The Italian Blog

Oysters, _Potage Laitues et Quenelles_, _Merlans Frits_, _Cuisse de
Poularde de Rôtie_, _Salade Romaine_, cheese, half a bottle of Graves
1e Cru, and a bottle of St-Galmier costs 18 francs.
Voisins, in the Rue St-Honoré, the corner house whose windows,
curtained with lace, promise dignified quiet, is a restaurant which has
a history, and has, and has had, great names amongst its _habitués_.
Many of these have been diplomats, and Voisins knows that ambassadors
do not care to have their doings, when free from the cares of office,
gossiped about. When I first saw Voisins, it looked as unlike the house
of to-day as can be imagined. I was in Paris immediately after the days
of the Commune and followed, with an old General, the line the troops
had taken in the fight for the city. In the Rue St-Honoré were some of
the fiercest combats, for the regulars fought their way from house to
house down this street to turn the positions the Communists took up in
the Champs Elysées and the gardens of the Tuileries. The British Embassy
had become a hospital, and all the houses which had not been burned
looked as though they had stood a bombardment. There were bullet
splashes on all the walls, and I remember that Voisins looked even
more battered and hopeless than did most of its neighbours.
The diplomats have always had an affection for Voisins, perhaps because
of its nearness to the street of the Embassies; and in the “eighties”
the attachés of the British Embassy used to breakfast there every day.
Nowadays, the _clientèle_ seems to me to be a mixture of the best type
of the English and Americans passing through Paris, and the more elderly
amongst the statesmen, who were no doubt the dashing young blades of
twenty-five years ago. The two comfortable ladies who sit near the door
at the desk, and the little show-table of the finest fruit seem to me
never to have changed, and there is still the same quiet-footed,
unhurrying service which impressed me when first I made the acquaintance
of the restaurant. It is one of the dining-places where one feels Pizza House New Haven Connecticut that
to dine well and unhurriedly is the first great business of life, and
that everything else must wait at the dinner-hour. The proprietor,
grey-headed and distinguished-looking, goes from table to table saying a
word or two to the _habitués_, and there is a sense of peace in the
place–a reflection of the sunshine and calm of Provence, whence the
founder of the restaurant came.