The Second-Worst Restaurant in France

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Paul thought about it. He was not sure whether Chloe was right. She liked to coin aphorisms, but when you examined them they were either downright wrong or, at the most, half-truths. Surely what mattered with generosity was the intention behind the gesture and the extent to which a gift involved a sacrifice. What did they say about the widow’s mite? The widow gave up something to make her small gift; the rich man would barely notice his much larger transfer.

  “Largeness,” said Paul, as he thought this through, “is measured on the inside rather than the outside.”

  He looked at Chloe. She appeared uncertain, but then she nodded her head. “You’re right,” she said. “That’s quite true, Paul.”

  Paul did not say anything further on the subject. He suspected that what he had said was nonsense, or at least so enigmatic as to be practically useless.

  “This husband of yours,” he said. “This Jack: you’ve never spoken of him before.”

  Chloe closed her eyes. “Too painful,” she said. “I still miss him, you see. I can’t really say that I miss the others, but Jack was somehow different. If he were to reappear and ask me to marry him again, I’d do so like a shot.”

  Paul looked disbelieving. “But you divorced him,” he said. “There must have been a reason for that.”

  “Overwork,” said Chloe. “On his part. He was always working. He made money, you see, and once you start making money, it’s difficult to stop. People always want more.”

  She smiled ruefully. “I’ll tell you more about Jack some other time. You must get down to work. A magnum opus will not write itself, Paul.” She glanced over his shoulder at the papers before him on the desk. Then, transferring her gaze to the screen of his laptop, she read the title of his chapter: “Food as Political Gesture: The Case of Italian Futurist Cuisine—and Others.”

  “Paul!” she exclaimed. “What an intriguing chapter title! I love Italian Futurists, even if they’re now a bit passé.” She looked regretful. “I suppose Futurists never think they’ll be old hat, just as gilded youths never imagine they’ll be forty and a little bit flabby round the waist.”

  “No, I suppose they don’t.”

  “Being able to imagine one’s older self is a real challenge,” Chloe continued. “And yet, ask anybody to whom the future has already happened whether it took place quickly, and they’ll say, ‘It happened in an instant.’ Life passes in an instant.”

  She took a step back. “I’ll leave you to it, Paul. Tell me about your Italian Futurists some other time.”

  “They were very ephemeral people,” said Paul.

  Chloe looked wistful. “But such fun,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Several hours later Paul read what he had written. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the author of The Futurist Cookbook, set out the objectives of Futurist cooking at a famous dinner in 1909. The menu at that dinner included such creations as ice cream on the Moon, Consumato of Roses and Sunshine, and Roast Lamb in Lion Sauce. The names of the dishes reveal the playful nature of Futurism, but the movement had a more explicitly political, nationalist purpose. The Italian people, Marinetti believed, had to be weaned off their unhealthy diet if they were to fulfil their historical destiny and gain their rightful place as a dominant nation. A bad diet, the Futurist cooking manifesto argued, had made the Italian people sluggish and unadventurous. In particular, the consumption of pasta had had this effect, and it was only through the eschewing of pasta that the nation’s creative energy would be released. “It may be,” suggested Marinetti, “that other nations owe their success to their cheeses and salt cod, to their sauerkraut. Italians succeed regardless of their bad food. Look at the Neapolitans. They have been passionate, generous, and intuitive in spite of their fondness for pasta, not because of it.” Macaroni, in particular, was the object of Futurist scorn. Marinetti wanted all references to it removed from literature and conversation. “We can easily get rid of macaroni,” he wrote. “Nobody will miss it. Nobody will shed a tear for the glutinous substance, even if they are in the habit of eating it morning, noon, and night. All references to macaroni in literature and in art must be purged. Publishers must recall all their books in which mention is made of macaroni…” The campaign against macaroni was a failure. Pasta, whatever its alleged negative effects on creativity and energy, remained an important part of the Italian diet, much to the chagrin of the Futurists.

  There was more, and by the time Paul left his desk early that evening, the chapter was almost complete. He stretched his limbs and crossed the room to the window. In the courtyard outside, an ancient tabby cat, its ears half bitten off in a hundred territorial skirmishes, was caught in a shaft of buttery sunshine. Paul watched the cat as it followed a fly. The cat’s head moved in sudden, jerky attentiveness as the fly buzzed about; and suddenly, unexpectedly, the cat struck out with its paw. The fly, as skilled in its way as a highly trained fighter pilot, darted out of reach and resumed its buzzing.

  He thought of Hamish and Mrs. Macdonald, whose world seemed so different from the life led by this French cat. Those two Siamese had never had to fight for anything, he imagined; unlike this cat, with its battle scars, like the wounds of some old Homeric warrior keen to get back to Ithaca but taking a long time to do so. The thought saddened him—not because the cat’s life was a hard one, nor because his unsuccessful swipe at the fly spoke to the failing of his powers, but because it led to further thoughts, and these were of Gloria. All that could have been so different; they might still have been together, and she might be here with him in France. She would love the bakery and M. André’s croissants. She would delight in the wide skies, and the sleepiness of the village, and the sense that a lot of history had taken place here, but all of it a very long time ago. Yet that was not to be; now there were different saliences in his landscape. He had The Philosophy of Food to write; he had the challenge of an eccentric, if not somewhat outrageous, cousin to deal with; he had dinner at the second-worst restaurant in France ahead of him.

