Читать книгу The Gourmet's Guide to Europe - Lieut.-Col. Newnham-Davis - Страница 9

Since Cubat in dudgeon gave up his restaurant in the Avenue of the Champs Elysées, there has been no prominent foreign restaurant in Paris. Cubat, whose restaurant in St. Petersburg is so well known, brought Russian cookery to Paris; but though the Parisians are fond enough of cheering for the Dual Alliance, they did not dip into their pockets to keep the Russian restaurant in existence. An expensive German restaurant, a relic of the last exhibition, showed its lights just off the great boulevards, but after a time disappeared. There are Viennese restaurants on the boulevards and in the Rue d'Hauteville, and Spanish and Italian establishments may be found by the curious who wish to impair their digestion. The Englishman or American who has been feeding on rich food for any length of time, often yearns for perfectly simple food. At Henry's, at the Club Restaurant, and at most of the English and American bars with which Paris is now studded, a chop is obtainable, and a whisky and soda which is not poison; but I, personally, when Paté de Foie Gras becomes a horror, truffles a burden, and rich sauces an abomination, go to one of the Tavernes, the Royale in the Rue Royale, or the Anglais in the Rue Boissy d'Anglas (where you get Lucas's food at lower prices than in the restaurant by the Madeleine), or into one of the many houses of plain cookery on the boulevards, and order the simplest and least greasy soup on the bill of fare, some plainly grilled cutlets, and some green vegetables. A pint of the second or third claret on the wine-card washes down this penitential repast. At Puloski's, an uninviting-looking little establishment in the Rue St-Honoré, I have eaten excellent dishes of oysters cooked according to American methods, and that dry hash which boarding-house keepers across the Atlantic are supposed to serve perpetually to their paying guests, but which an American abroad is always glad to meet. You will find a great variety of oysters, Marennes, Ostendes, Zélandes, at Prunier's, in the Rue Duphot, and the dishes of the house—soup, sole, steak—are all cooked with oysters as a foundation, sauce, or garnish. Prunier's is the house at which the travelling gourmet generally tastes his first snails, the great Burgundian ones with striped shells, or the little gray fellows from the champagne vineyards. If you eat Prunier's oysters you should drink his white Burgundy. If you eat his snails, you should drink his red wine, for he has some excellent red Burgundy.

Most travellers at least once in their lives go the round of Montmartre and its Bohemian shows. I have dined with the great Fursy in the restaurant attached to the Tréteau de Tabarin, and was given good substantial bourgeois cookery. I asked the singer of the "Chansons Rosses" how it was that he, who girds at all things bourgeois and commonplace, ran the restaurant on such simple and non-eccentric lines; and he shrugged his shoulders, which I took to mean that you may trifle with a man's intellect but not with his stomach. About two in the morning, in the upstairs room at the Tréteau, there is often some amusement forward. Upstairs at the Rat Mort, you may dine in comfort with Soupe à l'Onion and Tournedos Rat Mort in the menu; and at the Abbaye de Thélème, and at the Restaurant Blanche in the place of that name, you will find the artists and sculptors of the Butte.

In the Quartier, Thurion's in the Boulevard St-Germain is an interesting restaurant for a wandering Anglo-Saxon to become acquainted with, for there he will see most of the young Americans and English who are climbing up the ladder of pictorial fame. It is a Parisian "Cheshire Cheese." The floors are sawdusted, the waiters rush about in hot haste, and the chickens stray in from the courtyard at the back and pick up the crumbs round the tables. The place has its traditions, and you can hear tales of Dickens and Thackeray from the plump lady who makes up the bills.