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— by Jeremy Ferguson
LETTER FROM PARIS
The best restaurant in the city is the author’s apartment in the 2nd arrondissement.
Yesterday I took my wife, Carol, out for the “best” steak tartare in Paris—according to Frommer’s in the New York Times—at the Bar des Thé des Théȃtres, a bistro in the 7th arrondissement. Well, it wasn’t. Blender-pulverized and barely registering on the flavour meter, it wasn’t even in the 100 best. To add injury to insult, my wife came down with a nasty bout of Robespierre’s Revenge. Home for us for the past three months has been a 39-steps-up apartment in a 200-yearold building in the 2nd arrondissement, splendidly located between the Louvre and the Place de L’Opera. Lately, the 2nd has turned into Little Tokyo. Within a few blocks’ radius, we have a reputed 100 Japanese restaurants. But we hadn’t come to Paris for sushi-sashimi or the slurping of soba noodles in Dolby sound. We love this city. We love its food. But we don’t love its restaurants. At local brasseries, coffee is $10 and up. An American expat who’s lived in Paris for the past 25 years tells us that to eat well with wine, we must start at 100 euros ($150) per head. This, dear readers, is not our snack bracket. It’s not that we’re alien to haughty cuisine: We’ve eaten at Alain Dutournier’s Carré des Feuillants, which has two Michelin stars and now charges 200 euros for a six-course meal sans wine; we don’t remember a single bite. Guy Savoy, that twinkling essence of Right Bank chic, has three Michelin stars; we liked it better. But we’d happily trade both for the dinner of soupe de poissons and ris de veau we ate in a humble logis with lumpy beds in Cavaillon too many years ago. Our neighbourhood isn’t much celebrated for its restaurants, although just a short walk away on Rue de Beaujolais, Napoleon wined and dined Josephine at La Grand Vefour. Friends have treated us to the nearby Michelin-recommended Gallopin, but everything that hobbles out of its kitchen is the sort of French that opened our eyes 50 years ago and now closes them all too fast. Our local fave is Phnom Penh Saigon, a family-run Cambodian boite better than anything we’ve found in Phnom Penh or Siem Reap. Dancing with lemongrass, kaffir lime, sweet basil and red chilies, its fare is racy and authentic. A wee, grey-haired chef toils 18 hours a day six days a week to make her mark on Paris. She doesn’t know how good she is. With the disgraced nouvelle cuisine nowhere in sight, everybody’s playing the “cuisine traditionelle” card. This translates as menus studded with parts: brains, snouts, necks, livers, tripes, kidneys, hoofs and tails (presumably the recta are exported to England for its cooking traditionelle). We’re adventurous enough, but we don’t take kindly to anything that normally reeks like an outhouse on an August afternoon. Out damned kidneys! Out damned tripes! And the quest for an honest frite? At Gallopin, which touts tradition, they serve chips, not frites. Walking the alleys behind eateries from corner brasseries to gastronomic grails, we peer into the secret heart of Parisian cuisine and see that it’s called McCain’s quelle horreur, the boxes piled up to the ozone. I tell people the best restaurant in Paris is our apartment. Rental apartments abound in the City of Light. If they earn small fortunes for their owners, they also allow us to eat as the Parisians do, which is very, very well. My beret planted on my head, I venture out for baguette and croissants every morning, humming songs from Hollywood movies set in the City of Light, the ghosts of Gene Kelly, Maurice Chevalier, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn on my trail. The raw materials available to Parisians in ordinary supermarkets at ordinary prices send the foodie ricocheting. At our local Monoprix on Rue de L’Opera, we fill our basket with fresh foie gras, duck breast stuffed with foie gras, duck confit from the Southwest, fresh trout eggs, game birds, amazing cheeses hitherto unknown to us, Champagne and table wines from a defiantly chauvinistic selection of French labels. Street markets, which spring up regularly across the city, specialize in magnificent domestic product. Scallops from the Marché Ave du Président Wilson are the best I’ve ever eaten, their fat crescents of coral infused with the essence of the sea. On Rue Cler, Carol snaps up morels and white asparagus in season. The Rue Montorgueil, for pedestrians but never pedestrian, is one of the oldest markets in town, an unfettered delight. CONT”D AT THE BOTTOM OF PAGE 10
www.eatmagazine.ca JULY/AUGUST2010
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