Monsieur Montebello says that he lives not too far away and this is an investment. He shows me the coffee machine, opening the lid to discover an old filter, filled with dregs. He’s mortified, seeking my pardon several times as he disposes of it. Like many French people, he has more genuine charm than a platoon of publicists. I’d rung a few days earlier from Australia and he had been touched, he says, that I’d spoken so politely and courteously to his nine-year-old son. And Montebello? Originally from Latin precincts, his family have been French for six generations. He asks why I’m in Paris. To eat and write. And what does he do? He explains. Hmmm. Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked. It sounds like a fairly abstruse form of financial advising. But, then, money and I have always been parted.
I write a cheque that amounts to a stupendous bargain for six days’ accommodation in the world’s most popular city. A ridiculous bargain. Is he happy with the tarif? Absolutely, he says. Now, I say, the agency dictates that I should pay you double. The bond? The caution? Don’t worry in the slightest, he says. We can trust one another. And, on the strength of a couple of emails and two phone calls, we’re doing just that. One final thing, I ask. Does he know a good dentist? Yes, absolutely, but he’s a fair way away. At La Défense, the business quarter in the west of the city. I take the dentist’s name and number anyway. Monsieur Montebello hopes I won’t need him. ‘But it’ll be painless if you do,’ he laughs. He must go to work.
At a leisurely pace, I arrange the apartment to my liking. I’d like to try to feel at home. For most of the next fortnight, I’ll be testing Paris’s legendary status as a provider of fine eating, and I hope that just being here will stimulate a few happy Gallic reminiscences as well. There is enough room to expand the table to its full width, to use one of two fold-up alloy chairs as a bedside table, to make a comfy work chair with the other by padding it with cushions from a sofa too low to use. I set up my laptop, spread myself out, and notice that one of the lights doesn’t work.
I find Monsieur Da Costa in his office. Can he help me? He comes immediately. Did I try the light switch? Yes, I say, demonstrating that the switch on the cord attached to the light doesn’t make it either come on or go off. No, he says, the one on the wall. He switches the light on from a wall switch two metres away. Ah, no, I say, I didn’t try it. French wiring — like French plumbing — is a strange art for non-Gauls. The French do things their way.
Soon, my studio is perfect, a working unit, a place of no little comfort and space in a city where these things go for premium prices. For double the amount I’m paying you might find a reasonable, but minute, hotel room. It will have no cooking facilities, a bathroom the size of a cupboard and a shower the size of a vertical coffin. Protruding from the least appropriate spot on the least convenient wall of the shower will be plumbing that can dislocate vertebrae if you make the slightest wrong move. If you drop the soap, you will have to turn off the water and get out of the shower to retrieve it. While there is accommodation like Monsieur Montebello’s to rent on a weekly — and sometimes daily — basis, why would anyone on a modest budget settle for a hotel?
The rue des Petites Ecuries is a fairly sombre and undistinguished narrow thoroughfare, a typical Parisian canyon with a ceiling — on this day at least — of chilly sky in watercolour blue. At a small supermarket nearby, I buy coffee and a packet of salt for my toothache. French supermarkets seem to deal mainly in volume, and the only salt I can find weighs in at a hefty kilo. Even if my gum was sore for the rest of my life I can’t imagine I’d get through it all. Too bad.
In the nearby rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis there are food shops of all sorts, including a poissonerie — just what I’m after. A fat woman in a blinding white rubber apron and equally glaring gumboots is tending her seafood. The royal-blue canopy over her shop announces AU LAGON BLEU in big block letters — At The Blue Lagoon. There are few fillets for sale, whole fish being strewn silver and pink on deep mattresses of ice. The blue-edged display boxes, inclined a little towards the customers, put on a spectacle of esteemed bar, bream, snapper, tuna, mullets of various sorts and styles, including the prized red mullet, sole, pilchards and what appears to be orange roughy. There are also more everyday fish — salted cod and farmed salmon. Of non-fin varieties, I note crabs, squid, sea snails of a few sorts and (what I am looking for) three sorts of oysters. I want to repeat an experience I loved thirty years ago, I say to the woman. If I brought her a plate, could she open a dozen oysters for me? Certainly, she says. At your service. Probably tomorrow night, I say.
