I Lived in France and So Can You

By Michael Hickins

A police raid! Unfaithful spouses! A baseball player running the wrong way around the bases! In France!

Somewhere between travelogue and a ‘Dummy’s Guide to Running a Business in France’ (if there were such a thing), I Lived in France and So Can You is a serious but light-hearted exploration of 12 years’ worth of living, working, and loving in France. Using anecdotes from his experiences running an American restaurant in a small provincial city, to managing French baseball teams in Paris, to bringing up children with two different wives, and dealing with French people from all walks of life (including an exploration of the class system that’s still alive and well), Michael Hickins describes a journey through French culture and the life-long friendships he made along the way.

It’s the perfect book for anyone who ever thought about liquidating everything they owned and moving to France, or knows someone who has.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dzanc Books
• Release date: Feb 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781945814983

Michael Hickins

Michael Hickins lived in France for 12 years in the late 1980s and 90s, working in a variety of French and American companies before opening a restaurant with his then-wife Molly Elliott in La Rochelle, a quaint port with a significant historical heritage. Since leaving France, Hickins worked as a journalist with The Wall Street Journal and other publications. He is the author of a collection of short stories, The Actual Adventures of Michael Missing, as well as several other uncollected short stories, literary essays, and novels. Hickins lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife and toddler. He has two older children who live in France and Colorado, respectively.

Book preview

Chapter 1 – Le Molly’s (Molly’s Lone Star)

The restaurant had been open one day when the cops barged in.

Laurent Drouillard, our first kitchen hire, clumped up the stairs to the office over the kitchen, trying not to suffocate on fumes coming up from the heater downstairs. "The flics want to see you," he said.

In the months leading up to our Opening Day, Molly and I had met with plumbing regulators, electrical regulators, the signage regulators, food safety inspectors, and labor regulators, not to mention our own accountants, architects, lawyers and bankers – none of whom were exactly on our side, even if we were the ones paying the bills.

So what kind of flics could these be? We hadn’t even had time to start breaking any rules.

The restaurant was small, seating thirty – thirty five if we really pushed it. We had bought the lease from one of countless traditional French restaurants that marinate stews in cast iron cauldrons so black you can’t see the sedimentary layers of generations of baked-on food.

After we closed on the deal, buying the owners out of bankruptcy, we threw everything out – the stoves and ranges and the pots and pans and the dark red curtains and the carpeting and the lighting fixtures – in other words, everything we had supposedly paid for. We also gutted the upstairs apartment that the old couple had lived in and turned it into an office. We stored dry goods and refrigerated perishables in brand new fridges and shelving, and maintained an office in what had been their bedroom. We did most of the food preparation upstairs and built a dumbwaiter to move the prepped food down to the kitchen, and communicated downstairs using an intercom.

The only things we didn’t touch were the short bar by the front door, and the semicircular front window cut into the thick stone of the 17th century façade.

We had wanted to hang a neon sign on the outside, but the city of La Rochelle told us we didn’t have the right to do that (one of the many hurdles we encountered with French local and national bureaucracy), so we hung it inside the window. It glowed a welcoming red: Molly’s Lone Star.

The original place had been there for so long, most of its health code violations had been grandfathered. But new owners had to bring the place up to code, and we were more than happy to oblige. We weren’t just the new kids on the block – we were the Americans. We didn’t come in with exactly the benefit of a sterling national reputation for culinary heights. We were going to have to overcome a lot of prejudice about hamburgers and McDonald’s if we were going to have any success at all.

The first step was to make sure the place appeared clean to the naked eye, for both casual passers-by as well as our customers, and well-lit if not bright (lighting being one of the many things about which Molly had very specific, and very good ideas). We decided to run an open kitchen right behind the bar, so people could see exactly how we made the food – which became the subject of one of our many debates with Jean-Francois, our architect and interior designer.

Jean-Francois didn’t like the idea of us cooking right out in the open where customers could see how the sausage was made, so to speak, but we told him that was non-negotiable. But where he really wanted to draw the line was with the flooring, for which we picked black and white checkerboard tiles. He said we needed to cover those up behind the bar with thick black rubber mats so when our cooks dropped food it would fall through the holes in the mats and out of sight.

