But I am distracted immediately by the large rectangular dining room itself. (Mind you, ambience becomes less diverting over time.) It’s rich from the carpet up. The windows are hung with maroon velvet drapes so heavy they could stop birdshot. The patterned carpet is thick, and the original 1840s ceiling is intricate — its fine floral swirls, bordered by rectangles, triangles and arcs of filligreed gold, suggest the formal gardens of a great French palace. Knife handles look as if they’re made from solid silver, and the huge palest apricot napkins are embroidered with ‘Ledoyen’. Here is complete, classic luxury.
But the overall impression is not one of nineteenth-century overload. Other eras have obviously intruded, and the result, while quite homogeneous, is a little old-fashioned. A verdant climbing plant is here, mauve Singapore orchids there. Hefty mahogany caddies of perhaps late-Victorian or even twentieth-century persuasion contain champagnes and alcohols. Despite the original ceiling, there’s a fair bit of feinting with the later and the new.
I am a little surprised — but perhaps shouldn’t be — by Ledoyen’s guests, who, all but one, arrive after me. Tables, I should add, are so widely separated that no business confidences, let alone personal ones, are likely to be overheard.
Some three metres to my left are two large and senior gentlemen who might (not long ago) have captained certain motors of the French commercial machine. Or even played roles in its politics, although I don’t recognise them. Wrapped in jackets and waistcoats, they are at tremendous ease, and perhaps once earned enough to buy this place. Far away in the top corner, the three who have just arrived could quite easily do so now. Then they’d sell, I suspect, finding the going too hard for the return involved. They’re two men and a woman in their late thirties or early forties. Fashion or rock music, I’d guess. One of the men wears cuban heels, tight jeans and an expansive jacket of red and yellow stripes. Several metres of orange gauze are wound around his throat. The second man is completely in black apart from charcoal-grey suede shoes. The woman is Asian, high-booted, her body lost in layers of taupe-coloured clothes with more cut than a theatre critic. They talk loudly, showing us all that this is their canteen.
Then there are the two youngish blokes who are really at home at Ledoyen. Born to be here, in fact. No airs needed. They are from noble families, their supple grey trousers, razor-sharp creases, demur silk ties and tweed jackets say. They know the waiters and exchange bons mots. They smile and laugh (although how anyone can smile or laugh knowing what they are about to pay for this lunch is beyond me). And finally a Japanese couple in their early twenties sit across the room, as watchful as two moggies in the sun.
Over the next couple of hours I experience the highest of high French eating. Ledoyen is similar to Taillevent, there’s no denying, but there are also differences, with Ledoyen creating a slightly more formal experience. It plates smaller servings of fussier food. To differentiate themselves, the three-star restaurants have only one route to take in this era of casualness — towards ever more finicky formality and gastronomic sophistication. That’s how they stand apart from the brasseries and bistros that reproduce classic French dishes of varying quality. Ledoyen delivers altitudinal refinement — the kinds of flavours and textures you have to search for. And there is originality here, too, even if it’s restrained.
Four sorts of freshly baked breads are offered with wonderful salty butter. Then a silver salver of palate-teasers. There are two globes of a seafood mousse so light that I’m surprised they don’t levitate to the ceiling. Each wears a two-millimetre square flake of dried seaweed that must have been posed with tweezers. Inside the foam is a morsel of langoustine tail. Two small bricks of foie gras mousse are contained between tanned wafers so thin and brittle that I half-expect them to crack as I pick them up. There are little blocks of seafood jelly with crystalline caps, and two minute, super-crisp and very tasty spring rolls. And then the real food begins.
First out is a beetroot medley, the root in different forms stacked above a block of tiny bits of smoked eel and aromatic vegetables in an emulsion. A thin square of the vegetable separates the eel from microscopic beetroot cubes in a dressing. A glistening dome of beetroot sabayon tops the lot like the roof of a sports stadium. That’s beetroot, more beetroot, and beetroot yet again. Do not ask to hold the beetroot. The eel pieces are quite salty, but there’s no doubting the kitchen’s technical skills. Nor the time it must take to prepare something so worked.
