The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-07-17

From Paris a la Carte" by Julian Street
 in Everybody's for July.
 TT Is very annoying to have to write
 anything useful or instructive. That | is the trouble with this article-it is written with a purpose. I want to con vert you from the stupid pretense or standing before statues and paintings which you will never understand, and teach you how to improve your time in Paris, so that. instead of coming away with blurred list of painters and sculp- tors, you will have recollections, definite and permanent, of interesting restau rants dishes and people. To this end must encroach somewhat upon the field of MT. Baedeker and, instead of describ- ing separately each important restaurant on or near the Grands Boulevards, run through the list hurriedly.
 The Hotel Ritz, Henry's (not Henry's bar), Paillard's and Durand's are fash ionable and very good. The last of these is one of the older restaurants of the first class having been established about 1S2o-1S3o. The Cafe de la Paix is like wise good and is particularly celebrated for it's sidewalk terrace, where one may sit over a lemonade, a sirop or an ice and watch the fascinating Paris crowd. The Cafe Americain is not American at all, and has a rather sad supper room upstairs, in which professional dancing girls waltz, lackadaisically, between the tables. Prunier's is famous for sea food, but is closed in hot weather. Noel n. Restaurant Champeaux Established lSoU is popular with stockholders, and is de- scribed by Zola in the first chapter of 'LArgent."
 In enumerating these leading restau- rants l have purposely omitted Noisin and the Cafe Anglais, because they are entirely unique. Built before the days of Midas & Co., architects and mural decorators whose touch has turned all modern restaurants to gold. these two fine old establishments hold out with pa trlarchal scorn against the flamboyant tendencies of the times. Their doorways are not the doorways of palaces; they are white, inside and out; they employ no orchestras to drown stupid conversation, no buccaneers of walters to gouge their patrons. They are the two great ancient remain in Paris.
 Voisin's, the more recent of the two, was established in 1913, in a building be- longing to a convent, the grounds Of which occupied. until the revolution, the entire neighborhood. It has never moved from it's location, and has changed hands but twice. It's cellars containing such vintages as Chateau Margaux. 1S46: Cha teau Lahtte and Chateau Haut-Brion. 1s4) are the most famous. I suppose, of any public cellars in the world. And if there are not prices on the bill of fare, one does not feel resentful, for one knows that there will be no overcharging. as at certain other restaurants where this cus- tom holds.
 1 have the menu of a Christmas din- ner held at voisins in the year 1870, on the ninety ninth day of the siege of Paris. Perhaps they did not eat the things which were listed on that card, but they perpe- trated a brave joke in face of famine and disaster, when they debonairly listed such dishes as roast camel, stuffed donkey s head and cats with rat dressing.
 The Cafe Anglais is, in history, spirit and appearance very similar to Voisin's, Fournier, in his Promenade Historique dams Paris" tells of the discovery of the place in the year 1900 by some gay young men who soon made it famous and caused it's transportation from humble little cabaret into a restaurant of the first order.
 The great men of the last century have dned at both these restaurants, and precious souvenirs of royal patrons are preserved at the Cafe Anglais in shape of finger bowls, each bearing the
 monogram and cipher of the king or
 prince who used it. The late King Ed
 wards finger bowl is there, as are also
 those of the Kaiser. the late Leopold
 of Belgium, the King and the Crown
 Prince of Greece, the King of Spain, the
 Grand Duke Alexis, the ex-King Manuel of Portugal and many others.
 | Collectors look upon these souvenirs with greedy eyes
 "But, monsieur" the maitre d'hotel ex- plained to me, they are not ours to- sell We resard them as the private property | of their respective majesties and royal
 hiphnesses And what would they think monsieur, on coming back, to find their finger bowls no longer here?" "King Edward and King Leopold VIII not come back" I ventured.
 True, monsieur he replied with dig