Remembrance of Things Paris

by Gourmet Magazine Editors

  One day in May, André suggested a canard aux navets. “Out of the question,” I replied. “I’ve never eaten a turnip in my life and furthermore I never intend to.”

  “Lots of people say that,” he replied. “But for six weeks a year, turnips are not only edible, they can even be very good.”

  “Not possible,” I retorted.

  “Just try them,” he insisted. “If you really don’t like them, I’ll have a side dish of olives for you.” (Duck with olives is the usual manner at Allard.)

  Loathing myself for being such a pushover, I agreed to order the duck with the hated turnips. My companion and I were desolate, looking longingly at the next table where two rich businessmen were undisguisedly enjoying entrecôte marchand de vin and veal à la berrichonne. We, too, might have been so happy, and now we were stuck with turnips.

  To console ourselves, we opened the meal with a delicate turbot in the suave white-butter sauce, which we shared. Most servings at Allard are so copious that it is not niggardly, but simply sensible, to divide them.

  The duck arrived, neatly disjointed and reassembled—and completely smothered with tiny, golden-brown turnips. How glad we were, my friend and I, that we had supple characters, that we had been receptive to the voice of knowledgeable authority. For the despised vegetable, in the tender succulence of its youth, is sweet and gently flavored. In addition, the Allard kitchen obviously knew how to bring out the best of its ephemeral charms.

  That happened four and a half years ago, and it has become a standard house story. As for me, I can hardly wait until turnip time next spring.

  Fernande makes a cake with fresh raspberries that is celebrated throughout Paris. When there is no more fresh fruit available for the cake and for other fruit tarts, she substitutes a buttery mocha cake.

  Marthe Allard has retired to the country home in Burgundy but regularly sends her children in Paris home-preserved string beans, pickled mushrooms, and other delights that she puts up in old-fashioned glass jars.

  In the evenings, the women who come to Allard dress with particular care. For some reason the plain background seems to be an ideal foil for fine clothes.

  Those who like a taste of history along with their partridge should know that the great playwright Racine lived in a house on the present site of Allard from 1680 until 1684. Furthermore, the rue Saint-André-des-Arts has an added literary charm. Trilby, George du Maurier’s romantic nineteenth-century novel of English students at the Beaux-Arts, the servant girl, and Svengali, was set in this narrow, winding street.

  February 1966

  LE BISTROT DE PARIS

  Naomi Barry

  “Parisians like noise. Parisians like a room where they will be noticed. Especially the women. They are crazy about a restaurant where they can show off a new dress to advantage.”

  My knowing adviser on such matters is my excellent coiffeur, Serge Simon, an ultra-Parisian among Parisians. “You can divide our restaurants into two categories,” he continued. “Those for people who have something to say to each other, and those for people who do not. The restaurants where the people have nothing to say to each other must be full of personalities, droll men, elegant women.”

  He rattled off a list of spots in this category: “There’s Jarrasse, a fish restaurant in Neuilly; Moustache, where you can be sure of seeing people; Le Florence, always a few movie stars and very chic; Le Grand Comptoir in Les Halles—very much on top, I don’t know why; Au Vieux Paris—the Duke of Edinburgh recently took over half of it. The restaurant was very correct and did not inform the journalists, but of course there has been enormous publicity from mouth to ear.”

  These restaurants, known as très parisien, are smart, snobbish, humming with activity, and sharp with surface brilliance. And of all this group, the current phenomenon is Le Bistrot de Paris. All over town, which is rather unusual, the fashionable set are discussing it, arguing with acerbity, pro and con. “It’s great; it’s terrible.” The newspaper columnists and the television commentators have been adding their grain of salt. It is hot copy.

  The décor and the atmosphere are pure theater. The restaurant opened at 33, rue de Lille last November 11, Victory Day in France. Like a hit show, it has been playing to a capacity house ever since, at both luncheon and supper. It is always jammed, and it turns down an average of twenty-five to seventy-five would-be reservations a day. Everybody in Paris who thinks he counts feels he must be among those present. The noise could bring on a migraine in even a cool head. The women are exquisite, the clothes are from the top of the haute couture, and the jewels are real.

