In a more genteel version of our rather fraught Parisian lives, my husband and I would dine out once a week at one of Alexander Lobrano’s recommendations in Hungry For Paris and celebrate what is truly glorious about this city: its restaurants. I purchased Lobrano’s superb restaurant guide back in 2008 upon my friend Tina Isaac’s recommendation and have counted on it ever since to get us to the city’s choicest tables. It has never let me down. To be honest I’ve depended on it for more than culinary guidance: sometimes I read it as one might a novel, to be transported elsewhere, to imagine myself seated, say, before a repast of “canard croisé rouennais aux cerises anglaises et à la kriek », at the luxurious Le Cinq or tucking into a côte de bœuf at Robert and Louise with its atmosphere of “unself-conscious pre-war Paris.” Lobrano recreates the experience of dining in Paris so powerfully that you almost believe you’ve been his companion à table. I recommend Hungry For Paris: The Ultimate Guide to the City’s 102 Best Restaurants (Random House) regularly and enthusiastically to American friends and family visiting Paris and to my students and their parents. Anyone whose expectations of Paris include eating well should have a copy on hand and I imagine there is now an ebook version, for those so inclined.
Alexander Lobrano has been Paris-based since 1986. He wrote as Gourmet’s European Correspondent until the magazine closed and has written about food and travel for Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure, Departures, and Conde Nast Traveler among other pubications. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times T Style and has won several James Beard awards. In 2011 he received the IACP’s Bert Greene award for culinary writing for his article “Spirit of the Bistro” in Saveur magazine.
I’ve also been pleased to discover that Mr. Lobrano regularly posts his “gastronomic musings and restaurant reviews” on his blog at http://alexanderlobrano.com
Needless to say, I am a believer and a follower.
I contacted Alexander — or Alec as he likes to be called — out of the blue to see if he would agree to an interview and I was thrilled to discover a man as generous, discerning and warm as his prose.
Anne: You mentioned to me a concern regarding certain restaurant trends in Paris that you feel have it all wrong. Could you tell us more about this? What should we be wary of and why?
Alec: The main reason I go to a restaurant is in the hope of having a really good meal—décor, service, and all of the other factors that define a restaurant experience are secondary to me. Unfortunately, the Costes brothers have trained a whole generation of affluent younger Parisians to indifference at the table with their lushly decorated restaurants with semi-abusive service, Georges on top of the Centre Pompidou being a perfect and very sorry example. Now others seem to be building on their successful formula, which means barely average and very dull food in lavishly staged dining rooms. A regrettable recent newcomer in this vein is The Beef Club, a faux steakhouse in Les Halles that proudly serves British beef that’s been aged by a super-hyped celebrity butcher. The brand name trend on Paris menus is unfortunate, too—Bordier butter, Annie Bertin vegetables, etc. I appreciate the quality of this produce, but the brand-name-ification of Paris dining is ultimately a marketing gimmick. And in Paris these days they’re way too many gastronomic marketing gimmicks.
Anne: When I return to the States I often find dining out a less than satisfactory experience. Not only do the portions tend to be Pantagruelesque, but the service is obtrusive, plates get taken away the moment you put down your fork, the waiter or waitress inquires as you are in mid-chew if “everything’s all right” and then there’s the potentially fraught moment when you have to calculate the tip. Having lived in France all these years, how do you feel about American dining? Do you find attitudes are changing? Might there be a shift away from that American idea of “efficiency” (food served, removed, and billed promptly) toward a more French notion of dining pleasure and the sense of leisure that makes it possible?
Alec: I think the all-time worst Americanism in restaurants is: “Are you still working on that?” It’s a question you might politely but impatiently pose to mason who was building a wall. The portions are occasionally problematic, but what bothers me most of all is the noise—too many American restaurants are absolutely deafening, and the wretched steeplechase of phone calls necessary to create and maintain a reservation. In the U.S., as is increasingly true in Paris, restaurateurs seem to have willfully forgotten that deciding to go out for meal is an optional leisure experience. Almost no one wants to have dinner at 5.30pm or midnight, the first suggestions you always get when you call a restaurant in New York City, and no one wants to feel as though an invisible hour-glass has been turned upside down on their table. Alas, this sort of charmlessness is increasingly endemic on both sides of the Atlantic. That said, I do notice that waiting table has become a respectable métier in many large American cities, where the server is polite, well-informed, cheerful and charming—most people who work in Danny Meyer’s restaurants in New York City fit this bill completely, and I’ve had similar wonderful service experiences recently in the better restaurants in Boston and Philadelphia.
Anne: It seems to me that in recent years there has been some doubt cast on France’s status as the word’s culinary leader. What is your take on this?
Alec: There’s no question that the general quality of mid-level dining in France has been damaged by the widespread use of industrially produced gastronomic shortcuts. That said, a new generation of extremely talented young French chefs are winning Gaul’s gastronomic laurels all over again in every corner of the country—Alexandre Bourdas at Sa.Qua.Na in Honfleur, for example, and also Emmanuel Renault at Les Flocons de Sel in Megeve. There’s also no doubt that the vast gap between the food in France and that in such countries as the U.S., the U.K. and Australia has narrowed considerably. Happily, there’s excellent food in most countries these days. Where I still detect a real difference between the culinary culture of France and that in other countries is that the exigence of a classical French culinary education endows the country’s young chefs with an remarkable 360 degree set of skills—you know everything, from how to cut butcher meat to make pastry, and a profound working knowledge of the country’s gastronomic history. This means that gastronomic creativity and innovation occur from an ancient and profoundly solid foundation. And in an ever more globalized world, the general quality of French produce remains vastly better than what’s found in other countries, and this shows up on your plate, too.
Anne: In the preface of Hungry for Paris, you write about the genesis of your love for French cuisine, taking the reader back to your childhood trip to Paris during which you discovered the many manifestations of cheese and a delicious boeuf bourguignon. Your vivid account reminded of Julian Barnes’ reminiscences of discovering France en famille in Nothing To Declare. I am wondering what writers have influenced you and how you would identify your literary lineage.
Alec: In the most general of ways, I was very much influenced by E.M. Forster and Somerset Maugham, since I profoundly admire their prose, and also by such great American naturalist writers at Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos. Edith Wharton and Henry James were great inspirations as well. In terms of gastronomic writing, I never read anything that was specifically about food or cooking until I came across M.F.K. Fischer when I was working as a page in a library in the small town in Connecticut where I grew up. “How to Cook a Wolf” remains one of the greatest pieces of American food writing I’ve ever come across. I also love Elizabeth David and A.J. Leibling, and the casual descriptions of meals in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s books made me want to discover and taste Central Europe.
Anne: It is always a great pleasure for me to read your extraordinarily evocative prose. I always feel that I’m right there with you in the restaurant! Have you ever considered writing Paris memoir?
Alec: Thank you, Anne. I’m always sort of startled when I’m reminded that people actually read what I write. Like most people who write, I think I get so lost in it, that the idea of any an audience completely escapes me. Currently, I working on another non-fiction food book about France, but after it’s been put to bed, I want to return to a short novel I’d been working on and will also definitely get to some sort of a memoir-like project in the future.
Thank you so much, Alec. I’ll be looking forward to reading your next book and the marvels to follow!