Competition time (1)

Can it really be so?

From the long, dark nights of fevered imagination to the contented glow of a man who has got something right.

Today, tomorrow or very soon, Salut! will reach a significant milestone: 50,000 hits.

Having just attended a seminar at the London School of Economics on how journalists can make the web pay - in short they probably can't was the message I sort of received - I know all about page impressions and uniques.

But while I readily confess to not knowing how many individuals have visited this site since its creation last October, I can also tell you that we have already passed the 50,000 mark for visits (even if that is two people making 25,000 each).

Hundreds if not thousands of people had already been here before I set up the counter that you see somewhere down the right hand column.

It often strikes me as a little hard to accept that Salut! has not attained any ranking in the only blogger chart I have come across, the Technoranki one.

I swear I even saw a couple of oddball sex sites creep in towards the bottom of that hit parade for a week or two. But no sign of Salut!, and no way of knowing - since Technoranki jealously guards the secrets of its trade - what I need to do to make my breakthrough.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that I have been given massive public support in the small, income-free corner of the web that is this site.

My hope is that it will get better still, though that is likely to necessitate a move to new accommodation quite soon, and that more people will be attracted.

But as a mark of my appreciation of your support - whether as readers or readers leaving comments - I offer a small commemorative prize.

To qualify, all you need to do is trawl through my blogging history - here and/or at the Telegraph - and tell me the name of my ungovernable (thanks, John M) French cat BY E-MAIL PLEASE TO

colinrandall2001@yahoo.fr

PLEASE DO NOT POST THE REPLY AS A COMMENT ON SALUT!
The prize - perhaps even prizes....let us see - will relate to my interests, well documented here, in food and/or France. Arbitrary rules will apply*.

* The closing date is 1800hrs French time on Wed April 3. Winner or winners will be drawn from the correct replies received by then........

And the winner is......

Q: What kind of baker has his own press attaché? A: One who makes the best croissant in Paris.

And who says Pierre Hermé's croissants are tops? The team of six judges assembled by Le Figaro's midweek magazine Scope to munch its way through 64 of them.

All the competing croissants were bought on the same morning across the capital and then judged according to appearance, smell, flavour, price and even the welcome received by those doing the round of bakers and - let me be fairer to M Hermé - pâtisseries.

Actually replicating Le Figaro's operation presented obstacles. At any rate, it did when it came to Salut! second guessing the judges by paying its own visit to the winner's shop.

Scope helpfully gave M Hermé's address as 72 rue de Bonaparte, which threads through the Latin Quarter to St Sulpice and beyond.


Maybe Salut! was having a bad day. It cannot, of course, hope to have a bad hair day.

But look for yourselves. Would it not be entirely possible to see no 72 from the other side of the street and conclude that the magazine must have made a mistake?

For here is a shop that sells croissants and cakes but has a façade that looks rather more like that of an upmarket jeweller. It took a return trip to confirm that those small windows contained not necklaces and bracelets in 18 carat gold but M Hermé's less durable creations.

I hate to quarrel with a winner. But questions really need to be asked about an item associated throughout the world with breakfast but not sold before 10am.

In fact, even 10am proved a variable sort of opening time.

The door was not unlocked until four minutes had gone by after the sounding of the bell atop the nearby 6th arrondissement town hall.

If M Hermé feels this was a trivial delay, he may be interested to learn that by then, half the queue - OK, two people - had also gone by. They didn't even look back.

Once inside the shop, however, you found that service came with a broad smile. My four croissants, costing 1.20 euros each, were packed by the pretty, cheerful assistant as carefully as if she were wrapping delicate porcelain.

But it took another 10 minutes to pay. Pretty, cheerful assistant was not interested in receiving payment; a colleague at the till was in charge of that. Inconveniently for me, she was also in charge of taking Christmas orders.

The town hall bell for a quarter past rang out soon after I left the shop. It seemed a long time to have spent making such a small purchase in an uncrowded shop.

Had Mr Hermé been present, and willing to interrupt his labours for a couple of minutes, I would have asked what was the secret of his success, why he opened so late and whether I was right long ago to think croissants absolutely had to be served hot.

But he was not present. "Pas ce matin," the assistant replied. Oui, mais plus tard? Non.

Thinking it would then be a simple matter of arranging a quick telephone interview, I outlined my mission. "I'll give you a number for his attaché de presse," came the response.

The questions, therefore, will have to wait. Salut! cannot afford airs and graces but also has no wish to start negotiating on small print for an interview with a croissant-maker. Next, he'll be wanting copy control or banning any reference to flakiness and crumbs.

In any case, we can surely rely on Scope sufficiently to trust the thoughts attributed to him after the results were pronounced. The great croissant, M Hermé confided, needed a dry and crunchy texture. The buttery taste had to betray a perfect balance between salt and sugar.

When M Hermé wandered off into "I hear the cry of the croissant....it's alive, the soul of its creator" territory, I felt it was time just to get on with eating the wretched thing.



