The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (29 page)

I couldn’t resist. But I left in protest. “You’re too good a merchant, Kamel,” I said. “I’m going to stop passing by your shop every day.”

After that, I began calling him the most seductive grocer in Paris. Over time, I learned that the two grocers relished gustatory challenges. So I gave them a big one: to find
chou frisé non pommé,
a.k.a. kale.

The French do not know from kale. To them it is cabbage, pure and simple. And cabbage is a reminder of the dietary deprivation of World War II, when boiled cabbage became an unpleas
ant fixture of the dinner table. The French cannot even agree on what to call kale, which has at least five names. The technical term,
chou frisé non pommé,
translates unappetizingly as “curly headless cabbage.”

I discovered kale in Paris thanks to a young American crusader for crucifers, Kristen Beddard, who brought it to the city’s food markets. The Joan of Arc of kale, she created the Kale Project, reporting kale sightings and pitching kale to chefs and vegetable farmers. She gave me some of her precious kale seeds. I put them in a pot on my kitchen windowsill and dutifully watered it every other day. After two months, I had a healthy plant, four inches tall, with several curly leaves. I took it to Kamel and Abdelhamid. I explained that the ancient Greeks and Romans had cultivated kale-like primitive cabbages. I said that because kale grows well in cold climates, it caught on big in Germany, the Netherlands, and England. I said it is a “superfood” in the United States, that Barack Obama and his family eat it, and that every respectable New York restaurant offers at least one kale dish on its menu.

They were intrigued. Abdelhamid built a little shrine with fresh lychees and put my kale plant on top. In black marker, he wrote on the clay pot, “
Chou américain
: Kale.” Tourists took photos. Abdelhamid promised to look for it at the Rungis market. A week later, he reported that not a single vegetable distributor carried kale.

Then, one day,
le kale est arrivé!

Kamel was so excited that he chased after me up the rue des Martyrs, brandishing a big bunch of the curly green. He had six of them. I bought them all.

THE RESURRECTION OF FISH

. . .

Paris is a gray and rainy city, but when spring arrives and the terraces fill and street singers seem to emerge from every corner singing La Vie en Rose, the city turns into the best place in the world to be happy.

—E
NRIQUE
V
ILA
-M
ATAS
,
Never Any End to Paris

I
N HIS SEARCH FOR A NEW FISHMONGER AT NO. 5
, Mayor Jacques Bravo visited the National Union of the French Fish Trade and pleaded with its representatives to find someone, anyone, who knew fish. A young couple, perhaps, whose family had been in the business?

Some mornings Bravo arrived by five a.m. at the vast fresh fish hall of the Rungis wholesale food market, dressed in a suit, the red rosette proclaiming him an
officier
of the Legion of Honor in his lapel. He wandered up and down the aisles, shivering in the refrigerated space, as he lobbied fishmongers to take a chance on the rue des Martyrs.

In time, a small fish-store chain assumed the lease on the shop Marc Briolay had given up. Over several months, the new owner gutted and rebuilt the space, installing new shelves, lighting, and a state-of-the-art system to automatically spray ice-cold mist on the fish from vents mounted on the ceiling. He hired more fishmongers than before and bought a large lobster tank and,
bien sûr,
a new ice machine. The shop opened without fanfare—but with a lot of gorgeous fish. Counters piled high with oysters, mussels, and clams on beds of algae spilled onto the sidewalk; a counter in the back held cooked lobsters, crabs, and several varieties of shrimp. Behind that were the fishmongers’ stations for washing, scale scraping, filleting, and gutting.

A new fishmonger, also named Marc, arrived: big, bearded, with only one tooth visible when he smiled. He was a man who loved fish. He gushed over
coq rouge,
a small, reddish-orange, polka-dotted fish from Senegal.

“They are so beautiful!” he said. “Imagine grilling them whole.”

He preferred the ugly ones, the uglier the better. He held up a
lotte
—a monkfish. It had long filaments sprouting from its head and the wide grin and beady eyes of a sea monster. “I use it in bouillabaisse,” he said. “If I bake it with a dash of pastis, I’m in Marseille!”

Joël Vicogne, the son of the landlord, joined the new team. His colleagues in the old fish shop had regarded him with suspicion, but his new ones treated him as a trusted veteran, and this acknowledgment of his status gave him confidence. He continued to cut impossibly thin slices of smoked salmon. But he took on new responsibilities: twice a week he prepared
brandade de morue
—a puree of salt cod with potatoes, olive oil, and garlic—
and supervised a new display of prepared foods: octopus and shrimp made half a dozen ways and an assortment of
taramas
.

Joël had not been particularly friendly to me when the Briolays ran the place. He knew where my loyalties lay. But soon he and his colleagues began to warm up; Joël even greeted me with kisses on both cheeks. And he winked! Now when I want tuna filets, the fishmongers don’t wrap the pieces already on display; instead, they cut fresh ones from fish stored in the back room, especially for me. When I need a whole salmon for a party, they bend the rules and custom-cook it. During scallop season, they scoop the scallops fresh from their shells.

Justine Briolay, the daughter of the shop’s former owner, did not follow her parents to the countryside. She lived nearby and had made a life for herself on the rue des Martyrs. She went to work for the butcher two doors down from the fish store, in the part of the shop that served terrines and charcuterie. She learned how to differentiate the terrines, oversee and weigh the prepared salads, and slice the cold cuts. The counter on the other side is for serious butchery, a man’s job. Of the forty thousand butchers in France, only a few hundred are women.

