Pourquoi Pas?
Grand Paris, Part 7: Jonathan Nunn encounters an exceptional Chinese restaurant in an undervalued part of Paris.
Grand Paris is a column about the changing relationship between Paris and its suburbs, told through the food of its various diaspora communities and neighbourhoods. You can read the previous entries here:
Grand Paris Part 1: Les Olympiades
Grand Paris Part 2: Lognes and Torcy
Grand Paris Part 3: Saint-Denis
Grand Paris Part 4: Le Perreux-sur-Marne
Grand Paris Part 5: The Enabling Constraint
Grand Paris Part 6: An Englishman in Paris
‘Le quinzième? Pourquoi?’
I was discussing the dire state of French restaurant criticism while sitting in Lissit, a bar in the 11e that serves natural wine so tart it could restore a cast iron pan (complimentary), when I started making my excuses to leave. ‘Stay,’ the waiter said to my companion Vadim, ‘the food here is very good.’ Vadim explained that this may well be the case but I was off to eat across town in the 15e, which is when the waiter expressed his disbelief. The 15th? Why? Paris’s 15th arrondissement is both geographically and spiritually the opposite of the 11th; south-west and not north-east, frou-frou shops and middle-of-the-road brasseries in place of caves à vins and tiny stores selling fresh soba noodles. I was trying to think of a London equivalent that would make someone say the same thing. Sitting in an arch on the edge of London Fields and suddenly announcing ‘I’m going for dinner in Parsons Green’? It’s not that there aren’t good restaurants in the 15e but if you are an 11e person, then it’s a valid question: why bother?
My answer, now and always, is that Paris incubates eccentric restaurateurs everywhere. I once went to an Iranian restaurant in the 15e that served lousy food but where every table was waited on by the charming owner, a man who grew up on Elgin Avenue in West London and who, before the dishes of the day had been announced, would spend a good 15 minutes giving you his entire life story in whichever language you speak. ‘Ah Indians, a great people,’ he told me, after hearing my own origin story. ‘That’s because they’re originally Iranian.’ Nearby, on a trip to Paris last year, I was stopped in my tracks by a blackboard in the window of a tiny, minimalist Chinese restaurant. On it was written the names of every single ingredient and their provenance used across the menu, next to a sheet of laminated paper that announced, not so much passive-aggressively but aggressively-aggressively, everything it didn’t do: no sushi (it’s Paris, after all), no lychees, no nems, no entrées, no desserts, no changing ingredients, no changing the proportion of ingredients. The only water on the menu was two obscure mineral waters priced at €10 a litre. This is my equivalent of love at first sight. I knew I had to go back.
