Would Picasso Approve

 

Garden behind Dove Street Market

Picasso Museum

Cliff Back

Tom's new favorite Bean Dish with Caviar

All the wines we drank tonight

Our friend Lynn from San Francisco contacted us to tell us she was in Paris. She keeps following us around, the last time we saw we were in Tokyo when she popped up saying she was also there. Now Paris, we expect to see her on our next overseas jaunt. We immediately made arrangements to meet for breakfast and spend the day together. Still suffering from jet lag, we told her to come to our hotel at 10:00. Ten o’clock now qualifies as an early start.

Lynn joined us for breakfast and then we headed out shopping. Our first goal was to walk to Dover Street Market, the fashion-forward store with branches we have visited in London, Tokyo and Los Angeles.
The store is a maze—and amazing. It is less like shopping and more like visiting a museum devoted to clothes you would never actually wear. You wander around looking at things and asking yourself, “Who wears this?” Apparently somebody does, because Dover Street Market continues to thrive. We may simply not know the right people.

From there we went to a Japanese pop-up clothing store near the Picasso Museum. I successfully resisted buying anything, an accomplishment that apparently did not interest Cathy or Lynn. They had a very good time.

Behind the store was a beautiful garden, and we stopped for a while just to sit and take it all in. One of the pleasures of Paris is that you can go shopping and suddenly find yourself sitting in a beautiful hidden garden. In Los Angeles, you are more likely to find a parking structure.

We then went to the Picasso Museum. It is housed in a gorgeous old mansion, and Cathy and I had visited it years ago. Since then it has been extensively renovated. We were disappointed.

We don’t want to sound like hometown chauvinists, but after seeing the new Geffen Galleries at LACMA, with their beautiful concrete walls, the stark white galleries at the renovated Picasso Museum seemed sterile. Of course, we realize we are Americans visiting Paris and complaining that one of their museums isn’t as attractive as ours. This may be grounds for deportation.And we certainly aren’t criticizing Picasso. Just his newly remodeled home. Picasso remains blameless.

After all this culture and shopping, we returned to the hotel to rest. We needed to prepare ourselves for the serious business of dinner. Dinner was at Septime.

We arrived at 8:00 and ate and drank until 11:30. Three and a half hours. This is not dinner. It is a commitment. Septime serves only a seven-course tasting menu with an optional wine accompaniment. “Optional” seemed like an odd word to us, so naturally we had the wines. You can see in the picture just how many. By the end of the evening, we had received quite an education.

The highlight for both of us was a bean dish topped with caviar, layered over an ajo blanco sauce. It was terrific. (Are you reading this, Tom? We know about you and your bean fetish.) Apparently even beans can become haute cuisine if you put enough caviar on top of them.

There was also a wonderfully complex mushroom dish with pickled grapes. Pickled grapes? Who wakes up one morning and thinks, “I know what these mushrooms need—pickled grapes”? Whoever it was, they were right. They were delicious.
The service was wonderful, with detailed explanations of every dish and every wine. There were quite a few explanations. By wine number whatever, we were still listening attentively—or at least trying to look as though we were.

Septime is a must for any food lover. Excellent food, interesting wines, terrific service and enough surprises to keep you entertained for three and a half hours.
Tomorrow may present a different kind of entertainment.The Pope is in town. Roads will be closed, security is intense, and getting around Paris may be a challenge. We survived seven courses and all those wines. Surely we can handle the Pope.