by Baxter, John
For ordinary eating, browse the small restaurants around your hotel. Look for clients with napkins stuffed into collars, mopping their plates with pieces of baguette. The food there is almost certainly good, and cheap. Most offer a formule for a fixed price, with the option of either a starter or a dessert with your plat, or main dish. Don’t be surprised if the bill comes to a little more; 15 percent service is always included, as is TVA—value-added tax, at around 19 percent of the total bill. But you can still find a good lunch, with wine, for about $40.
• Some tips •
• Don’t be snobby about wine. House wines, sold by the pichet, or pitcher, of either 25 centiliters (two glasses) or 50 centiliters (two-thirds of a bottle), are better than you’d expect. In warm weather, try the Brouilly or other light reds, served frais—lightly chilled—or a Sancerre, red or white. And don’t order mineral water unless you absolutely feel you need to. Just order une carafe and you’ll get, free, what comes from the tap.
• If you’re really shaving the budget, take your morning café and croissant or evening apéritif standing at the bar or zinc. The law limits bar prices, which must be listed on a card near the cash register. Once you sit down, the café can charge what it likes—technically for “service.” And if you sit at a table outside, you’ll pay still more, because the café only rents the public sidewalk from the city and passes on that charge to clients. (Incidentally, buying un express at the bar is the traditional quid pro quo for using the café toilets.)
• Plenty of office workers grab a baguette fromage jambon for lunch, and eat it while window shopping. Why be different? Shop in a supermarket and picnic on a park bench. Choose “a slice of this and a bit of that” from the delicatessen and cheese counter—it’s okay to point: vendeuses are used to it—and a bottle from the supermarket wine section at a fraction of the price in specialist shops like Nicolas.
• Resist the inclination to tip. Every bill automatically has 15 percent service added. Even taxis. Tipping again not only wastes your money; it marks you as a plouc—a mug.
• Paris isn’t one of those fried-egg cities, with all the interesting stuff in the middle, ringed by boring dormitory suburbs. Instead, its twenty arrondissements spiral out from Notre Dame, with something interesting in each of them. Think of it not as a fried egg but a soufflé, equally delectable at its crusty edges and moist center. A good restaurant, a charming hotel, an interesting museum, or an important theater can just as easily be in the twentieth arrondissement as in the first. Peter Brook presents his productions at Les Bouffes du Nord, a once-derelict theater in the seedy tenth. Paris’s rare-book market takes place every weekend on rue Brancion in the fifteenth, in what used to be an old slaughterhouse. A little farther out is Porte de Vanves, one of Paris’s best brocantes, or antiques markets, both more friendly and accessible than Porte de Clignancourt and infinitely cheaper.
• Use public transport. The métro is safe, clean, reliable, and cheap. So are the buses. The same tickets work for both. Buy these in a carnet of twelve at any métro station and you get a discount. If you’re staying longer, a tourist card will cut your travel costs. Or, better still, follow the locals and get a carte orange at the métro station. It covers unlimited travel for a week. (PS: You’ll need a passport picture.)
• Take a bike. Paris’s latest way to get around is the vélib’—the free bike.
All over the city, you’ll see racks of identical gray bikes, locked into stands, with a computer terminal at the center. To use one for a day costs just €1, and for seven days €5. Shove your credit card into the slot, receive a PIN number, and take your bike, already fitted with a basket and a lamp. When you’re done, return it to any Vélib’ station where there’s a vacant slot.
So what’s the catch?
Well, each bike is free for only the first thirty minutes. After that, you have to find another station and switch bikes or pay an additional euro for every half hour, climbing to four euros after the third hour. It keeps bikes circulating, making sure every rack is filled and nobody keeps a bike all day. But it’s a bit awkward if you’re a visitor taking a leisurely ride through the Bois de Boulogne and stopping for a picnic. On the other hand, imagine what a taxi would cost. And don’t even think about renting a car.
