Bon's Voyage, Chapter 5: Destination Finale, Bienvenue à Paris

Editor's Note: Last year, Joe Bonwich traveled to his niece's wedding in Loctudy, a village in Brittany, France. The first four installments of the journal of his travels were published last year here on stlmag.com. After the tragedy in Paris last Nov. 13, we held the final installment, which we’re publishing now as a tribute to April in Paris and the resilience of the city and its people.  

Now that we’ve reached Paris, it’s time to close out this travelogue with a focus on food.

After arriving at the Gare du Nord on the Eurostar, we barely squeeze our rolling bags through one of the sliding gates – which, it would turn out, would be infinitely easier than getting them into the elevator at our hotel – and descend into the Métro. It’s been more than 25 years – and the cars are cleaner and everything, including the distinctive half-tone-harmony warning sound, is electronic – but the timeless, human-stoked eau de Métro fragrance still wafts through the station.

Our first hotel is L’Atelier Saint Germain, tucked in just off of the Boulevard de Montparnasse about 50 yards from the Vavin Metro station. I don’t know this part of Paris – I’d rarely ventured this far south of the Seine. It’s already close to 9 p.m., and we’re hungry, so as soon as we find the hotel wi-fi, I start hitting Zagat and Michelin and even Yelp to try to find a good restaurant. I also have a professional-concierge quality list from an American bon vivant of my acquaintance who’s had multiple stretches in residence here.

Ooh, there’s one close: Le Timbre. Zagat gives it 25 for food. It’s a little pricey, but food is one place where we’re not going to skimp.

And after our ten-minute walk, we discover a handwritten sign that we’ll find way too many times over the course of the next eight days: “Fermeture du 27 Juillet au 24 Août,” or something similar. France closes for August.

We end up at a brasserie, Le Rousseau, which has enough people chattering in French at its sidewalk tables that we’re easily drawn in.

And we’re just as easily made as Americans. The maître d’ is charming, but switches to English as soon as I open my mouth. He at least has the politeness to ask if we want a French menu or English menu. (I’m not warmed up yet, so we choose English.)

The waiter arrives. We’re famished, and order the grilled daurade, a Mediterranean fish served whole, and steak-frites, hanger steak and fries.

“Bien cuit?” asks the waiter, at once indulging my attempts at French and condescendingly indicating that all Americans order steaks well done.

“Bleu,” says I, indicating a French level of doneness that’s to the left of rare. For the rest of the meal, he and I are best buds. And the meal, although a little trite, quickly reminds me that even the basic restaurants in Paris have good food, lest they not survive.

Day 2 involves the usual suspects in this part of Paris – the Jardin du Luxembourg, the book stalls on the banks of the Seine, Notre Dame, the courtyard of the Louvre and the eastern end of the Champs-Elysées, with random churches and statues tossed in along the way.

No less of a St. Louis dignitary than Paul Azzara, former head of the local Alliance Française, has pointed us to one of his favorite restaurants in Paris, Au Vieux Paris d’Arcole, on the Rue Chanoinesse about a block from Notre Dame. It’s packed for lunch – a good sign – and although not cheap (there’s only one menu regardless of when you eat), we refuel leisurely on giant garlic-supercharged snails, an oversized plate of carpaccio and six huge scallops. Plus we can say that we’ve eaten at the oldest restaurant in Paris (dating to 1512). Plus we get free access to a wonderful melodrama in which our waiter throws a Parisian fit because a couple tries to pay with a 500 euro (about $560) note. They finally go to an ATM to get something smaller, they leave and his entire demeanor changes as he switches to a big smile and in multiple languages informs everyone at the streetside table tables that only Russian mafia would try to pay with a bill that big.

After that kind of lunch, we downsize our dinner budget and have duck, rumpsteak, and a huge caprese salad for a 20 euro prix-fixe at Le Montaigne, a brand new place around the corner from our hotel which allowed us to eat well while watching the passing parade on the Boul Montparnasse.

The wedding comes next – see the previous installment in this series – and upon our return to Paris, we again end up in Montparnasse, one arondissement to the south. Our room is six floors up with a view and more than twice the size of the first. Between this, a cost of less than $100 a night and the service we receive, the hotel deserves its name mentioned – Villa Montparnasse.

