The Balzar
Wars

The Balzar, on the rue des Écoles, in the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris, happens to be the best restaurant in the world. It is the best restaurant in the world not because it has the best food—though the food is (or used to be) excellent—and not because it is “hot,” or even particularly fashionable, but because of a hundred small things that make it a uniquely soulful and happy place.

The Balzar is a brasserie, which means that it is Alsatian in origin, serves beer, and stays open late. Over the years it has added a full dinner menu, so that it has become indistinguishable from a restaurant. For more than a hundred years the Balzar has been a family business, and each of the families has managed to keep it constant without making it stale. It’s a one-story, one-room spot, small by brasserie standards—with only ninety or so covers—and has a glass front that looks out onto the street; you can see with one eye people boarding the number 63 bus in the twilight, and with the other a pretty little park dedicated to Montaigne, with plane trees and pink-flowering chestnuts.

The Balzar is a democratic place. You are greeted at the door with a handshake and a quick squint of crinkled, harried warmth, by the two maîtres d’hôtel—one always in a tuxedo, the other in a suit—and are shown to your table with a few pensive words about families, children, and the weather. There’s not a trace of unctuousness or forced familiarity, no appraisal of your wallet, your last review, or your weekend gross. There are long banquettes covered with dark brown leather along the walls, and a T-shaped banquette in the middle of the room. On the tables are white linen and glasses and silver. The light—from eight round globe lamps, high above—is warm and bright, gay without being harsh. The carte is a long printed card, with the dishes listed on the front and the wines on the back, and it never changes. There are leeks and tomato salad and herring for starters—foie gras if you’re in an expansive mood—and then the same five or so plats: steak au poivre, roast chicken, grilled sole or salmon, calf’s liver, gigot with white and green beans. The wine list is short, and usually the best thing on it is the Réserve Balzar, a pleasant red Bordeaux. The only sauces are the sauce au poivre on the steak and a béarnaise for the grilled salmon. The pommes frites are fine, the crème caramel is good, the profiteroles the best in Paris.

It is the waiters—or serveurs, as they’re called—who give the Balzar its soul. A team of the same ten men has been in place for decades: They are courteous, warmhearted, ironic (able to warn a client off a dubious plat with an eyebrow), and mildly lubricious. (They have been known to evaluate, sotto voce, the size and shape of a woman’s rear even as they pull out the table to make way for it.) They work hard. By tradition at the Balzar, the plats arrive beautifully arranged on an oval platter and then are carefully transferred by the waiter to a round plate. This doubles the work but creates an effect. Whenever I am feeling blue, I like to go to the Balzar and watch a waiter gravely transfer a steak au poivre and its accompaniments from an oval platter to a plate, item by item. It reaffirms my faith in the sanity of superfluous civilization.

The other famous Left Bank brasserie, the Lipp, is known as a canteen for the men of power in the Fifth Republic, but when Lionel Jospin, the virtuous Socialist who is trying to transform French politics, was running for president three years ago, he made an event of being photographed, for Paris Match, having dinner at the Balzar. Everyone got the point.

On a Sunday night in April, Martha and I, with Luke, were sitting at a table in the back, just finishing one in a long line of good dinners and were once again refining our long-term plan to be buried at the Balzar—or, more precisely, to have the urns containing our ashes placed on the dessert counter just above the mille-feuilles and the lemon tart, and on either side of the flowers. The plaques, we decided, should read “A Faithful Client” or, better, should repeat the words of those inscriptions you see all over Paris: “Here, fallen for France . . .”

Just then Jean-Claude, the maître d’ in the tuxedo, came over to our table. His gravelly sud-ouest voice was pitched low, and to my amazement, his eyes were glistening. “I’d like to introduce you to someone who’ll be working with us,” he said graciously, and he summoned a melancholy-faced, lantern-jawed man, buttoned up in a good suit, whom I had idly noticed standing by the door earlier in the evening. “This is M. Delouche,” he said. I shook hands with M. Delouche and raised my eyebrows at Jean-Claude.

“The Balzar has been sold,” he said. “M. Delouche is here representing the new management.” He walked away quickly, and M. Delouche followed.

I grabbed our waiter as he came by the table. “The restaurant has been sold?” I said. “To whom was it sold?”

“To the Flo Group,” he answered, in a strangled voice.