For a handful of dollars, I buy bread from a boulangerie, paté de campagne from a charcuterie, and a raw-milk camembert from a fromagerie. From a wine shop I buy a bottle of new beaujolais (a couple of weeks old) and a muscadet to go with my oysters tomorrow night.
Back at the studio, first things must come first, though, and I rinse my throbbing mouth several times in a very concentrated brine. The paté is next. In its own container of aluminium foil, it’s covered with a thin lake of translucent amber jelly and weighs perhaps a third of a kilo. I chunk it onto my baguette and gum it gingerly. It’s excellent — rich, meaty, very dense and tasty. But the camembert is amazingly underdone, bearing in mind its apparent softness in the shop. Its interior is still mostly chalky and it will be several days before it turns creamy. I shall be my own affineur of this one: I will have to take responsibility for getting this cheese into shape for eating. (This amounts to no more nor less than keeping it in a cool place and checking its maturity every day or so.) But it should come good. Everything is right about it. Its label says it’s a real camembert, ‘au lait cru’ and ‘moulé à la louche’ — that is, made from raw (non-pasteurised) milk and ladled by hand into its moulds.
A couple of mouthwashes later, the sun has set and my gum or tooth or both are following it out of sight and mind. It looks as if the trip to La Défense (in defence of dental health) might be avoided. But I shouldn’t speak too soon. I’m well enough, at least, to complete the day as planned. I’m on my way to Maubert Mutualité to see if I can relive my first Parisian steak-and-chips. Don’t we cling to our best memories? To revisit them is a fetish; if I’ve had it once and it pleased me, why can’t I do it a second time? Or a third? Or forever? But we can never repeat things exactly, of course, no matter how hard we try. Or that’s what the, admittedly meagre, intelligent part of my mind is saying as I set off for the other side of the Seine. The rest of me is striving not to believe it.
But first, a slight detour. I come out of the Métro at Saint-Michel in the heart of the Left Bank, the busy student and restaurant quarter. I’m looking for a short street, the rue Suger, that branches off the place Saint-André-des-Arts. A Métro exit conveniently ascends into the square. And, although throngs of mainly young people — who look no different from young people anywhere else in the world in their jeans and sneakers, by the way — jostle for a cool time, the rue Suger, narrow, its footpaths mere elevated strips, is deserted. I stop at number five, where, on a rainy April night thirty-three years ago, my wife and I held our wedding reception. Then, as I recall, a wrought-iron sign above the arched doorway announced Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde: the Knights of the Round Table. We descended into a medieval stone basement with massive refectory furniture. Small heraldic pennants hung in bright colours under the vaults. It all seemed authentic, and probably was. After all, around here Paris is at its oldest.
There were about forty of us at the wedding breakfast. We had booked the whole place. And I have little recollection of the meal itself, except for enormous hardwood platters of salamis and terrines and patés. Our guests seemed to enjoy themselves. There was much laughing and dancing. Tonton Camille had the best time — as he usually did at family gatherings. At around midnight, I think it was, he began a little number he used to sing, a jolly ditty. It was music-hall stuff from the 1930s and described the activities of ‘ma petite Mimi ’. There were drinking games, of course, and younger revellers banged on our door — a tradition —
once we had gone to bed. We missed our honeymoon flight to Corsica.
I have a wonderful memento from the restaurant: a big white page in heavy paper simulating an illuminated manuscript. I have a feeling it might have been a placemat. Across its top are jousting knights, a small audience in chain-mail armour, a castle and its keep. Under them and to the left is an exquisite ‘J’, decorated with Guinevere, semi-recumbent on her canopied bed and attended by three handmaidens, bidding adieu to Lancelot, who has a broadsword at his hip, a cape to his ankles and a puzzled look on his face. The ‘J’ is the beginning of a sentence that has fascinated me for decades: ‘Jusqu’a la lie je bois dans la coupe vermeille qui fust celle du Roy’. It translates as, ‘Right to the lees, I drink from the vermilion cup that belonged to the King’. It just rings with loyalty and all that alleged honour and dignity of ancient knights’ times. (In those days, it seems, the odd casual fling was exempt from scrutiny by any high moral judgements.) In wild old French below Guinevere are several lines in which she pleads her love for her ‘messire’, describing her sighs and the sobs in her heart. And if, tomorrow, Lancelot fails to return from his campaigns, she says, she, a wounded bird in a cage, will die.
