EACH TIME I go to France I eat a little
worse. It's in the last five years that the decline has become alarmingly pro- nounced. I don't include here so much the grand establishments, the places one plans to go to with greedy anticipation and stu- dious forethought, I mean the out-of-the- way joint where once one would have expected to eat well without fanfare, or the odd brasserie at which, without premedita- tion, one stops off for lunch.
In Paris, this falling away of standards seems even more noticeable than else- where, and the chances are one will eat pretty poorly now. It's as if people have lost pride in their own culinary tradition. Partly, this is fashion; here, as everywhere else, it is chic to eat Italian, and the French have for once let their weakness for fashion get the better of their natural chauvinism: the city is awash with brasseries serving platefuls of carpaccio flecked with slivers of Parmesan (which is often accompanied, oddly, by a side order of tagliatelle au beurre) and damp salads of mozzarella and tomato, all from menus which have shamelessly round- ed up the usual suspects.
No one in England is in a position to carp. I could cite a dozen London restau- rants off the top of my head that do the same. In fact, I would find it more or less impossible to think of a dozen restaurants that didn't. But somehow it is a more pallid affair in Paris. We've done it to find a voice, even if it is, necessarily, an assumed one. One senses the French do it because they've lost theirs.
As I say, it's not impossible to eat well, but one has to choose carefully. I canvassed opinions: everyone told me to go to L'Ami Louis, all were astonished I hadn't yet been. Wonderful food, huge portions, I was told. Bit of a dump, what's more, bit of a fashion- able dump, but still fabulous, I was assured.
And so I went. From the outside this lit- tle restaurant, in a part of town which is the very opposite of comme it faut, looks like a parody of the leetle' French bistro, with its twee boxiness and red-and-white gingham blinds. Inside, the walls are a gravy-stained darkness, a mixture of dark wood and lac- quered Anaglypta to give the appearance of same. High up on the walls, which are decorated with a framed photo of the origi- nal owner, who set the place up in 1924 and died in 1987, are luggage racks such as were found in old trains, and the ritual is that your waiter will hurl your coats, above your head, to land on one of these. The menu is small, but — and I hadn't quite been prepared for this — hugely expensive. I have a slight petit-bourgeois tendency at such places to hiss, 'Thirty-five pounds for scallops!' becoming consumed with panicked shock. I tried not to, so we ordered the foie gras and scallops to start with, then agonised over whether to have the cote de boeuf or the roast chicken (both for two) next. It was the chicken. The foie gras turned out to be pate" de foie gras (I had imagined the liver itself, just sautéed in butter), not the normal slice of it, but three huge slabs, more than I've ever seen on one plate. It was cold and creamy and with that dense, well-packed roundedness that only it has. With it were pieces of baguette, sliced in half and charred on a grill. This was celestial. The scallops, seven of them, came sweet and round, with their soft, orange coral curling out from them, and fried in garlicky butter, the fried garlic cloves almost as big as the scallops themselves. I tried to stop before finishing them, because I knew a whole chicken was coming next, but I couldn't.
It was the roast chicken that was a disap- pointment. It wasn't bad, but a roast chick- en in a place like this (and not just because they charge, at current rates, over £40 for it) has to be the best roast chicken one's ever eaten, and this wasn't. It didn't even taste like a particularly good chicken. And the pommes allumettes that came with it were pale and limp and not up to much. I kept eyeing everyone else's food. And I think the mistake was not to order the beef. If I were rich I'd come back for the beef and the gateau de pommes de terre Bear- naise, which looked and smelt golden and buttery and heavenly.
We didn't have pudding, but shared a large green salad instead. With a couple of glasses of champagne to start with, a couple of bottles of Badoit and, chosen from an exceptional wine list, a half bottle of spec- tacular, intensely grapy Sancerre during, our bill came to just under 1,400 francs, which at the moment works out at about £180. I think I will have to wait until the franc is weaker before returning.
Restaurant a L'Ami Louis: 32 rue du Vert- bois, Paris 3ieme; tel 00 33 148 87 77 48
Nigella Lawson
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