Author interview: ‘Food is one of the most immediate languages any place speaks’

Chris Newens is an award-winning British writer with a focus on food, culture, and travel. Picture: Sabine Dundure

• Moveable Feasts: Paris in Twenty Meals
• Chris Newens
• Profile Books, €23.75

Chris Newens has lived in the French capital for more than 10 years. An award-winning writer, journalist, and member of the literary collective Paris Lit Up, he is part of a long tradition of anglophone writers in the city stretching back as far as the 18th century.

The idea for his new book, Moveable Feasts: Paris in Twenty Meals, came, he says, when he realised “how little I knew this city … I found myself questioning how much I belonged in this place I call my home”.

Moveable Feasts is divided into 20 chapters, each devoted to the search for a dish representative of one of Paris’ 20 arrondissements. 

The dishes — ratatouille and oysters, but also banh mis, malangwa, and kebabs — are less about fine dining than treating food as a means to understand the 21st century city.

Newens comes from culinary stock. His family owned a bakery and tea rooms in London for several generations. 

When I speak to him via Zoom, he is hard at work on the research for his next book about the state of English pub culture:

I’m trying to look across the English cultural spectrum, from city pubs run for migrant communities, to rural pubs that host foxhunting events, to others which act as incubators for far-right groups.

Moveable Feasts, he explains, is not about enjoying food or drink for its own sake. 

It begins by discussing the many waves of immigration into Paris: first from regions in the south of France such as Aveyron and Auvergne, then further afield. 

It ends in the shadow of last year’s legislative election in which the far-right unexpectedly lost the second round.

A trained anthropologist, Newens believes “food is one of the most immediate languages any place speaks. In any city, whether or not you can communicate with people, food is one of the ways it opens itself up to you.”

And despite the “massive reputation” of Paris for fine cuisine (one of the chapters in the book features a visit to the Cordon Bleu), food is “one of the big disappointments for many people who come to the city”.

“I remember when I first came here,” he says, “how often we would trick ourselves into thinking the bad restaurant we were in is a good restaurant and thinking it must be good. I think it’s quite a common tourist experience.”

Did writing the book change his understanding of the city?

“More than anything, it gave me an appreciation of how strong a role tradition plays.”

Nowhere exemplified that more than the city markets, where one market stall may be owned by the same people for three generations, with the same families going there from the start.

“In the outer arrondissements, markets are places people go to buy cheap food, whereas in the centre it’s where they go to buy high-end produce.”

This does not mean things have stayed exactly the same.

“These days a restaurant with Sri Lankan chefs cooking classic French food is more authentic, because it’s more common, than any other sort of French dining experience.”

But “there is a distinct quality to Parisian food because of how the tradition comes up against other influences.

“Obviously, there is a thread to food culture in rural France. But what’s interesting is how the tradition affects Vietnamese food, North African food, kebab shops, soup kitchens.”

In the 12th Arrondissement, Newens visits the restaurant solidaire Saint-Eloi, a soup kitchen conceived as a restaurant serving wine and a cheese course, “because that’s the way it’s expected that a meal should be”.

“Paris,” he tells me, “is one of the great battlegrounds between tradition and modernity, but tradition fights back harder than I might have suspected.”

Book retraces author's own life

Another important thread in the book retraces Newens’ own life. We learn of his first time visiting Paris as a young student eating an omelette in the Café Les Deux Magots; the summers during his 20s spent with Antoine, a family friend and aristocrat from the south-west of the city; his diabetes diagnosis in his early 30s.

“I think as a reader, it’s more engaging when you know who the author is and where they’re coming from. And it’s more honest. I don’t usually like it when the writer is not present in the work.

“Sometimes, it can be done very well, but in general, it’s important to be clear that the contents of a book like this are one person’s perspective, rather than assuming some false authority.”

For similar reasons, Newens made a point of trying to cook all the dishes in the book himself and feed them to his family and friends, some of whom appear as named characters.

“I wanted to stress the idea that these dishes are a kind of knowledge, and their recipes something you can take with you even beyond Paris: moveable feasts, like the title says.

“In any non-fiction book,” he tells me, “the form should echo the content.”

And so I believed that for it properly to be a book about food, it would have to be in part a recipe book, in order to speak to the way we most commonly engage with it.

Food, for many writers, is a challenging subject because it is so difficult to convey the experience of taste. It is like writing about a brilliant song. 

If you go too objective — “it was lightly marinated in sesame oil” — readers struggle to imagine the end-product. Too subjective — “it was delicious. It was so good” — and there is nothing really to imagine.

“There’s nothing more boring than food writing that just describes in unending detail what something tastes like because you’re never going to get that across,” he says. 

How did he square the circle? “When writing about taste, it’s best to be fast, simple, and evoke an idea of flavour without pinning it down. 

“I try to tell the story of the food and the place where it’s being eaten, the around it, without dwelling too much on the dish itself.

“Funnily enough, I was very influenced by Hemingway in that regard, he writes very well about food with lines like ‘the baked beans were hot and good’, ‘the oysters tasted metallic and faintly of the sea’.

“As a writer in those moments, you just have to get in and get out, let people bring their own ideas of what those things mean, and let the world around the food do the work.”

Although the focus of Moveable Feasts is on the past and present, many of the trends that it discusses point towards a direction of future travel.

“Since I started living in Paris, I have noticed a marked increase in capitalist imports: street-food restaurants, big brands, and other places that fly in the face of the all the city’s traditions.”

But the outlook, at least for foodies, may not be so bad. 

“Those same trends of commercialism and capitalism have recently led to the rise of the bouillon [a kind of cheap and fast, but high-quality French restaurant], which has caused the standard to go up across the bistros in general. 

“More and more people are realising that Parisian culinary traditions have a market value in themselves.”