The real victory on Sunday night was a victory for disorder, an unexpected blessing, bonking the head of an unprepared population. On that long, beautiful walk, there’s a moment when you arrive at the gate of the Tuileries and, for the first time, see the expanse of the Champs-Elysees. On Sunday you expected to see what you always see: a line of red car lights going up the right side of the champs and a line of white lights running down the left—two perfect, side-by-side mile-long lines of red and white, framed by the Arc de Triomphe. On Sunday night, for the first time that anyone could remember, the two neat columns of light were gone. The champs, a chaos of people and cars, was a blur of indistinct movement, the lights and colors a smear of milky pink. For once Paris was all mixed up.
The Balzar Wars
The Balzar, on the rue des Ecoles, in the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris, happens to be the best restaurant in the world. It is the best restaurant in the world not because it has the best food—though the food is (or used to be) excellent—and not because it is “hot,” or even particularly fashionable, but because of a hundred small things that make it a uniquely soulful and happy place.
The Balzar is a brasserie, which means that it is Alsatian in origin, serves beer, and stays open late. Over the years it has added a full dinner menu, so that it has become indistinguishable from a restaurant. For more than a hundred years the Balzar has been a family business, and each of the families has managed to keep it constant without making it stale. It’s a one-story, one-room spot, small by brasserie standards—with only ninety or so covers—and has a glass front that looks out onto the street; you can see with one eye people boarding the number 63 bus in the twilight, and with the other a pretty little park dedicated to Montaigne, with plane trees and pink-flowering chestnuts.
The Balzar is a democratic place. You are greeted at the door with a handshake and a quick squint of crinkled, harried warmth, by the two maitres d’hotel—one always in a tuxedo, the other in a suit—and are shown to your table with a few pensive words about families, children, and the weather. There’s not a trace of unctuousness or forced familiarity, no appraisal of your wallet, your last review, or your weekend gross. There are long banquettes covered with dark brown leather along the walls, and a T-shaped banquette in the middle of the room. On the tables are white linen and glasses and silver. The light—from eight round globe lamps, high above—is warm and bright, gay without being harsh. The carte is a long printed card, with the dishes listed on the front and the wines on the back, and it never changes. There are leeks and tomato salad and herring for starters—foie gras if you’re in an expansive mood—and then the same five or so plats: steak au poivre, roast chicken, grilled sole or salmon, calf’s liver, gigot with white and green beans. The wine list is short, and usually the best thing on it is the Reserve Balzar, a pleasant red Bordeaux. The only sauces are the sauce au poivre on the steak and a bearnaise for the grilled salmon. The pommes frites are fine, the creme caramel is good, the profiteroles the best in Paris.
It is the waiters—or serveurs, as they’re called—who give the Balzar its soul. A team of the same ten men has been in place for decades: They are courteous, warmhearted, ironic (able to warn a client off a dubious plat with an eyebrow), and mildly lubricious. (They have been known to evaluate, sotto voce, the size and shape of a woman’s rear even as they pull out the table to make way for it.) They work hard. By tradition at the Balzar, the plats arrive beautifully arranged on an oval platter and then are carefully transferred by the waiter to a round plate. This doubles the work but creates an effect. Whenever I am feeling blue, I like to go to the Balzar and watch a waiter gravely transfer a steak au poivre and its accompaniments from an oval platter to a plate, item by item. It reaffirms my faith in the sanity of superfluous civilization.
The other famous Left Bank brasserie, the Lipp, is known as a canteen for the men of power in the Fifth Republic, but when Lionel Jospin, the virtuous Socialist who is trying to transform French politics, was running for president three years ago, he made an event of being photographed, for Paris Match, having dinner at the Balzar. Everyone got the point.
On a Sunday night in April, Martha and I, with Luke, were sitting at a table in the back, just finishing one in a long line of good dinners and were once again refining our long-term plan to be buried at the Balzar—or, more precisely, to have the urns containing our ashes placed on the dessert counter just above the mille-feuilles and the lemon tart, and on either side of the flowers. The plaques, we decided, should read “A Faithful Client” or, better, should repeat the words of those inscriptions you see all over Paris: “Here, fallen for France…”
Just then Jean-Claude, the maitre d’ in the tuxedo, came over to our table. His gravelly sud-ouest voice was pitched low, and to my amazement, his eyes were glistening. “I’d like to introduce you to someone who’ll be working with us,” he said graciously, and he summoned a melancholy-faced, lantern-jawed man, buttoned up in a good suit, whom I had idly noticed standing by the door earlier in the evening. “This is M. Delouche,” he said. I shook hands with M. Delouche and raised my eyebrows at Jean-Claude.
“The Balzar has been sold,” he said. “M. Delouche is here representing the new management.” He walked away quickly, and M. Delouche followed.
I grabbed our waiter as he came by the table. “The restaurant has been sold?” I said. “To whom was it sold?”
“To the Flo Group,” he answered, in a strangled voice.
The Flo Group! I felt as I imagined I would feel if I had been stabbed: first surprise, then nothing, then pain. The Flo Group is the creation of an Alsatian waiter turned restaurant tycoon named Jean-Paul Bucher, and in Paris it is often referred to as the rouleau compresseur Flo, the Flo steamroller. It is for many people the symbol of the forces of restaurant consolidation, globalization, standardization, and even Disneyfication; Flo runs five restaurants at Disneyland Paris. Over the past thirty years Bucher has bought up some of the oldest and most famous brasseries and bistros in Paris, while also running a chain of lesser Flos, a catering business, and a chain of cheap restaurants called Hippopotamus. Some of the Flo Group restaurants—Julien, Le Boeuf sur le Toit—are actually pretty good. But even the good places have a processed, overwrought quality, and the food at one is pretty much like the food at the others. They lack all the things that the Balzar possesses so effortlessly: distinctiveness, eccentricity, and a sense of continuity.
A few moments later one of the waiters, whom I had known for a long time, and whom I’ll call Thierry, came up to me and suggested, under his breath, that we meet for coffee the next day. When we met, Thierry told me the history of the Balzar, seen from below. He was in mufti, wearing jeans and a jean jacket, a standard uniform for off-duty waiters, like blue windbreakers on off-duty New York cops. The Balzar had never been a perfectly happy place, he maintained, and the syndicat, the union, had suffered a good deal even under the old owners. Nonetheless the garcons loved the work, because they liked the clients and the clients liked them. (I noticed that he referred to the waiters by the usually forbidden, old-fashioned word garcons, or boys, and that he also referred to their metier as restauration, or restaurant work. The two words together gave their profession blue-collar integrity.) He outlined their fears. The Flo people, he said, might close the Balzar “for restoration” and disperse the waiters to other Flo restaurants, all over Paris, never to be reassembled. They express a savoir-faire that dates from 1968,” he said. “Ours dates from 1894.” It was said that the Flo people had arranged to have American tour groups brought to the Balzar; it was also said that they were standardizing the kitchen produce, bringing it in line with the rest of the Flo Group. More immediately, the garcons were appalled because the new man, M. Delouche, had been put “on the service,” drawing his salary from their tips—the 15 percent service charge that is added to all French restaurant bills. (Thierry explained to me that the service charge was real and sacrosanct; before Flo took over, one of the garcons collected it at the end of every evening and put it in a drawer, to which each of them had a key. Now they have to wait five weeks for the same money.) It also turned out that the suit-tuxedo distinction among the greeters was a deeply significant code: A maitre d’in a suit was aligned with the owner, one in a tuxedo with the staff.