I order travers (spare ribs) of pork baked with honey (9 euros), help myself to a half-bottle of wine and a bread roll, and head for the cashier. When I ask the smiling African Frenchman behind the till how I get my wine opened, he hands me a waiter’s friend. He asks if I know how to use it. ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ I tell him.
I find a place in the scrupulously clean and well-lighted eating space. There are plenty of empty white plywood chairs at lots of cleared white laminated table tops. My ribs, a succulent tanned block the size of a robust pencil case, are excellent. They’re sweet and salty, tasty and chewy. Green peppercorns are strewn on top, genuine cooking juices are flavoursome, and the garnishes are an excellent potato purée and a vegetable stew containing carrot discs, beans of two sorts and eggplant cubes. My little beaujolais nouveau ’ Eugene Brocard — is fine. It costs 4.40 euros. So, a very hearty lunch for 14 euros. Paper napkins on demand, and help yourself to pitchers of water and ice.
Paul Bocuse, the doyen of French chefs, told me ten or so years ago that even his most eminent colleagues were waking up. They could see the writing on the wall. People didn’t want to — couldn’t — any longer pay vast amounts to eat super-refined dishes served by battalions of waiters in regal surroundings. It was why even he had opened cheaper bistros. Eating out needed to be simpler and more casual to suit the Zeitgeist (although that wasn’t a word le grand Paul would use).
So I need to check what’s being served at a couple of places opened recently by veteran star chefs. Joël Robuchon, for instance, was the most talked about cook of the 1980s. His mashed potato was legendary. Then he got out of the game altogether to write a newspaper column. Recently, though, he has returned to restaurants with two Parisian outlets — a ‘table’ and an ‘atelier’ (workshop) — that are considerably cheaper than his three-Michelin-starred restaurant of the 1980s, Jamin, where you could eat a cold caviar jelly surfaced thinly with cauliflower cream, individual fish eggs dotting its edge in a perfect annulus.
I cross the river and make my way down the rue du Bac to the elegant rue de Montalembert in the seventh arrondissement. Robuchon’s L’Atelier is a cave of a place where no bookings are taken for lunch. (You can make dinner reservations, but only for 6.30 pm.) Low-ceilinged, it feels cramped and funky, two dining spaces — some at a type of bar — on either side of a central kitchen. Stylish and wealthy Parisians, most of them well into middle-age, sit on stools and chairs while young — and even younger — cooks learn their craft in the kitchen, searing, whipping and blending ingredients, sometimes enthusiastically and at other moments listlessly. I can’t see anyone who might appear to have significant experience, let alone Monsieur Robuchon himself.
I decide not to eat after I scan the lists of dishes handed over by a sniffy manager. Twenty-one small servings are labelled ‘dégustation’, meaning ‘tasting size’, and you should order several of them to make a meal. Then follow ten entrées and nine fish and meat dishes. Prices vary widely: among the small portions are a gazpacho with croutons for 10 euros and a butterflied fillet of beef with ‘pastoral’ savours for 26 euros. You can get an egg with fungal cream for 16 euros or marinated anchovies with an eggplant ‘confite’ for 11 euros. An entrée of vitello tonnato will set you back 21 euros and a rabbit terrine 19 euros. Prices lift considerably with mains, where thyme-flavoured milk-fed lamb costs 36 euros, suckling pig on a spit the same, and veal’s liver with onion rings and a sour sauce is priced at 39 euros.
No dishes really excite me. Many are pale imitations of New World originality, remaining cautious and tentative. I suspect that some of the tastes are very refined and balanced, but I’m used to heroic flavours these days — the heightened amplification cooks need to work into their offerings when bold foodstuffs such as chilli and lemongrass, coriander and lime, say, are employed. I don’t want to have to search for subtlety any more. I no longer need or want super-saveur-sophistication in a bistro (not that there’s any guarantee the atelier will dish it up). Reviews have been variable: one by Gastroville scoring it twelve out of twenty and complaining about less-than-the-best makings. It implied that some were stale. A single scallop cost 18 euros and a single crustacean ravioli, 25 euros. ‘Are we on the verge of seeing gourmet McDonald’s?’ it asked.
