At Montparnasse I must take one of the longest straight corridors of the network. Perhaps twenty metres across, three moving walkways occupy its centre. The middle one, which hurtles along at nine kilometres per hour for 185 metres, is out of commission. It was said to be a world first when it opened in 2003. Its speed was eleven kilometres per hour. Judging by the warnings, there have been teething problems. Perhaps already a brace of pensioners have been maimed in falls attributable to its haste. In Paris, you might never know. I’m left with no option but the three kilometres per hour version.
It’s funny how you notice duplicates of the dead who were important to you. I used to see my father in the street or shopping for cat food in supermarkets (even though my parents hated cats). Today ‘Max’ Sebald, the very great German writer, who died relatively young in a car accident in 2001, is on the tapis roulant just ahead of me. It’s Max all right, in a long grey overcoat, his spectacle frames stark, his white moustache luxuriant. His face is kindly and doleful, just like in the photographs. He’s wearing a black homburg and, although none of the images of W. G. Sebald I’ve seen show him wearing a black homburg, I’m convinced it’s the kind of hat he would wear. He observes the advertising hoardings as they pass. He would look at them this way — critically. It must be Max.
I skittle past my old studio at Dupleix — following it with my eyes — and walk from the Arc de Trimphe to Taillevent, taking a left at the rue Washington and another into the rue Lammenais itself. Nothing appears to have changed as I approach my lunch spot. The dark canopy over smoked glass doors remains emphatically discreet — on it, in roman typeface, the single word ‘Taillevent’.
I’m wearing a jacket and tie today (you can’t be too careful). Around my neck is an extravagant silken bolt of close diagonal checks in blue and dazzling gold that I bought at a Vietnamese street market. I am greeted by elegant young men in charcoal-grey suits, Taillevent’s uniform. They are students of their boss’s ineffable charisma. Monsieur Vrinat, the patron, the owner, the ringmaster of the show (two sessions daily) has had plenty of practice exercising his distinctive ways. André Vrinat opened the first Taillevent in 1946 in the somewhat-less-classy ninth arrondissement. Two years later Michelin awarded it its first star. In 1950 it moved to its present premises: a typically gorgeous Haussmann-style building in a homogenous multi-storeyed strip constructed in 1852. Initially the home of the Duc de Mornay, it was for many years the Paraguayan embassy. In 1956 Taillevent garnered its second Michelin star and in 1962, the year Jean-Claude joined the family business, its third. It has remained among France’s top restaurants ever since. In Paris in 2005 Michelin ranks only nine other restaurants as highly.
Among Taillevent’s most famous habitués have been Richard Nixon, Maria Callas and Salvador Dali. The website admits that the restaurant sometimes had trouble satisfying Dali’s whims. He once asked the kitchen to duplicate an ancient recipe — unplucked peacock baked in clay. The result was disappointing and bland. The website notes that when Dali ate with his muse, Gala, they drank water. When he was accompanied by ‘ravishing young women’ he ordered the best wines. (Taillevent, by the way, was the nickname of Guillaume Tirel, a celebrated fourteenth-century cook to the King. He wrote Le Viandier, which is seen as the founding textbook of Gallic cuisine, and his coat of arms features three copper stewpots and six roses.)
Taillevent’s website has prepared me for certain elegant renovations, but I am seated in a large room of gaspingly exquisite gout (taste). My booth is panelled to waist-height with new oak. Matching taupe-coloured leather dining chairs oppose the booths. The whole salon is, indeed, oak-lined with classical columns soaring to crenellated friezes. Everywhere there is richness, be it in the huge white worked napkins, the tablecloths, the crystal glassware or the silver cutlery set prongs-down, traditionally to display the flourishes of an engraved family crest. The lighting is even and faintly sepia — perfect to consume great food by.
Within five minutes, Monsieur Vrinat himself emerges from his army of servers to welcome me like an old friend. I recognise him immediately. His hair is greyer, his face a little fuller and more worn in, but it’s him. If there were a world championship of charm, I’d like to be his manager, take fifteen per cent. He is so gentle, so deferential and witty, so comprehensively charmant, his arms lightly folded, his body subtly inclined towards his guests, his manner so quiet, earnest yet good-natured and good-humoured simultaneously. He would win by streets. His demeanour is identical, no matter the diner. Fuss is unknown here. Indeed, the restaurant’s website tells you that Monsieur Vrinat wants you to feel at home in his eating place — or experience the sensation of being a hostage at the home of a dear friend (my translation). Like his staff, he wears a school-grey suit cut to the millimetre. His tie is just a little more subtle that the understated coppery check numbers of his waiters and maitres d’. His smile is genuine, beaming from a tanned handsome face, his spectacles framing lightly smoked lenses.
