So I arrived for dinner at Aux Lyonnais ten minutes late — unintentionally, of course. Dominique was there, as were Mr and Mrs Green. Waiting. At the table. Mr Green was in a pinstripe suit and a club tie. Mrs Green was in a grass-green silk dress, swooping pearls and large earrings. Her light ginger hair had been coiffed into an immaculately towering beehive. They looked magnificent. Spritzy even; they exuded that kind of zest only the freshly scrubbed and impeccably suited can emit.
I remember the roll-neck pullover I was wearing. Its colour, especially. A working-man’s colour: shades of diarrhoea. Its sleeves were blackened to the elbows by work. I pushed them up, revealing carbon smears up my forearms. (My hands at least were clean.) I could tell Mr and Mrs Green were shocked. I think they had a higher idea of journalists. They had no notion, at any rate, that someone who made a living from words could be so grubby.
We were all polite to one another, it goes without saying. And I can’t remember anything we talked about. The Greens were lovely, but I also think they were dumbfounded, Mr Green’s small eyes frowning too often and for too long at my face. I ate a brilliant pot au feu, the boiled meats and leeks tied up with thin string, the accompanying rock salt, gherkins and mustards all excellent. They enjoyed their meals, they said, and went back to their hotel. Dominique went home, and I returned to work. When I got back to the studio at midnight, Dominique had waited up to tell me it was unfortunate that I had arrived at the Lyonnais straight from work. I might have got away with it, she added, if it were not for my moustache. Moustache? I’d never had one. So that’s what they had been looking at: my AFP moustache. The heavy black one — in carbon triplicates.
Alain Ducasse recently acquired the Lyonnais, bringing his worldwide stable of tables to twenty-eight, according to one count. Founded in 1890, it’s a Bib Gourmand, too, starring ‘reactualised’ Lyonnais specialities. It is a small high-ceilinged space, with huge mirrors and leafy moulded plaster friezes painted a deep cream. The dado is depicted in wide floral tiles, bordered above and below by green ceramic strips. Below them, reaching to the floor, are white tiles. You sit on deep brown-leather benches or upholstered bistro chairs, and your dark-stained timber table is covered with a wide mat of heavy rough fabric printed with pale red stripes.
The Lyonnais is crowding quickly for lunch. Very businesslike waiters are in shirt sleeves and, when I ask one if I can take a few photographs, he refers me to the manager, who has a short, waxed, brush-backed haircut and wears a fancier shirt with blue stripes and a navy-blue tie. No trouble, he says.
As soon as I sit, small toasted sticks of bread and a bowl of a fresh semi-solid cheese punctuated with chopped herbs and laced with lemon juice is put in front of me. Two suggestions of the ‘season’ lead off the list: fried scallops with dandelions and beetroot (16 euros), and braised veal cheek (22 euros). Five entrées and the same number of mains follow. You may order a ‘cocotte’ of autumn vegetables for 12 euros or boiled egg with death-trumpet mushrooms and prawns for 15 euros. Among the mains, deer stew comes with vegetables and fruits of the season enhanced with ‘lard paysan’, which translates roughly as ‘peasant fat’. I have a suspicion there might be some flesh among the fat, and the dish costs 23 euros. Liver from an unweaned vealer with potatoes is priced at 20 euros.
Over the page is the bargain, though: a 28-euro menu of three courses, two choices in each. I take the plate of ‘charcuterie lyonnaise’ ahead of the sheep’s trotters in a remoulade sauce, the black pudding sausage instead of the quenelle and prawns, and a beaujolais pear with brioche croutons. And, in comparison with starred restaurants, the Lyonnais’s wine list is short — three pages that include two champagnes, a beaujolais, seven whites from the Rhône and twenty from Burgundy. Reds are similar in number, and a single rosé precedes a handful of great Lyonnais wines, including a Chevalier-Montrachet ‘grand cru’ white for 1000 euros.
