The Table Comes First Page 3
It was Chantoiseau’s establishment, on the Rue Saint-Honoré, that turned the restaurant from a place where you went to get well into a place where you went to have a good time. Chantoiseau’s restaurant and the others like it that soon clustered around the Palais Royal became places where you could go when you wanted to and eat what you wanted to eat, choosing from a limited but reasonably long list of dishes, sit at your own table with your own friends, and tell yourself you were doing it for your health. Doctors even let women go to restaurants. This was, perhaps, the single greatest revolution the restaurant wrought: under the pretext of health, women could come alone to an open social theater.
One by one, all the other things we associate with restaurants—menus, uniformed waiters, mirrored walls—were established, all with an eye to creating a public place that felt like home, and if not your home then the home of somebody richer, with better servants. “Some twenty years after they were first established, restaurants no longer specialized in providing delicately healthful soups to a genteelly weak-chested clientele but in catering to individual tastes. While the traiteur fed large groups, the restaurateur offered single servings and small, intimate tables,” the historian Rebecca Spang writes. As Diderot noted, writing of Roze’s restaurant, ‘Everybody eats alone there….’ ” The restaurateur invited his guest to sit at his or her own table, to consult his or her own needs and desires, to concentrate on that most fleeting sense: taste.
The restaurant soon sprouted a larger halo of virtue. New restaurants were made under the influence of or, at least, alert to the talk of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s cult of nature, of sincerity and simplicity, which, ironically, affected aristocrats as much as radicals—so that its greatest monuments are the Petit Trianon for Marie Antoinette (who was handed her head) and the Cult of the Supreme Being, the religion invented by Robespierre (who handed it to her). In his New Heloise, Rousseau sentimentally imagines a peasant harvest of the wine grapes. “You cannot conceive with what zeal, with what gaiety, it all is done; we sing, we laugh all day, and work has never gone better. All live in the greatest familiarity, everyone equal and no one overlooked…. One eats with appetite the peasant soup, a little raw and rude, but good, healthy and filled with fine vegetables!”
So it was that on a smaller, edible scale, the new cooking of the restaurant, far from offering fancy dishes you couldn’t have at home, offered plain food that you couldn’t forage for yourself, raw and rude but good and healthy. Jean François Vacossin, the second restaurateur in France, promised “Breton porridge, orange-flower-flavored rice creams, semolina, fresh eggs… fruits in season, preserves from the most famous manufacturers, fresh butter and cream cheese.” This nouvelle cuisine, as it was called, was hard to define, but everybody agreed that the food was simpler than the old food, was good for you, and was eaten only by the best people—as nouvelle cuisine always is. In a document dated to 1739, the “Letter of an English Pastry maker to a new French cook”—the Englishman(!) already summons the French cook back to primal simplicity. We greedy eaters are always being summoned back to primal simplicity, as women in vogue are always being called back to classic fashion. (No one recalls that five years ago the shorter skirt was classic, too.)
Voltaire—not surprisingly, given the Rousseauian rhetoric of the restaurant—thought the whole thing was nuts, and said so. His diatribe against the new cooking, which some academics have insisted on interpreting as an allegorical protest against Communion, now appears to have been actually a diatribe against the new cooking. “I swear that my stomach cannot bear the new cooking. I cannot bear sweetbreads swimming in a salty sauce nor a hash composed of turkey, hare and rabbit, that dreams of being mistaken for a single meat. I don’t like either pigeon in the frog style”—that is, flattened and deboned. “When it comes to cooks, I wouldn’t know how to bear the essence of ham, nor the excess of morels, mushrooms, peppers and muscade, with which they cover meats healthy in themselves.”
It might seem odd that what was meant to be romantically “simple” appeared to a jaundiced Enlightenment eye as needlessly complex—the morels and mushrooms doubtless were defended as striking that healthy country note—until one recalls that this is a standard event in the history of cookery: one need only remember the complaints about small fussy things centered in large empty plates to see that the same thing happened with the last burst of “new cooking,” back in the 1970s. What looks like nature renewed to the new cook’s eye always tastes like contrivance in the old diner’s mouth.
