STEPHEN DOWNES
Paris
on a Plate
A gastronomic diary
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Prologue
Day One
Arrival with toothache — A well-lighted room and
an unripe camembert — In search of lost Marmite
Day Two
A ghost in the Métro — Taillevent — Monsieur
No-one — Oysters and Brahms
Day Three
Croissant and politics — Chartier disaster —
A Fogón awful paella — Lido Boys, Bluebell Girls
Day Four
Barely alive
Day Five
Astrance magic — Pascal’s ‘free’ head — Veal’s
head at Le Pré
Day Six
The swimmer from the RCF — Snow — Lafayette’s
picture policy — Going home to Dupleix —
A Cartier-Bresson moment — ze kitchen galerie
Day Seven
Family lunch — Buisson’s mini-quail ’
Shakespeare & Company
Day Eight
Waiting, not so patiently, for Madame Fernandez
— The Eiffel Tower’s computers say ‘Non!’ —
Altitude 95 — A car on fire — The Vaudeville
—Rolly, the one and only
Day Nine
La Cafétéria de la Pyramide — La Coupole’s (new
and improved?) steak tartare — Salsa setback
Day Ten
Arab intellect — Tino Rossi and Coluche —
Mag Wheels and Le Severo — Bewigged brazilians
Day Eleven
More pool strife — Ledoyen — Zealous security
at Agence France-Presse — My camembert is
finally ready
Day Twelve
Mea culpa — Aux Lyonnais — Maurice, Mark and
some gastronomic sense at last — The frail old
man in the rue Turgot
Acknowledgments
Copyright
prologue
If man were meant to hover, he would be doing it with less fuss. All of us inside the belly of our Hovercraft — that brilliant British invention — thought so as we shuddered towards France. Even the English.
I’d been watching them from a disrespectful distance for months. An Australian simpleton, I felt they were odd. In fact, the Hovercraft was an embodiment of everything British — classically mad. Clearly, crazily idiotic. Small, the idea worked: hovercrafts were fine as lawnmowers and turf dryers. But, being English, the English had extrapolated the idea to absurd dimensions. A hovercraft would be made to walk on water. They would call its cross-Channel adventures ‘flights’. (Mind you, if you’d told an Australian you needed to cross the Channel in a hurry, he’d probably have said, ‘You got two arms? Start swimming!’) Any fool could have told the English an enormous hovercraft wouldn’t work. A real European — from east of Calais — could not have thought up the Hovercraft. And if he had, he’d have got out of bed, wiped his brow, thrown down a tranquillising cognac and returned to his lover.
The English could be ‘different’; lesson number one. In less than a year I’d learnt to pick a man wearing socks under his sandals from two hundred metres. Or a woman wearing a small animal around her neck. For warmth? Or companionship? It was a handy talent to have on London transport. You developed the skill of avoiding passengers who had urgent news for you. Some reported humans on Neptune. Others prattled strange sayings into their knees and looked at you sideways.
But now I was trapped, hovering across the Channel on a day that was clear and sunny somewhere else. I could see through murky windows as far as the next wave. Beyond that, a grey curtain fell over life. The sea was the colour of pale jade and as spiky as a waxed hairdo. Spray spattered the windows with the tireless rhythms of a porno stud. The Hovercraft shuddered and juddered, bellowed, leapt and lunged.
And filled with smoke, although we weren’t sinking. The further they got from England, the more the Brits smoked. They were, after all, about to confront ‘foreigners’, who began at Calais. Or even Boulogne, where we were going. It was a marginal day for hovercrafting, the crew had warned us. ‘Not the Serpentine,’ smiled a purser in a shirt redolent of light work.
