Paris Losing Famous Old Restaurants

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1004, 21 June 1930, Page 30

Paris Losing Famous Old Restaurants

The year IC*3O will have a ring of mourning around it in the calendar of many a Parisian gourmet. The passion for rebuilding, he has found, has sounded the knell of scores of the small restaurants whose clients’ minds ran more to excellent food than to mirrored walls and bright lights. Proprietors of these eating places, depending upon low rentals and small overhead expenses to serve the best food at.a reasonable cost, have glanced at the rental provisions of the new leases presented to them and silently folded tents. Their clients, finding their favourite restaurants suddenly transformed into brightly painted, modernistic food palaces with j skyrocketed prices, have turned away i to find a new home of good food with- ! in the limits of a small pocketbook. Some famous chefs declare that the decline of the serious side of restauraut.iug is due to a real decline in the taste of the public. As the days of leisurely two-hour lunch are numbered by modern demands, they say. so are numbered the days of fine sauces, carefully prepared entrees and poem-like sweets. One of the most famous chefs of j all France, who ran an exclusive little restaurant where kings and the great of the earth had been charmed with his exquisite dishes, recently found himself so far in debt that he had to close the establishment. His clients wanted plain steaks *and chops instead of “ortolans surprise” and j “delice de sole dieppoise,” and he j wasn't prepared to give them what i they wanted. Another famous restaurant, dating back half a century, was forced to ; give way for the erection of a mew | building. When it was erected, slick and shiny quarters were provided for j a modern restaurant. The rental was i 7.200 dollars a year instead of the* ! former 1,200 dollars. Prices wenjt up and clients went away. Chain restaurants,- and the larger establishments, with little overhead in proportion to the business done, ar* getting the trade. The gourmet wails that the big restaurant simply can’t produce meals like mother used to cook. The exception to the tale of sorrow is the left bank of the Seine, where the “Auberge” or country tavern type of eating place has caught on. The general idea is to simulate, more or less, the kitchen of some Normanby inn, and the bizarre surroundings genarally draw a fair clientele. Rents are still fairly low in the outskirts of the Latin Quarter, and as the proprietors of these restaurants rarely spend much on them, they are still •bringing in a good return. In most of them the food and wines are excellent.