  At the same time, Le Bistrot de Paris is a marvelous hodgepodge. Next to a carefully groomed blonde in a St. Laurent dress one will see a girl in a jacket with matching trousers. (The coordinated pants suit is the latest style rage of youthful Paris.) Beside a distinguished-looking middle-aged man in a formal dark business suit, enlivened with a red rosette of the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole, will sit a youngster in a black turtleneck sweater. This is the bistro—the bubbling of the pot.

  The tables are so close together that separation is only theoretical. It is almost impossible to keep your chitchat out of your neighbor’s plate, and as a result everyone with a bon mot is sure of an audience.

  To hear the comments later, one wonders if they are talking about the same place.

  “The food is superb and the prices are reasonable enough.”

  “The food is frightful and too much for what it is.” And in the next breath, “Oh, your cousin’s lawyer knows Michel. Could he get us a table? Certainly, we’ll take a week from Tuesday.”

  Good, bad, indifferent—it is important to get in.

  My experience with the food, on three occasions, was mainly on the fortunate side. The veal with olives, a variation of veal Marengo with olives instead of the classic garniture, was so good that I asked for the leftovers of the copious portion to carry home. The brochette of seafood (mussels, scallops, and bits of langoustine interspersed with branches of thyme) was consistently excellent all three times. On the other hand, the chicken with cheese stuffing—a house innovation—was passable but pallid. And a purist was furious to learn that the management had shortchanged the traditional preparation of blanquette de veau by omitting the egg yolks which add suavity to the sauce. Swinging back the pendulum, I liked an old-fashioned and very French hors d’oeuvre of hot Lyons sausage with cold potatoes in oil. And I love the lemon pie, which is so lemony it bites.

  Enormously popular is the pot-au-feu en vessie, a stew of plats de côtes, bone marrow, veal shins, turnips, leeks, and carrots, done up in a beef bladder and presented to the customer like a tucker-bag on a plate. The diner is given a pair of scissors to cut open the bag, thus making him a participant in the act. Although dozens of these pot-au-feu are served each day, I cannot judge their merits, for the mere thought of them reacts on me as did my mother’s fricassee when I was a child.

  The décor of Le Bistrot de Paris is artfully simple. Its atmosphere, evoking the bustling boulevard restaurants of the turn of the century, is pure showbiz. The lights are old brass-and-globe gaslight fixtures. (Actually, they were piped for gas the first weeks but had to be transformed to electricity because the heat from the gas was infernal.) The walls and ceiling are painted authentic bistro ocher beige, sickly but chic. There is a profusion of green potted plants. At the rear is a winter garden with a long marble bar presided over by a girl at a cash register. The scene could have been painted by Renoir. There are old cabinets with numerous drawers from the era when each regular customer was given a drawer in which to keep his napkin for the week. These days only calling cards and oddments are kept in them. Upstairs is a room with a billiard table, a further touch of grandpa’s day. Much may be phony, but the total effect is parisien, that acme of compliments.

  Behind Le Bistrot de Paris is a dynamic trio—Roland Pozzo di Borgo, Maurice Casanova, and Michel Oliver—who are young, know everybody, and have the kind of energy that lets t
hem enjoy working sixteen hours a day.

  Pozzo di Borgo, of the well-known Corsican family, is regarded as one of the most desirable bachelors in town. He is one of the top public relations men in France (a brand-new group), with clients as varied as a chemical company, which wants to sell a loving image of itself to conservative villagers, and a giant new housing concern that he is encouraging to model itself after California with swimming pools, tennis courts, and other recreational facilities.

  Maurice Casanova arrived in Paris from Algiers in 1954—stone broke. Starting from zero minus ten, he imposed himself on Saint-Germain-des-Prés, that most difficult of Paris neighborhoods for an outsider, and established two stunning successes—the Bilboquet, a semiprivate supper club with dancing, and Le Bistingo, which for years was a bistro à la mode. “The French in North Africa had a capacity for hard work that the French in Europe have never known,” he says in unassuming explanation. Le Bistingo was similar in genre to Le Bistrot, so Casanova and his two partners have ripped it apart and transformed it into a fish grill with the fresh fish trucked in directly from Brittany ports, bypassing Les Halles in Paris.

