Paris on a Plate

by Stephen Downes

  ‘Yes, but you know, I’ve snorkeled, and a stingray just surprised me out of nowhere once, and, oh my God, I nearly died when I saw it… So big and all glidey… It just kind of flew past. It was sooo close. I nearly drowned…’ Sioux begins flapping her arms up and down, which amuses the couple from Bordeaux, who are listening to our conversation with the most abject and bemused expressions on their faces.

  I explain that skate is not exactly stingray — probably a third cousin and much smaller. Sioux draws on her brave Indian progenitors and orders it. I take the Bayonne ham followed by another of my favourites here, the andouillette sausage.

  Three slices of ham with a knob of fresh half-salted butter and plenty of bread are wonderful. I dive into the breadbasket repeatedly and, when it’s half-empty, a waiter replaces it with freshly cut slices. Sioux goes off amid the crowds at other tables and snaps away with her digital camera. She is especially taken by the smell and the look of the old and, like me, has noticed the gee-gaws of tumbling plaster oak leaves high up on the walls and the magnificently ornate ‘C’ for Chartier, which accompanies them. There’s nothing like this in Boise, she says, rather stating the obvious.

  Sioux is an actress (sometimes), a very good (on her own admission) cocktail mixologist at other times, and quite a handy waiter. But for the moment she just works and saves to travel. It’s her way of getting an education. It will improve her acting. Couldn’t agree more, I say, and I also couldn’t help noticing the names on her calf, even in this cold weather.

  ‘They are my most important people in the world,’ she says, ‘and I like to know they’re near.’ She pokes out her leg from beneath the table and hoists the hem of her jeans. A finger traces around the names. ‘Charleen is my mom,’ she says, ‘and Doris is my grandmom. Then there’s Aunt Gladys.’ She smiles and lets her cuff drop. Close by in time of need, I say. A mom is a girl’s best friend. Sioux smiles.

  The skate looks excellent. Pretty plating is no great preoccupation at Chartier, yet here is a thick piece of wing with capers, chopped chives and small tomato cubes in what appears to be a vinaigrette sauce. Three boiled potatoes attend the fish, and they will have excellent flavour — all French potatoes do. And there is a clutch of the world’s greatest green salad, mâche. My andouillette — grilled chitterling sausage — is accompanied by a formidable pile of chips.

  ‘You know?’ says Sioux, ‘I took the ‘raie’ because of the capers. I know capers. We sometimes put them in martinis. You know martinis?’ Yes, I say, and I love them made with vodka straight from the freezer.

  Sioux tends to her wing delicately, coaxing its soft fibrous texture onto her fork.

  ‘Ray always looks like the cross-section of some kind of advanced aircraft wing, doesn’t it?’ I say. She looks at me strangely. Her face lights up. It’s good, she opines, teasing up another forkful. I try it. Its flavour is full, and the sauce nicely rounded and lightly oily. Sioux is looking at my andouillette suspiciously. I’ve yet to split it open. She wants to know what kind of sausage it is. I suggest that perhaps she wouldn’t want to know at all. ‘Try me,’ she declares. Well, it’s a sausage made mainly from the lower bowels of pigs.

  ‘Oh, gross!’ she says.

  ‘Now,’ I say, ‘I’m going to split it, and you’ll see, if you look, a great many curls of bits of guts and other stuff tumble out onto the plate. And you might smell something a little… “agricultural?” But don’t be alarmed. And you don’t have to watch. It’s kind of adult-rated food.’

  I take my knife to the andouillette. Curls of gluey skin-pale guts spill out, and the characteristic, gorgeous whiff of a shitty pigpen rises all by itself from the plate. Sioux is mesmerised. Thunderstruck. Appalled. She pulls a face. She sniffs the air. Tentatively.

  ‘Oh my God!’ she says. ‘I can smell it… Oh my God! I can! You can’t eat that!’

  I smile and shrug and eat, and the andouillette’s innards are sensationally gluey and flavoursome and gelatinous. Sioux is devastated. I can tell by the despairing look on her face. She sees me as odd, perhaps more beast than human. Mostly primitive, at any rate. She has stopped eating her skate. She glances at the andouillette and looks away. She no longer wants to sit opposite me. Her ‘experience’ at Chartier has been spoilt forever. And I’m the culprit. I feel awful. She looks around the room. Two tables away there is a vacant space next to three young Frenchwomen who are gabbling and gesticulating, densely involved in office politics, no doubt.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ says Sioux, picking up her plate of fish and her knife and fork. ‘Really sorry. I just can’t… Just can’t… That smell is so gross… It’s the smell mainly… I’m sorry.’ And she moves in alongside the Frenchwomen.

