It’s always busy — in fact, the whole store is always busy. Today, a few weeks from Christmas, even more people crowd in. Perhaps they’re sheltering from the snow. I unpack myself, removing gloves, beanie and scarf. I get my camera out and snap stacks of gift boxes containing teas and spices. Indeed, there are dozens of loose spices in bright tin buckets tiered around the stairwell.
As I frame my second shot I feel a gentle tap on my left arm. In a grey suit and tie, a smiling north African fellow apologises for having to tell me that photos are not allowed. I tell him what I’m doing — the photos will be needed for my notes. Galeries Lafayette will get terrific publicity. He’s sorry, he says, but any photography has to be cleared by management. I suggest he gets on the walkie-talkie he’s carrying and arranges permission. He agrees, walks away from me, pushes buttons and puts the device to his ear. I look around for potential shots. There are many in the distance beyond the very wide entrance. The security chap returns after a couple of minutes. He can’t get authorisation quickly, he says. I must get it in writing. In fact, I should have got it in writing weeks ago. I didn’t know, I say, and I’ve got to take photographs today. He moves away again and stabs buttons. A minute later he’s back. Perhaps a few photos only, he says. Two or three, he suggests. I up the ante. What about ten? No, not ten, he says. Eight? He shakes his head, smiles broadly and walks away. I interpret this move as permission for restrained open slather. Who’s going to count? I stride across the polished granite tiles of Lafayette Gourmet and bang away.
There might be bigger and better and more exclusive food shops in the world, but Lafayette suits me. In refrigerated cabinets behind spotless curved glass fronts is just about anything you might ever want to eat, including the most expensive. No man might be an island, but each speciality here has its own octagonal island. There’s Vidal duck foie gras, fig chutney, caramelised onions, chicken and confit onions that you’re meant to use in a couscous, lamb and onion confit, and goose foie gras made by Castaing and priced at a very reasonable 65.50 euros for 325 grams.
And after just about every snap of the shutter a server tells me I can’t take pictures. This is fine the first five times. I tell them all — to the last white-coated, blue-aproned, flat-capped, hairnetted man and women — that I’ve been given permission. But about the sixth time I get a little exasperated. (I shouldn’t have, I know.) I tell the young bloke in the cheese octagon, his cap the shape of flatbread, that I’m probably the most important food writer in the entire world and if he lets me take his picture he might become very famous and I might get my job done quicker. No photos, he says, holding up his hand like a Hollywood star. Mind you, my monologue also has the desired effect of his running a mile from the lens.
Hundreds of cheeses are there, including many raw-milk confections at risible prices — fresh goats’-milk cheeses, for instance, at 2 to 3 euros for a whole small cylinder. Scottish smoked salmon costs 100 euros the kilo, with smoked eel at 10 euros a kilo less. The famous fabricant Dalloyau has many lines on display, including Norwegian egg, which is capped with smoked salmon, for 9 euros the piece; perfect transparent dark-brown obelisks of pot au feu (a type of beef stew) in jelly for 6.60 euros; and eggs in jelly containing slivers of zucchini and carrot for 3 euros. Dalloyau’s chocolate and petits fours have made its name, though, and there is quite a range of loose flat choc-blocks of various strengths at high prices. A 375–gram box of Dalloyau’s best assorteds will set you back 34.50 euros. And everywhere I look money is changing hands.
A side aisle leads to Lafayette Gourmet’s wine shop, where there is excellent buying. But in such an important firm as this one, in such an esteemed gastronomic site as this, nonsense in English welcomes the anglophone. A notice says:
‘Wine a world of buffs and enthusiasts, appeals to the tide senses. And more besides LAFAYETTE GOURMET work together with Winegrowers who are keen to express their region.
Like a publisher urging his authors on to produce their best work we have put together this collection to help you build up your own to your personal taste.’
Love the publisher and authors stuff.
