a day ago
Forget croissants — the best Parisian grub is doner kebabs and mashed potato
Have you ever tucked into a charcuterie platter at a Parisian sex club wearing nothing but steamed-up glasses and a small sarong? Me neither. Fortunately, the food writer Chris Newens has participated in this dually pleasurable activity on our behalf and lived to tell the tale.
The enormous establishment Moon City, which from the outside looks like 'a bawdy Balinese temple', but on the inside is 'a funhouse of mirrors' with a hot tub 'surrounded by fake vegetation and fibreglass rocks', offers its patrons a slap-up lunch: brioche, desiccated iceberg lettuce and 'the pink and white marble of a rosette de Lyon'. But never brie or roquefort, France's most famous cheese exports. 'We'd never buy cheese,' the club's doorman says. 'Most of the people who work here are from Senegal. They just buy what appeals to them.'
Newens, who hails from an English family of bakers and as a toddler 'played with pastry as play-dough and food colouring for paints', migrated across the Channel a decade ago, drawn by the outstanding culinary reputation of Paris, a capital where even soup kitchens — restaurants solidaires — offer their patrons red wine and cheese courses. But, as he sagely points out in Moveable Feasts, his literary tour round the surprising culinary highlights of the French city, it's not all escargots, steak frites and perfectly domed madeleines, as flowery novels and cringey Netflix shows would have us believe.
In fact it's far from it. The city's edible offering has slowly morphed into a joyfully unique combination of tastes and world cuisines: 'Many of the best bouillons these days are Vietnamese pho, the most popular sauce is a spicy ketchup called Algérienne and only tourists eat frogs' legs.'
Having unveiled his plan to work backwards through the snail-shaped city map, choosing and recreating a dish he deems representative of each area, Newens starts with the 20th arrondissement, east of the historic centre. Here, paying attention to the rural origins of many Parisian bistro owners, he picks the ancient and fantastically tasty dish the French call aligot (and that the English in our slightly less unromantic language would probably call cheesy mash): pulverised potatoes with melted Tomme de vache stirred through, as well as garlic paste, 'a homeopathic amount of butter' and a drizzle of olive oil. 'Here was a dish to be eaten in a hillside shepherd's hut with a gale outside and maybe a goat at your feet,' Newens proffers. 'Its presence here, though, spoke of the city's willingness to accept and imbibe flavours from beyond its limits.'
In the 19th arrondissement, once home to the city's many abattoirs, Newens delves into the history of the meat trade. 'The sheer tonnage of tendon, cartilage and offal sliced and auctioned here over the years is almost impossible to imagine,' he says.
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Kebab shops now proliferate in the area, always with a 'name spelled out in red plastic above its door, high-contrast photographs of its dishes peeling in the window', so he chooses the humble doner — invented by a Turkish restaurateur in the mid 19th century — as the area's token foodstuff, served with 'salade, tomate, oignon', necessarily in that order, and the aforementioned Algérienne sauce, a 'grainy, spicy, sweet orange gloop'. He briefly considers environmental concerns, heeding the loud call of veganism, but speedily admits that when hunger strikes he closes his ears 'to the panicked lowing of the phantom livestock, which can seem to roll with the wind down the canal' and tucks in.
The 18th arrondissement has Newens seeking an authentic African restaurant in which to try malangwa fish in a marinade of 'white pepper, chicken stock, mustard, freshly grated ginger, lemon juice and a spice called Aromat'. In the neighbouring 17th arrondissement he takes a crash-course in how to craft the perfect croissant, revealing that the crescent pastries are so hard to execute that 'in Paris only 20 per cent of boulangeries make their own'. And so on.
My favourite chapters were ratatouille, which he allocated to the 15th arrondissement and its anxious trainee chefs 'for no good reason apart from that Pixar film about a preternaturally talented rat' causing chaos in a kitchen, and the mouthwatering 10th arrondissement tartiflette. Although the sugary macarons of the 8th arrondissement should get an honourable mention, especially after Newens' wonderful description of the evolution of dessert in the region as 'a single continuous episode of Come Dine with Me played out over more than 50 years.'
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Far more than a map of the city's most significant culinary markers, Moveable Feasts is a portrait of a place told through those who live there, the 'nicotine-pickled locals' who may have started life elsewhere but now make their living by sifting flour and sharpening knives, from a Peruvian marine biologist retraining at the world-famous Cordon Bleu cookery school to a nearly-80-year-old market seller who 'looked a little like a garden gnome' and deserves 'a chest full of medals' for the hard grind he puts in before dawn each morning. It's a thoroughly entertaining (and seriously hunger-inducing) book that will make the Eurostar marketing team squeal with joy. Et voilà.
Moveable Feasts: Paris in Twenty Meals by Chris Newens (Profile £18.99 pp368). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on online orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
