Tanya Gold reviews Maxim’s, Paris

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.