Paris Journal 2010 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com
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Some people watch TV in the evening. I listen to music. I have a Sansa Fuze MP3 player loaded with over 700 of my favorite tunes, but for variety, I use the Fuze to listen to radio. (A Fuze is much more than an MP3 player.) When we arrived here in early July, I turned the Fuze FM radio on one evening, thinking it would be on Radio Classique at 101.1, the same place on the dial as one of my favorite radio stations in southwest Florida. Radio Classique is all classical music, and some talk, which helps with the French listening comprehension. Radio Classique is also a favorite station of one of our Paris friends who is also named Barbara. I listened for a while, and thought, “OMG, the other Barbara is not going to like this!” Radio Classique seemed to be playing a very strange mix of music, and not much of it was classical. I thought maybe it was just a late evening thing they’re trying out. But then I finally realized that a button had been clicked and a dial turned on my Fuze. I was listening to 101.5, Radio Nova, whose catch phrase is “Le Grand Mix.” A weird mix it is, and, unlike the other Barbara, I like it because it gets me to listen to different music that I might not find on my own. And the music Radio Nova plays is NOT the top 40 variety at all. This music has been specially selected by someone who cares about music. I’m now addicted to Radio Nova. The Wikipedia entry about Radio Nova is brief, so I’ll include it all right here: Radio
Nova is a trendy radio station
broadcast from Paris,
created in 1981 by Jean-François Bizot. Its
playlist is characterized by non-mainstream or underground artists of
various music genres, such as electro,
new
wave, reggae,
jazz, hip
hop and world music. Several
well-known Parisians have had shows on Radio Nova, such as Ariel
Wizman, Edouard Baer, Jamel
Debbouze, Gilles Peterson, Ivan Smagghe,
Laurent
Garnier and David Guetta. The
radio is owned by the Nova Press company which also owns the record
label Nova Records, the jazz-oriented radio station TSF Jazz and edited Nova Magazine. Jean-François Bizot, alas, is gone now. He died of cancer in 2007, at the age of 63. At least this radio station carries on his memory, as does the magazine Actuel, which he re-started in 1970 with other people like Bernard Kouchner. But I think that magazine is no longer published monthly; it only comes out occasionally, as an almanac. Here’s a photo of a long-haired Bizot in a fur coat -- interesting looking guy. France itself is “Le Grand Mix” these days. The influence and evidence of its colonial past is everywhere. At one of our favorite French restaurants that is open during August, the influence of North Africa, for example, is unmistakable, even though this restaurant, L’Épopée, is classified as Traditional French Cuisine in the yellow pages. Before dinner, we took a long walk. First, we went up to the Allée des Cygnes because it was only 5:20PM, and we felt the need to get away from the rush hour traffic, even if it is August and the traffic isn’t as heavy as usual. We walked the full length of the Allée, until we reached the Pont de Bir Hakeim (check out the photo on this Wiki page). It used to be called the Pont de Passy, because it leads to the Passy neighborhood, which used to be the village of Passy before Paris swallowed it whole. It was given the name it now has to commemorate a WWII battle in which French forces fought Nazis (led by Rommel) in Libya. Passy is in the very chic 16th arrondissement. We hadn’t walked around in the 16th for a long time, so we decided to go there. Our route took us up the hill to the rue de Passy, which is a fairly commercial street but surprisingly not as re-developed and trendy as the rue du Commerce in our neighborhood. While we saw some charming things along the rue de Passy, we also found a modern shopping center stuck inside a semi-modern building. We walked through it, but I didn’t like it. It had the same chain stores that one sees everywhere in the world these days. I decided that we should leave the rue de Passy and walk down the hill along the rue de Boulainvilliers to the neighborhood next to Radio France. I keep hearing that even though the Radio France building is ugly, the neighborhood there is nice. On the other side of the street, walking a dog, was Candice Bergen. She saw that I saw her, and of course it looks like the thing in the pouch in my hand might be a camera (which it is), so she quickened her pace. She needn’t have bothered. I’m not about to disturb her. I looked away, but when I glanced over again as we walked on I caught her looking my way again, to see if she was going to be accosted by intrusive tourists. No way, Candice. We kept going. The 16th is relatively