I retrace my steps, take the rue de Rivoli, then turn right into the rue Royale and walk up to the place de la Madeleine. This is where the chef’s chef, Alain Senderens, opines from a certain gastro-intellectual hauteur. He’s been critical in recent years of unadventurous French cooking. The rest of the world — especially the New one — has been streaking ahead, while Gallic cooks approach new tastes with timidity. And his response to the new challenge of more casual dining has been to convert his three-Michelin-starred restaurant into a new brasserie. It happened only weeks ago. More or less overnight, Lucas Carton, the veteran posh classic where a meal with house wine cost between 144 and 380 euros (and without wine between 138 and 229 euros), became simply Senderens. I used to look through the window here, having never eaten at Lucas Carton. Some of the luxurious furnishings seem to be gone, but Senderens remains a very stylish eating space.
These days the boss has a penchant for choosing food that goes with certain wines — not the other way around — and his new list recommends a glass, costing between 6 and 16 euros, for each dish. Entrées are priced between 18 and 30 euros, the latter a lobster and mango-basil salad, which is old hat where I come from. The cheapest starter is ricotta ravioli with lemonthyme and a whipped sage butter — equally fading fedora. French chefs still trust curry, a flavour they know and love, and Senderens’ lamb chops come with a ‘Javanese’ curry that includes lemongrass and mango. It costs 39 euros. A fish and mussel curry costs 32 euros. I’ve tasted them all before, and both flavours and servings would, I suspect, be bigger where I come from.
I ate steak tartare for the first time at La Coupole, the quintessential Parisian brasserie. Steak tartare, you will remember, is raw minced beef blended with condiments such as a raw egg and finely chopped shallots, capers and parsley. ‘Huns and Mongols’, as an old French book of mine puts it, originated the recipe after tenderising beef under their saddles. Eaten at the temperature of a sweaty stallion, I suppose, it was reckoned to be a terrific winter pick-me-up.
By the time I went there in the early 1970s, La Coupole had for decades commanded custom from Left Bank writers and artists — as well as the upper bourgeoisie of the fourteenth arrondissement to the south. I dined there with my new wife Dominique, Pierre, my paella partner, and his wife Mireille, my sister-in-law. We were young — out for a night and a laugh. And La Coupole provided both those things. Its service was brusque and fast, the waiters’ attitudes as highly strung as their bowties (their aprons were spotless). La Coupole was an attraction for genuine Parisians, the people who lived in the city, as well as its well-known clientele of artists, singers, writers and models. Since opening its doors in 1927 it had always been the case. The scandalous black danseuse Josephine Baker, photographer Man Ray, Picasso and Hemingway were regulars. And one of its most famous offerings was steak tartare.
I have only dim recollections of that first night at La Coupole, but the spectacular tessellated floor, the clatter of bistro chairs and the tartare itself are among them. (I can’t recall having seen any celebrities.) In those days, a waiter brought the minced beef — all maroon and devoid of even the slightest skerrick of fat — for your perusal and approval. A beret of ground beast, it was topped by half an eggshell containing a raw yolk. The waiter would also bring small bowls of the traditional condiments — chopped capers, gherkins, parsley and onions. Under your direction, he would customise your tartare, giving you two or three tastings during the mixing process to confirm its rightness for your palate. (I have a suspicion oil and perhaps Worcestershire sauce were also offered.)
Groupe Flo bought La Coupole in 1988, and restored it immediately to its flapper-age glory. It’s hard to overstate the importance of Parisian brasseries in t
he gastronomic scheme of things. They sit several affordable rungs below the great starred restaurants. Most visitors to Paris take their Gallic culinary bearings from them. Indeed, for the locals, too, they are mostly what dining out is all about. They are usually very big, crowded, businesslike, and make their very own special kind of music: a symphony scored for excited voices, cutlery on plates and the periodic popping of champagne corks. And they offer the same canonic dishes, year in and year out, cooked in the same ways. Their gastronomic contribution has far-distant origins: Alsatian refugees from the 1870 Franco-Prussian war set up the first Parisian brasseries. A ‘brasserie’, after all, is a brewery, and the model for the Parisian brasserie is the German bierkeller. (Families from Auvergne in central France also owned many of the capital’s brasseries.)
From the boulevard du Montparnasse you can see beyond the glass-fronted café into the enormous square room that is La Coupole itself. By 8 pm about a dozen people are waiting for tables, but I’m shown straight in because I’m alone. And I immediately remember the mosaic floor and its modernistic chevrons and half-rings in cream and off-white, brown and black, even the way the brown leather banquettes, tables and oak dining chairs with their studded leather backs are set up in an enormous grid. In the centre of the room is something of a golden dome (but hardly a spectacular coupole), a sleek abstract statue of a pair of dancers under it. I ask for a non-smoking table. The waiter leads me to a far corner of this immense space, taking rights and lefts through the grid. La Coupole seats hundreds and is said to be Paris’s biggest dining room.
