By Shane Cubis
“Obviously I am not paying for you to go to France on a food
study,” wrote Nicholas, in my second disappointment of the day.* The third
disappointment quickly followed on its heels, when another email popped in from
Nick that wasn’t a change of heart accompanied by a first-class ticket
to Provence. “I want you to explore the services of Jean-Marie Liere from Our French
Impressions.”
Still, all wasn’t lost. My local pub was doing a $15 sardine
nicoise with a complimentary house white that might have had some sauvignon
blanc in the mix, getting me in the Gallic spirit for a chat with Jean-Marie
Liere, who takes people on tours of France to soak up the culinary scene,
cultural and historical surrounds, and excellent company.
In Australia, we are blessed with a frankly ridiculous range
of cuisines, especially if you live in a rapidly gentrifying, former working
class suburb where pubs that used to house hulking men covered with the filth
of their day’s labours can offer reasonably priced sardine nicoises with a
straight face. From my place, on the seven-minute walk to the Northcote Social
Club (formerly the Commercial Hotel, whose carpets would have had an entirely
different aroma, I suspect), my path passes eateries offering the following
international options: Israeli, Vietnamese, Thai, Ethiopian, Irish, Japanese,
Macedonian, Italian, Indonesian, Malaysian, Turkish, Indian, Modern Australian
and French. There was also Egyptian, but it closed down.**
But, of course, there’s nothing like actually eating a
nation’s food within that nation’s borders. Especially when you’re being guided
about by someone like Jean-Marie, whose life experience seems to have been
custom-designed to lead hungry travellers on bespoke tours through the “real”
Provence, showing off authentic cuisine, local wines and expert craftmanship
that winds up in your belly.
“One day my wife said, ‘You’re not doing anything with your
French-ness’,” he explains. “The next morning, I went and researched how I
could build a website for no money and start blogging. So, basically, Our
French Impressions was born that day as a website, and it grew up from there.
That's why we are ex-wife and ex-husband – we have very different ways of going
about things. My wife is a perfectionist, which means she doesn't do anything
until it's perfect, where I stop and I fine-tune it all the way.
“So, these trips didn't really happen until we were
separated because I said, ‘Even if I have only two clients, I’m going to run
the tour, and then the next year will be better, and the next year we'll have
more people.’ Now, I'm at this stage where I have done three trips. One
professional with Pepe Saya – a research trip on butter in France that was
entirely financed by him, and we did a book about it. Then I had two private
tours with clients who I knew through somebody else. I mean, it's word of mouth,
really. Now we have two trips planned for next year. I think we will fill them
up because there's a lot of interest.
“But it’s also very personal, too. The best testimonial I've
got was in September. It touched me very deeply, because the lady said, ‘Where
we were expecting a tour guide, we ended up with a friend.’ It's not
necessarily that I want to be friends with everybody, but I want people to feel
that they have taken care of very privately.”
Pained, I turned the conversation back to Australia’s
culinary scene, which has changed significantly in the time our man has been
here. And he has a theory as to why that is.
“I think a big change has occurred
because of MasterChef,” he says. “MasterChef has brought into
everybody’s home an interest for better cooking, and also has driven people to
buy better ingredients, fresher things, paddock-to-plate kind of things. That
has forced the chefs and the restaurateurs to actually up their games, as well.
So, it's been a win-win situation, I suppose. And then they also involved
children, so those children are now young adults and they want to cook properly
and have a nice feeling.”
It’s no revelation to say that for a lot of us, food is a
major component in our upbringing. Whether you were a fussy eater who would
only tolerate peas, mashed potato and sausages, or a Dora the Explorer type who
wanted everything in their mouth and make it snappy, there’s hardly a person
you’ll meet who won’t be able to wax lyrical on the meals they necked in short
pants. Or, you know, pinafores.
“My mum was at home,” explains Jean-Marie, “so her duty was
to take care of us as children and keep the household running while Dad was
away working. Her mum was the same and her grandmother was the same. So,
basically, she had the same training as I had, which is just watching people
you love doing the things that are going to feed you.
