When I left London for Paris in 2002, I was a keen but distinctly amateur eater. The London I was leaving had yet to become a hipster gourmet paradise. In the FT office at lunchtime, I’d see colleagues sitting at their desks eating what looked like plastic bags, but which, on closer inspection, turned out to be sandwiches. I used to go to a café called Harpers, which was known as “Toilet Harpers”, because it was a converted public lavatory.
My 20-plus years in Paris have been, above all, an education in eating. I’m still not a gourmet. But after thousands of Parisian restaurant meals, I have become an expert on eating, and specifically an expert on the highest form of it: eating in Paris. This is such a model of the good life that it has been copied (in debased form, obviously) worldwide.
I found a city where the highlight of the day was lunch, which happened at strictly regulated times. A Parisian restaurant might be half-empty at 12.30pm, packed at 1pm, and half-empty again by 1.45pm. As a foreigner, I learned to arbitrage by turning up then, when space was opening up but before the kitchen closed at the ritual 2pm. I also learned always to order the daily miracle of the menu du jour (or la formule): that day’s set menu, the best affordable lunch on earth in two or three courses, made from whatever fresh ingredients the restaurant had had delivered that morning by a double-parked van. (By contrast, the stuff on the à la carte menu was generally reheated from frozen.)
Early this century, lunch in Paris was still a solemn ritual lasting about 90 minutes. It started with the waiter unfurling the wine list, and ended with his finally deigning to notice my increasingly desperate requests for the bill. Back then, the experience cost little if you earned British pounds, and nothing at all, if like many office workers, you got “tickets restaurant” coupons from the boss. Daily happiness for me became a table for one with my book. Boiling pasta at home felt like missing the point.
The neighbourhood where I bought my tiny flat — which later became my office — is on the eastern side of Paris. The street’s grandest restaurant was owned by a big fat man who hung around the entrance like a bouncer, glowering at potential customers, sending the message: “My food is too good for you.” A sign by the door conveyed the Parisian restaurateur’s ancient certainty that he knew best: “The meat dishes will be served blue, rare or undercooked.” Yet the fact is, Parisian restaurateurs did know best. They had been serving sole meunière and crème brûlée for centuries, and over time they had perfected their methods. The places I went to didn’t feature in international gourmet guides, and the food wasn’t fussy or fancy, but it was the sheer density of excellence, the everyday routineness of outstanding places, that made Paris unique.
What kept standards high, I came to realise, was that most Parisian diners are de facto restaurant critics. Having eaten the same dishes at home since childhood, they know their onion soup. If it isn’t excellent, they’ll go to the place 30 seconds down the street. I’d regularly drink affordable wine so good it tasted, in the French phrase, “like the piss of Jesus”. In one restaurant on my street, I ate a chestnut soup so perfect that it was almost funny, yet for the kitchen it was routine, something it had done every autumn, for ever. A restaurant on the same spot a century earlier had probably done it for ever too.
I had an early realisation as to how seriously Parisians take food while buying avocados in a local market. “When are you going to eat them?” asked the stallkeeper. I couldn’t see why he wanted to know. “Tuesday,” I replied randomly. He then sifted through his avocados, selecting the ones that would peak on Tuesday.
On my rare ventures into tourist Paris, I was reminded why so many foreigners hate the city. One day I went to meet a visiting friend in a café near Opéra. The black-waistcoated waiter sneered at us in English, eventually brought us fantastically overpriced canned orange juices, and chucked in ice cubes against our express request. He was ashamed to be serving tourists, he wanted to show that our money couldn’t buy his subservience, and he didn’t care if we never came back. He knew he could hang us upside down and flay us, and the café would still be packed next year.
I mostly stuck to my neighbourhood, where restaurateurs and shopkeepers had to treat regulars well. Within months I was granted the eternal ritual of neighbourhood initiation: you walk into a restaurant and the proprietor strides over to shake your hand. Today, in less formal times, a waitress will beam and ask, “Vous allez bien?” The joy of Paris — as of any good global city — is that you live simultaneously in the great wide world and in your neighbourhood.
Over time, with familiarity, I lost some of the ability to see Paris’s beauty. I’d rush across the Pont des Arts at sunset sending a WhatsApp. But the almost constant sense of wellbeing I got from the food hasn’t worn off. Every day I eat here still feels like a gift, even if it’s just a hunk of Comté cheese with semi-salted butter on a baguette, bought in a local market so beautiful that tourists photograph me buying it. On the greyest day (and Paris has five months of them a year) I have the occasional glimpse of paradise.
When we had kids here, they learned to eat like Parisians. Even in crèche, they ate meals in courses, the French way, culminating with cheese. The school food was so superior that they’d spend dinnertimes at home raving about lunch.
They learned to enjoy all foods. The first time you encounter (say) a tomato, you probably won’t like the unfamiliar taste. French schools keep presenting the tomato in different guises — raw, in a sauce, as gazpacho, et cetera — until children grow accustomed. When we visited friends in the UK or US, we’d watch kids spend mealtimes running laps around the table before finally condescending to eat fish fingers. My wife and I would feel smugly superior, even though we’d have been like that had we raised our children in the Anglosphere.
Eventually, we integrated to the point that Parisians began inviting us to dinners in their homes. I’ve always resisted the idea that there is a “real Paris”. There are countless different Parises, many of which are barely French. Still, if forced to pick the “real Paris”, I’d go for the one we discovered at people’s dinner tables.
