Well, years pass and, if I’m looking for excuses for being picky, it might be because I didn’t have indigestion thirty years ago. Still, several hundred of us are sardined into a gently sloping auditorium. Despite freezing rain outside, it’s close and smoky in the salle, which is dominated by red and black plush that is worn in places. A bit tatty. The tiers of tables are gently arced, and at ranks below me diners finish their meals. The whole place is quite dark, of course, with illumination provided mostly by quaint skyscraper-like table lamps — obelisks in red and white perspex shards. A six-piece warm-up band is on stage fronted by a chanteuse in a long, black dress split high to the thigh. The boys on the trumpet, sax, guitar and drums are in tuxedos and bowties. They look bored. She’s singing famous French torch numbers such as New York, New York.
I begin counting how many spectateurs are smoking, but drop the ball, numerically speaking, at sixty-three. The rest of us passively inhale. One of the great lessons the New World is teaching the Old is implementation of smoking bans. France remains somewhat backward in this matter. But it’s better than some of its neighbours. The spectators finishing dinner have paid between 140 and 200 euros a person for the meal and show, including champagne. For 80 or 100 euros (depending on the day of the week) you can watch the show and drink a half-bottle of bubbly. A dance floor in front of the band hosts two or three shuffling couples, and in style and substance I suppose you can get the same thing a great deal cheaper at, say, the Dubbo RSL.
I sip my champagne, hoping it might ease my frequent belches and a tightening abdomen. I’m not feeling at all well. But I console myself; the tooth trauma has passed, and this one will too. With luck, sooner rather than later. I’m about to see the Lido’s twenty-sixth spectacle, its brochure tells me. It’s the story of a woman seeking happiness. (Sound familiar?) It will take you ‘on a ninety-minute journey of emotion and discovery with images that will fill your eyes and your imagination’. Four tableaux feature the Bluebell Girls and the Lido Boy Dancers.
In fact, the show is pretty boring and my indigestion gets worse. The costumes are extravagant and colourful, but from another era. They’re silly. The staging is conventional. Basically, young and gorgeous bodies march straight lines or circles and occasionally rotate or high-kick. They wear funny hats, ridiculous head-pieces and apparel you wouldn’t chance even at a Melbourne Cup. There are girls in top hats, girls in Thai-style fretworked headgear and girls in pink feathers. Girls in enough feathers, indeed, to fly. One scene clearly represents a street, because the girls and boys are in streetwear. With one exception: a strategic area of the girls’ suits has been blown away to reveal their breasts. If their grins weren’t so broad, it occurs to me, they would resemble stupefied survivors of a nuclear attack. Lots of coloured lasers pierce the blackness above the audience. The star of the show, who has a good body but never gets her gear off — I suspect she is slightly more senior than the Bluebells — has a smile of cast-iron. Sometimes she sings flat, and it’s impossible, anyway, to tell if she’s chanting or miming. She is backed by voluptuous music, but I can’t see an orchestra. Moreover, unlike Richie Benaud’s suntan, there’s no story here. No narrative. Just pointless scene after pointless scene. And if they went head-to-head on precision, the Lido Boys would beat the Bluebell Girls. Indeed, the girls are so sloppy on occasion that they’d be easybeats for the North Montana Linedancing Association’s B-grade team. But I’m not denying their bodies.
Wonderful independent acts punctuating the ‘narrative’ save Bonheur. There’s a couple who do some miraculous figure-skating at enormous speed on a square rink the size of perhaps half-a-dozen dining tables. A tiny woman contortionist runs through The Book of Knots on a trapeze, and a bloke tangles and untangles himself from a bolt of white satin hanging from the flies. Now, all these are great — and worthy of the name ‘spectacle’.
Perhaps it’s my indigestion, but I leave disappointed. I would hate to have paid. I leave my second glass of champagne untouched and my back hurts, I realise. The Lido’s dining chairs sit at right angles to the stage, and you must twist your body accordingly to get front and square, as they say in football.
