Untethered Soul In French

[Bartley Trowbridge]

My guest today is Alexander Lobrano. Alec, as most of us call him, has been a vital part of the Paris restaurant scene for decades, having covered the bistros, brasseries, and restaurants in the city for publications like the New York Times, Travel & Leisure, The Guardian, Cond Nast Traveler, and most notably, as the Paris correspondent for Gourmet magazine.

In addition, Alec gloriously chronicles his meals on his blog at Alexanderlobrano.com in addition to his books Hungry for Paris and Hungry for France. And he has a new book coming out on June 1st: My Place at the Table: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris, a memoir where he dives deeply into how he discovered the wonderful world of food, and how he fell in love with (and within) Paris, which came with a few ups and downs along the way, landing - enfin - in the city he has called home for three decades.

Alec: Actually I worked in book publishing and magazines in New York City for ten years before my fleeting affair with fashion, first in New York and then a second time in Paris, because of a job I went after as a way of getting there.

David: Androuet was one of the first cheese shops in Paris that I ever visited and I remember being completely wowed but it. I never saw so many amazing cheeses in one place! If you want to see the glory of France in one place, go to a fromagerie (cheese shop.) As you know, you can get by in France without speaking much French, but if you know the language, you can better understand French culture, French people, and French cuisine. How was that a critical juncture for you, in both your appreciation of French foods and learning French?

Paris also has restaurants that are beloved by the fashion crowd and which play the same game of desire, sharpened by inaccessibility. The awful restaurant at the Hotel Costes was one of these for a long time until it stopped being fashionable, as was Dave, a mediocre Chinese restaurant inexplicably adored by the jet set, and Stresa, a very average Italian restaurant near the swanky Avenue Montaigne.

Alec: It was a real gut punch, and it would have been nice to have a phone call or an email in advance, but the sky had fallen in New York, so I found out about it when the French press started calling me for comments.

As a country of immigrants, Americans have a pretty broad knowledge of the flavors and foods of other countries, and I think this is what changed our food culture from one that was hierarchical with French food at the top, to horizontal, with French food among the many kitchens we love, explore and reference.

This fifty-year-long evolution is why we eat so well in Paris today; because it adds a whole new category of choices to the static offer of haute cuisine, cuisine bourgeoise tables, brasseries, and bistros, the four main restaurant categories as they existed when I moved to Paris.

Alec: I think that the soul of France still lives in its bistros, bouchons, estaminets, winstubs, and all of those simple happy places where conviviality is generated by a shared love of good food and wine. So bistros and bistro cooking are as eternal for me as the great pyramids in Egypt. The brasserie is another happy Gallic invention that bloomed after so many Alsatians fled German-occupied Alsace for Paris and other cities after the Franco-Prussian war. At first, brasseries were simple brew-house restaurants serving sausages and choucroute garni (sauerkraut with sausage and pork), but they evolved into something more glamorous and metropolitan as more and more people began to travel at the end of the 19th century, leading up to the amazing boom in visitors to Paris for the Universal Exhibition of 1900.

David: Memoirs can be tough to write, deciding what to talk about and how personal you want to get. You did a bit of both, talking about some of the difficulties in your life and the challenges, which was very courageous. Was that hard for you, or did you feel relieved to have been so open about it in the book?

My guest today is Alexander Lobrano. Alec, as most of us call him, has been a vital part of the Paris restaurant scene for decades, having covered the bistros, brasseries, and restaurants in the city for publications like the New York Times, Travel & Leisure, The Guardian, Cond\u00E9 Nast Traveler, and most notably, as the Paris correspondent for Gourmet magazine.

I\u2019ve gotten to know Alec over the years, sharing tables in Paris caf\u00E9s, dining in bistros and restaurants, and sipping vin at local wine bars, and let me tell you - he\u2019s definitely one of most fascinating dining companions I know, with an encyclopedic knowledge of French cuisine, and a quick wit. Interestingly, we grew up near each other but never met \u2018til I ambushed him at a book signing for his book, Hungry for Paris, a comprehensive dining guide to the great restaurants in the city, a number of years ago.

