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Ponies
going home in the evening, up the rue Frémicourt,
East
Asian ceramic tower of some sort in an antiques store
Giant
sundial on the Promenade Plantée, above, and below.
The
Alive! (Vivant!) exhibit on the Seine near the
View of
the tower from the Alive! exhibit.
Photo
of dust mite from the Alive! exhibit.
The
Promenade Plantée. |
Thursday, August 23 My good friend Wendy gave me a book, Paris
on a Plate: A Gastronomic Diary, by the witty Australian food critic Stephen Downes. The book is great entertainment. If you like eating and you love Here, at the
beginning of my adventure, I'm taking no chances. Get a few early runs on the gastronomic
scoreboard. You won't believe it, but eating in Chartier is
an easy, relatively short walk from my studio (Monsieur Montebello's studio - and I write that with a envy). I take the rue
Richer, the continuation of the rue des Petites Ecuries, then turn left into
the rue du Faubourg In the nineteenth century, Parisian butchers with business
acumen would brew up a hearty broth from and sell it to customers. Some of
them expanded this sideline, offering simple dishes as well as their
soups. Eventually, some gave away
retailing meat altogether and concentrated on providing cheap, traditional
menus in large dining rooms. These places came to be known as bouillons or ‘boil-ups,’ a synonym for the broth that started it all.
French middle-classes are the world's champions at spotting and following
trends, and bouillons soon became
so popular that they eschewed all modesty and transmogrified into
full-fledged restaurants in grand venues. Never were their origins forgotten,
though, and simple
orthodox French dishes continued to be served. And at cheap
prices. Camille and Edouard Chartier had a chain of bouillons on both sides
of the The place is
packed. Every place at every table in
this gorgeous high-ceilinged space seems taken. I’m led to a table for four – a couple are
just leaving – and seated alongside a husband and wife from Under the
butcher's paper are pink-and-white tablecloths in a tea-towel fabric. The
chairs are well-worn basic timber bistro jobs and the stainless steel cutlery
and glassware are rudimentary (indeed, my knife is more bent than a Kings
Cross cop). Paper napkins are standard, and the floor is in brown linoleum.
Tables butt-join, and you share big baskets of baguettes cut up into generous
slices, salt and pepper, oil, vinegar and mustard with anyone within arm's
reach. Above me is an ancient hat-and-pack rack of three brass tubes. But look
beyond your table for the real joy of Chartier. Bevelled mirrors pattern the walls in a
dazzling check. The massive columns supporting the high ceiling have been
stained chocolate so many times now, it seems, that they appear encrusted.
Chartier is an eating-out relic. A small earthquake might set it to tumbling
down, but Small boxes
on the walls were once for serviettes. They are
numbered, and used to be coveted by Chartier's regulars. At some time in the past, authorities quite
rightly ruled them unhygienic and these days they are empty. The ceiling has
a magnificent skylight surrounded by a border of ornate wrought iron, and the
light here seems remarkably even, if slightly jaundiced. I'm settled
in for less than five minutes before one of Chartier's black-bowtied,
black-waistcoated waiters of a certain age - as many of
them are - seats a woman opposite me.
She is,
I'd
guess,
in her early thirties, has long dark hair and wears a heavy anorak. She
carries a daypack with a koala attached to the zipper. She's
looking all around in awe and wonder, a nice smile of achievement
at having discovered Chartier written all over her face. I smile back
across the table. I notice pink pompoms protruding above the heels of her
sneakers. Her lower calf is ringed with a tattoo of names in a fine cursive
script. The chest of her coarse-knit pullover undulates with a promotion:
'Funnee gril', whatever that might mean. 'Australian?'
I
ask,
because one of your obligations at Chartier is to talk to the others at your
table. 'Nooooo!'
she insists with an immense smile. 'I noticed the
koala,' I say, pointing at the backpack. 'I got it in She's Sioux,
she says, offering her hand across the mustard pot and vinegar and oil
bottles in their perforated sheet-metal holder. From 'You'll like
Chartier,' I say. Yes, she certainly will, she enthuses, but she's
really not used to French food and wants to order something she'll find easy.
She wants only an entrée. You mean a
main-course size? Yes, she says, that's our entrée. It's a starter, I say, in
France and lots of other countries. It's the entry to the meal.