  To open Le Bistrot de Paris, Pozzo and Casanova joined forces with Michel Oliver, son of Raymond Oliver, proprietor of the three-star Paris restaurant Le Grand Véfour. Michel is descended from a family of seven generations of cooks, chefs, and restaurateurs from the Bordeaux region. His two charming illustrated cookbooks, La Cuisine Est un Jeu d’Enfants (Cooking Is Child’s Play) and La Pâtisserie Est un Jeu d’Enfants (Pastry Is Child’s Play), have been recent international successes.

  The Oliver presence has meant a lot, for the curious Paris public was immediately eager to discover if he had learned anything from his father. He has the Oliver respect for a good cellar. Le Bistrot de Paris buys wine in kegs direct from the vineyards and bottles it in its own cave. Already the stock is up to twenty-five thousand bottles, and the three young restaurateurs hope to reach forty thousand within a few months.

  June 1966

  CLASSIC TABLES

  LA TOUR D’ARGENT

  Joseph Wechsberg

  Parisians rarely agree on their restaurants, but there is nearly unanimous consent that La Tour d’Argent, founded in 1582 and reputedly the oldest restaurant in the city, is one of the most beautiful on earth and a genuine temple of la grande cuisine. At the time of Henri III “The Tower of Silver” on the Quai de la Tournelle stood next to the monastery of the Bernardins near the gates of Paris. To get a table a cavalier might pull up his horse, walk in, challenge a diner to a duel, and kill him to take his place. The restaurant has always been popular with writers, artists, emperors, and queens. Balzac and Alexandre Dumas were habitués, as were George Sand and Alfred de Musset. Napoleon III came with Marguerite Bellanger, and in the museum on the ground floor is the table where on June 7, 1867, Czar Alexander II, the Czarevitch, Wilhelm I of Prussia, and Fürst Bismarck had a sixteen-course luncheon that must have left them unable to govern for the rest of the day.

  La Tour d’Argent is the beloved mistress of Claude Terrail, who was born in the building. Tall, elegant, and dynamic, Claude studied to be an actor, a diplomat, and a lawyer, and now he is a combination of all three as a restaurateur. When his father, André Terrail, who owned the famous Café Anglais, bought the Tower, the dining room was on the ground floor. That space is now the small museum, filled with Gobelins, paintings, brass, old silver, and incredible eighteenth-and nineteenth-century bottles. The wine cellar, with over 150,000 bottles, is a famous attraction. The last time I was there, they showed me some truly old Cognac—1800 and 1805.

  The dining room, now on the sixth floor, is a magnificent glass-enclosed penthouse with a superb view of the Seine and Notre-Dame. At night the cathedral is magically lighted. Claude Terrail arranged for the lighting years ago to please some friends. Today he runs La Tour mainly “for my friends and their friends. I wish I were rich enough to invite them all.” One rides up in an elevator with engraved metal walls and steps out into the warmth and elegance of a beautiful civilized home: large rounded windows, handsome wood, tapestries, deep rugs, a black-glass ceiling. Last year Claude turned an apartment on the fifth floor just below into a magnificent suite. The entrance walls are covered with velvet and silk, a cocktail room is paneled with wood, and an intimate dining room has silver walls engraved in the manner of old tapestries: very chic, very Parisian, and very much the personal creation of the proprietor, who is dedicated to beauty and aesthetics and who believes that a restaurant must always rejuvenate itself, especially when it is almost four hundred years old.

  La Tour d’Argent has had its ups and downs, but it has survived the whims of peoples tastes, especially of those who can afford to go there. Claude never compromised with quality. The service matches the décor: elegant and unobtrusive. The staff is interested in pleasing the diner. Even a young waiter is able to explain the intricacies of a gastronomic creation. La Tour d’Argent is more than a restaurant: It is an experience.

