Farewell, Angelina
January 25th, 2009
I had lunch today in Café Angelina on the rue de Rivoli across from the Tuileries. There I found preserved all the French rough edges that elsewhere have been worn smooth by globalization. It was a museum of snobby waiters, pretentious patrons in black turtlenecks, and little yapping dogs inside restaurants.
The little black dog was like the familiar of the witch sitting opposite. The witch was a French academic specializing (I gathered) in the representation of justice and the law in French literature, with an emphasis on Balzac. Her interlocutor was a fellow academic with a mop of Warholesque gray hair, the black turtleneck, and an American accent in both English and French. She switched to French for the pretentious bits of her conversation (I’m not sure if that is good camouflage…). I tried to screen her out, but heard snatches over the barking of the dog, including this good example, “The salient features of violence are its suddenness and the damage that accompanies it.” I would classify this as a tautology, but perhaps it sounds better in French. So much for the dog and patrons. As for the waiters, I watched two of them ignore a poor Japanese couple who were pressed for time. The third finished sorting forks into a container then walked across the restaurant to replace the tray he had been using before coming over finally to take their order. Service in Japan is so outstanding, Japanese people must be traumatized the first time they go abroad and learn they are expected to pay extra (that is, to leave a tip, which is not the custom in Japan) for snootiness and indifference.
Total damage at Café Angelina was €28, the same as the price of a single drink at the Hemingway Bar at the Ritz (I ordered a “Poire Victoire”). It is also half the cost of lunch at Café de la Paix (next to the Opéra) for the same number of courses, and exactly four times *more* than the beautiful, simple set lunch I had at a cafe called Chocolino near the Madeleine Church. The locals seem to think highly of Chocolino as well: in the 15-20 minutes it took me to order and eat my lunch, there was a constant line ten people deep. With throughput at around three people per minute, I saw around 50 people go through that place in a very short time.