Ruth Reichl’s The Paris Novel is a fantasy. Sure, it’s absent supernatural beings or other worlds, but who among us hasn’t dreamed of a life-changing trip, one in which a serendipitous encounter leads to transcendent meals with literary luminaries?
This is what happens to protagonist Stella when she takes a soul-searching jaunt to Paris from New York at her late mother’s behest. As Reichl notes, in 1983 when the events in The Paris Novel transpire, Paris was actually otherworldly for Americans.
“One of the reasons I chose the ’80s was I really wanted for Stella to have that experience of truly being in a place that was disorientating, that was completely unlike home, where she was an outsider,” she says.
This stark difference was apparent, too, when it came to food. “Everything about food in France in the early ’80s, for an American, was a revelation,” says Reichl. And in vivid restaurant scenes at restaurants like Les Deux Magots and L’Ami Louis, Reichl transports us to perfect Parisian meals.
We talked to the writer and longtime Gourmet editor about Paris then and now, her own Parisian dinner fantasies, and the restaurant she returns to again and again.
Eater: Why did you want to write about 1980s Paris in particular?
Ruth Reichl: I chose ’83 for a number of reasons, and one was the franc was weak and the dollar was very strong. I was a freelance writer then, had no money, and was able to go to Paris on like $2 a day. I actually got my first real job in 1984, so I had an expense account for the first time in my life, and decided: Oh, I’ve been a restaurant critic for all these years, I can go to Paris now and really find out what three-star restaurants are about. So for me personally, I got to do that transition from Paris on a shoestring to tasting the great food in restaurants. Eating [Joël] Robuchon’s food for the first time and literally thinking, I’ve never had food like this before. We had French restaurants in the United States, but we didn’t have anything of that caliber here. And it was really exciting. I remember the first bite of food at Jamin, Robuchon’s first restaurant. I thought, this wasn’t made by human hands. The technique was so impressive.
I think it’s hard for young people to understand what food was like in [the U.S.] in the ’70s and early ’80s. This was a time before farmers markets. So to go Paris and taste vegetables that have been picked and that had real flavor, you didn’t have that here very much. The idea of going into a place like Poilâne and getting really fantastic bread. It was before the bread revolution in the United States. There wasn’t a decent loaf of bread in 1984 in LA. So just to be in Paris and eat really great bread and really great, freshly churned butter? You just didn’t have that here. And the cheese. You didn’t have great cheese. You didn’t have foie gras.
Do you think it’s still possible for people to have a transformative eating experience in Paris?
I do, but it’s not the same. The other thing about going to Paris in the ’70s and ’80s was it was really hard to have a bad meal. Wherever you went the food was good. That’s not true anymore. Now you really have to do your research because you can really get awful meals if you don’t do your homework. And it’s really disappointing to be in Paris and just have one horrible meal after another. But it’s really possible now.
So many of Stella’s formative experiences in the book, particularly when it comes to dining, can still happen for someone today. These institutions are still around. Was that helpful in writing the book? Was revisiting some of these places part of your research?
I’ve been going to Robert et Louise since the ’60s, and [owner] Robert [Georget] is no longer with us. He was a butcher. But his daughter Pascal now runs it, and it feels very much the same to me. It’s still very welcoming, and affordable, and they’re still cooking in the fireplace, and it’s still a throwback to an earlier Paris. You can go to L’Ami Louis, which today is not that different than it was in the ’80s. Alain Passard makes an appearance in the book, but it was before he had his own restaurant, and you can go to Arpège today and he’s remarkable. What he has done for vegetables is amazing.
Were there places you wished you could have included that didn’t fit into Stella’s story?
I actually wrote Jamin into the book and then it wasn’t working for her story, so I took it out reluctantly. Robuchon was really an incredible, incredible chef, and I had great notes from my meals there.
What’s the best restaurant in Paris today that gives visitors a time warp to the past?
