Tortoni (Paris)
The Tortoni was a café - restaurant in Paris on the Boulevard des Italiens at the corner of Rue Taitbout. In the 19th century it was a popular meeting place for politicians, writers and artists. It found its way into numerous works of literature, painters and illustrators of the time chose it as a backdrop for their pictures. The specialties of the house were mainly ice cream in different variations, of which the almond ice cream creation biscuit tortoni spread internationally. In addition, Tortoni was the namesake for the traditional Café Tortoni in Buenos Aires .
location
The Tortoni was at 22 Boulevard des Italiens, on the corner with Rue Taitbout. Currently (2014) a branch of the bank BNP Paribas is located there . When the coffee house opened in 1798, the Boulevard des Italiens was still called Boulevard de Cerutti and was also known colloquially as le petit Coblence (little Koblenz), as many emigrants who had fled to the Rhineland during the revolution were staying here. From 1815 to 1828 the street was called Boulevard de Gand before the current name Boulevard des Italiens was introduced. The name refers to the Théâtre de la Comédie Italienne , which was not far from the boulevard and whose building now serves as a venue for the Théâtre national de l'Opéra-Comique . The Tortoni wasn't the only popular café on the Boulevard des Italiens. Café Riche , Café du Helder , Café Anglais , Café Cardinal and the restaurant La Maison dorée were on the same street . Other cafés in the area were the Café de Madrid , Café de Suède and Café des Variétes on the Boulevard Montmartre . These closely spaced cafés were popular meeting places for aristocrats, diplomats, artists and dandies in the 19th century . While most of the bars no longer exist, the Café de la Paix on Place de l'Opéra, which dates back to 1862, has been preserved to the present day.
history
The ice-cream confectioner ( glacier-confiseur ) Velloni from Naples founded the establishment in 1798 as a "café champêtre", a rather rustic café. In 1804, other authors state that in 1809, Giuseppe Tortoni (1775–1864) took over the house. The café's namesake also came from Italy and had previously worked as a waiter at Velloni. Successively three generations of the Tortoni family ran the café until the end of the 19th century.
The Tortoni's offer included drinks such as coffee, tea, drinking chocolate , beer from the Netherlands, Punch Romaine and liqueurs, as well as waffles, a selection of cakes and, above all, ice cream. The Parisian Café Procope had previously offered ice cream, but Tortoni is the first real ice cream parlor in town. The ice cream specialties of the house included Glace Plombières , an ice cream with candied fruit, the peach ice cream Glace aux pêches Tortoni and the Almond Ice Cream Biscuit Tortoni , whose recipe later became popular in the United States. After Tortoni had already opened a billiards room above the café on the first floor, he converted the café into a café-restaurant and from the 1820s onwards also offered hot dishes like a brasserie . At lunchtime, the guests did not order their meals à la carte , but rather chose their dishes from the buffet, which was also on the first floor in front of the salons , in accordance with the customs of the time . Typical meals included chicken fricassee, meat in aspic, or fish dishes.
The daily routine in the café was something like this: in the morning the stockbrokers came to have their déjeuners d'affairs (business breakfast). At the beginning of the 19th century, only men who were regulars called tortonists would meet for lunch . In the afternoon, artists came to sip an absinthe and in the evening the ladies of the company waited in their carriages in front of the café, where the waiters gave them the popular ice creams and cakes ("plateau d'argent chargé de glaces et de gâteau" on silver trays) ) brought to the car as dessert after supper .
The Tortoni on the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris was abandoned in 1893. Jean Touan, who immigrated from France, founded Café Tortoni in Buenos Aires as early as 1858 . The restaurant, modeled on the Parisian Tortoni, is located on Avenida de Mayo No. 825 and has existed to the present day.
Famous guests
The Tortoni had already established itself as a popular meeting place during the First Empire . Representatives of different political views met here: former terrorists, supporters of the House of Bourbon , Jacobins and Bonapartists . The bar experienced a heyday during the reign of Louis-Philippe I and the Second Empire . French Foreign Minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord , Turkish ambassador Halil Serif Pascha and Prussian envoy Otto von Bismarck frequented the Tortoni . The future President Adolphe Thiers went to Tortoni when he was thirty to eat his ice cream. There were also personalities such as the cartoonist and dandy Alfred Grimaud and the diplomat Casimir de Montrond . The director Louis Véron or the librettist Alphonse Royer visited the Tortoni from the neighboring opera house . The composers Jacques Offenbach and Emmanuel Chabrier were also among the guests. The editor of Figaro Hippolythe de Villemessant , the critic Albert Wolff , the journalists Aurélien Scholl , Yvan de Woestyne , Albéric Second and James Gordon Bennett junior , editor of the New York Herald, also met here . Famous writers who frequented Tortoni included Alfred de Musset , Alexandre Dumas , Eugène Sue , the Goncourt brothers , Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly , Honoré de Balzac , Catulle Mendès , Armand Silvestre , Stendhal , Gustave Flaubert, and Arsène Houssaye . Charles Baudelaire regularly had lunch with the painter Édouard Manet at Tortoni. In addition, the painters Alfred Stevens and Félicien Rops and the photographer Étienne Carjat were among the guests.
