The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (9 page)

I didn’t appreciate my father much during his lifetime. He believed the world was a dangerous place, that only family could be trusted, and even then not always. More than a decade after his death, bonding with food merchants on the rue des Martyrs has become my way of connecting with him.

SOME MORNINGS, I SIT AT A SMALL
, Formica-topped sidewalk table at Le Dream Café, at No. 8. It used to be Café le Commerce, a down-at-the-heels kind of place where a big-screen television was always on, tuned to an all-sports channel, and the regulars stood at the long zinc bar for a morning beer or a glass of house wine, an old workers’ custom. It did so well that the owners closed it down for renovations one day and opened a few months later as Le Dream Café, a café–wine bar–restaurant.
One wall was lined with bottles of wine, another with pale new stone made to look old.

Happily, it retains its down-to-earth spirit. The television stayed, as did a poster-sized blow-up of a one-hundred-year-old black-and-white postcard of the rue des Martyrs. The café opens at six-thirty a.m. to welcome the early working crowd. The butchers from across the street arrive holding half baguettes with ham for their first break, at ten. If Sébastien Dominique, my favorite butcher, is with them, he’ll chew and swallow, wipe his mouth clean, and kiss me on both cheeks.

Yves Chataigner, the cheesemonger across the street, comes for four espressos (two each for him and his wife, Annick), which he carries on a tray to his shop. One morning he kissed my hand—correctly; lips did not touch skin. I told him he was much more refined than former president Jacques Chirac, who always smacked the woman’s hand with his lips. At that, he clasped my hand and rubbed his thumb on it, just the slightest flirtation from a guy in his eighties.

“You know what they used to say about Chirac?” he asked.

“Five minutes, shower included!” I replied, proud to be in the know. That was Chirac’s nickname, because he was such an efficient ladies’ man, once upon a time.

Yves told me a new one: “They called him the machine gun!”

Momo Allili, the morning manager, serves the best
café crème
on the street (his hot chocolate is even better), in heavy porcelain cups and saucers stamped “Cafés Richard.” The croissants and baguettes are made early in the morning at the Levin family bakery next door.

One morning I did a taste test of three varieties of butter sold
at the Chataigners’ cheese shop. I sat at my regular table and sliced a baguette. The sweet butter from Normandy was rich but too unctuous; the sweet butter from Charentes, firmer and drier; the salted butter, also from Charentes, much saltier than store-bought.

“You want
the
best butter in the world?” Momo asked. “Just wait.”

He disappeared into the back room. “Now,
this
is butter,” he said, emerging with a saucer piled high with a deep yellow substance. He said his butter is made with unpasteurized milk from the Kabylie region of Algeria, where he was born and where much of his family still lives. His younger brother Mahmoud, who owns the café, makes the butter himself and smuggles it into France. Momo says it is too special to serve to customers. (Doing so would certainly violate European Union food standards.)

The butter was textured and dry, with a pungent taste of ripe cheese. I don’t know if it was the best butter in the world, but I didn’t care. What mattered was that Momo had shared his precious stash with me.

Late one morning, when Sébastien the butcher offered to buy me a
café crème,
Momo brought it with a swirl of cream and chocolate and chocolate sprinkles on top. “Made with love,” Momo said.

Sébastien is the most outgoing butcher at the Boucherie Roger Billebault, part of a small chain that has been owned by the Billebault family since 1899. He starts work at six a.m. He was planning a three-week vacation to a small chalet somewhere in the south, he told me. There would be water sports and other activities for his two daughters, ages fourteen and ten, who live with their mother.

“Do you want to get married again?” I asked.

“I do, but how to find a wife?” he said. “With my work schedule, who’s going to put up with that? Oh, I’ve had a few adventures, don’t get me wrong. But nothing serious. And I won’t introduce my daughters to anyone who isn’t ‘the one.’”

“Excuse me, could you help me?” asked a woman at the next table, extending her right arm. “The string on my bracelet is loose. Could you tighten it for me?”

She was forty or so. She wore a fitted T-shirt, capri pants, gym shoes, and no makeup. How long had she been sitting there? Had she been listening to our conversation?

Sébastien lifted her wrist and examined the knot on the bracelet. He pulled the string, and the bracelet tightened.