Number five rue Suger these days, I discover, has been recast into apartments. The ancient sandstone looks clean and dusted, as if the work has been completed only recently. There are no signs of the knights of any table — round, rectangular or oval. The heavy stone arch by which we entered is wider and more robust than I remember. And the door — massive and with bevelled panels — has been recently painted a glossy Brunswick green; a colour so deep, at any rate, that it appears almost black. Mid-door, a lion’s-head holds a thick metal ring in its jaws and, inserted into the stone nearby, is a digicode panel and its buttons and speaker. So, the Knights of the Round Table have ridden off into the past. And it occurs to me that, these days, restaurants and marriages often have about the same lifespan. Say, seven years. Anywhere in the world — not just in Paris — ours is probably unusual to have outlasted the venue in which it was first celebrated.
The boulevard Saint-Germain is thronging with youth as I head east towards Maubert Mutualité. They form knots on the wide footpaths. They — and older folk — cluster in the glassed-in fronts of cafés. Many of them smoke, and the joy they have at living life in Paris froths out of the scrums like water from a cracked hose. Perhaps teased by others, one or two shriek and burst from their groups.
The boulevard widens around Maubert, which, I suspect, wasn’t the case in 1971, and there is no longer any sign of the Hotel Pierwige. A recent apartment block, built in typical nineteenth-century Haussmannesque style, is where it must have been. Food shops face the street, including a superb fromagerie completely open to the chill night air. Opposing three-tier grandstands seat cheesey spectators in cream and grey. There are triangles and pucks and wheels. Some have surface moulds. Many of the goats’-milk varieties are coated with ashes in shades of char-grey to black. Their cities and regions of origin — sometimes even towns — are named. There are cheeses with washed rinds in colours from orange to deep mahogany. There are cheeses in shallow plastic tubs and cheeses in vine leaves tied up with rafia. Behind this stunning presentation are polished oak louvres. If you scoured Paris tonight you would find many similar shops. Cheese — its variety, nuances, flavours and complexities — is the high point of French gastronomy. Perhaps even French culture. France does nothing better.
Across the boulevard I search up and down for the bistro where I was taught to make a vinaigrette all those years ago. The Café Le Métro is not La Petite Marmite, but it seems to be the only place of similar size and status. Inside it is a stockyard of oak-panelled booths. I couldn’t have been taught anything from another table in a place like this — the panels are too high. I ask for the non-smoking area. Yes, they have one, but its air is contiguous with nearby smokers’ exhausts. Luckily I’m dining early and only three people — young students, they appear to be — are near. One is intent on his laptop, another scrawls longhand notes, a cigarette hanging from his bottom lip. All around are American paraphernalia — publicity panels for ‘Indian’ motorcycles, for instance, and a Union Pacific crest. Frank Sinatra croons. I’m served by a tall thin girl, her dark hair drawn back into a pony-tail, her eyes framed by squarish spectacles in heavy black plastic. She wears a black rollneck pullover, a tailored pale-grey jacket over it.
‘You look like Nana Mouskouri,’ I say. ‘When she was young, of course.’
‘Who is this Nana?’ she says (a funny response in the circumstances, because ‘nana’ is slang for a fairly libertine young lady).
‘A famous singer,’ I say. The waitress furrows her brow. Don’t inquiet yourself (as the French verb puts it), I tell her… I’ll have the bavette and chips. And a quarter-litre of the house Côtes du Rhone. She goes three paces before returning. The steak comes with a shallot sauce, is that OK? Fine, I say. Ten minutes later it’s in front of me. It’s skirt steak and is excellent — raw and red-raw inside, its taste fine. Atop it is an acceptable sludge of stewed shallots that just might have been thickened with a starch of some sort. A few ordinary lettuce leaves dressed with a weak mayonnaise and a segment of tomato are north-east of the meat. Some OK machine-cut chips are alongside them. Nobody watches me eat, I am not required to make my own salad dressing, and the past cannot be relived. At Monsieur Montebello’s studio, to which I return immediately, my sleep is like death itself.
day two
It’s the old reporter in me. Start a news story with the crux of the matter. Put your best stuff near the top. I’m lunching today, at any rate, at Taillevent, the artless, the transcendent, the exemplary, perhaps the greatest, cathedral of French restauration in Paris. It’s not just the food here. The experience is unique. The hospitalité reaches an unexpected dimension. I’m dining at the invitation of Monsieur Vrinat, its owner. The bill would break me.
