Fay Maschler visits Emmanuel Macron’s favourite restaurant Fay Maschler
It was seven years ago that Gérard Tafanel who with his brother Serge owns the Montparnasse brasserie La Rotonde said to one of his regular customers: “You will be president one day.” That customer, described by the waiters as “respectful, kind and polite” was the now 39-year-old Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron, leader of La République en Marche! and as of May 14 the youngest ever President of France. By virtue of this position, it is perhaps worth noting, he is also Co-Prince of Andorra.
That his wife Brigitte Trogneux is 24 years older is, of course, riveting and encouraging, but it is Macron’s choice of where to eat at least once a week presumably not any more that sends me hotfoot on the Eurostar to Paris to have dinner at La Rotonde.
Langan’s Brasserie, the London restaurant once co-owned by Sir Michael Caine and renowned as a 1980s celebrity hangout, has been rescued from administration.The Mayfair hotspot, where ordinary diners
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t is 1972. I am 27. My friend Dusty Wesker, wife of Arnold Wesker who is great mate of my then husband Tom, thrusts an Evening Standard at me announcing a competition they are running whereby the prize is to be the paper’s restaurant critic. With one or maybe even both of my two small daughters – the younger only a few months old – in my arms or round my feet I am thinking I probably shouldn’t be considering a job, but grievously I miss working, having been a copywriter at JWT and a journalist on the new, improved Radio Times. And the prize obtains only for three months…what harm can it do? I enter on the closing date.