Paris bulletin 2 2013

You have to be as old as me to remember when Les Halles was still a functioning food market in the centre of Paris, ‘le ventre de Paris’, to use the expression made famous by Zola. The marvellous wrought iron structures were dismantled or adapted for other uses in 1971and the hole left by the destruction was eventually filled by le Forum des Halles, a new-style shopping precinct more attuned to the consumerist trends of the second half of the 20^th century. The wholesale food market that was les Halles moved out to Rungis, south of Paris where it still is – the largest food market of its kind anywhere in the world, as I can testify, having driven round (and round) it years ago, not long after it first opened.

A Parisian friend lent me his BMW, to take me, my mother and, at that time, my only daughter to Chartres. My daughter was less than 3 and I was still a very inexperienced driver, having only passed my driving test on her first birthday. It was an awesome challenge to navigate my way out of Paris at the wheel of such an imposing vehicle (we owned a Mini at the time). I got in the wrong lane on the motorway and found myself heading down a slip -road to Rungis.  Before I knew it I was lost in a maze of hangars and warehouses - not a road sign nor a human being anywhere, to lead me out of that desolation.

Now the Forum des Halles is a chantier once more. It’s undergoing a radical make-over, due to be completed in 2016. When it is, the promotional literature assures us “it will offer a greatly enhanced and ‘greener’ shopping and leisure experience”.

Lucky us in the unfashionable north of Paris, we still have a nineteenth century covered market in the style of Balthard (designer of les Halles): le marché de l’Olive. It too had a make-over not so long ago but only to bring it up to modern standards of hygiene and comfort for the stall-holders. It reopened in late 2011. Mostly the same stall-holders took up residence but a notable absentee in the new era was the boucherie chevaline. The consumption of horse meat in France has declined steadily since WW2.

Reading the UK press it’s hard to work out how much of the horse meat hysteria is outrage at the fraud and how much because what’s been used to bulk out the sausages and burgers is horse meat rather than, say, goat, squirrel or dog. The British aren’t keen on the idea of eating Dobbin (or Rover), when he reaches the end of his useful life, although there are lots of countries where that kind of recycling goes on without any ill effects on the consumers.

By all accounts restaurants serving horse meat have been doing well since the scandal broke. I heard that bookings were up at ‘le Taxi Jaune’ in the Marais, one of the few restaurants in Paris where it features regularly on the menu. Otis Lebert, the chef-propriétaire serves it both cooked and in tartares.

Supposing you could bring yourself to eat a horse meat steak (unlike beef apparently horse meat gets more tender as the horse gets older, which makes the case for eating infirm old Dobbin even stronger), how would you feel about trying a fricassee of meal worms or giving the kids a scorpion lollipop instead of a pain au chocolat at goûter? Entomaphagic restaurants (ones that serve insects), are not yet thick on the ground in Paris but there is one, a Japanese restaurant, in the seventeenth arrondissement, on rue de l’Etoile, Mushi’s, which does.  See some of its dishes at http://www.rcrea.fr/Mushi/. Of course eating insects isn’t a ‘Dobbin’ problem, it’s something else entirely.

If you draw the line at insects but you’re interested in other things Japanese and exotic, you could do worse than spend an afternoon in the musée Guimet, on the place d’Iéna in the sixteenth arrondissement. It has one of the finest collections of far Eastern art anywhere in the West.

I went to a concert there on Friday evening: the Ensemble Yahyazadeh from Mazandaran in northern Iran, playing classical and modern folk music from that region. There were seven musicians in all, three brothers from one family and two lots of cousins – no sign of any women, although apparently Mazandaran is more liberal towards its women than most of the rest of Iran.

Ahmad Yahyazadeh, the leader of this group, is a virtuosos daf player – the daf is a large tambourine with tinkly ringlets round the edge. It is held and played simultaneously with both hands. Solos may last up to 10 or more minutes – the one he did for us was about 8. At the height of it you could hardly see his hands they moved so fast.

                                            

Yahyazadeh set up la Maison du Daf in Paris some years ago, to develop the teaching of Persian music. Students can learn to play the daf, tombak, santour, setar, tar, oud, ghanon,  kamancheh, ney, laleva, neghareh, tanbour, darboka, dayreh. I hadn’t heard of any of them except the oud and the setar until I went to the concert.

A concert like that, not a revamped shopping precinct, is for me, what makes living in Paris so exciting. And although I may never actually catch a train out of the gare de l’Est and keep going overland until I get to Vladivostok, I still quite like the idea that I could if I wanted to.

 

 

 

I went to a concert there on Friday evening: the Ensemble Yahyazadeh from Mazandaran in northern Iran, playing classical and modern folk music from that region. There were seven musicians in all, three brothers from one family and two lots of cousins – no sign of any women, although apparently Mazandaran is more liberal towards its women than most of the rest of Iran.

Ahmad Yahyazadeh, the leader of this group, is a virtuosos daf player – the daf is a large tambourine with tinkly ringlets round the edge. It is held and played simultaneously with both hands. Solos may last up to 10 or more minutes – the one he did for us was about 8. At the height of it you could hardly see his hands they moved so fast. Yahyazadeh set up la Maison du Daf in Paris some years ago, to develop the teaching of Persian music. Students can learn to play the daf, tombak, santour, setar, tar, oud, ghanon,  kamancheh, ney, laleva, neghareh, tanbour, darboka, dayreh. I hadn’t heard of any of them except the oud and the setar until I went to the concert.

A concert like that, not a revamped shopping precinct, is for me, what makes living in Paris so exciting. And although I may never actually catch a train out of the gare de l’Est and keep going overland until I get to Vladivostok, I still quite like the idea that I could if I wanted to.