Très Sympathique
Parisian cafés always look perfect in the movies. The lighting is perfect, the girl serving the drinks is perfect, the company is perfect. If there’s a romance to drinking in a bar — and I think we all probably agree there is — the Parisians have it nailed. (And the creators of Cheers come in a close second, amirite?)
The only time I’ve been to Paris I wasn’t old enough to drink. But this past fall, I got a chance for probably the next best thing to it, a veritable simulator for the Parisian café experience: a gorgeous little crêperie in Portland, Maine.
Looking for dessert after a big full meal, we found a side street closed off to cars, brick and cobblestone leading to a few tucked-away restaurants and nightclubs. Hiding among them was a tiny French bistro with the requisite French posters hanging on the wall and francophone singers over the P.A. It wasn’t decadent the way the movies do it, but it was nice. It was gorgeous, in a nice way.
And the bartender was nice. She was also the hostess and the server. Young and sweet and French and nice and the bartender and the hostess and the server.
But she wasn’t a very good bartender. In fact, she probably wasn’t the bartender. It was late on a Wednesday night and the café wasn’t busy, so everyone else had probably gone home.
I was on an Old-Fashioned kick and, finding it among the list of “Classics + Creations” in the bar menu, ordered one to prepare for a late-October nighttime stroll. She consulted her bar book and mixed the ingredients to exact measurements and handed it to me from across the bar.
It was good, but it was lacking. There was no personality to it, nothing that made this particular Old-Fashioned any different from the one I would get from any other bartender who consulted the book. It’s probably not far from the Old-Fashioned that I make when I look at the book.
A really special cocktail has personality, it has a proud creator, a craftsman. It doesn’t taste like it’s made from the book, because it’s not.
But that doesn’t matter, because on that night, in that nice little Parisian café, with that nice little French barkeep, we were drinking the way we were meant to.
It was nice.
And that’s where the movies do it wrong. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Sometimes, you just need nice.
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