Paris Journal 2014 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com
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This week, we had originally planned to be in Florence, Italy, staying with our friend Wendy in a home-exchange she’d arranged. But we changed our plans a couple weeks ago, when it became apparent that Tom had too much work to do, and it would not be possible to do that while travelling and doing touristy things like seeing great Italian museums. As it turns out, it was especially good that we cancelled those plans because Tom has had a bothersome head cold this week. So the past couple nights, I haven’t planned ahead for dinner; I just wanted to see what he felt like doing when evening came. Last night, he was up for a little bit of a walk, and I was able to reserve a last-minute table (well, in the last 30 minutes) at Carmine Café. Carmine Café had treated us very well two years ago when we went there with the 11-year-old twins (our granddaughters Olivia and Sarah) and Dan, Tom’s son. The servers were nice and very attentive to the girls’ orders. There being five of us at the time, we were placed in the front corner, along the banquette, and there I didn’t notice how crowded the rest of the restaurant was. Last night, we noticed – big time. We are accustomed to the way many Parisian restaurants squeeze those little square tables in a dining room, often lining them up in a great long row along the banquette on the sides. But Carmine Café had a double row of the little tables down the middle of the room where there was really only room for one single row. It was simply too much. Servers were constantly squeezing between the chairs and bumping up against diners’ arms. On the other hand, it is hard to argue with success. The place was practically full by the time we left. The location, so near the Eiffel Tower, the Champ de Mars, and the École Militaire (on the avenue du Suffren near the avenue de la Motte-Picquet), is hard to beat. The Carmine attempts to serve New-York-style pizza and good burgers with fries, and they do a very good job of that. They also have other, traditional French dishes. Grilled sardines and rice was one of the daily specials that I would have ordered normally. But I was in a rare mood for a burger. Tom ordered barbequed spare ribs, which were excellent. My burger was really good, too, but it came with too much bun, which I simply discarded. Fries were fine, too, but we could only eat some of them. We’d started with an order of calamari, which I liked and Tom did not. But we agreed that the dessert that we shared, the daily special – pear tart with chocolate – was superb. The servers were too rushed and busy, and were forgetting things. But they were nice. A New Yorker would laugh to see that everyone who ordered pizza (and there were many) was eating it with a knife and fork, rather than eating it New York style (each slice folded, and hand-held). I confess that I ate my burger with a knife and fork, because once I’d removed the oversize bun, what else was there to do? The problem is, we will now always have the memory of being uncomfortably crowded there, and I doubt we will return. Too bad. Earlier in the day, I’d gone for a walk by myself. When I reached the Place Charles Michels, I remembered a day, years ago, when I stopped to sit there on a bench near an elderly lady. The neighborhood residents had been mildly demonstrating and passing out flyers objecting to the upcoming Beaugrenelle commercial center re-development. The lady told me in rapid-fire, passionate French, just why she thought the project was awful. It is just too much, too intense, too big, she said. It was out of scale with the neighborhood. I was very sympathetic, being a pro-urban-neighborhood community organizer/activist type of person. But I also knew that the cause had been lost, years ago, when the Front de Seine high-rises and the 1970s-80s Beaugrenelle Center had been built. That was when the population density of the Beaugrenelle area had been pumped up on steroids. And once you have so many people living in all those apartments, it is impossible to go back to the days of less intense, 5- or 6-story Haussmannian-only buildings. Almost nobody wants to give up his or her apartment in central Paris! Not unless they’re moving away from the city altogether . . . . And when there is that much intensive residential density, the neighborhood demands a commercial intensity to match it, to serve it. There was no going back. The decision was made back in the 1970s. But that 70s-designed Beaugrenelle shopping mall had gone wrong; it was allowed to deteriorate, and probably wasn’t well designed to begin with. It was dark, and cave-like. The new