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a divorce with la vieille

Well, that was quick. As of earlier this month, I've left the manager and wine director position I held for the past eight months at the 1èr arrondissement restaurant Chez La Vieille.

In writing about the restaurant, before and after beginning to work there, I used to emphasise the involvement of American chef Daniel Rose, to differentiate this iteration of Chez La Vieille from the mediocre ones that preceded it at the historic Les Halles bistrot site. Alas, not even the involvement of Rose, who I've been tempted to consider a friend at times, was enough to save my job from his Parisian business partners. Many restaurants have investors who display zero familiarity with restaurant culture or the quotidian rhythms of a food service establishment, people whose actual involvement extends no further than dining as VIP clients from time to time and volunteering hilariously uninformed commentary on the cuisine and wine. Investors of this sort are no more than a benign nuisance when a more informed stakeholder is working on-site. At Chez La Vieille, I realised soon enough, the only informed stakeholder lives in New York.

As it happened, the task Rose had hired me to perform at Chez La Vieille - to turn the restaurant into a fun, raucous natural wine destination - ran counter to the wishes of his Parisian partners, who, like many of their generation and socioeconomic bracket, remain mystified by natural wine and find informal service slightly unsettling. The end result is, I'm back on the job market. Chez La Vieille will chug along, just with less natural wine, and bereft of the talents of the ace chef de cuisine Oleg Olexin, who left shortly after I did (for different reasons). I am poorer than when I began, having made less money working maniac 90-hour weeks than I used to make from stray gigs and writing assignments. Am I richer for the experience of having managed a restaurant on this side of the Atlantic? It has certainly left me cagier about the prospect of ever opening one of my own. Perhaps that is a form of wisdom.

at home chez la vieille

Early the other evening a client came into the restaurant and ordered a glass of Beaujolais primeur. There were few other clients at the bar at that hour and I decided to fill the air by delivering a short aria about Guy Breton's quixotic dedication to creating the greatest vin de primeur each year - his painstaking quest to perfect a wine type that almost nobody is willing to respect, let alone pay real money for. To create a perfect primeur is like solving a Rubix cube blind-folded in under 90 seconds, only less profitable.

To my surprise, the client was actually listening, and asked follow-up questions. When I mentioned that I wrote a wine blog, and its name, he was astonished, because he had been reading it for the last seven years. Before he left, he quite reasonably suggested I write something to inform readers what it is I am doing these days.

So here we are. Since end-August I have been managing a restaurant in the 1st arrondissement of Paris called Chez La Vieille. It's owned by the American chef Daniel Rose, who I first met years ago, back when my friend Josh Adler of Paris Wine Company worked for him at Restaurant Spring. The short version of how I returned to the hospitality industry is I found myself at loose ends last summer, having utterly failed to make sufficient money writing about food and wine for the previous year. When in mid-summer Daniel sent a message asking if I knew anyone who'd be a good fit to manage Chez La Vieille, I volunteered. Of course, I knew it would mean I'd have to cease penning fanged critiques of other Paris restaurants. That came as a relief at this point. I have spent so long explaining what goes wrong with restaurants and wine lists. Now my job is to demonstrate what can go right, or, more precisely, to draw clients' attention to the few aspects that do go right, to distract them from the train-wrecks, wild-fires, and five-car pile-ups that are part of the nightly routine at even the most successful restaurants.

buckets, bennes, and quenelles: beaujolais harvests 2015

I moved to Beaujolais in mid-August to research a book I hope to write on the region's wines. I bought a 50cc scooter to get around on and I rented an apartment in Lancié, between the cru villages of Villié-Morgon and Fleurie. The uncharacteristically long blog silence this past month was on account of harvest time. 

I had initially planned to harvest with just one domaine, Yvon Métras in Fleurie. Métras harvests quite late, however - we began on Sept. 3rd this year (early by historical standards, but late for 2015 in Beaujolais). By late August I'd realised that since I didn't need lodging, most other winemakers didn't mind if I put in just a day or two of work here and there with their harvest teams before commencing chez Métras. 

This is how I wound up harvesting sixteen days straight with the following winemakers: Gilles Paris (Chiroubles), Jean-Paul Thévenet (Villié-Morgon), Jean-Louis Dutraive (Fleurie), Guy Breton (Villié-Morgon), and finally Yvon and Jules Métras (Fleurie). This isn't counting several subsequent mornings and afternoons spent harvesting various experimental micro-cuvées for these and other winemakers, which stories I'll relegate to future blog posts. What follows for now is sort of a harvest data-dump, a series of images and observations that I hope will transmit some of the flavour of the experience.