Adam Gopnik - Paris to the Moon

At the meeting there was a general feeling that we needed to placate Quelin. We had a cross section of waiters and clients there that afternoon: Claude and Guy from the staff, and a left-wing journalist who I thought was looking at me darkly, having spotted not Tom Paine but a smoothie from the CIA.

Lorenzo led off with his usual quiet authority. He was in his usual costume: a soft black turtleneck and flannel slacks, with a scarf thrown, Little Prince style, around his throat. He has a round face, with an absolutely beautiful, warm smile. He has two registers at his command: a low, troubled one that he uses when he is reviewing the agenda and another, higher, and more plaintive one that he uses when he is exhorting us publicly, for instance when we occupy the restaurant. He outlined the problems. The waiters felt abused and uncertain because the standards in the kitchen were declining and Bucher was still letting the new manager take a chunk of their service money. “How were they declining?” someone asked. The fish was no good; the sole was being parboiled before it was grilled; someone else thought a supplier was coming in from the Flo Group with ordinary beef. “Well, I had a steak there the other night,” someone began… but we all shushed him. The food, good or bad, was not really the point, we all said. The point was the spirit of the Balzar. If we did not act quickly and more decisively, the brasserie, and the garcons ’ security, would be lost. The guys had decided to stage a one-day wildcat strike, and it was important for us to support them—perhaps by occupying the Balzar the same day, perhaps on the night before. In any case, the crisis of the battle was approaching, and we could not be lazy or indecisive in our actions.

Claude spoke next. He was angry and at the same time, and for the first time, a little pleading. The garcons were planning to walk out on Thursday, he explained, and he hoped that we, the members of the association, would come out to support them. We would have Bucher foxed coming and going.

I could sense a reluctance to do this on the part even of our elite radical circle; this would be going beyond the politesse of our arrangement with Bucher, moving toward open warfare. “ Attention!” someone said, a real interjection in French. “This could put us in a dangerous position.” I feared too that Claude’s ideas about the power of the association were greater than the power of the association deserved. I noticed that he liked to say the term the association, and he always referred to Lorenzo as “M. le President.”

I was becoming a little dubious, especially so because Lorenzo, for some reason, I thought, kept looking at me for ideas. I said, at last, that the only threat that had any meaning to Bucher was the threat of more bad publicity; that in effect, a boycott of his other restaurants would scare him more than anything else we could do. But I was also pretty sure that Bucher would never sell, and I feared that if the garcons walked out, he’d just replace them. Perhaps, I hinted, I gulped—I sensed the left-wing journalist looking at me with increasing disgust—we needed to start moving toward an exit strategy (I couldn’t think of the French, so I said, scenario de sortie, which was more or less right). Did we have an exit strategy, aside from victory? What if Bucher held fast and didn’t move? Could we get the garcons out in decent shape and not just blow up the Balzar, so to speak?

I was rewarded with steady, opaque looks. Having arrived at the logic of war, one of us—the American—was trying to wriggle out of it at the first sign of opposition. (I remembered what an American diplomat negotiating with the quai d’Orsay had once said to me: “It is hard enough to get them to start, and once they start, you can’t get them to stop.”)

Then Lorenzo and Mme. de Lavigne together raised another, stranger, and more tempting vision. What if we were to buy the Balzar? What if Bucher could be convinced that the cost to him in bad publicity and harassment was just too great, didn’t make sense for his chain, and that, finally, in a moment of facesaving capitulation (but why would this be facesaving for him? I let it pass) he could sell to a group of actionnaires— i.e., us.

Lorenzo had a nice rhetorical formula for this transaction: “M. Bucher wants to join the association, but the association would like to join the Flo Group.” Mme. de Lavigne had been in the restaurant business; it would not be hard to do. We could each own a little piece of the Balzar, the gargons too, and, run as a cooperative, a kind of writers and waiters cooperative, we could make it rentable.

It sounded like just about the best idea I had ever heard. Like many Americans of my generation, I am a fanatic restaurant imaginer: I think that someday I will open a restaurant called La Chanson, to serve French-American cooking: roast chicken with caramelized carrots and broccoli puree and pecan pie for dessert; then there is my favorite idea for a restaurant called Les Fauves, which would serve only game—taglietelle with wild boar, pheasant stuffed with chestnuts—or else to open—and this I was sure would make a fortune—a place to get real Montreal bagels, better than any other kind, boiled and then baked, sweet and chewy whereas New York bagels are bready and tasteless….

So this was the hand that we would play, or try to play at least. We would have another sit-in at the Balzar, the night before the meeting, and we would threaten Bucher with still more mediatisation. The next day, independently, the personnel would stage their wildcat strike, and the two actions together would, somehow, sufficiently intimidate a whipsawed Bucher and he would crumble and sell us back the Balzar.

I can only say that at the time it did not seem like a completely crazy scenario. What we could not understand, I suppose, was why Bucher would want to buy the Balzar only in order to destroy it, why, after it had been clearly shown to him that he could not understand the institution, grasp its traditions, perpetuate its values, he would still want to hold on to it. For the money? It was too small for his chain; he had said as much himself. He could make more money in a single sitting at one of his Right Bank atmosphere factories—the vast art deco Boeuf sur le Toit, or the belle epoque Julien—than he could in a week at Balzar. It wasn’t as if we had anything against him personally; if he wanted to come and eat at the Balzar, we’d welcome him, anytime. But why own it only in order to ruin it? Where was the logic in that?

I suppose we couldn’t realize, or could realize but couldn’t accept, that the logic of business is not a logic in that sense. It’s not only a narrow consideration of profits and losses, but a larger logic of, well, appetite. To buy something is to assert oneself, and to sell it, for whatever reason, is to collaborate in one’s own diminishment. We were asking him to regurgitate in public, and even if we offered him the feather with which to tickle his own throat, he wouldn’t want to do it. A man in his position couldn’t afford to regurgitate, not in public, because then he would look ridiculous.

Anyway, we all clasped hands and swore to be at the Balzar on October 7 to reoccupy the place. Everybody had bought some food to the meeting—I recall that Claude had brought a particularly beautiful and fragrant Cantal, a wonderful cheese—and we soon broke for some wine. I buttonholed Guy after the meeting and asked him what we could really do, what the guys, the garcons, really wanted. Did they really want us to try to buy the place? He said, We want it to stay the same. To continue doing what we’ve always done. And to serve good food—the food isn’t good enough. The food should be excellent.