Lucas Carton is one of a handful of legendary temples of Paris fine dining. It first opened as a restaurant in the 1860s (!!) and, through a number of  changes (chef, restaurant name, fashion, the world around it, basically!),  has remained one of the City of Light’s most elegant tables. Of course, part of its appeal comes from its stunning location, on the place de la Madeleine, facing the entrance of the neo-classical church of the same name. Then there is its magnificent carved art-nouveau  woodwork (installed in the 1880s and now a National Landmark) that gives dining there the feeling of of being transported to the Belle Époque.

As a young cook working in Seattle in the 1990s, I had read about Lucas Carton’s chef, Alain Senderens, who had not only kept the restaurant’s three Michelin stars (first earned in the 1930’s) since his promotion to chef in 1985, but was also reputed for having trained some of the most important young chefs in France. He was a legend.  So, when we began to make plans for a trip to Paris, I was keen to make Lucas Carton my first-ever Michelin three star dining experience (note that we had dined at restaurant Maximin in Nice in 1990, which had two stars at that time,  as the guests of Sheila’s uncle and beloved Seattle culinary figure Joe McDonnal…but then, that’s a whole different story). Months in advance, I called the restaurant from Seattle and made a reservation for dinner – the general knowledge was that securing a seat in a three-star required booking well in advance.

We stayed in the 12th arrondissement, near the marché at place d’Aligre, east of the Bastille, which is to say, a fair distance from the place de la Madeleine.  On the evening of our dinner, decked out in our best kit, me in a suit and tie (in those days, going to a top flight restaurant in Paris was the moral equivalent of going to the opera or a funeral…you got dressed up), we walked to the place de la Bastille to catch a cab to the restaurant.  The cabstand at the Bastille is busy always, and when we arrived there was a queue of about 20 people waiting (this is pre-Uber, remember).  As we waited, a couple of panhandlers came down the queue asking for change.  On hearing my American accent, one of the two proceeded to go off on a tear about how he disagreed with America’s actions in Iraq (this was the early 90’s so the First Gulf War was still fresh in everyone’s mind) and saying that George Bush was a war criminal.  I tried to assure him that we agreed with his point of view, with very little success.  Meanwhile, the queue advanced slowly and the time was running toward the time of our reservation.  We finally thought better of waiting and decided to try the nearby metro instead.  Of course, the metro in Paris always takes longer than one expects, so we found ourselves emerging from the metro at Madeleine fully 30 minutes late for our reservation.  Breaking a sweat, we finally reached the front door of the restaurant, where I apologized for our lateness to the Maître d’Hôtel who greeted us.  “This is Paris” he replied with a smile, ignoring my halting French, “one is never late!”

The first thing that struck me about Lucas Carton was the immense flower arrangement just inside the entrance.  Sitting on a table, the bouquet of flowers towered above the dining room, its highest blooms fully ten feet above the floor and was nearly that wide.  This bouquet set the tone for the entire experience. It seemed to say “relax, spread out, we are not pressed. Prepare yourself for grand gestures”.  The Maître d’ took our coats and ushered us to a beautiful table for four so that we could sit side by side on the banquet;  the restaurant was the show, so why not have a good view! The waiter brought menus, mine with prices, Sheila’s without, as if to say “why should she worry her pretty little head about prices, he will be paying”.  For her first course, with uncanny aim, she chose the most expensive dish on the menu, a salad of lobster, celery root and black truffle.  When it arrived, it surely must have included an entire lobster, and a snow storm of shaved fresh truffles. Of my choices, I recall a roasted loin of lamb raised in Provence, served with ratatouille and polenta, excellent.

One of the nicest surprises came when ordering wine. If you have ever dined at a starred restaurant, you know that the wine list will lean heavily to bottles with prices north of 300  dollars, and if you look toward Bordeaux or Burgundy, you can quickly pass 1000 euros (in those days, that would have been 5500 francs, which seems even more expensive).  So when I asked the wine steward for a recommendation to go with our main courses, I was happily surprised that he recommended a modest half-bottle of Bandol, which was more in the 50 euro range. He said his family came from that region so this wine was a particular favorite of his (or maybe he sensed that this meal was a big splurge for us and decided not to pad the bill). PS the Bandol was great with our meal.