  Just my luck, but Chartier is like that. On a good day you can eat well and learn a little about quantum physics or selling Citroëns in Reims, listen to a diatribe about French taxes or hear Britons boast about the strength of the pound (they think nobody understands them). But Chartier is always fun, a living treasure. In 1996 it celebrated its hundredth birthday. And they do something here that was common thirty years ago: the waiters tot up your addition in ballpoint on the butcher’s paper covering your table. I suspect they take lessons in the ornamental scribble they rip onto the paper. And the speed at which they compute mentally would dazzle today’s teenagers. I keep my bill as a memento before heading home in this especially damp and cold early winter.

  Word-of-mouth is the flywheel of most successful restaurants. I guess it’s the same with books and films and any creative endeavour. We believe what our friends and those we trust tell us. And one person in particular who knows his food has mentioned Fogón to me. It’s Spanish, its cook is Spanish and you begin with some tapas dishes, then have a rice — paella-style — main course. Simple. But the cooking is very original and super-refined, I’m told. I’m a little dubious.

  Over the years, I’ve had two extremely bad trips eating paella. In a Melbourne restaurant many years ago, a seafood paella smelt strongly of ammonia. Many of its marine bits were off — well and truly on the rot. I was reviewing the restaurant, ate little of its paella and the place failed. Then, holidaying on the Languedoc coast in the early 1970s, I went with a brother-in-law to Barcelona to see a bullfight. Opting for the complete tourist experience, we ordered paella for lunch. We sat and sweated in a dingy café under a creaking fan that clacked with every rotation. A recorded loop of flamenco music repeated itself until I felt like shooting the guitarist. I think now — though I might be wrong — that men with Zapata moustaches lazed about drinking sangria. The waiters certainly lazed about. They had, as well, surly Iberian manners, even if their moustaches were more disciplined. And Pierre and I waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually — I think it took more than an hour from ordering to eating — a shallow iron dish about half a metre across was put in front of us. In it, bits of protein of indeterminate species and yellow rice drifted in tepid oil several centimetres deep. The result was something truly revolting, disgusting, and we left most of it for the café’s cat. (Who, I’m sure, left most of it for the café’s rats.)

  A good critic tries not to prejudge, it goes without saying. And I believe I’m successfully repressing any paella memories as I take a seat at Fogón. (It’s on the Left Bank not far from the Saint-Michel station.) I want to be up on the Champs Elysées by around 9 pm, I tell the waitress. I’ve been invited to the Lido. Fogón looks as if it knows its job. It’s a narrow walk-in place facing the Seine and, like most restaurants cramped for space, it has chosen to illude optically by surfacing one long wall with mirrors above benches richly upholstered in a coppery satin. On the white-painted facing wall are more mirrors — horizontal in bronze-painted frames. It’s contemporary: even, rectangular tables in oak, white fabric mats covering them. Facing the benches are luxurious white leather dining chairs.

  Two slices of an excellent crisp-crusted brown sourdough arrive in a grey hessian sack the size of a toiletries bag. And when I can’t find my c
utlery, the waitress tells me knives and forks are in the drawer. Effectivement, I say to myself, finding a clever little compartment concealed in the table top. They contain stainless steel utensils I am less happy with — they have squared-off ends that will dig into my palms, especially the left, if I hold them correctly. I see bad cutlery everywhere these days; someone has let designers loose on knives and forks. They shouldn’t have. There’s a good chance, I reflect, that the creative people are Scandinavians or Italians. I mean, all that Beowulf blood still flows in the Scandos’ veins; their ancients ate with their fists and broadswords. And, as we all know, Latins eat spaghetti with their fingers.

