Before arriving in Paris, I wrote to one of my instructors at Le Cordon Bleu and asked a very practical question: where should I eat?
I had spent enough time learning French cooking to become curious about what professional chefs themselves considered worth eating. Not the restaurants tourists were told to visit, not necessarily the places with the longest tasting menus or the most elaborate plates. I wanted to know where a chef would send someone who genuinely loved food.
He gave me two recommendations. One was a bistro. The other was a bouillon.
The bistro was closed for the weekend, which settled the matter.
So, for my last meal in Paris, we went to Bouillon Chartier.
A bouillon is a very different creature from the formal French restaurant many visitors imagine when they think of dining in Paris. The tradition began as inexpensive places serving straightforward food to working people. No ceremony was required. You came to eat.
Chartier had been doing exactly that since the nineteenth century.
I knew it did not take reservations, so my instinct told me to arrive early. The Paris Marathon was taking place that day and several roads were closed. By the time we reached the restaurant, it was already noon.
From the street, things looked surprisingly quiet.
Too quiet.
There were barriers outside and markings on the pavement that seemed to indicate where people were supposed to line up. I followed them around the corner and discovered that the real entrance was at the end of a side passage.
That was when I realized the quiet street frontage had been misleading.
Inside, the dining room was already full.
My husband was still outside paying the taxi driver, but experience has taught me that when a popular restaurant appears to have one table left, philosophical patience is not necessarily a virtue. I went in first.
The room looked as though it had been preserved from another Paris. High ceilings, closely packed tables, waiters moving quickly through the noise in black vests and white aprons. Beside us was a long table where twelve elderly French diners sat in a row, apparently ready for a serious lunch.
A tall waiter said something to me in French and disappeared. I assumed it meant, “Madam, wait here,” although it could equally have meant something completely different.
Eventually another man came over, asked what I presumed was the size of our party, and reluctantly gave us a nearby table once I convinced him that the missing second person really did exist and was on his way in.
Then came the menu.
French only.
We stared at it for a while, pretending that determination might somehow improve our vocabulary. Just as we were about to enlist our phones, the waiter looked at us and smiled.
“English?”
We nodded.
An English menu appeared.
Suddenly everything looked delicious.
As usual, we ordered too much.
The waiter made no attempt to save us from ourselves. He simply wrote our order directly on the paper covering the table. Later I realized that the same scribbled record would also become our bill.
The food arrived quickly. The portions were modest, enough for one person, and there was very little attempt to make anything look important.
No architectural plating. No mysterious dots of sauce. No ingredient placed at an angle because someone had decided horizontal food was no longer fashionable.
Just food.
Simple French food, cooked properly and put on the table.
And it was very good.
When the bill arrived, the average was about €33 per person. After spending time around fine dining in Paris, I had to look twice.
By the time we left, the mystery of the barriers outside had also been solved. The empty-looking area I had seen when we arrived was now holding a queue that folded back on itself several times.
Walking away, I kept thinking about my instructor’s recommendation.
This was not the first time it had happened. In Florence, a chef who had spent years working in Michelin-starred restaurants had also pointed me toward a place that was much simpler than I expected.
Why?
I had gone to culinary school partly because I wanted to understand what happened behind restaurant doors. There I learned to pay attention to precision: the size of a cut, the temperature of a pan, the consistency of a sauce, the timing of each component on a plate. In Paris, that precision could be taken to astonishing levels. A plate might contain very little food and an enormous amount of work.
I admired the skill.
But sitting in Chartier, surrounded by noise, paper tablecloths and plates that made no effort to impress me, I began to wonder whether skill and complexity were really the same thing.
Perhaps the more you know how to do, the less you need to prove that you can do it.
That thought stayed with me.
There is a stage in learning when complexity is exciting. You discover techniques you did not know existed and naturally want to use them. In cooking, you learn another sauce, another method, another way to transform an ingredient. In other parts of life, we do much the same. We accumulate knowledge, vocabulary, experience and methods.
Then, if we keep going, something curious can happen.
We begin taking things away.
Not because we know less, but because we know enough to recognize what is unnecessary.
A simple plate is not necessarily simple to make. There is nowhere for a badly cooked ingredient to hide. A straightforward dish does not have twenty other elements competing for attention. If the food is good, it has to stand on its own.
Perhaps that was what those chefs appreciated.
Not simplicity as the opposite of sophistication, but simplicity that comes after sophistication.
I thought back to some of the elaborate meals I had eaten and some of the techniques I had practised at Le Cordon Bleu. I still loved the craft, the discipline and the imagination behind them. Learning how difficult cooking could be had only increased my respect for good chefs.
But that lunch in Paris added something else.
Technique matters.
So does knowing when to leave it alone.
The next morning, we left Paris early for a long train journey toward Prague. At Gare de l’Est, the city was already awake but not yet in a hurry.
I had arrived in Paris wanting to learn more about cooking.
I left thinking about simplicity.
Perhaps that, too, is part of learning a craft: first discovering everything that can be done, and then slowly discovering what does not need to be.