Monday, 9 October, Bofinger, Much Mucha, Le Gabriel

Written 19 November 2023

Another lazy morning in Paris.

The Grand Palais, on the right (north) bank of the Seine near the Alexander III bridge, is an exhibition building left over (like the Eiffel Tower) from the Exposition Universel of 1890, with a ginormous central exhibition space. I don't really know how to classify it, as a museum—I'm not even sure it has a permanent collection of its own. A section of it (entered from the rear door) is run as part of the Cité de la Science (Paris's huge science museum), but the rest of it hosts an ever-changing series of temporary exhibitions, usually ranging from the pretty unusual to the truly bizarre. When I looked, last spring, to see what would be on display during our visit, I found that it would be closed for renovations the whole time, but it would be running exhibitions in a huge tented space on the Champs de Mars. Alas, that, too, would be between shows during our visit. But to my surprise, it was also running an "immersive" exhibition entitled "Eternel Mucha" way over in the Place de la Bastille (maybe even, according to Google maps, inside the Bastille Opera building). And IMHO, you can never have too much Mucha, especially in the new "immersive" format of oversize projection.

On the most convenient day for it, it would be open only in the afternoon, so I signed us up for a 2:30 pm timed entry, figuring we could get lunch in the area, then, if it was too late to return to the hotel in between, take the no. 1 metro line straight from there to our dinner at Le Gabriel (conveniently near the Champs-Elysées-Clémenceau metro stop, where we could catch the no. 13 metro home afterward).

Accordingly, we took it easy in the morning, then took the metro to Bastille to prospect for lunch. At the left here is the July Column in the center of the Place de la Bastille, commemorating the short-lived revolution of 1830 and topped with the winged "Spirit of Liberty." At the right is the famous statue of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (clock-maker and playwright) on the nearby rue Saint-Antoine.

We considered the Hippotomus Grill and a couple of other places, but in the end wound up (as I suspected we would) back at old friend Bofinger, seated under its magnificent leaded glass skylight.

Still struggling (against all temptation) to eat light, in anticipation of yet another big evening tasting menu, we held it to one course each, plus dessert.

At the left here is my plate of razor clams (called "couteaux," i.e., "knives" in French), in snail butter. Yum. I love razor clams, and they can be hard to find.

All around us, folks were tucking into wide ice-lined platters paved with oysters and huge steaming plates of braised sauerkraut topped with multiple kinds of cured pork or chunks of fish.

David ordered tartare of Scottish salmon, which came with fries. I love how, in France, they don't even blink when you order mayo to go with your fries.

And at the right is David's dessert, which the menu called a "Paris-Colmar." It's actually a "Paris-Brest," a wheel-shaped cream puff filled with almond caramel cream (named for the Paris-Brest bicycle race, wheel-shaped, get it?), but Bofinger is an Alsatian restaurant, so they renamed it. Colmar is about as far from Paris as is Brest. It turned out to be huge!

For dessert, I threw caution to the winds and had a café Liègeois (coffee over coffee ice cream with whipped cream on top). It was only lunchtime after all, and I seem to have gotten away with it, as I had no trouble sleeping that night.

At the right here is more of Bofinger's lovely Belle Epoch decor. The food is good and the venue beautiful. I highly recommend the place.

From Bofinger, we strolled back across to the spot where Google claimed the Mucha exhibition would be, and it was—actually inside the Bastille Opera building, through a side entrance.

At the left is the poster over the entrance, and at the right a typical example of Mucha's poster work for Sarah Bernhardt. For much of her career, he was her exclusive poster designer.

The exhibition started with the "immersive" portion—a large room with a tall blank wall where oversize images were projected, shifting and moving as the show progressed. A row of benches lined the back wall, and about half the floor was covered with rows of mats with built-in pillows, for those who preferred to lie on the floor (I would never have managed to get up again, so we found spaces on the benches.)

These two shots are pretty dark, but they show the the seating (and reclining) arrangements for spectators in the immersive portion. The one on the left is from floor level, and that on the right from a balcony above that we passed along later in the show.

Both show the benches along the wall and the floor mats with pillows, all facing the projection wall.

At the left here is an sampling of the many posters he designed for Bernhardt, and at the right some advertising posters—the ones visible here are for Moët & Chandon champagne and for cookies produced by Lefèvre-Utile (later just known as LU).

About the turn of the 20th century, advertising really took off, and city streets were plastered with posters. Mucha believed that no distinction should be made between art and advertising—that the latter should be "artistic" enough to count as art and therefore transform streetscapes into open-air art exhibitions. He certainly did his part to contribute to that effect.