There are no “Eureka!” moments in cooking. The real pattern of change that brought about the restaurant revolution looks less neatly segmented than the myths. The difference between Russian and French service; the communal habit of a coup de milieu; the mixing of fish and meats; the division of the meal into three courses; the sequencing of wine—far from being attached to a single moment of discovery and a clear sequence of customs, each of these new things arrives, and fades, and reappears, and, in the way of the world, becomes the norm before it is ever the oddity. Some things that seem traditional are very new. The order of wines, sparkling to white to red to brown, and the idea that wines should match the dishes, is a twentieth-century invention. Some that seem to be modern (the division of the meal into three courses—small treat, meat, and sweet—for instance) date to the sixteenth century. (The evolutionary basis of the sweet as coda is argued to be part of our ape heritage; they end with bananas, too.)
For a new thing to take, it needs a new soil, a new kind of city, a new place for it to happen. The restaurant, whether as a health bar, or as an outgrowth of the café, may have had no special moment of creation, but it did have its primal savannah. It turns out that, with eerie exactitude, we can localize the field of invention of the restaurant to one small place, still with us: it all happened in and around the Palais Royal.
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Every tourist in Paris knows the Palais Royal as it is today: its great formal garden girded by long allées of plane trees, where neatly dressed functionaries crisscross en route to and from the Ministry of Culture, as in the great Cartier-Bresson photograph—with the placid arcades on all four sides filled by strange antique shops that sell old clothes and French medals. (Now newly invaded, sadly, by chic fashion boutiques.) Colette lived there, and photographs of her mad hair and wise face at her window are part of the Palais’s legend.
But its note of elegant retreat and quiet mystery is a new one. The Palais Royal of the late eighteenth century was the shopping center of the Lumières, the first modern mall. The private property of Philippe, the duc d’Orléans, who was “the first prince of the blood,” one of the richest men in Europe, he was an enlightened aristocrat who invented radical chic, in the end paying for it with his life. Known by the slightly used-car-salesman moniker of Philippe Egalité—Equality Phil—he was the prince of the hopeful prerevolutionary period when radical political philosophy took its inspiration from an idea of “English” free-market enterprise: the monopoly in bits and pieces of trade held by aristocrats was one of the complaints against them. It was very much as part of his egalitarianism, not as a piece of hypocrisy against it, that Philippe decided to rent the four great arcades of his palace to merchants: to modistes, tailor shops, bookstores, but above all to new places to eat and drink. Under Philippe’s protection, the Palais Royal became a petri dish of edible ideas, mutating and multiplying and then being devoured.
Although Chantoiseau’s first true restaurant was just around the corner on the Rue St.-Honoré, it was in the Palais Royal that the café and the restaurant flourished, and then, cross-fertilized by strange twistings of hunger and commerce, evolved into the thing we know now. All of the first great generation of restaurants—Véry, Méot, Beauvilliers, which were perhaps the most famous, if not the best, of the new places—found a home there. It is hard, walking through the Palais Royal today, to re-create what it must have been like in 1780: the noise, of course, and the sense of bustle, and the constant clandestine cons
piracies and argument. We would have been shocked by their dirt, and delighted by their debate.
The revolution, far from sparking this change, actually dampened it briefly. Even as restaurants prospered in the Palais, the Jacobins of the Terror became suspicious of them—not because they were linked to the old kind of ostentation but because they were linked to the wrong kind of simplicity, had a tang of Petit Trianon fresh-butter-and-cheese nouvelle wholesomeness about them. The revolution, in its most radical moments, encouraged “grands couverts,” instead—the tables d’hôte of the Reign of Terror, where people sat at long tables, sharing the food and telling each other loudly what a good time we are having, Citizen, never mind the produce! Philippe himself, who had patronized the early restaurant, paid with his life during the Terror, as a victim of the Jacobins who regarded his revolutionary fervor as mere ambition. “Champagne is the poison of the people,” Robespierre announced, turning down an invitation to dinner. Blood was the people’s liquor.