Probably Robert et Louise, and also L’Ami Louis. L’Ami Louis is now so expensive, but it is virtually unchanged. The menu is the same. The chef is no longer alive, but a lot of the waiters have been working there for 50 years.
Describe your ideal Parisian dinner party – the place, the guests, living or dead. What would you eat?
Who I would invite: Richard Onley for sure. Probably James Beard because he had an amazing appetite. Mary Frances Fisher because I would like to see her and James sparring. Julia Child. I would also invite James Baldwin and John Ashbery. And of course, I would want George Whitman to come along too, and I would just like to watch him watching all of them. Ideally, I would like Olney to be cooking in his apartment in Belleville. But if we were going to be in a restaurant, I might take them to Prunier because it is the most beautiful restaurant. It’s an art deco gem. The fish is impeccable. It’s very luxurious. Some of those people would be thrilled by the opulence of the restaurant, and some of them would be thrilled by the opportunity to eat mountains of caviar, which they couldn’t afford. Mary Frances Fisher loved caviar, and I once took her a tiny little bit – what I could afford at the time, which was like a small thing of it – and she ate it one gulp and said, “Is that all there is?”
What have been the biggest changes in Paris’s dining scene as someone who has been visiting consistently over the decades?
It’s changed so enormously. For one thing, when I first started going to Paris in the late ’60s — with the exception of North African restaurants, which had been opened after the Algerian Revolution — there wasn’t any foreign food in France. Restaurants were French. Today you’ve got fantastic Japanese restaurants and Basque restaurants and Chinese restaurants and Korean restaurants, and you’ve got this whole fantastic area of African influence in the 18th arrondissement. None of that existed even in the ’80s. French people ate French food and restaurants in Paris were predominantly French. And today you can eat fantastic food from all over the world in Paris.
The other big change is people speak English now when you go to restaurants. They did not in the ’80s at all. If you didn’t speak French when you were in Paris, you were seriously handicapped. Haute cuisine restaurants had much more elaborate rules about how you behaved in restaurants. You dressed up. Women mostly got menus with no prices on them, because it was assumed that the man was paying for the meal and it was impolite to let her know what the prices were. Men had to wear jackets in high-end restaurants, and ties.
Do you have any favorite newer openings in the city?
I haven’t been to Paris now for six months, but on my last visit I went to a little restaurant called Soces. It’s a chef who used to be at Clamato, and it’s a fairly modest restaurant but I loved it. It was just a wonderful experience being there.
What’s your favorite arrondissement for dining?
These days it’s probably the 11th. For our first Paris issue at Gourmet, which was 24 years ago, all the young chefs were sort of saying, “I don’t care about the stars. I don’t want just rich tourists coming to my restaurant anymore.” They sort of pioneered the 11th, and people are still going there, and it’s still a really interesting place to eat.
What are your favorite spots for shopping, for food or cookware?
For cookware shopping you’ve got to go to E. Dehillerin. I don’t think I’ve ever been to Paris [and] didn’t go there. For food shopping, kind of everywhere. My favorite food shopping street is Rue Mouffetarde, which is the oldest market street in Paris. It’s been a market street since the 1600s.
When’s your next Paris trip?
In the fall. Nancy Silverton and I lead an eating trip every year, so this year we’re going to Basque country, both France and Spain, and we will of course go to Paris first.
And Robert et Louise is on the list?
Oh definitely. I sent one friend there recently. She was [in Paris] for three days and she ate dinner there every night.
Where else is a must-go on every visit?
Huitrerie Regis. I always go and have oysters there. I always stop in at Androuet to look at the cheese. But mostly these days I try to go to places I haven’t been before, because there are so many great new places.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Additional photo illustration credits: Ruth Reichl headshot by Debby Wong/Shutterstock; Deviled eggs by Bistrot des Tournelles; fish dish and French onion soup photos by Soces; strawberry tart and rhubarb tart photos by Joann Pai/Tapisserie; Robert et Louise storefront by Robert et Louise/Getty