Outside in the passageway, the December sunlight paints sharp shadows on the cobblestones. While Mauro looks around inside, his father, Jacques, chats with the owner, a tired old Lebanese man who recounts the place’s history. It’s been a focal point of the neighborhood for a long time. In 2001, when he bought it, it was an upmarket bar run by local personalities, with a small, high-quality restaurant, a good wine list, and cheeses and charcuterie imported directly from the producers. But everyone in the area still remembered La Belle Saison as a family restaurant where generations of local craftsmen went to eat, a lair of pleasure seekers that had up to ten different kinds of andouillettes on the menu; everyone talked about the tables set with checked tablecloths, the burlap curtains with red tiebacks, the reproductions hung on the stone walls—the still lifes in particular: the return from the hunt in the marshes, shellfish with a carafe of sparkling wine, a surreal Arcimboldo-style fruit basket—along with the certificate of good and loyal service awarded by the Association of Connoisseurs of Authentic Andouillette, displayed in a gilt frame next to a ham hanging from a nail. At one time, this local institution was serving a hundred covers per day—two seatings at lunch, two at dinner. Everything had gone well until the owners lost a lawsuit against their neighbors and were forced to get rid of the upstairs kitchen and somehow squeeze one onto the staircase. Without a real kitchen, and lacking resources, the restaurant was transformed into a high-end bar, and soon after that—hankering after a retirement of growing vegetables in Quercy after forty years in the restaurant business, twenty of them at La Belle Saison—the couple sold.

The current owner had just married a much younger woman and wanted to give her the bar as a gift. Together, for seven years, they had run La Belle Saison with the same clientele, who came for the labneh and baba ghanoush, the hummus and tabbouleh, and all sorts of grilled kebabs and meat-stuffed pastries of Lebanese cuisine. Today, the business is on its last legs, Jacques quickly realizes: there is still the problem of the kitchen on the stairs, and the owner is quite old. Running a restaurant demands an energy that he no longer has; he, too, would like to retire now.