SHOWCASING THE WORLD’S FINEST PROPERTIES AND THE STORIES BEHIND THEM
French enough for you? In other nations, train stations mean fast-food joints. This is the dining room at Le Train Bleu in the Gare de Lyon, Paris. Of course it is. Where else in the world but Paris would assume that people shouldn’t board a train without a full-blown Belle Epoque banquet in their bellies? (iStock)
It’s indisputable. Fine dining in the West has only one birthplace: France. Dedicate an opera if you like to the delights of the Italian table, but you’ll still end up talking about cuisine because the French have commandeered the language for it. Here Storied chews over the defining ingredients that makes fine dining definitively Ooh la la.
You have to hand it to Napoleon for calling England a nation of shopkeepers. A withering takedown par excellence. But actually it’s the French who excel at merchandising what they make, especially in the realm of reputations as the rulers of what and when and how one ought to eat.
The French are masters of grandeur where grandeur need not exist. They delight in imagining complexity around the simplest matters of the table, they revel in making magisterial pronouncements about the humblest of dishes, the most meagre of ingredients are held in celestial regard, and some restaurant menus will not draw breath until each of the chef’s offerings has been explicated in une grande confection de verbiage using twice as many words as the full Larousse dictionary enjoys. Grandiloquence is a national pastime.
The reputation of French cuisine depends upon it. Indeed, for cuisine read culture, because if any single element of life defines the nature of a nation, it’s the way its people talk about food. It’s said that Italians enjoy nothing more than talking about dinner, while they’re having lunch. Nothing to shout about in that. In chow-down cultures, people eat to live. In France they don’t just live to eat, everyone’s around the table up to their elbows in linguistic gravy disagreeing about the most correct ways of being French. It’s what makes them so loveable.
Don’t call them chefs’ hats, they’re toques. Partly practical, mainly ceremonial, touches like this keep tradition alive today. (La Tour d’Argent/Matthieu Salvaing)
In France, food achieves cultural status via trenchant protectionism. All foodstuffs certified AOC (Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée) are blessed with a kind of regional heritage birthmark. A second level of authenticity comes when a dish is designated to be uniquely of its location. It’s not enough to eat tripe, for example, as if anyone would. One must eat Tripes à la Mode de Caen, where Caen is the capital of the Calvados area of Normandy, whereas Rouen is the regional capital of Normandy and also the duck capital of France, and that’s why, if you’re French, whenever you’re thinking of roasting a duck you must never buy anything other than a canard à la Rouennaise. Geography is the gelatin that keeps a dish on the menu for generations.
Authenticity comes when a dish is designated to be uniquely of its location. It’s not enough to eat tripe, for example, as if anyone would. One must eat Tripes à la Mode de Caen.
Nothing matters more to the French than the nonsense of naming their dishes in ways that only a trained biological etymologist can decipher. Italians may enjoy carbonara. A single word for a simple meal. The French have no time for such concision, because concision bespeaks social cohesion and that wasn’t what Louis XIV commissioned the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles for at all. So while a dish may essentially consist of roast duck (not again, maman!), it will never be known in any white-tableclothed restaurant worth its baroque ormolu clock as other than caneton rôti entier, découpe à la volée, sauce au sang, pommes soufflées, hâtereau de cuisse grille, tartelette de gesiers à l’estragon & peau croustillante, sauce béarnaise.
Nowhere better to feel the world is your huître. The fabled view from the sixth-floor dining salon of La Tour d’Argent (est. 1582 according to the restaurant) on the Rive Gauche, Paris, with Notre-Dame ahead. (La Tour d’Argent/Matthieu Salvaing)
That’s how they do it anyway at La Tour d’Argent, and they don’t need an ormolu clock because La Tour is a Parisian institution and therefore timeless. The view over the River Seine is majestic. Still, the opportunities for whispered culinary squabbles remain boundless. Oof!
Have the French got their priorities right? Absolutely. More than ever, as the world apparently careens towards carnage, there sits at least one culture worth preserving. Merci à Dieu, the French still lead the way.
There’s a litle-known street in central Paris where you’ll find the most enormous cathedral. Bigger than Notre-Dame in its own way, it glitters with silver, thrums with gold, and its aisles are thronged with supplicants in white garments, priests in high hats, some with holes in their shoes, kneeling before its bountiful stations. For this is the kingdom of their calling. It’s a kitchen supplies shop called E. Dehillerin.
The miracle is that a shop still exists in the center of a city. And that anyone still cooks. As human life dissolves into an online world, with nutrition dispatched by drone workers on two-wheeled conveyor belts, let us give thanks that an establishment like E. Dehillerin persists. What was once a normal corner store in the days when Julia Child would go gathering copper pans, it now exudes the aura of a site containing religious relics.
In one tiny corner of E. Dehillerin, precious metal. Copper pans in every size to suit every pocket, as long as your pocket is as deep as a mine. (Courtesy Annie Diamond/mostlovelythings.com)
But this is where you find real-life mixing spoons, tasting spoons, serving spoons, soup spoons, dessert spoons, teaspoons, morning noon and night spoons, spoons made of antler bone just for caviar. Bowls of a thousand sizes piled high on shelves. Coffee pots, copper pots, sauté pans, omelette pans, samovars, fondue sets, paelleras, woks. Knives of every shape and temper. Linens, trivets, mouse-traps. And then, oh Lord, the machines…
The machines make the Spanish Inquisition look like a birthday party. Gnarled wooden shelves groan with the polished chrome of torture tools. Arcane contraptions with heavy levers and purposes known only to men who possess leather aprons. Ham slicers, obviously. Mechanical meat-hooks. And prime amongst them, the duck press. Oh Lord, the duck press.
Exhibit 1: The duck press. With a price tag of €2,840 at E. Dehillerin today, you may find it more economical to simply dine at La Tour d’Argent, where pressed duck is the feature dish. Depicted, it all happens here at the restaurant’s signally named Théatre à canard. (La Tour d’Argent/Matthieu Salvaing)
What does a duck press do? It slowly screws every visceral drop of juice from a half-cooked quack-quack carcass, to anoint the pluck of internal organs on the way to a blood-infused sauce. The same $1,000 duck press that Anthony Bourdain bought from the shelves of Dehillerin in 2012 and brought back to his restaurant Les Halles in NYC, signal not of need but souvenir of older ways. In this ancient magic lantern show Julia Child shows how to use one.
The shop occupies the corner of two aptly named streets. Rue Coquillière, meaning shell (as in Coquilles St-Jacques, that creamy dish of scallops), and Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th-century moral philosopher who warned us all against the rush of progress.
But of course E. Dehillerin is not a shop, nor even an emporium despite its enormous size. And despite sous-chefs rushing in before a Tuesday lunchtime service for replacement whisks and onion forks in their white toques and black Crocs. It’s something much more important than a shop, it’s a rare reminder of a lost civilization. Visit while you can.
The mother of all kitchenware shops. E. Dehillerin’s vibrant green twin façades spread out like open arms in a wide embrace around this corner of Paris. (Courtesy Annie Diamond/mostlovelythings.com)
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