Just as showy is a sea-urchin concoction. Perhaps the egg sacs of a whole urchin (or possibly even a couple) have been plundered for this dish. Some two dozen long thin tongues of brilliant orange roe are arranged over an avocado mousse in a mauve urchin shell. Atop the swirl of egg sacs is a soufflé of scallop roe in paler orange. The shell itself is steadied in a conical glass dish by small coffee-coloured ovoids of glass. Tastes are good but a little faint, and I’m noticing again that French restaurant food is saltier than I’m used to.
My third true starter is a ripper. As if riding in a gondola, two balls of baby lobster tail sit above more crustacean tailflesh in its shell. Around the balls has been wound a hair-fine North African ‘macaroni’, which is deep-fried and tanned. Between the two is an oozing sludge of off-white — just faintly green-tinged — emulsion that comprises hazelnut oil and herbs of several sorts. Of transcendental deftness, this dish really works. It’s great because of the superb balance of sweet savours. None is lost, despite their slightness.
My first main is a Ledoyen speciality (three are listed, following six entrées, four fish dishes and six of meat). It’s a small block of very white-fleshed turbot, caught by line — not netted. It’s a witty construction, because the alabaster top of the block appears to have been seared on a barbecue grill. With some precision, too. But the black grill marks are nothing of the kind. I’m told they’re composed of ground, dried truffle that solidifies into a thin plaque. The fish sits on crushed potatoes in an off-white froth. Flavours are again delicate and very refined, the sweet mustiness of truffles invading my nostrils. Placed between the phantom grill-bars, three pale yellow-green leaves the size of nailheads — they’re from celery tops — garnish the fish.
My second main is a single enormous sweetbread, a tawny neck gland from a vealer. It’s nut-brown, its surface significantly caramelised. Two short sticks of lemongrass penetrate the gland at right angles, going in one side and coming out the other. It’s Saint Sebastian and the arrows, a martyr of a dish. The sweetbread sits on a raft of thin salsify batons in a bright-green jus composed from eight herbs and butter. The result is exquisite, the sweetbread flesh claggy, sweet and flavoursome, its lemongrass skewers lending the faintest of inscrutable tastes.
Desserts maintain the standard: a pineapple sludge wears the lightest meringue possible; and a major construction of sesame wafers, pistachio ice cream and warm melting chocolate oozing into a fine nest of something indefinable but sweet should be magnified a million times so that the girls at Le Crazy can dance through it.
I am regaled with a different drink — almost always wine — for each course. They are all wonderful; the kinds of liquid treasures that only the greatest restaurants can afford these days. There’s a ‘yellow’ wine like a fino sherry with conté cheese. And a very special cider with my camembert. A Viognier escorted the sweetbread, and the 1996 hundred-percent chardonnay champagne with which I began the meal is the best bubbly I’ve drunk. (It’s from Jacquesson, a small maker, dates from 1996, and Ledoyen sells it for 90 euros a bottle. Mind you, only three thousand cases are produced a year.) A dark and pharmaceutical ‘Maydie’ wine partners the chocolate dessert.
Ledoyen lists no Australian wines, even though the sommelier, Géraud Tournier, tells me he loves them. He has twice driven from Adelaide to Melbourne, sipping here and there. He raves about Jasper Hill. Why no antipodean wines on the list, then? He explains. I understand the commercial technicalities of the wine trade less than well, but it has something to do with the distribution of impor
ted wines within Paris and the reliability of supplies.
And soon the chef himself, a thin, big-boned Breton, is out and about, visiting the tables. I congratulate Christian Le Squer on his food. But what about the Senderens contention that French cooking is slipping behind? He draws breath and pauses quite a long time before replying.
‘You know,’ he says, ‘we eat well in France and our cooking is still at a pretty unbeatable level.’
I don’t disagree, eschewing yet another debate about letting loose the ‘unbeatable’, laudable and obvious skills of French cooks on a wider range of ingredients. We wish each other well, and he moves across to the young Japanese. I notice shiny stone-washed jeans and black runners under his voluminous white tunic and apron.
