AROUND THE HALLES
In no city in the world are there so many and so varied places to dine as in Paris. One can hardly look right or left from any corner of any street and not find restaurants, from little boîtes, where a plat du jour and a bottle of wine are to be had for a few sous, to those whose cuisine and rare vintages are adapted only to the well-filled purse of an epicure. There are numberless resorts frequented by the vast army of bohemians, some the rendezvous for students and grisettes, others for the poets, the pensive, long-haired devotees of the symbolistic school, and kindred souls in the realm of art. There are those patronized by jolly, devil-may-care young doctors, sleepless night-owls, who discuss till graying dawn their latest operations with a complacent sense of superiority over the other half of the human world, who, they are convinced, without their medical aid would be left as helpless as a mass of struggling white bait in a net. And there, too, buried away in the dingy alley of Montmartre and fringing the ill-reputed neighborhoods of La Butte and the great Halles, are the feeding places of thieves, reeking from the odor of decaying vegetables and bad cheeses, yet, they say, supplied with some of the rarest wines.
A BUSY MORNING
It was a famous French sociologist who declared, from extended personal investigations of the private life of the Parisian mendicants, that the best champagne brut he had yet encountered he had found on the dinner tables of professional beggars.
Along the lighted streets and boulevards are the great brasseries for Munich beer and German dishes, and the richly decorated taverns, some of them in black oak shining in pewter and ornate with medieval decoration and stained glass. These are swarming with eddies from the passing world until long after midnight. Many of these are the habitual rendezvous of journalists, like the Café Navarin. Others, like the Café des Variétés and the Taverne de la Capitale, are the favorite places for actors, and still others for painters and musicians. There is hardly a resort in Paris which has not its distinct clientèle, from the buvettes of the cochers to Maxime’s.
And of soberer kind are the innumerable, perfectly kept establishments created by Duval and imitated by Boulant. They are big places for small purses; everything is of excellent quality, well cooked, and served by respectable women in spotless white caps and aprons.
There are hundreds of other restaurants besides, with dîners and déjeuners at a prix fixe, in which a secondary quality of food is turned into a clever imitation of the best, and where the wine is plain and harmless and included with a course dinner au choix for two francs fifty and less. On fête days and Sundays these well patronized petits dîners de Paris are crowded with bourgeois folk: clerks with their sweethearts, commerçants and their families, economical bachelors, and others, frugal-minded, from out of Paris who have come into the metropolis to spend a long-anticipated holiday.
And in contrast to all these dining places are the smart restaurants, filled with the correct grand monde and the chic demi-monde—the Café de Madrid, the Maison Anglaise, Paillard, Arménonville, La Rue, Joseph, Ledoyen, Voisin and the Café de Paris. There are serious old places, such as the Tour d’Argent, plain and unadorned, where all the wealth is in the casserolles and the cobwebbed bottles. Then, too, there is the ancient Restaurant Foyot, with its clientèle of senators, academicians and military officers, and the Restaurant La Pérouse on the quay of the Seine, where resort savants and magistrates and others less grave—an old-fashioned place with a narrow stairway leading to quaint, low-ceiled cabinets particuliers and excellent things simmering over the kitchen fires below stairs and certain rare old Burgundy lining the walls of the cellar.