Slices of crusty brown bread in a grey cheesecloth bag beat my charcuterie platter to the table, but not by long. Actually, the platter is described on the list as a planche, or plank. It’s of breadboard size, and scattered across it are four sorts of fermented sausage (salami), a slice of pig’s-head terrine containing lots of parsley choppings, curls of crispy fried pigskin, and a small bowl of fat warm Ds of classic Lyonnaise pork salami under a gribiche sauce. Halves of small but excellent potatoes, their skins retained, dwell beneath the sausage. The terrine is somewhat salty, but the rest of the spread’s components are a sheer delight.
Tables are very close at the Lyonnais, and taking their seats alongside me are two noble French messieurs who are perhaps in business together. One wears a chestnut corduroy blazer and the other a V-necked Lacoste pullover of a palette-challenging lemon colour. They comment on the list. One wants to order the Lyonnais’s famous pot au feu and the other gently chides his friend — ‘It’s not the season’. They spy the scallops. If only we could get dandelions these days, the chap in the Lacoste jumper says. If we could find only one, he emphasises. No question of several.
The black pudding is a surprise. Usually you’ll get a single, large blood sausage balancing on a mound of mash. The Lyonnais’s is an ice-hockey puck. It’s an inch thick and the diameter of a jam-jar lid. And, instead of sitting on mashed potato, it rests on a thick bar of rolled-up macaroni glued together with a bechamel-type sauce. The lot is oiled up and served in a small baking dish of enamelled cast iron. As I look around, all the mains appear to be coming out in these bright orange cassolettes.
The gentlemen alongside me are a joy to listen to. Not only does their language flow — their conjugations precise, their nouns sought-for — but they address each other with the polite form of ‘you’. Just as at Taillevent, it surprises me. Here are two old friends using a courteous construction. Why they’re employing it would baffle most of the rest of the world. Australians, in particular, would be puzzled. For us, the closer we are, the more casual we become. It’s ‘mate’ here and ‘mate’ there, and an intense desire to act dumb, a fear that our friends might perceive us to be bunging something on, putting on side, if we speak any differently. How cultures vary. It’s obvious that one of the national traits these men pride is blatant courtesy, doing what is seen to be polite. It reminds me of the young blokes in the bus shelter the other day as I crossed the broad rue La Fayette. You’ve dropped your glove, they shouted. And I had.
The men alongside have ordered scallops, and they pay particular attention to the texture, which is springy — comme il faut (as it should be), says the one in the cord blazer. His companion says he’s going to Australia for the first time in a couple of months. It wouldn’t normally attract him, he says, but he has friends living briefly in Sydney. You know, he says, leaning forward across the table, I understand Australians are quite casual. They have a ‘minable mentalité’ (this can best be translated as a ‘lamentable’ or ‘pitiable’ culture). Yes, says his friend, Australians are a little backward. Of course, they would have to be, he continues. They are descended from the dregs of the British — convicts — and it must rub off on the young. These men are not being nasty, let me add quickly. They’re just two decent blokes discussing what they’ve gathered over the years about a place visited by few of their compatriots older than thirty. I feel like enlightening them a little but keep my powder dry.
A huge pear poached in beaujolais is as maroon as the floor’s tiles. Moreover, it’s wonderfully tasty — and coloured — all the way through. It’s in a rich and equally dark syrup with five croutons of brioche. The lake of syrup obscures a creamy custard.
At the end of a fine lunch at a reasonable price I need back-up. I divert the manager as he passes, repeating details about the book I’m writing and that I’ve been here, there and everywhere over the past dozen days and some places have been very good and some have disappointed but today was good and offered value for money in a place like Paris and it would even cut it in my home town of Melbourne where the middle-level restaurants are excellent for what you pay and
Aux Lyonnais could very well easily fit in among them and what I need are the menu and wine list. I’ve turned into Molly Bloom — the words tumble out and I must admit that I’m pushing them at some volume so that the men alongside me can’t fail but overhear. They are, indeed, all ears.