  Fogón’s list is brief; to the point. It’s on the right-hand page facing a slim inventory of wines on the left. You can begin with charcuterie ’ pork products — that are made from Iberian pigs raised in the mountains, it says. Why not the seaside, you might ask. Humans enjoy the seaside more than mountains, in general, so wouldn’t pigs be the same? Wouldn’t the odd piggy-dip — a bit of porcine surfing — do them the world of good? I understand waves break on the north-west Spanish coast. Well, the mountains, as Europeans would presume when reading Fogón’s list, means hardy aromatic plants on which an Iberian alpine pig might graze. This notion is central to the marketing of Corsican charcuterie, for instance. Undermining this is a menu note saying that Fogón’s pigs eat mainly acorns. I can see them now, lazing under a giant, hospitable tree. And one says to the other, ‘Wow, these acorns, Luís, my son! Just sensational! Throw me another.’

  You can order a serving of ham for 25 euros, chorizo sausage or salami for 10 euros and ham rillettes (fat and shredded pork) for 12 euros. Below these offerings are six types of rice cooked paella-style: with squid, squid ink and calamari or with vegetables for 18 euros, or with ham for 23 euros. But the rice dishes, the list notes, are for a minimum of two diners. I explain what I’m doing and mention the people who have recommended Fogón. No problems (it’s an international expression, I’m afraid), avers the waitress. We’ll do a rice for two and you can eat what you like. Now, she asks, charcuterie or tapas? The list offers a 35-euro menu — several tapas dishes to start, followed by a rice and a finisher of choice. Again, it’s for a minimum of two, but I argue my case and opt for it. No problems, she says.

  In a short while, I’m eating, beginning with a deft crystalline consommé of ham, chicken and mint, a subtle, tasty soup. Four small cubes of swordfish are next. They’ve been marinated in vinegar for half-an-hour, I learn, then coated with a very thin and fine dust of flour and deep-fried. They’re wonderful. A croquette of Iberian ham demonstrates the complex flavours of this superlative product, but it’s pretty dull alongside the swordfish. And it’s a little too salty at that. Two big mussels are barely cooked and excellent, and a baby calamari is wonderful. These tapas, I must add, are not alone on the plate. Each dish has its sophisticated garnishes — grilled red capsicum slugs, thin slivers of root vegetable and garlic. Three cylinders of huge octopus tentacle on a timber skewer are miraculously tender and tasty — the best legs I’ve eaten. Strewn with salt flakes, they share a rectangular dish with a block of shreddy, crunchy eel-and-potato pie and a groyne of spicy green-tomato chutney. A scallop in its shell is excellent, springy and tasty, but it’s topped with squiggles of ham (no doubt, Iberian) and salt flakes, which makes the dish far too salty, in my view. Moreover, a tawny froth in the half-shell that has fungal hints is also too salty. Tentative conclusion: salt is important to Iberian cuisine? (Over many years, I’ve found European cooking generally far saltier than what I’m used to in Australia.) Three large and shining chunks of persimmon speckled with herbs are the pick of the tapas. They’re draped with a balsamic reduction and have been marinated in lemon juice and oil, I learn. They’re great — soft, fruity and sharp, a true expression of the art of balancing sour, salt, sweet and bitter. Vanilla, says the waitress, is in the reduction. And lime. And ‘secrets’.

  So far, mostly good. Fogón is showing off some stylish culinary conjuring indeed, but the oversalting is a pity. I’m left to digest my tapas for an appropriate fifteen minutes before a shallow iron dish thirty or so centimetres across arrives. It’s supported above the table on a three-legged stand made from steel of little-finger thickness. From first glance it lacks appeal. Very hot, it’s liberating an unappetising and volatile, salty, cephalopodic odour. The smell verges on astringency. It’s a little sickening. And the food itself appears to be somewhat dry. The rubbly surface of the rice and the little rings of calamari are coated with a skin like cellophane.

  Into it I dive, deciding immediately that it’s too salty for me — way, way too salty. The calamari’s delicate taste has been all but obliterated. Tomatoes and carrots seem to be contributors to the dish, but their flavours are lost. The rice is al dente (firm on the bite) and saffron’s presence is over the top. Like truffles and balsamic vinegar, saffron is one of cooking’s bullies; you have to keep it in order and, in my view, Fogón’s kitchen hasn’t. I don’t like the paella’s colour: it’s an intense mid-brown, which suggests overdone-ness in food like this. Out of politeness, though, I eat perhaps a third of the dish, not enjoying it. I shouldn’t do it, I tell myself, but I do. And after a morsel of cheese and quince paste, I’m out of Fogón for 47 euros, including a fino sherry and a glass of fairly basic white wine. Were my informants right about Fogón? Well, yes — and no, I reflect. Close, but no cigar. And paella, it appears, still stalks me.

