Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [75]
A: I always offer classes in Paris in the spring. I love the first-of-season asparagus, peas, baby artichokes, spring lamb, strawberries, and even great tomatoes from Sicily.
Q: Which arrondissement do you live in, and what are some of your most frequent stops in your neighborhood?
A: We live in the seventh and I have my office in the sixth. Favorite haunts are of course Bon Marché (24 rue de Sèvres, 7ème) for both the department store and food hall; Fish La Boissonnerie (69 rue de Seine, 6ème) for dinner; Fromagerie Quatrehomme (62 rue de Sèvres, 7ème) for cheese; the boulevard Raspail street market on Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday; La Dernière Goutte (6 rue Bourbon le Château, 6ème) for wine; Huilerie Leblanc (6 rue Jacob, 6ème) for oil; and Poilâne for bread.
Q: How long were you working at the International Herald Tribune?
A: I worked there from 1980 on, and still do some occasional writing, but gave up my restaurant critic job in 2007.
Q: You’ve obviously experienced a lot of changes in Paris over the last thirty years. Have some things remained the same? And in what ways do you feel Paris changed you?
A: As I said earlier, the markets are the one constant, though the increased availability of produce is one big change. When we moved to Paris, people dressed up, men in sport coats on weekends, women in dresses. Now it seems everyone dresses the same all over the world. Stores are open longer hours. Many small places have gone out of business, but I am pleased to see that there are still so many independent shopkeepers with great boutiques.
Q: I suspect that your wine Clos Chanteduc—a Côtes-du-Rhône that received a score of 89 from Robert Parker—is the one that occupies the most space in your wine cellar. Is it available in the States?
A: Eric Solomon of Eric Solomon Selections (europeancellars.com) is now our importer.
Q: Are you working on a new book?
A: Yes! Two books, to be out in 2011: Salad as a Meal and Simply Truffles, both published by William Morrow.
Q: Will you ever move back to the States?
A: Never say never, but we have no plans to return for good.
At any season, and all year long, in the evening the view of the city from the bridges was always exquisitely pictorial. One’s eyes became the eyes of a painter, because the sight itself approximated art, with the narrow, pallid façades of the buildings lining the river; with the tall trees growing down by the water’s edge; with, behind them, the vast chiaroscuro of the palatial Louvre, lightened by the luminous lemon color of the Paris sunset off toward the west; with the great square, pale stone silhouette of Notre-Dame to the east. The stance from which to see Paris was any one of the bridges at the close of the day. The Pont Neuf still looked as we had known it on the canvases of Sisley and Pissarro.
Paris then seemed immutably French. The quasi-American atmosphere which we had tentatively established around Saint-Germain had not yet infringed onto the rest of the city. In the early twenties, when I was new there, Paris was still yesterday.
—Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday: 1925–1939
Photo Credit 13.3
LES QUARTIERS
It would take volumes and libraries to tell the story of the Marais, so profoundly French is it in every stone, so tied to the wandering of History that human forgetfulness and urban development could do it no harm.
—LÉON-PAUL FARGUE,
Le Piéton de Paris
In spite of its glamorous appearance, Paris is a hidden, private city. You only get to see inside when Parisians decide to let you in. And they only let you in when they know who you are.
—JEAN-BENOÎT NADEAU AND JULIE BARLOW,
Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong
Photo Credit p3.1
The New Left Bank
ALEXANDER LOBRANO
AS THE AUTHOR of this piece aptly notes, it’s really been only recently that the tenth arrondissement was considered worthy of locating in your plan de Paris, let alone considered hip. Yet that is what it has definitely become, along with neighborhoods in the eleventh and twelfth.
ALEXANDER