Ptipois

Restaurant customers have, or should have, a spontaneous notion of how little they can order, and it usually works fine that way. The kind of restaurant or café they're sitting in provides all the visual codes: you don't order the same way in a café, a brasserie, a bar, a restaurant, a bistrot, etc. It is quite common to lunch in company and beggingly turn to your waiter, explaining that you have a migraine or a hangover or whatever, and they will let you get away with even a tiny green salad. It's all in the protocol. This is why I mentioned the kind of salad as an important element: if Lipp serves only one kind of salad, i.e. a few leaves of lettuce with dressing, meant to go with steak-frites or tartare or before the cheese course, then it is perfectly understandable that they won't let anyone, in a normal situation, order it as a meal. But if they do serve "salades composées", that are a much more substantial affair, their requirement doesn't make much sense. This time it's not in the protocol, it's in the context.

You're very unlikely to be ever turned down. I was only mentioning a very ancient French law: the obligation, in a café, to give a glass of water for free to anyone who asks for it. It is not only a law, it is a tradition linked to hospitality. So you can imagine how it feels like for a French person to see that sign "Pas de verre d'eau". It's just like reading "We're big fat jerks and proud of it too" signs pasted all over the café. It's only one café in Saint-Maur, but I sure remember it. I was just about to order coffee there and refrained from it as soon as I read the sign, not only one sign, but six or seven of them pasted here and there. I said nothing and walked out.

Well, it all depends on when the start fights and how much you have been warned. I was mentioning the legal check in an abstract way. Just like you, my choice is not to patronize restaurants of that sort. There are so many others. If more people did the same thing, the situation would be much nicer. I never go to Lipp, for instance. Once they served me a stale sole meunière with mushy potatoes and the waiter was looking at me down his nose, and that was it for ever. The trouble with Lipp is that it's horribly hyped, for ages it has been patronized by politicians, journalists, public persons obsessed about what seat exactly they were going to get in order to check their popularity level and how remote they were from common mortals. This usually doesn't go with good eating. Some simple troquets in the 12e or 15e serve better fare. If I want to eat at a nice shiny brasserie I prefer Balzar, La Lorraine, L'Européen, but to me Lipp is the epitome of vulgarity. I just avoid it. Well, I do understand your situation. But francophilia, as any philia is bound to be, is a sure way to be disappointed someday. Being French, but having spent lots of time away from France, I consider myself a "francophile" too. It takes some courage to be able to love French culture in spite of all its flaws once you get to know it deep down, but isn't it the same with every other country in the world? One word still: French brasserie and cafés owners are a distinct breed with their own special character. I wouldn't depict them as typical of the French character (fortunately!), though they are so much associated with the "couleur locale". There is a paradox here, and one should be aware of it.

The fact that they did that to you doesn't mean it's legal. You do realize what French café and bistrot owners can get away with as long as no one complains. In the Eastern suburb of Saint-Maur, I even know a café that refuses to serve a glass of cold water on demand. Now they do get away with it and they never serve a glass of water, but they're not supposed to do it. You also see ads "waitresses wanted" when actually it is illegal to require a female waiter for a job that could equally be made by a man. Now in practice it is quite possible to select waitresses instead of waiters, and it is usually done that way, but there is always a gap between what is supposed to be done and what is actually done. Nobody thinks about it or brings up the subject until there is a complaint. And when complaints happen, surprises arise. Now I do not know precisely about the legal situation regarding salads as a meal, but it would be worth checking. If a restaurant or café or whatever serves "salades composées" of some size, it is perfectly understood that they are ordered as a main course and not as an entrée. A restaurant owner may choose or not choose to consider a big salad as a main course, but he cannot force his clients to overorder.

At least ten years. I remember buying liquid soap right there not after 1994. Hot dog! I hope that's true. I think the place was doing very badly, too. From the start, I thought opening a Hédiard in that location was a big mistake. The 5e is not an upperclass neighborhood yet. To answer another question, I think the rue de Lévis-rue Poncelet in the 17e can still be considered a market street. There is some cutification indeed (can't escape it), but there is also one of the most wonderful pastry shops in Paris: the German-Austrian Le Stübli. There is rue Daguerre, too, in the 14th. You should really not expect market streets to be "pure", i.e. spared by cute shops altogether. The coexistence of cute shops, or at least interesting shops, and permanent market stalls has always been a common process in Paris, and has started intensifying no later than the early 70's.

That's why I wrote I did not think it was legal, if Lipp makes "salades composées", that is. If they only serve lettuce as a salad, then it makes sense. It is very common now for the French to eat a more or less substantial salad as a meal with maybe a small dessert and a cup of coffee after that, and there is no way a café or even a brasserie waiter, be it at Lipp's, would be in a position to refuse a client's order of that sort, unless of course the "house culture" implies a lot of personal intimidation. If I go to Lipp with someone, that this someone orders a choucroute and I want nothing more than a Salade Auvergnate or Alsacienne or whatever they have, I do not think the waiter can refuse to take my order or force me to order something else.

I don't think so, but now you have to try again the two separately in order to find out the cause.