All of this was of secondary importance to me, of course. I was excited by more cerebral things. Recently twenty-five, I’d quit Australia ten months earlier with no plans to go back. I’d lapsed badly from a strict Methodist upbringing in the process. I’d betrayed both church and country by enjoying life. To the extreme. Energetically, in fact. It was 1971, after all. And now I was off to Paris for the first time, which, for an antipodean Protestant, was as naughty as you could get. It had severely thrilling potential. It was a world-heritage-listed site of sin, I understood. Devoted to hedonism. The French were Catholic, Methodism had taught us. Immoral, they sinned, and then scurried to confession. They went to dirty movies — made them — and drank red wine instead of weak tea with meals. But Paris was also supposed to be the world’s most beautiful city. This was handy. It provided a legitimate reason to visit.
Clifford and Moira from Southend sat next to me. They were about to visit Boulogne for the day with as much enthusiasm as a male attending prenatal classes. They’d wanted to go to Spain, said Moira, a big woman in a dress of printed jonquils. Have a proper holiday. But France was all they could afford. They’d buy some red meat, she rationalised. Perhaps a nice leg of lamb.
Clifford was wearing shorts, for three reasons, no doubt: he was English, it was April, and he was having a day off. His sensible sandals had thin leather soles and wide brass buckles. They were strapped to feet hosed in red woollen socks with fleur de lys above the heels. His bare legs were whiter than a corpse. He peered grimly through dirty lenses at the spatterings of spray. Two veils over the world. And he smoked more than anyone else, drawing in enough fumes to fill the Albert Hall. He exhaled with power and wheeze. I suspected he himself would hover if placed downwards. Moira and he loved a day out, he coughed, before heading off for more waxed bags. She’d filled three already. She held them tight across her bosom as if they were presents for her grandchildren. If she stood up she’d feel worse, she said. Clifford had his hands full just getting up the aisle. He clamped his cigarette in his mouth to hang on better.
The Poms and I had declared an uneasy truce. I could live with them if I had to. But only just. Since arriving in London I’d irritated them by doing all the usual expatocker things. I’d been employed and sacked in a matter of weeks. (I’d contracted glandular fever, and you couldn’t keep on someone who’d caught ‘the kissing disease’, the argument must have gone at the Sunday Express. Not that they’d let me in on it.) I’d fought an Indian landlord’s bath times and cooking odours. I’d moved to Earl’s Court. I’d aged in dole queues and acquired almost-free spectacles. I’d had blood drawn by an African and my arse caressed by an editor. I’d done my time. If I liked Europe enough to want to cross over, then I owed the English nothing. Whimsy was legitimate. I was free!
I was confident of finding work anywhere. And if I couldn’t, I was the kind of person who could live off frozen vegetables and cheap mince. I bought them by the ounce. I was hermetically sealed against accidents, illness and malnutrition, impossibly secure. I also had thick socks and a warm jacket. I could settle wherever there was a bed and a pillow. They didn’t even have to be comfy. I didn’t need space, either. Apart from clothes and a pair of zip-up boots, I owned a foot’s length of books, a tartan rug and a portable typewriter. I could dance around Europe as easily, say, as Ali around a ring.
And there was something about this France place that intrigu
ed me. It might be beautiful, and it might be full of Catholic filth, but it was also supposed to have class. I held to a ridiculous vision of a whole nation of smart people. Discerning, too. They could pick quality from rubbish. Photographs showed them in tailored suits that were freshly pressed and worn to the millimetre. And they ate well — everyone knew that. The best, in fact. Even Methodists knew no nation ate better. They sniffed their red wine and could tell if it was good or vinegar. Their novelists wrote fat books that were supposed to be very perceptive about the human condition. And, I thought, this immature Australian thought, I’d love to try to match it with this mob. Not just see what makes them tick, see if they really do have it all, but challenge them to improve my lot. ‘Enrich me, Froggies!’ I’d demand.
The Hovercraft staggered from the sea, exhausted, settling with relief onto its concrete landing pad. It farted thunderous sprays. Its engines screamed a last pained crescendo — it hadn’t wanted to be a Hovercraft — then fell silent. We were as done in as the beast. Bedraggled and ill, the heart and soul of British tourism staggered along a cement walkway to a customs hall.
