So, backstory: I'm just about to finish Graham (pronounced Gram, just as Ralph is pronouned Rafe and Meurice Morris) Nash's fabulous book "Tales" and throughout it, like reading the works of my late friend and fellow "poonie" John Updike, I revel in the fact that these are my guys, this is my life and times (without the drugs), this stuff I know. And so, when my cyber-buddy Parnassien kept recommending Taxi Jaune, I kept thinking of Joni Mitchell's "Late last night, I heard the screen door slam, And a big yellow taxi, Took away my old man,....They paved paradise, And put up a parking lot," - I said, I gotta go with my friend who still sees patients in her cabinet in the Marais and always has to catch a quick lunch nearby.
5.4 Taxi Jaune, 13, rue Chapon in the 3rd, 01.42.76.00.40, (Metro: Arts & Metiers) closed weekends (it's in the heart of the schmates district after all) has one of those impenetrable fascades, I'm wandering about, poking at doors and windows, and this worker bloke, the guy on the right, for whom clearly this is not the first time, says "here" and pushes the correct secret panel and I'm in. But not my "date" who enters from the east side - "the kitchen" she blithely says. On the wall are the products of the month, plates of the day and wines by the glass, carafe and bottle.
Quite frankly, the carte was not one to send my heart soaring - it looked boring aka traditional. But hey. So, my pal of 52 years, whom I've known longer than my wife, ordered the raviolis of radishes and goat cheese - excuse me, Q. but what could that mean? Ans. It meant a wonderfully light production that I couldn't reproduce in 6 weeks if under KGB orders. And I had what I assumed would be a serviceable/boring/but get thruable seafood salad - Unh unh, it was lovely, light and quite tasty. Man.
For mains, we split the choices - she the boring lieu and me the boring ham, with crushed, indeed obliterated green peas (unpictured). Not at all boring. Instead, rather good, simple, road stop, 1950, outside Toulouse, chow. This was no fooling food, no pretenses - what did Dustin Hoffman's character call it - "honest food"?
For dessert she had the chocolate noisette cake and I the prunes in booze; both meeting the truck-stop 1950's standard.
So, the bill; OK, with 3-courses each, no bottled water and a half-liter of a fine Cotes de Luberon, you're talking 48 E. Make sense to you?
Go? As they say in Law School "Res ipsa loquitor." I only took two courses, but that stuck. Decibel level with a full house turning folks away - 84.8 dB,