39Vaugirard

I can’t wait to read the newest book by my friend and writing teacher, Ellen Sussman.   French Lessons is the book, and it’s out July 5th.

.

Knowing Ellen, my bet is that this will be a well-told sexy story, with plenty to learn about life and love from the three main characters. Hopefully, she’ll make some allusions to the life we lived in the ’90s when we were in Paris together.

Here’s the official synopsis. More to come after I see her book reading at Booksmith in the Haight on July 13.

French Lessons: A single day in Paris changes the lives of three Americans as they each set off to explore the city with a French tutor, learning about language, love and loss, as their lives intersect in surprising ways.

Josie, Riley, and Jeremy have come to the City of Light for different reasons: Josie, a young high school teacher, arrives in hopes of healing a broken heart. Riley, a spirited but lonely ex-pat housewife, struggles to feel connected to her husband and her new country. And Jeremy, the reserved husband of a renowned actress, is accompanying his wife on a film shoot, yet he feels distant from her world.

As they meet with their tutors—Josie with Nico, a sensitive poet, Riley with Phillippe, a shameless flirt, and Jeremy with the consummately beautiful Chantal—each succumbs to unexpected passion and unpredictable adventures. Yet as they traverse the grand boulevards and intimate, winding streets, they uncover surprising secrets about one another—and come to understand long-buried truths about themselves.

I came upon Le flaneur des deux rives, a charming bookstore near Boulevard St. Michel and Rue de Vaugirard.  Beautiful lithographs and hard to find books line the window.  How lovely to see a line out of Guillame Apollinaire’s book as a name of a book store…

From the New York Times…

I read today that Sheila Lufkin, the author of “Silver Palate Cookbook 25th Anniversary Edition” (Julee Rosso, Sheila Lukins) had passed away. I was struck that her cookbook got me started cooking when i was just out of college, some 25 years ago. During my weekends to NYC from Boston where I attended college, many people were talking about her recipes and her catering company. Many of my most memorable dishes and dinner parties, through my early 20s, 30s and often now with my family, consist of simple dishes that I learned to cook from book. Salut! Here is my favorite recipe from her book. It’s not French, but Spanish/Moroccan, named after a beautiful seaside resort Marbella, where we visited with our friends Jose, just last summer….

[From Chicken Marbella Silver Palate Cookbook Recipe at Epicurious.com]

Hemingway’s descriptions of Paris in A Moveable Feast are as true today as they were then. I’m glad though that I’m no longer trying to decide between a pack of cigarettes and a croissant.

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the baker shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you were skipping meals at a time when you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to do it was the Luxembourg gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l’Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were heightened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry.

From A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

Much of this period in his life takes place in the 6th around our apartment and over to the 5th. The Musée de Luxembourg at the time housed the Impressionism collection that would move after that to the Jeu de Paume, and then on to the Musée d’Orsay. Unfortunately, no where does Ernest mention staying at our apartment at 39 Vaugirard.

I’ve always disagreed with Hemingway on the whole “moveable feast” thing. It’s a great image, but I was lucky enough to live in Paris as a young man, and I never feel like it’s a moveable feast. I certainly have memories of it, and things I crave when I’m away, but, justement, I keep coming back to Paris because I can’t replicate the feelings I have when we’re here.

By the way, in the recent controversy over the new or old versions of A Moveable Feast, I hold with the original, which may be a bit harder to find right now.

If you’re traveled France for 20-30 years, you likely have Madelaine cookie-style memories of French food that are conjured up every time you have a good glass of wine or a hearty boeuf bourguignon. But, if you’ve been to France recently, you may also wonder if France has lost it. I always thought I could take my wife to any old French bistro and get a good meal. I sighed at her reams of articles from Vogue, Bon Appetit, and and Gourmet. Why go to across Paris to get an over-priced meal surrounded by Americans when the little place on the corner had all the classics.

The question still remains whether I changed or whether the food has gotten worse, but I now mostly follow my wife onto the métro across town because I can’t tell the good from the bad looking at a menu placard in the window.

Here’s a review of a new book that tries to deconstruct what has happened to France. It’s a similar description to what has happened to food everywhere.

I can’t tell you how relieved I was when Steinberger’s recent book, “Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine, and the End of France” (Bloomsbury USA), came across my desk not long after we got back from Paris. For weeks, I’d been thinking it was me. After all, my memories of magnificent French repasts were a couple of decades old. Maybe they were too rosy. Maybe my palate had changed. Maybe it was because we hadn’t really planned out where to eat, assuming that we’d walk into deliciousness without any effort. Maybe we were just old and out of it.
ad_icon

Even if all those things are a little bit true, reading Steinberger, a wine columnist for Slate magazine (which is owned by the Washington Post Co.) and admitted “food-loving Francophile,” reassured me. Because there’s more to it than that, he writes. Way more.

