Things have changed. Notably prices. But the tricks to having a good time on your own still apply.
“You don’t plop down in one of these good restaurants and whip out your computer and start playing and being oblivious to what’s going on around you,” Liederman said. “They will respect you if you seem to be taking in the act unfolding in front of you.” Even better: Ask to see the kitchen. “Because that means you’re really interested in the food,” Liederman explained, “and the chef will a) know you’re alive, and b) look out for you when you go eat in the restaurant and probably send you something even though he doesn’t have to.”
“It’s different than just coming in, dropping your coat off at the coat check, ordering a martini, and putting your face into a bowl,” he continued. “It’s showing interest in what the restaurant’s doing. And that breaks down a lot of barriers.”
“I don’t know any chef that wouldn’t welcome you into the kitchen. It’s almost a given that they’re going to be receptive to your asking.” And if you like wine, he said, “ask to see the wine cellar. They love showing off their dusty bottles.”
Susan Liederman, who has some thirty years of experience owning, running, and buying wine for restaurants in New York (plus years of eating out all over the world), also traveled alone in France, dining in two- and three-star restaurants, “so I know just how well a lone female diner can be treated!” she said.
“It was love of food, love of travel, and I wasn’t afraid,” she explained of her choice to travel and eat solo. When making a reservation to dine alone at nicer restaurants, she advises telling the person on the phone how much you’re looking forward to dining there and thank them for the reservation. When you arrive for your meal, show your enthusiasm, saying something as simple as, “I’ve looked forward to being here,” particularly because a lot of chefs consider it a compliment when someone decides to dine alone at a fine restaurant.
For something more casual, she recommends restaurants with bars or communal tables—like La Régalade or Willi’s Wine Bar in the 1st arrondissement. All kinds of restaurants today have counter seating around open kitchens, be it Le Pain Quotidien or L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon Saint-Germain. Another option, she said, is a cooking class. (See the Tips and Tools guide at the back of this book.) And while she’s not opposed to “le room service,” as a hotel I once stayed in put it, for vegging out and movie watching, she doesn’t like to think of travelers routinely grabbing fast food and eating in their rooms out of hesitation to venture out alone. “There’s an element of punishing yourself in that,” she said, “like ‘I’m not worth sitting and having a nice meal.’”
The evening was warm, and as I finished the last of the wine at Les Éditeurs, so was I. I put a few euros on the red table and crossed the street back to the grassy island and the stand-up bar at L’Avant Comptoir de la Mer, which was new since I was last in Paris.
There was a food counter along the sidewalk and inside, a bar that faced polished wine refrigerators. Guests ordered from small boards, each with a plate and a price, that hung from S-hooks on the ceiling. Adorable! you think when you see them, though you must then contemplate dinner with your neck in a position better suited for an evening at the planetarium. I ordered by pointing skyward at a photo of what appeared to be fried shrimp balls.
The place was appealing: bright and open to the street. And it was created by the chef behind Le Comptoir, Yves Camdeborde, and where the salmon had been transcendent.
Alas, the shrimp balls, which turned out to be sea urchins, were not. Standing at a bar for dinner ought to make for solo-friendly dining. It’s casual, you’re facing bartenders, and there are other people beside you, all of which seem conducive to conversation. But I didn’t speak enough French to engage anyone, and in any case, the other patrons were occupied with partners or children. At Les Éditeurs, I had had a cold Chablis and a view. Yet I had been so intent on sticking to my plan and trying the latest place that I went and left a good thing behind. I could feel my mood dampening.
Happily, there are other advantages to standing while eating: It’s easy to leave. I paid the bill and went next door to the crêperie stand at L’Avant Comptoir, yet another spot owned by Yves Camdeborde. Inside, a chalkboard menu listed sweet offerings like chocolate, banana, and Grand Marnier, for 2 to 3.50 euros. Supplements like honey, orange blossom, and whipped cream were another 50 euro cents each. I ordered a sugar and butter crepe. The cook smiled and nodded, gently swirling batter on a griddle until the pancake was ready. He folded it into a neat triangle, tucked it in paper, and passed it over the counter.