The kitchen is right by the window, he argued. People will see whenever one of your cooks drops a French fry on the floor and it gets mashed underfoot. It will look disgusting.

No, because they’ll pick the French fry right up, Molly said.

Jean-Francois shook his head. Like just about everyone we hired or consulted, he saw us as naïve fools to be fleeced quickly, before we went out of business, taking our profit-sharing, everything-on-the-up-and-up approach out of town with us.

We did abandon some aspects of that approach pretty quickly, but the day the cops showed up, we were still mostly law-abiding, and fresh off the biggest opening we could have hoped for.

***

Closing – shutting down the kitchen, mopping the floors, finishing the side work so the day shift wouldn’t have to fill ketchup bottles first thing, counting up the receipts and preparing the bank deposit – is all about orchestration. Our first night, we used up every avocado, every chicken breast, every bit of tomato and onion for the guacamole and pico de gallo, every morsel of beef and every corn tortilla in our possession.

We were all exhausted. Our staff included Laurent, of course, as well as Carl Bardin, a short guy with a Chaplinesque sense of humor, and Nick Longhi, an American friend whose family happened to be in the restaurant businesses. Nick’s father, ironically, was a Frenchman who had opened an authentic French restaurant in Albany, NY, and catered to the snooty state politicos and the lobbyists who expensed lunches and dinners.

That first night, we hadn’t yet figured out the shortest distance to the kitchen window and the dish washer; Molly hadn’t had a minute to stop mixing guac and prepping wings in the upstairs prep kitchen to wash any utensils; we hadn’t figured out how long to wait before the oil cooled enough to drain the fryers so we could clean them; we hadn’t figured out the most effective way of stacking the heavy oak chairs on tables, or which way the water ran while you were mopping so you could squeegee it into the floor drains.

Once we’d figured out what we were all doing, we managed to close in under an hour. We stopped serving at 1 in the morning, and could be on our way home by 2. That first night, though, we didn’t get out until 4 am. Molly and I put our heads on the pillow at 4:30 am; when the alarm rang a few short hours later, my first thought was, holy shit, we have to do it all over again. And again. And again. Forever.

We got out of bed, had a cup of espresso at the Café de la Poste downstairs, went shopping at Promocash, one of the restaurant wholesalers. Almost all the town’s restaurants got their supplies from one of two places – Promocash and Procmarche. A few years later, we got a third choice – a German restaurant wholesaler called Metro. Over time, eating at other restaurants, we realized that just about everything they served, from frozen shrimp to ready-made pasta sauces, came from one of these places.

We had to do things differently because the food we prepared couldn’t be bought ready-made. We got deliveries of beef (which we butchered ourselves) straight from a slaughterhouse and chicken (wings, thighs, and breasts) from a wholesale chicken distributor. We ground our own spices to make our various sauces and spice blends and baked our own desserts.

We moved down wide aisles loading supplies onto a six-foot long wooden flatbed carriage, nodding to competitors we knew by sight, and at checkout received a long computer printout that served as our receipt as well as documentation of our expenses for the purpose of our P&L. Then we loaded it all into the used van – a small yellow vehicle formerly owned by the post office, with three gears that came off the dashboard and that could go a maximum of 50 mph on the highway. (Three times during our first year, after closing, I drove that little iron deathtrap 150 miles to Bordeaux, which had a Metro, to pick up cream cheese for our homemade cheesecake and a few other ingredients the local suppliers didn’t carry. A couple of times, my little-engine-that-could almost got rammed from behind by a truck driver who couldn’t tell or believe how slowly I was going.)

We would double-park on the narrow side street and our cooks would help lug the potatoes and other foodstuff up to the second storey prep kitchen, and I would then look for a parking spot.

Molly went upstairs to prep more food, and I inspected the tableside condiments and the black-and-white checkerboard tile floor for cleanliness. Molly would buzz the intercom when she was ready to lower food to Laurent, the first cook we hired, who would load up the downstairs kitchen.

