The New York Post:
“Fast Times: The Parisians throw the best Ramadam feasts, and Ethan Gilsdorf tells you where”
-November 12, 2002
The Parisians throw the best Ramadan feasts, and ETHAN GILSDORF tells you where
SEATED at a café on Place des Abbesses in Mont-martre, the village-like hilltop neighborhood in northern Paris, Hisham Matar is ravenous.
It’s the first night of the Muslim holy month of Rama-dan, and he’s been fasting all day.
“You enter into different levels of consciousness as the month goes on, from dreading the fasting to becoming connected to it,” explains Matar, a writer of Libyan descent living in Paris.
Matar and his wife Diana, an American from the Bay Area who converted to Islam in 1998, live in Paris, home to an estimated 375,000 Arabs. It’s an ideal city to schmooze with the pious during Ramadan, a month of days spent fasting (food, cigarettes and sex are forbidden), with nights devoted to prayer, socializing and feasting at the myriad cafés, couscous restaurants and kabob stands.
The holiday commences after the first appearance of the new crescent moon of Ra-madan, the Muslim calendar’s ninth month. This year, it began Nov. 6 and will continue through Dec. 5. “It’s not just about eating, though,” explains Matar.
“There’s also a spiritual abstinence. You can break your fast by looking at someone in the wrong way or by getting p- - - - - off. Food is symbolic, but it’s not the main issue.” Nonetheless, at the end of each night, some Muslims head to the Left Bank, to the shining Institut du Monde Arabe (www.imarabe.org), the city’s Arab cultural center, home to cafés, movies and art shows. Nearby, the restaurant at the Mosque de Paris tempts with bowls of tagine, hot mint tea and colorful pastries. The nightclub Café de la Danse celebrates the month with “Les Belles Nuits de Rama-dan,” a 10-night program of traditional and modern Arab-world music and dance running through Nov. 23 (www.chez.com/cafedeladanse).
Tonight, at the humble Al-gerian Restaurant des Quatre Frères in the mainly Arab quarter of Ménilmontant, Franco-Arab pop stars and struggling students alike dip into huge bowls of soup and fluffy heaps of semolina (127 Boulevard de Ménilmontant). Elsewhere in the neighborhood, shopkeepers extend their wares out onto the sidewalks. Tables are laden with bags of nuts, boxes of dates and fried snacks.
Crowds fill the halal butcher shops, and mill about the modest mosque on Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud.
At the Bague de Kenza, an Algerian pastry shop a few blocks away, there’s a line of hungry fast-breakers stocking up on sweet honey-nut delicacies with names like cornes de gazelle (gazelle horns) and doigts d’or golden fingers (106 Rue St.-Maur). “Not just Islam, but all the monotheistic religions — Ju-daism, Christianity — have a period of fasting,” reminds Nadir Haddoum, one of the four “brothers” who run Quatre Frères, as he flips sausages on his charcoal grill. “And here in this quarter, we have Portuguese, Jews, Arabs, Chinese. Just like New York.”
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