But I don’t think the students have been getting a representative sample. Logically, people wandering about alone at lunchtime are more likely to be getting a takeaway than going to a restaurant. And if you go to any office area in Paris—behind the Champs-Élysées, for example, on the grands boulevards, at the Bourse or in the north of the Marais, the cafés are always crammed with workers enjoying a sitdown meal with their friends and colleagues. They may not take two hours for lunch like they did (or claim to have done) in the past, but they’ll be feasting on the plat du jour or even the whole three-course menu of entrée, plat, dessert. Since it’s la crise, more of them will be drinking water from the carafe rather than having wine, or they will opt for just two courses—most restaurants and cafés offer a choice, entree/plat or plat/dessert for a reduced price. But they’ll be there, day in day out, lunching their way through the economic siege.
No doubt talk at table will be at least partly about their working conditions, but they’re French, after all, and no conversation between French colleagues—even during a well-cooked, efficiently served lunch in a Parisian café—is complete without a whinge about how hard life is. The people tucking into that camel ‘roasted English style’ back in 1870 probably said much the same thing, although they were being bombarded by Prussians, so perhaps they had more of an excuse.
In the market for a market?
The market that Zola described in his novel Le Ventre de Paris was knocked down at the end of the 1960s and replaced with the homeless persons’ toilet and underground big-brand shopping hell that is Les Halles today. The food stalls were deported to Rungis, seven kilometres south of the city, near Orly airport, which is still one of the biggest and most varied food markets in the world.
Fanatical foodies would drool over a visit to the immense market at Rungis, but everything interesting happens there before dawn (the fish market, for example, is only open from 2 a.m. to 7 a.m.), all buyers need a membership card, and they can only buy in bulk. So unless you’re in the market for a whole cow or half a ton of potatoes, it’s not a practical place for visitors.
But this doesn’t matter, because at their best, the street markets in Paris itself are every bit as droolsome as Zola’s descriptions.
To get the full market experience, it is wise to avoid the posher parts of town, where you’re not allowed to touch anything, and head to an arrondissement numbered over nine (except the 16th).
My favourites are the big market in the 12th at the place d’Aligre, between Bastille and the Gare de Lyon, which combines cheap stalls with an upmarket covered hall, and my own local market in the 19th, at the rue de Joinville, reputed to be the cheapest in Paris.
The Joinville market takes place every Sunday and Thursday, and its hundred or so stalls push Parisian small-shop specialization to the limit. There is a trader selling only onions (red, white and shallots) and two types of garlic. The herb sellers display nothing but different types of wet green leaf—parsley, chervil, marjoram, sage, coriander, mint. Another stand sells only dates (wrinkly or smooth) and raisins, which rise up from the table in three glistening golden mountains. The mushroom man is just as specialized—he deals only in grey button mushrooms from his farm in the Aisne, a hundred-odd kilometres northeast of Paris. He sells out every time, and by the end of the morning his stall consists of nothing but a stack of empty wooden crates, a handful of unsold mushrooms and a huge smile.
The three or four cheese stalls all have a hundred or so varieties on offer, including adulterated kinds for those who think the French are fanatically purist—goat’s cheese coated in golden sultanas, or a soft, whitish variety covered in dried papaya. Cheese is probably the only product that’s more expensive at the market than in the nearby supermarkets, which may be why there are rarely queues in front of the fromager. At one of the stalls, I once heard a lady seller, impatient at the lack of custom, start to call out ‘Allez, mangez, régalez-vous, on est là!’—‘Come on, eat, enjoy yourselves, we’re here,’ which sounded almost like a call to cannibalism.
At food markets in Paris’s poorer neighbourhoods, there are two zones—one selling higher-priced, top-quality merchandise and a second, in the case of Joinville squashed up against the back wall of the church, where people go to buy irregular cucumbers, fennel bulbs that have been amputated to take off the rotten bits, mottled (though perfectly edible) bananas, and dirt-cheap strawberries that will be fine for lunch, but by dinner time they’ll have mutated into a cross between a summer-fruit smoothie and Roquefort cheese.
The crowds in the cheap section of the market are worse than anywhere else. People shove through with shopping baskets, crushing feet, while the street lamps become roundabouts in the flow of pedestrians, and when it rains, the earth at the base of tree trunks
