Le Severo is a tiny place, luxuriously panelled in french-polished timbers. Bare hardwood tables are many, small and close. Indeed, one particular table for two hugs a pillar: somebody would need to eat round the corner, so to speak. Maggie and I are first in, followed quickly by two women and a man — proper senior Parisians.
Two fellows in chefs’ tunics and a more casual chap, who stubs out a cigarette, finish a conversation at a rear table. They bid au revoir, the out-of-uniform fellow leaving with a brief ‘bon soir’ to all of us. The neater and tidier of the chef-suited gents adopts a genial-host role, greeting us all with a welcome and a smile. The other retreats to what must be a tiny kitchen behind the bar.
Monsieur Front-of-House is, indeed, the boss — he makes this clear to us from what he says about the produce. We all stand around two blackboards empanelled in a wall. In white-chalked capitals, one lists the menu, the other the wine. The boss seems an odd sort of cook, or even restaurant-owner: he looks like a retired history teacher with his steel-rimmed glasses and greying, college-cut hair. I tell him Le Severo was recommended by a certain restaurateur. He’s delighted, he says. They share butchers. Actually, their butcher is the chap who just left. We’re in for a great beefy treat, he assures us. He recommends anything on the list, but the côte de boeuf (beef chop) is formidable and huge. He sits us at a tiny round table. The other customers are sent far away to the other side of the room — at least three metres distant.
Heavy maroon drapes hang from brass rails halfway up windows. Terribly traditional. And there are benches or timber bistro chairs with elegantly inlaid backs and seats. Big white, worked fabric napkins catch your dribbles, and Le Severo’s cutlery is excellent — forks are old and classically shaped, and the knives have bone handles and keen edges.
Above us the blackboards announce entrées of Auvergne ham, slices of ‘rosette’ salami from the same area, leeks with a vinaigrette sauce, and a salad starring fresh goats’ cheese, all costing from 6 to 10 euros. For mains you can order steak haché (hamburger) and chips for 14 euros, steak tartare with chips for 15 euros, beef fillet for 25 euros and a côte for two or three people (65 or 75 euros). There are perhaps forty wines listed, many of them costing in the twenties of euros.
Le Severo’s produce is wonderful: the rillettes rich, fatty and porky, the ham perfumed. Hand-cut chips are excellent and the côte has come from an enormous beast with marvellous flavour. It’s been just sealed on the outside. The interior flesh is maroon and bloody raw, oozing juices. Just the way I like it. We drink a rich and fruity 2004 Morgon made by Jean-Paul Thévenet. From gamay grapes, it costs 28 euros.
Constantly cutting slices off big loaves of a terrific, crusty sourdough, the boss is never still. Until he takes a breather with us. He’s William Bernet, he says, and his chef, Johnny Beguin, has been with him since 1987. He tugs at his tunic. He’s not a chef at all. He used to be a butcher, but Le Severo has become his life — so successful lately that he’s changing nothing, only enlarging the operation. He opened a new place, Le Bis du Severo (Severo B, if you like), only three months ago, installing a Japanese cook who does an interesting take on traditional Gallic dishes.
There’s a pause, before Magali, in all innocence, throws a gastronomic grenade. Can she have some mustard, please, to go with the beef? William gulps. Mustard? You’d like mustard? Now, I have a view on this, I say, intervening hurriedly. I suggest to William, the butcher who isn’t a chef, that if you run a steak restaurant you should do more than present bloody brilliant meat on a plate. Or even bloody brilliant meat and commercial mustards on a plate. Does he remember Le Relais de Venise, near Porte Maillot, where people queued in winter for the privilege of eating? Thirty years ago, you ate at the Relais not because of the high quality of the meat, although that was important, but because of its ‘secret’ house sauce. Every steak restaurant should have one. You build it on a base of great brown sauce, I say. William smiles politely but shakes his head. He clearly can’t agree.
‘Do you really want mustard with meat like that?’ he asks Magali.
Maggie Wheels says yes, she would prefer her steak with some Dijon, please. William smiles and shakes his head again, looks at us a little ruefully and takes three steps into the kitchen.
‘And she’s a butcher’s daughter, as well,’ I shout after him. ‘And granddaughter!’