Change continued on the rue des Martyrs as new businesses replaced the old. While some stalwarts survived, others did not. It was as if a Kansas tornado had ripped through, sparing certain targets, destroying others. A newspaper and magazine shop halfway up the rue des Martyrs went out of business, but the owner moved into a space on the street where I live. I decided to support him by canceling many of my home delivery subscriptions and stopping in frequently to buy his magazines.

The rue des Martyrs had once been famous for shops run by private laundresses; most closed their doors decades ago, when
residents began buying washing machines. The last custom laundry and dry cleaner closed in 2010, and more than two years later, an outlet of the Belgian chain Le Pain Quotidien moved into its space. On opening day, I was the first customer, a newcomer welcoming a newer-comer.

A few days later I went to Le Pain Quotidien with Margherita Frezza, a young Italian architect who lives with her French boyfriend across the street. I wanted to see the restaurant through her eyes. She hated it. “In real cafés and bistros, the menus are handwritten on blackboards in white script every day,” she said. “Here, the script is phony—it’s in permanent white ink. Yes, the scales are old, but they’re exactly like the ones in just about every other Pain Quotidien.”

She tapped the picture window, which had cracked, and proclaimed it unstable; the floor tiles were too uniform to be old. “Imitations,” she sniffed.

Sometimes, new employees struggled to fit into the new shops. When a designer pizza place opened, I became acquainted with one of the pizza makers, a young, slim Italian man whose voice had the heavy sound of Sardinia. He knew very little French—but enough to declare many of the pizzas awful, especially the ones with speck and truffle cream. The chemicals used to imitate the flavor of black truffles in what is sold as truffle oil tasted like the metal in the dregs of olive oil tins, he said.

“When the ingredients are really good, you don’t need many,” he said. “Tomato. Mozzarella.
Basta
. When I go fishing, I go early in the morning, and all I need to do that evening is grill the fish for a minute on each side.
Perfetto!
”

He confessed that he was terribly lonely. I flashed on what my
French tutor at the Alliance Française in Chicago had told me before I moved to France the first time, in 1978.

“Buy a second pillow,” I told the pizza guy.

“I don’t understand.”

“Find a French girlfriend.”

“But how do I do that?”

I told him I’d help him work on it. But by the time I returned, he was gone—a fish out of water. He needed the sea. I never even knew his name.

Some closures were inevitable victims of modernity: a DVD rental shop, for example. Yves Hassid, the owner of Paris Video 58, had been on the street for eighteen years. When two other neighborhood DVD shops went out of business, he took over their customers and held on.

Then in June 2013, he posted a sign saying that he, too, was closing. Yves put two large bins holding his stock of DVDs outside the store. Everything was on sale: three euros for run-of-the-mill French comedies, ten euros for classics.

I stopped by on closing day as Yves, all alone, loaded boxes into his car. French law required him to leave the premises clean and empty, as if he had never been there. A sparkly metal Christmas ornament shaped like a stocking hung by a ribbon on the knob of a cabinet. “Compliments of Paris Video” was engraved on the back. It had been a sample made by an advertising promoter who had wanted Yves to put in an order for year-end gifts. Yves is Jewish and celebrates Hannukah, not Christmas, so he never ordered them. But he liked the look of the stocking and kept it. He gave it to me to remember him by. It’s corny, but I keep it on my desk as a good-luck charm.

I helped him carry out his boxes. It didn’t seem right to end this way, so I said, “Let’s have a drink.” We walked to the bistro across the street and ordered red wine. Yves cried, just a little.

He left behind his enormous “Paris Video 58” neon sign (No. 58 was his address on the rue des Martyrs). I pleaded with him to keep it as a reminder of his nearly two decades there. I said it was part of his
patrimoine
—that untranslatable French word means heritage, but more than that. He made excuses.

“It’s too fragile.”

I said we could easily cut away the neon tubes with a wire cutter.

“I don’t have a wire cutter.”

“I’ll go home and get one.”

“I didn’t negotiate its removal with the new tenant, so it would be illegal.”

I gave up.

The sign remained in place for months. Then one day I saw an open door at No. 58. Two young men, a Belgian named Gabriel Mathy and a Norwegian named Viggo Handeland, were discussing plans to open a take-out Belgian waffle shop. I introduced myself and asked if they would save the neon sign.

Sure, they said. They were humoring me, I knew; no way would they make the effort to dismantle and save it. A few months later, Yves’s sign was gone, replaced by one that read, “
Le Comptoir Belge—Maître Gaufrier
”: The Belgian Counter—Master Waffle Maker.

Not long after, Viggo called me. Did I still want the sign?

Did I ever!

I called Yves. I said I had his sign and began to talk logistics. When could he meet me at the shop? When could he bring a car big enough to hold the sign?

Yves was overwhelmed. Words stuck in his throat. He said he had been trying to open a convenience store in the Paris suburb of Asnières-sur-Seine, where he lived, but that he couldn’t get the necessary approvals. Convenience shops bring vermin, he was told; they stay open late and attract sketchy people in need of booze.

I told him I would retrieve the sign for him. Trusty Emerik Derian, my former research assistant, immediately hopped on his scooter and met me at the shop. The two men working there were not happy to see us. It was almost five p.m., quitting time. They did not want to hear the story of Yves’s sign or Viggo’s generosity. But after considerable grousing, they carried it out to the sidewalk.