THE BEET GENERATION.

TO MEAT OR NOT TO MEAT.

The classic gigot d’agneau.

Recently, some visiting Americans asked me to recommend a bistro that served vegetarian food. Thirty years ago, when I first moved to Paris, such an enquiry would have been met with disbelief, even derision. One didn’t come to Paris to eat vegetables, any more than one looked for a hamburger in Shanghai. Most classic French cookbooks didn’t even dignify them as a food group. A dish took its name from the meat component; accompaniments were dismissed as garni.

            There were cultural reasons for this. Until the twentieth century, vegetables and, in particular, grains, generally in the form of bread, made up most of the French diet, augmented with cheese and soup. Meat was reserved for Sunday, when a leg of lamb - the traditional gigot- or a pot au feu of beef stewed with carrots, turnips and leeks became the star of an elaborate evening meal. When up-and-coming actor Jean-Paul Belmondo asked veteran tough guy Jean Gabin why he went into movies, his reply – “So I could eat meat every day” – was a shocker. Meat every day? Could anyone be so greedy?

Generations of visitors, mostly American, have chipped away at the monolith of meat, until vegetarian or vegan cuisine is at least represented on most Parisian menus. Since Covid, more restaurants have taken to courting this growing market. As my friend Heather is a vegetarian - though less from conviction than allergies- we’ve taken to checking them out.  Our most recent visit was to Pouliche in the 10^th arrondissement. One of the hottest new venues, it serves no meat on Wednesdays. We ate baked cauliflower and celery root, a salad of beetroot, and coconut cream with passionfruit – all delicious. (I wish I could be so certain of what they served at a more trendy Japanese/French fusion establishment: think a bowl of goo, a heap of twigs and a cup of slime.)

Pouliche and chef Amandine Chaignot,

For a few chefs, vegetables have become a speciality Their doyen is Alain Passard of thrice-Michelin-starred Arpège, one of France’s most distinguished restaurants (and, at 500 Euros a head -not including wine - among the most expensive). Early in the 2000s, Passard experienced, if you can believe his website, “a deep rift in his creativity. He rediscovered the garden — its fruits, its vegetables —and realized that he had never given them the room they deserved in his dishes.” Announcing grandly “I want to elevate the humble vegetable to a grand cru,” he planted two organic gardens and reduced the meat content until it appeared in only one or two plats of the ten-dish menu de degustation : I remember a somewhat apologetic inclusion of some nuggets of chicken, apparently cooked in hay, in an otherwise 100% meatless meal, distinguished by a dish of two white beets baked in rock salt – the essence of beet-ness, if you share my enthusiasm for that neglected vegetable.

Alain Passard. "What do you mean 'You prefer it well done.'?"

As you can probably tell from his language, vegetarianism became less a preference for Passard than a Cause. But eating at Arpège has never been about simply satisfying hunger. Some food writers invited to sample its new tasting menu were startled to be served the first course twice. “When you ate it before,” Passard remonstrated, “you weren’t paying attention.”

I assumed such proselytizing zeal was just exaggerating to make a point, but lately a similar extremism has emerged among diners.  Take the group who asked about a bistro with a vegetarian option. Reasoning that the menus of larger bistros were sufficiently long to include plenty of non-meat choices, I took them to a local favourite, Chez Fernand on rue Guisarde. Who knew that the plat du jour that day would be os a moelle – roasted marrow bones? They could have eaten perfectly well from the many non-meat dishes but the sight of massed carnivores excavating the fat from chunks of veal shank and smearing it on slabs of baguette was too much, and they fled as if they’d stumbled on a cannibal feast.

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