It was almost lunchtime, our first live lunch. We had no idea of how many people to expect. We had served over a hundred people the previous night – four seatings between 7pm and midnight. People had waited outside in the wet, cold February air, the incessant breeze of La Rochelle running in under their coat collars. We had intentionally opened in the middle of the week so we could get our feet wet before the weekend rush. No one went out to eat in the middle of the week in February. Certainly not to a restaurant run by an unknown couple of Americans with no apparent experience or expertise. But they did, and they waited, crowding around the window with a view on the kitchen, admiring our night cook Carl flip burgers and dip fries into boiling hot oil. No one could remember seeing anything like it.

***

La Rochelle is a port city about 200 miles north of Bordeaux and 200 miles south of Normandy. In other words, if you’re an American, you’ve probably never been there. But it holds an important place in American history. People from La Rochelle immigrated to the U.S. in waves. They arrived in Canada and later in New Orleans, and of course they founded New Rochelle, New York, about 20 miles from where I live today. It was also one of the most important stopping points for the slave trade.

When Molly and I decided to open Molly’s Lone Star in La Rochelle, we found an apartment in a building in the center of town. La Rochelle, led by its progressive Socialist Mayor Michel Crepeaux, had been one of the first cities in France to close its downtown to automobile traffic, tear up the blacktop and install pretty cobblestone pedestrian streets, pass regulations forcing all the shops to adopt similar, ye olde style facades, and create a bike lending program. La Rochelle was even the first city in Europe with a pilot electric car program; anyone could sign up and borrow an electric car and then leave it back at one of the charging stations.

At 15,000 inhabitants, La Rochelle is the biggest city in the Charente-Maritime region and is the local capital, or Prefecture. Another 30,000 or so people live in its orbit – which made it an attractive enough place to open a business. It was developing some high tech business thanks to tax incentives from the local governments (France balances a politically powerful central government by giving significant powers of taxation to the local governments. There are 100 such departments in France organized for the sake of efficiency into 13 regions.)

La Rochelle also had a new university, built on newly reclaimed land called Les Minimes, across a narrow inlet from the Old Port. We briefly considered opening our restaurant in Les Minimes because friends told us that’s where the action was and where the kids liked to hang out, but it looked kind of cheap and lacking in character. And we didn’t want kids with $20 in their pockets. We wanted the old money, because with such a small capacity, we needed to get a relatively high average ticket. (Restaurants were not lacking anywhere in France, and to succeed, you had to stand out in one of three ways: you could walk out having spent less than 100 francs (around $18); you could get out in under an hour; or you could eat in a place with some kind of offbeat ambiance or theme. We checked all those boxes, but we did our best to make you spent more than 100 francs.)

And there was old money to be had. As the Prefecture of the department, La Rochelle also had a full-blown cultural center, La Coursive, which hosted shows from Paris like Cirque du Soleil, as well as original acts. As Europe’s biggest port for leisure sailing, it also attracted thousands of well-heeled part-time residents (and hosted Les Voilliers, an annual boat show that extended the summer tourist season a couple of weeks into the fall).

Off the coast was an island, L’ile de Re, on which 9 out of 8 Parisians have either rented a summer home or owned a second home for generations. One of the secrets of building and maintaining generational wealth in France is that people hold onto their family homes.

La Rochelle had always been a place of industry – a place of shipbuilders, sailors, merchants, bankers and rebels. Geography has also been incredibly kind to La Rochelle.

The mouth of the port is very narrow – an experienced baseball player can easily throw a ball from one side of the mouth to the other. The citizens of La Rochelle took advantage of this feature many centuries ago, and built a pair of towers, one on each side. They strung an iron chain between the towers, and when everything was normal, the links lay harmlessly across the water. But if the guards on the tower spied enemy vessels in the distance, they would tighten the chain between the towers about 100 feet in the air above sea level. Any vessel trying to enter the port would have its masts snapped in half as they came in contact with the chains.