Monsieur Vrinat is so pleased to see me back. He has spent the summer renovating and this is the result. He hopes I like it. It is the work of the sixth architect — sixth! ’ who tried out for the job. The large windows behind me, he says, are of glass. I turn to look; they appear to be an opaque pearlescent muslin. It’s glass, says Monsieur Vrinat, it really is. Special glass that admits a superlatively even and enriched luminosity. In alcoves and on tables are stark but elegant contemporary artworks — sharp sculptures of various sizes in gleaming metals. Quite a contrast to the oak.
‘So, Taillevent evolves?’ I say. Yes, he says, lifting a warning finger. The right word, ‘evolution’. Even the cooking.
‘Never revolution?’ I ask, mischievously. Monsieur Vrinat smiles. France has had its revolutions, he says. ‘Non, non, non plus… Dans les revolutions on coupe les têtes!’ (‘In revolutions, heads are cut off.’)
On heavy cream stock of light texture, Taillevent’s list is almost the size of its napkins. Think a broadsheet newspaper. Among the entrées, you may choose a velouté of grey shrimps, cauliflower and radish, a scallop salad with beetroot and citrus flavours, lobster with a cappuccino of chestnuts, and a duck tourte au foie gras with a rouennaise sauce. Fourteen seafood, poultry and red-meat mains follow, including john dory fillet with black olives and fennel, fried foie gras with caramelised fruits and vegetables, and a simple beef fillet with grey shallots and a top raking of salt from (no doubt) the marshes of southern Brittany. To me, the list reads modern — evolutionary — but lacking, beyond a turbot curry, the kinds of stronger and more exotic flavours we are used to in the New World.
Almost matching his boss’s charm is that projected by Monsieur X, Taillevent’s ‘Premier Maitre d’Hotel’, as his card expresses it. With a laugh, he asks me not to identify him: ‘I am called Mr No-one.’ I tell him I shall eat and drink whatever he puts in front of me. I should, he says. We must enjoy Taillevent; it is a place for fun. He has been at Monsieur Vrinat’s side for many, many years and to eat here is to fête life. People should enjoy themselves here, despite the restaurant’s formidable reputation for refinement.
I begin with champagne and strongly flavoured gougères — puffballs made from choux pastry and cheese. A demi-tasse of white-bean soup with truffle oil follows, just to amuse the palate before the principal dishes arrive. It’s very oily, but very tasty, too; the truffle taste not at all irksome, which it can easily be. And the first official item on the dégustation menu is a crème brulée of foie gras and small broad beans. Tanned off on top, the brulée wears a light thatch of raw apple sticks about a millimetre square. An oval of crisped bread of about the same thickness accompanies. The blend of liver and beans is very subtle indeed and quite sweet. Soon, I am regaled with a great chablis to accompany three ravioli in a shallow bowl of tawny foam. The foam is a ‘cappuccino’ of chestnuts, and the ravioli — made with fresh, soft, thin, translucent paste — contain pieces of wild cep and girolle mushrooms infiltrated with chestnut crumbs. Each of these fungi
has a characteristic flavour, and at Taillevent they sing their parts distinctly against the chestnut’s sweet creaminess. Taillevent’s culinary style is obvious. It’s slightly sweet, but the flavours are huge. Big flavours are fine as long as they are in balance. And they are here — any palate funambulist could tell you. The cooking assembles tastes that are firm yet subtle, and I’m now looking forward more than ever to chatting to its relatively new and young chef, Alain Solivérès.
Do the people eating around me know how good Taillevent is? The place is packed, and many have more than an inkling, I decide. The lunchers’ average age is over sixty, and you can assume that many have known Monsieur Vrinat for years. Exceptions are the American couple — a handsome young executive and his elegant black companion. Each would hold a significant position, I guess, in a financial institution of some sort. Or a UN bureauracy. Then there are the suited businessmen in their mid-forties in the next booth. Lean and elegant in that wholly Parisian self-regard, they face one another across a shared table, exchanging financial intelligence, talking about oil prices and movements in trade indices. ‘Do you speak Spanish?’ one asks the other. There is work down there, apparently. And it might seem curious to us that these two men, who seem to rely on and know each other well and who obviously interact a great deal professionally, use the formal ‘vous’ form of ‘you’. It’s a mark of respect, we must understand, a declaration of trustworthiness while their career meters are running. If they were dining as host and guest in one another’s homes, these same two men might use the familiar form, ‘tu’. There is simply a lot more to lose — a lot more at stake — during work hours than when relaxing. Relationships must be more clinical and considered so that it is easier to impose conditions. And harder for others to betray them. Most of us betray only those closest to us.