Humans everywhere build trust over shared meals. But communal dining is an especially potent socialising agent in Paris — a city where the food is excellent, trust in strangers low, and the eating etiquette of unmatched complexity. It’s a city where you generally only do business with somebody after eating with them. Dinner is Paris’s chief networking zone, the equivalent of golf in less civilised places.
This has always baffled Anglos. In the 1770s, the newborn United States sent two commissioners to Paris, Benjamin Franklin and the future American president John Adams. The duo were charged with obtaining French money and support for the revolutionary wars against the British. Adams, a puritan, tried to fulfil his mission by waking early and working all day.
Franklin preferred eating. “The Life of Dr. Franklin,” Adams complained, “was a Scene of continual discipation.” Franklin, who in the US had been the famed advocate of “early to bed and early to rise”, in Paris breakfasted late, then hung out with “all Sorts of People”, until it was time to dress for “dinner” (by which Adams meant lunch).
“He came home at all hours from Nine to twelve O Clock at night,” snorted Adams, who sometimes had to wait days before he could get him to sign documents. Adams plainly thought Franklin was a layabout. I initially made the same mistake in Paris. How could people fritter away so much time queueing to buy food, cooking it, eating and drinking with friends till the early morning even on school nights, then spending half the next day in recovery mode? If there was business to sort out, why not do it with a phone call, or a coffee? Like Adams, I had work to do.
It took me years to grasp that Parisian diners were also working. In fact, they were working more efficiently than I was. The networking — as Franklin presumably grasped — is all the more efficient for being disguised as hedonism.
In general, Parisians don’t talk business at dinner, or at most in the last 15 minutes. Transactions are considered dirty, and must be hidden. In the dictum of Guillemette Faure, author of the invaluable Parisian codebook Dîners en ville, mode d’emploi (roughly, Dinners in Town: A Manual): “You’re at table, not on LinkedIn.” However, she adds, sharing food accords you the right to phone any of your co-diners afterwards. A business meeting works better if you’ve become acquainted outside business. Faure quotes the sociologist Michel Maffesoli as saying that French dinners are the site of three exchanges: of goods, love and ideas.
The social climbing aside, I’ve come to admire Parisian dining culture. I like that Parisians devote whole evenings just to eating and talking with intimates. (We once brought friends visiting from New York to a local dinner. After an hour they thought: really? You’re just going to sit here all night, with the same people? So they rang a high-status New Yorker who was also passing through Paris and met him for drinks.)
I like it that dinners here are taken so seriously that they’re phone-free zones: almost nobody puts theirs on the table, and it’s not done even to pull it out for a discreet check. (If you can’t resist reading your messages, you go to the bathroom.)
Parisian dinners aren’t only about networking. They are also, often, joyous. On a good night here, the food, conversations, beauty, friendships and flirtations transport you to a higher realm.
Even Paris changes. When I arrived, there were still only a few thickets of foreign restaurants: mostly Vietnamese, while Chinese restaurants were hurriedly switching to sushi after a popular TV programme had accused them of dubious hygienic practices. (Even today, the typical Parisian sushi joint is Chinese-run.)
But Paris keeps getting more international. My neighbourhood now has gyoza, gourmet hamburger and empanada joints, and had “un street food festival” complete with “les food trucks”. These places, if they aspire to serve Parisians rather than mere tourists, must meet the city’s standards of excellence. One day I was eating in the local hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese canteen when the woman who ran it told me she was going to turn it into a Szechuan restaurant — the new fashion. To do this, she’d despatched her husband, the chef, to Szechuan for a months-long cooking course. That’s what it took to survive in Paris.
The other big change is that, even in Paris, time has become money. Over the 20 years, I’ve seen prices rise, neighbourhoods gentrify, and the pace of life quicken. The price of the average two-course lunch plus coffee in my local restaurants has risen to over €20, from perhaps €16 before the pandemic. The ordering is so efficient, and the food comes so quickly, that the meal now takes about 45 minutes, half what it did when I arrived. Sometimes, after just 35 minutes, I realise, with a jolt, that the daily high is over.
There’s been a spectacular decline in wine drinking. I sometimes ask people to guess which country was the world’s biggest exporter of wine in 1970. The answer: Algeria. Even after independence, the Muslim country was still producing cheap plonk that kept the former motherland pickled. French winemakers did their bit, too. But since the 1960s, the average French person’s consumption of wine has dropped by about 70 per cent, to below 40 litres a year. Wine barely exists at lunchtime any more. Younger French people prefer cannabis.
Getting your lunch bill is quicker than in 2002. I totter to the counter and pay. The young just flash their phones at the table. Ever fewer Parisians even stop for a restaurant lunch: there’s been a long-term trend of cafés closing, and a compensatory boom in fast-food places and bakeries, which sell lunchtime sandwiches.
Still, the all-round quality of food has helped keep me in this city that will forever remain alien. I’ve come to realise I’ll probably die in Paris (though not, I hope, imminently). Maybe I’ll go in a quintessentially Parisian manner, run over by a police car speeding to score some lunchtime French tacos. I expect that in the ambulance, as I speak my last words — perhaps, to please French bureaucracy, my name, address and social security number — my dying sentiment will be gratitude for all the lunches.
This essay is an edited extract from Simon Kuper’s new book ‘Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century’, published by Profile Books
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