I’ve lunched at Taillevent once before — with my wife in 1982. I’d telephoned, saying I wanted to file a last gastronomic column from Paris before returning to Australia. (I had been studying in Europe for ten months.) Dinner at Taillevent was booked out for weeks, but a lunch reservation could be made.
We arrived, and the maitre d’ asked ‘sir’ if he would mind wearing a tie. I selected one from a range of half-a-dozen he pulled from a wardrobe in the entrance hall. It was the most extravagant of the lot, a muted rust-red cravate bearing miniature horse-heads like chess knights. Then we sat and ate what was put in front of us. Thin slices of sweetbreads varying in colour between pink and fawn were served with lightly sautéed wild mushrooms on the tiniest, yellow-green endive leaves. A perfect nut-oil vinaigrette dressed them. The dish cost about $A12. There were fillets of turbot luxuriating in a butter sauce containing flecks of sorrel, the herb’s oxalic acid grabbing your salivaries and hanging on to balance the butter. There were scampi tails in a lobster coulis. I ate about eight big pieces of fresh foie gras of duck (about $A14) in a long-tasting brown sauce strewn with truffles, and finished with an ice flower whose petals were oval scoops of pear, raspberry, blackcurrant and passionfruit sorbets.
And the service and entente between the staff and the unknown Australian and his wife were exceptional from start to finish. Leading from the front was a youngish man in a sombre grey suit with, as I wrote eventually, tinted spectacles and a gentle smile. I suspected that he was the owner, Monsieur Jean-Claude Vrinat. He treated us with the greatest kindness and courtesy. And, as Taillevent emptied, I took a deep breath and asked for the bill. A waiter returned with a fold of paper on a silver salver. I opened it: ‘Avec mon amical souvenir,’ it read. It was signed Jean-Claude Vrinat. The waiter had disappeared. No-one else seemed to be about. And Monsieur Vrinat himself had disappeared.
I found him on the doorstep under Taillevent’s canopy in the rue Lammenais, casting an eye up and down this backstreet near the Champs Elysées. His was the signature on the bill, he admitted. I hadn’t expected a free meal,
I said. He smiled and said he knew it, but it had given him the greatest pleasure to offer it to us. I’d picked up a little chart of vintages in the restaurant. A footnote on it advised that it was devised by the Messieurs André and Jean-Claude Vrinat. I asked who André was, and his reply was this:
‘André is my father. Like many restaurants, Taillevent has passed from father to son. People sometimes say in a mean way that a lot of sons stand on the shoulders of their fathers. Well, I am proud to say that I have stood on my father’s shoulders. In our publicity material and in reference to the restaurant we always use his name as well as mine. Our regular clients like that. There is a sense of continuity about it. In everything we do we like it to appear as if my father were still here.’
These words — and the inevitability of a longer fall from your father’s shoulders — ring in my ears as I take the Métro. And, for old time’s sake, I go the long way — I promise myself to do it more than once during my stay. It takes me south under Paris to Montparnasse Bienvenue, where I shall change after a long walk through white-tiled vaults and bitumenised pavements, to the above-ground line to Charles de Gaulle Etoile at the top of the Champs Elysées. This line takes me past the second-floor studio where I lived for three years. I warm inside every time I pass it. But, in the meantime, there is a lot to see. Ineffably sad or janglingly boisterous is the music picked from horizontal harps in the Métro’s corridors. You have to audition to play them here. So many of the musicians these days seem to be from eastern Europe. Almost all have waved goodbye to middle-age. They pluck and strike at antique instruments of honeyed wood and catgut strings. Some have CDs to sell. And almost every station is an elongated billboard, so much so that it occurs to me that Paris must be the world’s billposting capital. Professional poster-hangers thrive on the Porte de Clignancourt to Porte d’Orléans line. I love watching them applying water — or perhaps glue — from buckets with broad brushes. How they unfold a hoarding at high speed from a rectangle of paper the size of a large envelope is a marvel.
Paris on a Plate Page 3