One of the joys of living in France is that you are never more than a train ride away from Paris. From our TGV station in Orthez, you can leave in the morning and be in Paris in time for a lunch reservation. A few weeks ago, we took advantage of the great French train system (and our Cartes Senior Advantage, which give fat discounts for voyagers over 60…not everything about getting old sucks!) to spend a couple nights in Paris with the goal of seeing a couple interesting museum exhibitions and, of course, dining.

Before lunch one day, we stopped for an apéro at Bistrot Vivienne in the Galerie Vivienne, one of the storied passages that dot central Paris. The fantastic Belle Époque ambiance is included with he cost of the drinks, as are the olives. This galerie is also home to one my favorite Paris bookshops, Librairie Jousseaume, which has been in this location since 1826. Jousseaume specializes in rare and antique books, so I rarely find anything in my price range. But the shop is such a voyage back in time that I like to brows and maybe take home a few old postcards or a bookmark.

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

Recently spotted on a wall in Paris’ 11eme arrondissement.  Roughly translated, it reads “The era of impunity is coming to an end”. Hmmmm.

Of the long list of things to accomplish before we can move to France, getting approved for  a Long-Stay Visa is one of the most important.  We took the first step in that process earlier this month when we made an appointment with the French Visa office in San Francisco. We had already filled out the preliminary forms on-line but the next step is an in-person meeting at the nearest office.  Here we go!

The process of getting my Student Visa in 1990 taught me a couple things about dealing with French bureaucracy.  First, be patient, don’t get upset and keep an upbeat attitude. Second, remember 1) when your application goes way off track and you feel like going over the counter at some annoying clerk.

I remember arriving in Paris in August 1990 with my temporary visa in hand and excited to start cooking classes at Ferrandi.  As instructed by the French Consulate in Seattle, during my first week in Paris, I headed to an address out past the last metro stop at La Chapelle where I was to request and receive my Carte de Sejour, the official document that gives students the right to live in France.   The interior of the building was what I imagine a first view of Ellis Island must have been like in the 1880’s, a vast hall with row after row of benches filled with visa seekers from every part the the world. There must have been 500 people in front of me in line!  Fortunately, after waiting for 20 minutes in line, I discovered that there was a special window for student visas, where only about 20 people were waiting.  Long story short, when I got to the front, the list of documents demanded by the woman working was completely different than the list I have been given to bring.  I trooped off to seek the new list of documents, only to return a week later and be told by a different clerk that I needed still different documents.  I finally asked the name of this person so when I came back with the list they had requested, I could speak to them directly and not risk someone else’s list.  Whew!  Then I still had to travel across town for a medical exam, but that is a whole other story!

With high hopes of a Much Simpler process this time, full of optimism but also prudence, we headed to San Francisco.

We arrived 15 minutes early for our Visa Application Appointment, which was in a lovely neo-Gothic building located at 110 Sutter Street.  The staff was friendly, but no nonsense;  it was clear that, if you didn’t have all the documents requested, things would turn much less friendly quickly.  I have to say, as a technology skeptic, I love the old school way that French bureaucracy works…there is an obsession with having hard copies of everything and one could believe that the process hasn’t changed that much in the last 200 years.   The clerk filled out longhand a number of forms that described why we were requesting a visa then gathered all our accompanying documents.  She then pulled out a brand new dossier folder (you know the kind with the fold-over flap that is secured with an elastic band) to it all.  The final file, which would be sent to the French Consulate in Washington DC, must have weighed four pounds. She finished by putting a sticky label on the front and filling it out by hand with a felt tip marker.  I can only imagine that there must be a French government warehouse somewhere filled with row after row of shelves holding the millions of such dossiers representing every person who has ever applied for a French visa.

The final step is fingerprinting and having photos taken.  Our dossiers were complete.  Now we wait and see if we get our Visas.  The official line is that we should have our visas in 15 business days, but the person who filed our application warned us that not much gets done during the holidays, so we should be prepared to wait longer. Very French.

Café Presse and Le Pichet were very proud to have been asked to be a part of the 2017 Premier Chef’s Dinner to support the great work they to that the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.  The gala dinner, that featured guest speaker and culinary icon Alice Waters, as well as a host of top Seattle chefs, took place last Sunday May 21.

For their cocktail hour hors d’ouevre offering, Café Presse chef de cuisine Patrick MacWhorter and Le Pichet chef de cuisine Dave Cooper chose a mini-version of the classic Parisian sandwich, the jambon-beurre.  The ultimate in simplicity, the jambon-beurre consists only of good bread, salted butter and jambon de Paris.  Their version featured house-made Paris-style ham, sea-salt butter from Brittany, house made brioche and a garnish of cornichons.

