1936 On the Continent

with champagne and liqueurs. The two main rules of wine-drinking are:
    (
a
) Delicate wines, with a “bouquet,” should be served before the heavy, coarser, wines;
    (
b
) The quality of the wines served should go in
crescendo
.
    To enumerate all the special dishes of French cooking would be sheer waste of time, for you would immediately forget them all. There are too many. Especially when you think that, apart from Paris, the capital of the world in cooking, France itself has ten or so big gastronomic centres, such as Lyons, Marseilles, Strasbourg, Dijon, Rouen, Nantes, Vienne, Grenoble, Castalnaudry, and a whole series of other cities famous for their specialities.
    Strasbourg represents the German influence in France, with its excellent sausages, sauerkraut and lovely Alsatian wines.
    And what about Paris? Hasn’t Paris any specialities?
The Mecca of Cooking
    When all is said and done, Paris is the quintessence and concentration of all the regional cooking of France and even of foreign cooking too. In Paris, each dish has its special restaurant and its own particular cook. In the old days, the gourmets of Paris used to eat on the run, as it were; they would have their soup in one restaurant, their fish in another, their meat course in another, etc. Even now, if you want a fish meal, go to Prunier; though let me whisper in your ear that if you go to Pascal instead, at the Porte Saint-Denis, you will eat just as well, and instead of paying 50 or 75 francs, will pay 15 or 20 francs. You have certainly heard too of the Tour d’Argent, that wonderful Paris restaurant—expensive though—where each diner who eats duck (naturally they only serve whole ducks ordered in advance) receives a slip certifying to posterity that he had the honour of eating the 7,689th duck cooked there since the restaurant was founded.
    For meat there is not better restaurant than the Ecu de France, and for oysters and hors d’œuvres there is the famous Larue.
    In Paris you can eat the food of any country you like. Chez Korniloff, the former cook of the Tzar, you can taste all the perfections of Russian cooking; while at Little Hungary and the Danube Bleu, you will be served the best dishes of Hungary and Austria. Scandinavian cooking is excellently done, and fairly cheaply, at the Vikings or the Patisserie Danoise.
    There is a restaurant, too, near the Paris wine market called Ducottet, where they serve a perfectly delicious Coq au Vin, and at the top of the Boulevard Saint-Michel a little restaurant, Chez Emile, whose speciality is Escalope à la crème. But the greatest joy of all is to find a favourite little restaurant for yourself, and keep the secret jealously from all but your boon companions. You will have to go through many disappointments and much suffering before you succeed, but when you have done so, how delightful to be able to say to your friends: “I know a little restaurant where …”
Famous Men Fed Here
    Anatole France has made famous the Rôtisserie de laReine Pedauque, 6 Rue de la Pépiniére, not far from the Gare St. Lazare. In the centre of Paris there is also the excellent and not very expensive La-Grille (Rue Montorgueil), and in the Latin quarter, on the Place Saint-Michel, the Restaurant Rouzier. The big cafés in Montparnasse, such as the, Coupole, the Dôme and the Select, serve very good meals at moderate prices. You can also eat well at the Café Versailles, opposite the Gare Montparnasse, and at the famous Closerie de Lilas, at the corner of the Boulevards Montparnasse and St. Michel, which used to be the favourite rendezvous of the Paris writers and artists, in the days of Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde and the Parnassians.

    Afternoon tea, even in Paris, is served much more rarely than in England. But in Paris at any rate you canget excellent tea with all the accessories at Sherry (Rond-Point des Champs Elysées), Rumpelmayer (Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré), Au Danube Bleu (Rue Royale), and at the Pâtisserie Danoise (Avenue de l’Opéra). And, of course, in the tea-room in Smith’s bookshop, Rue de Rivoli. Tea is quite good, too, now in most of the big cafés on the Champs Elysées or the Grands Boulevards.
    Good eating is certainly one of the main attractions of Paris, which I doubt it will ever lose, and you will certainly not be the only one to say, with a smack of the lips as you tell of your visit to France: “And then … the food is so good.”
    But take care and remember the quip of Alain Laubreaux: