An Evening at Chez Paul

Chez Paul has become one of those Parisian institutions whose reputation is largely made up of people telling you that it is an institution and that you must go there. Because of this, we had been keen to go for some time, with little exact knowledge of what it actually was, beyond the fact that it was a very historic restaurant in Paris.

So what is Chez Paul? It is a small, old-fashioned French restaurant near Bastille with lace curtains, red neon signage, checkered napkins and food wonderfully stuck in the 1960s. It is a place people go to experience the idea of a Paris restaurant. There are three of us, and it is one of those late August evenings when the air is still warm yet with the first faint suggestion of autumn in it. A touch early for our reservation we do what the French have always understood to be the correct response to being early: a drink.

So we have a Picon bière, that strange and wonderful French combination of beer and bitter orange that tastes like if an Aperol Spritz had an uncle they only saw at Christmas. Chez Paul is waiting for us though, glorious in the late evening sunshine, looking like the set of a film. Our waitress speaks English with a too-strong American accent, a group of Italians ask if we're also American, an elegant woman dines alone in the corner. Another elegant woman, 40 years her senior, also dines alone, in a different corner.

The room is exactly as we had hoped it would be. A mirage of red neon and gastronomic pleasure. Foil stamped leather bound menus, softened by thousands of thumbs over years of important decision making. There is red wine by the carafe and two beers on the table. Nothing is fashionable. Nothing is deconstructed. Nothing has been placed on a piece of slate. The plates are not small. The restaurant seems almost aggressively uninterested in the last decades of European dining.

We order snails for the table, because we’re in Paris, and which arrive swimming in so much garlic and butter that any suggestion they were once living creatures has been thoroughly erased. There is no hint of shell, garden, slime or mollusc. They might be snails, or they might not be. Either way, you eat them with bread and immediately understand why the French have never seen the need to apologise for anything. We had leeks in vinegar, which were, quite literally, leaks in vinegar.

Then come the steaks. One each, nothing for the table here. There are certain evenings when democracy is best expressed through identical plates of beef. They come accompanied by a small vat of potatoes au gratin, a sea of cream with the tips of potatoes breaking the surface like icebergs.

We eat the steaks. We drink the red wine. The beers disappear. The room gets louder. The Italians continue being Italian beside us, and the waitress continues being magnificently French with her incongruous American accent.

Then dessert, restraint has never been the point. A pavlova, and some profiteroles. The pavlova has the chewy meringue you want, and the profiteroles arrive in the usual glorious mess of pastry, chocolate sauce and ice cream. For a few minutes the dinner table becomes a shared site of excavation.

By now Chez Paul is really getting going. Voices are rising, glasses are being drunk and refilled. A Pamela Anderson lookalike gets behind the bar and starts posing for photographs. It is the sort of moment when you realise the restaurant has crossed some invisible threshold and the night is now officially underway.

Outside, Paris has changed. The streets, deep blue and cool, the warmth of the restaurant immediately behind us. We walk away and look back at Chez Paul, glowing red, orange and gold through the mottled glass windows, a culinary bordello of noise and heat in the middle of the night.