Thanks to our good friend Stanley Purdue for this great photo, taken on the terrace of the the Café des Mousquetaires, near the Bastille.  Wish that I was there.

In the past, if you had heard of the Clown Bar at all, it was likely in the context of its wonderful Belle Epoque clown decor, which is so iconic that is often shows up in architecture books on cafes of Paris.   The design pays homage to the Clown Bars history as a hangout for performers and audience members from the nearby Cirque d’Hiver, long home to Paris’ circus.  Paris legend has it that Toulouse-Lautrec, among others, used to spend time bellied up to its zinc bar.

A few years ago, however, the team behind popular 2nd arrondissement restaurant a vin Saturne bought the Clown bar, washed away more than a century of tobacco stains from its hand-painted glass clown murals and re-purposed it as a bistro specializing in clean, thoughtful, modern French cooking.  For those of you who might jump to the conclusion that “modern” is a pejorative term for me in the context of French cooking, let me assure you that, in this case, it is not.  The food is simple and well prepared, the ideas and flavors direct and delicious, all while still subtly evoking traditional french bistro fare.  In other words, modern in the best sense.  The foie gras terrine smothered with shaved raw champignon de Paris and the beignets of sea snails with aioli were both perfect examples of the kitchen’s style:  surprising updates on traditional dishes that seem both new and intuitive at the same time.

The wine list skews decidedly natural, at least that is what I have heard.  When we were there, the young man running the dining room made lovely wine recommendations after discussing our menu choices with us, so I never had to look at a wine list.  All his choices seemed well considered and showed a real affection for the rapport between simple food and simple country wines (which is code for nice wines that went will with the food and didn’t break the bank).

Lots has already been written about the young Japanese chef and French sommelier who are in charge, so I wont add to the œuvre.  Suffice it so say that is is always a pleasure to find a new spot in Paris doing good food at a fair price.

The Clown Bar
Address:  114 Rue Amelot, 75011 Paris
Tel: 01 43 55 87 35
Reservations:  Always a good idea in Paris, especially in a small space such as this.

On the borderline between the 11th and 12 arrondissements and to the east of the Bastille is a neighborhood that is referred to alternately by reference to its main thoroughfare (the Faubourg Saint-Antoine) or its metro stop (Ledru Rollin), or, as often as not, by its market, the Marché d’Aligre.  Which makes sense, because the market is  the heart of this neighborhood, and like its neighborhood, it is an amalgam of the very traditional and the current, old and young, bursting with the flavors of France, which in modern Paris means also North Africa, the Levant and Asia.

The market consists of one of the oldest covered market in Paris, the Marché Couvert Beauvau, and the street market that spills out of the Beauvau into place  and rue d’Aligre , from which the market takes its name.  Quite simply put, this market is one of my favorite spots anywhere, and one that I almost never miss when I am in Paris.

Packed with too much stuff for any description to do it justice, it’s a market that demands that you just wade in and experience it.  Here are some of my favorites:

Poissonerie “La Marée Beauvau”, inside the covered market, a beautiful selection of fish and shellfish, and they have a single table for 2 where you can enjoy a plate of oysters and a glass of muscadet.

Boulangerie Moisan, an organic bakery facing the market  The fennel and raisin rolls are fantastic.

Fromagerie Philippe Langlet inside the covered market offers the most amazing selection of goat cheeses I have ever seen.

Boucherie “Les Provinces” along rue d’Aligre behind the market vegetable stalls;  you can select your preferred cut of “bio”  beef, lamb or veal butcher case, then pay the 9 euro “droit de cuisson” to have them cook it and serve it to you with salad and roasted potatoes in the small dining room next door.

At the south end of rue d’Aligre, Halal butcher shops predominate, some with rotisseries offering roasted merguez sausages in addition to the more usual roasted chickens.

The surrounding neighborhood is particularly rich in restaurants, bars and wine bars, like the legendary Le Baron Bouge, (formerly Le Baron Rouge…it’s a legal thing, don’t ask) where shoppers  meet for a glass of wine and a plate of charcuterie after the market closes.  Also not far are Chardenoux, Au Vieux Chene, l’Ebauchoir and Le Siffleur de Ballons, all places that find their way on to my list when friends ask for Paris recommendations.

Marché d’Aligre / Marché Couvert Beauvau
Place d’Aligre and along rue d’Aligre between rue Charenton and Faubourg St.-Antoine
Paris 12eme