Category: Travel

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Our walk up to Montmartre on Friday was beautiful.  By looking for back streets to walk, David found Rue Montorgueil, a delightful, pedestrian street full of markets of all kinds — fruit, vegetables, pastries, and wine — and many cafes.  When we got to the top of the hill, the view of the white dome of Sacre Couer, against the only brilliantly blue sky we’ve seen while here, was stunning.  We sat on a bench and I pulled out my notebook to write.  I noticed the young woman beside me was also writing.

We walked the narrow, cobbled lanes that wind around the hilltop, only briefly passing through the throngs of tourists at the Place du Tertre, which Lonely Planet calls “the pinnacle of touristy Paris,” then headed down the hill, on many “streets” that were stairs, to Le Progres cafe, which I’d found in two guidebooks that claim this is a cafe where Parisians, not tourists eat (a bit hard to believe entirely, since we ourselves are tourists and found it in a guidebook).  It was a lovely cafe, with huge windows looking out on the city, and some of the best food we’ve had (David had an endive and roquefort cheese salad, topped with a heap of arugula, followed by salmon with white wine foam and a top grilled to a caramel perfection, piled on vegetables, while I had the vegetable soup followed by an appetizer plate of arugula and tapenade, on a plate drizzled with pesto).  As with every meal, there was plenty of fresh baguette to sponge up all the sauces and flavors.  As we were about halfway into our meal at Le Progres cafe, the same young woman from the bench at the top of Montmartre came in and sat by the window.  She took our her small notebook and started to write.

We then headed to a small museum with the wonderful name Musee de la vie Romantique — the Museum of the Romantic Life.  Down a cobbled lane is a lovely, small house devoted to the life and work of Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin Baronne, better known as George Sand.  Full of paintings and furniture, and featuring a sweet garden with flowers still in bloom, it was a wonderful, and free, treat.

Walking back to the Marais and our apartment, crossing yet more boulevards and squares and streets, all lined with gorgeous old buildings of stone, David looked up at one point and said, “There’s so much Paris everywhere!”

 

In Adam Gopnik’s new book, The Table Comes First: Family, France and the Meaning of Food, Gopnik has an interesting and thoughtful (though at times over-written for my “taste”) discussion of taste.  Obviously, taste is more than just what we experience in our mouths, it’s also what is considered good, what is “tasteful,” what’s the best, what’s the most popular or current or noteworthy.

Of the numerous people who sent us recommendations for sights and restaurants in Paris, two suggested Chez Dumonet for dinner.  So I made a reservation and we went on Wednesday night.  When I called the restaurant last week, from the U.S, and asked for an 8:00 p.m. reservation, I was told, “Non, 7:30.”  I suspected we were being told to come when the tourists are seated, and I was right.  We arrived to an empty restaurant and were seated in the front room.  Soon other English-speaking customers arrived, all seated in the front room with us.

The food was very, very good, but not any better than the very, very good food we had at an unknown and empty restaurant on Monday night, which we found by asking someone leaving his shop for a good place to eat and try wine.  At Ma Salle de Manger the sommelier/waiter gave us numerous wines to try, talked with us about the food choices, and even drew us pictures of what he meant by the “eyes” of the grape vines.

At Chez Dumonet the sommelier was a happy and helpful man, but the waiter was gruff and clearly not interested in how we experienced the service.  We left with bellies full of fine food and light-hearted from all the wine, but immediately began talking about the impermanence and trickiness of taste.  With food, like with poetry or fashion or art, what is considered the current, or even next, best thing changes, often quite rapidly.  With food it’s especially hard to pin down exactly what is good, because once the meal is done, there is no object left to judge, only the memory of your mouth and your other sensory experiences of the meal.

“There were three restaurants there,” David said as we started walking back to the apartment.  “The front was for tourists drawn by the name they’ve established.  The next room was for French diners, then the inner room was for those closest to the chef.”  That led to a long discussion about taste, how a restaurant or poet or fashion designer or artist gets a “name” and then can get caught only working to serve that name, rather than working to keep truly creating.  The discussion took the entire 3 km walk back to the apartment.  As we walked we passed storefront after storefront, filled with high fashion, and knock offs of high fashion.

Paris is the perfect city to ponder the delights and mysteries of taste.  We spent yesterday at the Musee D’Orsy (more on that in a later post), where what was considered great art changed over the course of French artists introducing bold new ways of painting, art for which there was no “taste” when first shown, but which permanently changed the whole landscape of what happens with paint on canvas.  Today we’re walking up to Montmartre, a part of Paris that has always challenged the city’s concept of what is fashionable and acceptable and correct.  I’ll let you know how it tastes.

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We hunted bread, cheese, wine and art yesterday.  As soon as I got up yesterday morning, I went to the closest boulangerie I could find and got croissants for breakfast, because the night before as we were falling to sleep I realized we had yet to have a croissant.  The croissants were excellent.

As we set out for the day, we headed for a boulangerie that a website a friend sent us identified as having among the top 10 best baguettes in Paris, then headed towards a cheese shop another website had identified as the best, in Arrondissement 7.  On the way,  as we crossed the Seine, a weak sun showed through the grey sky and I hoped for some fair weather for a picnic in Le Jardin Luxembourg, before going to the Musee Bourdelle.  Antoine Bourdelle was a sculptor and a contemporary of Rodin, though obviously never achieved anywhere near the same level of fame.  Another friend had told us about the museum (I made a list this morning of all the sights and restaurants friends have sent as recommendations, and there is no way we have time for it all, even with 9 days in Paris).

We got to the cheese shop and it was closed for lunch — from 1:00 — 4:30.  And it had started to rain.  So we stopped at a cafe for lunch, one of the hundreds of cafes across the city where people stop in for coffee or wine or a salad or burgers, like the two young women who came in behind us ordered.  We walked down rainy streets, lined with lovely shops, to the museum, and along with the usual massive sculptures and plaster casts for sculptures, there was an exhibition of Bourdelle’s drawings, which was advertised as Que du Dessin.

I know enough French to get the sense of something I read, and catch a word or phrase here and there when listening to someone speak.  But there is much I don’t know, and I didn’t know what “dessin,” means, so I asked one of the museum staff if he knew English, which he did a little, which led to a confused conversation about what the word “dessin” meant until I finally figured out it means “drawing”.  Ah, yes, there was an exhibition of Bourdelle’s drawings along with the sculptures.

A kind French woman, who knew a bit more English than I know French came up to us in the middle of the conversation and asked if she could help.  That led to a 5 minute exchange in which she tried to understand what I wanted.  The woman thought I was asking where the drawings were, which struck me as funny, as we were in a room full of drawings, surrounded by other rooms full of drawings.  She must have thought I was even more lost than I seemed.

The cheese shop was open on our way back to the apartment we’re renting, and so was the wine shop I’d read about.  We bought enough cheese for 8 people, a red pepper, a zucchini and a few potatoes.  When we got back to the apartment, wet from the rain and chilled from a long walk through the damp city, we opened the Bourgogne Pinot to let it breath (“If you can get yourself to wait a half hour after you open it, to drink it, that would be best,” the wine shop proprietor had said, “though I usually can’t wait myself.”) and I cooked the potatoes, pepper and zucchini in a big skillet, then scooped the creamy cheese on top to melt into the vegetables.

We drank the wine and ate the vegetables and melted cheese, along with three different varieties of goat cheese we’d bought, along with the baguette.  It was a successful hunt.