Patrick Simiand shows me out, asking for news of Melbourne. I get him up to speed as best I can. He wants to know what Monsieur A and Madame B are doing; if I’ve seen them lately. We touch briefly on the very big difference between the best French and Australian cooking. I laud Ledoyen’s enormous finesse and its partnerings of drinks and dishes. In Australia, as well he knows, I say, ingredients are less worked, and the trick is to balance several of them in more natural states on the plate. Here, the emulsions and froths have their own constructed genius. But they also produce far less aggressive flavours. In the New World, I laugh, we specialise in culinary matériel — taste incendiaries. Mouth explosives.
I intend to visit or revisit a museum. Perhaps the Picasso or Marmottan-Monet. Or even the Musée d’Orsay, where I had a very ordinary lunch in an extravagant room of sun-king decor with Maggie Wheels and my wife during a recent trip. But as I envelop myself to re-enter the fridge sometimes known as the Champs Elysées, I realise walking at a fairly stiff pace — and continuing to walk — will be a better option.
I cross the place de la Concorde and its obélisque, watching out for fast-moving cars, whose rumbling over the cobbles luckily warns of their approach. Through the Tuileries gardens I go, through the Louvre courtyard, then north, up to the Palais Royal and its arcaded antique garden, classy couture boutiques and art dealers.
Nothing has changed here since the days when I took meal-breaks from Agence France-Presse. I hope nothing ever will. You can walk like this for hours in Paris, never beginning with a specific route or even a direction, and you will never be bored. (As it happens, it looks as if I’m heading home.) Hemingway said that if ‘you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you...’ He was right, scoring a bull’s-eye on the matter. Quite banally, I’m churning an emotional feast. But I’m also turning over a physical one. I don’t feel at all uncomfortably full, luckily, but I won’t eat out tonight.
For a few francs — on recollection, a little over four — in the 1970s you were served a four-course meal at the Agence France-Presse canteen. You began with salads, terrines or crudités (sliced and dressed raw vegetables), moved along to a ‘wet’ dish, usually a stew or roast of some sort, and followed these up with cheese and desserts of various varieties. The dishes were well cooked and tasty, and a quarter-litre of acceptable table wine cost next to nothing. Have things changed? I’m not far from AFP. I’ll drop in and find out. It’s a bit of a last-resort effort, I’ll admit. I sent emails from Australia to try to arrange a meal in the canteen and got no replies.
The agency’s headquarters is a stern and incongruous multi-storeyed modernist structure opposite the Grecian classicism of the Paris stock exchange. Whereas you could simply walk into the place years ago, today there are several security doors to negotiate. The glass is so thick it has a bottle-green tinge.
A male and a female — security personnel — are behind a counter in an airlock. He is young and sits at a console of CRT monitors a metre or so from the reception window. She is in early middle-age and fields my inquiry. I recite the short speech I’ve used several times on this trip: I’m an Australian writer, working on a kind of ‘diary gastronomique’... Then I take the appropriate branch track. I used to work here thirty years ago. I remember how good the canteen was. I’d like to sample it once again. First, does AFP still have a canteen?
The woman screws up her face and waits several seconds before replying. Yes, she says. Have I organised to visit it? No, I say. I tried. She consults her colleague and returns to me. So you want to eat in the canteen? Yes, I say. She can’t do anything. Nothing? Nothing. I should have organised a visit with the head of the English service. Seeing as that’s where I worked.
‘Can I speak to him?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘He’s gone out.’
‘Can I speak to someone on the English desk?’
By this stage, I’m irritating the woman. She doesn’t need a mid-afternoon confrontation with a gastronomic diarist. She’d rather be doing her crossword. She regards me with contempt and picks up a phone. She turns her back and whispers into it. I can’t hear what she is saying. She passes me the handpiece. An affable young chap with a South African accent says hello. I explain my plight. Look, he says, he’s on a deadline and has to file a story about Ethiopia. It’s on the screen in front of him. He’s right up against it. Very sorry, but the best thing he can suggest is for me to go direct to the head of the English service. He gives me his name and number.
I go home, trying the chef du service anglais repeatedly throughout the afternoon. I fail to reach him. I leave messages, but nobody from the English service — let alone its boss — gets back to me. Tant pis, as the French say. Had someone bothered, the agency might have had well-deserved recognition of how well it looks after its staff, let alone its ability to put out the news.