With justification, she looks at me sideways, then scans skywards to take in
Chartier's filigreed iron. We peruse
the list. It's of almost A3 size and chronicles a plethora of offerings under
the rubrics ' poissons '
, 'plats',‘legumes’, 'fromages', 'desserts’ and 'glaces'. And that's not counting
starters (on any given day Chartier has twenty of them). Turn over to find a limited, but cheap,
list of French wines – a bottle of Chartier’s own ‘rouge de table’ costs 4.90 euros. Things like a boiled egg with house-made
mayonnaise costs 2 euros, as do salads of tomato, cucumber, and red
cabbage. You'll pay the same for
grated carrot with a lemon vinaigrette, and a slice of what is known as
Parisian ham - just excellent basic ham for
us - with sour gherkins. Terrine and jellied pork
dishes cost a little more, and I always have the dark maroon,
dense and salty But none of
that helps Sioux. She likes fish, she laughs, because 'Ray?' she
says. 'Is that like a fish with wings?' 'Exactly,' I say. 'In
fact, they call it "wing of ray".' 'Like in
stingray?' she asks. 'It's
wonderful,' I say. 'Not at all what you think.' She looks somewhat
anxious. 'Yes, but
you know, I've snorkeled, and a stingray just surprised me out of nowhere
once, and, oh my God, I nearly died when I saw it.. . So big and all glidey.. . It just kind
of flew past. It was sooo close. I nearly drowned ...' Sioux begins flapping her arms up and down, which
amuses the couple from I explain that
skate is not exactly stingray - probably a
third cousin and much smaller. Sioux draws on her brave Indian progenitors
and orders it. I take the Three slices
of ham with a knob of fresh half-salted butter and plenty of bread are
wonderful. I dive into the breadbasket repeatedly and, when it's
half-empty, a waiter replaces it with freshly cut slices. Sioux goes off amid
the crowds at other tables and snaps away with her digital camera. She is especially taken by the smell and
the look of the old and, like me, has
noticed the gee-gaws of tumbling plaster oak leaves high up on the walls and
the magnificently ornate 'C' for Chartier, which accompanies
them. There's nothing like this in Sioux is an
actress (sometimes), a very good (on her own admission) cocktail mixologist
at other times, and quite a handy waiter. But for the moment she just works and saves to
travel.
It's
her way of getting an education. It will improve her acting. Couldn't agree
more, I say, and I also couldn't help noticing
the names on her calf, even in this cold weather. 'They are my
most important people in the world,' she says, 'and I like to know
they're near.' She pokes out her leg from beneath the table and hoists the
hem of her jeans. A finger traces around the names. 'Charleen is my mom,' she
says, 'and The skate
looks excellent. Pretty plating is no great preoccupation at Chartier, yet
here is a thick piece of wing with capers, chopped chives and small tomato
cubes in what appears to be a
vinaigrette sauce. Three boiled potatoes attend the fish, and they will have
excellent flavour - all French
potatoes do. And there is
a clutch of the world's greatest green salad, mache. My andouillette - grilled chitterling sausage - is accompanied by a formidable pile of chips. 'You know?'
says Sioux, 'I took the 'raie' because of
the capers. I know capers. We sometimes put them in martinis. You know martinis?' Yes, I say, and I love them
made with vodka straight from the freezer. Sioux tends
to her wing delicately, coaxing its soft fibrous texture onto her fork. 'Ray always
looks like the cross-section of some kind of advanced aircraft wing, doesn't
it?' I say. She looks at me strangely. Her face lights up.
It's good, she opines, teasing up another forkful. I try it. Its
flavour is full, and the sauce nicely rounded and lightly oily. Sioux is
looking at my andouillette suspiciously. I've yet to split it open. She wants to
know what kind of sausage it is. I suggest that perhaps she
wouldn't want to know at all. 'Try me,' she declares. Well, it's a sausage
made mainly from the lower bowels of pigs. 'Oh, gross!' she says. 'Now,' I say, 'I'm
going to split it, and you'll see, if you look, a great many curls of bits of
guts and other stuff tumble out onto the plate. And you might smell something
a little . . . "agricultural?" But don't be alarmed. And you don't
have to watch. It's kind of adult-rated food.' I take my
knife to the andouillette. Curls of
gluey skinpale guts spill out, and the characteristic, gorgeous whiff of a
shitty pigpen rises all by itself from the plate. Sioux is mesmerised.
Thunderstruck. Appalled. She pulls a face. She sniffs the air. Tentatively. 'Oh my God!'
she says. 'I can smell it.. . Oh my God! I can! You
can't eat that!' I smile and
shrug and eat, and the andouillette's innards are
sensationally gluey and flavoursome and gelatinous. Sioux is devastated. I can tell by
the despairing look on her face. She sees me as odd, perhaps more beast than
human. Mostly primitive, at any rate. She has stopped eating her skate. She
glances at the andouillette and looks away. She no longer wants to sit opposite me.
Her 'experience' at Chartier has been spoilt forever. And
I'm the culprit. I feel awful. She looks around the room. Two tables away
there is a vacant space next to three young Frenchwomen who are gabbling and
gesticulating, densely involved in office politics, no doubt. 'I'm really
sorry,' says Sioux, picking up her plate of fish and her knife and fork.
'Really sorry. I just can't.. . Just can't..
. That smell is so gross.. . It's the
smell mainly.. . I'm sorry.' And she moves in
alongside the Frenchwomen. Just my
luck, but Chartier is like that. On a good day you can eat well and learn a
little about quantum physics or selling Citroens in Reims, listen to a
diatribe about French taxes or hear Britons boast about the strength of the
pound (they think nobody understands them). But Chartier is always fun, a
living a living treasure. In 1996 it celebrated its hundredth birthday. And
they do something here that was common thirty years ago: the waiters total up
your addition in ballpoint
on the butcher's paper covering your table. I suspect they
take lessons in the ornamental scribble they rip onto the paper. And the
speed at which they compute mentally would dazzle today's teenagers. I keep my bill as a memento before heading
home in this especially damp and cold early winter. |
