Meet Paris Oyster

September 1, 2014
In her breezy and engaging new paean to the French way of living and eating well, Guiliano (French Women Don’t Get Fat) discusses one of her favorite foods and the tiny Paris oyster bar in the Sixth Arrondissement that’s become her home away from home: Huitrerie Régis (huîtres is French for “oyster”), which is barely big enough to accommodate 20 diners with seven tables inside and a few outside. It is run by the imperious but charming Régis, who bakes his own apple tart for the restaurant six days each week. It’s not the kind of place where everyone will call out your name when you arrive, and the small staff may be indifferent if you’re new. In fact, when Guiliano went for the first time, starving and ill-tempered, Régis made her wait 30 minutes for a table. As she learned later, his number one rule is “Nobody gives me pressure.” But her bad mood was quickly forgotten upon tasting the oysters, which are simply accompanied by a slice of bread with a thick layer of salted butter and a chilled glass of wine. Guiliano also provides lessons in how to open and eat an oyster (an expert shucker should leave the liquor in the bottom shell to avoid a dry, less flavorful tasting experience) and gives a brief but helpful overview of French oysters, including types, regions, and which wine makes for the best pairing.

October 1, 2014
Another instructive fantasy of French luxury lifestyles from former Veuve Clicquot CEO and best-selling author Guiliano (French Women Don't Get Facelifts, 2013, etc.). "Where else do you find people excited to rapture over slurping slippery gross-looking chunks of flesh down their gullets? Ummm...delicieux." In this slender book, Guiliano sets out to convince readers that Paris is the international center for oyster lovers, and her narrative is rather like a whirlwind specialty tour. She manages to make her own nationality seem like an affectation by salting her already French-influenced prose with often cliched French words and phrases and inconsistent replacements of "the" with "zee." This book is not likely to please fans of good travel and food literature, but for the author's fans, and for a light first introduction to the world of oyster consumption and the oyster's place in French culture, it may be a pleasant choice. Guiliano circles around a tiny and excellent oyster restaurant in Paris, the Huitrerie Regis, and its predictably charming and temperamental owner, making them the stepping-off point for the rest of her material. The author provides some solid information about oysters embedded in scattershot anecdotes. Throughout the book, she devotes sections to oysters' nutritional value, a brief history, the many varieties and their characteristics, how to open them, eat them and evaluate them, the condiments and wines that go best with them, the oyster growers of France, the first oyster experiences of her friends and even a few glances at the oysters of other nations. Her preference is very much for the freshest possible raw oysters, but as in her previous books, she includes a nice selection of French, American and Italian recipes in the penultimate chapter. A somewhat fluffy and affected introduction to mostly French oyster consumption.

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