The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [170]
I could not have agreed more, though my way of putting it would have been slightly different. But one thing I have learned after thirty visits to Paris is never to trust your reaction to the first night’s dinner, befuddled as you are by jet lag, the romance of Paris, and your half of the wine bottle. These distortions disappear nearly overnight. After drinking two bottles of wine a day, you quickly come down with, I find, a case of temporary alcoholism. You know that this has happened when you wake in the morning and reflexively feel around the night table for a glass of wine. From then on, your judgment is faulty only between meals.
And it was amazing food.
I do not remember which restaurant we were at on the night of my wife’s revelation. I have been eating these days on the edges of Paris, because that is where my favorite food is, la cuisine moderne at les bistrots modernes. It could have been La Verrière or La Régalade, L’Épi Dupin or even Chez Michel. But I suspect it was L’Os à Moëlle because dinner there is always six courses, and the wine list offers mainly 70-franc bottles, $13.60 at July’s exchange rate of 5.15 francs to the dollar, which, I predict, will only improve until the November election. On the other hand, if I could foresee exchange rates, I would be rich enough to buy this publishing house. And then you would see some changes! But even rich as Croesus, I would still eat at these five bistrots modernes and others like them.
Dinner averages 170 francs ($33) plus wine—lunch is less—the food is delicious, and it maps out a new path for the future of French cuisine. In case you have not been paying attention, haute cuisine in France is skirting the edge of calamity.
The origin of these things is always obscure, but we can start in 1992 with Yves Camdeborde, then twenty-six, one of four young sous-chefs at Les Ambassadeurs, the formal, sometimes transcendent, two-Michelin-star restaurant at the Hôtel Crillon. As a teenager, Yves had come to Paris from Béarn in southwest France to apprentice in the great kitchens of the Ritz Hotel, the Relais Louis XIII, and Tour d’Argent before he was hired as a sous-chef by Christian Constant, the esteemed chef at the Crillon. Constant is a fine teacher, but after six years Yves was ready to move on. In earlier years he might have stayed in haute cuisine as the second in command at one of the grand French gastronomic shrines or as chef at a dressy hotel dining room. Instead, he decided to open his own bistro in the Fourteenth Arrondissement, or, as he now considers it, a small restaurant as might exist in the provinces, attracting customers from both the neighborhood and around town. He would offer a limited choice, draw on the recipes of southwest France, charge just 165 francs ($32) for every meal, and call the place La Régalade, which refers to the practice you once saw in Spain and southwest France, where drinkers would squirt wine from a leather bag into their mouths. I suppose it was their way of having fun, like getting a bull to step on your foot in Pamplona.
Yves was taking a great gamble. His fellow sous-chefs at the Crillon helped out now and then, and watched to see if he would succeed. And he did, completely and famously, both in the quality of his food and in his clientele. Soon it was impossible to get a dinner reservation at La Régalade unless you telephoned three weeks ahead. Yves’s business has never slackened.
I have visited La Régalade on nearly every trip to Paris since it opened, with its bright, creamy walls and six-by-ten-foot kitchen. The menu changes a little every week, so by the end of a month nothing is the same but for some specialties whose disappearance might cause a riot among the regulars, like the cochonnaille—a wooden board of salamis, sausages, pâté, and cornichons, some made by Yves’s father. And the perfect little Grand Marnier soufflés Yves learned to make at the Tour d’Argent.
I have eaten