Surprisingly enough, by eight o’clock I’m hungry. I don’t like the look of any of the cafés or restaurants nearby, and I don’t feel like Métroing anywhere. Then I remember the camembert I bought more than a week ago. It’s in the fridge. When I unwrap it, I find it’s in perfect shape — its core of white chalkiness has become smooth, glossy and creamy. I’ve done a fabulous job maturing it, I tell myself.
I spin down the spiral staircase and walk for all of three hundred metres before finding a little grocery that’s still open. It has half-loaves of sourdough in the racks and a selection of three or four new beaujolais. I’m back up the stairs in a trice, and the camembert, the crusty loaf and the fruity red are perfect dinner partners. I’m not at all sure that my meal would pass a dietary analysis, but it’s exactly what I feel like eating.
day twelve
What I’m doing lacks any plausible defence. How dare I write about fabulous food and audacious eating while Africa starves? How dare the French — and the nationals of all rich countries — eat well while most of the world’s peoples have empty stomachs?
High cooking is an art, we may safely say. But it is an illegitimate one, born out of a desire by those with disgusting wealth and power to push the boundaries of pleasure beyond its more harmless, inclusive and cheap creative manifestations such as dance, music, literature and theatre. It is an art devised by the privileged for their exclusive enjoyment, a pursuit in which the people of the streets cannot participate. Rulers — whether in France, England, Thailand, China or Fiji — sponsored the first and most expensive regal cuisines, because they could afford to do so. As a bonus, eating richly was another way in which they could set themselves above the proletariat.
Today, in Western cities such as Paris, London, Sydney and New York, men and women in finance, commerce, government and law are the new rulers who support contemporary high cooking and keep it exclusive. I fell into writing about food by accident. And not food broadly speaking, of course, but cooking that most Africans and Indians and Asians and South Americans could never taste. Almost three decades later, I am from time to time ashamed of my career. I should chuck it in, I tell myself, become a vegetarian and write about other things. (Many restaurateurs — and so-called colleagues — would be pleased if I did.)
Yet at other
times, I remember that I am helping to educate people in my own country to eat more healthily, to consume better and more varied diets, to profit from the simple, enormous and often inexpensive pleasures that cooking brings when we build dishes from raw ingredients. (It’s not just a question of tastes and textures but the thrill and satisfaction of creativity.) Moreover, I have identified and revered the chefs and restaurateurs who have democratised eating out in Australia over the past quarter-century. It has been a grand achievement. At least in my home country, almost all people can eat out well from time to time, and the base criterion for every restaurant I test is whether it offers value for money.
All these thoughts are a kind of self-appeasement, and I push on, doing my job, in the hope that the hundreds of millions in Africa and Asia at the other end of eating’s very skewed ‘normal’ curve will one day have enough food in their bellies. More than enough, indeed. And that they will have a diet offering variety as well as satisfying their nutritional needs. It’s a challenge I really should try to do something about. Musings, these, as I approach the last day of my intensively gourmet fortnight.
Aux Lyonnais was — still is — an easy walk from Agence France-Presse. Moreover, it had a Michelin star and was renowned for its hearty renditions of the great culinary classics. Mr Green and his wife were in Paris and wanted to take my wife and me out to dinner. I suggested Aux Lyonnais. On the chosen date, I could not avoid my shift and would come straight from work, I told them, cribbing a bit of extra time before having to get back to the desk. My wife would come from home and return there — no taxis needed. Lovely, said Mr Green, in that courteous way begat from negotiations over weeks by exchange of handwritten letters. Mr Green, by the way, was no surprise packet disguised as an ordinary man, no reverend from ‘Cluedo’ or character from an Agatha Christie novel: he was the State of Victoria’s top public servant. My father and Mr Green were colleagues and close friends, and Dominique and I, who had heard a little about his toughness and conservatism, had never actually met him. His decisions were straight down the line, my father used to say. He followed the rules and expected others to do likewise. He was the perfect public servant, and a nice man to boot.
Paris on a Plate Page 16