Here’s the thing. If you’re a food expert, you’ll know where to go to find tasty food in France. Joe Yonan, who runs The Post’s Food section as well as this one, knows his vittles, so when he visited Paris a few weeks after we did, he planned well, used his contacts and had lots of fine meals. But if you’re a casual tourist, you need to know: You’re not going to find a fabulous meal around every corner. And mostly, the French don’t care.

Take a look at these facts: From 200,000 cafes in 1960, France was down to 40,000 — and dropping — last year. Bistros and brasseries are likewise disappearing rapidly. Certain kinds of cheeses are dying because no one knows how to make them anymore. The wine industry is in upheaval as the French quaff less of the fruit of the vine. Forget the quaint little French outdoor market; they still exist, but the French now buy 75 percent of their food in supermarkets, just like Americans. And “most ominously,” Steinberger writes, “the bedrock of French cuisine — home cooking, or la cuisine familiale — was in trouble. The French were doing less cooking than ever at home and spending less time at the table: The average meal in France now sped by in thirty-eight minutes, down from eighty-eight minutes a quarter-century earlier.”

[From An Unsavory Holiday: Lamenting the Decline of French Cuisine - washingtonpost.com]

We’ll be in Paris on Monday and we have plenty of old standards to go to (some not as good as they used to be), but I’m glad that we don’t have to try to find places to eat “au pif.”

By the way, I lived above the Vagenende (photo above), a beautiful Belle Epoque restaurant at 146 Boulevard St. Germain, and can attest that the food there was once edible, and not the over-done garbage that is served with a sneer there today.

Two ladies in Camelot.…. Who knew… Just read in the Vanity Fair article of how the 1963 American exhibition of the Mona Lisa in New York City and Washington, D.C., was America’s first blockbuster art show. The writer Davids recounts in numbing detail the negotiations, preparations, flummoxes and successes of the exhibit. The exhibition was masterminded by the diplomatically savvy Mrs. Kennedy, whose personal relationships with French cultural minister André Malraux and National Gallery director John Walker overcame negative French press and concerns over subjecting a fragile artwork to a transatlantic journey. Heavily guarded and packed in a custom strong box, the Mona Lisa traveled in a first-class cabin on the USS France. Imagine…

This three-floor, 16,000-square-foot general store near the Marais offers shopping with a conscience; all of the profits are donated to children’s charities in Madagascar. The couple behind Bonpoint children’s clothing fame have put together an irresistible array of cutting-edge design, in-house collections, vintage furniture and kitchen and tableware finds, plus fashion, lowers, a perfume bar, and a used book café. 111 Boulevard Beaumarchais.

Our friend Laila is so rafinée, with such discriminating taste. We’ve become closer friends since she and her family moved to Paris from San Francisco. As she is a French local, she has found for us several places in the neighborhood which are definitely great finds. One is a terrific gathering place for families on Sunday brunch. She found for us Le Pain Quotidien. She also had us meet at Bonpoint restaurant, which of course is housed in the Bonpoint boutique situated in the VIéme arrodissement, not too far from the Sénat, It is a welcoming place, at once sober and chic, with murals on the walls done with chalk, clearly at the hands of little artists. They serve creative Italian cuisine for the entire family. The space is underground, with plenty of space for kids to play and draw while the parents can eat and enjoy adult conversation.

It’s a great way to pass a nice afternoon with tea and snack, or for the children to enjoy the delicious house chocolate mousse or any of the goodies on the menu. The store and restaurant is housed in a grand hotel with a ample courtyard, where the large French doors are opened to the outdoors during the summer. Of course, after your respite, each of the rooms of the hotel/boutique is beautifully curated and showcases the entire Bonpoint children’s clothing and objet collection, as only the French can. 6, rue de Tournon, 76006.

Of all the French poets I’ve studied, Jacques Prévert would be at the top of the pile. He’s melancholy and romantic without being obtuse, which is why many of his poems are turned into songs, like “Autumn Leaves” (which I can almost play on the piano). There is a an exhibit going on at the Hotel de Ville (when did they get so good at this? We also loved their Willy Ronis show a few years ago.) Go on a weekday during work hours or I’m sure you’ll never get in. Pick up a copy of his biggest seller,
Paroles, if you can. Even for an intermediate French speaker, you’re sure to enjoy it.

As part of Prévert trivia, I also learned that he lived near our apartment on the rue de Vaugirard and studied at the Catholic school on the rue d’Assas (directly in front of our apartment) when his family moved back to Paris 1907.

Here’s all the essential information for the exhibition “Jacques Prevert, Paris la belle”

When: 2′th October 2008 to 28th Fébruary 2009
Where: Hôtel de Ville, Salle Saint-Jean, 5 rue Lobau, 75004 Paris. Métro Hôtel de Ville (lines 4 & 11)
Opening hours: open every day except Sundays and public holidays from 10am to 7pm (last ticket at 6.15pm)
Admission: adults 0 euros, kids 0 euros, students 0 euros, goldfish 0 euros. Yep, free for everyone!

[From "Jacques Prevert, Paris la belle," an exhibition at Hôtel de Ville - Hotels Paris Rive Gauche]