Moveable Feasts: Paris in Twenty Meals, Chris Newens, Profile, £18.99

You don’t have to travel far in Paris to feel like you’re not in prosperous Western Europe anymore. The suburban terminus beneath the Gare du Nord has the air of a North African bazaar. Or take a taxi around the périphérique where there are shanty towns that wouldn’t look out of place in Rio de Janeiro. This is the city that tourists hurry through, eager to get to their reservation at Auberge Bressane or a slot at the Louvre.

But not Chris Newens. In Moveable Feasts: Paris in Twenty Meals, Newens, an expat Englishman, has set himself the immense task of encapsulating the French capital in all its bewildering variety through its food. Each chapter takes one of the 20 arrondissements with a dish that represents the area. Along the way, we learn about France, the culinary history of Paris, and a fair bit about Newens himself.

He’s a writer who has a background in food – he worked at his family’s bakery and tea rooms in the holidays. His love affair with France began when, in his late teens, he went to stay in the Dordogne with Antoine, a family friend: ‘The summer, well it was the best of my life’. Antoine and his friends, including a man described as looking like ‘an unhealthy Sean Connery’ (Newens has a gift for instant character sketches), provide him with a thorough education in French cuisine and culture. Back in Paris, Newens becomes a regular visitor to the family’s flat in the elegant 16ème arrondissement and learns to appreciate the rigidity of French dining with the unchanging three-course meal of starter, main, and pudding or cheese.

Amazingly, this formality persists in the city’s soup kitchens, where everything is cooked from scratch and the registered homeless – yes, you have to deal with the legendary French bureaucracy – can get a three-course meal. With wine, naturellement! But for his dish of the 12ème, Newens picks something simpler: sarmale, a Romanian dish of cabbage leaves stuffed with meat inspired by a visit to a homeless encampment in the Bois de Vincenne, the city’s largest green space.

It’s his willingness to engage with the Paris that nobody knows that sets this book apart. For the chapter on Congolese food in the 18ème, the author had the advantage of having shared a hospital room with a former politician from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who had been tortured ‘after upsetting the wrong people’. Both were in for diabetes. Newens’ quest to try malangwa, a dish made with river fish, involves a run-in with a marabout, a holy man, who claims he can cure diabetes, though he may be running an extortion racket.

Later, he heads ‘deep into the Paris suburbs’ to discover more about the döner kebab. Unsurprisingly, nobody wants to talk to him about what exactly goes into this most notorious of dishes. One kebab philosopher tells him: ‘You cannot ask a man who makes kebabs for a living how to make a kebab. Those who do not take it seriously will not know, and those who do will not tell you.’ And talking of meat of mysterious provenance, he doesn’t quite get his rocks off at Moon City, ‘the largest heterosexual sex club in Paris’. It’s one of the funniest chapters in the book, but I couldn’t quite work out what it had to do with food.

The book is not all immigrants and swingers. One of the big questions is how well French cuisine is holding up against globalisation and fast food. Newens writes that the city is ‘still as much a city of croissants and coq au vin as it is of kebabs and couscous’. He goes behind the scenes at the remarkable Bouillon République, a restaurant that only opened in 2021, but has already become a Paris institution offering classical three-course meals with wine at frankly ridiculous prices. It’s a well-oiled machine: ‘We have it so that an order for a table of ten people all asking for different things can be prepared and brought out in no more than ninety seconds’, the manager tells him. No wonder there’s a queue out the door at all hours.

For tourists, the holy trinity is onion soup, escargots and boeuf bourguignon, but many will also come for the couscous. This chapter on the 11ème is perhaps the most interesting as well as the most politically charged as it deals with France’s tortured relationship with her former colonial subjects. Philippe, who is North African Jewish, tries to explain it: ‘When we talk about North African assimilation into France, it’s not even like there’s only one kind of North African we’re talking about.’ Furthermore, the seemingly traditional couscous royal served in the city’s Algerian restaurants was created by the pied noir, European settlers in Algeria who fled to mainland France in the 1950s and 1960s. At the end of the chapter, Newens cooks a recipe for Shabbat couscous given to him by a Jewish Tunisian lady – a relic of an ancient community that is dying out.

Though the possibility of Marine Le Pen becoming president looms over the final chapter, this is largely an optimistic book. He doesn’t ask the Israelis behind L’As du Fallafel in Le Marais how comfortable they are in a city which sees pro-Palestine protests on a regular basis as well as outbreaks of antisemitic violence from some militant members of the Muslim minority. Historians such as Andrew Hussey, author of the brutal The French Intifada, have pondered whether France might be on the verge of civil war. There’s an ominous parallel when Newens meets a refugee from Sri Lanka, an immigrant group which plays a vital role in keeping tourists in steak frites and œuf mayonnaise: ‘The colonisers [the British] came up with a policy to ship Tamil men from Southern India to bolster Sri Lanka’s labour force and in doing so unnerved the island’s more populous Sinhalese community and sowed the seeds for thirty years of civil war.’

I hope that Newens’ portrait of a city of many different parts rubbing along together through a shared love of food is the more accurate and prescient one. It’s certainly a wonderful read: a history of food, a travelogue, a recipe book and an anthropological study all in one, and the best book by an expat on France since Edward Chisholm’s A Waiter in Paris. If you’re visiting Paris anytime soon and intending to eat well, then you can’t do without a copy of Moveable Feasts.