Rue Mouffetard has been cutifying itself for more than twenty years. The bougnat couple who sold chestnuts from their 400-year-old tree gave way to a parfumerie years ago. Le Moule à Gâteau was there when I was a kid. Fish was already too expensive then. L'Occitane has been there for about ten years. Etc. The best butcher was replaced by a fancy flower shop in the early 80's. On rue Monge another great butcher was replaced by a bobo bookshop roughly at the same time. This is the way Paris goes. La Mouffe has been dead for about 15 years, but on the other hand I'm glad there is a Moisan boulangerie now. The real tragedy, to me, is the apparition of Hédiard at the Rue Monge-Claude-Bernard corner. This is a serious sign of a neighborhood going to hell. Anyway, though I live very close to La Mouffe, I almost never shop there. The prices are outrageous.

Lipp is not bad (it can be at times), it's not great either. It's only very hyped and, as Bux says, more sought-after for social reasons than for food reasons. However, I have never tried the choucroute but I have had some rather poor meals there. As for the "no salad as a meal" principle, I do understand why it's there, but I don't even think it's legal, though it may be the accepted rule of the house.

You're quite welcome, Nina. I'm glad you like it.

Hehe, thank you! that's great.

Just for your information, we just opened an English-speaking section on Miam, which thus becomes a bilingual food forum.

Trends are one thing, the disappearance of traditions or at least good food products is another thing. Trends come and go. The French will always appreciate a good baguette for breakfast, even if kids at the same breakfast table thrive on Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs (because the Western world is slowly drowning in sugar, and that's a real problem). As well as there will always be people willing to preserve our raw-milk cheeses. There is a need to be vigilant but no need to be alarmed. Our good food traditions are not all as fragile as you think. There are always people to fight for them. Besides (this makes me feel I'm reliving the past, this same discussion took place a few months ago), crusty bread and baguettes in France are now of much better quality than they have ever been since the end of World War II two to the late 1980's, owing to the improving of wheat quality, the décret Balladur defining the criteria of the baguette de tradition française, and the rising consciousness about the baking terminals and the importance of artisanal bakery. So things are looking up.

Vous êtes tout pardonné, mon cher ! No offence, I thought that was funny. However — nice try, but the person who told you I am a professional journalist is not quite right in this. I am not a journalist, though I do write occasionally for the press. I am not exactly a chef, though some chefs have at times called me one. I wasn't vexed by the word "amateur", I was only meditating over it. Indeed many of us here are amateurs and professionals. It all depends on what.

Hehe, er, thank you. Let's test your french right now: do you know what a gaffe is?

Probably not gallons of tequila, but everything else you're mentioning, quite certainly. And not only in the Southwest!

Actually I have been there twice for lunch and once for dinner, and I definitely prefer lunch at Le Comptoir. I think the food served at lunch is more in harmony with the place and type of service, besides it tastes distinctly better for it's the kind of food Yves is good at, at least in such surroundings. At dinner, there's a trace of trying too hard: the place is too crammed, too casual for the widening of the mind that goes with refined cuisine, and some dishes were nice but below the standards of the generous gascon-bistrot food served at lunch. My melon balls were like raw squash bullets. This is a very personal opinion, but I believe the dinner formula doesn't quite make it. This kind of cuisine needs another "context". I'll aways go back very happily for lunch though.

Michel Chaudun, not Chaudron. This can only mean that John has never been there... What a shame.

Next year, hopefully, my friend. And I hope we meet there! It was a lot a lot a lot of fun. And the pouring rain made it an epic adventure.

Yes, indeed, that rainstorm was pretty extreme See here for a photo-report. In French.

I'd be interested, but not that curious. I never say no to a good pho, though. But I bet they'd be just as good in DC and in Paris. There are some extremely good and authentic Vietnamese restaurants in Paris and no reason for them to be any less good than the ones in DC. Now, of course, it all depends on the cooks. But I don't think there's a competition here anyway, like "my Vietnamese are better than yours". I know that some cuisines are just better in other places. It is, for instance, perfectly true that London has much better Indian food than France (guess why ). A good proof of this is that, when a friend of mine finds a good Indian restaurant in Paris, she says "It's just as good as a London Indian restaurant". But concerning Vietnamese food, we fear no one.

Hello Jennahan. I didn't believe that you were making an accusation and you have nothing to apologize for. But I must confess that I was seriously wondering where you got your observations from, and I now feel relieved to acknowledge that they are not first hand. It is simply just not true that people from a given region in France feel like they're eating "ethnic" when they're eating a dish originating in another region. This is one of the strangest things I ever read. It it true that the French attitude towards non-French cuisines has its peculiarities, but not that many in fact, and this is certainly not the way to identify them. The French are not as closed to other cuisines as some believe they are. They are open to some things and more closed to other things, as is every other country. You know, I have stopped counting the very, very stupid things that get written regularly by "very serious journalists" on the subject of France. Sometimes I'm really at a loss trying to find out where they get their information. The title of this book has already kept me away from reading it. Now I might give it a look, just out of curiosity.

What is wrong with our Vietnamese and Laotian restaurants, the best outside of Southeast Asia, and our North African restaurants? Not to mention Lebanese food? Do they count for nothing? What other ethnic restaurants should we have in order to be labeled "acceptable" in the field of non-French restaurants? Well, things have changed a bit, in France, since the Middle Ages (I'm saying "the Middle Ages" because we have written proof that we already knew about couscous in the 16th century).

I checked during a walk in the sixième: Mulot is alive and kicking.

Well said!