  He was disturbed by a knock on the door. When he opened it Chloe was there, balancing a small tray of tea things. “You can stop now,” she said, placing the tray on his table. “Satisfactory progress?”

  Paul nodded. “I finished what I wanted to say about the Italian Futurists. And I’ve started on the other examples.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of food and politics. Patriotic food, for instance. The Americans serve that on the Fourth of July. It tends to be red, white, and blue.”

  Chloe was interested. “Lin Yutang,” she said.

  Paul waited.

  “A Chinese essayist. He wrote a book called The Importance of Living—a fairly self-evident title, I would have thought, but there we are. But he said something about patriotism that I’ve always remembered.”

  “And that was?”

  Chloe smiled. “I feel I’m always telling you things. I must try not to. One should not address one’s cousin as a public meeting.” She paused. “That was Queen Victoria, I think. She said it about Disraeli and about how he spoke to her.”

  “You don’t,” Paul reassured her. “I like listening to you, Chloe. I’d like to hear more about your husbands, for example. That Jack…”

  Chloe’s voice was low, barely above a whisper. “Oh, please don’t let’s talk about him—or any of my husbands right now. I miss them all, you know. I say I don’t and that I only miss Jack—and maybe one or two others—but I really do, you know. I miss my boys. I miss them so much.”

  Paul stood quite still. You can misjudge somebody like Chloe, he thought. You can think of them as galleons in full sail, breezing through life, expounding their theories with such confidence, whereas all the time they’re sorrowing inside. He reached out and touched her gently on the forearm. She looked down at his hand, and then up at him. She smiled, and then moved away, slightly, almost imperceptibly. But s
he moved away. Paul wanted to say: Chloe, I don’t mean it that way. But he said nothing, because it was just inconceivable. Chloe was his older cousin. She was more of an aunt than anything else. Surely she could not imagine that he was interested in her in that way. No.

  Chloe’s tone became brisk again. “Lin Yutang said something very perceptive about patriotism. He said: ‘What is patriotism but love of the good things one ate in childhood?’ That’s what he said, and…”

  Paul laughed. “May I use that?”

  “Of course. It’s his thought, not mine. By all means use it.” She paused. “Even if it isn’t remotely true.”

  * * *

  —

  They walked to the restaurant. The evening sky, at that point in the summer, had not yet darkened and was filled with a soft blue light that would in half an hour or so shade into the velvet of night. The village might have been quiet, but it was filled instead with activity. A man worked in his vegetable garden, sucking on a cigarette as he did so, the smoke rising in a tiny, brief cloud above his head; a woman tended a vine on a slice of communal land beside the mairie; the bakery van reversed and M. André emerged to unload a hefty sack of flour from the back.

  “I don’t know what to expect,” said Paul. “Do you?”

  Chloe shook her head. “I suppose when we go to restaurants we usually go on a recommendation. A review, perhaps. As long as it’s good. Would you ever go to a place that you were told is simply bad?”

  Paul replied that he would not. “Reviews never say Dreadful place—do go.”

  Chloe was firm. “This won’t be dreadful.”

  “The conversation in the boulangerie?”

  “These small places are full of waspishness,” Chloe answered. “Envy stalks. It always does in a village. There’s envy everywhere you look.”

  They had reached the restaurant, a small, self-contained building at the far end of the village. It was typical of so many rural French restaurants, with its air of quiet assurance, a sense of being what it was and nothing more. It was built of the honey-coloured stone common to the area and had a creeper, slightly undisciplined, growing up the front wall. There were window boxes, the paint peeling, spouting red and orange nasturtiums; shutters, painted light green, were fixed back against the stonework; a large board sign advertising the name of the restaurant, La Table de St. Vincent, filled the space between the two windows of the building’s second floor. The day’s prix fixe menu, written in coloured chalk on a small blackboard, was displayed beside the door.

  The restaurant’s dining room was larger than might be imagined from the outside. A dozen tables, covered with faded blue gingham cloths, occupied most of the floor space, although there was still room for a large sideboard on which stood a line of bottles of wine, like soldiers on parade. The prints on the walls, in thin oak frames, were Vuillard and Bonnard interiors: a young girl arranging flowers; a domestic scene of two women sewing; a stout, black-suited French paterfamilias presiding over a meal.

  “Nothing wrong with all of this,” whispered Chloe appreciatively.

  There were several diners already there, and they could hear more arriving in the small car park at the side of the building—the crunch of car tyres on the gravel, followed by the slamming of doors. They had been wise to book, as the tables were filling up.

  The chef greeted them. This was Claude, a man in his late forties, thought Paul. He was well built, with that solidity that stopped just short of fat, and he had tattoos on both exposed forearms: a rose on one, and on the other what looked like a masonic symbol. He was wearing a white neckerchief, tied loosely, which lent a slightly raffish air to his appearance.