  In the Métro to the Lido — nice song title that — I begin belching. Every minute or so I erupt, ejecting gas. I pick up my complimentary ticket at the box office and take my place at a back-row table. I concede that I’m not in the best shape to enjoy this famous spectacle, as the French call it. But I accept the offer of a flute of champagne. I wrote to this famous veteran of Paris’s fol side a few months ago, telling them what I was doing. And why. When I went to live in France in the early 1970s, one of my first Gallic experiences was this place. I have very fond memories of it. I went with my fiancée. To this day, the colour, costumes, choreography and coordination of chorus-line crumpet constitute a lasting souvenir. And the shameless bare breasts! They were unbelievable. An Australian Methodist boy was up to his neck in a new and thrilling tease-zone. It was a world I could not possibly have imagined — as foreign to me as the topography of Venus or an extra-terrestrial civilisation.

  Being French, my fiancée saw it all as fun. Me? It disturbed me. How others live when you’re brought up to think everyone is a committed, conservative and repressed Christian is beyond knowing and understanding. I was an Inca seeing Pizzaro and his men. In no way, said Dominique, could the Lido be misconstrued as provocative. Or even naughty. Under her guidance, I changed my views very quickly. Such are cultures. The evening’s single fault was an ordinary dinner — I remember a particularly gristly and quite thin bit of steak. This time the Lido has offered me a seat at their new show Bonheur, hoping I will enjoy it as much as my first experience.

  Paris and naughtiness are a traditional pairing, of course; part of Gallic lore. I own a slim volume called Paris by Night. The book is cloth-bound in rich violet (the colour of the silk that lines a cad’s cape, say), the title impressed on the cover in gold leaf, three stars twinkling around it. Published in 1959, it depicts — mostly through black-and-white photographs of nude showgirls — Paris’s nightclubs and cabarets. Unblushingly outrageous, the book describes itself as a ‘tour of the capital’s gay pleasure haunts’ (my research suggests that ‘gay’ began to mean what it does today some time in the late 1960s). Paris by Night appears to have been written by a Frenchman, Jacques Robert, but was translated by Stephanie and Richard Sutton, who might or might not have been anglophones. Whatever the case, the text gushes in a style that predates by several years the time when young women came to be considered human beings and not simply sex objects. Exhibit one: ‘The Night-Prowler is a patient hunter anywhere, but in Paris he will wander until the grey light of dawn tinges the sky, waiting and s
earching for that frivolous heavenly moment which he will be able to recall thirty years later.’ Exhibit two: ‘On nights such as these the prowler suffers from an almost unquenchable thirst. He becomes a lion, a man-eater, and it is well known that lions, even as man-eaters in fairy-tales, are always avid for the freshest flesh, young, and preferably well-padded.’ Even the captions indicate a long outdated perspective: Marguerite is ‘charming and most promising’; Monique Gérard — photographed astride a balustrade — ‘tore her first underwear on the rails of the Sacré-Coeur steps’; a shot from a dance-floor of legs and pantied pudenda explains that ‘Bluebells look charming from any viewpoint’; Sidonie Patin, a performer at the Crazy Horse ‘is just eighteen’; and Linda Romeo, unlike many girls, ‘can also pilot a plane’.

  The Lido is described as ‘the supreme queen of her Species, a Venetian Palace in the Catacombs of Elysium’. Founded in 1929 by Léon Volterra (who had originally intended to open a Turkish bath), by 1945 the Lido was the finest cabaret in the world. Pierre-Louis Guérin, one of Volterra’s partners, told the author of his ‘perpetual wish to astound Paris...’ One night he would present a ‘Carnival of Venice, built on a so-called Lidorama with Panoramic scenery’. On another, he might ‘pour artificial rain on a battalion of nude women’. He staged ice shows in the middle of summer, and his extravaganzas were routinely backed by three or more orchestras. Then there are the Lido’s iconic Bluebell Girls, the ‘most famous girl-troupe in the world...’ In 1959 the most intriguing of them was Antoinette, ‘who wears glasses’. At management level, it seems, ‘the problem of whether Antoinette should appear nude with or without (her glasses) was hotly disputed’. Jacques Robert himself advised the Lido that she should wear them. ‘Such a thing had never been seen before,’ he writes, ‘and it turned out to be incredibly sexy.’