Otto von Bismarck
Adolphe Thiers
Jacques Offenbach
Honoré de Balzac
Gustave Flaubert
Charles Baudelaire
The tortoni in literature and art
The writers among the guests mentioned their visits to the Tortoni in numerous works. Louis-Benoît Picard was one of the first authors to describe tortoni. In his play The Idiot from 1809 he writes about “My cup of chocolate at Tortoni”. Honoré de Balzac has the figure of Frau du Val-Noble order an ice cream with fruit in the Tortoni in his novel Glanz und Elend der Courtesans : “Everyone knows that there are small, very fine preserved fruits on the ice; the whole thing is served in glasses ... ". In Florentine Nights, Heinrich Heine describes a French officer who, after the Napoleonic campaign in Russia, “got such an antipathy to everything frozen” “that he now even disgusted the sweetest and most pleasant ice cream flavors from Tortoni.” Guy de Maupassant, too went into The Liebling on Tortoni's ice cream specialties. During an evening carriage ride, he has Magdalene ask her companion: “Do we want to have an ice cream at Tortoni before we go home?” In addition, de Maupassant mentions Tortoni in day and night stories , Hans and Peter , two brothers and Mr. Parent . Edmond de Goncourt mentions the tortoni in his diary of 1871, Émile Zola in Die Treibjagd , Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly in Teufelskinder , Stendhal in red and black and Gustave Flaubert lets the figure of the Dussardier on the steps of the in The Education of Emotions Café Tortoni is dying. One of the best-known works in which the tortoni is mentioned is the novel In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust . In addition to French authors, it was the American Edgar Allan Poe who immortalized the tortoni. In his satirical How to Write a Blackwood Article , he describes a capon dish as it was served in Tortoni. In Paris, the Prix Tortoni literary prize has been awarded since 2009 in memory of the Tortoni as a meeting place for writers.
Painters and illustrators encouraged the Tortoni to make some pictorial representations. For example, Jean Béraud, known for his views of the city of Paris, painted the picture Le Boulevard devant le Café Tortoni around 1890 , in which he sketched the street view of the Boulevard des Italiens with the guests sitting on the terrace of the restaurant. The terrace can also be found in the illustrations by Eugène Charles François Guérard , Paul Renouard and Adolphe Martial Potémont . In his painting Chez Tortoni , Édouard Manet shows a guest who has taken a seat at a table in the restaurant and is making notes with a pencil. The title of the painting, however, does not come from Manet and it is not known whether the painter actually portrayed a guest at Tortoni.
literature
- Theodore Child: Characteristic Parisian Cafés in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol.LXXVIII, April 1889.
- LK: Farewell to Tortoni's: The famous cafe of the boulevied shuts its doors , in: The New York Times, July 30, 1893. [1]
- Daniel de Nève, Sophie Monneret, David Van Laer: Visiting Manet: the great painter as a gourmet . Heyne, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-453-12355-7 .
- Luc Bihl-Willette: Des tavernes aux bistrots; histoire des cafés . L'Age d'Homme, Lausanne 1997, ISBN 2-8251-0773-5 .
- Karin Becker: The gourmand, the bourgeois and the novelist; the French food culture in literature and society of the bourgeois age . Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-465-03102-4 .
- Auguste Lepage: Les cafés artistiques et littéraires de Paris . Martin Boursin, Paris 1882.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Luc Bihl-Willette: Des tavernes aux bistrots; histoire des cafés , p. 95.
- ↑ a b c d e Karin Becker: The Gourmand, the Bourgeois and the Novelist , p. 181.
- ↑ Biscuit Tortoni was on the menu at the Hotel Waldorf-Astoria in 1900. See the Waldorf-Astoria menu in the archives of the New York Public Library
- ↑ De Nève, Monneret, Van Laer: Visiting Manet , p. 44.
- ↑ Louis-Benoît Picard: The idler , translation by August Wilhelm Iffland. Berlin 1812, p. 275.
- ↑ Honoré de Balzac: Splendor and misery of courtesan , Chapter 3 What old gentlemen let the love taste . Online at Projekt Gutenberg.
- ↑ Heinrich Heine: Florentine Nights , Chapter 2. Online at Project Gutenberg.
- ↑ Guy de Maupassant: Bel Ami , chapter 10. Online at Projekt Gutenberg.
- ↑ Reference to the Prix Tortoni at http://www.prix-litteraires.net/
Coordinates: 48 ° 52 ′ 17.8 " N , 2 ° 20 ′ 12.9" E