He was one of the pioneers and perhaps the greatest and most influential practitioner of Art Nouveau. After becoming highly successful through his advertising work, he returned later in life to his native Moravia (now in the eastern part of the Czech Republic) to paint a long series of more "serious" works celebrating depicting and celebrating the history and legacy of the Moravian people. He also designed the banknotes of Czechoslovakian currency. And he worked tirelessly for pacifist and humanist principles.

Written 20 November 2023

Here, at the left, is a not-very-good photo of one of those later large-format works.

At the right is a photo montage of the man himself—Alphonse Mucha, 1960–1939—at three ages.

In addition to these, the exhibition included photos of his models and his studios, the filming of the re-creation of some of his Bernhardt posters, with living actors and much more information about the man and his art. What really amazing about Mucha, though, is the staggering extent of his influence on subsequent artists—not just his style, imitations of which might be attributed to the influence of other Art Nouveau practitioners, but individual works directly traceable to him.

In fact, just a couple of days ago (as I write this), young Jason (the house sitter featured in the early pages of my 2005 travel diary), who works with a tribute band called Yellow Dubmarine, posted to Facebook a poster for their upcoming concert that had Mucha written all over it!

As we left the exhibition, I asked one of the docents how the Opera came to have so much space to spare to lend to the Grand Palais. Her reply was that the Opera had never used the space—it was just extra—so they had no problem letting the GP use it! I was stunned. In an earlier travel diary (19 June 2019) I described our tour of the Bastille Opera, which rivals the Louvre in total usable area—it is big!. I knew that, but who ever heard of a facility, especially in the arts, that was designed and built so big that space was left over?! Let's hear it for French architecture!

We did have time to go back to the hotel before going out again to our dinner at Le Gabriel, in a hotel called La Réserve, right next to the presidential palace just off the Champs-Elysées. Even walking from the metro through the park in the dark, we had no worries about muggers, because that close to the palace a pair of heavily armed guards was posted about every 10 steps.

The amuse-bouche came in three parts: (a) souffléed potato chips dusted with paprika (the browning objects that look like eggs in the photo, (b) a tartlet of "crême de cochon" (i.e., "cream of pig") topped with cubes of apple, and in the photo at the right (c) a cromesqui (i.e. hot, liquid-centered croquette) of snail on a stick. All very tasty!

The chef is very proud of his vegetables, so the first two courses featured them. At the left is a series of preparations of special sand-grown carrots, all delicious!

At the right, artichokes in several guises. David was having the wine pairings, but artichokes are notoriously difficult to pair with wine (because they contain substances that affect human taste buds, making whatever you eat after them taste sweet). The sommelier had therefore chosen to pair that course with a Japanese saki, which David said went very well.

The bread was, of course, a crusty round load cut into quarters and served with salted butter, but the waiter warned David not to eat it, as it had buckwheat in it—we had listed our allergies and intolerances on the reservation website, and David can't digest buckwheat. In fact, I think that's a dish of buckwheat groats under the bread. The obligingly brought David some alternative bread, which you can see on his bread plate to the left and above the buckwheat loaf.

The third course was supposed to be sardine gravlax, but they warned us that it had been replaced with scallops—fine with us! It consisted of two slices of a large scallop accompanied by a frilly flower made of shaved daikon, with a citrus sauce spooned over the top. Yummy.

Fourth, we got a neat cylinder of poached salmon, seared on top after poaching, on a bed of three purple things, one of which was shiso, surrounded by cylindrical plugs of celery root and Japanese curry sauce.

And fifth, a very large langoustine tail lying in a rich sauce made from the langoustine heads and claws and topped with a tangy vinaigrette and little cubes of crisp fennel and grapefruit flesh. Excellent.

The sixth course was very lightly smoked fish, turbot, I think, surrounde by roasted cherry tomatoes "engorged with sun" on a bed of tomato purée, surrounded by saffron tomato juice. The garnish is onion flowers. I really liked that turn of phrase, "engorged with sun," until two of the next three restaurants used it as well—it's going round, I guess, like the bread.

I guess the photo at the right is the seventh course, but I have to admit I have no idea what it is. I think they gave us a little hand-out describing the menu, but it's in with all the other paper memorabilia I brought home and haven't had time to scan. If I come across it, I'll amend this page later.

On the eighth course, my notes again let me down. It's clearly the meat course, and I think it's beef, but it could be pigeon or even duck! Again, I'll fill it in later if I can.

After a predessert of Granny Smith sorbet with diced Granny Smith apple and shiso, we got the ninth course: roasted and “confit” mango, with a mango sorbet spiked with red pepper, a white tangle of shredded green mango, and in the center a spoonful of smooth, warm peanut soufflé. At the left here is the postdessert, a small ball of ice cream with curved sheets of vanilla-seed studded white chocolate stuck all over it.

The mignardises were chocolates with praliné inside and tartlets described as filled with a purée of algae with lemon on top.

Finally, they presented us with a little loaf of lemon cake to take home for breakfast.