No matter what you thought of the man’s prose style or his personality or the newspaper where he made his name and later maintained a legendary expense account, you could never challenge R.W. Apple’s appetite. A lover of pork ribs, chocolate and a good canard, Three Lunches Apple’s love of food made everything he wrote on the subject required reading, even when it was borderline goofy.
The obituaries have supplied samples of his greatest hits. I can’t remember why or where I first read Apple’s piece on bistros (written 23 years ago), but it made me glad to revisit it last night. It’s a testament to what made him a great eater and reporter: his love not only of food but also of the messy, jam-packed, buzzing world that eats it.
Read Apple’s Bistros piece from the Travel section of the New York Times, March 13, 1983.
BISTROS, by R.W. Apple Jr.
You go to a bistro to eat and drink - not because of the table linen, not because of the lighting, not to impress, not to pitch woo, not to spend a lot of money and certainly not to preen in the company of the would-be great. You go to eat food that remembers its peasant origins: copious, hearty and old-fashioned.
If it has flowers on the table or Muzak in the background, it isn’t a bistro. If it has a maitre d’hotel, it isn’t a bistro. And if the waiters don’t argue with you, either it isn’t a bistro or you’re not a bistro customer.
Travelers, wise travelers, go to bistros to immerse themselves in the mood of the place they are visiting. Three-star restaurants just about anywhere (especially when everyone wants to be a Paul Bocuse or an Alain Chapel) have much the same ambiance, and food that differs little from country to country. But a Left Bank bistro in Paris feels Gallic, with that characteristic struggle between exuberance and discipline, while at a trattoria in Bologna exuberance wins hands down.
Strictly speaking, of course, bistros are French; but no Frenchmen would doubt for a minute that he was in a bistro if he wandered into Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville, Miss., or into the Duna-Corzo in Budapest. The formula is the same: You sit down, preferably jostling someone at the next table in the process, take a sniff or two of the aroma of the day, and wait (about 25 seconds) for the harassed waiter or waitress to notice you. Then you order - fast, if you know what’s good for you - and the waiter asks: ‘’Drink?'’ If they know you, they won’t bother with the question, presuming that after half a dozen visits you will have discovered which of the house’s wines are produced in the boss’s village and are therefore better and cheaper.
You drink Rully at Chez les Anges in Paris because the house Rully is made by the former patron, Armand Monassier, and you drink chianti at Sostanza in Florence for much the same reason. I didn’t learn the lesson fast enough at a Paris bistro that has become a favorite haunt of mine, Chez l’Ami Louis, a place that prides itself on its ugliness, its primitive plumbing, its foie gras and its cote de boeuf. On my fourth visit, the waiter, dour of countenance and flat of feet, listened to my order and replied, ‘’I'll deal with the wine because you’ve been ordering the wrong ones.'’ The ‘’right'’ ones, it turned out, were listed as ‘’sauternes'’ and ‘’burgundy'’ on the wine card and priced accordingly, despite pedigrees that entitled them to grander names and higher prices.
People-watching - especially waiter-watching - is among the ancillary pleasures of eating in bistros. A lunch at Duna-Corzo, jammed with young and old Hungarians with all kinds of jobs, tells you a lot about the country’s economic success. The determination of the eaters in a German bistro tells you something (though not everything) about the national character. The joy of Italians comes across in the trattoria waiters, like one I once watched in Udine, taking care of ten tables with consummate skill without writing anything down, yet still finding time to chuck babies under the chin and flatter ugly old women and boozy, worn-out old men.
The thing about bistros is that they live or die on the quality or freshness of their ingredients. If the angler fish at the Madonna, the best bistro (or, if you prefer, the best trattoria) in Venice, was lousy raw at the fishmonger’s it will be lousy when it turns up, grilled, on your plate. In more elaborate preparations you can sometimes cheat, but never in peasant cooking, of which the bistro is the chief guardian these days. Pierre Troisgros, perhaps the most down-to-earth of all the princes of nouvelle cuisine, once told me, ‘’Cooking is 80 percent shopping.'’ Exactly.
Day in and day out, I would rather eat in bistros than in any other kind of restaurant. Well, not always; once a week, maybe, I would rather eat refined, elegant food in a luxurious setting. Sometimes twice a week. More often and both my palate and my digestive system beg for relief. That never happens at Sam’s in San Francisco, where the owners start badgering you before you have your coat off, then feed you the way a fisherman would; or at Alfredo-Gran San Bernardo in Milan, where they turn cliches like veal cutlet Milanese back into classics; or at Zlata Praha in Berlin, where they know what to do with a goose and a red cabbage. To say nothing of El Pescador in Madrid, where I must have eaten 10 kinds of grilled fish and shellfish in three weeks last fall without ever tiring of the place.
And then there is Allard in Paris. I don’t pretend to be rational about Allard, which has been my favorite restaurant in the world for as long as I have been old enough to have such a thing. Every once in a while, someone in Paris or Milwaukee or Cairo tells me that it has slipped, but they are always wrong. Both Mme. Allard, who cooks, and M. Allard, who chooses the glorious beaujolais and burgundies, have been sick in recent years, but I have never had a bad glass of wine there and certainly never a bad dish.
The repertory is unchanging - fish or scallops with beurre blanc (a solecism in a Burgundian restaurant, but who cares?), navarin of lamb, boeuf a la mode, game birds, real snails that have never seen the inside of a tin, incredible cucumber salad, duck with olives or (in the spring) with baby turnips. There are a couple of weeks a year when the duck with turnips and a raspberry cake are both on the menu, and I look forward to that fortnight the way I used to look forward to Christmas vacation. The raspberry confection is the second best dessert in Paris; the best is the chocolate charlotte with custard sauce, also at Allard. It’s better than the famous marquise au chocolat that Michel Guerard makes in his place down in the boondocks of southwest France, it costs less and you can eat it without wearing a necktie. You start a meal at Allard by walking through the kitchen; you end it by arguing about the digestif with the waiters, who will call you ‘’Monsieur le President'’ (or ‘’Madame la Presidente'’) if they like you. If you go, take my advice and order the Calvados. In the end, that’s what they’ll bring you anyway.
