Berryer off the rue Royale. The place was run by an Englishman I’d come to know, Mark Williamson, also proprietor of the famous Willi’s Wine Bar, and one of the items on the menu, which Claude ordered, was côte de boeuf with “petit pudding de Yorkshire.” This got him reminiscing about being sent with his younger brother to live in England for a few months when he was sixteen, to learn English. The boys had a pair of maiden aunts in Odiham, in Hampshire, and they arranged for the two to lodge there with the family of a baker—whose name was Baker. The aunts kept a formal home, with maids who wore gray in the mornings, black in the afternoons, and would take Claude and his brother to church on Sundays—where the sermon, he recalled, was read by Neville Chamberlain, who lived nearby. The baker had two daughters, a blonde and a brunette, and Claude fell in love with both of them. His aunts found out about his infatuation and told him, “It is not correct to fall in love with a baker’s daughter.” Claude said “Okay,” and that was that—an easy capitulation that seemed, all these many years later, to embarrass him. He suddenly stopped talking, looked confused for a moment, and said, “Why the hell am I telling you this?” Then he remembered. “Ah,” he said, “once a week the baker would make roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, and to this day it was the best I have ever had.”
We used to go sometimes to La Coupole, eating oysters with Alsatian Riesling and then steak au poivre or lamb curry with Beaujolais or Côtes-du-Rhône and enjoying the crowd. La Coupole was the quintessential Paris brasserie, legendary in the old days for its good food but also its illustrious clientele. Everybody came sooner or later: Joyce, Hemingway, Cocteau, Picasso, Matisse, Giacometti, Henry Miller, Man Ray. I once saw Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir having lunch there, and, one afternoon, Anaïs Nin taking tea, surrounded by a gaggle of adoring young ladies in white blouses and plaid schoolgir
l skirts. My favorite “sighting” at La Coupole, though, wasn’t of a celebrity, at least not one I recognized. For several years, almost every time I went there in the late evening, I’d see the same tall, elderly gentleman, always dressed in white tie and tails. He would dine alone, looking up from the table occasionally to exchange a few words with a passerby, then pay his bill, stand up with some obvious effort, and move slowly across the room in the approximate direction of the front door, stopping whenever he saw a pretty woman, bowing to her, and wishing her a pleasant evening. Then he’d disappear into the darkness outside. I remember thinking that there must be worse ways to spend the twilight of one’s life.
Claude could be prickly. Even in his Chicago days, my father wrote, “he had the feisty belligerence that was born in poodles until Park Avenue popularity bred it out of them.” At Alain Dutournier’s upscale Carré des Feuillants one warm summer evening, he was put out because two men at a nearby table had removed their jackets and were dining in their shirtsleeves. “In a restaurant of this quality, at these prices,” he sniffed, “they should tell them ‘I’m sorry, monsieur, but one must wear a jacket.’ ” On another occasion, at a place, long since vanished, called Alain Rayé, his word of the evening was “fulminate.” He complained about the food, then added, “But I don’t mind. The food gives me something to fulminate about, and I like that.” He told me about an elderly Spaniard who covered sports for the AP, and who still came in and filed stories about Spanish sporting events every day even though he should have been retired. “It keeps him going,” said Claude, “just as fulminating keeps me alive.”
My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants Page 9