On Saturday, Susie and I fly off to Paris for a five week
stay. In my mind, I am already walking
the streets of the fifth and sixth arrondissements, checking on old familiar
buildings, looking to see whether little shops have survived, planning outings
[this time, we plan to see the newly renovated and enlarged Picasso Museum in
the third arrondissement], and of course imagining the meals I shall cook or
the restaurants to which we shall go. I
have decided to try my hand at a recipe for a daube de boeuf Provençale which, oddly
enough, is due to none other than Martha Stewart.
A recent TIMES
news story brought a number of apparently quite Parisian disparate memories and
associations into conjunction. A little
background is called for. As most people
are aware, the automobile tire company Michelin has for many years published an
annual guide to touring in France [and now other countries as well], the
feature of which is ratings of thousands of hotels and restaurants in every
corner of France. [The Michelin logo is
a man made entirely of white tires stacked one on top of the other. He looks a good deal like the enormous
Pillsbury Doughboy in Ghostbusters.]
The Michelin restaurant critics award from one to three
stars to restaurants they consider especially worthy of notice, and an award of
three stars identifies a restaurant as one of the great eating places of the
world. I don't like fancy restaurants
where cooking is treated as a visual art and sauces are dribbled onto the plate
in decorative patterns so that they look nice but are virtually impossible to
taste. I have actually, on two different
occasions, gotten a famous restaurant to refund my money after I wrote an angry
letter detailing precisely how and why their fancy food tasted bland and
uninteresting [but that is a story for another day.] By the way, it is quite easy these days to
drop a thousand dollars for a meal for two including wine at a three star
restaurant.
The chefs of three star restaurants are more CEO's than
cooks, and they frequently trade on their fame to open less expensive satellite
restaurants. One of the tiny handful of
French three star chefs is Guy Savoy.
For the entire time that Susie and I have owned a Paris apartment, on
rue Maître Albert
in the fifth, there has been a Guy Savoy satellite restaurant, Atelier Maître Albert,
down at the end of the street. It is a
very up-scale place, but the food is not, in my opinion, particularly good,
save for a saladier du moment with
chicken livers that is really quite nice.
So, that is the first fact.
The second fact is that my classic early morning walk in Paris is along
the quais on the Left Bank from our apartment to the Assemblée Nationale, which
sits across a bridge from Place de la C
oncorde. Along my walk, I pass a
large block-long building called La Monnaie
de Paris, or The Paris Mint, which was at one time in fact France's mint,
where coins were made. The building
dates from the eighteenth century, but The Mint was actually established in 864
[that is not a typo -- really, 864!].
The Mint is located along the south side of the street just at the
western most tip of île de la Cité,
the lozenge shaped island in the middle of the Seine where the Cathedral of Nôtre Dame stands. For several years now, the Mint building has
been covered with scaffolding, and a large sign announces that it is undergoing
a "metalmorphosis" [a really bad joke.] In March, when we visited Paris for a brief
eleven day stay during UNC's Spring break, I saw that the scaffolding was being
taken down, signaling that the work was almost done.
Just a
few days ago, Susie read in the Times
that Guy Savoy is moving his premier signature restaurant into the top floor of
the renovated Mint building.
Unfortunately, at six-thirty in the morning, which is when I am usually
walking by, the rich and famous will not be entering for a light repast, but
maybe there will be a new sign. Susie
thought it would be fund to go in and ride the elevator to the top floor just
to get a look, but I am sure there will be a guard at the ground floor entrance
screening out the unworthy, so I shall have to content myself with sidelong
glance at the top floor windows as I pass.
By the
way, Guy Savoy also has a satellite restaurant in Las Vegas. So much for the traditions of French
cuisine. It probably offers his creative
revision of classic Buffalo wings.
5 comments:
Regarding the Picasso museum, be sure to get your tickets in advance on-line. My wife and I failed to do so and had to wait in line, in the rain, for an hour.
Thank you, Jerry. I will. How was the museum, by the way?
I didn't want to say, but I was very disappointed. I've always admired Picasso because of his virtuosity. And in the past, even in the work I didn't care for, I was impressed by his authority. But this time, the exhibition was uniformly similar (about 5 or 6 floors worth of work) in that I didn't find that defiant vulgarity. The work had a formulaic quality to it. Almost careless. However, I did like seeing some of the work that he collected. Several erotic Degas' were fascinating. Picasso called Degas a voyeur; I think he was right.
I visited the museum many years ago in its old form, and the one thing that struck me as astonishing was a luminescent painting of his son dressed as a Pierrot. I came around a corner in the narrow hallways and there it was, almost leaping off the canvas. Generally speaking, I am not very appreciative of the visual arts.
BTW, in my very small selection of desert island cookbooks (an odd metaphor, as I'd have to bring a cooktop and a batterie de cuisine, not to mention deliveries from some farmers...) is at least one that I think you'd both enjoy and use:
Simple French Food by Richard Olney
A stunningly good book and one learns a lot just from reading it.
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