Paris when it's cooking

In the cultural American tradition, Paris is still the mecca of many good things in life. Over the last years, a new trend has taken root and begun its ascent to the more visible spots of popularity: the presence of expatriates in the Parisian cooking scene. Blogging and internet have given wings to explorers and reviewers of French cuisine. If you type in the beloved Google search box something like “best recommendations for bistros in Paris”, the logarithm at work will return you the chilling number  24,400,000 results.  Well, even if you sift through some, you will be spending valuable time comparing and preparing your eating out plans. This is one of the prices you pay to give your taste buds an invigorating culinary adventure in the city.

So, these days, besides the explosive growth of professional guides to what is being cooked in Paris, more adventuresome mavens have chosen to set up shop offering their cooking to enlightened customers. And praise be given, some are not only excellent but deservingly successful. Braden Perkins and Laura Adrian have made of Verjus one of the hottest spots in the city where you can either have a long restaurant meal or a combination of small plates at the wine bar. Daniel Rose at Spring is already an institution, having won the praises of the New York Times and  turning the place into location where awe is the reigning mood.  

This flourishing trend has continued with the arrival of Kevin O’Donnell and Michael Lombardi at the helm of the French owned L’Office. Since October 2011, they have been gaining a reputation as their cuisine twists classic French themes and invents new ones all based in the freshest ingredients.

Only two blocks north of L’Office a newcomer has made an entrance with a bang: Albion, run by Matt Ong and Hayden Clout and just opened in November 2011. It offers nouveau comfort food fare with a British accent.

But this is not a post for foodies so I cannot recommend to you which one to select and which one to ignore and I do not have the eloquence to describe the fine delights that await you in these eateries. However, yes, I am partial to good food and better design and I’d rather comment on the latter. I can’t therefore but incline my heart to the gloriously simple, Albion in the desultory Rue du Faubourg Poissoniere. I enjoyed my meal in its balanced interior where the silver sage painted walls adeptly match the textured wooden floors. The deep and wide single space is cleverly allocated to wine shelves on the left of the entrance and a large zinc and wooden bar on the right leaving the back of the room for the guests tables. The effective and low key space is a winner and many restaurant designers could take from Albion some inspiration.

Portrait of De Chirico as an older man

In October 2011, the Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico donated to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris a total of 61 pieces comprising paintings, sculptures and graphic work produced by the artist late in his life. Upon entering the Palais de Tokyo there was no sign of the event. After asking three museum guides for directions to the exhibit rooms, I found them buried next to the Surrealists and the German Neue Sachlikheit paintings with no more than a brief reference to the new arrivals on the left wall of the first room. Has De Chirico become untrendy? ?  I would have to reply in the affirmative, given the display offered by the museum curators to George Baselitz’s current sculpture exhibition. One of his standing pieces presides over the lobby, a colossal wooden figure. The public is asked to pay to visit the Baselitz show. The De Chirico exhibition as the rest of the museum is free.

I always had a weakness for De Chirico. To me, he was one of the most recognizable painters during my growing years and that fact filled me with self-importance. Later, his dreamscape resonated with my adolescent moods and I somehow felt that his canvasses were always talking to me and showing me the way of my emotions as I struggled to make sense of the world.  The way I responded to De Chirico’s aesthetic insinuations changed as I became an adult and what these days remains in memory is an exquisite melancholy, a puzzled symbolism (always on the edge of identification) and a classical form both simple and clear. His metaphysics and writings (he wrote a surrealist novel called Hebdomeros) are just dense complements to his visual force.

At the exhibition, I remained intrigued by his self-portrait with his wife. While she stares defiantly at the viewer in a reddish glow as mistress of her own universe, he seems desolate and worried, prepared to step out of the painting and tell us about his weariness. De Chirico always suffered from poor digestion and who knows if this added to his intellectual melancholy and angst.

Later in the museum library I enquired about any publication commemorating this bequest. The lady in charge gave me a puzzled look as if I had asked to see Napoleon coming out of the shower (a suggestion that no doubt De Chirico would have seized upon).

Belleville and me

What makes the rue de Belleville such a stimulating environment? I cannot count the number of times that upon returning home from Belleville I feel dizzy with colors and images. The shock of Belleville is not just how much exoticism there is in one small terrain but how deep it gets buried into your senses. Let me put it this way: from one block to the next I walked past a halal butcher, a Pakistani cash and carry, a Chinese takeaway and perhaps a branch of Monoprix to remind me of where I was. Globalization is to Belleville what a fish is to the water. The gradual transformation of the neighborhood has taken place in different waves from the not so remote days where Belleville was still a village attached to Paris attracting mostly artists and bohemians until the present day. During the XX century, Jewish immigrants from Germany and Spaniards fleeing the civil war settled in the neighborhood.  As if mysteriously destined to be layered by myriad cultures, it continued to absorb the new North African and Asian arrivals, stacking up their dreams of a better life and shelter in a foreign country.

