How do you stay so fit?

The most common question I’m asked is “How do you stay so fit and eat the way you do in Paris?”  The answer is exactly what you’d expect from someone like Jane Brody, but the opposite of someone like Barry Sears or Dr Atkins, they of the simple formulas. 

First, I had the right genes.  I had grandparents who lived into their 90’s, and with fairly good qualities of life. 

Second, I make sure I have enough red wine to kill the pathogens and toxins lurking in raw food, the meals I eat and the environment. 

Third, in Europe I eat my big meal at mid-day.  Ah ha.  This is the real secret. Let’s take ten days in March. Eating at Ze Kitchen Galerie, Le Bistral, Les Anges, Le Repaire de Cartouche, Pinxo, Thierry Burlot, Au Bon Accueil, Drouant, Cerisaie, and Maxan, one would think you’d really pound on the pounds.  But what do you do after eating?  Go home and nap?  Snooze on a park bench.  Watch silly French TV?  Or walk?  Yesssssssss!  

Walk where?  Well, my wife, Colette, gravitates towards gardens, principally the Parc Monceau, Luxembourg  and Vincennes but also the Andre Citroen, Bois de Boulogne, Albert Kahn and Buttes Chaumont. 

Me – I go to museums. 

The week in question, as an example, we had lunch at Ze Kitchen Galerie, as usual, at it’s great level of innovation and presentation – Colette had lamb, I had innards and the other two folk split meat/animal fat and squeaky-clean fish – didn’t matter; t’was all as good as usual. Then I wandered across the Seine to the Louvre to “do” the Ingres show.  Lot’sa people but you could see the stuff through the shoulders and sense the clarity of line, color and poses.   

The next day we had another spectacular meal at Le Bistral, enthusiastically enjoying their ability to provide “natural” wines and produce complex combinations of products and spices/accompaniments such as pied de porc, rougets, rabbit and beef (me); so afterwards, what else to do but schlep our separate ways to various venues, me to the Willi aka Willy Ronis photo show at the Hotel de Ville.  For those addicted to Paris, old but also new, this is it.   

After a “just right meal” at Les Anges aka Chez Les Anges for those of us over 60, of frogs’ legs, salmon, langoustines, bar caught on the line and various veggies, what else but to again walk across the Seine to the Big Palace to see the spectacular show of Henri Rousseau.  And again, what clarity of line, color, and composition (did I say that before – oh my!).  Somehow, walking through this forest of color, despite the menacing animals, one feels calm and serene – as if, if one died that moment all was well. 

After Le Repaire de Cartouche, with its usual, great dishes such as a tartare of bar and oysters, the tete de cochon, scallops, cod and (me, me, call on me!) sweetbreads we headed over to the Picasso Museum, now showing the exhibition of “Picasso and Dora Maar.”  Now he was only entangled with her from about 1937 to sometime in WWII, but during that time, he really moved.  My recollection of Picasso is enhanced by two memorable impressions – one the film by Claude Renoir and Henri-Georges Clouzot called “The Mystery of Picasso” showing him painting “backwards” on a two-way screen and second, by David Douglas Duncan’s book of Picasso in Southern France called “The Private World of Pablo Picasso.”  In any case, this show is, as Ed Sullivan said, “A really big shew.” 

Then there was the Sunday lunch at Pinxo with an après-dejeuner walk to the nearby Louvre for the complicated tangle of Tintoret and Tintoretto or who we Americans know as Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto and Domenico Tintoretto.  It was not a really great meal (well, it was fun, radish sprouts (their signature amuse bouche), tapas, mezze’s, great goose and chipirons and OK scallops, etc, and affordable) and not really a great show (OK, once you read the French, English and Spanish, or was it Italian?, signs) and have an art historian explain it all to you, you sort of figure out the real story.  But that takes a while and is it worth it?

Monday was La Cerisaie, which once again held up to its superb level: the tete de cochon was not too fatty and offset perfectly with dandelion salad; my buddy had a main as a first, a delicious warm mackerel on beans so garlicky that everyone had to have them; then we tried the foie gras entier with corn polenta, lamb with stuffed red peppers and breast of duck with pear; finishing it off with the chocolate cake (the tops), prunes in armagnac and assorted desserts. Afterwards I walked it off at ArtParis, the 8th version of the contemporary art fair now back at the Grand Palais.  While the GP has been open for tours, this was one of its first public art shows.  The Press Package I was given called it the “Fist [sic] artfair in the Grand-Palais” and indeed in some ways it was “fisty.”  But it had a couple of things in its favor; contemporary was defined very broadly, so that there were both Cartier Bresson photos and a great set of disrespectful statues of Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov not John).  On the downside, the art, while not offensive or full of the “felt strips on the wall” and the “pieces of slate on the floor” that characterizes the Whitney Biennial, was pretty thin, immature and silly.  The show reminded me of the time a few years ago when I was riding in the elevator of a Fifth Avenue (57th Street, NYC) gallery building with an artist-celebrity and three of his acolytes after they and I had just exited an exhibition – the personage said “I said his stuff was “ca-ca” twenty years ago and I say it’s “ca-ca” now.”  And of course, it being France, even in a venue with million dollar paintings, the men were smoking cigars, the flooring was as irregular as a California swimming pool after an earthquake and the stands were “manned” by women who were bored and once beautiful Slavs.  Wandering through all this were women of a certain age trying to look ten years younger than I, sporting stuff such as orange fright wigs and weird fur coats and the really old ones (e.g., my age) looked gray and ten years older than I.   

