Maxim’s! The very name is drool from Maurice Chevalier’s lips, as he perved around Gigi and sang, ‘Thank heaven for little girls/ And hebephilia generally.’ Myths sprout up around Maxim’s, which was always, in restaurant terms, a kind of Prince Michael of Kent with sex appeal. The female customers were so overdressed in 1913 according to Jean Cocteau that taking their clothes off was ‘like moving house’. Ho Chi Minh was apparently a bus boy, so the food at Maxim’s and the communist revolution in North Vietnam are obviously connected — although exactly how I cannot say.
Maxim’s is off the Place de la Concorde, where the guillotine stood. This hollow city seems to have no residents, only gawpers and passers-through and angry street performers. When did Paris stop being interesting? She used to do regicide and other exciting things; now she does hotel rooms and shoes. All kinds of hotel rooms and shoes, as long as they are either hotel rooms or shoes. The Place de la Concorde should have stayed the Place de la Revolution, but that was too controversial for TripAdvisor. La revolution est morte. Vive le minibar.
So here it is, the most famous restaurant in the world, movie star and Art Nouveau museum, and quite obviously the ancestor, among other things, of the Angus Steak House. I have a reservation, which I secure by email through a bright red website, which is quite the ugliest website I have ever seen, which also advertises Maxim’s aprons, chocolates, coffee cups and affiliated branches in the Far East. A rather needy confirmation comes by return, asking if I require a cake or, for some reason, a firework. I have never been asked this before. I needn’t have bothered to book. Maxim’s is now so unfashionable that an excitable ‘marketing director’ greets me by name at the door, draws me in. What to say? It is a series of sequential salons in golds and reds and greens — lovely, ruined beauty, now owned by Pierre Cardin of tie fame. It looks like it closed in 1959 and reopened ten minutes ago.
This is the land of waxworks. If Norma Desmond were a burger joint, she would be this one. If the Scooby Doo gang dined in a haunted restaurant, it would be this one. If the Phantom of the Opera had a friendly neighbourhood brasserie where he felt secure enough to remove his mask, it would be this one. And so on. It feels like the edge of the world; Maxim’s is waiting for something.
Only one salon is set for dinner, out of four. There is a tiny stage and curtains and small tables, with pink, tattered lamps with a film of dust. Only six tables are full, with birthday and anniversary parties chirping in the vast emptiness, frat boys wading across the River Styx. The menus are huge; there are no prices on mine. The sense that we are dining in Death’s own restaurant makes it more, not less, fun. The waiter looks like a monochrome Shrek.
There are two cabaret acts. There is a handsome lounge singer who keeps disappearing to tweak his backing track, and a cross torch-song singer with muscled arms who thumps the piano as if it were her ex-husband. They channel Ella and Frank, easy listening wars.
The food is wonderful; this is a relief, because bad food here, in Vincent Price’s head, would be unforgivable. A consommé is fierce, dark; pasta with mushrooms, a dish so easy to destroy, is perfectly cooked and seasoned. We order côte de boeuf for two. It is €160. I can report that this cut, which is brought on a board, sliced, served and whisked away, presumably to the stomach of the dog of the chef’s brother-in-law, is quite the best beef I have had — soft, wet, red, like a Bourbon’s head bouncing across La Place de la Revolution. One more revolution, you could say.
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