LA CLOSERIE DES LILAS, 171 Boulevard du Montparnasse, Paris.

We went in. It was good to go in. The door was a door and I opened it the way a man opens a door when he knows about doors. Marie-Claire was with me. She was a woman. I had known other women but Marie-Claire was there now and that was the thing about her.

The maître d’ looked at us. We looked at him. He looked at us some more. This is what men do in Paris. They look. Then a second maître d’ appeared, which seemed excessive, though I have known places with three maîtres d’ and those places were not good places.

The room had mosaic floors and red leather seats  and the feel of a place that had once been genuinely good and now knew it had been genuinely good and charged you accordingly for the memory of it. There were mirrors and period woodwork and a piano , and a man was playing the piano the way men play pianos in establishments that want you to feel the piano justifies the prices. It did not justify the prices. Nothing justifies the prices.

They brought bread. The bread was bread. I have eaten bread in Pamplona and in Madrid and once on a boat off the coast of a place I will not name because I was with someone whose name I will not give, and this bread was bread in the way that bread can be bread without being particularly good bread. Marie-Claude said it was fine. I did not say anything. I knew things about bread.

I ordered the pavé de rumsteak au poivre Hemingway , because a man ordering a steak named after himself in a restaurant where he used to write is either the most honest thing in Paris or the most dishonest, and I could not decide which, and the not deciding felt very Parisian, and I resented it. The steak arrived. It was a steak. It had been a cow and now it was a steak on a plate in front of me and there was pepper on it and the pepper was there in the way that pepper is there when someone has put pepper on a thing. There were Pont Neuf fries and a creamy purée . I ate them. They were there to be eaten and I ate them. The bill was not there to be eaten but they brought that too.

Marie-Claudette had the pike quenelles . A quenelle is a thing the French make when they have fish but do not want you to know it is fish. She said they were delicious. I thought about Zola, who had sat here, and Picasso, and Sartre, and whether any of them had ordered the quenelles and whether, if they had, existentialism would have developed differently. Probably not. But you think about these things.

Hemingway wrote much of The Sun Also Rises here , presumably because people from the Dôme and the Rotonde never came to the Lilas — there was no one there they knew.  Now there are tourists who have read that Hemingway wrote here and have come to eat where he wrote, and they sit at the tables and feel literary, and the restaurant charges them for feeling literary, and everyone understands the transaction and no one mentions it, and this too is very Parisian.

We had the crêpes Suzette. They were flamed at the table  by a man who had clearly flamed many crêpes and intended to flame many more. The flames were real flames. I respected the flames.

Outside, the boulevard went on in the way boulevards go on. It was Paris and it was night and it was expensive and we had eaten and now we would go. Marie-Clémence flagged a cab. The cab stopped. A cab stopping is a simple thing and a good thing and one of the few remaining good things about cities.

The food was fine. The room was fine. The piano was fine. Fine is not the same as good, but in a restaurant that charges this much for a steak named after a dead man who would be appalled by the prices, fine is perhaps what fine has to be.

I gave them four stars. Stars are what you give. You give them and then it’s done and you don’t think about it. I thought about it.

★★★★☆ — Would return, if someone else were paying. They would not be paying.