Iyow - in your own words

In Paris, tucked away in a little corner of Montmartre, is the Rue Yvonne-le-Tac. Rue Yvonne-le-Tac is where, reputedly, around the year 250 A.D., Saint Denis—newly arrived from Greece and not yet going by name Denis—was taken. This was after his binge of proselytizing Christianity to fun-loving—and obdurate—pagans, his zeal taking the form of smashing up their statues. He was dragged to the steps of the Temple of Mercury and had his head cut off, after which he picked his head out of the gutter by the hair and stumbled around the neighborhood, the bodiless head continuing to preach the gospel until he finally fell over.

Just off the Rue Yvonne-le-Tac, and no less unsettling, is the Fondue Refuge. ‘Fondue’ and ‘Refuge’ are two words not often seen together, and—even independently—a cause for mild concern when used in the name of restaurant. Casting an umber glow over the cobbled streets outside, the large window is filled by a painting—like the paintings on windows of used car dealerships—of a clown lifting weights. What clowns have to do with boiling meat, I can only surmise. The door handle is a brass baby bottle.

Under the reverse, obscene glare of a clown, we managed to get three seats. It was packed. The tables were all squeezed together in a line, one on either side of the room, like barracks. We were wedged next to a glamourous Italian couple—the woman in pigtails—who looked like they might have been extras in La Dolce Vita.

The waiters were a parody of Parisian disdain, with their pantomime brusqueness, haughty like French waiters in a 1940s Warner Bros. Cartoon (an innocent time when mocking the French was less insult than anthropology). Without smiling, they ungently picked up women and hefted them over tables and into their seats. Our waiter, whenever a young man passed by, leaned into my ear and breathed, ‘He ees my lover!’

‘Red or white?’ he asked in English.
‘Rouge,’ I said. He sneered. ‘Three red,’ he said. Where was the oenophilic pride of the French in general, and French waiters in particular?

He soon returned and I understood that wine pride would have been misplaced. The wine was served in baby bottles, the hole in the nipple bored wider to accommodate adult suckling.

Down along the wall from us was an American ski bum with his new girlfriend, trying to look swarthy while latched onto a nipple. No adult looks cool sucking on a nipple. Quite the opposite: it can be quite uncomfortable watching your aging friends across the table sucking rapturously on a bottle.

There were two choices for the meal, meat or cheese; Manichean, like the wine selection. The glamorous Italians got the meat. My friends were vegetarian, so we got the cheese. We were dizzy with hunger, so when the waiter brought us a little plateful of hors d’oeuvres we dove in in order to retain consciousness. My friends even forewent their vegan ways and were aggressively pursuing the thin slices of sausage, having already usurped the olives and pickles, when our waiter came by with two steaming pots. He put the pot for the Italians down and waited while we cleared a place for ours. As I lifted the plate with the remaining bits of our amuses gueules, the Italian woman took the plate out of my hand and put it to the side, on their plate, to be cleared. When I asked for it back, she laughed. I said, no, we really want to finish it. I reached for it. She said, ‘No, no, no!’ and pulled it away. I panicked. I looked to my friends. They motioned for me to just take it back. Humiliated, I grabbed it. The glamorous Italian tightened her grip, and I had to yank it out of her hands.

As we sat looking into our pot holding two quarts of molten cheese, the Italians got their plate of meat and began cooking it. We waited. Surely we would get something to dip into our cheese? We tried to assuage our hunger with further pulls on the nipple, but finally resorted to eating liquid cheese with our spoons. When the Italians were finished with their fondue, we finally caught the waiter. He grunted. But he brought us a basket of baguette cut into chunks. And three more baby bottles of wine.