Outside, the snow is falling more heavily, gathering centimetres thick on the roofs of parked cars. The crowds are heavy along the footpath, many of them parents showing children the fairly dowdy Christmas displays in the department-store windows. I scamper to a Métro entrance to take line eight to La Motte Picquet Grenelle.
I’m heading home, or the precinct of Paris I once called home. In the Métro, I listen for the long tenor note the undercarriage makes between Invalides and La Tour-Maubourg. The trains go around slow dark curves, and an air on a rail prevails. It’s accompanied by a chorus of squeaks, metal on metal. And has been for as long as I can remember. Brakes, possibly? The sounds are all very comforting. Like grunts, they indicate to me that one of the most efficient and easy to use transport systems in a big city is going about its daily routine in a businesslike manner.
The temperature descends abruptly as I arise from the tunnels into the avenue de la Motte Picquet. Right outside where I want to go, as it happens — I’ve picked the correct exit for a change. In this corner café-brasserie, Le Bouquet de Grenelle, I met with a few friends the night before my wedding. We got very drunk. I can’t recall patronising it at other times in the 1970s and I don’t feel like going in today. I do have enormous sympathy, though, for the stout, rubber-aproned fellow outside the cafe selling Normandy oysters under his scarlet-and-yellow awning. Snow is falling as if the world’s doonas have burst. I turn right and head up the boulevard towards the river.
Rather than changing lines here for the single-stop journey to Dupleix on the elevated grey viaduct in cross-hatched steel, I often used to walk. It seemed a much longer hike after work in the 1970s than it does today. But, then again, it’s not midnight, and I haven’t finished nine exhausting hours rewriting French despatches about hostages and Middle-Eastern madness — terrorists at Munich and the attacks that followed. I haven’t sprinted numerous times across a crowded room with a flash about bodies and attentats and Palestinians and Israelis. I haven’t returned home as tired as a coalminer and covered in carbon. In those pre-tech days only representatives of two métiers came home black after work: miners and agency journalists. We had typewriters then, and everything was done in carbon triplicate.
I pass the little shop where a wizened old chap used to fix radios. His horn-framed spectacles seemed larger than his face. He was learning to repair television sets, he told me one day when I picked up our radio. Black-and-white, of course. The shop’s windows are papered over, and I guess that, long ago, it lost its sign — Valdiv, was it, or Valdez radio repairs? So many businesses along this stretch of road seem to be in commercial limbo. So many shops have their windows blanked. I can’t explain it. I pass the corner restaurant where I took my parents on their first night in Paris. It’s a real-estate agency. Then I take the slight bend in the road — pavements are getting slippery as the snow freezes and traffic is moving at snail’s pace — past the Dupleix station. (‘Dupleix’, by the way, is pronounced ‘duplex’, not ‘duplay’. French proper names are usually sounded out, especially Breton-sounding ones such as Dupleix. In general, French make no attempt to obliterate the consonants in names.) A little way farther on and I’m at number one rue Clodion, my home for three years.
Poilâne, the famous bread shop, is still on the corner. It was the second in the Poilâne empire, opening just before I came to live over it. Pierre Poilâne started his first bakery in 1932 in the rue du Cherche Midi, the sixth arrondissement. But in the post-war years he objected to white industrial bread and rode a tide of increasing affluence with his artisan sourdough loaves. By 1970 his son Lionel had taken over.
The shop remains as it was when I lived above it. On the wall beside its facing of narrow brown bricks is a bas-relief of a windmill. About seven or eight metres below our bed, Poilâne’s ovens warmed the whole building all night. It was great in winter. We were
never cold. But I never liked Poilâne’s bread, even if it was produced from wild yeasts and stone-ground wholewheat flour, baked in wood-fired ovens and seasoned with Guérande salt.