The Flo Group! I felt as I imagined I would feel if I had been stabbed: first surprise, then nothing, then pain. The Flo Group is the creation of an Alsatian waiter turned restaurant tycoon named Jean-Paul Bucher, and in Paris it is often referred to as the rouleau compresseur Flo, the Flo steamroller. It is for many people the symbol of the forces of restaurant consolidation, globalization, standardization, and even Disneyfication; Flo runs five restaurants at Disneyland Paris. Over the past thirty years Bucher has bought up some of the oldest and most famous brasseries and bistros in Paris, while also running a chain of lesser Flos, a catering business, and a chain of cheap restaurants called Hippopotamus. Some of the Flo Group restaurants—Julien, Le Boeuf sur le Toit—are actually pretty good. But even the good places have a processed, overwrought quality, and the food at one is pretty much like the food at the others. They lack all the things that the Balzar possesses so effortlessly: distinctiveness, eccentricity, and a sense of continuity.

A few moments later one of the waiters, whom I had known for a long time, and whom I’ll call Thierry, came up to me and suggested, under his breath, that we meet for coffee the next day. When we met, Thierry told me the history of the Balzar, seen from below. He was in mufti, wearing jeans and a jean jacket, a standard uniform for off-duty waiters, like blue windbreakers on off-duty New York cops. The Balzar had never been a perfectly happy place, he maintained, and the syndicat, the union, had suffered a good deal even under the old owners. Nonetheless the garçons loved the work, because they liked the clients and the clients liked them. (I noticed that he referred to the waiters by the usually forbidden, old-fashioned word garçons, or boys, and that he also referred to their métier as restauration, or restaurant work. The two words together gave their profession blue-collar integrity.) He outlined their fears. The Flo people, he said, might close the Balzar “for restoration” and disperse the waiters to other Flo restaurants, all over Paris, never to be reassembled. “They express a savoir-faire that dates from 1968,” he said. “Ours dates from 1894.” It was said that the Flo people had arranged to have American tour groups brought to the Balzar; it was also said that they were standardizing the kitchen produce, bringing it in line with the rest of the Flo Group. More immediately, the garçons were appalled because the new man, M. Delouche, had been put “on the service,” drawing his salary from their tips—the 15 percent service charge that is added to all French restaurant bills. (Thierry explained to me that the service charge was real and sacrosanct; before Flo took over, one of the garçons collected it at the end of every evening and put it in a drawer, to which each of them had a key. Now they have to wait five weeks for the same money.) It also turned out that the suit-tuxedo distinction among the greeters was a deeply significant code: A maître d’ in a suit was aligned with the owner, one in a tuxedo with the staff.

Within a week or so a group of Balzar regulars, mostly editors and publishers and professors—the Balzar is around the corner from the Sorbonne—arranged to meet at the apartment of one of the staunchest clients, on the quai Anatole-France, to think about what we could do. It was a beautiful day, but ominous reports were coming in from all sides. Someone had had a doubtful sole; someone else had noticed that oeufs crevettes, hard-boiled eggs with shrimp, had been sneaked onto the menu. (No, no, someone else said, reassuringly, the oeufs crevettes were there twenty years ago; it was really a restoration.) More seriously, it was said that the waiters were being forced to rush checks to the table. It is a Balzar tradition that you can nurse even a cup of coffee and a plate of cold cuts for as long as you like. Now, it was said, after seventy minutes the waiters were forced to put the check on the table. This was—well, there was no other word for it—so American. You see this in California, someone said; he had eaten once in Santa Monica, and the young woman slapped the bill on the table after an hour and a half. (I could only imagine the waitress, on her way to her tai chi or acting class, dying on the vine while a couple of Frenchmen sat polishing off a bottle and solving the world’s problems.) More horror stories were told; a keen-eyed regular claimed to have spotted a Flo Group camion parked outside the Balzar at six o’clock one morning, bringing in Flo produce.

It was obvious that something had to be done, but what? One person suggested a boycott; another person a sit-in; someone else a campaign of letter writing. We had a left, a right, and a center even before we had a party. Finally a leader emerged, a handsome, round-faced young publisher named Lorenzo Valentin. He had an excellent plan: Why not invite all the regulars we could find to reserve tables on the same night, occupy the restaurant, make a scene, and demand that Bucher meet with us? Fine, someone else said, but added that if we did it, we had to be sure not to leave the waiters, on whose behalf we were acting, “in an ambiguous position.” If we sat in, occupied the restaurant, and didn’t order anything, they would be the ones to suffer. Therefore we also had to order and eat dinner. Good, one woman said, but we had to be sure to hold on to the tables for the entire evening. “Eat, but eat slowly” would be our motto. Why not order foie gras on toast, she suggested; that could be spread very slowly. She mimed just how to do it, like a veteran of many a foie gras slowdown on the barricades. We all watched her studiously.

