My memories of La Tartine always seem to be in black and white, from a part of my life so distant that recalling it seems like looking at an old photo. Except that I remember the yellow of the walls, a streaky, ochre-yellow that comes from years and years of layered tobacco smoke. When we later built Le Pichet, I asked our contractor, who had visited La Tartine, to imitate the effect. He accomplished it using a base of yellow paint with a streaky over-brush of boat varnish.
La Tartine was one of those places in Paris that I was too timid to enter at first. I had read about it in Patricia Well’s classic “A Food Lover’s Guide to Paris“, a dog-eared copy of which I carried around with me when we lived there. When we first moved to Paris, my French was not very useful, so going into a crowded wine bar, moreover a wine bar that was crowded with French people and seemingly free of tourists, was a bit daunting.
The evening did arrive when Sheila and I pushed the door of Le Tartine and made our way up to the bar. It was early in the evening, when the crowd was still thin, so we easily found a place at the marble topped bar near the front door.
In those days, in the early 1990s, Le Tartine gave off a feeling of long-cultivated decay. It still featured its turn of the century decor: a lovely marble topped bar, moleskine banquettes, micro tiled floor, pressed tin ceiling and globe lighting. But the time was long past that any serious upkeep had been undertaken. Its basement toilets, reached by a winding wooden staircase, were dark, barely lit and featured some of the last “hole in the floor and 2 places for your feet” style toilets in Paris. Tiles were missing from the floors. The marble bar top had an ugly crack along the short edge. The faded, wall-mounted wine lists would not have looked out of place in Robert Doisneau photo. In short, Le Tartine looked exactly like I believed Paris should look, drenched in romantic sepia tones and oozing atmosphere. As the room filled with idiosyncratic neighborhood regulars, the vision was completed. La Tartine was an American’s dream of Paris.
Of course, the real attraction was the wine, which was inexpensive and very good, with 20 or so choices by the glass, mostly Beaujolais and whites from the Loire. At this stage in its life, La Tartine didnt serve full meals, only snacks to go with wine: platters of charcuterie and the namesake tartines constructed on fat slices of course country bread. We ordered a tartine with creamy goat’s milk cheese to accompany a glass of Sancerre. Next to us, an older gentleman pulled a dried sausage out of his well-worn raincoat and began slicing it up with his pocket knife, politely offering us a few slices.
The staff were mostly older, matronly women, who, based on their rapport with clients, had worked there for years. They were terse but friendly, the classic Paris waitperson who is not rude per se but has a lot to do and no time for nonsense. The owner, an ancient homuncules of a man, bald, round, in shirt sleeves, tie and suspenders, sat it the banquette closest to the bar, going through the receipts and counting bills from an ancient tin cash box. From time to time, he snapped questions or demands at the staff, who rolled their eyes or turned away to avoid answering. The woman working behind the bar seemed to be a particular target of his wrath. An older woman with hair dyed red, wearing a house dress under her servers apron, she was jovial with regulars and patient with our poor French.
At some point, the owner proffered one comment too many and the woman behind the bar became volubly angry. She addressed a stream of invective at the boss, broke a glass on the floor and informed the crowd at the bar that she had had enough and that bar the bar was closed. As silence fell on the crowd, she turned her back and began wiping glasses. We looked at each other, at our empty glasses and at our neighbors at the bar. What to do? Our friend with the raincoat and the sausage took it upon himself to act the peacemaker. “Look!” he said “these people have come all the way from America and their glasses are empty. Surely you can at least pour them another”. Stepping behind the bar, he put his arm around her shoulders and continued speaking to her in a low voice, mixing supplication and reason, trying to bring her around. Finally, reluctantly, still angry, she returned to the bar poured us another round. “What about your friends” said sausage man, “they need a glass also. With a deep sigh, she began to fill glasses all around. The clamor of happy voices restarted. It was to be the first of many visits to La Tartine.
Years later, we returned to find it under new ownership, the old owner and familiar servers gone, replaced by a fresh coat of pale lemon-yellow paint, newly up to code restrooms and young waiters in sharp black and whites. It was a wine bar no longer, but a full restaurant with a menu of classic dishes and tables full of tourists. At first, the change was a jarring disappointment: what had become of the sepia patina that so accorded to my idea of classic Paris? Why would anyone want to ruin such a classic venue? Would all of the classics spots in Paris be lost in the same way?
But as one glass of Beaujolais followed another, I occurred to me that La Tartine had probably looked very much like this on the day it opened, before the decades of smoke and conversation and thoughts has burnished it to a fine old glow. To have reset the clock was not a betrayal but a new start.
A fantastic write-up of a great old joint! Please keep these histoires coming!!