Every now and then, Monsier Vrinat checks that I’m fine. He tours his dining room constantly, always a kind word ready — even a longish conversation with a well-known guest. My next dish is a big fillet of lightly fried, exquisite red mullet resting on a brandade (a fine mince) of ‘merlu’, which is a cousin of whiting. A paper-thin wafer tops the fish, and the lot is presented on the most delicate, luminous green and minerally herbal juice that, in turn, is retained by a rectangle of very strong garlic mayonnaise. The amplitude of flavours again surprises. They are astonishingly strong, yet perfectly balanced. With a wonderful disc of stuffed lamb saddle I eat potatoes of a density and sweetness that defies culinary logic and miniature halves of artichokes whose aniseed savour is reluctant to leave the rear palate. And, in a tall-stemmed martini glass, I finish with a layered delight of vanilla cream, rose-faint jelly containing bits of ripe fig and a cloud of snow egg. A crowning deep-fried figleaf hints at veiling the concoction’s muted immodesty. All the while, my table is periodically swept of crumbs with a sickle-shaped brush of worked silver and its matching pan.
You might be curious about Taillevent’s prices. What does one pay to eat in this princely way in such regal surrounds? Two decades ago, the cost seemed reasonable. Today, the cheapest dish on the list is the grey-shrimp velouté — it costs 34 euros, or about $A56. The scallop salad costs $A7 more. The red mullet dish is 62 euros (about $A103), and the turbot curry with Malaga raisins and coconut milk, among the more expensive offerings, comes in at 90 euros (about $A150). For two people, the list’s most expensive dish is roast Bresse chicken with truffles and a walnut butter — it costs 150 euros. Desserts are priced at 24 euros.
Monsieur No-one drops by with a story. He rides a scooter to and from work. When he got off it near his apartment the other night, a beggar approached him. There was something about the man that made Monsieur No-one immediately sympathetic to his plight. He found four euros in his pocket and gave them to the man, suggesting he go and get a good hot coffee. And the tramp replied, ‘Merci, mon bon monsieur.’ (‘Thank you, my good man.’) It was not good French, something a French person would never say, of course, says Monsieur No-one. But he was very touched by it. ‘Merci, mon bon monsieur,’ repeats Monsieur No-one, grinning, as he drifts to another table. ‘Merci, mon bon monsieur.’
I have eaten and drunk sublimely, and it remains only to quiz the man behind it. Alain Solivérès approaches me across the dining room, a recognisably working chef from his stained white tunic — name embossed — clogs and matted thatch of blond hair. He looks a little tired and glows with half-evaporated sweat. Of medium build, he speaks in a soft, modest and confidential manner. He is forty-two and has been chef at Taillevent for almost two years. A perfect age, I think, to reach such a pinnacle. The new list is his seventh, and I was right to detect the restaurant’s culinary evolution. Taillevent’s regular clients were ready to accept it, he says. But he had to respect the place. ‘Lieu’ is the word he uses, signifying a reverence for one of the holies of gastronomic holies. He has been so bold as to take the lobster boudin (sausage) off the menu. It had been a signature dish for thirty years. I quiz him about the light sweetness of even some of his savoury dishes. It is purely accidental, he smiles. No sugar is added to savoury plates. Because we are in autumn, root crops possess higher and more concentrated sweetness. It has to be that.
Monsieur Vrinat gives him carte blanche to write menus. But the boss no doubt takes an interest in them, I say. Certainly, says Alain Solivérès. But he trusts him. After all, he has, since beginning his apprenticeship in 1979, already had a long career that includes stints with other culinary magicians, among them the Alains, Ducasse and Senderens. In almost a decade before joining Taillevent, he has won a second Michelin star for Les Elysées du Vernet at the Hotel Vernet on the other side of the Champs Elysées.
