Flophouse Favorite #2 - Les Diablotins (formerly Les Galopins)

Restaurant Les Diablotins, 27 rue des Meuniers, Suresnes

When I was working in Suresnes this place was very popular. For those of us who ate there often, it was practically the company cafeteria. There was even a story (probably apocryphal) about one executive who knew the wine list so well that he would bypass the waiter, go straight to the cellar and select his very own bottle of wine from their fine selection.

Really, really good food. The menu is here.

Get a reservation and go for lunch. There is a very nice park across the street so you can walk off your crème brulée. They are closed in August (yes, the entire month) so plan accordingly.

The most memorable meal I had here was right after my boss (two companies ago), the much-loved and greatly respected CIO, announced that she was leaving the company.

My Operations Director and I left the meeting room, walked out onto the streets of Suresnes and headed straight for the restaurant where we ordered:

An aperitif (kir)
The Côte de boeuf for two (a huge slab of perfectly cooked, melt in your mouth, bloody rare, beef )
A nice bottle of Bordeaux (also for two)
Dessert (it was either the Fondant au chocolat or the Crumble)

The meal was superb and, after the third glass of wine or so, we cheered up and started plotting our next career move.

Restaurant Les Diablotins
Tel : 01 45 06 54 54
They also take email reservations

What is a "Flophouse"?

When I was a child growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I lived in a house in Seattle that everyone called “The Thackeray Street Hotel”. This house (also called “The Blue House” by the Frenchlings) was located on Thackeray Street in the Wallingford District of Seattle, not far from the University of Washington.

I’m not sure who first came up with the idea of calling it a “hotel” but I surely know why; it was an open house in the best sense of that term. Almost every day there were people popping in and out; some stayed for dinner, some for a night and some practically moved in for months at a time. It wasn’t a large house by any means but there was always room for a friend or a friend of a friend to sleep and there was always space at the dinner table for “just one more if we squeeze the chairs together a bit tighter.” At one time there were so many keys to this house floating around that my parents were no longer sure who had one and who might unexpectedly appear in the evening hours. Interesting people: lawyers, artists, scientists, engineers, anthropologists, jazz and folk musicians, public radio aficionados, a retired Federal Appeals Court judge and at least one hobo.

So when the time came to found my own household I looked for name of my very own. One that captured the bi-cultural nature of the family, the transient nature of our living situation and the hope that we would have our own collection of interesting people to visit us wherever we decided to live.

“Franco-American” was obvious. As a synonym for “hotel”, the archaic American “flophouse” seemed appropriate. When I put the two together I thought that “Franco-American Flophouse” tripped nicely off the tongue.

For those who wish for a formal definition, Wikipedia says: “a place that offers very cheap lodging, generally by providing only minimal services... Occupants of flophouses generally share bathroom facilities and reside in very tight quarters."   A very accurate description of every apartment I've ever lived in and the house I own today in Porchefontaine (55 square meters).

Unlike the Thackeray Street Hotel, the Franco-American Flophouse is not a physical place. On the contrary, it will never have a fixed location. But it travels well and has found homes in Seattle, Tokyo, Courbevoie, Suresnes, Paris, Versailles, Osaka and now Brussels.

Think of it as a state of mind; a place where the door is always open, you have your own key and there is always a place at the table for someone with an open mind and a gracious heart.

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.
Francis Bacon

French: a Passport or a Citadel?

“For any speaker of it, a given language is at once either more or less his own  or more or less someone  else’s, and either more or less cosmopolitan or more or less parochial - a borrowing or a heritage;  a passport or a citadel.  The question of whether, when, and for what purposes to use it is thus also a question of how far a people should form itself by the bent of its genius and how far by the demand of its times.”

Clifford Geertz

The Interpretation of Cultures

My Frenchlings are bi-lingual by birth;  I am bi-lingual by choice.

When I arrived in France in 1989 I was a mono-lingual American who had taken French classes in high school and university but who was incapable upon arriving in Paris of ordering a baguette in a bakery.  Surviving a job interview was out of the question.  Writing the thank you notes after my wedding was pure torture.  My first job was with an NGO in Paris where the working language was English.

At the time I perceived French as this enormous hurdle I would have to overcome to be able to function normally in this country.  Today I see French as the vehicle, my passport, through which I can move freely though worlds I never knew existed.   This poem by Robert Desnos, for example, which has the power to move me to tears every time I read it: 

http://www.feelingsurfer.net/garp/poesie/Desnos.TantReve.html.  

Or the excellent novel, Les Bienveillantes by Jonathon Littell which had such terrible reviews in the Anglo-Saxon press that I questioned  the competence of the English translator.

