by David Benjamin
PARIS — In all the years I’ve been in and out of this most beautiful city on earth, I’ve rarely been taken for American — at least until I open my mouth and blow my cover. This accidental knack for disguising my origins has to do mainly with clothing.
Above all, I never wear shorts — neither the baggy plaid Bermudas and white patent-leather belts favored by my generation nor the pre-rumpled $150 Desert Storm-camouflage 12-pocket cargo shorts preferred by yuppie scum. I cling to the conviction that no white man, unless he makes money playing tennis, rugby or basketball, can morally justify exposing his legs to impressionable children on the public streets.
Nor would I be caught dead in (besides Bermudas) the rest of the tourist uniform: Ban-lon shirt, spanking new, unsmudged Nikes and white tube socks. The vast majority of American men wouldn’t think of wearing this comical get-up 50 weeks of the year. But, to travel overseas for ten days in July among sniggering foreigners, they forsake all good taste and turn into Ralph Kramden on a Sunday jaunt to Coney Island.
A key to my disguise, besides long pants, is that I often wear a hat that isn’t a baseball cap. In colder months, my wool hat usually gets me mistaken for Irish. The other day, in my summer Panama, a cluster of French people, who were drunk and groping for an analogy, compared me to Indiana Jones. We all laughed at that one.
The real value of wearing grown-up trousers and a hat with a brim, in Paris, is that it defends me against the subtle snubs and indignities visited upon the unwitting and underdressed by the merciless French fonctionnaire.
This morning, for example, I spotted, from a distance of 150 yards, a blatantly American family of five, all in shorts, sneakers, ballcaps and Polo by Ralph Knockoff. This hapless group would have little hope of getting a decent table at a quality restaurant.
How, you wonder, does one identify a “quality restaurant” in Paris? Well, if you find yourself on a bustling narrow street among dozens of folks just like you in your knickers, anklets and fanny-packs, and you’re all reading blackboards that offer an entire three-course “French” dinner (in English) for ten euros while the maitres d’ of three such eateries harangue you (in English) to come on in, take a load off and chow down, you know for sure that you have not yet found the boulevard of haute cuisine.
Among the elements that distinguish a quality restaurant in Paris is that you usually need to reserve a table in advance, nobody gets served before 7 p.m. and the owner of the joint is never known to run into the street and try to inveigle American tourists inside.
But let’s say you happen, by accident, to venture into a quality restaurant. Alas, you haven’t bothered to return to your hotel to change into a pair of grownup pants and a shirt with buttons, and you’re dragging three kids who’d be happier dining on microwavable mac & cheese with Coke than foie gras and agneau du lait. In this case, the proprietor has a special place to feed you. It’s typically upstairs or down-cellar, and it’s not nice. My wife Hotlips and simply call it “the ghetto.”
The ghetto is the province of ill-dressed tourists, busloads of Chinese, German or Japanese tourists on a budget tour (if it’s Tuesday it must be Prague) of Europe, and sweaty, frazzled couples with several kids, one of whom is strapped into an advanced tactical, ten-wheel International Harvester baby-stroller and all of whom much prefer flinging their food to letting Mom shove it down their 110-decibel cakeholes.
Your waiter in the ghetto is the greenest plongeur in the place and he bears his patrons a seething resentment because he has to shlep the stairs 800 times every night.
Overall, the ghetto section in a quality French restaurant has roughly the same ambience of a prison cafeteria, but with a lower standard of service.
Now and then, trying out a new restaurant (always after calling ahead), Hotlips and I have been pegged as tourists and led up (or down) to the ghetto. We never accept the table. We tell our host that he can either put us back among the French people or bise us goodbye. We usually get our way, which is worth the confrontation. We squeeze from the maitre d’ a grudging respect, and we get to dine among Parisians.
In France, you really want to eat among the voluble and incomprehensible French, not side-by-side with a family from Texas or Providence whose every word you can understand. The French — not withstanding their difficulties with armed combat since 1815 — eat beautifully and carry on charmingly. Moreover, they possess the restraint preached by Jesus, who must have foreseen the mortal sin of American mozniks in Paris restaurants when he warned, in his Sermon on the Mount: “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine.” The French, except on Sunday after church, leave their offspring at home with the TV remote and the microwave.
This is not to suggest that French restaurants enforce any sort of formal dress code. You won’t see a lot of silk suits and mink stoles anymore in Paris, except at joints only Dominique Strauss-Kahn can afford. But the French still understand that you offer respect to a good restaurant — and burnish your own self-esteem — by dressing at least as thoughtfully as you would if invited to dinner by the boss.
On the other hand, this tendency to slip one’s sartorial moorings when traveling is not unique to the unkempt Americans, garish Germans and Italo-Slobbovians who invade Paris in the summertime. I’ve noticed, among French people returning home from the U.S.A. an alarming number of ten-gallon hats, spangled Harley-Davidson leather jackets and Mickey Mouse ears. You can tell a Frenchman who’s been to Vegas by his sequined Celine Dion t-shirt and the turquoise earring dangling from an infected earlobe.
And then there was the Paris business exec, age about 50, size M, who had scoured Manhattan and invested a booklet of traveler’s cheques on a complete electric-blue satin replica uniform — size XXXL (including his name monogrammed on the back, and Reeboks that blinked in the dark) — of the New York Mets basketball team.
He wore it proudly all the way home and probably didn’t burn it ‘til he woke up sober the next day and saw it hanging — like the picture of Dorian Gray — in his closet.
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