I ask if Monsieur Ducasse ever visits the Lyonnais. Yes, says the manager, he checks the bookings each day from wherever he is in the world and calls in from time to time in person. I pass the manager my card. He says he’d be delighted to get me the lists and he retreats. Seconds pass. Then the bloke in the lemon Lacoste pullover who is about to visit Sydney leans forward and tells me he couldn’t help hearing. Could I provide some restaurant recommendations for his visit? Hmmm, I reply, I don’t know Sydney as well as I used to. And it’s got nothing to do with Australia any more — it belongs to the world, and its prices. You’ll eat as badly there for a huge fee as you can in London or Paris. Don’t go to the esteemed Icebergs at Bondi, for example, because you will be served basic tucker at outrageous prices. Whereas Melbourne, a paradise of gourmand gustation at reasonable cost, is unknown to the entire world. I’ll be home in a couple of days, I continue, and I’ll send him a list of twenty Melbourne restaurants worth his time and money. He’ll have to go south.
His thanks is fulsome as I pass across my card. He says he tried the Australian embassy and other official outlets and found nothing about contemporary art exhibitions or permanent galleries, the things he wants to see in Australia. Don’t even mention restaurants. Yes, I say, it’s typical. Our official Australian tourist offices cringe. They believe they can’t sell Australia’s real trumps — such as music, art and food — but have to project a mostly false notion of relaxed provincial casualness and broad egalitarianism in one of the most heterogeneous of nations. They feel they’ll sell Australia and Australians better if they tell the world we’re dumb-arses.
For years, I tell the messieurs, I have been recommending to official bodies to begin promoting Australia for its restaurants. I get laughed at. They think I’m the fool. But they don’t know. It would be easier for me to write a book about diverse fine eating in my home town, for instance, than in Paris — but who would want to read it? If you need corroboration for my views, I say, I’ll give you some addresses of Parisians I know who have been overwhelmed by the quality and variety of Melbourne restaurants.
The messieurs are appreciative. They won’t need corroboration. It’s only after I leave Aux Lyonnais that I begin to realise the trowel with which I’ve laid it on so thick is heavy in my backpack.
I’ve promised to drink a ballon de rouge with my friend Maurice Bensoussan, a writer of excellent food histories, grandfather, and former head of a French photocopying firm’s United States operations. I meet him at Willi’s Wine Bar in the rue des Petits Champs. He’s just finishing off a bitter-chocolate terrine. Although he lives on the outskirts of the city, he comes up to lunch in Paris most days, to look up old friends and have a yarn. He says we should have co-ordinated better — we could have both been at the Lyonnais. But it’s not as if we haven’t seen each other lately. Not so long ago we were at this very table, I remind Maurice, and we ate a fine turret of raw tuna dice impregnated with parsley and shallots, Lyonnais sausage on lentils, and nice bits of beef on green beans with a gluey peppery sauce.
Willi’s has been the quintessential Parisian bistro and wine bar since it was set up by Mark Williamson in 1980 — quite a long run. Indeed, it’s credited with bringing the ‘concept’ to the French capital. Its food prices are fair and the wine list is long. Mark Williamson himself, a lanky Englishman with a drawl and a droll manner, joins us. He’s wearing a white shirt with buttoned-down collars, a dark tweed jacket and a scarlet tie with orange buttercups. Maurice and I feel underdressed, I say. ‘Ah, but you’re relaxing,’ says Mark. He’s at work. He’s come from his relatively new restaurant Macéo, just down the road. The name Willi, he tells me, by the way, is coincidental and has nothing to do with him — the bistro was named after Colette’s husband.
Shop-talk dominates — as it must — and we bemoan the lack of adventure in Parisian eating-out. Its sameness. Even its tradition. Critics are unable, apparently, to lever any changes for the better. In a city that is supposed to lead in many fields, the towel appears to have been thrown in. Even Senderens disclaiming high dining. Yes, I say, and the list at his new place reads like something from Melbourne ten years ago. For all that, I add, France seems to be changing slightly, accepting new ingredients and techniques, slowly recognising the New World contributions of diversifying raw materials and culinary techniques, and understanding that ordinary people want to eat out differently from in the fine-dine days.
Appreciating the best of French restaurant cooking is, it strikes me, a bit like being a fan of old cars. You can love DS Citroëns, for instance, for the style, mechanical refinement and elegance they had during the twenty years from 1955 in which they were produced. But even the best remaining examples of the model don’t perform like contemporary saloons. These days it’s all about performance. And French chefs are being outperformed.