I belch all the way back to the studio and hit my drug kit as soon as the key is out of the lock. An anti-inflammatory for my back, a very rare second Omeprazole tablet (it reduces stomach acidity) for the day, and half a Valium for sleep’s sake. Looming, though, is the thought that I’m iller than I think I am.
day four
I’m alive, but only just. If I’m awake at 5 am, I must be alive, I reason. Last night’s sleep was restive, and I’ve done little of it. I’m blurry from the Valium, my stomach is cramping constantly, and I’m still belching. My rear end is making quite a fist of all four Mozart horn concertos. I’m a wreck. There’s the awful chance, I realise, that I’m too ill to do anything gastronomically constructive today. But I should try. I struggle out of bed and manage to swallow a dried crust from a two-day-old baguette. I’m lightheaded and want only to go back to bed. I know I should try to find extra antacid tablets in the nearby supermarket. They’ll be a backstop (I’m wary of the consequences — unsure about them — of overdosing on Omeprazole). I barely manage to down half a glass of water before struggling into a very cold rue des Petites Ecuries.
I should have guessed. The supermarket has no indigestion tablets. Everything in France has its place. Everything is attributed according to good commonsense, basic Cartesian rationality. And indigestion tablets, I guess, would be sold only by pharmacists. It would be their territory. You buy pork products from a charcutier, not a boucher. I haven’t got the energy to go down to the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis to find out. Could my tumultuous intestines be reacting to Paris’s tap water? It would be unusual after three days drinking it. And I drink it without problem whenever I’m here. But I buy a big bottle of mineral water, just in case, and return to the studio.
Everything I do is at the discretion of my cramps, it seems. Liquefy me, and the gas would fuel the traffic of France. I sit. I stand. I review the work I should be doing. (Have I mentioned my Methodist upbringing?) I try to read. I look at the bed longingly and think, quite fairly, that lying down means throwing in the towel, running up the white flag. I’m ill, but I’ll blast through. The only blasting I’m doing, of course, I’ve already mentioned. At 12.30 pm I give in and take to the bed.
I’m prostrate for no more than fifteen seconds before a need — an undeniable desire — overwhelms me. I am thankful for it already as I sprint five metres, kneel on Monsieur Montebello’s fake-oak linoleum and grip the rim of the lavatory bowl with two hands. Then paint it. Violently. You’ve seen Jackson Pollock work? Fast and arbitrary. There’s a man who could sling paint. My raging at the porcelain is similar. Talk about Barry McKenzie’s Technicolour yawns. Pieces of carrot emerge still in the small cubes into which Fogón’s kitchen had chopped them. Tomato — and perhaps red capsicum — are intact smears. Hundreds of rice grains — thousands, it seems, but that’s wrong — show no signs of fraying. Even the tan of last night’s paella has been retained. I vomit repeatedly for perhaps a minute. And muse that the result is pretty. It could be a new faience pattern from a Gien dinner set. But I find it hard to cope with the intact rice grains. I am astonished. Disbelieving. I calculate that I’ve been trying to break them down for sixteen hours. Has Fogón’s rice been digestion-proofed? Sprayed? Of course not. But the paella didn’t like me. Pays me back for not liking it, I suppose.
I am exhausted; completely debilitated. But much better with the source of my discomfort evacuated. And I go to bed, deep sleep taking me at one o’clock in the afternoon as, beyond my window, Paris itself is changing gear from busy to frantic.
day five
I wake early, feeling as fragile as a rickshaw-wallah’s singlet. But the cramps have gone. And the belching. My delicacy will depart, and by lunchtime I shall be fine, I know. I had better be. I’m anticipating an enormous pleasure today: a dégustation by arguably Paris’s bigg
est new culinary star. Pascal Barbot won a first Michelin macaron (the round almond-paste biscuit by which French chefs call Michelin’s honours) for his restaurant, Astrance, the year it opened — just five years ago. His second is only months old. Moreover, he cooked for two years in Sydney and is the first French chef to revere Australia’s culinary contribution (essentially the appropriate assembling of diverse ingredients) to world gastronomy. Without prompting, he told me on the telephone a few weeks ago that his years in Australia had definitely influenced what he was serving diners at home.
So I’d better be well. My stomach is empty and will stay that way until I take up implements at Astrance. Previous tenants of Monsieur Montebello’s studio have left a couple of commercial soup sachets containing the dried makings for a broth. I use one. An Italian brand, its foil packet depicts lots of flourishing colourful vegetables. Of good, strong and complex flavour, it’s also salty but not too much. I eat an end of bread. By now it’s as hard as a dinner plate and I gum it into a paste I can swallow. (My tooth has completely recovered.)