We were dining on a weeknight, so the dining room was not very full, with maybe half the tables occupied. At one table, clear across the room, was seated a couple who loudly informed their waiter that they were “not from America, honey, we are from Texas”.  This spoken by a woman who was either drunk or very loud or both.  She was, as the French say, “of a certain age” and dressed in a red strapless leather mini dress.  Throughout the night, she became more and more inebriated, and had to stand up often to go to the bathroom.  In this era, when a lady went to the bathroom at a restaurant of this caliber in Paris, she was escorted to the door of the bathroom by a server.  At Lucas Carton, the bathrooms are reached via a rather tight spiral staircase (built in 1860, remember), so the task was complicated. And not made easier by the fact that the woman kept losing her red stiletto-heeled shoes when she walked.  At one point, Sheila noticed that, reflected in a ill-placed mirror wall, we could see members of the staff in the service area joking about her and wagering if she as going to fall over! The moral is that Americans in Paris have a great advantage: Parisians expect Americans to be like this woman, loud, boorish and entitled.  So if you are polite and try to speak French, in short, if you are not a tactless boor, you are, well served by the contrast and  and Parisians are grateful for it.

For dessert, I remember that Sheila ordered a mille-feuille au vanille, one of the classics of French patisserie.  I am not generally a fan of French pastries, of the sort that fill the shelves or patisseries across Paris, as I find them often too sweet and more designed to look good than to taste good. Give me a slab of some grandmotherly dessert any day. However, this mille-feuille challenged this smug generalization: perfectly simple and perfectly executed in every detail, crisp, only slightly sweet pastry,  rich, smooth cream lusty with Madagascar vanilla, just lightly dusted with confectioners sugar, it was proof that there is a reason why some dishes are classics.  I have never tasted a better mille-feuille since.

Three and a half hours after our arrival, we settled the bill got ready to leave.  It was expensive, like a month’s rent expensive, but in the years since, we have spent more for meals we enjoyed less.  That is the trick with fine dining at the very high end:  it costs a ton, so expectations are sky high and one is very unforgiving of any error (rightly so).  It is a high priced gamble, and I have as often been disappointed in starred restaurants as delighted.  But when it is done right, when the kitchen and the dining room are both hitting on all cylinders, well, there is nothing better.  When we rolled out of Lucas Carton, well fed, warm of belly and comfortably tipsy, into the night only to be face to face with the église de la Madeleine all lit up like Christmas, with all of Paris ahead, one doesn’t mind the price.

End note:  In the early 2000’s, Chef Senderens grew tired of the conservatism and exorbitant prices, that, in his view, were required to satisfy Michelin examiners and maintain stars.  These days, I tend to agree with this point of view and our trips to starred restaurants have become very rare.   At Senderens’ urging, Lucas Carton gave up its Michelin stars, underwent a remodel that added modern touches to the classically elegant dining room,  and moved its menu toward a “bistrot de luxe” model. The restaurant was renamed “Senderens” in recognition to his legacy. Chef Senderens retired in 2013 and the restaurant is once again called Lucas Carton.

It is fair to say that the Baron Rouge changed the way I think about how a public space can and should be used.  Before discovering Le Baron Rouge, I had never been in a place that spent so little time making guests physically comfortable or paying attention to the rules, but was so perfectly fitted to the life of its neighborhood. But that is getting ahead of myself.

Le Baron Rouge first entered my conscientiousness by chance, on a Sunday afternoon, when we happened past it during a stay in Paris. Back in the 1990’s, our favorite Paris neighborhood was near the Place d’Aligre, on the border between the 11eme and 12eme arrondissement.  We always stayed in the (long vanished) Résidence Trousseau, a hotel named after the nearby Square Trousseau. Heading back to the hotel one fall Sunday afternoon, we were surprised to see a big crowd of people filling the sidewalk of rue Théophile Roussel. The nearby street market at place Aligre had already closed for the day and the rest of the neighborhood was settling into its Sunday afternoon torpor, as people headed home for the traditional Sunday afternoon family supper.  But here was a boisterous, happy mob, spilling out between the parked cars and into the street.  What is this place?

Pushing up through the crowd, we discovered Le Baron Rouge for the first time.  Behind its cheerful red storefront, a tiny space, one wall lined with wine barrels, the other with a tiny zinc bar, and one corner filled with five tightly packed tables.  Behind the bar, the wall is covered with small chalkboards listing the (seemingly vast) selection of wines.  A few wine barrels are scattered around as a place to put your glass of wine. Toward the back, a tiny kitchen space, maybe 6’x6′, from which emerge plates loaded with charcuterie or runny St-Félicien cheeses. And everywhere, elbow to elbow and shoulder to shoulder, neighborhood denizens, happily raising a glass to celebrate the fact that it is Sunday and one doesn’t have other obligations.