So, just after 11am and in the knowledge I would soon be meeting friends for lunch, I had my late breakfast.

It was good, very good, and I was content to eat it cold.

But I would have had more difficulty thsn the judges in finding it so much better than all the rest. Or in relegating last year's winner - Julien, located on the rue St Honoré - to seventh place, or last year's third placed contender (a Paul branch on the rue de Seine, not far from M Hermé) as low as 24th. Unless, of course, Paul served the undercover buyer a 2005 croissant.

France in flashes.....8

Soon I will be leaving Paris, but not France. Two-and-a-half years in the City of Light is not much of a milestone but it's the longest I've lived anywhere outside London since the 1980s.

Thanks to this Parisian phase of my life, and indeed to living in France generally,
I am able to start listing - in no special order - a few of the things I now know.

It is a work in progress; the number in the headline will change each time I have a flash of inspiration and want to add something and - as now - I may bring it to the top of the blog.

New thoughts will always appear first in the list but the earlier comments from readers are at the original posting.....feel free to find inconsistencies with what I wrote in 2003.




************** WHAT I KNOW NOW **************

* Paris may not, despite a former colleague's insistence, be the City of a Thousand Bad Restaurants. But I am up to double figures and truly believe London now has a distinct edge on quality, variety and service - though not always value.

* Provincial France is still streets ahead for eating out. But my search for a good Indian restaurant seemed doomed to failure until I stumbled the other night upon Le Royal Shah Jahan at Enghien Les Bains, where 95 (Val d'Oise) meets bad old neuf-trois (Seine St Denis). Easily the best I've had in France. It was our friends' fallback idea after their first choice, at Argenteuil, turned out to be full.

* The French press is more decent - and more dull - than its British counterpart. One (French) theory, heard again today, holds that the country has just two seriously good daily papers: L'Equipe for sports lovers and Mon Quotidien (plus stablemates) for kids.

* Anyone who voluntarily leaves a proper job in France, even a job he or she loathes, is considered mad unless there is something immediate fixed up.

* From the millionaire to the man on the Boulevard Masséna tram, French people know how to appreciate good food. The mountainous plateau de fruits de mer served to my table yesterday could have been ordered at either end of that spectrum (and indeed was, though I'm not saying which).

* And at both ends, they know how tipping is done at the restaurant in France: sparingly or not at all, and without hint of self-consciousness.

* People who insist you should never dine in or near railway stations don't know Paris. Two of my best eating experiences have been at the Brasserie Terminus Nord directly opposite Gare du Nord and, complete with fabulous arty decor, Le Train Bleu inside the Gare de Lyon.

** Châtelet is probably the grimmest of Métro stations unless you are going through without stopping, but if you do have to change, alight or board there, it also has the best buskers on the system.

* When a Parisian receptionist welcomes you with the question: "Is someone behind you?", this is not because she assumes such a nice person would surely have friends queuing up to accompany you. It's her way of telling you to close what you thought was an automatic door, and sharpish.

* Charles de Gaulle airport is not, repeat NOT, the least user-friendly place in the world to fly to or from. Not quite. But getting to terminal three offers a strong challenge to that view.

* Toulon, the nearest town of any size to where I'll be living come January - at least in the short term - has been placed bottom or second bottom in league tables for economic activity, employment, culture and heaven knows what else. Have I made a dreadful mistake? The eastern city of Nancy, which I have never visited, came top in one of these palmarès des villes.

* Policemen on roller skates and - when deployed as traffic cops - bicycles will always look like something out of a French farce.

* Marks & Spencer should be ordered to re-open its Paris store. Don't take my word for it; ask a native Parisian.

* The French are not the worst drivers in Europe and probably not even the second or third worst.

* It is therapeutic to swear in English at psychopathic drivers who try to mow you down on green at pedestrian crossings. But this is not advisable if you happen to be having a mobile phone conversation with a charming American lady at the same time.

* If you want to find out something from a French ministry, make friends with a French official in London. Exposure to le modèle Anglo-Saxon will have given him a hint of urgency.

* Power walking or gentle jogging in the Tuileries is not recommended for those liable to feel like physical wrecks in the presence of superfit Parisian sapeurs pompiers.

* Arriving on time, for dinner, drinks or similar, is a serious gaffe. Getting there early is positively insulting and destined to bring social exclusion.

* Gard du Nord handles people more efficiently than Waterloo. And no one there will try to serve you wine in a cardboard cup.

* Anna Perry was right. The Champs Elysées may look pretty when lit up for Christmas - see above for photographic support, however amateurish, for that claim - but feels ugly and naff most of the time and, at the bottom end, menacing late at night.

* Brits who want to live in France, but stick to English-speaking ghettos and recoil in horror from any idea of integration, bring disgrace on their country and should go home.

* French reality and game shows are even worse than those on British TV. And French television generally is dire.

* Leaving Paris on a TGV feels much better than coming back.

* Coming back to Paris on Eurostar feels much better than leaving.

Here's an explanation I prepared earlier