Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [139]
The Paris Café Cookbook: Rendezvous and Recipes from 50 Best Cafés (William Morrow, 1998) and The Bistros, Brasseries, and Wine Bars of Paris: Everyday Recipes from the Real Paris (William Morrow, 2006), both by Daniel Young, are two books I really like, along with Young’s more recent Coffee Love: 50 Ways to Drink Your Java (Wiley, 2009), a photo- and fact-filled little book with fifty recipes for a wide variety of coffee drinks worldwide. Young is no stranger to the culinary world—he’s also the author of Made in Marseille: Food and Flavors from France’s Mediterranean Seaport (William Morrow, 2002) and he served as food critic and columnist for the New York Daily News from 1985 to 1996. He also maintains a great Web site, Young & Foodish (youngandfoodish.com). Young obviously really knows his cafés, both the kind you drink and the kind you frequent. I highly recommend readers note Young’s list of “Café Do’s and Don’t’s” in The Paris Café Cookbook, a few of which are: “Don’t assume a café that carries pain Poilâne has good food. Do ask for pain Poilâne when you order a croque-monsieur” (though note that you will pay a premium for it); “Don’t plan a café lunch for noon. Do plan a lunch at a popular café for 12:55” (despite Mark Greenside’s observation on this page, one o’clock is a popular time for lunch, and the best way to snag a table among locals is to show up just before office workers fill up the best cafés); and “Don’t order a café au lait at any Parisian café, brasserie, bistro, or tabac. Do order a café crème or, better yet, a petit crème” (at some point in the early nineties, café au lait became café crème, and if you order a café au lait you will immediately be identified as a tourist who is about thirty years behind the times).
To Young’s guide to Parisian café decorum, I would add the following reminders: waiters command respect in France, even at cafés, and men and women typically have serving jobs as a profession. Consult the menu posted outside the café before you sit down; Parisians usually know what they want before they take a seat. Cafés (and many restaurants) may have three seating areas, each commanding a different price: at the bar (or au comptoir), where there might be seats but customers usually stand (least expensive); indoor tables (more expensive than the bar); and outside tables, known as à la terrasse (most expensive). If you see tables set with napkins and silverware, don’t sit at one unless you plan on eating a meal. Don’t expect service rapide; allow at least thirty to forty-five minutes to place your order, eat or drink, and pay. If you’re really in a hurry, stand at the bar, where it will be faster and cheaper. If your waiter asks you to pay the bill before you’ve finished, it’s because he or she is going off duty and is required to settle the bill first. Finally, don’t complain about the price of your thimble-sized cup of espresso. You’re in Paris, after all, and you’re paying for the pleasant privilege of obtaining a seat at a table where you can linger—even if your tiny cup is long depleted—for hours.
Though cafés may no longer hold quite the central place in the lives of the French as they once did—according to Harriet Welty Rochefort in an article she wrote for France Today, the number of cafés in France has fallen from two hundred thousand in 1960 to little more than forty thousand today—they are by no means out of fashion. If you frequent the same café on a string of mornings, you may find, as I have, that you see the same people in it, usually sitting in the same spots. As André Aciman notes in Entréz: Signs of France, “Cozy, snug, warm, and secure, a café is not only a second home in a country where homes are always too small, or where being alone is unthinkable; it is a place where one draws closer to others. In La Bohème, everyone would sooner go to a cabaret than stay at