Paris to the Moon (31 page)

We mumbled something and, after more handshaking, withdrew to the sidewalk. We had not anticipated the strategic advantage to Bucher of total, enthusiastic assent. We wanted to save the
steak au poivre
on the oval plate and the waiter serving it, but you couldn't argue with the man when he pointed to the steak, the plate, and the waiter and said nothings changed. (Thierry, when he heard of our breakfast with Bucher, said, "It is the old technique of the kings of France: Treat your worst enemy like your best friend.")

I did not doubt that Bucher was being perfectly sincere, as far as it went, and that in his case as-far-as-it-went went as far it could. The Balzar would stay the same until it changed. The waiters seem encouraged by our actions. When I go to the Balzar now, Thierry, bringing a coupe champagne, slips by and, under his breath, makes a toast: "A
la sante de I 'association—
to the health of the association!" We repeat the toast, under our breaths. It is like being in the resistance. (But when M. Delouche comes over, we shake his hand too. Perhaps that is also like being in the resistance.)

Les Amis du Balzar has sent an eloquent new letter to Bucher, written by Lorenzo Valentin, and describing the
objet de nos preoccupations:
that no dish will come from a centralized kitchen and that there will be real autonomy for the staff, and real autonomy in the management. My Parisian self is prepared to defend the Balzar to the end, whatever it takes. My American self suspects that the Balzar will stay the same, and then it will change, and that we will love it as long as we can.

Alice in Paris

Not long ago, in the brown dawn light of the western Paris suburbs, three Americans could be seen taking a mildly illicit walk through the Rungis wholesale food market. The three Americans—the California chef Alice Waters, the vegetable scholar Antoine Jacobsohn, and I—all had something on their minds, and all were in a heightened emotional state that had its origins in something more than the very early hour and the very chilly weather.

Alice Waters was in a heightened emotional state because, as many of her friends believe, she is always in a heightened emotional state, particularly when she is in the presence of fresh produce. Alice, who was wearing a wool cloche, is a small, intense, pale, pretty, fiftyish woman, with a quiet, satisfied smile and a shining, virtuous light in her eye, the kind of American woman who a century ago would have been storming through saloons with a hatchet and is now steaming fresh green beans, but with similar motives. Her vision is rooted in the romantic Berkeley politics that she practiced before starting her restaurant, Chez Panisse, with a ten-thousand-dollar loan twenty-seven years ago. She believes in concentric circles of social responsibility, with the reformed carrot in the backyard garden insensibly improving the family around the dinner table, the reformed family around the dinner table insensibly improving the small neighborhood merchants they shop with, the reformed neighborhood merchants improving their city, and so right on, ever upward and outward, but with the reformed carrot always there, the unmoved (though crisply cooked) mover in the center.

Earlier this year Alice was invited to open a restaurant at the Louvre, by Mme. Helene David-Weill, the
tres grande dame
who is the director of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs there. An enthusiastic article in the
Times
gave the impression that this was a fait accompli, or nearly so. In fact in September it still existed essentially only as an enthusiasm in the eye of Alice Waters, Mme. David-Weill, and Richard Overstreet, an American painter who lives in Berkeley and Paris and has been the go-between since the beginning. (Francis Ford Coppola was the first person to suggest Alice to Mme. David-Weill.) Alice had come to Paris to move the project along, and Richard had brought her together with Antoine as a possible "principal forager," on the lines of a principal dancer, for it. Rungis was the setting for their long-awaited meeting.

Antoine Jacobsohn was in a heightened emotional state because he is in a heightened emotional state whenever he visits the Rungis market. Twenty-nine years ago Rungis replaced the great Les Halles complex, which had dominated central Paris from the fifteenth century until after the Second World War and which Zola called, in a novel he devoted to it, "The Belly of Paris." For Antoine, Les Halles was not just the belly of Paris but its heart, and for him the replacement of Les Halles by Rungis is the primordial sin of modern France—the destruction of Penn Station, Ebbets Field, and B. Altman's combined.