Out on the sidewalk, I bit in and began a slow walk back toward my hotel, past the shop selling flat-caps and straw hats with sashes, and the florist with pots and baskets of cherry tomatoes, lavender, and purple mophead hydrangeas on tables beside the door. And as I walked I felt happy again, high on a mixture of sugar and butter, and the gaiety of Paris on a spring evening.
As I neared the hotel, my balcony came into view with its pink café chairs, as pale as cotton candy. I retrieved the tasseled key from the desk, passed the blue sitting room where in the evenings wine bottles replaced the pastries, and walked up the corkscrew stairs to room 61. I took a wineglass from the closet and swung open the door to the balcony.
Long after my drink at Les Éditeurs, I came across an old review in Time Out Paris. The magazine had described the restaurant as relaxed and down-to-earth, “with a mixed clientele tending to solo Americans of a certain age reading novels over a glass of wine.” And to think I had had a delightful time! Had someone told me that I would be one of those wine-drinking solo Americans, I would have responded with appropriate chagrin. I might never have slid into a chair at Les Éditeurs or thought about the meal at Le Comptoir and marveled at all that had transpired in the months since. I wouldn’t have enjoyed my Chablis. In my ignorance, I had a wonderful time. If only life were always like that. If only we didn’t know what we were supposed to be embarrassed by.
Out on the balcony I poured some cheap Sauvignon Blanc that I had picked up at a neighborhood grocery, sat down in the fading light, and took a sip. It was terrible.
But I had the sky. I had the soft sounds of French conversations drifting up from tables outside the fondue restaurant below. I had the breeze on the back of my neck, and the sweep of gray and orange rooftops as the lights of the Eiffel Tower came on.
* * *
Rue Montorgueil is a wide pedestrian thoroughfare in the 2nd arrondissement lined with cheese, fish, and flower shops. Crates of peaches, apples, grapes, cantaloupes, watermelons, asparagus, and tomatoes are interspersed with restaurant supply stores and café chairs as colorful as the produce.
At Maison Collet, pink pastries in cupcake papers were fashioned to look like little pigs with squiggly tails, with a few erudite piglets wearing chocolate-rimmed glasses. At L’Éclair de Génie, one of several shops to specialize in a single product, éclairs were decorated with polka dots, swirls, leaves, and berries, like 1960s frocks. Some had glossy electric hues and flavors like Cassis, Ananas, and Passion Framboise. At Stohrer, one of the oldest pastry shops in Paris, I stopped in to try the puits d’amour, which I’d read somewhere was enjoyed by Queen Elizabeth II (Stohrer’s website features a video of her in a blue, wide-brimmed hat climbing out of a Bentley on rue Montorgueil). This, alas, seemed to have made them popular. “A demain,” said the man behind the counter. They were sold out until tomorrow.
Just north of all this temptation is Frenchie to Go, a tiny restaurant and takeout joint. Tall, hinged panes of glass open onto a quiet street paved with setts. Customers can eat on sidewalk stools facing a narrow counter into the restaurant, or inside looking out onto rue du Nil. The menu is on blackboards above the register: hot dog, lobster roll, Reuben sandwich, pastrami on rye, fish and chips, to name a few. Tomato-red business cards at the counter that read “Who the fuck is Reuben?!” explain the popular
choice to visitors, but I just couldn’t get excited about corned beef. “Fish and chips, to go,” I said to the tattooed man with the shaved head behind the register.
He asked if I really wanted the order to go—a peculiar question, given the name of the place. But he could see that I wanted to stay.
Not that it mattered. There wasn’t an empty chair. I looked around at the people at communal tables and counters eating meat sandwiches and fish from Poissonnerie Terroirs d’Avenir across the street, and then back at the tattooed man. Behind him, men in blue aprons were moving about the open kitchen. He leaned over the counter, surveyed the room, and then pointed at a customer standing against a nearby table. “That man’s just waiting on his to-go order,” he said in English.