  “The ladies told me about you,” he said, wiping a hand on his apron before extending it first to Chloe, and then to Paul. “My name is Claude. I’m the chef and patron. Everything, in fact. You’re very welcome.”

  He led them to their table. They had obviously been given the best one in the house—right up against the front window. As they sat down, Claude asked them whether they would like an aperitif while they perused the menu. “We go for a limited menu,” he said. “Being short-staffed, we find that’s best.”

  “It certainly is,” said Chloe. “Those places that offer forty or fifty choices—how do they manage it?”

  She had said the right thing. Claude raised his eyes. “Exactly. They can’t. Better to have a small choice—one of three dishes per course, perhaps, because then you know it’ll be properly prepared.”

  He turned to Paul. “Monsieur, I hear that you write books about food?”

  Paul made a self-effacing gesture. “I try. But I am not much of a cook myself.”

  Claude nodded. “And you’re writing about our cuisine here—in this part of France?”

  “Not really,” said Paul. “I’m working on a book on the philosophy of food. It’s more theoretical.”

  “But he does write about actual dishes,” offered Chloe. “His last book was called The Tuscan Table.” She paused. “And don’t listen to him when he says he isn’t a good cook. He’s one of the best.”

  Claude seemed impressed. But then a shadow passed over his face. “You’re not a critic, are you? You don’t review?”

  Paul was quick to reassure him that he did nothing like that. “Don’t worry—I’m not going to write anything about you.”

  Claude took this in. “We had a reviewer in once,” he said. “A very arrogant man. He wrote a review for one of the local papers. It was very unfair.”

  “They can be,” said Chloe, exchanging glances with Paul. “I think that reviews of restaurants should be written by chefs, not by journalists. The same goes for the stage. Actors and directors are the most suitable people for that, because they know how difficult it is to stage anything. Armchair experts may have no idea of how to do the very thing they’re criticising.”

  “You’re so right,” said Claude, looking appreciatively at Chloe. “But now you must excuse me. There’s a party of people outside and I must show them to their table. Audette will come and take your aperitif order shortly.” He handed them each a menu and went off to settle his new guests.

  “Charming fellow,” said Paul sotto voce.

  “My thoughts exactly,” agreed Chloe. “People are so unkind, aren’t they? He’s obviously very proud of this place, and why not? This is what France is all about—small, real establishments. Local food. Local ambience. Not great, characterless barns serving standardised fare.”

  They looked at the menu.

  “It’s pretty short,” said Paul.

  “No bad thing,” Chloe countered. “And what more could one want: starter—Moules marinières—well, I’m fine with that. Soup—onion soup, if you want it. I love that—always have. And then a choice from three entrées. Nothing wrong with Gratin de pommes de terre aux anchois. I love anchovies—and pommes de terre, too, of course. Navarin printanier, which is…well, what is it, Paul?”

  “A lamb stew with spring vegetables. And it’s summer, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t be so pedantic. Spring and summer are states of mind.”

  Paul laughed. “They’re seasons, actually.”

  “Well, I’m sure it will be delicious, even if the chronology is a little bit dodgy. And look, Boeuf bourguignon. No cause for complaint there.”

  Paul agreed that Boeuf bourguignon was usually delicious.

  “And then,” continued Chloe, looking down the menu, “Quatre fromages—four cheeses. That’s generous. You must admit that. Sometimes you only get two. Four here. Four. Followed by a custard tart. Custard! I adore custard, Paul—I adore it. I’m sure you do, too. You like custard, don’t you?”

  “If it’s made well,” muttered Paul. “It has a rather school-lunch feel to it, though. It has the wrong associations for me.”

  “Perhaps, but perfectly adequate.”

 
“I’m not saying it isn’t,” said Paul. He felt that Chloe was trying to make him look churlish. But she, in his view, was being gushingly enthusiastic. This restaurant, in spite of its bad advance publicity, was probably perfectly acceptable—a comfortable, rather run-of-the-mill country restaurant—but not much more than that. Chloe seemed keen to dictate his opinions, and he resented being told what to think. “But it’s a bit pedestrian, isn’t it? Moules marinières are okay but not…how shall I put it? Not very imaginative. There are so many other things you can do with mussels.”

  Chloe seemed surprised. “Really? I don’t think I’ve ever done anything other than Moules marinières. That’s how people eat mussels, surely.”

  Paul explained. “Actually, there are hundreds of ways of doing them. The French are very inventive when it comes to mussels.” He reeled off a short list. “Moules à la moutarde de Meaux, Tian de moules aux épinards, Moules farcies…I could go on.”

  “Gracious,” Chloe exclaimed. “That’s me put in my place.”

  Paul softened. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

  “No, you shouldn’t apologise—I should. I can’t help myself. I go on. I know I do. Here’s me sounding off about mussels when I know so little and you know so much. You know everything, it seems, that there is to be known about mussels.”

  He felt regret. This extraordinary woman, with her enthusiasms and tangential observations, was fundamentally good-natured. There was no call for him to seek to put her down. And she was lonely, he sensed; she was lonely and her loneliness made her gush.