Of snails, onion soup and the savour of brighter days ahead

On Monday morning, after more than 100 days of living in fear – and when certain glad tidings had on Saturday afternoon crossed my ears – something in me snapped.

I was going to go down town, I was going to go by bus, I would no longer wear these sweaty vinyl gloves and I was going to eat out.

not that I was a fool. I pocketed the latest elegant face mask and a small bottle of hand sanitiser.

And from the moment the no 11 slid to a halt by the handful of us waiting, I snapped on that polka-dotted cotton and, from the very start, treated that double-decker as one suppurating petri dish of pestilence and death.

Most of us, since mid-March, have become very good at not touching things. From start to finish of the ten-minute trundle, even negotiating my way upstairs with the no 11 under way, through deft use of elbows no unclad part of me made the least contact with that vehicle.

When I alighted, at Tollcross, I anointed myself at once with sanitiser and then, by Fountainbridge and the West Port, with an assured manly stride, made my way to the Grassmarket.

I have known Edinburgh for more than 40 years – so long that our neighbour, even in the mid-1980s, had a live-in maid frae West Calder and city centre milk was still delivered on horse-drawn floats.

But nowhere has changed more than the Grassmarket, and I know that as we had weekly to brave it in order to attend our Highland church very near by.

The Grassmarket in Mrs Thatcher’s time was the last stinking midden of an old and disgusting Edinburgh.

It was a place of grime and vice and despair, as it had been for centuries, long the site of public executions (a surviving pub is cynically named The Last Drop), of Covenanting martyrdom, of drear hostels and dreadful doss houses.

Every crone was Edna the Inebriate Woman; every second male was in an old coat tied with string – the sort of derelict who, in extremis, would drink Brasso.

AS if to cement its record in human misery, on April, 2, 1916 – in Scotland’s first-ever air raid and the worst of the Great War – the Grassmarket even took a bomb or two from a passing Zeppelin.

Today the Grassmarket is a gracious and charming public space, one of jaunty wine bars, high-end antiques, delightful restaurants and niche shops. One sells only hats. Another exclusively sells fossils. And, yes, the tables were out, in their gay blue or red chequered clothes, corks were popping, Mathieu himself bemasked and front of house. Le Petit Paris was back in business.

I suspect it was a close-run thing. For months it had been dark and shuttered. In June, to widespread terror, its website vanished. Could it be le crunch for l’Édimbourg delicieux? Mais non; c’est indefatigable. Socially distanced, of course, and for the time being but al fresco – yet, Petit Paris had ridden out the storm.

In a city notorious for curt service and rip-off prices, Petit Paris is much beloved. As a man in a dream I removed my mask; there were delighted smiles of recognition and I sank into the proffered seat. From an improbably tiny kitchen, in the heart of a thickwalled building erected in the 1600s, Mathieu Cagna and his ebullient staff serve some 600 meals a day.

Choice on the menu is not wide, but every French classic is delicious, is cooked to the highest standard and served with joy. All the staff are French – mostly pert young men.

The stew of the day, the snails in garlic butter with a hint of Pernod, the Toulouse sausage and the fabled onion soup are particular glories.

Though it only opened ten minutes ago, its allotted share of Grassmarket cobbles are already very busy. There are cheerful cries of recognition and reunion and I am hailed like a long-lost friend, which may reflect my justly famous charm but, more likely, because I am a great tipper.

As always, bread and butter and a bottle of plain chilled water materialise on my table. They will be replenished, without charge, as necessary, like the concluding filtered coffee.

I voyage through that onion soup, savouring its subtleties, leaving the Gruyere-draped crouton to last. Its crunch never fails. The chicken à la crème forestière, with accompanying fried potatoes and a touch of salad, is less a course than a symphony, going well with that little Duralex tumbler of the house white. The restoration of such normalities, such civilities, such a feast brings a wetness to my eyes.

The slice of Roquefort sur l’assiette de fromages sélectionnés par nos soins has a depth in taste that has me briefly conducting an inaudible Marseillaise with my fork.

The couple lunching at an adjacent table actually are French, which is some seal of approval. They conduct much of an intense, involved conversation with their hands.

THE broken English descriptions in the menu have the charm of a burn bubbling by green and mossy stones. La crème brûlée à la vanille, we’re assured, is ‘the same that Maman used to do on Sundays’.

As I await la tarte au citron meringuée et son coulis de framboise, with a restorative Armagnac, I note that we are of media interest.

TV cameras roll and several journalists, one in a magnificent Covid hair-don’t, are interviewing diners.

Four exuberant ladies, already doing significant damage to wine-bucketed bubbly, are – from what I can make out – ardent fans of Sir

Andy Murray. Mathieu has briefly set aside his duties. As dignified as de Gaulle, almost as tall, he is granting a quick interview. I could listen to his beautiful English all day.

The lemon tart – like most of the desserts, it is from a famed patisserie just round the corner – is sublime. My coffee is twice refilled, without asking. For two blessed hours, no one has mentioned the virus.

The catastrophe about to break over our service economy, and such catering enterprises as this, has yet to dawn on most. As in March I suspected, several Morningside businesses will never open again. Our only off-licence, the Hallmark card shop and several beauty parlours last week declared their end.

Each one was someone’s dream. Every little economic unit was a community. In the months ahead, hundreds of thousands of people – mostly young – will frantically chase jobs that, for a year or three, will not exist. The intimate, germy coffee culture enjoyed by twentysomethings since the 1990s is unlikely, amidst and for long after Covid, to return.

Mindful of all those calories, I walk briskly home, after settling up and leaving a fiver pour les serveurs.

May they, Mathieu and Petit Paris make it through.