Today I buy my favourite Poilâne offerings: a little chausson aux pommes and a small button-shaped roll. I met Lionel Poilâne once in Australia and told him where I had lived. He seemed a little tetchy and uninterested, although his entourage gave me a cushion shaped like one of his loaves. These days a couple of dozen ovens and forty bakers daily produce thousands of loaves that are dispersed to hundreds of shops and restaurants throughout Paris and overseas. In 2002, Lionel Poilâne, his wife and their dog died when the helicopter he was piloting went into the sea off Brittany. They were heading for their holiday home on a small island. Today the chausson is excellent, its pastry so flaky and light, its filling of apple purée magnificent, tasty and lightly nutmegged. I eat it and the roll looking up at my former windows and little balcony. What great days we had in that tiny studio, even if you needed to climb over the stove to get to the shower. I regret never having taken many photographs.
I cross under the viaduct, where the pigeon droppings are thick and a street market operates, but not today, and take the rue de Lourmel, which has a tradition of good food shops. In its first fifty metres off the boulevard there is a champion cheese outlet, a patisserie, a great fish shop, a butcher and a couple of charcuteries. This is the fifteenth, too — locals have money and they are very white and old French. The difference in appearance between a cluster of Parisians here and a similar-sized group where I’m living north of the river is striking. The people of the fifteenth are homogeneously bourgeois. At selected shops, they are queueing in the street. In the snow. Now, it’s true that some of them might be standing and waiting because a particular shop has become fashionable — in the way that Poilâne caught the imagination of Parisian consumers in the 1970s. But there will be enough standing in line who know their tucker to make it worth your while wrapping up and getting behind them. You might have a bit of a wait on your hands, but what you buy and eat at the end of the line will be excellent. These are neither Russian bread queues nor African humanitarian grain lines. They might best be described as Gallic gourmet queues.
I retrace my steps in the snow — some of it is mounding under doorsteps and by buildings now. It falls constantly, the sky from which it’s coming the dullest grey imaginable. The buildings seem morose, and the few pedestrians about are so enveloped in what they are wearing that they appear barely human. I take the avenue de la Motte Picquet towards the Champs de Mars. It’s a broad thoroughfare with classy shops and a few stylish brasseries. There’s a memorable view coming up. With your back to the Ecole Militaire, you look up the Champs to the Eiffel Tower. But I’m unprepared for the sight today. The wide formal gardens and alleys are blanketed in snow. It’s Siberian. The top of the Eiffel Tower is in cloud. I have never before seen Paris like this.
I get out my camera and snap away. Quite by accident, one image shows two couples and two people quite distant from each other. But what’s astonishing about it is the perfect chevron they make to a vanishing point on the horizon. They mimic the triangle of the tower itself and the perspective of the alleys against the white of the snow. At the bottom right a male has just entered the frame, and in the far left someone weighed down by bags — it’s impossible to distinguish gender — is bent over atrociously and appears to be limping. One couple cross in the middle distance, and the second couple, a little closer, are taking photos with a tripod. Henri Cartier-Bresson would have ‘seen’ this shot. I certainly didn’t. He believed the best photographers saw the magical visual instants that most of us miss. Moreover, they were quick enough with their index fingers to capture them. I smile, realising I’ve had an accidental Cartier-Bresson moment.
In the foreground is the Peace Wall, a monument of glass, steel and wood installed in 2000. It was supposed to be removed to the UNESCO headquarters after three months but is still here. It’s essentially two enormous glass panels in which ‘peace’ is engraved in thirty-two languages and thirteen alphabets. Thin columns repeatedly spell out the word, and a boardwalk links it all. A few tourists dawdle about. In the superstructure’s niches are video screens on which you are invited to leave a message for the world. A mischievious thought crosses my mind. I struggle to remove gloves and put on my glasses. I can’t get the videoscreen to work. Just as well. I was tempted to write that while humans exist wars will be waged. That fighting is in their blood. Man is a vicious, competitive bastard by nature. Greedy by nature, too. But in the aftermath of wars birthrates are excellent, something several Western governments would love to have right now. Economies are rebuilt and become stronger and fairer after wars — see those of Germany and Japan. Whole countries are sometimes rebuilt to be more democratic and resilient — see Vietnam. The technical innovations that have far-reaching effects in peacetime — see radar and other electronic sensing, computing and rocketry, to name a few — are often developed only because of the imperatives of war. I hate war as much as anyone, but wars usually produce benefits for vast numbers of people. That’s what I would have written. But I hardly think that these thoughts would be welcome on the Peace Wall.