Beaugrenelle mall, while massive and intensive, is not dark and cave-like. I just hope it will be cared for in a way that the former commercial center was not. While I was roaming every level of both the Panoramic and Magnetic sections, I saw some hopeful signs that care is being taken. I sat for a few minutes in a comfortable lounge area to see if my fussy old smartphone would connect with the free wireless service in the center. When I got up to continue my walk, I noticed a couple of very big men in sort-of construction attire coming into the lounge space in Panoramic. Then I saw the big pair again in Magnetic, just after I discovered an exquisitely cute housewares store. One of the men was looking up at the ceiling, and taking out his smartphone as if to take a photograph. I looked back over my shoulder to see what he saw. Aha! A leak in the ceiling, already! The bad patch in the plasterboard seemed to correspond to the place where the sprinkler system piping would be overhead. Farther on, I notice another leak stain, in a similar position under the sprinkler system pipes. But the men were on the job, and I bet those pipes will be replaced pronto. We shall see. Also on my walk, when I passed by the lounge area in the top level of Panoramic, where a baby grand piano sits ready for anyone to play it, a woman sat with her sheet music before her, shopping bags at her feet, playing away. She clearly was just learning to play, yet she played as if she was already a musician of some sort. It wasn’t too painful to listen to her practicing, even if she wasn’t as accomplished as the person I heard playing the last time I passed by that spot (see photo below from July 12). I think I shall always make a point of walking by this piano when I visit the Beaugrenelle mall, just to see who’s playing and how well. What a nice amenity that is, for those who need to practice and who don’t own a piano. Or, how convenient it is for tourists who want to practice while on vacation, provided they bring their sheet music with them on their travels.
One of the aspects of the Beaugrenelle mall that surprises me is the extraordinarily casual nature of most of the clothing carried in the clothing stores; it is so very Gap-like. There are a couple exceptions, and the Marks and Spencer clothing departments are among them. But if you were to judge the preferred Parisian style by the amount of space devoted to which type of fashion, you’d come up with something very much out of a Gap advertisement. And that pretty much coincides with what we see on the streets these days. I’m talking about Parisians, not tourists, mind you. I think maybe people dress up more in downtown Fort Myers! That fashion-plate Bernie Feliciano would actually look quite over-dressed in Paris! (Fort Myers people will know who I mean; I do love the kind of shoes she wears, even if they aren’t practical for me.) The few stores that do carry a more dressy, and more expensive, kind of clothing are remarkably void of shoppers in Beaugrenelle. That said, I observe that the shopping on the rue du Commerce is just as good as in the Beaugrenelle mall – and it includes many of the same chain stores. So we don’t have any need to go to the shopping mall (except to go to the Marks and Spencer food hall!), but it is a convenient place to walk, especially if the weather is threatening to put a damper on the day. The chain stores are mostly forgettable, with the exception of the cute housewares store that I found in the mall. The windows and doorways that charmed me most yesterday were on the regular old streets, like the rue du Theatre, where the man who runs the games shop plays excellent jazz on his stereo all day long. And on the avenue Emile Zola, where consignment shops display the odd assortment of things that neighborhood residents would like to sell. And on every street where there are little groceries run by North African/French men who expertly display fresh fruits and vegetables under their awnings stretched over the sidewalk. And where there are ubiquitous bakeries with glamorous window displays of carbohydrate-laden offerings. That’s my Paris.
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Friday, August 22, 2014
Gorgeous ceiling in the crowded Carmine Café.
Cute, colorful housewares store called “little extra.”
Chess pieces representing Napoleon’s soldiers at the Battle
of Austerlitz – 108 euros at Games in Blue, where the shopkeeper plays really
good jazz and keeps his door open to the street so we can hear as we walk
by. Good man!
Brocante/antiques shop on the avenue Émile Zola.
Our favorite sparkling water – the blue Perrier.
Le Plomb de Cantal on
avenue Émile Zola.
The Magnetic section of Beaugrenelle Commercial Center. |