Ordering is a bit of a struggle:  there is no neat order for approaching the bar, you just push forward. When you get to the bar, the service team is friendly but in a hurry and, therefore, would appreciate you having a ready idea of what you want to order – if you want to chat about the qualities of the wines they offer, show up during off hours, when time is not at a premium. The Beaujolais is chilled, the charcuterie is excellent (especially the smoked andouille sausage from Normandy), you find a little corner to put your plate down and life is good.

The toilets at Le Baron Rouge are also a bit daunting. Access to them is through a small door on one side of the kitchen, so you almost feel you are intruding to go that way. This door leads to a small courtyard, mostly used for garbage cans and bicycles.  Against one wall, a rustic lean-to contains a classic Parisian hole-in-the-floor toilet, complete with a dangling pull chain for a flush.  It doesn’t get any more authentic.

Sundays, especially, are good at the Baron Rouge, that is, if you are in a month with an “r” in it.  Then, a friend of the house who raises oysters in Normandy sets up his table on the sidewalk in front, and sells his stock at rates that, by Paris standards, are bordering on philanthropic.  When there is no longer any space inside, guests make due by using nearby cars, fire plugs, garbage cans, whatever may serve as a table. I once saw a young woman balancing an enormous plate of oysters between two brightly striped construction barriers.

The line to order oysters can stretch down the street.  When it was finally my turn to order, I selected the size 5, preferring a smaller oyster (in France, oysters are sized from “0”, the largest, to “5”, the smallest, don’t ask me why).  The oyster man sized me up with a wry smile and said “Grand américain, très petites huîtres!”, then laughed as if he had made a very funny, slightly smutty joke.  Over the course of many years, he made the same joke every time we were there.

On a later visit, we arrived on a Sunday morning right at the 11am opening time, in the hopes of grabbing one of the coveted tables.  We were in luck and sat down in a corner table for 2 on the crowded banquette. As we started on our first glass of Petit Chablis, the bar began to fill up with people finishing their Sunday shopping at the nearby covered marché Beauveau , some with bags of groceries, some with wheely carts, some with kids in tow.  The oyster guy was setting up his stand out front.  Soon, the room was completely packed.  The couple at the table next to us got up to leave and an elegantly dressed older woman pressed forward to take their place, balancing a glass of wine and a platter of oysters.  As she turned to settle into the banquette, her oversized purse knocked my glass of wine into my lap.  Horrified, she apologized profusely, as we all sacrificed our paper napkins to the spill.  Crisis over, our older neighbor insisted in offering me one of her oysters by way of apology.  I looked down at her plate, to see immense size zeros, the largest size available, fully four inches long.  I politely refused, assuring her that it wasn’t necessary, but was really terrified at the prospect of trying to slurp down one of these mammoths.    But she continued to insist and wouldn’t take no for an answer.  Finally, I agreed and, adding a squeeze of lemon, tipped one into my mouth. Holy mackerel, I felt like a sea lion trying to down a king salmon!  Three gulps later and a little green, I was ready for another glass of Chablis.

Over the years, Le Baron Rouge became a sort of milestone for me; on any visit to Paris, I never really felt like I had arrived until I pushed up to its bar and ordered a glass of wine.  With a deep sign, I could feel the worries of the world falling off.  Once again, Paris!

My memories of La Tartine always seem to be in black and white, from a part of my life so distant that recalling it seems like looking at an old photo.  Except that I remember the yellow of the walls, a streaky, ochre-yellow that comes from years and years of layered tobacco smoke. When we later built Le Pichet, I asked our contractor, who had visited La Tartine, to imitate the effect. He accomplished it using a base of yellow paint with a streaky over-brush of boat varnish.

La Tartine was one of those places in Paris that I was too timid to enter at first.  I had read about it in Patricia Well’s classic “A Food Lover’s Guide to Paris“, a dog-eared copy of which I carried around with me when we lived there. When we first moved to Paris, my French was not very useful, so going into a crowded wine bar, moreover a wine bar that was crowded with French  people and seemingly free of tourists, was a bit daunting.

The evening did arrive when Sheila and I pushed the door of Le Tartine and made our way up to the bar. It was early in the evening, when the crowd was still thin, so we easily found a place at the marble topped bar near the front door.