If this was France, then nothing had changed. More buildings constructed for a purpose, not an aesthetic. Well, perhaps a few things were different: in plain block letters we were urged to NE PAS FUMER and FAITES LA QUEUE. Make the queue? To where? For what? Beyond the signs, unmanned cream counters bordered an empty space. A poster on the wall displayed an angry-looking lobster about to attack. Its caption claimed something about Brittany’s seafood.
We made our queue and waited. Moira recovered some colour, and she and Clifford were led off to an anteroom to be processed for Boulogne. The rest of us were bound for Paris. We understood this when a band of railwaymen set upon us. They were convincing. Identically serious in hue and manner, they wore white shirts and thin dark ties knotted tightly at the neck. Over these were grey, V-necked pullovers and close-fitting jackets in a midnight shade. Peaked caps, grey trousers and peremptory manners completed their ensembles. On their breasts the logo of the French railways, SNCF, scintillated in gold. Each had a black calfskin book — the Book of Railway, no doubt — under an official armpit.
As a group, they began waving broadly with their free hands, shouting ‘Paris! Paris!’ When shouting failed to move us, they began herding. Ahead of their flapping arms, we shuffled forward through heavy glass doors towards a platform. It was getting dark. The railwaymen shouted louder, ‘Paris par là! Là! Là!’
We spread along the platform. Facing us was an untidy embankment, sparsely vegetated with weeds. They looked dry, as weeds do in Australia, not green like English weeds. As in prisoner-of-war movies, we straggled into a thin, tired trickle.
A train would arrive soon, the SNCF herders made us understand. But we must not get on it. It was not a train for us, not our train. Our train was another train, they scowled, taking up strategic positions along the platform. They seemed to be daring us to board any train at all.
Dun-green carriages stuttered to a halt, drawn by a hissing locomotive. We made for the doors. ‘Non!’ shouted the SNCF men in unison. ‘Non!’ This was not our train. But it was Agincourt again. England versus France, the tourists pressing forward, the SNCF men resisting. Spreading their arms, the French attempted a series of pincer movements.
‘They always reckon it’s never this train,’ said an Irish accent next to me. ‘Just push on board. All the trains go to Paris.’ The voice belonged to a crumpled man who obviously travelled a lot. He looked as if it was his job. He carried a bulging canvas sausage bag. Protruding from a voluminous khaki raincoat was a dark, epic face. His hair was messy. He might have been wrapped for throwing out.
‘You know the ropes,’ I said in a congratulatory tone.
‘Know the Froggies,’ he affirmed. ‘Just push.’
We did. An SNCF man caught me. He was affronted. ‘Paris?’ he clipped. Yes, I said, waving my Hovercraft-Train-All-In-One-Eleven-Pound-Return ticket at him. He glanced at it, then pulled the Book of Railway from under his arm. ‘This is not your train,’ he read appositely from its pages. His words were clear, his accent heavy. ‘You have a special train for Paris.’
‘Just get in,’ shouted the Irishman, who was disappearing ahead.
‘All trains from here go to Paris,’ I ventured, smug in my new knowledge. I swept an arm down the track, hoping Paris was that way.
‘Perhaps that is so,’ said the SNCF man. ‘But you don’t go in this train.’
‘Why not?’ I persevered.
‘Because it is not your train,’ he pronounced.
‘But, if it goes to Paris, it’s all the same... For me.’
‘But it is not your train,’ he protested firmly, waving his bible.
I could sense the tightness of his tie. A gale force of garlic breath engulfed me. It possessed a special meaning, something profound. Would this railwayman really want to herd cantankerous British tourists around his station while his dinner was getting cold? I didn’t think so. I played what I hoped was a trump.
‘Paris est Paris,’ I said with a smile, following up even more daringly — and in an atrocious accent — with, ‘et un train est un train.’
Paris was Paris and a train was a train for him, too, apparently. And philosophy was philo, something French children studied at school. He smiled knowingly. Cartesian to his comfortable black lace-ups, he was clearly overwhelmed by my impressive logic. He opened his bible, looked one last time, then closed it and dropped his hands to his sides.
‘Allez-y, monsieur,’ he said, gesturing me on board.
