"no poulet pour vous"

While Paris has allowed us to experience some incredible restaurants, among our favorite ways to eat lunch and early dinner here has been to visit bakeries, food stores, and butchers to acquire what we need to assemble food ourselves. Our local bakery Av la Motte Picquet has seven different prepared sandwiches on that-morning baked baguettes ready for us to take on any of our daily adventures. On Rue Cler a shop specializes in servicing the lunch crowd with poulet, sausage, or boudin noir sandwiches and a side of frites, if you are so inclined. The too-many-to-catalog little gourmet stores have pate and prepared salads (fennel and goat cheese, roasted eggplant) available in little containers, just enough for two to share. Many of the butchers have rotisseries in their shop – rotisseries where the drippings from the rotating chickens fall on small fingerling potatoes at the bottom of the machine.

So it has been that when we have not gone out for incredible well-prepared dinners we have eaten at home or picnic style at one of the many gardens and lawns throughout Paris. Our second day in the city we walked past a butcher on Boulevard Saint-Germain shortly after noon, a butcher that had a rotisserie where the chicken meat looked like it was completely independent of the bones, it was so tender. We rushed in and bought a chicken – 15 euros – and ran it home, devouring it before taking a nap.

We have talked about this chicken almost daily since. Tonight, after exploring the old, windy streets and red light district on Monmarte for nearly six hours, we decided a chicken – a full rotisserie poulet – would pair nicely with a Provencal rose we had been saving and should be enjoyed this evening in front of the Eiffel Tower, on a lawn where hundreds of French students seem to gather every night to enjoy one another’s company over food and drink, watching the glitter of the Eiffel Tower as it performs a light show every hour from 10 PM onward.

But after six hours of walking Tara is tired and hot, so e decide to head home. We arrive shortly before 6 PM and, as Tara gets comfortable at home, I get ready to head over to this little boucherie, J Fournier at 256 Boulevard Saint-Germain. Walking down, all I can think about is the succulent, seasoned chicken and an éclair we had eaten somewhere nearby on the way to the Rodin museum about a week before. We didn’t know it at the time, but that coffee flavored éclair might have been the best we have had so far in Paris.

I arrived at J Fournier around 6:30, about an hour before they close. There is one more chicken in the rotisserie. Pay dirt! I get on line – 5 deep – and wait expectantly to ask for “un poulet.” But it is not meant to be. At 50ish year old woman, baguette in hand, points to the rotisserie and says the words that end my quest, “un poulette, s'il vous plait.” I don’t even wait – I turn around and leave the store.

It occurred to me on the way home that such an incident is unlikely to occur in the US. Most stores would stock enough chickens to be sure everyone who wanted one could buy one, even if that meant having leftover at the end of the day. It ensures no one is unhappy, because saying “we’re out of that right now” is something most shopkeepers hate to tell their customers. The Parisians, at least the ones we’ve encountered to date, are less … bothered in delivering that news. At restaurants, clothing stores, and even butchers, they’re all too ready to create situations where they will have to say, “sorry we’re out of that.” In short, in the US they’d say, “here’s your chicken.” In Paris, I am more likely to hear, “no poulet pour vous.”

It would be easy to say, “why don’t they just make more chickens?” But, based on the taste of the one we were lucky enough to purchase, that would not be sustainable. The butchers prepare a certain number of chickens to meet the needs of the people who can’t cook without it dominating their main business of cutting up meat to sell. The rotisserie is a small corner convenience sitting in an odd corner that would likely be otherwise unused. There are enough chickens in the rotisserie for the butcher – that I couldn’t get one is just a factor of getting there too late.

With nothing to show for my walk, I start retracing my steps from there to the Rodin museum, certain I can find the boulangerie that sold us that transcendent éclair not just a week ago. After walking up one street, down another, and up again a third, I find it. And they still have eclairs. And baguettes that look terrifically crispy even from 8 feet. I happily use the 5 words of French I know, relying on gestures and the LED of the cash register to assist with the barrage of words I don’t understand. Handing over 3 euro 50, I walk out with an a single piece of wax paper folded into a bag around my éclair and holding another piece of wax paper wrapped around the middle of a baguette.