There’s a sigh or two and a few ums and ahs — no disagreement, if you like. I tell Maurice and Mark about my Fogón experience. Maurice hasn’t been there, but Mark has, and was underwhelmed. He’s glad I’ll be so frank when I write about it. French critics aren’t. He lists for me four restaurants worth trying, as he gets up to return to Macéo. They’ll have to wait for my next trip.
A half-hour later Maurice and I are out the door, too. He wants to guide me to the closest Métro station but I insist on walking. He has to catch a train back south. A propos of nothing, I ask his views on the riots — on race relations in France in general. He’ll admit that times are tough for many French of Arab descent, but he finds it hard to understand manifestations of racist behaviour, be they by French from Europe or Africa, north or south. When he was growing up, a Jew in Cairo, there was simply no question of not getting along with others in that very cosmopolitan city. It didn’t enter his mind to exclude Arabs from friendship, he says.
I’m walking home up the rue Turgot, which gets a little steep as it approaches the place d’Anvers, where I know there’s a market today. I’m having Maggie Wheels to dinner, and I shall do as the French do — see what’s for sale, take it home and cook it.
A few paces ahead of me on the narrow pavement, a tall young fellow wrapped in a charcoal-grey overcoat ambles in the same direction. He’s absorbed in a mobile-phone conversation. He has long dark hair and his head is inclined towards the phone, jamming it between his ear and his collarbone. Perhaps ten paces ahead of him, a frail old man on a stick suddenly emerges from his front door. As the young man draws level, the old man puts out a hand, rises up on tiptoe and whispers gruffly. I catch the last syllables — ‘PTT’. As I pass, the young man makes a teapot handle with his right arm, the old man locks his left into it, and they begin a dodder up the footpath. The young man continues his phone conversation. I can see that from time to time he smiles and chortles. Seconds later I’m passing a post office — a ‘PTT’ in local parlance. They’re almost halfway there.
And Maggie Wheels shall dine on rabbit rillettes, bream, sweated leeks and a camembert that the fromagière assures me is perfect for tonight. And we will wash them down with a new beaujolais, even though it’s not the best of years.
acknowledgments
My thanks, yet again, go to the entire team at Murdoch Books, led by chief executive Juliet Rogers and publishing director Kay Scarlett. Editor Jane Price showed great feel for my words and made subtle and important improvements to them. Sarah Odgers and Antonia Pesenti created a design and illustrations perfectly in tune with my manuscript.
In Paris itself, I am indebted to the unstinting generosity of Pascal Barbot and Christophe Rohat at Astrance, Christian Le Squer and Patrick Simiand at Ledoyen and Jean-Claude Vrinat at Taillevent. Similarly, my thanks go to Eric Lanuit at the Lido and Christophe Millant at the Crazy Horse. Fina
lly, I must thank family and friends who supported my gastronomic trek, gave important advice, and made the project so enjoyable: my wife Dominique, niece Magali Delouche, her parents Jean-Pierre and Josiane Delouche, and my dear friend Maurice Bensoussan.
First published in 2006 by Pier 9,
an imprint of Murdoch Books Pty Limited
Murdoch Books Australia
Pier 8/9, 23 Hickson Road, Millers Point NSW 2000
Phone : +61 (0) 2 8220 2000 Fax : +61 (0) 2 8220 2558
Murdoch Books UK Limited
Erico House, 6th Floor North, 93–99 Upper Richmond Road, Putney, London SW15 2TG
Phone : +44 (0) 20 8785 5995 Fax : +44 (0) 20 8785 5985
Chief Executive: Juliet Rogers
Publishing Director: Kay Scarlett
Design manager: Vivien Valk
Design concept and designer: Sarah Odgers
Editor: Jane Price
Project Manager: Jacqueline Blanchard
Production: Monika copyrightTexttore
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia, Canberra
ISBN 9781742660813 (eBook)
Text copyright © Stephen Downes 2006
Paris on a Plate Page 17