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.