The next day at Drouant, two of us had their fabulous 45€ menu and one, a single dish, of course  for Madame – all for 156 € (recall the fact that their wines start at only 17 €) and one can get out for not ruinous prices while dining with the likes, that day, of three Red Michelin macaron chefs – Bocuse, Guerard, Blanc and of course, the host, Westerman (multiply 4×3=12 stars).  Now we cheated a bit by going across the street first for Carol Bouquet’s wonderful oysters, but still.  Afterwards we went to the Bazar de l’Hotel de Ville or BHV (beh-hash-veh) – this is the boring part of maintaining a place here, one has to replace broken/useless/old cabinets/chair cushions/etc., but it’s also across from the aforementioned Willy Ronis show. 

Then we went back to an old shrine, Au Bon Accueil, which, like La Regalade, is struggling with the loss of both its chef and its direction.  The menu is still at 27 €, an outstanding value, but for what? The men’s first, a duo of lamb sweetbreads and kidneys was OK, but Madame’s scallops and the men’s dorade were not top quality product and the desserts of chocolate three ways was just OK.  On personal note to the chef – give up the tired mashed potatoes, served to everyone and barely ever approaching Robuchon level. The bill was a gentle 132 €, but go back?, not until they go back.  Ah but then, by now four of us hit the Bonnard show at the Museum of Modern Art.  The three folks who know art (a real certified, PhD. degreed art historian, her self-taught companion and my wonderful wife Colette, who agrees with me 98.76 % of the time), thought it was “no great shakes,” to me that means they hated it – me, I loved it.  Why?  One, it had more works of his than I’d ever seen in a single space.  Two, the guy could never quite get the nude woman with all her particulars out of his mind – not bad for old guys, eh?  And third, while a bit of a “one-trick pony,” agreed, he did stick in a groove, in 1944, he began to paint more painterly, more impressionistically and I assume more cataract-inflicted.  See it, you bet! 

The next day Maxan was another disappointment – everything seemed flat and without character. What was certainly not boring was the 15th Salon du Dessin at the Bourse where 30 galleries strutted their stuff, about 1000 original drawings from Tiepolo to Kandinsky and Fragonart to Klimt.  No bored Slavic exbeauties here, the crowd of visitors was largely indistinguishable from the gallery dealers: tweedy Brits and wrinkley faced French connoisseurs in coats and ties, accompanied by woman with permanent suntans and jewels. 

The last eatery in this chronicle was Thierry Burlot and while the raviolis (dim sum) measured up, he has changed his signature caramel sauce on ice cream dessert and wine list (ridding it of the bargains) and while I was happy with my “tagine” of shrimp, eggplant and artichokes, my friends and wife were decidedly not happy with their offerings.  However, the subsequent tour of tour of the Jean Lariviere photography show at the Musee de la Publicité, while pretty thin, gave the old leg muscles a good workout. 

I hesitate to really dig into commenting on art, respecting my co-equipier Deborah Markow Ph.D.’s, training and intelligence, but I think that the art of three of these guys, Ingres, Rousseau and Magritte, who overlapped and were so different, but had a similar clarity of vision, line and color, is remarkable and the fact that they are all being featured in Paris at this moment is wonderful.  Ingres (1780-1867), Rousseau (1844-1910), and Magritte (1898-1967) are terrific exemplars of the pursuit of a single dedicated ideal. Now, compare them to Picasso, who lived from 1881 to 1973, almost overlapping all of them and note that his pictures of Dona Maar demonstrate his shift in styles, encompassing realist, surrealist, cubist and his own special genre exemplified by Guernica and you see the difference.  Bonnard was less diverse, but still, with his cataracts (I assume) taking over (like they did Titian, Monet and countless others before surgery was able to correct this condition), he got more subtle in his later years. 

So what is the lesson of the week?  Eat heartily, see richly and walk continually.   

©2006 John A. Talbott