• Plan your day, but not too much. Nothing wastes time and money more quickly than “What do you want to do today?” “I dunno; what do you want to do?” But it’s almost worse to set a tight schedule that leaves no room to rest. Choose one high point—dinner at Au Bon Saint Pourcain, an ascent of the Eiffel Tower, afternoon hot chocolate at Proust’s favorite café, Angelina—then improvise the rest. It’s while you’re walking from the métro toward the Eiffel Tower that you pass that wonderful art nouveau façade or spot the intriguing restaurant about which you’ll be inducing envy in your friends back home.
• Buy Pariscope. This little weekly is the real Parisian’s guidebook and, at less than a euro, the city’s best bargain. It lists everything: movie, theater, and museum times and schedules, walking tours, auction sales, even strip clubs.
• The French eat much later than do people in other countries. Peak hour in restaurants is 8:30 to 9:00 p.m., and kitchens close around 11:00 p.m. Try booking for 7:30 p.m. The place should be quieter, the chef less frazzled, the waiters more amiable (though don’t arrive too early, or you may find them eating their own dinner).
• Try going later. By day, you can queue for an hour outside I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the Louvre and even then only see the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo over the heads of tour parties. But at mid-afternoon, the crowds melt away. Also, at 3:00 p.m. the admission price drops from €7.50 to €5, while on Wednesdays the Louvre stays open until 9:45 p.m., and not a coach party in sight.
• Paris is the world capital of souvenir shopping. However, paying boutique prices for that seductive piece of lingerie or radical kitchen gadget is the quickest way to erode your budget and load down your luggage.
Of course browse Dior, St. Laurent, Feraud, Agnes B, and the other up-market shops in the chic quartiers around rue Bonaparte or avenue Montaigne. But then check out rue Saint-Placide, running down the side of the Bon Marché department store (the world’s first, incidentally), and you may see the same items in its funkier boutiques at half the price. Key words: Soldes—Sale. Promotion—Reduced Price. Dégriffé—Knock-off or overstock of a known brand.
For less conventional items, visit funky ethnic districts like the Goutte d’Or (the Drop of Gold) that lap the hill of Montmartre. Shops and markets bulge with African or West Indian items. Look particularly for Moroccan brass and pottery and vivid African tribal fabrics—Yoruba, Wolof, Hausa, Mandingo.
Montmartre is also the home of Tati, Paris’s favorite cheap department store for clothing, table linen, and lingerie. Madonna shopped here for those bizarre long-line bras and clunky shoes. It’s worth a visit just to stare at the stock and the locals jostling for bargains. (Tati has various branches, but start with the one at 4 boulevard de Rochechouart in the eighteenth—métro Barbès-Rochechouart.)
• Forget the rules. Paris is above all a city of revelation. As Gene Kelly says in An American in Paris, “It reaches in and opens you wide, and you stay that way.” If you want a genuinely memorable visit, embrace its extremes. For instance:
• The Eiffel Tower stays floodlit until midnight, lighting the huge park of the Champ de Mars almost as bright as day. If the weather is warm, take your dinner and picnic on the grass.
• Try absinthe. The modern variety lacks the alkaloid that used to rot your brain, but squint your eyes and you might even spot Modigliani or Toulouse-Lautrec. Worth a visit is Le Fée Verte—The Green Fairy, once the popular name for absinthe—at 108 rue de la Roquette, in the eleventh, near Bastille. Along with the correct art nouveau carafe to trickle water over the sugar lump into the absinthe, they also make absinthe cocktails and serve a decent late supper.
• Explore the red-light districts of Saint-Denis and
Pigalle, and the hill of Montmartre above them.
• And don’t miss the Musée de l’Erotisme at 71 boulevard de Clichy (eighteenth arrondissement, métro Blanche). Open from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m., its seven floors of exhibitions will give you plenty to talk about when you get home.
• But if that’s too raunchy, book into Au Lapin Agile, the Frisky Rabbit, at 22 rue des Saules, in the eighteenth arrondissement. Paris’s oldest and strangest night spot, this tumbledown building on the untrendy north side of the Montmartre hill was the hangout of painters like Picasso, Vlaminck, and Maurice Utrillo, who sneaked out the window of his mother’s house to get drunk there. For €24 you can get a small glass of cherries preserved in brandy and a cabaret of street songs from the time of Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, performed a capella by the house singers. Eerily memorable.
