Le Guide to an "Electric City"

By Michael Demarest

For French visitors, words kind and beastly about New York

My dear Jean-Pierre and Nicole:

Listen, mes chers. Before you leave Paris for I'Amerique on your honeymoon it is absolutely essential that you equip yourselves with the new Guide to New York by Henri Gault and Christian Millau. There is no other comparable introduction to New York and les New-Yorkais, certainly not in French (and it's available only in French). With its information on hotels, restaurants, theaters, shopping, museums, la night life, even transportation, it will be as valuable to you as your traveler's checks. The book also contains many sage observations about the habits--some barbaric, some hugely commendable--of les Americains that may help you get back home in une piece.

Gault and Millau, as you know, publish the monthly food and travel magazine Le Nouveau Guide as well as a feisty annual guide to French restaurants, which sometimes makes Michelin's comments seem like soggy croissants. Oh, mes chers, what G-M have to say about l'Amerique is not what you have read in Tocqueville! You will be among a record number of French visitors to les Etats-Unis this year--estimated at 450,000--and should come prepared.

First, the good news. Les Amis are unbelieveably hospitable. Compared with them, according to GM, "the Frenchman is the most constipated human being on earth." Forget many of the chauvinistic cliches of the past. (Chauvin, after all, was a Frenchman.) Par exemple, the book points out, "the notion that the Americans could produce anything good to eat or drink used to make us giggle." Faux. Actually, there are several restaurants in New York (run mostly by Frenchmen) that would rank with some of the best in Paris. American restaurants, the book says, "are infinitely more elaborate, elegant and artful than ours." Also, in New York at least, there have never been so many good ones. There are in that city many young chefs who are versed in la nouvelle cuisine.

L 'Amerique is now fairly bursting with the ingredients for le grand repas. Lobsters from the state of Maine (named for the region in northwest France), milk-fed veal from le Midwest, good beef and lamb from Montana and New Jersey, le bon canard known as Long Island duckling, the little shrimp of New Orleans, the crab of San Francisco, an aspiring caviar, even snails, frogs' legs and truffles from la Californie. Speaking of la Californie, G-M advise you to drink its wines by all means. The Californians, led--cela va sans dire--by French and Italian growers, have won global respect.

As an old boulevardier, I must agree with many of the sentiments expressed in the Guide. Par exemple, New York itself: "It is beautiful and hideous, tender and violent, generous and greedy, fascinating and horrifying. New York is the image of the whole continent. Contradictory, profound, lyrical. . . it is the most electric city in the world." The authors add that your visit will be "more than a simple tourist trip, it will be a decisive stage in your maturing."

You will find out, no doubt, that Americans who do not patronize les grands restaurants live on substances like le cake mix, JellO, peanut butter, ketchup, Coke and orangeade without orange. Surfeited with frozen victuals and "baby food," they have lost all contact with natural flavors. From an early age they grow fat on sugars, gassy drinks, bread and superfluous vitamins. "No wonder," say GM, "that American dentists are the best in the world or that the gastroenterologists are so busy." Evidemment, you must eat only in the very best places, and your first duty on landing is to make your reservations. "Otherwise," advise GM, "you run the risk of being condemned to eat hamburgers in les fast food."

Now, as les New-Yorkais say, for le nitty-gritty. Rumor has it that the celebrated Algonquin serves bad food. "This information is absolutely erroneous. In fact, it is very bad." At Tavern on the Green, they serve a banana cheesecake "that would have smothered Desdemona faster than her pillow." At the "21" Club, which is not a club at all but a place to be seen, the cuisine is "irregular: one time it's bad, another time it's worse." At P.J. Clarke's, they serve un hamburger that is "both cooked to death and cold and even an English dog would not want to eat it." Ordering a simple sole meuniere at elegant La Grenouille is as complicated as filing an income tax return.

But of course, mes chers, you will stay away from such spots and follow Gault-Millau to the very special places of New York and, indeed, l'Amerique. Say your prayers and hope that Andre Soltner may accommodate you at Lutece, by any measure one of the world's finest French restaurants. The authors rate equally high The Four Seasons, where vraiment the courtesy, the ambience, the efficiency as well as the food are "an amazement." Be adventurous like your French ancestors there: cross the bridge and dine in le vrai Brooklyn, at the Continental-style River Cafe or else at Gage and Tollner, which, contrary to the authors' statement that there are no bistros vraiment Americains in New York, is just about as American as you can get, serving the good Atlantic seafood and the great corn-fed beef of the Midwest, which, entre nous, is better than France's finest.

Unlike Paris, New York has an abundance of taxicabs to take you to the good places. Helas, the drivers seem mostly to be crazy and they do not know their geography! As for their cars, say GM, they could not be in worse repair if you boarded them in the farthest depths of Turkey.

En tout cas, I hope that you will have a truly ravishing visit to this extraordinary land, and please blow a kiss to my very favorite French lady (next to you, Nicole)--the Statue of Liberty.

Your loving cousin,

Michael Demarest

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