French restaurants

These pages recently carried a lament for the little French restaurant, and the loss from the cities they once graced of a certain element of gentility and, yes, class. On the same subject, let us consider another era when class was valued more highly, and which produced the classiest, and the grandest, French restaurant of all. This requires a journey. In July 1936, a Chicago family, relations of mine, embarked on an unrushed two-month European vacation. A meticulous Thos. Cook & Son-Wagons-Lits, Inc. itinerary routed them first to France, then Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Holland and finally to England. It was a thoroughly first-class affair.

In the seminal Casablanca, there is a classic moment when the Humphrey Bogart character is asked how he ended up there. Bogie, doing laconic and world-weary as only he could, replies, “My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.” When Claude Rains’s iconic Captain Renault purrs, “Waters? What waters? We’re in the desert!” Bogart’s response is simple. “I was misinformed.” This exchange occurred to me when I recently visited Bordeaux, a city with awe-inspiringly beautiful architecture, some of France’s most stylish places to shop and eat, situated teasingly close to the beaches of the Atlantic coast. Yet if you attempted to tell anyone that you’d come to Bordeaux for history, couture or coastline, you’d get the Bordeaux version of “What waters?

Readers of a certain vintage will recall when any listing of fancy restaurants in a big city had a heavy French accent. Look at the ‘Let’s Eat Out’ section at the back of an old issue of Gourmet magazine from the 1970s for the evidence, at least for New York but, if memory serves, it was true for London as well. (The Italians probably ran second, then the Chinese, then a big falloff to other countries but still mostly European ones.) The way it worked at Gourmet — you got a listing if you bought an ad — only understated things. Lots of good places never advertised at all or simply did not aspire to the tony status that association with the likes of Gourmet conferred. Names like Le Chamberlin, La Caravelle, Le Chantilly, Mon Paris, announced their sole culinary allegiance.