"When the market moved out of Les Halles," Antoine was saying, as he led our little party—it was illicit because, strictly speaking, you need a permit to shop at Rungis—"it effectively changed the relationship between pleasure and play and work in all of Paris. For centuries, because the market was at once a center for restaurants and for ordinary people, a whole culture grew up around it. Shopping and eating, the restaurant and the market, the stroller and the shopper, the artisan and the bourgeois— all were kept in an organic arrangement. And because many of the goods couldn't be kept overnight, it meant that what was left at the end of every day was given to the poor. But for trivial reasons—traffic and hygiene—they made the decision to move the market to Rungis, and left a hole in the heart of Paris. There was no place allotted here for the small artisan, for the small grower, or for the organic market."

He shook his head in disbelief. Antoine was raised in North Plainfield, New Jersey, by a French mother; he has a research fellowship at the Museum of Vegetable Culture, in the Paris suburb of La Courneuve, a degree in agricultural sciences from Cornell, and a perfect, crisp, contrary French mind trapped in an American body and voice box. Antoine has been known to give his friends an idealized poster of the twenty-four cultivated radishes—some lost, some extant—of the Ile-de-France, and he has written beautifully, not to say longingly, of the lost monstrous spinach of Viroflay and the flat onions of Vertus.

We had been joined by Sally Clarke, of Clarke's restaurant, in London, who is one of Alice's many spiritual godchildren. The two chefs seemed torn between delight and surprise—delight in the freshness and green beauty of the vegetables, surprise at the lack of variety.

"I'm going to show you the space left for the local growers," Antoine went on. We walked through the aisles of the vast, chilly airplane hangars of vegetables: bins of
girolles,
crates of shiny eggplants. It all looked wonderful but remarkably standardized, explaining the standardization of what the average Paris greengrocer sells.

"Imagine," Antoine said. "So many radishes gone; the artichokes of Paris, almost gone; the turnips of Vaugirard, gone. There's a variety of beans that one reads about all the time in nineteenth-century texts. But gone! We've kept some seedlings of the plants in the museum, and they could be revived."

"We'll plant them in the Tuileries," Alice said softly, but with determination. One of her dreams for the restaurant is to raise a vegetable garden right outside the door.

Antoine walked along, greeting old friends and growers. "This man has excellent tomatoes," he now whispered to Alice.

"Does he grow organically?" she asked urgently. In recent years Alice has become a fanatic of organic growing.

Antoine, who had been telling Alice how the French sense of
terroir—
of the taste and traditions of a local region—was more important to authentic produce in France than the precise rules of organic growing, asked the grower. The man shrugged and then explained his situation. "He says he's giving up the business, in any case, as it happens, since its becoming hopeless," Antoine said to Alice. (He failed to add that every French merchant, in every field, will always tell you that it's hopeless, he's going to give up the business; when French weapons salesmen go to China to sell missiles, they probably shrug when the Chinese start to bargain and say. Well, it doesn't matter, we're giving up the business anyway, it's a hopeless metier.)

Alice gave the grower a steady, encouraging look. "We just have to get the suppliers to adapt," she said. "That's what we did at Chez Panisse. You have to let them know there's the demand. You have to bring them along with you." In the early-morning light you could sense Alice Waterss eyes radiating the spiritual intensity that for so long has startled and impressed her friends and admirers and has set her apart from other chefs, making her a kind of materfamilias to a generation of chefs ranging from Sally Clarke to Michel Courtalhac, in Paris. (He keeps a photograph of Alice in the window of his restaurant.) Aubert de Villaine, who is the codirector of the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, the greatest wine estate in France, speaks of her in hushed tones, less as a superior hashslinger than as a kind of cross between Emily Dickinson and La Pucelle. "There's something crystalline about her, an extraordinary purity of spirit," he said not long ago. "She's one of
les vigiles en haut,
the watchman in the crow's nest, seeing far ahead. The thing I most admire about Alice is the sense that the sensual is not really sensual if it is not,
au fond,
spiritual."

Antoine nodded at another merchant across the way. "Now, this man grows excellent asparagus," he whispered. "It's interesting. Two hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago it was always green asparagus; now the demand is for white asparagus."

