Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [143]
A: The original number was 101, but that sounded too much like a college intro course, so I added another one. I arrived at the choice of a hundred restaurants because I wanted to offer a broad selection of excellent tables in all parts of the city and in all different restaurant classes and categories without becoming encyclopedic. When I look at a restaurant book with a thousand restaurants, I always find myself wondering, “But which ones are really good?” In Hungry for Paris, they’re all really good—these are the places I’d send close friends who love good food.
Q: I understand that you only replaced about a dozen restaurants for the second edition of your book, which seems to me to be a statement about the consistent quality of places to eat in Paris—after all, it’s possible that you could have had to replace many more. Do you find that the level of quality is generally higher, and that places don’t open and close with such rapidity as often happens in the States?
A: There are fifteen new or revised restaurants in the updated edition of Hungry for Paris, which is indeed a reflection of the fact that the Paris restaurant scene is less novelty driven than that in other major cities on the one hand, and also a reflection of the fact that the best-quality restaurants in Paris are much more enduring than similar tables in, say, London or New York.
Q: When you first moved to Paris, in 1986, you bought three restaurant guidebooks. Which ones were they, and what were their shortcomings?
A: I bought Patricia Wells’s The Food Lover’s Guide to Paris, the Michelin guide, and the Gault Millau guide. The one I used the most was Patricia Wells’s book, because it offered a complete portrait of every restaurant in terms of cuisine, history, décor, and clientele and had a friendly, reliable tone. The Michelin guide in those days was still a sphinx (this was before they started adding a few tag lines of copy) so it wasn’t very helpful, and I found Gault Millau rather too Gaullist and self-congratulatory in tone. I travel a great deal for my work as a food and travel writer, and so I often avail myself of guidebooks, Web sites, etc., as a consumer. With this experience, I wrote the Paris restaurant book I’d be hoping to find if I were visiting Paris as an adventurous and intrepid food lover, or looking for a subjective survey of the city’s best restaurants with write-ups that would fully prepare me for the experience I’d have if I chose this place—Where is it? What’s the atmosphere like? Who goes there? And so on. I want all of this information in addition to an erudite judgment of the kitchen, and if I’m going to carry a pound or two of paper with me on a trip these days, I also want something that will be fun to read.
Q: Is there a food guide to another city in the world that you thought was well done and that might have inspired you for your own book?
A: The restaurant guide that first made me aware of the literary possibilities of restaurant guides was Seymour Britchky’s The Restaurants of New York (1977), which offered witty, amusing, useful portraits of a constellation of New York City restaurants that this author, a very good writer, liked. It was published by Random House and the editor was Joe Fox.
Q: When you were growing up, what were some books or movies that inspired a love of travel? And similarly, what have been some of your favorite books about Paris or France that you treasure as an adult?
A: My love of travel began as soon as I learned to walk, a curiosity that was profoundly nourished by my paternal grandmother, Jean, who was one of the most intrepid travelers I’ve ever known and who fanned the flames with black-and-white postcards from Egypt, India, Persia, Peru, and many other places. As soon as I learned to read, I devoured a series of books called The Land and the People of … that I found at the Westport, Connecticut, public library. These nonfiction books presented the history, geography, etc., of a variety of different countries