Paris bulletin 7 2014

This September bulletin brings a new contributor to the site: Pamela Shandel.

In her own words, Pamela is  a “portrait, events, art, nature, and everything else photographer.  Her photos have been published in magazines and books and on book covers. She has had photo shows.  Her shooting style has been published in a lively history of Las Vegas.  She belongs in different ways  to New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Paris.”

Welcome, Pamela and more about her in the next bulletin

It’s not a bad idea, after a long absence, to start with what is close at hand, familiar. So I’ve been just round the corner, to the esplanade Natalie Sarraute, the newest playground of the young families in this part of the 18th arrondissement. The esplanade is where the eco-friendly youth hostel I’ve mentioned in a previous bulletin, is located, and the Vaclav Havel public library. It is also where we now have Bob’s Bake Shop selling diner kind of food and ‘artisanal coffee and cold-pressed organic juice’. The Bake Shop is right next door to a self-proclaimed ‘concept store’ selling ‘streetwear’, although for the life of me, I can’t see what kind of street those sort of clothes belong in. Not one I’ve ever been on but then I don’t know what a concept store is either, any more than I really know what ‘artisanal coffee’ is.

 

 

What is much more remarkable about the esplanade Natalie Sarraute than the kinds of shops and eateries that have opened up, is the speed with which it has been colonised by its local families. In the space of a few, mostly sunny months, the outdoor serving area of les Petites Gouttes café has spread across the esplanade like an algae bloom over clear water. At present there are more tables outside than in, although doubtless as the evenings get cooler that will change again. It isn’t cheap by local standards (14 euros for a burger and frites) but there’s lots of space for children with trottinettes and skate-boards. In the way it’s used it has become another striking example of the merging together of private and public space/life that is such a feature of big cities nowadays.

A little further afield now. I was in Allen’s Market (33 rue du Chateau d’Eau , one of the Joe Allen group, the original at 326 W 46th St, New York City), at the end of the week. A wedding party had taken over the mezzanine and the staff were kept busy filling glasses and popping corks. That gave me time to study the condiments and bottles on the bar, among which, one from the Groovy Food Company, ‘premium agave nectar low GI organic sweetener from the finest blue webber agarve plant. Helps you kick your ‘bad sugar’ cravings’. GI = glycemic index in case you didn’t know (I didn’t).

US culture has fascinated and seduced Parisians for far longer than I’ve been coming to Paris or living here. There are various well-established American-style cafes, a few of them actually calling themselves ‘diners’ and one of the oldest of them, Harry’s New York bar, off the avenue de l’Opera, with a strongly nostalgic pre-WW2 feel to it. There are Subway outlets all over the city and even a couple of Californian-style food trucks doing the rounds: le Camion qui fume and Cantine California.  None of these sets out to break new culinary ground, except perhaps in the matter of low GI sweeteners. They give their clients what their clients expect from a US take-away: burgers, ribs, tacos, cornbread, cheesecake, cupcakes and brownies (scarcely a lettuce leaf in sight).

 

The all-American sandwich  (image Pamela Shandel)

 

What’s new - to me at least - is the trend in French cafés towards providing those kinds of food, quite often ‘instead of’ rather than ‘as well as’, a native French alternative, for example, an assiette de crudités or a croque monsieur. The American star may be setting in the west but the taste for barbecued beef slathered in ketchup and mayo is still as strong as ever.

So finally, back to l’esplanade Nathalie Sarraute where employees of the still publicly-owned Eau de Paris were out in force last Saturday, to convince the 18^th arrondissement of the health benefits and ecological bon sens of drinking water straight from the tap. You might think we all know that by now, like we all know about that terrifying mass of microscopic plastic particles, The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, swirling round in the North Pacific Ocean, being ingested by animals and birds, killing them and their off-spring in vast numbers. Apparently not.  Parisians are still responsible for in excess of 500 kilos of déchets per person per year, two-thirds of it made up of plastic bottles and other packaging.

The Big Climate March is about to happen in New York (21^st September) and in other cities around the world. Time’s running out for all of us. Assez de paroles – il faut passer à l’acte!