The towers and chain gave its name to rue de la Chaine, one of the streets perpendicular to the main drag of the Old Port, and where we opened our second restaurant, after the first one proved too small.

The second feature for which La Rochelle can be truly grateful is its very shallow draft. Because it can only accommodate small fishing and sail boats, the city built an industrial port to the south, called La Pallice. That’s where the real commercial shipping happens, where the local customs and immigration police are headquartered, and also where Germans made their submarine base during WWII.

Because La Rochelle itself didn’t have any of these characteristics, it is one of the only important cities on the Atlantic coast not to have been bombed by the Allies during WWII. In contrast to places like Le Havre, Cherbourg and other citiies in Normandy that had to be rebuilt on the cheap, La Rochelle looks pretty much the same as it did when Cardinal Richeliue put the city to siege because it was a Protestant stronghold.

Its history as a Protestant holdout (it held off the Catholic attack for 16 months before finally surrendering) is part of its appeal to the predominantly Catholic French, who see in the city a more sober, honest place than other port cities like Marseille or Nice. Famously, La Rochelle doesn’t have a strong mob element – one of the many reasons we opened up there instead of somewhere with a larger potential market (and labor pool).

La Rochelle does have its drawbacks of course. It’s home to mediocre doctors, lawyers and dentists who are incapable of or unwilling to compete in Paris or Toulouse or any other great French city, and who are attracted to the beauty and laid-back lifestyle offered by La Rochelle.

Its university is new, and therefore not favored by the best students. Only the dull locals without ambition matriculate there, along with the indolent kids of wealthy Parisians. The labor market is also poor because most businesses in the tourism trade are seasonal, which means most of the workers disappear in the winter. That was not good for a business like ours that counted on revenue year-round.

And like many provincial capitals, the people of La Rochelle think very, very highly of their town. As the French like to say, ils pêtent plus haut que leurs culs (they fart higher than their asses).

The pristine town center where Molly and I lived revolved around a vast empty square with a fountain in the center. We lived on one side of the square, on the fifth floor of a sixteenth century building with a narrow staircase and large French windows that closed poorly and flapped open when the wind gusted, which was most days. A large brasserie, Le Café de la Poste, was on the ground floor – convenient for getting a quick cup of espresso first thing in the morning. The post office was adjacent to the brasserie, and across from the post office was the stately town hall, built in the 17th century to resemble a chateau, with turrets and a main central tower with a larger-than-life sized statue of Henri IV – not the English king; the French one who was famous for saying Paris is worth a mass. He was a Protestant who converted to Catholicism in order to ascend to the French throne.

Every morning, Molly and I awoke to a view the statue of Henri IV at eye level, and below us at night, we could hear the late-night revelers singing well into the morning or, on occasion, the horrified screams of our Irish prep cook Stephen as he ran away from pursuers who existed only in his alcohol-fueled hallucinations.

The cops who burst into our restaurant that morning were from the office of customs and immigration, located at the port of La Pallice.

We’ve been informed that there are illegal immigrants here, the commanding officer told me when I got downstairs and asked what the trouble was. A couple of other uniformed cops stood behind him by the entrance.

My first thought was that they were after Fred Lof, the mixed-race kid we were getting a tax break for putting on a short-term contract. We had been introduced to Fred by his social worker, who had been walking around town looking for work on his behalf. The government paid most of his salary for a year, and we got a break on the social charges for our other employees. If that seems paternalistic, it is, but it’s the way things often work in France. When we hired him, we realized there was nothing wrong with Fred – no reason for him to have fallen through the cracks of the French educational system, other than the color of his skin. He was extremely smart and inventive, and a hard worker for most of the time he worked for us. He was exceedingly young – 17 – and had somehow already disqualified himself for further traditional education.

But it turned out they weren’t concerned with Fred.

Or maybe they meant Stephen, the Irishman. The European Union allowed for free movement of individuals, but the rules were new, and France required Europeans to apply for a work visa, even if the visa was granted automatically. As with many things in France, it was the formality that mattered. The outcome was usually predetermined.

All of our employees had