And what about Senderens, I ask, who a year or so back declared in print that French cooking was losing ground to more inventive concoctions in the New World. Are French chefs too timid and rooted in tradition? Alain Solivérès draws breath and pauses for quite a while. You must cook as you feel and as you were trained, he says. If you were brought up to eat McDonald’s you would cook like that. He has Maltese and Algerian ancestors; cooking and eating are part of his culture. And Taillevent, the ‘lieu’, has to be respected. There is a ‘war’ between French and fusion cooking styles, yet each needs to express itself. And what of the froth and foam chefs, the chemical concocters? It is ‘laboratory’ cooking, he says. Monsieur Solivérès seems to have little interest in it.
I say that I liked his strong flavours. There were some mammoth tastes, especially with the vegetables. Yes, he acknowledges, but it is all in the raw materials. Taillevent takes delivery of vegetables three times a day. He thanks me for coming — for appreciating what he does — gets up and returns to the kitchen.
I finish with strong fine coffee and miniature cakes and chocolates. Then, with charm so skilled it seems effortless, Monsieur Vrinat shows me out. I remind him of the twenty-three years between visits and he laughs. ‘Don’t leave it that long again,’ he admonishes, and I promise I won’t.
With a bit of rummaging, I manage to find a large platter among Monsieur Montebello’s crockery. At around 6 pm I revisit the Blue Lagoon. The big woman isn’t there, but two equally hefty blokes in early middle-age are serving customers. They too are enveloped in huge white aprons, their feet gumbooted brighter than white. Pale-blue fleeces squeeze out of the aprons and up around their necks like cats through a crack in a wall.
Holding out the platter to the server I judge to be the more senior of the two, I explain again what I want. He knows exactly. A dozen oysters? No problems. I look again at his three sorts: belons; fines de claires; and, a little more expensive, the generic ‘huitres de Normandie’. They nestle among seaweed in trapezoid boxes stapled together from raw plywood slats. Make it eighteen, I say, getting greedy despite my lunch. Six of each. I reason that the Taillevent meal will be well and truly digested in an hour or so, but I should show it some sort of gastronomic respect by declining food of any complexity for dinner. Just stick to something simple, light and unspeakably refine
d. The oysters are a perfect choice, a gustatory pinnacle, but also devoid of the palate differentials that might spoil my immediate memories of Taillevent’s tucker. I am anticipating at this very instant their juiciness — indeed the flavour of each variety. Belons are flat indigenous bivalves that have a big characteristic taste — lots of iodine. They’re not to everyone’s gout but I love them. The fines and the more expensive ‘Normandy’ oysters will taste similar, be equally succulent but slightly different in size.
I ask to take a few photographs, and the men joke about their looks. Doesn’t everyone about to be photographed? ‘C’est pour L’Equipe?’ shouts the boss, posing as a front-row rugby gorilla in the hope of appearing in Paris’s famous sports daily. I’ll be back in an hour, I say. He assures me that my oysters will be ready.
Ninety minutes later I pay just over 13 euros (about $A20) for them. They’ve been carefully opened, their lids replaced over juices brimming in the bottom half-shells. A few strands of seaweed steady them strategically. I take special care to keep the plate horizontal in my two-hundred-metre walk back to the studio.
I uncork the muscadet (sur lie ’ I’m no expert, but it sounds as if lees have had something to do with the wine-making) from Sèvre et Maine. It’s a sharp but fruity little drop whose colour, says the label, is a ‘belle robe limpide aux reflets verts typiques’ — ‘a clear beautiful colour with typical green hints’. Its aroma is supposed to be frank and fresh with citrus touches, and in the mouth it’s fruity, ample and rich. After a bouchée or two, I find myself agreeing with the whole pitch. And the muscadet partners the oysters brilliantly. The shellfish are unsurprisingly exquisite. (And I chew — and swallow.) Without a doubt, they have come up from the Normandy coast very early this morning. The Blue Lagoon probably bought them at any time between 1 and 6 am, when the immense fish market at Rungis on the outskirts of Paris is in full swell. Each oyster is firmly and naturally attached to its bottom shell. You must cut the gristly little ‘foot’ to eat it. Squeeze lemon juice over oysters if you like — I have no lemons tonight — but I prefer them as prehistoric man discovered them. I notice one further indication of their freshness: live barnacles encrust most of the top shells. I count eighteen on one shell alone. Their vulval shape arouses me even more than the oysters. But a greater tease are the tiny feelers that protrude from the barnacles, wave about, then quickly retract when I tickle them. Barnacle clitorises?
Paris on a Plate Page 4