Gourmet shops and restaurants – and a ramshackle hardware store – line the Rue Daguerre a block from our hotel. (Mental note: Take lots of pictures.)

It’s here I discover two cheese boutiques, including a branch of Androuët, which has been hawking cheese in Paris since 1909. Sometime before we leave, I’m finally going to get to take my life in my hands, at least according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, by eating the raw-milk cheeses (right) that are forbidden in my home country.

Tonight’s dinner is at another cookie-cutter but food-savvy brasserie, Café Daguerre on the Avenue du Général Leclerc. The duck confit is lusty and the waitress is so taken with the cute American couple that she brings us (and not many other people, I observe) several free shots of a house-made coconut liqueur.

The next night I get my foie gras fix as a slice on top of a hamburger (OK, a steak haché) at La Chope Daguerre. It’s certainly the only time I’ve ever had foie gras served with a side of a bag of potato chips.

And although we never do get to any of Paris’s more exclusive patisseries, we do manage breakfasts and snacks consisting of any number of excellent breads and pastries, along with meringues and macarons which, in the US, would no doubt be sold at a chain called Meringues and Macarons Bigger Than Your Head.

Given the August restaurant drought, we decide to find a restaurant with at least two Michelin stars for our last day. We’re going to have to get up at 3 a.m. for the hour-long trek to Charles de Gaulle airport for our flight, so we decide to celebrate with a lunch and manage to land a reservation at the two-star Champs-Elysées location of L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon.

This is, no doubt, the greatest restaurant in the world that’s accessed through a drug store. It’s also in a basement – you get there by walking down the stairs from the Champs-Elysées Publicis. (OK, it’s a very classy drugstore. Still…)

Aside from certain sushi bars, this also may be the greatest restaurant in the world where you eat at the bar. Said bar overlooks a large kitchen, providing an active performance to match the still lifes on your plate.

Prix-fixe menus range from 44 to 84 euros, which means a minimum of $50 for lunch, but that’s actually cheap for a Michelin two-star. We go with the 64 euro menu, which adds one entrée (appetizer) to the basic sequence. Language is no issue here – the captain asks, in English and French, how we’d be most comfortable, and then proceeds to make the same query in German, Spanish and Italian to people at adjoining seats. I guess that the Asian woman to his right takes care of Japanese and Chinese, and others who are scurrying around can handle all sorts of other languages.

We start with an amuse-bouche of crispy-fried red quinoa topped with what looks like an egg yolk but turns out to be pepper sauce. The initial crunch starts flavored by the fruity side of the peppers’ flavor, which then gives way to a slowly accelerating heat. And, of course, it’s beautiful, made even more so by spotlighting from above.

The rest of the show continues to be, in both English and French, a spectacle of flavors and presentation. Octopus (above), including the sucker-cup portion, is sliced paper thin and flavored with sweetened rind of citron, paprika and other warm spices, with spice flecks, watercress and other greens, caperberries and tomatoes displaying it in brilliant colors.

Tiny pools of olive oil dot a gazpacho of multiple tomatoes, with a burrata island in the middle forested with baby greens and radish slices. An egg reaches one of its highest expressions steamed and served in an eggplant sauce with shiitake mushrooms.  Thin slices of veal are flavored by the mayonnaise-consistency tuna sauce that covers them. Breaded whiting is fried in a twisted, upward facing position that makes it appears to be swimming.

And to finish it off, coffee shows up as ice cream and mousse, and of course separately as espresso, with madeleines and bonbons tacked on afterwards to take home.

With five glasses of wine between the two of us, the bill is about $200 (with tips built in, as is common in France). Expensive, but one of the best 2½ hours of my life.

I can’t help but stay up as late as I can even with the early flight, and my tale ends at Wine Touch, which specializes in small pours of great wines. It’s my first experience with a well-aged Cahors, a 2003 called Le Sid, and one of many with Gevrey-Chambertin, this one a Premier Cru from Domaine Dominique Gallois.

Well, it’s not quite over. Walking back to the hotel, I pause in the middle of the Pont Saint-Michel and gaze wistfully at the Seine, savoring the finish of that superlative red Burgundy even as I savor the finish of an epic voyage.