TO BISTRO OR NOT TO BISTRO?

UNPICKING ANOTHER PARISIAN PUZZLE

    

      La Mere Catherine on Place de Tertre, Montmartre. Nice try, but not the first.

  We all know the legend. On March 30th, 1814, Cossacks from the allied army that toppled Napoleon were visiting Montmartre. They stopped by a small café called Mére Catherine and loudly demanded food “bystri, byistri” – Russian for “quickly”. And so the bistro was born.

            Sorry, but it just isn’t so. The first use of “bistro” doesn’t occur until seventy years later. It probably derives from bistraud, bistingo or bistrouille, all meaning “someone who makes or sells wine”.

Properly, a bistro is a modest bar that also serves light meals. This hasn’t stopped restaurateurs from attaching the name to everything from an establishment with three Michelin stars to a line of frozen ready-meals. During the ‘seventies,  a group of British restaurants called Bistingo even fancied themselves arbiters of culinary excellence. A cartoon on their menus showed an irate chef booting a client into the street. A watching waiter explains to a colleague “He tried to add salt.”

            These days, with the industry dependent on dried or frozen ingredients, the average bistro meal is closer to those TV dinners than to the Guide Michelin; boil-in-a-bag portions of confit de canard, boeuf bourguignon and cassoulet, and frites bought frozen in 50 kilo tubs from one of those sprawling catering supermarkets on the outskirts.

            It wasn’t always so.  When I first visited Paris, the word “bistro” connoted simplicity. They served wine by the glass, or in ceramic or glass pichets, and water in heavy-bottomed litre bottles of “Chateau Chirac”, as they called tap water in the days when that redoubtable gentleman was mayor of Paris.

If you requested a menu, a dog-eared, grease-stained card would be produced, but to ask for one marked you as an outsider and probably a plouc – a mug. Most people ate the daily formule, details of which were chalked on the blackboard by the door: three courses: salad, a choice of three or four entrées, followed by cheese or a dessert.

   Office workers made up most of the clientele. They, and bistros, were a favourite subject of Jean-Jacques Sempé. His drawings capture both perfectly: the over-ironed and starched table-cloths, the sleeping dog or cat, the imperturbable madame behind the caisse. He set his first book, Monsieur Lambert, among a group who gathered in such a place each day for lunch  – until one of them, unaccountably, takes up with a woman. It doesn’t last, of course, and reason is soon restored. My wife took my copy to Sempé to have it signed. He added a little sketch, and confessed “This is still my favourite book.”        

     Romance has a place in my memories of the bistro. My first French affair was also one of my first with an older woman. Throughout a summer in the ‘seventies, I made almost weekly trips from London to spend weekends with Céline in her high-ceilinged sixieme apartment.

            August descends on Paris like a curse. Empty streets echo to the clatter of jackhammers as café owners rush through renovations before their clientèle floods back in early September. By noon it was too hot to move, to eat, certainly to make love, so we read and dozed, pressing to our foreheads the glasses of homemade limeade, beaded with moisture, that we drank by the litre.

            From time to time, we descended to the street and, clinging to the shadows and each other, drifted around the corner to a little bistro where one table in a small tiled alcove at the back offered privacy and the occasional breath of fresh air. We ate green salad with a too-vinegary vinaigrette, nibbled museau in aspic or herrings in oil, drank chilled Brouilly, that atypical red at its best when cold, and skipped cheese or Ile flottante in our eagerness to be back indoors.

Years later, I recognized my experience with Céline mirrored in Le Divorce, a novel by the American writer Diane Johnson. Her heroine is an American girl who takes a much older Frenchman as a lover. Reveling in the way he instructs her in the intricacies of life in Paris, she muses, “If you didn’t know where to look, you could pass your whole life with no sense of what you were missing.” As far as France was concerned, Céline was as much my teacher as lover.

It was she who explained that the story about the Cossacks was wrong.

“So what’s the truth?” I asked. “Why are they called bistros?”

She let her book fall and leaned back on the cushions.

“Very well,” she said. “But first you must kiss me.”

            Proust wrote that “houses, trees and avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years”. But I still remember the bistro, and that kiss.