Underlying all this local whirlwind, a very intense working class feeling preserves the original spirit of the place. It is here that the last barricade of the Commune of 1879 endured the attacks of the government troops. And it is here that Edith Piaf was born at number 72 the Rue de Beleville. Her pathos did not originate in the search of a personal style but from her biography and family. And from the place where she was born.  The legend of Casque d’Or, a feuilleton of blood and passion, unfolded in the neighborhood.  Amelie Hélie, her true name, and a girl of, so called at the time, loose morals, is the lover of a local mafioso, Joseph Manda. She wants to become an artist under the name of Casque d’Or. Her dream takes a different turn when she meets Leca, a Corsican and rival of  Manda with whom she falls madly in love.  The ensuing revenge and tragedy captured the imagination of the Parisians of the period. As one of the chroniclers put it: “elle avait le diable au corps”. In 1952 Jacques Becker made  the eponymous film with Simone Signoret in the role of Amelie.

This is not a beautified spot of Paris gradually dominated by the uncontrollable forces of the trendy and artsy. Some will be inclined to disagree and perhaps there is some presence of those urban clans . Where would you not find them in Paris? They are the contemporary version of the body snatchers. They steal the soul of the place. However their occupation of Belleville has not succeeded in rooting out that spellbinding personality that dominates the quartier from its shops and markets to the turbulent life one encounters in the streets. If Nino Rota had walked the streets of Belleville he would have given us the same generous music he has given Fellini for his most touching films.

Belleville is today a laboratory where Parisians measure the chances that divergent cultures and social classes may live together. 

Around St. Gervais

What a generous location this church enjoys! Narrowly escaping the bustling traffic surrounding Hotel de Ville and just a few feet away from the Seine, its baroque façade contrasts awkwardly with the rest of its body. The combination shuns harmony in favor of seductiveness. An imposing and tall classical front hides from view a structure of joyful gothic style. The present church, built on the site of the first parish on the right bank of the Seine, was started in 1594 century and concluded late in the XVII century. I specially enjoy its south-east flank magnificently in view as one crosses the Pont Louis Philippe into Le Marais and climbs the medieval cobblestones of the Rue des Barres to step down at the other end on to the rue François Miron.

On Wednesdays afternoon and Saturday mornings, a local market comes to life in the Place Baudoyer located to the west of the church. Fishmongers from Normandy, Vietnamese greengrocers and Moroccan and Italian food stands fill  the square breaking the stony monotony of the rectangular space. The market does not have the high reputation of other more established food markets but it has a refreshing unpretentiousness that appeals to me. Further along on the rue François Miron, at number 30, the spicemonger Izrael deploys a full attack on our senses. It is barely possible to move as floors are taken by bags brimming with Tuscan fresh almonds or Turkish pistachios. The shelves collapse under the weight of all corners of the world spices and food ingredients in containers, boxes or bottles. The eye has to zoom in all those detailed objects as the intoxicating aromas of saffron, cinnamon and cardamom fill the air.

    

  










 Not far from this exotic grotto, the Hotel de Beauvais hides behind his unimposing facade a truly stunning work of XVII century town house design. Luckily restored in 2004 after years of neglect (the vicissitudes of the Parisian hotel particuliers through the ages make for good drama), it now houses the Administrative Appeals Court of Paris. Its sumptuous anatomy and layout and are still the object of study in architectural treaties and a glimpse from the street of its unique oval courtyard is worth an expedition from any corner of Paris. Its wooden doors are part of the original construction and the elaborate carvings in the upper section remind us of the truly elevated craftsmanship of the period.

Yet, the deep-seated flavor surrounding St Gervais is entirely medieval. From the rue de Brosse to the rue de Barres and along the rue François Miron, this section of the city is nothing but a whispering memory of its early history.

La Butte aux Cailles

There is a distinctive perfume to this neighborhood. On the face of it, la Butte aux Cailles has no monuments, historic landmarks or the typical Parisian charm that seduces so much. It does not offer any significant ethnic flavor to compensate for the modesty of its appearance. Yet there is a deeper magnetism to these humble streets that soon captures you and stays with you. The name of la rue des Cinq Diamants evokes the romance and adventure of a Jules Verne short story while la rue de la Butte aux Cailles recalls its past, a modest hillock outside Paris purchased by a Pierre Caille in the XVI century

The poetic ring of those names creates already a slice of mystique for a place buried in the midst of a neutral arrondisement of Paris, the 13^th.  And the seduction deepens as you walk these long and narrow streets where you do not have to gaze up to high concrete walls of cement or stone. Housing is no more than one or two story-high, humble and discreet facades are the uniform look of the streets. Bars and small bistrots abound as if the area was teeming with revelers and tourists yet the quietness and reduced human presence add on more seductive contrast to the spirit of the place.

I confess an attraction to those urban enclaves in old and historic cities that seem to be magically cut off from the rest of its organic structure, not so much because of its architectural or historic imprints but rather because they possess an intangible and abstract melancholy that like a magnet feeds more emotions into the soul.