Yet, though the revolution did not create the restaurant, in the end it could not stop its growth. The revolution was the lightning that struck the primal soup already in place and helped a new form of life to emerge. “If the French revolution had a detrimental effect on almost all the arts,” the gastronome Alexandre Grimod de La Reynière would write, and no fan of the revolutionary politics, he, “that was not the case with cooking; far from having suffered as a result, it has the Revolution to thank for its rapid progress and motive force.” The fifty years between 1780 and the revolution of 1830, when the world that we think of now as Parisian came into being—the soft-power civilization whose authority the great gastronome and liberal Brillat-Savarin tried to trace when he published The Physiology of Taste in 1825—were when it all happened, and it nearly all happened in the Palais Royal, “this lewd hanger, brazenly tweeting with some mad gaiety,” as Balzac called it. By 1805, there were fifteen restaurants and twenty cafés under the arcades; the most famous of the cafés, the Café de Foy, occupied no fewer than seven full arcade arches. The Foy was at number 59, the Beaujolais Theater at number 13, the Café Corazza at 12, and at number 80 was the Café Chartres, which persists to this day, largely unchanged, as the Grand Véfour. My intimations of origins were not false; the sun-flooded room with the dainty enameled nymphs really was the savannah from which Restaurant Man emerged.
Though Beauvilliers was the most famous of the first-generation restaurants, Véry, run by two brothers of that name, was perhaps the first “three-star” restaurant recognized as supreme—the undisputed top temple, first in a line that would pass through Maxim’s and end in its classic form at the Tour d’Argent. Though the Véry brothers’ first place was in the Palais Royal, they soon had an offshoot in the Tuileries, lodged in a specially designed, self-contained neoclassical temple on the Terrace des Feuillants. (Alain Dutournier’s contemporary Carré des Feuillants, off the Rue de Rivoli, is named in its honor.)
Theater lovers put themselves to sleep at night imagining the performances from the past that they would love to have seen: Richard Burbage, say, in the original Hamlet, or David Garrick in the eighteenth-century production. People who love to eat lull themselves thinking about the places where they wish they could have eaten. What would be the five restaurants that a greedy eater would most want to have dined at, but that no longer exist even in ghost form? Maybe the Café Foyot in the nineteenth century, when côtes de veau Foyot had just been invented; Prosper de Montagne, the first of the luxury bistros of the 1920s; or Pyramide in its heyday in the 1950s, with Fernand Point at the stove; or maybe Michel Guérard’s original Pot-au-Feu in the 1970s. (A list to which now will be added, as it closes, Ferran Adrià’ elBulli, in Catalonia.) But certainly Véry in its little temple should be very high on the list of restaurants to dream of.
And, just as the theater lover hesitates, worrying what Garrick or Burbage would have really been like in Hamlet—embarrassingly broad? surprisingly subtle?—greedy eaters worry whether they would have relished or been bemused by a Véry meal. What would we have eaten there? The menus that survive from its contemporaries (I know of none from Véry itself) alternate between dishes that one might make tonight—beef braised in Madeira, garnished with vegetables; grain-fed chicken with crayfish butter—and others that seem to belong to a weird remote past: a sauté of lark filets; filet of partridge in aspic with almond milk and rusks. Doubtless this duality is what we would register at a David Garrick performance, too: if we could go back to any past, we would surely be struck by how past it seems, its best fruits inevitably seeming dried, as seeds of the present we know now. An eighteenth-century Shakespeare performance would surely swing between recognizably sublime moments and weirdly remote rhetorical flourishes; even watching films of early-twentieth-century acting we rock uneasily between Madeira-braised beef and sautéed lark. So, surely, dinner at Véry. We would have been struck, for one thing, by how odd their drinking habits were, with sweet wines offered throughout the meal—sherries and ports. The familiar wet progression—starting with champagne, and then a bottle of white wine, on to red wine, then liqueurs and brandies, ending with a sweet wine—is a late invention, and largely English.
