Two forty-somethings in Paris, November 15, 2007PARIS ON A THURSDAY …
Well, two weeks have passed since we hit Paris, and I admit at the rate things happen here, it’s beginning to feel a little distant. After my last post, Anne and I had two more days in Paris alone, which we filled almost exclusively with eating. Lunch on Thursday at Guy Savoy was the first of our two mind-blowing meals in Paris. Guy Savoy is a three-Michelin-star restaurant in a backstreet near the Arc de Triomphe. A sliding door (through which you are admitted only if you have a reservation) brings you into a collection of intimate, bright rooms full of African art and lovely objets of all sorts. Our waiter was someone I later learned was one of the best-regarded waiters in Paris, Hubert Schwermer. A German with perfect French, he treated us to an experience almost as special as the meal itself. For one, he told us we were the only non-regulars in the place. Some of the men and women in the restaurant ate there up to three times a week (on expense accounts, natch, as lunch with wine can run a group of four two thousand euros, no problem) but we were the only new faces. This prospect excited him visibly. He loved that we’d never eaten in a restaurant as fine as Guy Savoy and from the instant we sat down, we felt like it was his treat to have us there, not ours. (A sidenote: we had lucked out and reserved the 100 Euro menu, available to one table every lunch and only reservable through the internet, which is why our lunch did not cost the prorated amount all of you no doubt did the math on a couple moments ago.)
Well, two weeks have passed since we hit Paris, and I admit at the rate things happen here, it’s beginning to feel a little distant. After my last post, Anne and I had two more days in Paris alone, which we filled almost exclusively with eating. Lunch on Thursday at Guy Savoy was the first of our two mind-blowing meals in Paris. Guy Savoy is a three-Michelin-star restaurant in a backstreet near the Arc de Triomphe. A sliding door (through which you are admitted only if you have a reservation) brings you into a collection of intimate, bright rooms full of African art and lovely objets of all sorts. Our waiter was someone I later learned was one of the best-regarded waiters in Paris, Hubert Schwermer. A German with perfect French, he treated us to an experience almost as special as the meal itself. For one, he told us we were the only non-regulars in the place. Some of the men and women in the restaurant ate there up to three times a week (on expense accounts, natch, as lunch with wine can run a group of four two thousand euros, no problem) but we were the only new faces. This prospect excited him visibly. He loved that we’d never eaten in a restaurant as fine as Guy Savoy and from the instant we sat down, we felt like it was his treat to have us there, not ours. (A sidenote: we had lucked out and reserved the 100 Euro menu, available to one table every lunch and only reservable through the internet, which is why our lunch did not cost the prorated amount all of you no doubt did the math on a couple moments ago.)
About to have one of the best meals of our lives ...So off to the food itself. We started with a glass of Billecart-Salmon champagne (yum) then were served two amuses gueles, which were brought together, one hidden under the other. The first was a soupe à l’homard, avec une croustillante de chataigne – an incredibly instense five tablespoons of very rich, very delicious bisque. It was served in a ceramic love-seat kind of thing: the ceramic bowl was inverted on the other side of the object to form an upsidedown bowl beneath which was hidden the second amuse guele, a little lobster springroll. Herbert watched us from a discreet distance as we discovered these fine surprises.
It seemed at Guy Savoy that the employees almost outnumbered the guests. The level of attentiveness was such that I had no doubt if I happened to choke on something that I would be Heimliched before I could even gesture for help. The level of expertise and attention exceeds what would be reasonable by anyone’s standards, but since this is as much of a performance as it is a meal, anything that is done to surprise or delight you could never be considered “too much.” You are paying for “too much,” and it is delivered in spades (and glasses and fine china and little tiny bowls and so on).
We ordered our meals and instantly the sommelier appeared to take our wine order. He almost declared a national holiday upon learning what my selection to go with our main course was (gibiers – a platter of sliced wild duck, pheasant, and pigeon done in a crock pot), but of course, he would have steered me elsewhere if he felt it wouldn’t have been a good match. (The 2005 Les Chaillets Condrieu, however, would probably go with Rice Crispies.) Then there was also the white-gloved bread girl, who appeared in order to suggest which of the six fresh-baked breads would go best with each course.
The wine-pourer (note, not the sommelier) came and opened our bottle, poured a very small glass, sniffed it, swirled it, looked at it in the light, sniffed it again, and then to our complete shock and delight tasted it himself. Yes, you are in Paris, people. You don’t tell the server if the wine is drinkable. He tells you.
It was drinkable. (Lord, was it drinkable.)
