12/03/2015

The letter ‘o’ is a mysterious one at the best of times. It lacks an obvious start or end point, is easily confused with the puzzling number zero, and forms the phonological centrepiece of this strange song featuring Ost & Kjex. Its very presence in the word “mysterious” is itself something of a mystery*. But if you were trying to make it look even more enigmatic, you could do little better than superscripting and underlining it, before rotating it a beguiling 45˚.

Oh...

Au Clocher du Village is the cozy-looking bistro which I walk past whenever I exit Église d’Auteuil station, as befalls me from time to time. On my first sighting, I was immediately hooked by the cryptic ‘o’. Was the underscore a diacritic? Was its slantiness an arcane prosodic cue? Perhaps an artistic approach was needed – could the ‘o’ be tumbling gracelessly to the earth, a token of this establishment’s rustic charm in  the city of haute cuisine? Or could it symbolise one of the swinging bells evoked in the poetic title? For some time, it seemed to me there was nothing in the world more perplexing and unfathomable than the tilted letter that had captured my imagination.

Until I found a second one.

... my god.

A mere 800m separates Au Clocher’s frivolous vowel rotation from a perfect replica, this time tucked between the letters “au relais Chard” and “n”. At a restaurant called “au relais Chardon”.

If my curiosity had been piqued before, it had now been soaked in methylated spirits and exposed to an open flame. How many more lop-sided ‘o’s were lurking around this city? Or if it was only these two, which one came up with it first? Did the owner of one walk past the other and recognise a good thing when he saw it? Was this a very literal case of one restaurant mimicking the other to the letter?

As it turns out, there’s more linking these two establishments than just a cartwheeling ‘o’ and an ill-advised chocolate colour scheme. They share an owner, and at a total of two locations represent the smallest possible restaurant collective you could just about call a chain. Oddly, it’s not the first minimal chain I’ve come across in Paris. I was struck recently by a façade lit up with the name “Le Congrès” at the Porte Maillot, having already discovered one at the Porte d’Auteuil. I was confident an online search would prove the existence of others around town - but to paraphrase one famous Parisienne, “that’s all there is, there [are]n’t any more”.   

Spot the difference

I have other examples, but rather than list them I’d ask that you just take my word and indulge me the next few sentences. The unlikely parade of Parisian double acts provides a welcome contrast to the tired copy and paste instinct of English restaurateurs. Yes, places like Côte, Bills and Strada are solid eateries in their own right - but once you’ve seen one,  you’ve seen 35% of restaurants in Britain. So I'll take the tilted ‘o’ of tw-independent Parisian dining over a flat UK chain culture any day.

(My apologies to anyone who finds “French food is better than English food” rather an uninsightful conclusion.)

*Where’s the ‘o’ in its French root and counterpart, mystérieux? 

28/02/2015

Restaurant Review

France and fine food. It’s impossible to imagine one without the other. The two go together like moules and frites, foie gras and compote d’abricot, cab sav and côte de boeuf. French cuisine is so thunderously iconic, it even clinched a spot in the Japanese game show Iron Chef. The western dining tradition will forever be indebted to a vast array of French innovations: there’s the amuse-bouche, the hors-d’œuvre, the pièce de résistance. There’s grande cuisine, haute cuisine, nouvelle cuisine. And then there’s this.

For those who find themselves tiring of France’s prissy approach to dining, here surely is the antidote. With its garish shop fronts and dated 90s design, Speed Rabbit Pizza stands out at the party of French gastronomy like a biker stands out a funeral – leather clad and smelling of sweat, hunched in the corner with his back to the casket, blasting death metal from a boombox held together with gaffer tape.

The baffling decision to name the chain after a jumpy sex-crazed rodent has found some justification in recent years: since opening shop in Boulogne-sur-Seine in 1991, Speed Rabbit Pizza has spawned a litter of over 130 restaurants across metropolitan France. About sixty of these are spattered grossly throughout the streets of Paris, doing their utmost to smear excrement in the face of Haussmann’s 19^th Century urban vision.

It’s hard to put a finger on the secret to SRP’s astronomic success in a country where restaurant chains are rare and the term “fast food” borders on profanity. Could it be the compellingly poetic title? The judicious and sensitive depiction of a typical female customer in their TV advertising campaign? Perhaps it’s their avant-garde range of toppings, with innovations such as four cheese (“La Cheese”) and spicy sausage (“Spicy Lovers”)? Or the enigmatic logo, rendering sleek design in a sophisticated monochrome, accompanied by a toxic yellow font redolent of mustard and abscess pus?