I’m trying another high recommendation for dinner: ze kitchen galerie, in fashionable lower-case letters, is said to be doing new things for Paris, using Thai flavours. It’s not far from Fogón, so I don’t need to tell you what I’m thinking as I approach along the quai des Grands Augustins.
How swish and contemporary — so like new brasseries in Melbourne. Although to be fair to my home town, most of them provide comfortable chairs these days. I’ve been on about uncomfortable seating in restaurants for decades. The galerie’s chairs score half-marks. The seats are spacious and upholstered in red fabric, but the armrests are narrow and tubular — hopeless. The chairs are also too diverting per se. Any chair that makes you look at it can’t be good to sit upon. It’s a general rule, and I’ll leave you to find the exceptions. Luckily, I’ve got my length of bench seating against a wall.
The galerie is medium-sized. Its floor is of unvarnished pine strips, and narrow Pollock-type canvases in black and vivid reds and yellows hang on white walls. (I remember Clement Greenberg, who discovered Jackson, once told me that every splodge the artist made was intentional to the millimetre. Yeah, Clem, yeah.) Cooks in a small exposed kitchen slave away in the back corner.
Froths, croquettes and salt are à la mode in Paris. It seems you have to have them pretty liberally to be a successful restaurant. It’s what I’ll remember most about ze kitchen galerie, at any rate. None of the dishes is magical. There’s an attempt, at least, I tell myself, to use lemongrass, ginger and chilli. But it’s not right: half-hearted and out of balance. Are the chefs afraid of overdoing things, frightening away customers with conservative Gallic palates? No dish lights up.
I’ve asked for a dégustation, and I’m tasting a handful of fairly small offerings. There have been a couple of chunks of tuna with a vinaigrette, half-moons of black and red radish, and a salty prawn mince. A crustacean soup is pretty one-dimensional with lemongrass and nori shreds. Prawn tails have a lively crunchiness. A couple of bream ravioli have good strong fishiness but are a little too salty — alarm bells ring! They’re said to be flavoured with Thai herbs but I can’t detect the references. Topped with nori and chives, they’re in a green cress froth with a medicinal flavour. Using herbs in contemporary French cooking often seems to result in tastes achieved by infusing a sachet in water to sleep well. Sometimes, some herbal concoctions taste as if they should be smoked. Or taken for an ailment. (Like the rest of the West, the French are obsessed with herbal cures. Shelves upon shelves of pills and capsules that can redress any physiological imbalance known to man are sold each day.) But, to my mind, medicine is not gastronomy. That zinging freshness that Australian cooks have extracted by gentrifing plants of the south-east Asian floodlands is missing.
The galerie’s platings are ver
y attractive — worth the covers of food glossies. It’s unusual for dishes to look good in French restaurants, and on this score alone this place deserves loud applause. A croquette of hare and foie gras is OK but hardly distinguished. Mealy and chewy, it’s accompanied by a chillied fruit purée that is equally ordinary. Beetroot purée sits between two slices of root and some black trumpet mushrooms garnish. I describe a fawn sauce on the plate in my notebook as ‘obscure’, meaning that its flavour doesn’t leap out and grab you. But at least it has flavour — based on hare stock, I’d guess — and has come to the table unaerated. The galerie’s entrées cost 13 to 14 euros, with mains mostly priced between 23 and 30 euros.
On the way out, I suggest to one of the very young front-of-house team that the cooks ought to go to London and try the food of David Thompson at Nahm. Have a look at what the former Sydney boy, the world’s leading Thai high cook, is doing. For fifteen years, his versions of regal Siamese dishes and his originality with what are said to be the classic Thai ingredients (in recent years they have been incorporated into many other indigenous cooking styles, of course) have been peerless. The young chap looks vague.
Paris on a Plate Page 9