Wednesday, 11 September 2024, Paris: Musée de Cluny, Jacques Faussat

Written 14 September 2024

Wednesday's expedition was to the Musée Cluny, Paris's museum of the middle ages. It was the only one on our list that didn't have timed entry; our tickets were good all day. So David announced that he was going to sleep in and would be ready about 11:30 am to go in search of lunch.

I slept in a little myself, so by the time I got there, the breakfast room was a zoo, but I managed to have quite a pleasant breakfast, sharing a table with a nice young woman from Brazil who was spending a few days in Paris on her way to a solo visit to Turkey!

These photos were actually taken on a later day, when the buffet wasn't entirely obscured by ravening crowds of breakfasters. (The crowding problem was so severe and predictable that the hotel staff had posted histograms in the elevators illustrating which hours of the morning were most popular on weekdays and on weekends and recommending that those wanting a more tranquil experience avoid those times.) The menu didn't seem to change from day to day, although we'll see what Sunday brings. At the left is the assortment of viennoiseries (the usual croissants, pains au chocolat, etc.) and madeleines. Farthest right are little ice-cream-cone cups waiting to be filled from dispensers of five kinds of jam plus Nutella.

Written 21 September 2024

Around the corner of the buffet was a chafing dish of not-such-a-much scambled eggs and one of small pork breakfast sausages (serviceable but not outstanding). Then came square crocks of applesauce, lettuce leaves (oil and vinegar offered on the side), and sliced grapefruit and oranges.

After bowls of yogurt and some fruit pureées came the buffet's very best feature (IMHO)—four-pound slabs of butter ad lib! The cylinder was unsalted and the rectangular block demisel, and as fast as I and the other diners carved them up, new ones were brought forth.

To the right of those were always a couple of big wedges of Brie, a pan of rectangular cheese chunks that might have been gruyère, and another of long precut wedges of a yummy semisoft with a faintly orange washed rind. They were labeled "100% French cheeses" but otherwise unidentified.

I ignored all the little squares of boiled ham and chicken cold cuts, but I usually split a length of baguette and fed the pieces through the rotary toaster.

Another excellent feature was that the automated coffee dispenser produced extremely hot water, so I deployed a PG Tips tea bag in the the little REI aluminum teapot that made its debut in my last travel diary, filled it up with three shots of hot water, and enjoyed two or three cups of excellent tea with my breakfast. The hotel did not supply hand towels, so I took a pillowcase off one of the pillows (I wasn't using all four!) and used that to wrap the pot for heat retention.

On my way back through the lobby, I was finally curious enough about the planter full of soda straws to stop and read the signage. It's a promotion by the hotel, aparently only open to customers of a certain loyalty-program rank. You draw one of the straws from the planter, and according to the color its buried end turns out to be, you win something (from a free drink to a free night). If you draw a "short" straw, you win some unspecified better prize. Whatever.

David ordered his usual grilled goat cheese salad, which came with red onion rings.

I had this perfectly lovely "CP" salad, which included lettuce, tomato, shaved raw mushrooms, fried potato slices, lardons, and confit chicken gizzards, all with a perfect poached egg balanced on top.

For dessert, we split a pair of profiteroles with an outstanding hot chocolate sauce.

And here at the right is the outside menu that lured us in, with its many terrific composed salads.

For various logistic reasons, we never went back there on this trip, but I would definitely go back if we find ourselves in the neighborhood again. Great little place.

At the bus stop, we caught the #86 bus to the museum. At the left here is the only photo I got of Notre Dame, still covered with scaffolding and flanked by cranes. The picture came out pretty well for being taken from the moving bus (though it's framed a little oddly by café tables and umbrellas). We had hoped to walk around it and have a closer look, but that got crowded out of the schedule.

The bus took us, as promised, right to the Cluny despite some unnerving messages, on the display that should have been announcing the next stop, to the effect that because of roadwork, the route had been modified and it might not stop everywhere it normally would. No details were provided about the modifications or what stops might be skipped!

As you can see, the museum is fittingly housed in a thoroughly medieval building.

As a result of major renovations, the museum had changed hugely, and for the better, since we were last there, decades ago. For starters, this large brown box (out of sight to the left in the previous photo) has been added to serve as an entrnace hall, cloak room, ticket office, etc. Inside, the traffic pattern, lighting, etc. are much improved.

Medieval is not my favorite era for art, but I did see some beautiful pieces, and in particular I learned a lot about the technology of the period. Today, we associate Limoges with china, but at the right here a collection of Limoges enamels, the technique the city was known for in the Middle Ages.

Cologne was known for "ivory" carving, especially those made from less-expensive bovine bone, like this small shrine.

The (broken) round box lid at the right was part of the royal furnishings and is made of elephant ivory. It protrays a king with a lion and a queen with a dragon amidst lay people. It's called "The Assembly," and "its iconography has not been completely understood."

Unfortunately, the museum is currently so understaffed (lack of candidates, I think, rather than lack of funding) that they can only keep one of its two floors open at a time. Therefore, shortly after we arrived, we were told we had 10–15 minutes left to see what we wanted on the ground floor but that we could then take the elevator upstairs and spend the rest of the afternoon there.

At the left here is a view down the staircase we could have taken instead, if we wished.

At the right is a 15th-century censer "of architectural design" in gilded copper.

David especially liked this 14th-century appliquéd relief from the tomb marker of a university professor, shown sitting at his desk lecturing.

I especially liked this stone fireplace from a house in Le Mans (first quarter of the 14th century). It came with a handy diagram explaining the purpose and use of each of the many wrought-iron implements it was furnished with.

This gilded wood and ivory madonna and child (14th century, from what is now Poland) actually opens to reveal a "Throne of Grace Trinity"; the Christ on the Cross was apparently added later.

