The Smallest Restaurant in Paris: XVII — The Star

There is a point in writing a memoir when you realise, sometimes annoyingly late, what the whole thing has actually been about. I thought I was writing about moving to Paris, learning pâtisserie, opening a tiny supper club in a 21-square-metre flat and somehow ending up with a cookbook deal. That’s not quite the whole truth.

The last thing I had on my mind when I moved to Paris was to open a supper club. I moved to Paris to learn French pâtisserie and French, which tells you quite a lot about how much I knew at 25. I had no grand strategy, no five-year plan, and certainly no vision board involving television, books, self-publishing, warehouses, storage fees, or a life lived between countries. But I did have a stubborn feeling that something more interesting was possible, and that I was unlikely to find it by staying exactly where I was.

The final card in this memoir tarot series is The Star. In my version, the star is made from hand-drawn Eiffel Towers, which feels right, because Paris was never simply the backdrop to this story. It begins as an idea, becomes a test, and then becomes the big romance of the memoir. Not the French boyfriend, but the city itself: difficult, seductive, maddening, beautiful, and not especially interested in making life easy.

Over the past few weeks, I have been telling the story behind The Smallest Restaurant in Paris through five tarot cards. The Fool was the one-way ticket and the questionable confidence of leaving London before I had any real idea what I was doing. Temperance was the slow, sometimes boring work of learning to adjust. Three of Pentacles was apprenticeship and craft. Nine of Pentacles was the little table with two chairs, and the discovery that limitation can become possibility if you are resourceful enough.

The Star brings all of that together. It is the card of hope, but not the floaty, inspirational-poster kind. It is more practical than that, and much more useful. It is the part of you that keeps going when the plan has already started to fall apart, when optimism has been properly tested, and when you realise that wanting something very badly does not mean it is going to be served on a silver platter.

The Smallest Restaurant in Paris, my memoir, is out now.

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The rest of this post, including the story behind my first Eiffel Tower, a scene from the drafting process that did not make the final book, the less romantic reality of making this book, the video reading and a few questions to sit with, is for paid subscribers.

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