Speaking of Grégoire’s: I once walked by there with my distinguished colleague Jean-Louis Colliot-Thélène, and remarked to him that it was a really good French take-out.
“It is a contradiction,” he said gravely.
“No, seriously,” I told him, “it’s take out but it’s run by a real French chef.”
“If he were really French,” Colliot-Thélène said, “he would not run a take-out.”
At which point there was nothing for it but for C-T to go into the restaurant himself to question Grégoire about his national origins.
Colliot-Thélène came out and we walked together for a while in silence. Eventually he said, “That is a very unusual Frenchman.”
Quomodocumque 