Though something like familiar “French cuisine” would have been found, life in the lewd hanger was, above all, mixed up. And it was the mixing-up in the kitchens, as much as the screwing in the apartments above, that made it lewd. The restaurants at the Palais Royal were, as often as not, what we would now call “ethnic,” not narrowly “French.” The cuisine of the Palais Royal was open. Things poured in. “Wines have been imported from all over the world,” Brillat-Savarin tells us proudly—not a boast that a French food writer would be inclined to make two centuries later—and “French cookery has annexed dishes of foreign extraction, such as curry and the beefsteak and relishes, such as caviar and soy.”
At least two of the most famous and admired restaurants in the Palais Royal were proudly “Provençal”: Les Trois Frères Provençaux—actually run by three brothers from Provence (Maneille, Trouin, and Simon)—and the Boeuf à la Mode, founded by two brothers from Marseille. Both flourished at a time when Provence was as exotic as the Maghreb is now, when familiar dishes such as braised beef and bouillabaisse were what tagines and couscous seem today. That Provence could have contributed to the lewd hanger’s cosmopolitanism, achieved by métissage, strange mixing, shows you how sedate a world the Palais restaurants were shaking up. That braised beef with poached vegetables, still the best of company dishes, should ever have been considered “à la mode,” much less exotic! The secret to its dazzle, then as now, was to add a calf’s foot in the braising liquid, to make it gelatinous. (I remember the odd pride with which my favorite Parisian butcher would include the foot, somehow so white and forlorn, with the roast when you told him what you wanted to make.)
The cosmopolitan current did not flow from Provence alone; when Brillat-Savarin said that a Paris meal could be a cosmopolitan whole, he meant that everything was there. Everyone talked about how many kinds of food you could find—the cuisine of the provinces, of course, Béarn, and the southwest and Burgundy, which kept some of their character as little countries right up to the coming of the railroads and the highways. But still more the cooking and goods of Africa, and America and Asia. “French cooking” was a composite disguised as a whole, an airborne and seaborne thing recast as a shoot from the soil.
Another change that the new restaurants imposed in the 1790s was the abandonment of French or banquet service for what the French themselves called Russian service, which is just what we today think gives order to a meal: instead of a lot of dishes placed nobly on a table with servants to serve them—Carême’s idea of dinner—dishes would come one after another, in an order chosen by the host and his chef. The loss in architectural splendor and arrangement of the kind Carême made great was compensated for by a gain in freedom: once every diner was brought his own dish, soon every diner could choose his own dish.
The passage from
French to Russian service turns out, the historian Jean-Louis Flandrin reports, to be a lot more complex than it seems. It took place over time, and, indeed, probably seemed less marked when you experienced it than when you read about it. It is sometimes said that, in the grand French service, the diner’s place at the table determined what he ate: if you were seated down by the beets, beets is all you got. (I have been to New York dinner parties where, seated down among the lesser notables, this was true: you ate what was nearest, and what was nearest was a sign of who you really were.) But in the novels and histories from the period that is not the way people eat at all; what later historians overlook is the superabundance of footmen, ready to help you get the bits you wanted from the other end. One of the hardest things for modern people to keep in mind is the difference between a servant-scarce and a servant-rich environment. Whether the service at the table was Russian service or French service, it was servant service. “It makes a servantless New Yorker sore, to think that Mozart had to bare his head,” Auden wrote once. “But Mozart never had to make his bed.” Servants are to history what dark matter is to the universe: the omnipresent thing that affects everything but that no one quite sees. But surely the change to Russian service was driven, just a little, by fear of footmen, too. “The presence of valets at table is the greatest scourge that can be inflicted on a meal. Their eyes avidly devouring all the dishes, their ears mopping all the opinions, and their tongues always ready to denounce their masters,” the lawyer-turned-bon-vivant Grimod wrote. Even if the threat of betrayal was made melodramatic, the problem was probably really there.
It took time to turn this mixed-up menu into a single ordered enterprise. If the story of the transition from French to Russian service is cloudy, the idea of “French cooking” is truly foggy. Though the idea of “French cuisine” as a systematic enterprise with a single starting point and a neat underlying grammar would spread out to take over the world, French restaurant cooking in 1810 was really a jumble of country food, health food, city food, old chefs from fancy families, and cheap food for hungry people. Only in reading about it later did anyone think of it as old, fixed, and neat as a pin.