I scrambled for a window seat. If all the French were like him they would be easy to like. These people took it on the chin, didn’t obfuscate or doublespeak. They didn’t want to argue. Logic was more important. They said what they thought and clearly appreciated others who did the same.
Hovercraft veterans poured in after me. Through the windows, I watched the not so valiant — the more English, perhaps, or at least the more polite — trying to be less forthright. The French overwhelmed them.
A few minutes later, the train clanked away from the platform, gathering speed to a reluctant, if brisk, walking pace. Within a hundred metres we passed through a cutting. Its crusty geological face was scattered with dull, scrubby plants and dried grass a metre tall. I hadn’t seen vegetation so distressed since leaving worn old Australia. Instantly, weirdly and without reason, I felt strangely at home. At home in France! The idea astonished me: it was absurd. This was a foreign land. I couldn’t believe it wasn’t. But perhaps in some ways it was like home. Perhaps, I would like it. Even like it a lot, I thought, as night fell.
A friend in London — a well-travelled Englishman of no few years — had jotted down an important address for me. ‘Keep it in your wallet at all times,’ he’d advised. It was an office in Paris that found people rooms. ‘Open most hours,’ he’d added, ‘just in case’. I juggled the phone and my wallet and pulled out a tiny slip of paper. ‘BUREAU D’ACCUEIL,’ he’d written, followed by Paris’s best address, the Champs Elysées.
With not much effort on its part, the vinyl suitcase and I struggled out of the Gare du Nord into a black night that had put on garlands of lights. So many of them. Overdressed? The jury would stay out. But, gee, Paris scintillated. I found a taxi and showed its ‘chauffeur’ — as I understood you called them, even if there wasn’t glass between you — my slip of paper. We accelerated away.
For every first-time visitor to a country that uses another tongue, there comes a moment when the language must be tried not in stammering ripostes but to start a conversation. As we turned into the Champs Elysées (which I had recognised without difficulty — the lights, again) my moment of Gallic truth arrived.
‘Champs Elysées,’ I pronounced with worn awe.
‘Mais oui,’ said the chauffeur wistfully, lightly tapping his steering wheel. ‘Les Champs Elysées.’
A fair fraction of the world’s peoples were in Paris that night. Most of the
m were without hotel rooms. Moreover, they were all counting on the Bureau d’Accueil. I ‘made’ another queue, half-an-hour passing before it was my turn. A small and unsmiling brunette manned the counter. She had centuries of pragmatism bred into her — a gene predisposed to it — and a cool respect for diplomacy. In which part of Paris would I like my hotel, she demanded brusquely in fair English. I had no idea. Then, what number of stars would I like my hotel to possess? Hmmm. None showing through the roof, I countered. She frowned, her brown eyes narrowing under a prim fringe. She peered over her counter at my suitcase.
‘Two is good for you,’ she said.
‘Absolutely,’ I agreed, having no idea what two, three, four or even twenty-six stars would entitle me to in terms of pillow softness.
‘Two is for students and less,’ she said. ‘Now you will live in the Latin Quartier. It is where all the young people are.’ She made a phone call, babbling quickly, and scribbled the hotel’s name and address on an official-looking docket. I was to go to the Hotel Pierwige. I begged her pardon.
‘Pierwige!’ she stressed. The name sounded like someone coughing through fudge. It was on the boulevard Saint-Germain. I would enjoy it. She directed me to get another taxi and have a good stay in Paris. Peering through her fringe, she beckoned the next refo.
Another chauffeur to impress. I passed him the Pierwige’s details and we were off. At speed, as usual. The cab smelt of fresh plastic and old cigarettes. I wound down the windows, letting in Paris’s own peculiar smell. I already knew London’s odour: a blend of stale humans and perished rubber. And I knew Singapore’s, which was raw sewerage and five-spice. (New York, I would later decide, smelt of wet steel and raincoats.) I sniffed the air. Paris’s odour was up-market biscuits. Something sweet, but a complex flavour, too. A perfume you could chew.
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