“Over in France at the time, kids didn’t go to school on
Wednesday. And I vividly remember that was the day where we would go to the
market and then maybe to the butcher or do all the food shopping with her. And
the butcher would always give you a slice of saucisson, or whatever. He was
doing a loss, basically, saying, ‘Well, that piece of saucisson that I’m giving
away today will bring back business.’”
Any Aussie in a romantic relationship with someone of
certain European heritages knows that almost everything is food (and what’s
left over is sex). It has to be discussed, planned, anticipated, dissected and
judged. You can’t just off-handedly tell your Italian father-in-law that the
place on the corner does a great Lebanese pizza. And you can’t tell Nonna you
had Macca’s before visiting, unless you want to cop the wooden spoon.
“My family lived a very nomadic life because my dad was
posted regularly elsewhere,” Jean-Marie explains. “So I think I have moved 45
times in my life. I lived in France and Mexico and Scotland and Holland and in
Australia. I visited, I don't know, over 40 countries for sure, or not far from
50. So, I have also an appreciation of different cultures and different foods,
and now even the language and the food are related. A lot of the jokes in
France or the expression are food related, and it’s really weird because this
is a big, big part of French life. I mean, I know when I'm with my mum and my
sister, who live on the west coast now, it’s going to be, ‘Oh, where are we
going for lunch tomorrow?’
“It’s very funny – you can be at a two-Michelin-star
restaurant for lunch and then the conversation will go on to, ‘What are we
going to have for dinner?’ Even if it’s just a piece of saucisson and some red
wine, you never miss a meal. That doesn’t happen.”
I tell him it’s actually a bit of a shock for me to spend
time with some unreformed Aussie-Aussie mates, who enjoy endless cups of tea and
sunny-side-up eggs on dry toast. Who’ll order the beef and black bean, and look
suspiciously at any beer that doesn’t come in a marone and gold can. It’s
actually a bit of a palate cleanser, or a nostalgia trip that takes me back to
dunking Milk Arrowroots in sweet milky tea while Nana Jean played tennis with
her gossipy friends on the Russell Vale court.
(Actually, I didn’t tell him a single word of this, but you
can imagine me as a far better interviewer, forging spontaneous connections
between cultures and praising rather than burying my own family’s relationship
with food. No? Okay, let’s move on to when I asked him about how things are
different for diners in 2019 as opposed to the late ’90s.)
“When I first came here,” he replies, “about 22 years ago
now, there was not much table manners. Kids would run around freely in
restaurants, screaming their heads off. A lot of people would go to a fancy
restaurant, and not know how to use the cutlery. And then the waiters were
backpackers that didn't know anything about waitressing.
“I remember my first boss, we've been very busy, we have
done very well, and one night she said to me, ‘Oh, here is a couple of hundred
dollars, go and take your wife to a good restaurant on us.’ So we decided to go
to Café Sydney – and we didn't get our wine until the middle of the main
course. That's the sort of thing that has changed tremendously.
“In Sydney, anyway. It was slightly different in Melbourne
because of the influence of the Italians and the Greeks. There was a culture of
waitressing being a job, where in Sydney, it's very recent that people are
actually employed to that job or at least trained to be properly.”
I threw in some words like sommelier to let him know
I knew my cuisine, that I’d be something of an asset on his overseas tours, but
upon reading the transcript of our conversation, I realise I’m probably too gauche.
But at least I crossed out the questions I had about Gabriel Gaté and Manu Feildel.
Last word belongs, as it should, to Jean-Marie: “It is a
very, very personal trip. Most tours that are run in Provence, or elsewhere in
France, are usually by expats – people that are English or Australian or
American who settled in Provence years ago, they bought a property or whatever.
And in many ways they know Provence today better than me. But they don't have
the anchor in the terroir, if you will. My roots are there.
“And actually, this last trip there was really, really
strong as a feeling. Aborigines here talk about country, and I really felt for
the first time, in my bones, it was not intellectual at all. It was really a
deep connection, a physical connection, really, with the land in Provence,
which I have never had happen before. I suppose it was just too much noise in
my head about it. All these things happen to you in curious ways.”
*My first disappointment of the day, of course, was spotting
myself in the mirror and realising I hadn’t spontaneously dropped 15-odd kilos
overnight.
**And now you know why.