It was a tall round table with a couple of stools, off to the side of the register, beside a box of magazines and a stack of napkins. The end of it was practically touching a dessert box, making it a potentially awkward place to tuck into fish and chips. But the tattooed man was so welcoming, and outside, the sky was threatening to rain. “I’ll take it,” I said.
He came out from behind the counter, asked my name, and ushered me to the high-top. I was seated at the edge of the open kitchen, with a view of the front door and the street, which turned out to be a terrific spot for people watching. Not unlike sitting at a bar.
What makes a table for one feel good? I’ve eaten alone in other big cities, including Tokyo, where at the Moomin Bakery & Cafe in Tokyo Dome City solo diners are offered company in the form of large plush trolls known as Moomins (characters in the books by Tove Jansson). For a while, a Hello Kitty character called Keroppi also had its own theme café, where a solo diner could sit across from a frog. The tattooed man placed silverware and a carafe of water on my high-top, explaining, “In case you are thirsty.” The more I dined alone in Paris, the more it seemed that I was treated not only well, but sometimes better than when I was accompanied. When my order was ready, he returned, all but singing my name as he sailed over with a golden fillet in a cardboard boat. “Fish and chips,” he announced, lowering the plate. The fillet was nestled on a bed of crisp, browned fries and what appeared to be some sort of green tartar sauce, but was in fact a sublime-tasting (if not looking) green pea hash, so good I used it in lieu of ketchup. I picked up a fry as the rain began and the dry, gray stones on rue du Nil became wet and silver. The staff carried in the stools from the sidewalk and closed the tall windows, cocooning us inside. I had the right meal for a rainy afternoon: warm, crispy, a touch spicy, extremely comforting. The rain didn’t last. Neither did the fries.
I was equally well looked after at the Minipalais, the hidden-in-plain-sight restaurant, bar, and lounge serving tasty modern French fare in the Grand Palais, off Cours la Reine, one of the few escapes from the throngs of tourists in the 8th arrondissement. One day I asked for a table on the terrace with the colonnades and potted palm trees, rattan armchairs, and mosaic floor overlooking Avenue Winston Churchill. The place was busy, yet the hostess offered several table options and was determined to find a menu in English, even though I told her not to bother, that I could make out enough of the French.
On another afternoon, on Boulevard du Montparnasse, I came upon La Closerie de Lilas, the restaurant and bar that’s been around since the 1840s. It’s been visited by the likes of Rimbaud, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, who mentions it at least a half dozen times in The Sun Also Rises (much of which he wrote while at La Closerie). For years, a friend who grew up in France had been encouraging me to go, and more than once I had walked past its leafy terrace. This time, I went in.
It was humid, and I was flagging, carrying a couple of damp shopping bags. I had shown up at 3:30 in the afternoon, when business was all but dead and some sort of Muzak version of Kool & the Gang’s “Joanna” was playing. As I followed a waiter into the brasserie, it didn’t occur to me to ask to sit under the arbors instead.
There were only three occupied tables inside, and the zinc piano bar was empty, its shelves of liquor twinkling in the half-light. In a few hours it would be a bustling hive of well-heeled patrons drinking 18.50 euros “Pimm’s Champagne” in the warm glow of red sconces. I put my assortment of damp bags on the chair across from me, embarrassed by them and by myself, and slid onto a maroon banquette. The Roman shades were down, making the place feel glum despite the glass ceiling as I draped a napkin across my lap. It seemed too late to get up and leave.
When the waiter returned, I ordered six large oysters. He scribbled in his notepad, then stopped, pen poised in midair, waiting.
I cocked my head and sat up straighter. He remained bent over the notepad, pen at the ready.
“And for after?” he asked, raising only his eyes.
I didn’t want any “after.” But rather than say so, I ordered more. I was sloppy and damp and didn’t want to appear tight, on top of it all, which is how, on a spring day in Montparnasse, I came to eat an entire platter of oysters—and a plate of salmon and avocado tartare.
