The Sweet Life in Paris: Delicious Adventures in the World's Most Glorious - and Perplexing - City (22 page)

A Parisian friend who is a member of the Communist Party said, “The French strike because they are selfish people. It’s all about ‘me’; they strike for their own benefits. And if they say they’re going on strike in sympathy with the other unions (like La Poste striking along with the train workers), it’s only because they think they’re next.”

As a casual non-Communist observer, I’m not exactly sure how true that is. But since I’m around fifty, I know if I were expecting my gold watch soon, I’d be miffed, too. I’m interested in seeing what happens down the road. (And I don’t mean the road in front of my apartment.) Have the French people and their government lost patience with the unions and their frequent strikes? Or will things go back to normal, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves on the sidewalks of Paris?

I can’t say for sure. But there is a similarity between the two most recent
mouvements sociaux:
I feel a little bit healthier breathing in less second-hand
smoke when dining out or sitting in a café, and I know I’m a lot safer not sharing the sidewalks with the motor scooters. I’ll let Sarko duke it out with the unions over how much longer people will have to work. But could they please do it under someone else’s window for a change?

MELANGE DE NOIX EPICEES
SPICED NUT MIX
MAKES 4 CUPS (400G)

In advance of a strike, signs are posted at the various bus and Métro lines a few days before so we can adjust our plans accordingly. Regardless of how disruptive they are, at least the strikers are kind enough to think of others.

Similarly, when Parisians have a party in their apartment, they post a note in the lobby of their building or in the elevator, letting others know they’re having a gathering that may get noisy. My neighbors are lucky since my apartment is too compact for large, rowdy gatherings. When I do have guests, we tend to be a fairly subdued crowd. So far, I haven’t had any complaints.

This is my favorite party mix and I keep a small box of
bretzels d’Alsace
on hand so I can toss a batch together at the last minute. It makes an excellent nibble.

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C). Spread the nuts on a baking sheet and toast for 10 minutes.
   

2. Meanwhile, in a large bowl, mix the butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, chili powder, maple syrup, and cocoa.
   

3. Stir the warm nuts into the spice mixture to coat them completely, then sprinkle on the salt.
   

4. Mix in the pretzels, then spread the mixture on the baking sheet and bake for about 15 minutes, stirring once or twice, until the nuts are well glazed and browned. Remove from the oven and cool completely. Once cool, break up the clusters and serve.
   

STORAGE:
The nuts can be stored in an airtight container, at room temperature, for up to five days.

THE VISITORS

The biggest thing Americans living in Paris complain about isn’t the constant strikes, or tangling with French bureaucrats. Nor is it the lack of customer service or the availability of necessities, such as molasses, cranberries, organic peanut butter, and chocolate chips.

It’s visitors.

At first it sounds like a lot of fun having friends arrive. You can take them to your favorite restaurants! Spend afternoons meandering through museums! Introduce them to that charming little bistro on your corner! Visit chocolate
shops! Best of all, you can catch up on all the latest gossip about everyone back home.

But all too soon, the morning check of e-mails that have cascaded in during the night includes an ever-increasing number with subject lines like these: “Guess What?!” or “We’re On Our Way!!” or “Remember ME??” The worst are the ones that assume I’m able to drop everything I’m doing for their impending arrival:
“In Paris … this weekend!”

It’s one thing when the messages are from people you know, and visits are spaced out over the course of a few months. But when word got out that I lived in Paris, I had no idea what a popular guy I was. And not just with my friends, but with friends of friends. And their friends, too.

You click to open … “Hi David! We’re friends of your brother’s friend, Tom, the guy who used to cut his hair. He said that we should look you up since we’re on our way to Paris, and you’d show us around.” And it gets better: “… and we’d love to meet up with you for dinner one night. You can help us order since two of us are vegans, but we don’t eat vegetables. Oh, and my sister is deathly allergic to shellfish, and the triplets can’t have gluten, dairy, or anything with DNA. We can’t
wait
to have dinner with you!”

By necessity, I had to formulate a policy of getting together for a meal only if the word “invited” was included somewhere in the message. Simply “meeting up for dinner” doesn’t rouse me to action. Because once committed to “meeting up,” I know I’ve got my work cut out for me.

I’ll start by translating the menu—usually twice, since one person wasn’t listening the first time. Shortly thereafter, I’ll have to explain that “sauce on the side” isn’t an option in France and that it’s going to come drenched in a lot of butter whether they ask for it or not.

