|
 La
Coupole, Montparnasse, Paris
(102 bd Montparnasse, Paris. Lunch and dinner every day
!!!)
A few years ago I met my Van der Merwe in a restaurant in
the New Forest. Late in the evening when the majority of
the punters had finished eating, and Afrikaner strode across
the dining room and told me to put out the cigarette I was
smoking. This was an order rather than a courteous request
(to which I would have acceded). I muttered something about
not being his houseboy and got on with killing myself slowly;
it is, no doubt, this sort of boorish individual who Messrs
Hague and Townend are so anxious to exclude from these diseased
dysfunctional islands.
Still,
I should no, I guess, have been surprised.
The League of Passive Smokers is a powerful self-righteous
lobby with God – a former 40-a-day man who saw the light
– on its side. It is self-evidently of American, specifically
Californian origin, which is presumably why Rules, an ur-English
restaurant and thus a magnet for transatlantic tourists,
has banned smoking altogether. You wouldn't bet against
other London restaurants following its example. Until recently,
however, I'd never considered the possibility that Paris
might go the same proscriptive way. But that was before
my last dinner at, of all places La Couple when the middle-aged
middle-class Frenchman at the next table wondered whether
I might desist. And I did – he was polite, charming, amused,
and we fell into conversation in the way that you do in
that city's restaurants but seldom do in London's where
an invisible cordon segregates each table, Nonetheless…what's
going on? The French used to smoke with the same fanaticism
as the Spanish, the current European champions. No longer;
and the country's taste for native tobacco, the national
odour, appears, too, to have declined. There are Marlboro
Lights everywhere. And as if that were not bad enough, Seita,
in an act of corporate vandalism that borders on aesthetic
treason, has amended Ponty's 1938 design for the Gitanes
packet. I recall that I was similarly indignant about the
restoration to its original Twenties decorative scheme of
La Coupole 12 years ago: it made it seem brand-new, a copy
of its former self. The patina of half a century disappeared
overnight. These 12 years have improved it no end. It once
again looks lived-in. There have been times when the cooking
was something you suffered in order to pass time in the
world's most beguiling brasserie. That is no longer the
case. This dinner was the best I've eaten there in my 30
years patronage of the place. There was straightforwardly
boiled crab – white meat, dark meat, red roe – of such size
and consequently intense flavour that mayonnaise was redundant;
presumably this beast was from the Atlantic. A tartar of
salmon and scallops was bound with a finely judged, faintly
citric emulsion which countered the extreme richness of
the meat. Grey shrimps were served by themselves with a
pig of lemon. Entrecote was better flavoured than Chateabriand.
To drink: an acceptable Madiran and a Poire served in a
glass set at 45 degrees in a bowl of ice. To watch: a serious
and entertaining outbreak of waiter rage when two members
of the brigade collided causing breakages and irate factionalism
among their colleagues.
|