During the next two weeks, as I helped organize the occupation, I felt exhilarated, though I recognized in my exhilaration a certain hypocrisy. Like every American in France, I had spent a fair amount of time being exasperated by the French because of their inability to accept change, their refusal to accept the inevitable logic of the market, and their tendency to blame Americans for everything. As I raged against the changes at the Balzar, I began to hear people repeating to me the same tiresome and sensible logic that I had been preaching so long myself: that nothing stays the same; change must be welcomed; one must choose to live in the world as it is or live in a museum whose walls increasingly recede inward. . . . It was all true, and when it came to the Balzar, I didn’t care. I would like to say that the difference was that my concern was now attached to particular people—to Thierry and Jean-Claude and the rest. But that would be giving myself too much credit for disinterestedness. The difference was not that it was happening to the Balzar. The difference was that it was happening to me. I was being asked to give up the continuity of a thousand small associations and pleasures—the night we went after we signed the lease, the night we went, still jet-lagged, after a summer away—and I didn’t see why I should.

“Can’t repeat the past?” says Gatsby. “Why of course you can!” And every American schoolchild is taught that in this belief lies Gatsby’s tragedy. But why should the thought be so absurd? Can’t repeat the past? We do it every day. We build a life, or try to, of pleasures and duties that will become routine, so that every day will be the same day, or nearly so, “the day of our life,” Randall Jarrell called it. There seemed to me nothing stranger about my wanting to eat forever at an unchanged Balzar than about my wanting to stay married to the same wife or be father of the same kid. (“M. Bucher has now bought your family, and will be adding a new child to the staff on the same terms. Change is good. Here, try Ralphie for a while. He comes from the centralized nursery and only speaks German, but you’ll soon find that . . .”) On the day of my life, I eat dinner at the Balzar—the Balzar as it is and was, and not some improved, Flo Group version. I realize that one of the tricks of capitalism is to lure you into a misleadingly unreciprocated love with a cash register, but what impressed me about my friends in the Balzar war was that they weren’t prepared to treat their attachment to the Balzar as somehow less real than the cash register’s attachment to it.

June 25 was picked as the day for our occupation of the Balzar. We carefully arranged to stagger our phone calls to reserve tables for that Thursday night, to avoid tipping our hand. When my turn came, I was so nervous that I had to dial twice, and then, in a high-pitched quaver, I reserved my table. (“Oui, madame,” said an obviously bemused maître d’.) On the night I arrived with a couple of friends. The tables filled up with regulars, gaily overacting the part of ordinary diners: Oh, how sympa, you’re here too, we said to each other, exchanging meaty, significant winks. We ordered apéritifs and made nervous conversation. Finally, at nine o’clock, the last regular sat down, and, with two taps on a glass, Lorenzo Valentin rose. The revolution was under way.

“We are here tonight,” he said, “to demonstrate our sympathy with the waiters, clients, and tradition of the Balzar.” Valentin stepped away from his table and addressed Bucher’s man, M. Delouche, directly. Delouche clasped his hands behind his back and thrust out his chin, both obsequious and defiant. When I saw him like that, bearing the brunt of a sudden wave of disapproval—and, surely, thinking, I’m the working stiff here, these people are rich gauchistes, easy for them—I have to admit that a small whitecap of sympathy for him rose in my mind.

“This is not a personal assault on anyone,” Lorenzo declared. “We have gathered here tonight as, shall we say, an opportunity to discuss the issue at the heart of our concerns about the recent purchase of the Balzar by the Flo Group. Our question is: Is this merely a place to eat or is it something more, and if it is something more, what is it? Our organization, Les Amis du Balzar, is here to safeguard the quality and, what’s more, to defend the spirit and the staff of a place that we believe offers a respite from time itself.” This was grandly said, and he got a big hand.

M. Delouche attempted to defend his position, but his voice was mostly inaudible. All you could make out was “logic,” “safeguard,” “continuity.”

“But what about the staff?” Lorenzo demanded. “What of their continuity?”

“Les serveurs! Les serveurs!” The cry went up from around the room as we pounded the tables and hit cutlery against glasses. The waiters, their eyes fixed studiously on the floor or on the tables, continued to serve.

“Why can’t this place be different from other places bought by Flo?” another protester said, rising to his feet. “We all know what Flo does. How many people here are former clients of La Coupole?”

“Anciens! Anciens!” we chanted in unison, pounding the tables some more, meaning that we used to go to La Coupole and didn’t anymore.

We were building up to an impressive pitch of indignation, but at that point the waiters began to serve the dinners that we had ordered while we were waiting to begin our protest, and this weakened the revolutionary spirit a little. There was, I sensed, a flaw in our strategy: If you take over a restaurant as an act of protest and then order dinner at the restaurant, what you have actually done is gone to the restaurant and had dinner, since a restaurant is, by definition, always occupied, by its diners. Having come to say that you just won’t take it anymore, you have to add sheepishly that you will take it, au point and with béarnaise sauce. It was as if at the Boston Tea Party the patriots had boarded the ship, bought up all the boxes of tea, and then brewed them.