Waistcoated waiters, and the sheer numbers of staff and diners, suggest I’m in for a correct eating experience, as the French say, even if it’s probably not going to send me into raptures. I take a seat on a banquette facing a wall three or so metres away. Behind me, a little above a partition of honeyed wood, two thick brass rails run parallel to hold hats and gloves, overcoats and bags. The room is splendid. Lustrous oaks empanels much of it, of course, but there are also mirrors and murals of showgirls and nymphs. Two dozen square, moss-green columns with gilt capitals are an especially revered feature. Almost three dozen artists — several of them of considerable renown — are said to have painted the original images, which Groupe Flo restored.
In the great brasseries you should stick to the simple offerings for which they are famous. Choucroute garni is the best-known — nothing more nor less than sauerkraut topped with pork of various sorts, usually sausages and belly straps. La Coupole serves seafood platters at a range of prices; lots of half-dozen oysters priced between 13.20 and 19.50 euros, depending on size, origin and species; house-made pigs’ trotters (12.50 euros); fresh tagliatelle (17.50 euros); and steak of several sorts.
My napkin is enormous, white and worked, and the tablecloths are equally rich. You use dazzling alloy cutlery, and if you look carefully you’ll notice that the logo on the plates features a naked young lady with a 1920s bob sitting between an artist’s palate and an open book. It’s a lovely — very Gallic — image; the young woman is torn between decadence and the thrill of thinking. So many famous Frenchwomen, Colette in the vanguard, have been thus. La Coupole is used to flirting with decadence. On the walls hang black-and-white photographs, taken between the wars, of crowd scenes inside the dining room. Look at the smiles on the faces! It was an era when libertine attitudes were more or less mandatory — as was seeing a priest to confess the following day.
I muse on what life must have been like for Felix Del Prado, billed as the ‘chanteur’ with La Coupole’s celebrated Bachichia orchestra. He peers into the distance opposite me, looking disconsolate. A dark brilliantined bow-wave of hair sits above his forehead, and a white scarf is knotted around his neck. His billowing satin shirt shines. Perhaps it was pink. With a ten-gallon hat he could be crooning in Nevada, a singing cowboy.
Three fillets of Baltic herring (7 euros) are said to be served with fresh cream. Soused in oil, they are good, but the cream component is really only a watery white sauce containing a couple of discs of carrot and cubes of apple. A sprig of thyme and a bay leaf garnish. And, although I’m in a non-smoking section, the sweet, obnoxious smell of burning tobacco reaches me as I swallow my last mouthful of fish. A chap has lit up not two metres away. I alert a senior waiter. Is he allowed to smoke? Oui monsieur, he may, says the waiter. But this is a non-smoking section, I say. I asked to be brought to a non-smoking part of the restaurant. Yes, says the waiter, who is quickly tiring of me, he may smoke there, where he is smoking, but not here, where you are. Those tables are for smokers. You are unfortunately near them. Pure logic. Come in René Descartes. Where the smoker is sitting, and where I am sitting, is beyond doubt. It’s also beyond doubt that they are only a metre or two apart. But I’m not going to win any war I wage on this one: La Coupole is full, and I’m halfway through dinner.
I’m quite excited to be eating steak tartare here again after so many years. I expect to enjoy the mixing ritual. But I notice a couple of waiters at their station a few metres away. Their backs are turned and they’re whipping away. Within seconds my tartare is in front of me — ready-mixed. No tastings, no exhibition of components, no trial runs. There’s your steak tartare, monsieur, now eat it. Which I do, and it isn’t bad at all. But I prefer the way La Coupole used to do things. And I should add that my meal’s highlight is sublime chips. One of the first things you notice about eating in France is the tastiness of French potatoes, no matter their size or variety. They are formidable, and La Coupole’s chips have a sweetness and strength of flavour that are astonishing. Moreover, they have been cooked properly. Super-crisp on the outside, their insides amount to stratospherically tasty, blow-away spud-froth.