He went up to the grower and said, in French, "Why is it that no one any longer grows green asparagus? When was it that people went over to white asparagus?" The man gave him an incredulous look and then said, in the beautiful clear French of the tie-de-France, "You know, I would say that what you've just stated is the exact contrary of the truth." It was a perfect Parisian tone of voice—not disputatious, just suggesting a love of the shared pursuit of the truth, which, unfortunately, happens not to be in your possession right now.

Antoine made the right response. He raised his eyebrows in polite wonder while smiling only on the left side of his face, an expression that means, How greatly I respect the vigor of your opinions, however much they may call to mind the ravings of a lunatic. "What do you mean?" he demanded.

"Well, it is my experience that everyone grows green asparagus now. It's all you see for decorative
plats,
that touch of green. In the magazines, for instance, among the fashionable chefs, it's all you see, green asparagus. It has a much greater decorative effect. It's obvious."

"Ah, yes, for decorative effect," Antoine agreed calmly. Everybody won.

As they were speaking, I was poking a pile of
girolles
nearby, and wondering if I had made a mistake in not planning to serve some kind of autumnal mushroom plate for dinner the next night. I was in a heightened emotional state because I had offered to cook dinner for Alice Waters, and I had spent most of the summer worrying about what I would cook and how it would taste. I had decided to try and sneak in a little serious shopping while I was observing Alice and Antoine. I had also decided to go out later that day and buy a new set of dinner plates. I had come to both of these decisions more or less in the spirit of a man who, having in an insane moment invited Michael Jordan over to play a little one-on-one, decides that he might as well use the occasion to put down a new coat of asphalt on the driveway.

I had made up my mind to do a lamb braised for seven hours—a
gigot de sept heures,
as it's known—which would be cooked in the Provencal style, with eggplant and tomatoes. But to be in Rungis at dawn with two such devoted
terroiristes
as Alice and Antoine, for whom cooking is meaningful only if it is an expression of the place where the things are being cooked, made me feel a little guilty. I was going to have to get the tomatoes out of a can, and though the canned tomato is absolutely typical of my own
terroir,
I somehow felt that they would disapprove.

Nearby Alice had found
frisee
and watercress and was looking at them raptly—not with the greed of a hungry man seeing dinner but with the admiration of William Bennett looking at a long marriage. "There's nothing so beautiful as French watercress," she said. "I can recall walking down the rue Mouffetard in 1965, my first year in Paris. I was a girl from New Jersey who'd grown up on frozen food, and to see the baskets and baskets of greens, so many shades of green and red!

"I walked up and down the street, my eyes unbelieving," she went on. "I had never tasted an oyster. I went through Normandy, eating eighteen at a time, and drinking apple cider, and it was so wonderful that I was just carried away, and I would fall asleep by the roadside. When I got back to Berkeley, I thought of opening a creperie, and I tried to import some of the cider and found out that there was alcohol in it. That was why I kept passing out! I thought it was just the oysters and the apple juice and France." She was lost for a moment.

"You know," Antoine said, coming over, "there used to be asparagus grown in Argenteuil, just down the river from Paris— great asparagus. And they used to have figs in Argenteuil too. The white figs of Argenteuil, they were called in the nineteenth century. The trees were bent over with weights, so that the branches could be buried in the ground, to protect them all through the winter. Yet we think of figs as a southern fruit."

"Oh, we have to have them," Alice said, her eyes moist with emotion. "The white figs of Argenteuil! We'll grow them again. It can be done, you know." We had been wandering through the airplane hangars and were standing among towers of carrots and leeks, mountains of
haricots verts.
She looked upward and, Pucelle-like, seemed to be seeing before her—in a vision, as though they were already tangible, edible—the white figs of Argenteuil: an improbable Berkeley Joan, imagining her France restored to glory.

I had been thinking about various menus ever since I'd had the idea of cooking dinner for Alice, and for a while I'd thought I might do a four-hour braised leg of lamb that I had found the recipe for in the Sunday magazine of the
London Independent.
Unfortunately I had lost the issue of the magazine. I had the phone number of the editor, but I thought that it was unprofessional journalistic practice, in this day and age, to call up a fellow scandalmongering cynic and ask him if he would mind thumbing through his back issues for a recipe.