Then there’s explaining the inexplicable: French cuts of beef, which are different from American cuts and don’t correspond. A typical French menu might have on it, say,
Pavé de boeuf grillé. Pavé
refers to something slablike, and
grillé
is obvious; order this and you’ll get a grilled hunk of beef. In France wine lists rarely list the grape, because the French aren’t so concerned with knowing the origin and genealogy of every item when they
place their order, nor do they expect a narrative from the waiter of how each item is going to be prepared and presented. They just order and leave it up to the cooks in the kitchen to make their dinner. (What a concept!)

Americans are “customizers” and we want to know before ordering what cut of steak it is, how it’s going to be cooked, which ranch it was raised at, how far away it was, what the cow ate, did he live a happy life, what exactly is going to go into the sauce, what’s going to come alongside it (and can they change that?), whether it’ll be possible to share it, and whether they can take the rest of it home. It takes great restraint for me not to yell across the table, “Just order the damn piece of meat—and eat it!”

The final straw was when one of those friends-of-friends types, whom I foolishly agreed to meet, deeply insulted a waiter at what was once my favorite café in the Marais. The charming waiter, who liked to joke around with me, said to this fellow, who ordered his drink in English, “You should try to speak a little French, after all, you are in France!” To which my gracious guest glared and shot back, “You know what? I don’t even
want
to try.” I would have looked a little funny trying to disappear by sliding under the table, so instead, I gulped down my drink quickly and got out of there as politely as I could. And I haven’t gathered up the courage to go back. After that, I swore off guests forever.

A few years later, when Maury Rubin, owner of the superlative City Bakery in New York, wrote to tell me about a friend who was coming to Paris for a month, I decided to rethink my policy of no guests, since anyone who has Maury’s seal of approval was probably all right. And I didn’t want to risk being cut off from his fabulous salted croissants on my next trip to New York, either.

If you don’t know City Bakery, the place just screams Manhattan and is busier than Grand Central Station. Most make a beeline for the thick hot chocolate with a plush homemade marshmallow melting on top, or one of the frisbee-sized chocolate chip cookies. As arduous as it sounds, some
people manage to down both. Others wolf down a slice of French toast of such girth, it would feed a French family of four. And then there are the aforementioned salted croissants, which I learned on my last visit I can easily eat three of all by myself. Thank goodness all my friends know better than to ask me to share.

Maury’s a hard-core New Yorker and opened a branch in Los Angeles, but was having difficulty adjusting to life among us West Coast types. He joked that he was going to have a trap door built and as soon as anyone uttered the word
diet
, it would open up and neatly dispatch them away.

Maury’s friend turned out to be Nancy Meyers, a director and screenwriter, whose most successful film was
Something’s Gotta Give.
I remember not only the film, but the midnight phone call from my friend Lewis, who lives in the nearby place des Vosges, telling me to “get down here—
right now!”
when they were filming the scenes with Jack Nicholson strolling through Paris. I hadn’t moved so fast since my days in the kitchen at Chez Panisse.

So I decided to make an exception to my long-standing policy against visitors.

Shortly after Maury’s matchmaking, Nancy and I were corresponding daily, and I was sending her addresses to all my favorite places for good food near the apartment she was renting on the rue Jacob: I insisted she stop at Da Rosa for
pots
of Christine Ferber’s
confitures
and oval pats of handmade butter from Jean-Yves Bordier. She must get her cheese, I told her, from the cheerful crew at Fromagerie 31, and it was obligatory to pick up her daily
pain aux céréales
from Eric Kayser on the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie. And she must run, as soon as she landed, to Pierre Marcolini for chocolate-covered marshmallows even before she unpacked her suitcase. (In retrospect, she must have thought I was nuts: here I was, planning her whole vacation around things to eat.)

When we finally met in person, Nancy was laid back, and indeed, as the French say,
“très cool
,” and more than happy to indulge in all the places I recommended. She asked if I knew any good spots for seafood, but I drew a blank and could think of only one place: Le Dôme. I’d had lunch there
once, and was quickly ushered past all the festive Parisians having a grand time eating their
plateaux de fruits de mer
heaped with glistening oysters, cracked crab, and lobster-length
langoustines
, to Siberia, a hideously decorated, overlit hideaway. One look around and I saw it was their repository for Americans who showed up in sweatshirts with fanny packs strapped to their sides. I was there with a pastry chef friend who had just sold her bakery for somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty-five million dollars, and we were both dressed just as nicely as the guests in the main dining room. I suggested that it would have been pleasant to sit in the gorgeous gilded dining room, but the maître d’ thought otherwise.