  A little guidance helps the diner appreciate the finesse of the cuisine. I’ve seen people at La Tour d’Argent who ordered steak and french fries; I don’t know why they bothered to go to the restaurant. On the other hand, the croustade de barbue Lagrené is a masterpiece—the barbue (brill) surrounded by a fluffy soufflé frame and served with a delicate sauce mousseline. One could say that the noisettes des Tournelles are tournedos made of lamb, sautéed in clarified butter, glazed, and served on artichoke bottoms with a magnificent sauce, but that doesn’t explain the dish at all. Or that the caneton Marco Polo (wild duck is, of course, La Tour’s great specialty) is roasted and served with a sauce made with four peppers, including a very rare one from Madagascar. It still doesn’t explain the elegance of the dish; one has to taste it. There are other variations—the duck served with olives, with a julienne de citron, with oranges, with pineapple, with peaches, with oysters à la façon de M. Carême, en terrine. But there is also a modest salad, salade Roger, that shows what these artists in the kitchen do with a few fine lettuce leaves, a very light vinaigrette dressing, thinly sliced mushrooms, and cut boiled potatoes, which take the vinegar out of the vinaigrette and make it mild and soft and wonderful. Years ago I had a similar experience with purée de pommes de terre—mashed potatoes, if one will pardon the expression. But how they were done—with love.

  That is the secret of La Tour d’Argent. Its staff does everything with love, style, and refinement, although they are under pressure and against strong competition, as is everybody else in the big city. Never mind the number your wild duck comes with. The Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, got No. 328; much later Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip got No. 185,397. The numbers change, but the spirit is still there. Take your lady to the lovely penthouse and make her feel like a queen for a couple of hours.

  January 1973

  PRUNIER

  Naomi Barry

  September in Paris is la Rentrée. The city fills up as families return to town so that the children can start their classes. The theaters reopen. There is the delicious excitement of the new fashions; the men are eager to see how the women will be dressed for the coming season. The flowers in the gardens of the Tuileries and the Luxembourg are more wildly brilliant than those of the spring. Oysters are back with the r in septembre, and Prunier reopens after its annual two-month vacation.

  Prunier is an important landmark in the Paris restaurant world. For ninety years it has occupied the same location, albeit with more space now, on the short, narrow rue Duphot at number 9—a few hundred yards from the Place de la Concorde and the Place de la Madeleine. The first Prunier had its modest beginnings three years earlier on the rue d’Antin. It has been in the capable hands of the same family since 1872, a restaurant of exacting standards and flawless service.

  For oysters, as for all kinds of fish and shellfish, no restaurant in Paris is more superlative than this noble institution. It is amusing to realize that the Prunier kanak predates the Eiffel Tower.


  The word kanak, or canaque, originally referred to the Melanesians. Why the name was given to the Prunier boys who made home deliveries with baskets of oysters on their heads, nobody any longer seems to know. Prunier still makes home deliveries of oysters. A kanak comes to your house twenty minutes before dinner is to be served. He opens the oysters in your kitchen and arranges them on platters of crushed ice and seaweed. Although he no longer goes around town with the basket on his head, the traditional costume is still worn by the men who open the oyster shells in the stalls in front of the restaurant itself.

  On the ground floor of Prunier are a series of small dining rooms and an oyster bar. The grands salons and the private dining rooms are upstairs. Upstairs is decorated in a kind of avant-garde 1925 style that I used to think was just terrible. Now that 1925 is far enough back in time to represent a period, the décor has suddenly taken on a certain charm like a stage set for a play of Colette. Furthermore, 1925 was supposed to have been rich, wild, and gay. This nostalgic aura does more than a little for the interior decoration.

  The service is peerless. It is very grave and very serious. Each man, from the busboy to the headwaiter, performs his duties with the dignity and pride of people who regard themselves as representatives of a great house.

  Simone Prunier, third generation of the dynasty, once said, “The good headwaiter must have the tact of an ambassador, the discretion of a father confessor, the sunny humor of a fashionable doctor, and the memory for faces of royalty. His post is one of those in which the enjoyment of the work is part of its rewards. In addition, he must possess an encyclopedic knowledge of food and drink.” With standards like these, no wonder the grand dukes used to head for Prunier’s, straight from the steppes.

  A meal at Prunier should start with oysters. The house has its own beds and parks on the Atlantic coast. At the beginning of the century, Émile Prunier was largely responsible for the development of an association for the promotion of the oyster cultivation industry in France.