Whereas at the right is a gilded glass statuette of the madonna and child (probably made in Paris ca. 1407) in which the the reliquary set into the child's stomach supposedly held the holy umbilical cord.

Written 3 October 2024

At the left here is the view down into a section of the lower floor that we didn't get to spend much time in.

But at the right is what David really came to see—one of the unicorn tapestries. The museum has a cycle of six of them, all portraying the lady, the lion, and the unicorn and bearing the crest of the Viste family. Only two such sets of tapestries are known to exist; the other is in the Cloisters museum (a branch of the Met) in Fort Tryon Park in New York City. I actually saw them there in the summer of 1969, when I had a summer job at the New York Botanical Garden. Again, the iconography is "not completely understood."

Then, despite the threat of rerouting, we easily found the #89 bus (which arrives on one side of the museum but heads back the other way from the other side), which took us home.

Dinner that night was at Restaurant Jacques Faussat, where we had previously dined on 13 June 2019. It was the only destination on the schedule that required a change of subway lines on the way

At the right you can see the artistically irregular wooden paneling of some of the walls. We later saw it in other restaurants—it's apparently in vogue just now.

For some years, now I've remarked on Paris restaurants' propensity for serving things on rocks. Faussat has taken it a step further. For the benefit of those who prefer to read the menu, order, and pay with their phones, each table bore a rock painted with the requisite QR code. I don't know why it said "sunday" on it as well; we were there on a Wednesday.

As usual, we couldn't resist the tasting menu, so my descriptions (and memory of what we ate) will have to rely heavily on the notes I made at the time from the verbal descriptions provided by the wait staff.

At the left here is the initial amuse-bouche, the one everybody got while considering whether to order the tasting menu. The tasty-looking brown item in the foreground is actually a fresh raw horsechestnut, resting on part of its outer husk, decorative but not edible. The three black oval flat things are black oval flat rocks, again not edible. And the oak leaves and green acorns are real (as is the moss underneath) but not edible. Two of the rocks, though are topped by craggy-looking black items that are edible. They are lumps of something firm and slightly sweet coated all over with black garlic (the waiter told us what they were, but we didn't catch it). We speculate that the lumps were cubes of turnip cooked in sugared water.

The tiny tartlets are bright yellow eggplant and brown olive and all quite spicy and strongly olive flavored. The tartlet shells were home-made tuiles, not commercial phyllo.

The second amuse bouche, the one that came with the tasting menu, was a thick cream of corn garnished with little red sprouts, a brown sauce, and tiny crumbs of horribly stale popcorn. (Even the best French chefs just do not understand popcorn. At other restaurants, we have been served it as an amuse-bouche—a little dish containing four kernels, two for each of us, and invariably terribly stale and chewy.) Again, we were told what the sauce was, but didn't catch it. The server always recites the full content of every dish, but between not always hearing every syllable and not being able to remember them all when I make notes, we often miss some elements.

The first actual course was a "compression" of cooked potato and foie gras, with truffled juice. I at first took the two little brownish dots on top to be olives, but they were instead something quite sour, a citrus purée maybe. Fried parsley garnish.

The fish course, at the right here, was "maigre" (Agyrosomus regius, Sciaenidae). It has many common names, but corvina is the one I've seen most often. It was accompanied by little raviolis of sweet potato filled with green pea puree and a thick slab of tender cooked fennel bulb topped with sour chopped eggplant and dots of very sour but yummy citrus purée. Best dish of the meal, I thought. The "raviolis" did not include pasta. Instead, thin slices of lightly cooked sweet potato were folded up to enclose the filling.

The meat course was "7-hour lamb" (yes, lamb braised for seven hours until meltingly tender; this version used the loin, I think, rather than the usual shank). It was accompanied by a "declension" of artichokes. That's the term French chefs use for a series of theme and variations on a food item. In this case, we got part of a cooked artichoke, crispy artichoke chips, and a velvety artichoke purée.

The cheese course was optional, but we chose to include it, though we asked for a single portion to share. At this restaurant, it's always a "composed" cheese constructed by the chef. This time, it was Coulombiers, Bleu d'Auvergne, and mascarpone, layered and aged together. It was served with an herb oil (chive, I think he said), powdered tonka, and piment d'Espelette. In this photo, it's a little hard to distinguish the cheese from the plate, which feature the same color combination.

The predessert was described by the chef as "in the tradition of a trou Normande." A trou Normande is a ball of apple sorbet topped with Calvados (apple brandy), reputed to revive the appetite. This one was a tart lemon granité covered with a tonic-flavored mousse and a little gin.

Dessert was a soufflé of "peche de vigne" with a peche de vigne sauce, sided by finely diced peches de vigne and a honey verveine lime sorbet made with honey from the chef's own hives. The peche de vigne ("vine peach") is a particular variety of intensely flavored heirloom peach that ripens so late in the season that it coincides with the grape harvest, hence the name. It was delicious, but alas, I forgot to photograph it.

Finally the waitress plied David with limoncello and mandarincello that she made herself!

We got to talking with the staff about our previous visit, pointed out the table we occupied in 2019, etc., and our waitress asked us to wait a little before leaving so that the chef could come out to greet us. He was intrigued that the description of that previous visit was available on line, invited us back to the kitchen for another tour (as he had in 2019), and introduced us to his son Hugo, who now works with him in the kitchen.

At the left, that's me and Jacques himself. At the right, the way Jacques posed us so that another staff member could take a photo of all four, left to right, David, Jacques, me, Hugo. We'll almost certainly go back there whenever we're in Paris—good food, nice people.

Rather than reverse our journey by metro at that time of night with tired feet and full stomachs, we whistled up an Uber and enjoyed a pleasant ride back to our hotel with driver Bernard.