Is there a waiter or waitress standing outside, hustling for custom? Bad sign. In any decent café or restaurant, all the waiting staff are busy serving customers.
How many people are impatiently waiting for their food? A full restaurant can be a good sign, of course, but if there are more people waiting than eating, the place may only be full because it’s trendy, and not because of the quality of the food and service.
At lunchtimes, does the restaurant look as though it is catering for groups of Parisian colleagues? If so, this is a huge plus point. The general standard of lunchtime cafés and restaurants is far higher in office districts because the chefs have to keep workers happy five or six days a week. (In the evening, though, when the demanding workers have gone home, the same café might bring in a less experienced chef, so beware.)
An empty café terrace, a tempting sight. But ask yourself—why is it empty? Similarly, if it’s full, take a look at the customers: are they munching merrily, or gazing around in desperation, hoping to spot a waiter? Choosing the right place to eat is a tricky business, which, happily, is explained in this chapter.
Take a careful look at the menu, which by law must be on display outside the restaurant. Is it translated into several languages? Almost certainly a bad sign. Parisians are inherently snobbish and don’t respect the taste—gastronomic or otherwise—of foreigners, so an establishment that caters mainly for tourists won’t make as much of an effort. As in other countries, a restaurant that offers no linguistic help to foreigners can actually be the best place for foreigners to eat.
Does the menu have a handwritten plat du jour, either on a Post-It or a blackboard? It should. A short menu with a plat du jour is far better than a long, varied menu without, because the ingredients will have been bought in specially.
In the Poissons section of the menu, is there a fish other than salmon? If not, the chef is mechanically ordering in salmon rather than dipping into the veritable shoals of fresh fish that flow into Paris. Despite its distance from the sea, it has one of the best fish markets in Europe. Sometimes, chefs will propose a duo de poissons—two fish in the same dish. Again, if one of these is salmon it’s not a great sign.
All of the above may sound very picky, but if you’re in Paris for a weekend, you may only have time for three or four meals at a restaurant. And in a city so obsessed with good food, and so full of it, there’s really no reason to eat badly.
And so bon appétit, which, by the way, is pronounced without the final ‘t’—it’s ‘bonapay-TEE’. A snooty Parisian once told me that it is considered slightly vulgar to say this before eating, as though there were some absurd risk that you might not eat well in France. But most Parisians seem happy to say it, and it would be churlish not to do likewise, a bit like not saying bonjour because you’re bound to have a wonderful day in Paris.
Though the above-mentioned snooty Parisian was partially right—if you avoid the obvious tourist traps and über-trendy places where people go to be seen rather than eat, it is fairly difficult to eat badly here, and easy to eat wonderfully well without risking bankruptcy.
* The French word mince doesn’t mean English mince, though—that would be viande hachée.
** For hints on surviving in Parisian queues, see Chapter 1.
*** For more ways of spotting a good and bad restaurant, see later in this chapter.
**** Though I might add here that most Japanese restaurants in Paris are run by Chinese, and that Parisians don’t know enough about Indian cuisine to force the standard up. For authentic Japanese food go to the rue Saint-Anne, near the Palais-Royal, and for great Indian and Sri Lankan, between Gare du Nord and La Chapelle.
***** On the subject of definitions, bistro is a general word usually used to mean a small café or cheap restaurant. And the difference between a café and a restaurant is the same as anywhere else—a restaurant is a place where you go for a meal rather than just a drink.
Worth his weight in chintz. Englishman Charles Worth (1825–95) came to Paris and invented haute couture. And amazingly, Parisians acknowledge their debt to him.
9
FASHION
La mode domine les Provinciales, mais les Parisiennes dominent la mode.
(Fashion dominates Provincial women, but Parisiennes dominate fashion.)
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU,
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WRITER AND
PHILOSOPHER
EVERYONE COMES to Paris hoping to witness first-hand the elegance for which Parisians (and especially Parisiennes) are famous. This, though, can lead to disappointment. I often see tourists wandering along the boulevard Saint-Germain thinking, Why are so many men dressed in jeans and sports-brand T-shirts, just like they are at home? And those women in cargo pants and plain blouses—can they really be Parisiennes?
Well, yes, they are. The sobering fact is that Paris is a fully paid-up member of the global brand conspiracy. Most Parisians wear clothes that could be bought in any shopping mall in the Western world. Even the trendy cultural elite is singularly lacking in creativity. I recently went to a gallery opening in the Marais and thought someone had turned the lights out. Literally everyone in the fifty-strong crowd was wearing black. Fashion itself seemed to have become the victim.
You do, of course, see some very classy, elegant people walking about the place, but their elegance will probably have a lot to do with the way they wear their clothes, whatever the brand. You might also spot girls who look like models. That’s because they are models—seven-foot-tall female stick insects, their portfolios under one arm and their ears bunged up with