I’m dying to know the answer. What does a contemporary girl do about her brazilian in polite company? It’s all right for most women, who undress only with intimates. But what about the girls of Le Crazy Horse, Paris’s most famous nude spectacle? They’re very beautiful, their bodies the last word in the female physique. I suspect that being modern, cool and super-sexy — the sort of girls who could pull boyfriends and partners from Paris’s most celebrated and wealthiest ranks — they’d also be à la page in grooming. If I understand women these days — and the jury is clearly still out on that — this means they’ll be waxed to the ultimate follicle. But will Le Crazy, which has been known for more than half-a-century for displaying complete nudity or ‘nu intégral’, expose twenty-first-century women’s plucked pudenda?
Maggie and I pick up complimentary tickets at the box office. (Le Crazy has invited me.) The theatre is much smaller than the Lido but much bigger than I remember it. From two previous visits long ago, I recall only blackness and babes. Goings-on in a cave. Having left Methodism behind, I devoured each show. The second visit had its consequences, though: Dominique and I had bumped into a wonderful old friend from my former church and one of his colleagues. They’d been in Paris doing some work for a big chain-link fencing company, had finished their business a day early and were, for twenty-four hours, tourists. We had time off, so we showed them around. My friend Jeff, who was level-headed, a great man and mentor and a somewhat unconventional Methodist in that he was unafraid of fun, mentioned in passing a curious coincidence: their boss and his wife were holidaying in Paris. They didn’t particularly want to look them up. Naturally, I said. But as we walked up the rue Tronchet towards the department stores, Mr and Mrs Managing Director headed towards us from the opposite direction. Much back-slapping and laughing at the smallness of the world.
‘What are you doing tonight, boys?’ asked the MD, and Jeff turned to me. What could they do? A show? Something really typical of Paris? Really Parisian! Dominique and I thought fast. You’ve got to understand that, by then, I’d become almost a native. I’d forgotten about prudishness, for which there is a French word, but not one you’d ever hear. In the 1970s Australians were still in many ways cultural adolescents — supporters of self-important and ultra-conservative Judeo-Christian politicians, bureacracies and institutions. (In many ways, we still haven’t grown up: see the institutional and political pressure on abortion, or our poor public transport policies yet simultaneous obsession with the road toll.) And I suggested Le Crazy. Wonderful, said Mr MD. Look, I said, it’s a bit rude, and the girls are nude... Completely. Mrs MD looked stern. The boys pricked up their ears. But, I said, there are also great non-girlie acts — magicians, contortionists and so on. Just brilliant. ‘Great,’ said Mr MD, smiling broadly. ‘Sounds terrific. I’ll book the tickets, and it’s my shout!’ Mrs MD grimaced.
We all turned up, sat in the dark with our drinks, and the show began. I looked along the row. The boys were loving it. Mr MD appeared to be trying to love it, but from time to time I noticed him patting his wife’s hand. And her face! Set. Granite. Probably insulted. Appalled. Certainly very, very offended.
As we left the theatre, the boys and Mr MD all told me how much they’d loved Le Crazy. Especially the girls. Great choice. So artistic. Jeff put an arm around my shoulder and told me not to worry. The boss’s wife would get over it. He could tell me this out loud because Mrs MD was well out of earshot. She was striding up the middle of the avenue George V — it was late at night, so no traffic — four metres away. She was putting a respectable distance, you see, between herself and men who enjoyed filth. (Dominique stuck
with us.) When they got back to the hotel, Mr MD was going to get the earful of his life. I never heard, by the way, if he did.
Has the world changed? Australia has, of course, but not enough. And I suppose that, if I’d had a beautiful young French niece back then, I could have sat in Le Crazy Horse with her and nobody — certainly neither she nor I — would have thought there was anything odd or salacious in it. On the contrary, Maggie is tonight looking forward to the staging, lighting and production values. It will be a treat for her graphic eye.
We’re led to wide bench seats towards the back of the theatre in very plush blood-red velour. Not too far behind us is the bar, from which you can watch the performance for 49 euros. In the stalls it’s 90 euros and, for your money, you get two alcoholic drinks in huge glass tumblers. Both my gin-tonics, as they call them in France, are among the most powerful I’ve swallowed. Wonderful.
