Paris Diaries: Fear and loathing in Montparnasse

Steak and frites, tout suite

I don’t know what it is that irks me about places that make you queue to get in, that offer no alternative booking system and instead make you stand outside in the drizzle waiting for a table. Perhaps it’s that there’s no opportunity to book your table and get a sense of security or peace of mind. To know that at that allotted time on that specific day you will be sat at a table by a waiter who will then bring you food that you have asked for.

In places such as Le Relais de l’Entrecote, which steadfastly refuse to maintain any form of booking system and instead make you stand outside even before they’ve opened to ensure you have even a glimmer of hope of getting a table, security or peace of mind is not part of the service.

It’s Friday night in Paris and L. and I are huddled under an umbrella in the Montparnasse district, as are a few hundred other people who have all got one thing on their mind: steak and frites.

Le Relais de l’Entrecote is a simple place. You queue, you sit at the table, you eat a walnut salad followed by two servings of steak and frites accompanied by a sauce that will make you want to convert to an unspecified deity, perhaps the patron saint of sirloin, and then you pay and leave. If it sounds quick it’s because it is. Forget the old cliché of slow French waiters who will only see you when they want to see you, here they will see you and they will check that you are making progress.

The sauce tastes a lot better than it looks here.

Because we are smart people who have done our research (read: L. has looked the place up on TikTok) we arrive half an hour before the restaurant opens and there are still around fifty people in front of us. The enlightened restauranteur may say they have no booking system so as to not be exclusive: if you can stand in the queue you can get a table. Perhaps this is somewhat true, the family in front of us are all wearing expensive designer clothing and yet their obvious wealth will not get them a steak any quicker than us. Their early arrival time will, however.

It is less exclusive I suppose, making the only condition of getting a table being able to stand in the queue and wait, though I haven’t been to any restaurants where it has been beneficial to have lots of money apart from when the bill arrives.

Tonight we are one of the lucky lot, the timely few who will get in on the first wave of service, not long after the doors have opened. The best thing, or perhaps one of the only good things about standing in a queue, is that there are people behind you. We spend so much of our lives in queues (a huge part of travel is queueing, in a way, to check in, to board, to disembark, to see something or get in somewhere) and we always look at the people in front with envy or annoyance. Why does this family in front of us have designer clothes? Why can’t I have those Prada shoes?

But wait: look behind you, and try not to look smug. Because you will, if you’re anything like me, be smug. God, it’s a good feeling. There may be plenty of people in front of you but there are so many more behind, especially in a queue for Le Relais de l’Entrecote. The best feeling is holding firm in your place in the queue as someone new and unsuspecting rounds the corner. They are still holding out hope that there may not be much of a line until…oh, there it is, the moment of realisation. They are crestfallen, they have a long wait. So do you, but not as long as them.

Eventually the restaurant opens and we’re bundled into next to a man who just looks English. I don’t know why or how I have acquired this ability, but spotting an Englishman abroad is something I really excel at. If all else in my life fails I will always be able to pitch up in a foreign city, sit in the main square, and point out Englishmen for money.

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I am one myself of course and so I don’t know whether I share this look with my countrymen, but there’s just something about them. Sure, they do have some distinctive clothing habits and often (as most tourists do) spend a lot of time looking around and taking pictures. But I think it goes deeper than that. In the expression of every Englishman abroad there is that same hint of enjoyment that is almost eclipsed by a lurking sense that someone, somewhere here is ripping him off.

It could be the hotel that doesn’t provide free shampoo even though it really looks like the sort of establishment that should. It could be the tour guide who promises an informative and enthusiastic tour with an intimate, small group, who stands waiting in the main square surrounded by at least forty other Englishmen. Or it could be the restaurant that promises a romantic evening but instead makes you feel like you’re a slab of meat on a conveyor belt that leads to a smiling waiter with a card machine and a bill with an eye-wateringly high service charge.

Not a steak but instead a strawberry concoction we had for dessert.

The man who looks English is English, obviously, as is his partner sitting across the table. It quickly becomes clear they have not come prepared for speed. Their salads have barely been touched by the time their first helping of steak arrives prompting a look of harassed stress from the man’s partner.

“Don’t let them rush you,” he says, attempting reassurance, and prompting silent scorn from us as we know, in Le Relais de l’Entrecote: that’s their goal. There’s a line of people down the street and around the corner, buddy, eat up and get out. Then we can get the next unsuspecting Englishman in and serve him his food so quickly that by the time he leaves he feels like he hasn’t eaten and has just been mugged for a hundred euro.

Of course that isn’t the primary goal of Le Relais de l’Entrecote. That is, I suppose, to serve fantastic steak and frites. That, it succeeds in doing. But their secondary goal, which is to ensure you receive fantastic steak and frites in double quick time, has slightly taken over.

Everything in the restaurant has been boiled down to its simplest form to stop you from dawdling. The wine is white or red, a glass or a bottle. We order a bottle which arrives so quickly that by the time we’ve worked out whether it’s any good or not we’ve drunk half of it. This has the effect of making an already fast dining experience feel like it’s been put on fast forward and the waiters and the diners are moving around us as if, in their heads, the Benny Hill theme is playing on a loop.

The only people that aren’t moving fast are the people in the queue outside and those who are tall enough to see over the thin curtains lock eyes with you in the dining room like convicts in cells looking at the visitors to the prison who will be leaving and going out into the sunshine in the next five minutes. At some point in the future they may be like you, experiencing what you are experiencing, but right now they are trapped and have no choice but to wait their turn, however long it takes.

The walnut salad appears and just as quickly disappears down my gullet since I’ve been waiting outside in the cold and now I’m drunk, so any food that appears in front of me is completely demolished. Then the steak and frites arrive with their special sauce (ingredients a secret, they won’t tell you no matter how much you plead) and I get the first of two generous helpings.

These go the way of the salad because that’s not even touched the sides and soon I’m sitting looking at L. wondering where the last 45 minutes have gone because despite having barely looked up I have eaten a salad, half a side of beef and enough fries to feed the baying mob outside the window.

But the waiter is back and says with a simple look that if we don’t order dessert within the next five minutes we can fuck off, and so off she goes with an order for a strawberry tower concoction that finally starts to make me feel full. Actually I go way past full, the strawberry tower hits the steak and frites which have hit the salad which, and this feels like days ago now, has hit the puddle of wine that started this whole mess. Now I feel like Violet Beauregarde in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I’m growing and expanding and, I’m sure of this, changing colour as everything meets in my stomach and moves around like it’s dancing the tango.

Then the bill arrives and suddenly we’re whole stones heavier but a hundred euro lighter, and since we have served our purpose to the good people of Le Relais de l’Entrecote it’s out into the street we go. The cold air hits my bloated and shocked face and the people in the queue are giving me a look that goes way past hate. And I stand there and look at L. and then back at the restaurant and think, “I’d like to do that all over again.”

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