We shared our starters: a Coquille St. Jacques with parsnip crisps in a rich, dark sauce, the thin scallops almost raw. Then it was the soupe d'artichaux aux truffes et une brioche de champignons avec une beurre de truffes (the second bread dude—maybe he's just the brioche dude—cut the brioches for us and lathered them up from his very special truffle butter pot. He took it with him back to the kitchen). Luckily, this soup wasn’t a member of the opposite sex, or we each would have left the other for it. This was the first of my two encounters with truffles on this trip, and I can now say I understand what the fuss is all about. Black truffles are like eating the earth: a round, pungent, fleshy flavour comes off the black truffles, while the white are another story (although a very good one) entirely. More on the white truffle later, but here the black turned the artichoke soup into a small display of oral fireworks, although “fireworks” suggest flashiness while the taste of this mushroom is fugitive and muscular, and although I can’t imagine this is going to come out right, there is something in the black truffle of the inside of the body, something organal, something like sweat and skin. See, it didn’t sound right. But the taste is lunar, rare, and spectacular.
Our main course was brought to the table still in its crockpot: we were invited to smell it, and then it went back to the kitchen to be sliced up, arranged on an autumnal mix of forest mushrooms and choucroute in a wild- mushroom sauce and topped with a massive slab of foie gras. This was a very ambitious dish and it was probably done perfectly, but we later agreed it lacked something, some layer that would have moved it beyond simple pleasure and made it memorable. The meats were lovely (although pigeon is perhaps a bit too gamey for me) and the choucroute—sauerkraut—gave a slight tang that brought out the flavours of the meat. However, for a restaurant with three-stars, invention and perfection need to go hand-in-hand: we are seeking immortality. Anywhere else, this dish was a homerun, here it was very, very good, but it was not brilliant. After this, the punishment of dessert began. Our ordered desserts came to the table (including a little cake with a candle in it for the birthday girl): terrine de chocolate. Incredible. But then the dessert cart, manned by the impishly grinning Hubert, arrived. Chartreuse guimauve, a spoonful of head-spinningly delicious Earl Grey sorbet (yeah, I know!),
a single raisin enclosed in a little crispy wafer, a chocolate-enrobed fruit jelly. If Hubert wanted us to shout oncle, we were ready. We thought, seeing our glassy-eyed satedness, that he was finally going to leave us alone, but then he reappeared, crying “Regardez qu’est ce j’ai trouvé!” and gave us more treats. Half of this would have been enough, would have ensured that we would remember the meal always, but Hubert had one more thing in store. He’d been visiting us throughout the meal, gossiping … tenderly can be the only word … with us about the rest of his guests, ensuring we were happy, joking with us, and so on. And at the end of the meal, he presented us with the restaurant’s business card, on which he had written “Hubert, Menu de 100€, 22:30.” He explained this meant that when we came to Paris next, he was inviting us to have dinner at Guy Savoy for the same price as lunch, at 10:30. The normal prix fixe at lunch is at least 270€; at dinner, it is 365€. Per person. We were floored. Is this a common courtesy, extended to all Savoy virgins? I have no idea. All I know is that he made us leave the restaurant—stepping into the November Paris sunshine, drunk and full—feeling very special indeed.
After Guy Savoy we went right to the Rue de Rosiers and each had a pastrami sandwich and a hamentaschen.
Okay, maybe we went home and had a nap.
PARIS ON A FRIDAY ...
Happy girl at Le BristolYou can see how much food makes me run off at the mouth. You try to describe Guy Savoy in 750 words or less.
Friday, somehow rested and ready to face the world again, we decided to try Paris’ wonderful “Vélib” bike rental system. Although the strike was placing inordinate pressure on this rental system (175,000 rentals a day during the strike as opposed to 90,000 normally) we found the system worked beautifully. You buy a one-day membership, put in your code, take a bike out of its computerized dock, ride it as long as you want, find one of the hundreds of downtown lock-up locations, and return it. You can walk six blocks, put in your code, and get another bike.
Friday, somehow rested and ready to face the world again, we decided to try Paris’ wonderful “Vélib” bike rental system. Although the strike was placing inordinate pressure on this rental system (175,000 rentals a day during the strike as opposed to 90,000 normally) we found the system worked beautifully. You buy a one-day membership, put in your code, take a bike out of its computerized dock, ride it as long as you want, find one of the hundreds of downtown lock-up locations, and return it. You can walk six blocks, put in your code, and get another bike.
We rode all over, enjoying Les Jardins du Luxembourg, and back up to the Louvre, where we went to see Paris Photo. This November institution is a three-day international photography love-in, with three enormous display rooms commandeered below the Louvre to show everything and anything you can think of. Early salt-paper prints (including work by William Fox Talbot) daguerrotypes, strange colour images made on celluloid from the turn of the century, as well as every photographer you can think of: Steichen, Mann, Steiglitz, Cameron, Bertillon (who invented forensic photography), Man Ray, Nadar, Atget (a stunning self-portrait from the late 1800s, which comprised only an image of his shadow behind the camera; would that I’d had 18,000€), Cartier-Bresson, Hine, Kertesz, Eisenstadt … lord, it was overwhelming and wonderful. The website has a list of exhibitors and you can tour examples of the work they had by clicking here.
