Forced re-imaginings

I was supposed to be headed to Paris in about two weeks, from which I’d go straight on to Tours for a few days’ rest, then back through Paris to Cannes to work at the film festival and then, finally, a weekend in actual Paris before coming home.

I still have the ticket (getting that sorted out is on my long task list this week). So I’ve been getting email after email about tiny changes to the flight (it’s moved down the board seven minutes) and big ones (it was originally through London; now it’s a direct flight). And Paris is on a near-total lockdown through May 11 anyhow. There are far worse things than having your entirely non-essential trip canceled, but the pangs sting a little still.

In the New York Times, Elaine Sciolio writes of the shopkeepers on the Rue des Martyrs, where she lives in Paris:

I’ve spent so much time on the street that I know many of the shopkeepers and they know me. I’ve learned the landscapes of their lives: the names and ages of their children, their vacation destinations, their plans for retirement. That openness allows us to have safe-distance conversations.

“The word to describe the mood is morose,” said Yves Chataigner, the 85-year-old cheesemonger who runs the cheese store at No. 3 with his wife Annick. “But what are we supposed to do, stay shut up in our apartment upstairs and pretend to be on vacation?”

Mr. Chataigner said that the day before, in the absence of normal operations at the vast Rungis wholesale food market outside of Paris, he had to walk three miles — he clocked it on his pedometer — to find all the cheeses he wanted.

Adam Nossiter, the Times’s Paris bureau chief, also writes about the changes in the city:

For those willing to brave police checks, this is a remarkable chance to rediscover Paris. In recent days, I saw for the first time — in a relationship with France that is nearly 60 years old — an epicenter of mass tourism, the beguiling Place du Tertre at the top of Montmartre. The little village square was nearly empty, and a worried Parisian stopped to ask if I wasn’t taking a chance by being out on my bike.

But it is all an illusion. Paris is no more Paris without its smart young people chattering outside at now closed cafes than New York is New York without skyscrapers. Paris reduced to its architectural essence is grandiose but cold, an unreal postcard.

Yet it is also a fertile theater for the imagination.

Back home, here in New York, one of those important little places that have long built out the texture of the city — Gabrielle Hamilton’s East Village restaurant Prune — has shuttered, like everyone, and Hamilton wrote a terrific essay revisiting whether the city even needs Prune anymore:

And right when I started to feel backed against the ropes, I got a group email from a few concerned former Prune managers who eagerly offered to start a GoFundMe for Prune, inadvertently putting another obstacle in front of me: my own dignity. I sat on the email for a few days, roiling in a whole new paralysis of indecision. There were individual campaigns being run all over town to raise money to help restaurant staffs, but when I tried to imagine joining this trend, I couldn’t overcome my pride at being seen as asking for a handout. It felt like a popularity contest or a survival-of-the-most-well-connected that I couldn’t bring myself to enter. It would make me feel terrible if Prune was nicely funded while the Sikhs at the Punjabi Grocery and Deli down the street were ignored, and simultaneously crushed if it wasn’t. I also couldn’t quite imagine the ethical calculus by which I would distribute such funds: Should I split them equally, even though one of my workers is a 21-year-old who already owns his own apartment in Manhattan, while another lives with his unemployed wife and their two children in a rental in the Bronx? I thanked my former managers but turned them down: I had repeatedly checked in with my staff, and everybody was OK for now.

It would be nigh impossible for me, in the context of a pandemic, to argue for the necessity of my existence. Do my sweetbreads and my Parmesan omelet count as essential at this time? In economic terms, I don’t think I could even argue that Prune matters anymore, in a neighborhood and a city now fully saturated with restaurants much like mine, many of them better than mine — some of which have expanded to employ as many as 100 people, not just cooks and servers and bartenders but also human-resource directors and cookbook ghostwriters.