Dubbed Taboo, the spectacle begins with an ensemble piece, the twenty girls undressed militaristically — saucy grenadiers. Their choreography is fast, snappy and in perfect unison. The lighting is fabulous — fast, furious, soft, dazzling, laminated, etiolated and shimmering. At times it flares on the dancers’ exemplary forms, at others it fretworks them. It makes the Lido’s efforts look second-rate. Katcha Kiev, Lasso Calypso, Misty Flashback, Nooka Karamel, Wendy Window, Psykko Tico, Yodel Weiss, Xya Cyclamen, Athena Perfecto, Lady Pousse-Pousse and their colleagues are breathtakingly precise, their high-stepping poker straight, their costumes (and lack of them) stylish and original. Recorded music is funky and loud.
Since its 1951 launching by former painter and antique dealer Alain Bernardin, Le Crazy has dedicated itself to what it calls ‘the art of the nude’. In Paris by Night there is a photograph of Monsieur Bernardin. Perhaps in his late thirties, he has sharp handsome features and is dressed in a fine suit and check silk tie. There isn’t much of his own neatly coiffed, fair, straight hair, but he holds the tumbling, curly mane of a Brigitte-Bardot-lookalike who is sucking her right thumb. Perhaps in envy or astonishment (the girl is wearing nothing more than a tiny bikini bottom), his eyes bulge. The book calls Bernardin ‘Monsieur Strip-Tease in person’, a man who had ‘vision enough to introduce strip-tease in toto into French Night Life’ and its author, Jacques Robert, writes that Monsieur Bernardin looks like a young man of good family. He was, in fact, expelled from a convent school for ‘working on rather tasteful “indecent” drawings’ (and is quoted as saying that ‘it isn’t feasible to maintain that a nude woman is indecent’). Believe it if you care to, but apparently Bing Crosby suggested the idea of the Crazy Horse to Alain Bernardin — the club was supposed to be a ‘very realistic flashback of the brash Western saloons of the 1870s’. What I’m seeing, though, has not the remotest connection to cowboys, Indians, masked men, silver bullets, Zorro, Gene Autry or Hopalong Cassidy.
And my question is answered almost immediately. No naked pudenda. The girls wear tiny pubic hair patches. I lean over to Maggie Wheels: ‘They’ve got wigs on.’ But, of course, she says, giggling.
Vik & Fabrini, a double-act of staggeringly clever magicians, and Les Blackwits, weird caterpillar and butterfly puppets that tell intellectual sight gags at lightspeed, perform mute. But it’s the girls who win, and singly, doubly or en ensemble they are sublime. I seem to recall that, thirty-odd years ago, the scenes, which followed in quick succession, were more blatantly erotic. Today’s are suavely suggestive and technically very, very impressive. Only the narrowest of Western minds could find them offensive. And, for a reason other than the slickness of the production and the ideas she’s taken from it, Maggie Wheels is gleeful. She grabs my elbow as we leave. Smiling broadly, she thanks her tonton (uncle) for inviting her and adds, ‘I saw some cellulite!’
day eleven
Mag Wheels often does her laps in the Georges Drigny pool in the rue Bochart-de-Saron, just off the boulevard. She can’t swim this morning, she tells me when I ring. She has work to do (I wonder if it’s a hangover from the excitement of seeing a Crazy girl with cellulite). But I need to exercise before tackling lunch at one of Paris’s most historic and expensive (I’ve been invited) restaurants, Ledoyen. Is it still the ‘leader’ of Parisian gastronomy? I’ll know by mid-afternoon.
I pay my 2.60 euros, ask for directions to the changing room, and pass a huge salad bowl containing a sugarloaf of metal washers. There’s a notice on a piece of cardboard jabbed into the pile. In black marker pen it reads, ‘Jetons deux euros’. I can’t imagine why a washer worth a few cents would cost two euros. I should have thought about it more deeply.
You descend to the pool here, too, but not as far as in the rue Rochechouart. I’m ignorant of the ropes, expecting someone to take my clothes from me in return for a numbered bracelet, but the routine is different, with banks of battleship-grey lockers confronting me. You need to put two euros in a slot on the inside of the locker door to close it.
At least, that’s what a notice says. But neither a two-euro coin nor two one-euro coins fit and I can’t shut the door. A dangerously thin man with snow-coloured skin shivers on a three-rung bench a little way from me. In silence he holds up one of the washers from the salad bowl at reception. He’s offering it to me. I’m confused, but I take it. It works, fitting the slot inside the door to the millimetre. I turn to the chap who offered it.
‘What about the two euros?’ I say, fumbling among coins. He waves a hand. I insist. He won’t take the money. I wonder why. Two euros is not an insignificant sum. I close the locker, hoping I can remember my four-digit code.
