There are a score of capital restaurants in Paris which may be called
"bourgeois" without in any way detracting from their excellence. An
excellent type of such a restaurant is Maire's, at the corner of the Bd.
St-Dennis, owned by the company which controls the Paillard's Restaurant
of the Champs Elysees. It is a good place to dine at for any one going
to the play at the Porte St-Martin, the Renaissance, the Theatre
Antoine, or any of the music halls or theatres in the west of Paris.
Mushrooms always seem to me to play a great part in the cookery at
Maire's, and the _Poulet Maire_ is a fowl cooked with mushrooms; but the
restaurant has a long list of specialities of all kinds, and the
mushroom only appears in some of them. Charbonnier is the especial
dinner wine of the house, and it is said that the name was originally
given to the wine owing to the discovery of a quantity of it stored
under sticks of charcoal in the days when Maire's was only a wine-shop.
Next door to the Gymnase Theatre is Marguery's, which always seems to be
full, and where the service is rather too hurried and too slap-dash to
suit the contemplative gourmet; but Marguery's has its special claim to
fame as the place where the _Sole Marguery_ was invented, and though I
have eaten the dish in half a hundred restaurants, there is no place
where it is so perfectly cooked as in the restaurant where it was first
thought of, for nowhere else is the sauce quite as good or as strong.
Pages:
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38