Lunch at L'Ami Louis

For those who care, and even for those who don’t, a restaurant called L’Ami Lous is the place to go in Paris.

For those who are planning a trip and are looking for just the right place to indulge their gastronomic impulses, Vanity Fair has kindly provided a review by Scottish journalist A. A. Gill. Link here.

Gill didn‘t much care for the restaurant, concluding that it was “the worst restaurant in the world.” Not only that, but lunch cost $403. Vive la France!

I have never been to L’Ami Louis and have no plans to go there. But I took special delight in Gill’s prose. It is a pleasure to read such wonderful expository writing outside of the sports pages.

Sacrilegious is the term that best describes Gill’s thoroughly British take on the experience of eating snails. Like a good Brit, Gill does not bother to call them escargots, as the rest of us do.

Here is his description of eating snails: “Twenty minutes later, possibly under their own steam, the snails arrive. Vesuvian, they bubble and smoke in a magma of astringent garlic butter and parsley. We grasp them with the spring-loaded specula and gingerly unwind the dark gastropods, curling like dinosaur boogers. They go on and on, expanding onto the plate as if they were alien. We have to cut them in half, which is just wrong. The rule with snails is: Don’t eat one you couldn’t get up your nose.”

As though he were trying to outdo himself prose-wise, Gill then shared his experience of eating the veal kidneys: “Nothing I have eaten or heard of being eaten here prepared me for the arrival of the veal kidneys en brochette. Somehow the heat had welded them together into a gray, suppurating renal brick. It could be the result of an accident involving rat babies in a nuclear reactor. They don’t taste as nice as they sound.”

As is clear from these texts, Gill derived significantly more pleasure from writing about the restaurant than he did from eating there. We are grateful to him for having undergone the torment so that the rest of us don't have to.