. . . After the play or opera it is the fashion to take supper in the Chinese quarter. These Orientals live some distance away in a few small streets where they have set up restaurants. Here you drink excellent tea and eat "ratatouille," a meat and vegetable stew, which no more resembles the real Chinese cooking--such as I became acquainted with in Saigon--than does a meal prepared for a Parisian workman in a creamery resemble a dinner at Voisin's or Paillard's. The difference is even greater, for nothing can compare, in point of delicacy, with the true Chinese fare served in fragile tiny painted cups which look as though they had been made for fairies. Sea-weed soups, lotus grains, young bamboo shoots, edible birds' nests, delicious shrimp pâtes mounded in the form of floweres and stars, perfumed sauces, small preserved tomatoes, light sticks of tortoise-shell and ivory, spoons of flower-adorned porcelain: the barbarous Occident is unworthy of you!
Make sure to follow the above link to Voisin's. It will blow your mind.
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