Nonetheless we carried on. We loudly criticized the fish; we angrily demanded a meeting with Bucher; we rose and offered memories of the Balzar, and vowed that we would fight for the Balzar yet to be.

We were hoping for a little médiatisation, and we got it. Pieces about the protest appeared in the magazine Marianne and in Le Figaro. Then, unfortunately, Jean-Pierre Quélin, the food critic of Le Monde, who is a kind of Jonathan Yardley of French restaurant writing, weighed in, announcing that the food at the Balzar had always been terrible—but that he had eaten there since the Flo Group took over, and now it was even worse, so to hell with everybody. Lorenzo thought that this might actually be a useful article for our cause: By defining the Balzar radical fringe, Quélin was allowing us to occupy the rational center.

To the surprise of my American self, Bucher sent back word that he would be delighted to meet with our association, to have breakfast with what amounted to our Directorate at the Balzar itself. At nine on a Saturday morning we assembled at the Café Sorbon, across the street and then trooped over to meet the enemy. Bucher turned out to be a simple round Alsatian, wearing an open shirt, and he spoke with the guttural accent of Alsace. We all shook hands—he had a couple of his PR people sitting behind him at a second table—and then Lorenzo Valentin, with quiet dignity, began his speech.

“We are here,” he said, “as representatives of our association, to argue that your regime is not compatible with the spirit of the Balzar. This is not meant to be offensive to you—”

“Not at all,” Bucher said politely.

“But without denying your right of property, we claim for ourselves a kind of right of usage.” And from that premise Valentin carefully outlined our thesis that what mattered was the esprit of the Balzar and that the esprit of the Flo Group was, on the evidence, not compatible with that esprit we were defending. We asked him to keep the Balzar an autonomous brasserie, outside the Flo Group proper, and to make no changes in the staff, in the decor, or in the spirit of the place. After stating these demands, Lorenzo looked at him squarely.

I don’t think any of us were prepared for what happened next. Bucher looked us over, up and down the table. “No problem,” he said, a friendly, gap-toothed smile creasing his face. “No problem. Tell me, my friends, why would I want to change something that is working so well right now, something that works so effectively? I bought the Balzar because it’s the crown jewel of Parisian brasseries. I bought the Balzar because I love it. What motive would I have to want it to be different? I’m here because if I weren’t, McDonald’s would be—and that would be too bad. I sincerely think that we are defending the same thing.”

Our committee exchanged glances. Lorenzo pressed his point. “It’s not just the cuisine,” he said. “It’s something more. A certain relaxation, the feeling of time suspended, the spirit of a place. You see, five hundred and fifty people have already joined Les Amis du Balzar.”

Bucher nodded emphatically. “I know. You are to be congratulated,” he said. “What an accomplishment!” After some more conversation about the cooking—he had brought out the chef de cuisine, who was understandably upset about the piece in Le Monde—he said, “I am sixty years old. I give you a guarantee that I will keep the Balzar as it is. This wasn’t a good buy for me. My accountants advised against it. My analysts advised against it. My heart and my soul told me to do it, and they’re with you. A restaurant this small—it makes no sense for my chain. A hundred covers. It makes no sense for me except as the jewel in the crown of my Parisian brasseries, whose quality and values I’m going to defend.”

We mumbled something and, after more handshaking, withdrew to the sidewalk. We had not anticipated the strategic advantage to Bucher of total, enthusiastic assent. We wanted to save the steak au poivre on the oval plate and the waiter serving it, but you couldn’t argue with the man when he pointed to the steak, the plate, and the waiter and said nothing’s changed. (Thierry, when he heard of our breakfast with Bucher, said, “It is the old technique of the kings of France: Treat your worst enemy like your best friend.”)

I did not doubt that Bucher was being perfectly sincere, as far as it went, and that in his case as-far-as-it-went went as far it could. The Balzar would stay the same until it changed. The waiters seem encouraged by our actions. When I go to the Balzar now, Thierry, bringing a coupe de champagne, slips by and, under his breath, makes a toast: “À la santé de l’association—to the health of the association!” We repeat the toast, under our breaths. It is like being in the resistance. (But when M. Delouche comes over, we shake his hand too. Perhaps that is also like being in the resistance.)

Les Amis du Balzar has sent an eloquent new letter to Bucher, written by Lorenzo Valentin, and describing the objet de nos préoccupations: that no dish will come from a centralized kitchen and that there will be real autonomy for the staff, and real autonomy in the management. My Parisian self is prepared to defend the Balzar to the end, whatever it takes. My American self suspects that the Balzar will stay the same, and then it will change, and that we will love it as long as we can.