Beyond the world of the arts, French has made friendships and business relationships possibIe in places far beyond the borders of the Hexagone.  Every day, I meet,  work and study with people from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.  It was in French that I discovered Quebec, Canada.  It was French that gave a new dimension to my all too brief relationship with my French-speaking great-grandmother, Celestine Amans.

And if that were not sufficient reason to make me a proud Francophone, here are three more I came up with over my morning coffee:  

Primo - it is the most beautifully precisely imprecise language I have ever encountered.  Why do you think it was the language of diplomacy for so many years?  

Secundo - its demise has been greatly exaggerated and it is more widely spoken than many people think with more than 200+ million native and bi-lingual speakers.

Tertio - since I do speak it, I feel I own a part of it even if I am not French. 

The citadel (the Academie Francaise) be damned - a language is living thing that is lovingly created and re-created every day by those of us who use it.  All of us:  African, American and European.  

Flophouse Favorites#1bis - Ready for the New Year

I stopped by the salon this afternoon and asked Sabine if she could show me how to put my hair up in a "chignon" so I could be elegant for tonight's festivities.

Sabine sat me down, served me an espresso and went to work.

The result was, well, quite amazing.

Happy New Year everyone!

Victoria

Choosing a place

My eldest Frenchling is in her last year of high school here in France. She has passed the first part of her baccalaureate and will pass her final exams at the end of this school year.
For the next step, she is much better equipped then I was at her age. When I was 17 I spoke one language and had never been outside of my home country. My daughter has lived in three countries, is bi-lingual and has two passports. France or the United States are within easy reach. In addition she has family and friends in both countries that will help whatever she chooses to do.

But that is indeed the conundrum because this time around she will have to choose for herself.

Will she stay in France? Move to the United States? Or will she find a Third Place?

A suivre….

Flophouse Favorite #1 - L'Or de Saba

I am often solicited for advice about Paris - nice places to eat, good shops, salons and so forth - that are a bit off the beaten path.  These are places that were recommended to me by friends, colleagues and vendors (thank you, IBM...) or in a few rare cases I discovered them myself when I was tootling around the city.  These are places I like enough to go back to on a regular basis.

L'Or de Saba (39 rue Taitbout, 75009 Paris)

Since 1989 I have been looking for a really good hair salon in Paris.  My first haircut in France (I was living in Courbevoie at the time) was a complete disaster.  I obviously misunderstood the customer/service relationship.  To make a long story short, I asked for a short hair cut and the hairdresser violently disagreed.  "I refuse to make a woman look like a boy," she said.  She won, I lost, and it's been the same depressing story with every salon I have been to since.

Until I found the L'Or de Saba.  This is a very small salon near the Galeries Lafayette run by two charming ladies, Laure and Sabine. The service is excellent.  Sabine has a sense of adventure - she will try just about anything you have in mind because, as she says, "It's just hair and if you don't like the way it turns out, then we'll do something else".  To date she has never had to resort to a plan b.  Everything she has done to my hair has turned out spectacularly well.  Laure gives amazing facials and has managed to make my skin look as good as that of the Parisien women I work with.

So, if you just happen to be shopping in the 9th arrondissement near the "grands magasins" and you have a couple of hours free, stop by and see if they have an opening.

Always a Resident. Never a Citizen

This subject comes up every time I have to renew my French residency permit. I just received my third 10 year Carte de resident which means I am entering my third decade of association with this strange tribe. Inevitably I am asked (at the prefecture, at work and at home) why I don't just apply for citizenship. After all, they say, it would save me a lot of paperwork. To which I reply, "Let me see if I understand the reasoning here? You are suggesting that I should become a French citizen so I don't have to deal with your bureaucracy once every 10 years?" And we all have a good laugh.

Occasionally the conversation takes a negative turn. “Perhaps it is not interesting to be a French citizen?” And then I must summon all my powers of diplomacy to soothe hurt feelings and ruffled fur.

Because it’s not rejection – I love France. If I didn’t have the deepest respect and love for this country and its culture I would have never have raised my children here.

But I love being an American citizen. I am often asked if I suffer here because of anti-Americanism. Not really. I realized long ago that the French preoccupation with the U.S. is actually quite a compliment. There is an entire industry, armies of intellectuals, which study and critique the U.S. When people here meet me for the first time they are never neutral about me or my country. Love it or hate it, they are positively obsessed by it. Which I personally find rather fascinating and it makes for great if sometimes heated conversations every single day.

And regardless of the country I live in, I am passionately attached to my country of origin. Nearly 20 years of wandering has not changed one whit my deep and abiding love for the US of A. As an American living in France, I can revel in my status as Exotic Beast and enjoy a high level of intellectual stimulation. If you balance those two things against the rather tepid arguments from my French friends and family about the benefits of becoming a French citizen, the status quo wins hands down. I am simply having too good a time and enjoying the show way too much to want to trade in my residency papers for a passport.