The pool is eerily similar to the one I visited last week. Think Parisian pools and you see stern lifeguards, powder-blue and white walls, wet tiled floors and people of all ages and sexes sharing the showers. You hear the same caveman echoes here as you do at pools the world over. Kids yelp and bray, and the sounds of splashing and occasional pea-whistles are an obbligato to a ground bass of enormous filtration equipment rumbling away somewhere below.
This pool is as crowded as last week’s and I struggle to complete a worthwhile tally of laps. In the two lanes reserved for earnest swimmers, only one person shows any real form. She’s young and tumble-turning at the ends. Nice style, too, even if her strokes cross her body a little too much when they enter the water. I point this out to her as she takes a breather, expecting a response less abrupt than I’d get in Australia.
‘OK,’ she says, thanking me in a thick accent. She’s from Chile, she reveals, and she’s studying psychology here for a couple of months. Why Paris? To learn French. But also for the prestige of studying in France. Hmmmm, I say. Did she consider Australia? She would have learnt a language that’s in many ways more useful.
She stares hard at me, pulls her goggles over her eyes, and kicks off up the pool. She’s crossing her strokes more than ever. Eccentrically. Determinedly.
Back in the changing-room, everyone is reclaiming their two-euro jetons from the locker doors. (Not too long ago, you used to have to buy smaller jetons from tobacconists to make a public phone work.) I take mine back to the reception and toss it into the salad bowl.
‘You don’t really charge two euros for those, do you?’ I say to the girl behind the counter.
‘Of course not,’ she says.
I suggest you overcome your spluttering attack upon noticing that Ledoyen’s specialities are priced between 82 and 95 euros, and turn instead to a fascinating narrative. The restaurant’s history is on the back of the carte. It’s headed, ‘Ledoyen, two hundred years of Parisian life’ (my translation).
Pierre-Michel Doyen was the son of caterers and set up his restaurant on the Champs Elysées in 1791. The revolutionaries Robespierre, Danton and Marat were all clients of what one contemporary observer described as a small, white house with green shutters and a merry-go-round with wooden horses in its garden. Napoléon and Joséphine met here, so the story goes. In 1814, it more or less officially took on its owner’s name, becoming a great Parisian table. It was notable, according to one
restaurant guide, for its prompt service. Whether it wasn’t fast enough when it came to steak tartare is not mentioned, but a camp of cossacks destroyed the restaurant — and other nearby buildings — soon after.
A new ‘Pavillon Ledoyen’ was built off the Champs in 1842, amid chestnut and willow trees, lawns and fountains. And it was much-loved, even if it became known as a lunch-spot for short-fused racailles about to fight duels. In time, it became popular with artists such as Degas, Manet and Monet, and writers — Zola, Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant among them. During dinner at Ledoyen, André Gide founded France’s most influential literary magazine and publishing firm, the Nouvelle Revue Française. For several years following the war it was officially a venue for French foreign-office receptions, and it re-opened as a privately owned restaurant only in 1962. Since then, says the back cover, it has become a renowned rendezvous for politicians and the ‘grand’ Parisian bourgeoisie.
Irrespective of its background, Ledoyen is an unusual restaurant in the French capital. First, it’s the only one with such a long history — all the others that opened in post-revolutionary France, at the dawn of the modern restaurant era, including Méot, Beauvilliers, Les Provençaux, Mme Hardy, Rocher de Cancale and Véry, are no more. Secondly, it remains a pavilion among mature trees, lawns and gardens, something of an achievement in a city where rebuilding is constant.
From the outside, Ledoyen today is a sizeable but elegant two-storey building painted a mustard colour — more hot English than Dijon, oddly enough. Inside, the opulence begins immediately, and I’m asked to wait in a kind of spacious downstairs sitting room for a few moments before being shown up a broad staircase to the dining room.
Patrick Simiand welcomes me at the top of the stairs. He remembers my visits to Mietta’s in Melbourne, where he was on the floor for two years during the 1980s. Ledoyen’s director (the modern title for a maitre d’) possesses the kind of easy charm that seems to come naturally to top hospitality-industry people. Tall, with wire-rimmed glasses, he is sobrely suited. Flamboyance is the last thing you need from service staff in a great restaurant. The food and the wine must do the talking. No distractions. It’s one of the things people like Patrick know only too well.
Paris on a Plate Page 15