‘There was an emigration of Alsatian brewers getting away from Prussian power,’ says François Thomazeau, author of The Brasseries of Paris. Taking their name from the French word for brewery, because beer was made on-site, brasseries migrated from Alsace, in north-eastern France, after the Franco- Prussian war of 1870-71, in which Prussia annexed the region. But by and large, you know when you are in one, and not only because the word ‘brasserie’ features in the name. The term ‘brasserie’ is nebulous – there is no formal definition of when something is a café, a bouillon, a brasserie or a bistro – and it slightly depends what the owner wants to call it. ‘It’s bitterly disappointing, to be honest,’ says O’Neill. They were the beating heart of society.’ But the impression today is of restaurants running on fumes. ‘They were the kind of Mecca of restaurants – exciting, busy places, where the artists and the wealthy sat next to the taxi drivers. ‘I wanted to give this sense of this great empire of brasseries,’ O’Neill says. The idea behind his trip to Paris was to see the originals – the inspiration behind it – and to brush up on the classics. O’Neill has run several brasseries in London Maison François, his latest, launched in 2020. I am not the only one to be disappointed.
His shouting at the inscrutable manager doesn’t improve the atmosphere. An English man has brought his mother for her birthday but – or so he claims – the waiters have pulled some scheme with his addition. As we pay the bill, a row erupts at a nearby table. La Coupole still looks the part, a vast room supported by emerald and gilt pillars, with brass rails sweeping around the tops of the banquettes and abstract mosaic tiling on the floor. The back of its menu claims that President Mitterrand had its Indian lamb curry as his last meal (I thought he’d had an ortolan). Since 1927 it has stood proudly in Montparnasse, a sprawling 300-cover art deco hall, through whose doors practically everyone of note in Paris has come: Man Ray, Picasso, Georges Simenon, Josephine Baker, Simone de Beauvoir, Edith Piaf. The latter is one of the most storied restaurants in the world. Our terrible dinner is the third disappointing meal of the day, after an average seafood early lunch at Terminus Nord, the first building that greets you when you leave the Gare du Nord, and an outright disaster of a late lunch at La Coupole. Good brasserie meals in Paris are increasingly the exception rather than the rule. But to judge by the evidence in front of us, something has gone badly wrong. The idea of a bustling, flexible venue, suited to every budget and occasion, has long been a holy grail for restaurateurs, even those who would not call themselves a brasserie. The all-day service, the menu with something to suit every taste. It’s possible that no type of venue has more influenced how we eat today. When you imagine a restaurant in Paris, it looks like this: a darkly panelled brasserie, with lamplight shimmering off slightly foxed brass, where expert waiters present unimprovable classics: onion soup, oysters, celeriac remoulade, devilled eggs, steak tartare. Sure enough, our waiter, having finally extracted the cork, goes to pour before he notices the lack of vessels. ‘He’s about to realise we don’t have wine glasses,’ says O’Neill, 37, under his breath. Next to our table, a waiter wrestles with our bottle of wine. ‘I don’t think you’d get away with this in London,’ he says. He examines the offending items in the dim light. Or, for that matter, at Maison François, O’Neill’s own smart version in London’s St James’s. Certainly not at the Brasserie Floderer, one of the most famous restaurants in Paris. It’s pedestrian.’ He moves on to the salt and pepper shakers, which are those thin glass pots you might expect to find in a London caff or possibly at school dinner. ‘This is supermarket salad with some beetroot. I feel like a bit of my childhood has been sucked out of me,’ says the restaurateur François O’Neill, pushing a forlorn-looking leaf around his plate with a fork.
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