calm. There was just about nobody else out walking around. Of course, these wealthy people are all on vacation now. I don’t know what Candice is doing here now, but she is very, very tan. When we reached the rue La Fontaine, we turned left because I wanted to check out a park that I spotted on the map, Square Henri Collet. Then we got another surprise. Voila! The Castel Béranger, one of the architect Guimard’s masterpieces! I remembered this apartment building as being farther up the hill, farther from the river, and Tom did, too. But there it was, right on the rue La Fontaine. We sat on a bench and admired it while its guardienne in pink slacks swept the sidewalk in front of it with a broom. I think she is very proud of her building. She said “pardon” when she swept right in front of Tom. He responded by saying “bonsoir,” to which she responded by giving us a big smile. I don’t think she expected to hear French, because we’d been talking to each other in our native tongue, of course. I took some photos and then we went on to the Square Henri Collet, which is charming. From there, we walked down the very quiet rue Félicien David, the busier rue de Versailles, and finally to the Pont Mirabeau, which leads back towards our neighborhood, along the avenue Émile Zola. It was a long walk. We looked into the windows of Cambodian and Thai restaurants, so by the time we reached L’Épopée just a few minutes before 8PM, we were hungry. We were given a table, and had a delicious dinner of snails, lamb, steak, and a few little extra things that were given to us free. The free mis en bouche served to us immediately was packed with powerful flavor, including pepper, causing us to drink more Badoit mineral water. We shared the escargots, which are served outside of their shells, on a plate drizzled with persillade and sprinkled with spices. In the middle are some sautéed slices of eggplant and zucchini with some wonderful goat cheese. My lamb shank was supposed to come with bulgur, but I explained that I have a wheat intolerance, and asked if there was something I could substitute for this garniture. The server said yes, there is a rösti of potatoes. I was pleased with that. A rösti is a traditional Swiss dish of fried grated potatoes, a little like a hash brown or a tater tot, but much better. And very buttery. Yumm. Tom had a rösti with his filet of beef, too. The morel mushrooms and the sauce with the filet were full of flavor, and Tom said the steak was, too. My lamb shank was extremely good, but you know, it wasn’t any better than the lamb shank served recently at the simple and less expensive Café le Commerce. But the sauce and spices with this lamb shank were wonderful. The flavoring in this sauce is called a Ras el Hanout, a very aromatic blend of spices used in Morocco. There’s that North African influence again! We did not order dessert, but Tom had a decaf coffee. With that coffee came, gratuit, two Valrhona chocolates, two teeny-weeny dark chocolate cupcakes, and two wonderful pralines. L’Épopée is very generous. I liked our server. He is very young, and he does speak English, sort of. But he quickly understood that we wanted to use our French, and he accommodated us. He did get confused after tending to a table of two Brits where he did have to speak English. He then came to our table and spoke a few words in English, then stopped himself, and began again in his beautiful French. He was very busy working that dining room by himself. His boss must be on vacation. The restaurant was taken over in April 2008 by two young men who studied at the École Supérieure de Cuisine Francaise Grégoire Ferrandi à Paris, a fascinating place that Tom and I visited on Patrimony Days a couple years ago – probably just five months after the two young guys started running L’Épopée. One young man, the maitre d’hotel, runs the dining room, and the other is the chef. All was calm and good when we got back to the apartment. The cool nights are great for sleeping. Bonne nuit! |
Saturday, August 7, 2010
The
front gate of Castel Béranger, an Art Nouveau masterpiece of an apartment
building designed by Hector
Guimard, who actually lived in the building for a while, too.
Eiffel
Tower and Statue of Liberty at the end of the Allée, or Ȋle, des Cygnes.
The
Mississippi and the Tennessee, paddlewheel boats on the Seine.
L’Épopée’s
Souris d'Agneau confite au Ras el
Hanout with its rösti of
potatoes.
There
were actually two more morels hiding on the other side of this beef filet and
rösti at L’Épopée.
The
balloon that we see from our apartment has new sponsors this year. The main one is AirParif, which tells us what we know
– the air quality has been very good this summer in Paris.
View
from the Pont Mirabeau
yesterday evening. Note: For addresses & phone numbers of
restaurants in this journal, click
here. |