And the next morning, after our lunch in purgatory, both of us were too weak from writhing on the bathroom floor all night, clutching our stomachs, to even think about our carefully planned Paris pastry crawl that day. But I figured since Paris was giving me a second chance at life—and I was giving myself a second chance with visitors—why not just declare a blanket pardon to all, which included giving Le Dôme another chance as well?

This time Nancy and I were led to a plush booth, and over fillets of St. Pierre with rounds of crusty, buttery pan-fried potatoes, she gave me some equally juicy Hollywood gossip while I filled her in on more tasty Paris hot spots to check out. This time, the service was
très correct
, with the handsome and assured waiters hovering over us, their long aprons wrapped around their waists and impeccably starched collars standing tall. I remarked to Nancy on how nicely we were being treated. She responded, “Well, if you really want to see star treatment, you should see what happens when I go to Le Grand Colbert.”

For those of you who don’t know, etched in the minds of every middle-aged woman is the scene toward the finale of
Something’s Gotta Give
where Diane Keaton sits down for dinner with Keanu Reeves at Le Grand Colbert to dine on roast chicken, which she’d raved about as being the best in Paris at various points in the film. (Although it wasn’t even on the menu until Nancy wrote it into the script.) I was dying to see what “star treatment” meant to not-so-easily-impressed Parisian waiters. So I called Le
Grand Colbert to make a reservation for lunch the following week. The person who picked up the phone was pleasant, if a tad reserved.

“Bonjour, monsieur
, I’d like a reservation,
s’il vous plaît”
(which was, by the way, the first sentence I mastered in French).

“Oui, monsieur, pour quelle date?”

“Tuesday.”

A bit of silence as I could hear him leafing through the pages of his reservation book.

“Oui. Eh …
(pause,)
… à quelle heure?”

“1 p.m.?”

“Bon.”

I could hear some pen scribbling in the background.

“Combien de personnes, monsieur?
”

“Deux.”

A moment of silence. More writing.

“À quel nom?
”

My moment had arrived. I took a deep breath. “Nancy Meyers.” I stood back and took a mental bow. This time, there was a long silence.

“Nan-cee May-oarz?”
he asked, his voice going up several octaves.

“La directrice? Mais oui, monsieur! Pas de problème!”

I’d been to Le Grand Colbert once before and, frankly, I had been skeptical. Plastic-laminated English menus in the window and a faded poster of the movie tacked up in the window weren’t exactly beacons for good food. The silly pink writing on the menu was totally inappropriate for a Parisian bistro, and aside from the gently aged façade, the appeal of the place was lost on me. I was tempted to bolt to Le Grand Véfour nearby in the Palais Royal, constrained only by my credit card limit.

But step inside and
bien sûr
, Le Grand Colbert is indeed a classic
bistro parisien
, right down to the mirrored walls, starched linen napkins, waiters gliding across the room with platters of oysters, and the aged, yellowed ceiling attesting to decades of Gauloises clouding the air. The food had been fine, but, I wasn’t especially eager to return.

But this time I was. And as I whizzed around the place des Victoires,
with Louis XIV on horseback lording it over me and my bike, I made a pact with myself that I wouldn’t have anything to drink, so I’d be on my best behavior with Nancy. I have a tendancy to mindlessly toss down what-ever’s put in front of me to mask my anxiety in social interactions, a problem that’s especially acute if I’m around anyone famous. Water, rum, fruit juice, wine, absinthe, iced tea, kava, Champagne, or vodka all quickly disappear if I’ve got a glass of it in my hand.

The moment we sat down, two tall frosty flutes of Champagne were set in front of us. I grabbed mine right away, brought the thin rim of the chilled glass to my lips, and gulped down three-quarters of it. Nancy took a delicate, measured sip and put hers back on the table.

I’m always amazed how my journalist friends are masters at whipping out their notebooks and furiously jotting things down when meeting important people. I often have a hard time focusing. Trying to appear equally respectable, I’d brought my little Moleskine notebook, as Nancy told me beforehand that she was willing to answer any and all questions. I asked her about what Jack and Keanu were really like (she loved them both), why she chose Keanu Reeves (he was a star, but different enough to not be dominated by Jack’s large-scale presence), how fabulous Diane Keaton is. And then she told me about Daniel Craig, which got my undivided attention.