After a couple of hours apart (in which I saw a fairly serious bike accident—the traffic crushes in downtown Paris were terrible because of the strike—and watched about seven strangers become a team: two helped the injured biker, three directed traffic, and two called the police and ambulance) we met back at the hotel and got ready for our second Michelin experience. Forgive me for the detail here, but if you can’t bear it, you can skip to the next section.
The stunning winter garden dining room at Le BristolLe Bristol is also behind the Champs d’Elysées; the restaurant shares the name of the hotel it's in: both are among the best in Paris. This restaurant, however, gave us a much more classical experience of a fine meal. The service, impeccable and perfect, was considerably less personal than Hubert Schwermer’s (on the Savoy website, Schwermer is described as "'the European' who is lost without his guests...") But the service was still extremely attentive—almost clairvoyant—and the room was incredibly beautiful. You could see Catherine the Great approving a room like this. It was the dining room on the Titanic, except the only thing to fear was bloating.
Again, some marvellous little amuse gueles arrived (after the immediate offer of champagne; immediately accepted): little jewels of delicious silliness, followed by a strange serving of jelly with bits of beef and carrot within: the warmth of your mouth melted it into a soothing, wonderful soup. And again, an almost embarrassing array of bread appears; the second you pop the last morsel of one piece into your mouth, the bread server (I’d invent the word painnier if it wasn’t so close to the thing you stick on your bicycle) reappears offering more. Here, at long last, is the original fantasy of food, the one from infanthood: it appears magically, just when you want it, and you can have as much of it as you can take.
We were served next a foie gras starter with a sorrel foam, which was very foiey and particularly grasy (and, okay, a little bit salty) Anne had their signature starter, artichoke “macaroni” farcis avec truffes. She loved it.
Ohmigod, this is not bad at all ...
Then they brought two dishes in a row that were in the top five things I’ve ever eaten. The first was Le Bristol’s interpretation of Coquilles St. Jacques. One fat, quivering scallop in a rich, mossgreen watercress & white truffle sauce with three tiny gnocci. I was about to tuck in when a waiter arrived with a small wooden board on which was a glass jar half full of arborio rice and three absolutely monstrous white truffles. He took off the lid, waved the jar under my nose, picked me up off the floor, and then took one of the truffles and shaved five enormous, gossamer slices of it over the scallop. White truffles … well, tell me this: have you ever had sex? I bet you think you have. You probably think that, once in a while, you've even had great sex. Fahgeddabouddit.
White truffles are sex, pointe finale. Absolutely reeking of pheromones, redolent of the human body, its secret fragrances. Put these with a fresh scallop, electric in a watercress reduction, sharpness of seasalt, the sinewy texture of the warm scallop, the melting and explosive taste of the truffle and you have an absolute culinary atomic bomb. This dish took my head off, filled it with rosepetals, the scent of Penelope Cruz’s armpit, and the lost woods and lakes and oceans of my childhood, plopped it back on, then reached down the back of my pants and gave me a giant wedgie. I almost died. And then, while I was quaking with pleasure, my pupils blown, gibbering in lost Assyrian, they brought the next course: a small sole filet stuffed with girolles in a creamy golden pool of sauce aux girolles, a creation of incredible delicacy and force, all at once. 
The way this sole dish complemented the scallop was remarkable: faintly similar textures treated quite differently, but with these arborial notes throughout. Call it a pretence, but these two dishes, together, had more in common with the structure of a sonnet than they did with food. Simple patterns inscribed in a masterful way, unobtrusive-ly rhyming with each other—the abab, cdcd of the sonnet's structure: ocean forest ocean forest, cream salt cream salt—leading to epiphanies. One of these dishes would have made the evening; to have the two of them, one after the other, was to suffer joys heretofore unknown.
The mains were also incredible, but in context, mere brilliance was a letdown after the two entrées.
They served a wonderful chunk of venison in a dark, woody, meaty sauce with roasted beets. Then a cheese course. Sorbet of cassis and blood orange. A roasted fig with a tiny sliver of gold leaf, a fig in jelly (see Anne, below right, deciding if she can survive two enjellied dishes in one night), homemade milk chocolate ice cream, a mascarpone ladyfinger bracketted with tiny splints of chocolate sitting on a crust of opera-cookie, a salt-caramel macarron, and finally, to ensure we could not walk, a teaspoon with a tiny jelly looking like bathbead that when you bit into it exploded a little gush of citrus-flavoured tea.
Okay. I’m hungry now. By the end of this week, I’ll finish and tell all about the Nanny-Grandpapa-boys weekend we had, our last-moment terrors in Paris, and Goodness opening in Girona, Spain, this past weekend.