“That wasn’t so hard,” said Sébastien. They exchanged smiles.

The woman’s name was Laurence. She lived in the Fourteenth Arrondissement (not far from Sébastien!) in the south of Paris. She was unmarried and had no children. For twenty years she had had an office job, but three years ago she had quit.

“What do you do now?” I asked.

“Je suis une KHAT-seet-air,”
she said.

“A what?”

“Une KHAT-seet-air.”

“Of course,” I said. “A cat-sitter.”

Laurence had joined a friend’s dog-walking business to handle the cat side of things. Summer is the season for cats. The French tend to take their dogs but not their cats on vacation. As everyone knows, cats are homebodies and want to be left behind. But in ninety-degree weather, with no air-conditioning, Paris cats need Laurence.

“I make less money than I did before, but my life is so much better,” she said.

She gave Sébastien and me business cards showing a big-eyed dog with a smile. “A Dog in the City. Individualized dog-walking,” it read.

“We haven’t printed cat cards yet,” she explained.

“I like cats,” said Sébastien.

As we said our good-byes, I whispered to Laurence, “He’s a wonderful guy. He’s looking for a wife.”

I followed Sébastien back to the butcher shop. “You see, Sébastien, it’s not that hard.”

I SOMETIMES WRITE
about food for the
New York Times
, and occasionally share my discoveries with the neighbors. When I wrote about American Thanksgiving one year, I brought samples of cornbread-apple stuffing to my favorite bakers. At Christmas, when I wrote about chocolate, I brought back dozens of bars from Bonnat, a small chocolate maker near Grenoble, and passed them out like Santa.

One spring I harvested white asparagus. A cold, wet winter in France meant the special white variety had come late to the rue des Martyrs. It was expensive, at ten euros a pound, and because it had been trucked a long way, it was dull and wrinkled.

So I set out to harvest my own, in the deepest part of the Landes, near the Spanish border. When I returned to Paris with two shopping bags of white asparagus, I gave some to my greengrocer friend Ezzidine.

“I’ll cook them for my wife!” he exclaimed. But Ezzidine is a fruit and vegetable guy, not a chef. He overcooked them, and they turned limp and stringy.

“They tasted great!” he said. I didn’t believe him.

Shortly after New Year’s, I saw that he had four baskets of fresh cranberries on the display. “What are you doing with fresh cranberries?” I asked. “Thanksgiving was in November.”

Ezzidine said he’d ordered them for his French customers, thinking that in an era of culinary globalization, they might want cranberry sauce with their Christmas turkeys. But the French are not particularly inventive about holiday cooking. No one bought them.

He told me that if I took all of them, he’d shave a third off the price.

I said I would, and he produced four more baskets. He must have felt guilty about foisting so many cranberries on me, so he said, “Ah, I haven’t given you your New Year’s present.” He handed me a long, slim bottle of olive oil, produced not far from his home on the Tunisian island of Djerba.

I made a vat of cranberry sauce with orange rind and just enough sugar to cut the bite, like my mother used to do. I gave a jar to Ezzidine. “I could charge a lot for this, but never you!” I said. “Enjoy!”

Another day, baskets of strange oval shapes with velvety skin the color of celadon turned up: fresh almonds. Ezzidine slammed a nut against a wooden pillar to crack the tough skin and fleshy covering. He removed them to reveal an almond kernel. When I put it to my mouth, he stopped me.

“You have to peel it now,” he said. He pinched the skin with a fingernail and pulled it back. He did it again and again until he had a smooth, white almond. “Now you can eat it.”

It tasted like almond, only crunchy and fresh like a water chestnut.

“But it’s so much work,” I said.

“It’s not the eating that counts,” he said. “It’s the process of cracking and peeling. After dinner, with a glass of mint tea, in front of the television, with all the family together. There is nothing better.”

Over time, Ezzidine began to share his stories: about his niece’s wedding in Djerba and his fantasy of one day kissing Sharon Stone.

“You know what I love about her?” he said. “She’s so natural. She’s never had any work done.”

“What, are you kidding me? Of course she has,” I said.

“Well, maybe just a little filler, but no cutting,” he said.

How in the world had he come to this conclusion, I can’t begin to guess.

He showed me photos of his wife and their nine-year-old daughter. He confessed that he was sad on his day off, when his wife was at work and he was home alone. “I wish I had my customers,” he said. He sounded like my father.