The tartare was good but the oysters—cool, wet, tasting faintly of the lemon I drizzled over them on their icy metal stand—were perfection. They were also nearly 30 euros. I suppose you could say, What price love? Or, as Eleanor Clark put it: “Obviously, if you don’t love life, you can’t enjoy an oyster.”
Not long after l’affaire La Closerie, I took myself out for a less solemn meal on the Champs-Élysées. Number 140 is a two-story restaurant, with views over the wide sidewalk. People come and go toward the Arc de Triomphe and the traffic that curls around it. I opened the door, eased through the crowd toward the counter, and ordered a Filet-O-Fish sandwich.
And for after?
A vanilla hot fudge sundae. Total for dinner at McDonald’s on the Champs-Élysées: 7.10 euros. I looked down at the Filet-O-Fish box. “Savourez,” it said. “Savor.”
And I did.
BEAUTY
Musée de la Vie Romantique
How to Be Alone in a Museum
Thanks to art, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms, and as many as there are original artists, just so many worlds have we at our disposal . . .
—Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
At the end of the cobblestone path, the courtyard was in bloom.
Tentacles of ivy reached out from the walls. Rose vines were tangled above a bench. Lace cap hydrangea and hollyhocks burst from their pots, and tiny white wildflowers gathered around stray planters and filled the gaps between the steps. In the middle of it all was an 1830s powder-pink mansion with green shutters: the Musée de la Vie Romantique.
Piano music wafted from the drawing room, through the entryway, out the stained-glass doors, and to the stairs beside the tea garden, like a hostess saying softly, Come in, come in.
Inside, heavy drapes flanked the windows of the drawing room, which had a floral rug and a dark portrait of George Sand. On either side of a mantelpiece, the glow of electric candelabras was reflected in a large mirror. And in the middle of the room, four upholstered chairs circled a Louis XV desk and an unlit candelabra, as if at any moment a medium might arrive with a match and commence a séance to conjure the writer’s ghost.
Though a “George Sand” family tree (showing both her pseudonym and her given name, Dupin) is displayed on a wall near the entryway, Sand herself never lived here. The museum is the former residence of the Dutch painter Ary Scheffer and now houses works and memorabilia of his and his better-known friends, including Sand, who on Fridays were invited to visit his studio.
The mansion is in New Athens, named for the district’s neoclassical houses, on an ancient street called rue Chaptal, once home to a young Serge Gainsbourg, and the offices of Hot Club de France, “the jazz Parthenon of Paris,” as Michael Dregni described it in Django, where Django Reinhardt and Duke Ellington played.
In a room off the entrance of the museum are also keepsakes that belonge
d to Sand, including a plaster cast of her lover’s left hand by Auguste Clésinger. The lover was Chopin, who also walked these halls, as did Rossini, Liszt, and Delacroix, himself a proponent of alone time. (His former apartment and studio on the beautiful Place de Furstenberg is a museum as well.) “How can one keep one’s enthusiasm concentrated on a subject when one is always at the mercy of other people and in constant need of their society?” he wondered in his journal. “The things we experience for ourselves when we are alone are much stronger and much fresher.”
Research suggests this is true. One study, part of a project supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, found that visitors who attended an exhibition at a fine-art museum with other people found it significantly less thought-provoking, were less convinced by the exhibition design, and were less able to enjoy the museum space in silence than those who toured the museum alone. Those who went with companions experienced the beauty of the artworks to a lesser extent, and were less able to experience a deep connection to the art.
For the study, more than five hundred and fifty visitors to the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen in Switzerland were given an electronic data glove to wear as they toured the museum. The glove enabled the researchers to record the paths of the participants, as well as other information, including the time they spent in front of the artworks, their speed, heart rate, and fluctuations in skin conductance level, a potential indicator of emotional processes. The subjects also filled out visitor surveys before entering the exhibition and after leaving it.
The study, published in the journal Museum Management and Curatorship, found that conversation interfered with visitors’ making a connection to the art. People who weren’t discussing the art with a companion were more frequently and more strongly emotionally stimulated by it. They were able to “enter the exhibition with ‘all of their senses open and alert’ to a greater degree.”
Alone Time Page 6