As a bit of an introduction, you\u2019ve written two books, Hungry for Paris and Hungry for France, which are both great references to where to dine in France. As one of the most esteemed food writers, why did you decide to turn the pen on yourself, to write a memoir?

Alec: The desire to write this book just sort of dropped in my lap - like a ripe peach - but I\u2019d been mulling it over subconsciously for a long time. I love writing about restaurants, food, and chefs, but I also just plain love writing and storytelling. My voice has developed a lot through the years, so I was drawn to doing a non-fiction project with two main characters\u2014me and food, that would tell the story of how I became a writer who chose to make food his subject.

My book is also the answer to many people, but most of all my late father, who had asked me, \u201CBut why food?\u201D That\u2019s what my father said asked me the last time I ever saw him. He complimented me on my writing but found my primary subject matter incomprehensible because it didn\u2019t seem important to him. I disagreed, of course, because for me there is no subject that\u2019s more important than food.

Writing My Place at the Table is also the expression of my desire to push out the walls on my relationship with food and writing. Because the internet has set off an era of iconoclasm, the formal expertise I\u2019ve acquired over more than thirty years of eating in France needs to be expressed differently in today\u2019s food and media world, to remain valued and relevant.

David: I\u2019ll say\u2026and yes, the internet has really changed things. Anyone can be a food writer nowadays howeever it\u2019s interesting how many people attempted to do so back when food and travel blogging started, but haven\u2019t kept up with it. But you\u2019re right; the tone of food writing has changed and evolved.

You began writing about fashion, hopping from New York to London, before finally settling in Paris. You have a chapter on a dinner you had two months into your life in the city, where at one point you realized that you were \u201Cnot a tourist anymore,\u201D which changed everything. But mostly, as a young man untethered in Paris, you were mostly dining on your own, which is something Americans are apprehensive about. What was your earliest experience of dining in Paris, how did your experience evolve, and what did you discover dining alone?

But insofar as eating alone is concerned, I think it\u2019s changed some in the United States, but dining out, as in going into a restaurant and sitting down at a table alone, as opposed to being seated at a counter or standing, was something I never saw anyone do until I first visited Paris. My family went to La Coupole on that trip, and I was fascinated to see several people dining by themselves.

When I arrived in Paris to work for a fashion publisher, I knew no one, so I ate an omelette with salad in the caf\u00E9 near the hotel I was staying in almost every night until the day the stout blonde waitress who always served me, reproached me for it. \u201CYou\u2019re young, you have some money, you\u2019ve just moved to this beautiful city, so go out and discover it!\u201D she barked, and as embarrassed as I was, I knew she was right.

So the next day I bought a bunch of restaurant guidebooks and picked out a place that sounded good, Au Quai d\u2019Orsay, which was famous for its mushroom dishes, and made a reservation just for me on the following Saturday night. I was pretty mortified when I arrived, but eventually I relaxed and had a superb meal all by myself. This little triumph left me feeling elated because it was then that I understood the best way for me to learn about Paris and improve my French was by going to its restaurants.

David: It\u2019s funny that you were just a timid young man scared to order anything more than an omelet\u2026who eventually because one of the world\u2019s leading voices on French cuisine! How did you pivot from fashion, to writing about the bistros and restaurants in Paris?

Alec: The first story I ever did from Paris for Fairchild Publications was about Androuet, a famous cheese shop that was then located on the Rue d\u2019Amsterdam. I loved meeting Monsieur Androuet and visiting the aging cellars carved into the limestone beneath the shop with him, which unfortunately are now gone. My French was terrible, but he was patient and kind, perhaps because he saw that I really was fascinated by everything he taught me about French cheese. It wasn\u2019t until after I\u2019d left the interview, for example, that it was explained to me by the photographer who\u2019d accompanied me that instead of telling Monsieur Androuet that his cheeses were masterpieces worthy of being in the Louvre, I told him his cheese should be smashed on the walls of the museum; the photographer had groaned at my train wreck of a sentence, so I\u2019d known something was wrong, but Monsieur Androuet never raised an eyebrow.

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