It occurs to me that when events like last night happen, it’s a bonus in my job to have delicate guts. The inflammation and ulceration (discovered only four months ago and subsequently healed) of my oesophagus is, in all probability, mostly genetic: my father died relatively young of gullet cancer, nine months after his first gastroscopy. But another trump is the alarm bells that ring in my stomach whenever food is wrong. Whenever it starts upsetting me. That’s probably a skill I’ve developed from extremely varied eating.
I take the same route for Astrance as for Taillevent. This time, though, I shall get off the Métro at Passy — posh Passy — the first station after the train crosses the river via the pont de Bir-Hakeim. I’m noticing many more police in the Métro’s passages this trip, no doubt because of the riots. They’re in twos and threes and wear combat boots and a kind of dark denim coverall, pistols and badges bright. They stop young north Africans and blacks for their papers. Males only are quizzed. Their female companions complain from a safe distance. I overhear a baby-faced flic (cop) ask one Arab youth how long he’s been in France. ‘Six years,’ he replies.
Max Sebald is missing from Montparnasse’s tapis roulant today and the nine kilometres per hour lane is still out of order. Soon I’m on the viaduct, passing my old studio, which I can’t help staring at until it is out of sight. (It’s always shut up these days. Moreover, a fake plastic stained-glass effect that covered the kitchen window and that I rather liked has been removed.) Then on to the bridge, and Passy, which is an elevated Right Bank precinct several metres above river level. Going towards the Champs Elysées from Passy, you disappear straight into a tunnel and re-emerge only on foot. This is the sixteenth arrondissement, built on a hill. Here the streets are wider, the immigrants fewer, and the seven-and eight-storey apartment buildings have an elegance and authority lacking in more modest parts of the city. Their stormwater downpipes are made of heavy fluted iron, wall brackets ending in ornate collars. The fawn-and-grey stone exteriors are grooved between courses, and corbels that support balconies are often ornately carved. Around Passy, building maintenance is impeccable and constant.
I walk up the hill to the place de Costa Rica, and turn right down the wide and elegant boulevard Delessert. Few people stroll the footpaths this bright cold day. Halfway along is a broad stone staircase descending to the rue Beethoven, in which I shall find Astrance. It’s a short street, and I can’t see any obvious restaurant signs along it. But I’m early, and I’ve got time to do the block, continuing along the boulevard to the Trocadéro garden and the avenue du Président Kennedy by the river. I photograph the Eiffel Tower soaring up between trees in full leaf.
Two-Michelin-starred eating places aren’t generally as tiny as Astrance. I’m surprised at this small, square but very elegant space. I’m the first in for lunch, and a grey-suited, long-tied waiter takes me to a corner table. He is in his late twenties, I’d guess, and his neat haircut appears recent. I’m there for no more than half a minute before two more young men join him to look over paperwork — a sheet of reservations, I’d guess — at the small bar inside the door. They appear to be in their early thirties, but might be older (French young men and women always look younger than their ages). The taller of the two is elegantly grey-suited. The shorter, who has close-cropped black hair, wears a white chef’s tunic, an aubergine apron over it.
I get up and ask if I can take photographs before the lunch crowd arrives. The men oblige without hesitation. And it suddenly dawns on me as I snap away at the striated grey walls, the benches and seats in cadmium-yellow leather, the rich fabric tablecloths and napkins and a minuscule mezzanine behind a nautical balustrade… No, it couldn’t be. He’s surely too young to be Pascal Barbot, Astrance’s chef and owner? I glance at him and he smiles. His face has the rosy-cheeked gleam of a first-year university student.
‘Monsieur Downes,’ he says. ‘Pascal Barbot,’ and I stride over to shake his hand. He acquaints me immediately with his business partner, the older of the two young men in suits. He’s Christophe Rohat, maitre d’. We exchange briefly the usual jolly nonsense, then I tell him I can’t believe the size of Astrance. It’s twenty-five seats, he says, and it’s what they want. Quality is more important than other considerations. They’d rather do twenty-five couverts well than hundreds badly. We talk about Sydney cooks and restaurants we know and about where he worked in Australia. And does he think, I suggest, that his time in Australia has influenced what he cooks here? ‘Perhaps you’ll tell me after you’ve eaten,’ he says, confidence counterpointing deference. We laugh, he returns to his kitchen, and I’m left in young Monsieur Rohat’s hands.
