pioneers: le tagine, 75011

I started frequenting my friend Marie-Jo Mimoun's adorable Morroccan restaurant Le Tagine about two years ago. Mimoun has a superb little Rhône-focused wine list, featuring, among others, such legends as Domaine Gramenon, Dard et Ribo, and Jean Foillard. Yet on every visit I'm surprised by how little wine is consumed in the place. The haute-Marais clientele, largely white and French (i.e. non-Muslim), seem to stick to beer.

I can only assume it's because Le Tagine doesn't look like a wine place. It looks like a chill spot for some ethnic food with the family on a weeknight. And I get the impression that Paris diners - native and tourist - are more reluctant to purchase serious wine from people who don't look classically French.

Justin E. H. Smith, professor of history and philosophy of science at Université Paris Diderot, recently touched on this bias in a terrific NYTimes Opinion piece, where he astutely cited the link between European nativism and "the celebration of terroir and 'Slow Food'." It's a discomfiting alliance based on resistance to globalism and its effects. At worst, as in the case of Friulian winemaker / hatemonger Fulvio Bressan, the resistance is manifested as outright racism. In France, we see certain slippery creeps organising anti-Muslim protests under the guise of "sausage and wine" parties beside mosques. On a far more innocuous level, you have the fact that quality terroir-driven wines in France - let alone natural wines - are consumed almost exclusively in identifiably French restaurants.

In the case of Le Tagine, an overlooked gem of a restaurant that boasts stupendous service and solid soulful Morroccan cuisine alongside its well-priced wine list, it's a crying shame. On the plus side, there's almost always a six-top free when I need one.

oh, you shouldn't have: literary critics, bad champagne

Image swiped from sunnysidenyc.com.

Over at the Paris Review blog, I notice that Parisian literary critic Nelly Kaprielian went to interview Michel Houellebecq armed with a bottle of Veuve Clicqot. It always surprises me when an expert in one field reveals a total lack of sophistication in another field. But, save for the regrettable tendency of English writers to pronouce ignorant dictums on drinking (see Ford Maddox Ford, either Amis, etc.), the two fields have little in common, so I shouldn't blame Mme Kaprielian for name-checking such a dull mass-market cherry-coke Champagne.

Image swiped from jonathanfrance.wordpress.com, c/w Mariusz Kubik.

I do, though. Later in the same article they have a Chateauneuf-du-Pape with Moroccan food, which sounds just wrong.

I think my omnicritical impulses result from having done one or two weird career-switching pirhouettes so far in my life. (Two is if you count studying writing only to immediately begin a largely unrelated mini-career in wine.) Mercifully few people ask me about the writing career - instead they ask about the transition from wine & food to fashion (what I do now, other than write this blog).