Since the rue des Martyrs is about food, it must be about wine, too. The butcher and cheese shops and one of the fish shops sell wine. So do the take-out
traiteurs,
the smoked salmon shop, the Spanish
pata negra
ham shop, the beer emporium, and the convenience store with no name. The two supermarkets sell wine so respectable that some of their labels are featured in wine reviews. Terra Corsa, the Corsican
traiteur,
sells a large selection of Corsican wines. Pelops, the Greek
traiteur,
sells a small selection of Greek wines. Chez Plume, a high-end take-out place with a small eat-in space in the back, offers an ambitious range of “natural” French wines (made pesticide- and additive-free, with minimum sulfur) starting at 6.50 euros to accompany all kinds of
free-range fowl: chickens from the Landes, ducks, guinea hens, quails, and pigeons.

The rue des Martyrs boasts four wine shops. Nicolas, the outlet of a nationwide chain, sells a wide variety of passable, well-priced wines. Nysa, which opened in 2014, is one of ten outlets in Paris whose mission, the company says, is to bring “democracy” and New Age thinking about wine to the table. Emotional connection and pairings with specific foods are more important than vintages here. So there are special wines for “a big day,” “between girlfriends,” and “love at first sight.”

I am a light drinker and, therefore, a mediocre student of wine. I’m not good at playing the field by trying a lot of wines, year after year, which I’m told is the only way to master the wine universe. I can’t tell the difference between a Côte de Beaune and a Côte de Nuits. Not even
French Wine for Dummies
makes me smarter. So I need help.

My close-to-home, go-to place is Le Repaire de Bacchus, an outlet of a small Paris-area chain with good wines and sound advice. Its merchants woo customers with regional promotions, and they never make me feel stupid. The day the shop mounted a celebration of Italian wines, it won me over with its selection of proseccos. Since then, we talk about Italy and I don’t always have to buy French.

At the top of the rue des Martyrs, Sébastien Guénard is a wine pioneer. A thirty-something chef, he is the owner of the bistro Miroir, the only quality bistro on the Montmartre end of the street. When Mario, the butcher across the street from Miroir, retired after twenty-five years, Sébastien bought him out, and in 2009 he opened Cave du Miroir, a retail wine store and wine bar
that specializes in natural wines from small, little-known vineyards. He built shelves up to the thirteen-foot ceiling and filled them with wines, focusing on varieties he knew from visiting his grandfather’s home in the village of Soings-en-Sologne in central France. His favorite is a 2012 Racines, an obscure red wine produced by Claude Courtois and made with several varieties of grapes from that area; it sells for seventeen euros. He installed a simple counter that does double duty as the bar; added a few stools, tables, and chairs; and retained the bare, cracked concrete floor. “My goal is to have the best of the best for as little money as possible,” he said. “I want my clients to feel good because they haven’t been robbed.”

His customers prefer sipping to guzzling, even on the nights when the Cave is open until midnight. His neighbors continually express gratitude that Mario the butcher’s departure didn’t bring still another clothing boutique to the street.

Even when wholesale prices of fine old vintages soared, Sébastien didn’t raise prices, either at the bistro or at the wine bar. A 1989 Saint-Émilion, which he called one of the finest wines of our day, is listed on the bistro menu at more than 500 euros. “I want to be accessible, unpretentious,” he said. “I want people to come in and know they are getting a deal. Not that five hundred euros is nothing. But it’s a gift.”

“A gift?” I asked. “Five hundred euros is a gift? A round-trip ticket to New York in low season isn’t much more!”

“It’s more than triple that price at a three-star restaurant across town,” he said. “So yes, if you want to experience this wine, it’s a gift.”

Then he came back down to earth.

“If it hasn’t gone bad, that is! And if it has, then it really will be a gift. Zero.”

GIVEN MY FAMILY HISTORY,
I know a lot more about cheese than wine, and more about Italian than French cheese. As Yves and Annick Chataigner, the couple who have run the cheese shop for half a century, enlightened me, we formed a special bond. Yves is in his eighties, Annick about seventy. They have been married for more than fifty years. In a country where the thirty-five-hour week is the law for the salaried employees, they work close to sixty hours, over six days.