A presentation plate of hand-blown glass containing swirls in a rosewater colour is in front of me. North-west of the plate is a squat glass vase containing a yellow rose and two orchids, one of them a deep purple. Beneath my feet are large ceramic tiles with an ancient Greek-grey appearance. Mirrors on the walls are simply framed in brilliant gold. A silvered alcove has glass shelves supporting stamped and numbered black bottles of cognac, their wax seals broken. They date from the sixties and seventies.
Then the dishes begin to arrive, all matched with wines selected by Monsieur Rohat. On a plain glass square, a spoon contains a perfect mound of what I’m told is parmesan ‘cream’ topped with a couple of tiny thyme leaves. To its left is a thick oval of toasted brioche (a light cakey bread) drenched with rosemary butter. Simple and unspectacular, these palate amusements are sharp scrub-ups, especially the parmesan. Next up is what appears to be a small glass of a very frothy beer plated on a white saucer. The head is a clementine (a sort of mandarin) mousse, the beer a carrot-flavoured yoghurt. The concoction is very cold, the flavours terrifically strong but foiling one another perfectly. I love it. It’s witty as well, unpretentious, laughing at itself, and therefore unlike a lot of top Gallic cuisine.
Let me leave for a while Astrance’s ultimate confection — an artless and brilliant piece of culinary work that came next — to summarise the rest of the meal. I hope I haven’t miscounted, but I dégusted six savoury dishes after the signature. Two huge scallop adductor muscles — as sweet and springy as you could get — present on a small mound of spinach in a curry-flavoured froth. In a second small bowl, raw worms of scallop swim in a brilliant fungal consommé. (A few flakes of pink Murray River salt from Mildura on each scallop would make a formidable dish sublime, I think to myself.) Two oysters as plump as cushions wade in a mussel sabayon. They wear slivers of ginger and red capsicum and crumbs of roasted nuts. It’s very Australian, but the mussel sabayon would probably have been stronger down south. And the ginger’s contribution a little more robust. There’s a fillet of sandre, an esteemed cousin of perch from the Loire River. I wish the world who loves eating could see its colours. In the middle of the cross-section, the flesh is mauve, then, like a rainbow, the hues change to indigo, a blue-pink, then pale pink and finally a creamy white near the skin. And the me
at shines, glinting irridescently like a slick of oil. Its taste is mild, but it’s real and wild and accompanied by very thin slices of raw and fried cèpes (a gill-free mushroom), a cylinder of fried apple, a small ovoid of a herb purée and another of nuts and garlic.
Alongside me, a jovial couple of amateur eaters in late middle-age appear to live locally. I admire them, because they’re the French who are prepared to try these very different and adventurous tastes. This is antipodean style, I’m tempted to tell them. Luckily for them, I shut up. He’s dressed splendidly, a shirt of possibly two-fold Egyptian cotton — has to be — in yellow and mauve stripes taut across his considerable embonpoint. He wears braces, a silk tie in a rich saffron and a dark suit. His spectacle frames are in striped perspex. Perhaps he designs sous-vêtements for well-heeled women. His wife looks impeccable, as do all French women of a certain age. When they’re out, that is. It takes work. And he says to her that this food is the product of someone performing a métier, what we might call a profession that you put your heart and soul into. He talks about its creativity. Then he says something I am especially pleased to hear. He observes that the dishes are put together with a certain ‘génie d’association’. ‘You’ve got it!’ I almost scream at him. ‘You can see what young Monsieur Barbot is on about.’
Australian chefs are showing the world that ingredients don’t need to be blended into anonymity for cooking to have occurred. Prepared appropriately, they can associate with others on a plate to produce a pleasing integrity. And that’s what you are getting at Astrance. I eat lotte, another freshwater fish, with translucent discs of pumpkin, turnip and white radish, a clementine emulsion, and a partnering bowl of oursin (sea urchin) coulis and raw urchin leaves. Paper-thin slices of a huge white truffle arrive over meat juice, and duck breast comes with bright fried vegie bits, black olive crumbs and leek choppings, eggplant topped with a sweet miso paste and duck liver spread on toast. There’s a chilli and lemongrass sorbet — the flavours more restrained than they would be in Australia — and the star of the desserts is a plonk of quince jelly blanketed with a sabayon of bitter almonds. Monsieur Barbot’s cooking shows comprehensive technique — at this level you expect nothing less, of course. His mousses, froths and jellies are super-refined, sauces less emphasised than they are in more traditional French haute cuisine. But it’s his assemblies of flavours and textures that make him braver and more interesting than most chefs working in Paris today.
Paris on a Plate Page 7