In those days, in the early 1990s, Le Tartine gave off a feeling of long-cultivated decay.  It still featured its turn of the century decor: a lovely marble topped bar, moleskine banquettes, micro tiled floor, pressed tin ceiling and globe lighting.  But the time was long past that any serious upkeep had been undertaken. Its basement toilets, reached by a winding wooden staircase, were dark, barely lit and featured some of the last “hole in the floor and 2 places for your feet” style toilets in Paris. Tiles were missing from the floors.  The marble bar top had an ugly crack along the short edge.  The faded, wall-mounted wine lists would not have looked out of place in Robert Doisneau photo. In short, Le Tartine looked exactly like I believed Paris should look, drenched in romantic sepia tones and oozing atmosphere. As the room filled with idiosyncratic neighborhood regulars, the vision was completed.  La Tartine was an American’s dream of Paris.

Of course, the real attraction was the wine, which was inexpensive and very good, with 20 or so choices by the glass, mostly Beaujolais and whites from the Loire.  At this stage in its life, La Tartine didnt serve full meals, only snacks to go with wine: platters of charcuterie and the namesake tartines constructed on fat slices of course country bread.  We ordered a tartine with creamy goat’s milk cheese to accompany a glass of Sancerre. Next to us, an older gentleman pulled a dried sausage out of his well-worn raincoat and began slicing it up with his pocket knife, politely offering us a few slices.

The staff were mostly older, matronly women, who, based on their rapport with clients, had worked there for years.  They were terse but friendly, the classic Paris waitperson who is not rude per se but has a lot to do and no time for nonsense.  The owner, an ancient homuncules of a man, bald, round, in shirt sleeves, tie and suspenders, sat it the banquette closest to the bar, going through the receipts and counting bills from an ancient tin cash box. From time to time, he snapped questions or demands at the staff, who rolled their eyes or turned away to avoid answering. The woman working behind the bar seemed to be a particular target of his wrath.  An older woman with hair dyed red, wearing a house dress under her servers apron, she was jovial with regulars and patient with our poor French.

At some point, the owner proffered one comment too many and the woman behind the bar became volubly angry.  She addressed a stream of invective at the boss, broke a glass on the floor and  informed the crowd at the bar that she had had enough and that bar the bar was closed. As silence fell on the crowd, she turned her back and began wiping glasses.  We looked at each other, at our empty glasses and at our neighbors at the bar.  What to do? Our friend with the raincoat and the sausage took it upon himself to act the peacemaker.  “Look!” he said “these people have come all the way from America and their glasses are empty. Surely you can at least pour them another”.  Stepping behind the bar, he put his arm around her shoulders and continued speaking to her in a low voice, mixing supplication and reason, trying to bring her around.   Finally, reluctantly, still angry, she returned to the bar poured us another round.  “What about your friends” said sausage man, “they need a glass also.  With a deep sigh, she began to fill glasses all around.  The clamor of happy voices restarted. It was to be the first of many visits to La Tartine.

Years later, we returned to find it under new ownership, the old owner and familiar servers gone, replaced by a fresh coat of pale lemon-yellow paint, newly up to code restrooms and young waiters in sharp black and whites.  It was a wine bar no longer, but a full restaurant with a menu of classic dishes and tables full of tourists.  At first, the change was a jarring disappointment: what had become of  the sepia patina that so accorded to my idea of classic Paris?   Why would anyone want to ruin such a classic venue? Would all of the classics spots in Paris be lost in the same way?

But as one glass of Beaujolais followed another, I occurred to me that La Tartine had probably looked very much like this on the day it opened, before the decades of smoke and conversation and thoughts has burnished it to a fine old glow.  To have reset the clock was not a betrayal but a new start.

Over the years, I have been lucky enough to have eaten and drunk very well in France. Since my first visit in 1989, through the years of 1990-1991 when we lived in Paris, through frequent return visits after we were once again living in Seattle, until today, when we live full time in Orthez, some the the most memorable moments of my life have taken place seated at a table or standing at a bar somewhere in France. It occurred to me that some of these memories might be of interest to you who read this blog.

So I am inaugurating a new post category which I call “Petites Histoires”, which will relate some of my favorite memories of eating and drinking at restaurants and wine bars in France. These recollections should in no way be considered recommendations:  some of these places are long gone and much lamented.  If the establishment in question still exists, its likely that I havent been there for many years, so I am in no position to recommend or not.

By way of disclaimer, I would point out that these are memories, and experts tell us that a significant amount of what we remember is false. And I would note that a very intelligent and much adored man I was privileged to know was fond of saying that people prefer a good story to the absolute truth, a sentiment which I have taken to heart.  Buyer beware!

Coming soon, wine bar Le Tartine, Paris