So I've come to Paris to write about the French Open and I’ve got a night to spare before I’m due at Roland Garros. I’ve flown in Friday morning at 7:00 and spent the better part of the day, pale and sweaty and a little dazed from the intermittently horrifying all-night plane ride, trying to decipher the 256 tiny names on the draws and come up with some kind of prediction for how each of them is going to do over the next two weeks.
Now all of that is over, it’s 6:30, and I’m hungry. This is a more unwelcome feeling than it would be normally, because it means that I must go out and find food. You might think this wouldn’t be a problem in Paris, gastronomical capital of the Western world. But I know from past visits that it can be a peculiarly, frustratingly, agonizingly, mortifyingly difficult thing for me to do here. There might be a thousand places to eat in the eight-block radius around my hotel—there are very few square feet where you can’t eat—but none of the ever seem quite right.
Still, there’s no way around it. I walk out the front door of the hotel into the Montparnasse neighborhood—a former Hemingway haunt that’s long been left to gaping tourist barbarians like myself—and immediately realize that I’m trouble. On my side of the street, a few feet away, there’s a group of seven or eight Mexican men strumming acoustic guitars and singing Simon and Garfunkel’s “El Condor Pasa,” (You know it: “I’d rather be a sparrow than a snail/Yes I would, if I only could . . . ” etc.) What this song or group has to do with Paris isn’t clear, but this is a tourist zone, which means nothing has anything to do with anything. The same goes for the food. The first place I see across the street is a pizza joint with an Italian name where two Americans are silently staring at their menus in the seats closest to the door. Pizza in Paris—please, I can’t do that. I don’t know why I can’t do that. There’s no one who would ever know that I ate at a bad pizza place when I was in Paris. But I can’t do it.
The same goes for the next place up the street, a vaguely authentic looking café that might be appealing if it weren’t for the monstrous neon Heineken sign tacked above the awning. Moving on, I pass through a mass of drifting groups of fellow foreigners. They’re doing their best to avoid getting hit by buzzing motorbikes while they turn their Paris Streetwise maps rightside up. On the far corner is another semi-authentic café, with empty tables out front. I consider it as I walk toward it, but upon closer inspection it looks a little too modern, too neon. I know this is nitpicking, my stomach is telling me this is nitpicking, but I hold out for something, I don’t know, quainter, something made with wood, at least.
Next, on the other side of the street, is a woodier place, but out front I see a big group of Americans. The sight of them deters me; somehow I’m embarrassed to admit to them that I’m also tourist. Never mind that I will almost certainly never speak to them or see the again in my life; in fact, they haven’t even noticed me. No matter. Half-appalled at myself, with part of my body trying to turn around and sit down, I keep walking down the street, where I see a group of black-clad Parisian teenagers lounging on sidewalk tables. At the center is a kid in a hip-looking jacket who's leaning all the way back in his chair, his brilliantly unkempt 1968 hair flopped over one eye. He’s staring blankly into the distance as if he’s posing for a fashion shoot. His girlfriend next to him, her long, brilliantly unkempt hair also flopped over one eye, is biting his earlobe. I keep walking. This is a little too Parisian for me.
Cafes, bistros, brasseries, tables d’hote—I’ve never been exactly sure of the difference—pass by dizzyingly, most of them jammed from front to back. How many people can be eating in one city at one time? The place that’s recommended in the neighborhood, the venerable La Coupole, is, like most restaurant recommendations in Paris, too serious for a solo walker in shorts and sneakers. Finally, on the verge of having to cross a major boulevard and enter an entirely different neighborhood, I see a few empty tables at a bright, tacky restaurant called Chez Clement (no relation to Arnaud, I don't think). I force myself to make the giant leap and step inside. The Middle Eastern waiter gives me a slight smile—did he see my hesitation?—and points me to a corner table. He’s friendly, though he somehow gets me to order a bottle of Evian for 4 euros. The beer, German and cheap, is awful, but the steak frites is pretty good, with an appealingly stark, un-American-style presentation.
At the table across from me is a 12-year-old French kid with braces who’s sitting with his father. In front of him isn’t a burger or a hot dog or a grilled cheese sandwich, as it would have been when I was a 12-year-old brace face. Instead, he’s working his way through a titanic circle of oysters, greedily sucking them down like a veteran. He looks in my direction while I lift a fry to my mouth. His sharp, penetrating gaze sends a self-conscious pang through me: Should I have used a fork?
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Happily, last night I had a much better dinner with fellow reporters in the vicinity of Roland Garros. Today some Gulbis watching is in order. I'll be back later.