• Then, if you think you can stand the romantic rush, climb the famous stone staircases of Montmartre around 5:00 a.m. or take the little cable car, buy coffee and rolls, and eat breakfast on the terrace below the Cathedral of Sacré-Coeur. If the harpist is there, drop a euro into his hat and ask him to play “Jeux Interdits.”
C’est tellement simple, Paris.
About the Author
John Baxter, who gives literary walking tours through Paris, is an acclaimed memoirist, film critic, and biographer. He has lived in Paris for twenty years and gained an intimate knowledge of the city and its history, particularly of the expatriate artists who lived there during the twentieth century. His books include the memoirs Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas and We’ll Always Have Paris, both available from Harper Perennial. A native of Australia, he lives with his wife and daughter in Paris, in the same building Sylvia Beach called home.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Also by John Baxter
Carnal Knowledge: Baxter’s Concise Encyclopedia of Modern Sex
Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas
We’ll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light
A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict
Science Fiction in the Cinema
The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg
Buñuel
Fellini
Stanley Kubrick: A Biography
Steven Spielberg: The Unauthorized Biography
Woody Allen: A Biography
George Lucas: A Biography
De Niro: A Biography
Von Sternberg
TRANSLATED BY JOHN BAXTER
My Lady Opium, by Claude Farrere
Morphine, by Jean-Louis Dubut de Laforest
The Diary of a Chambermaid, by Octave Mirbeau
Gamiani, or Two Night of Excess, by Alfred de Musset
Credits
Cover design by Milan Bozic
Cover photographs: top © by Alan Becker/Getty Images;
bottom © by Panoramic Images/Getty Images
An Excerpt from
The Perfect Meal:
In Search of the Lost Tastes of France
By John Baxter
Available March 2013
First Catch Your Pansy
I’ve taken to cooking and listening to Wagner, both of which frighten me to death.
-Noël Coward, diary entry, Sunday, February 19, 1956
It all began with the pansy in my soup.
Rick Gekoski was in town, so we went out to dinner. Rick deals in rare books, but only the rarest. He’s sold first editions of Lolita to rock stars, bought J. R. R. Tolkien’s bathrobe, and so charmed Graham Greene that the great writer let him buy the library in his Antibes apartment. In between, he’s written a few books and chaired the panel presenting the Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award.
After the Greene deal, the two shared an aperitif in the café below.
“Y’know,” said Greene, “If I hadn’t been a writer, I’d have liked to do what you do—be a bookseller.”
For a man who could excite the envy of a literary giant, no ordinary meal would suffice.
“Have you eaten at the Grand Palais?” I asked.
“You mean that block-long example of Belle époque bad taste just off the Champs-élysées? I’ve attended art fairs and book fairs there. It also hosts automobile shows, horse shows, and I believe once accommodated a trade show for manufacturers of farm machinery. But eaten there? Never.”
“A new experience, then.”
In 1993 the Grand Palais shut down for renovations. Fragments of the 8,500-ton glass-and-steel roof had shown a tendency to fall on unsuspecting heads. To keep the building at least partly alive, the terrace along one side became the Minipalais restaurant, with triple-Michelin-star chef Eric Frechon in charge. I’d enjoyed some pleasant meals there, as much for the setting as the food. I hoped Rick might be impressed.
The following evening, we mounted the wide steps at the corner of avenue Winston Churchill.
The Grand Palais is the kind of building that takes the eye. More vast than an aircraft hangar, it soared above our heads. Along one side, the 65-foot-high columns of the terrace dwindled into the dusk. The marble-floored foyer would have done credit to an imperial embassy. Even Rick conceded a respectful “Humph.”
While we waited to be seated, I looked across the avenue at the statue of Britain’s wartime prime minister after whom the avenue was named. Churchill leaned on his stick and glared, as if remembering his problems with Charles de Gaulle when the Free French government in exile fled to London in 1940.