After a nine-month nationwide talent search for a new logo design, this winning entry was selected at random.

I don’t think any of these can fully explain Speed Rabbit Pizza’s trailblazing triumph over the last two decades. More likely is that the restaurants are simply a front for the French amphetamine trade. It’d take an idiot not to spot the overt allusions to the product’s aphrodisiac qualities, the suggestiveness of their by-line “les meilleurs ingrédients font les meilleures pizzas”, or the unsubtle reference to “speed” in the company title. Suddenly their jumpy mascot makes a lot more sense.

What's really in this amphetamine-laced Hawaiian? 

To conclude, SRP cleverly couples a “speed over substance” culinary approach with a “speed as substance” real world sensibility, providing a refreshingly unpretentious Parisian dining experience that anyone can enjoy. Five stars.

10/01/2015

To quote Memrise, a stroppy vocab learning app which has frustratingly acquired permission to use push notifications, "it's been a while". In the last two months, I have:

• Had a delicious $10 dinner in Melbourne's Chinatown 
• Photographed a ruined French abbey in the North Yorkshire Moors
• Won a Tom Tailor minigolf tournament
• Eaten some mediocre pizza in Hamburg for a fiver
• Jogged up the side of a ski piste to the bemusement of an elderly Swiss couple
• Worked an all-day shift in a Tom Tailor store, djing and making popcorn... At the same time.
• Been to Phillip Island and not seen the penguins – cheers Fergus
• Had a solid 20€ dinner in an Indian restaurant in Versailles (biryani was the right choice)
• Changed country… Four times.
• Not used Memrise once. 

With the boring details covered, I'd now like to write about my latest trip to the supermarket. My local Carrefour hypermarché may not quite match up to my favourite branch in the outskirts of Antibes, where freshly prepared sushi is sold alongside immense 3D televisions and 0,89€ bottles of wine (a product arrangement which could probably be improved upon). Though with live lobster marauding aquariums and four aisles dedicated to cheese, the Porte d’Auteuil offering certainly holds its own. Upon entry, the Gruen transfer effect was immediate (non-Australians may need to google), and I eventually washed up outside the store with far more stuff than I knew what to do with.

It was a three day hike to the stationery section.

In that dizzying blur, ten minutes of consternation in the shampoo & conditioner aisle stood out. In other countries, the name of the game in male grooming tends to be simplicity and accessibility. Not so in France – unable to locate a familiar Pantene shelf in this palace of FMCGs, I turned instead to the local hero, L’Oréal. Of the five distinct shampoos available, each styled itself as the solution to some hair-related problem: two were anti-dandruff, two were anti-hair-loss and one was anti-thinning. In other words, the assumptions in every case were that you a) had a problem with your hair, b) had identified it and c) sought measures to counter it. Their range had somehow managed to miss the proportion of men who (i) don’t have a problem with their hair, (ii) don’t know about it, or (iii) don’t care.

Blue+orange & blue act against dandruff, black+teal & red against hair loss, maroon against thinning. Where is my Pantene classic care?

As a (i) or (ii)er, I felt alienated, frustrated and confused. For L’Oréal’s downbeat offering to work, you’d have to assume a culture in which most men are actively looking for problems with their hair. In my experience, that culture doesn’t exist in England or Australia – but then, it probably would if the market-leading haircare brand started listing all the things that can go wrong on their standard selection. So well done, L’Oréal. You’ve balanced the unfair body image expectations on France’s women by beating its men into paranoia too*. You’ve traded in a little bit of liberté for a bit more égalité on the part of the fraternité. And now I’ll never again lose a hair on my pillow without fearing the worst and cursing your name. And giving thanks for the Arginine Resist X3 Shampooing Renforçateur in my shower. Bastards.

Picked it for the colour scheme, I swear.

So. Shampoo in hand (along with a couple of tartes tatin, some onions and a bathmat), I brought home all my essentials for the next six months in Paris. May those months be littered with LAP articles.

*Thereby making this hilarious but fairly depressing joke a little less true.

PS. The shooting of several policemen and unarmed civilians in France over the last few days has left me feeling cold. I think these articles provide some important reflections in the immediate aftermath.