I’ll take a promenade for a while, but return later for La Coupole’s ‘salsa’ night in the basement. Should be fun. Pleasure remains pre-eminent in Paris, and careful observation reinforces clichés. Portly and of no great physical presence, either of them, two white-haired chaps sit metres apart in La Coupole’s glassed-in café. Each has a gorgeous girl opposite him, who, in years, might tally a third of his age. They cuddle the girls, one of them fondling an exposed thigh. At La Coupole, especially, it’s meant to happen. While staring at one — all right, perhaps in envy (of his money, of course) — I’m almost tripped up by a feisty terrier. Little more than a bundle of butterscotch-coloured fluff darting erratically on nude legs a few centimetres above the footpath, the pooch has been given too long a leash. Its owner is a grande dame of wide thoroughfares out for an evening constitutional. Her hair is ‘done’ so that no strand should displace by more than a millimetre during the week between visits to the coiffeuse, and her lipsticked mouth is as red as a stop light. She purses it. ‘Adolf, you little villain,’ she tells the dog.
I’m back for early entry to the salsa, paying 16 euros admission and another few to check in my leather bomber jacket, gloves, hat and backpack. Leaving them in the vestiaire is obligatory. You enter the dansant with only dignity, your lightly clad self and a wallet. I’m given two chits. One is for a free drink at the bar, the other to recover my belongings. Already animated, the basement is the size of a country hall. Ninety-five per cent of its area is dance-floor. I get a (cheap, as it happens) beer at a long, damp timber bar. There is no ‘live’ band. Latin brass bleats through amplifiers and loudspeakers somewhere, or perhaps everywhere, in the room. And the dancers, especially the girls, look terrifically expert. They fill the floor. Their sways and swivels are precise, sensuous and complex. They match the titillations of the beat, and it’s all done at frenetic pace.
It occurs to me that someone has taught all these people how to discipline their bodies in such a way; how to do this stuff. Of course! Preceding La Coupole’s salsa nights is a one-hour course (22.50 euros). They must have all attended it at some stage, I reason. Women are accepting invitations to dance from anyone who asks — African French, north African French and even pug-ugly white mugs. It seems to be the etiquette. Or perhaps they just know their faces f
rom the salsa classes. And there seems to be a ritual associated with taking your partner onto the dance-floor. Men are leading their ladies with a kind of archaic gallantry, their hands held high. They must be taught that, too. It almost looks as if they’re from the eighteenth century — about to trip off a little minuet or quadrille.
But the salsa is another dance altogether. My mother and other Methodists would have fainted had they seen three seconds of it. Some couples are grinding away in such perfect time, their bodies for all intents and purposes welded together. Their simultaneous and shimmering elevations and descents, twists, bends and sways, are intended to arouse. Them — but also we who watch. The voyeur in me conquers, and for a second or two I feel like yelling at one bloke, all hips and thrusts, ‘Aaaawwww, why don’t you just fuck her and be done with it!’ (But I’d like to keep the panier à salade well away from La Coupole tonight.) I don’t dance, of course, not knowing how to. I’m envious, angry and ashamed all at once. It reminds me too painfully of the youth I never had, the Bible that stole my being.
Then I realise I’ve lost the stub to get my clothes back. (And my camera — new — is in my jacket.) I panic. I check all my pockets. I check them again. And a third time. It has gone all right, but it’s somewhere in this room, by now probably ground to dust under Cuban heels, jogging shoes and stilettos, or saturated with beer and glued to the sticky top of one of the basement’s few low tables. I’ve got to leave immediately. I’ve got to try to explain my predicament to the vestiaire girl.
She’s sympathetic, but the incoming queue is about twenty-strong. She has to deal with them first. Then she will look for me. Five minutes pass, and the queue for the salsa night just gets longer. I appeal to her. It won’t take a second, I suggest. She asks me what time I entered — it’s crucial. Behind her are racks, metres upon metres, of swaddlings of every description. Can I see how difficult the task is going to be? She returns to the incoming queue, taking mountains of fake furs, anoraks and vestes in her arms. I wait ten minutes before she turns away from those arriving. Describe the jacket again, she demands — in detail. I do. She disappears to the back of the cloakroom. I see movement. An elephant appears to have got into the back of an aid truck distributing garments. Seconds later, she re-appears with my blouson. And scarf and gloves. The camera is in the pocket. I am effusive with thanks — can’t thank her enough. She smiles and returns to the arrivals. I mount the stairs alone against their tide (I’ll bet all of them can dance). Out in the boulevard, it’s arctic and the zip of my jacket has broken. I’ll have to clutch it around me for the rest of my stay.
Paris on a Plate Page 13