Anyone who knew the eating habits of the two men could have foreseen they would never get on. Churchill was a drinker, de Gaulle an eater, or at least someone who embraced the philosophy of “Devour, or be devoured.” Metaphors about food pepper his writings. Dismissing the idea of a Communist France, he enquired, “How can any one party govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?” (In fact, there are more like 350.) Asked about his literary “influences,” de Gaulle dismissed the very idea that any other mind might affect his thinking. “A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested.” But in Churchill, as gifted a writer, orator, and statesman as he, he’d met another lion, and the two men snarled over the future of Europe like two males over the same kill.
The waitress led us into the dining room, quarried from the Palais’s mezzanine, and tried to seat us at one of its tables.
“I asked for a table on the terrace,” I said.
She gave one of the moues for which the French mouth is uniquely constructed.
“Mes excuses, monsieur. Were you actually guaranteed a table on the terrace?”
“Well . . . no . . .”
Her shoulders started to rise in that other French specialty, the shrug that indicates powerlessness in the face of overwhelming contrary circumstances. (Interestingly, there is no single French word for “shrug.” Asked to define it, a French person will just . . . well, shrug.)
“After dinner,” Rick interjected, “I intend to enjoy a cigar.”
Dipping into an inside pocket, he extracted an aluminum tube the length of a torpedo. The family that would have been seated next to us leaned away collectively. They knew the smoke generated by a weed that size could entirely obscure their dessert.
“I will see what I can do,” the waitress said hurriedly.
Two minutes later we were seated on the terrace, under those soaring columns, looking out on the gathering darkness and the Seine flowing in stately complacency beneath the Pont Alexandre III. In 1919 a triumphant General Pershing, on horseback, led American troops on a victory parade along the avenue below us while cheering Parisians crowded the space where we sat, and flung flowers. We were in the presence of history.
“So . . .” Rick pocketed his cigar and reached for the carte. “How’s the food here?”
Twenty minutes later, my first course arrived.
Marooned in the middle of an otherwise empty soup plate was a small mound of something green and granular�
��peas mashed with mint, I later discovered. It supported two tiny slices of white asparagus, so thin I could have read Le Monde through them, and the small print at that.
“I ordered the cold asparagus soup.”
“This will be the asparagus soup, m’sieur,” said the waiter.
He returned with an aluminum CO2 bottle, from which he squirted white froth around the peas. A few seconds later, he was back with a jug from which he poured a milky liquid—the first thing to resemble soup.
“Voilà, m’sieur. Votre Soupe d’asperge Blanche, Mousseline de Petit Pois à la Menthe Fraîche. Bon appétit.”
Belatedly, I noticed the finishing touch on top of the peas and asparagus.
It was a tiny pansy.
Close to midnight, we strolled across the bridge in the soft Paris night. I thought I could still smell Rick’s cigar, which, when he did fire it up over coffee and calvados, was only one of many being enjoyed on the terrace. Their smoke rose into the shadows at the top of the treelike columns. Statues looked down in approval. For a moment, surrounded by the architecture of a heroic age, we had felt ourselves, if not gods, then at least priests of some hallowed rite, celebrating the joys of food and drink.
If it hadn’t been for that pansy.
“A place like that . . .” Rick said as we walked.
He looked back over his shoulder at the line of columns marching in majesty toward the Champs-élysées.
“Not that the food wasn’t good . . .”
And it had been good. Just a bit . . . well, precious.
The ingredients and dishes were, on paper at least, traditional: pork belly, snails, even a burger. But the pork, instead of arriving rich and fat, sizzling from the barbecue, proved to be a severe oblong, glossy and sharp-edged. Posed on a heap of boiled potatoes lightly crushed with grain mustard, it resembled Noah’s ark aground on Mount Ararat. For Escargots dansLeurTomate Cerise Gratinés au Beurred’Amande, a dozen snails were embedded, for no very good reason, in individual cherry tomatoes, and the whole dish covered in a gratin of butter and powdered almonds. Least likely of all, the “burger” was a nugget of duck breast in a tiny bun, topped with foiegras and drizzled with truffle juice. At the sight of it, Ronald McDonald would have fainted dead away .