La Tour d'ArgentSix floors up, facing Notre-Dame

The window on the sixth floor

5th arrondissement, Paris, France — French cooking on the sixth floor above the Seine.

The frontage is small: one wrought-iron lamp above the door, the name written on the glass. A lift takes you to the sixth floor and the doors open onto the river. The windows run in a line from Notre-Dame to Île Saint-Louis, and in daylight the water throws light up at the white cloths.

The house has been serving since the sixteenth century. Owners have come and gone several times; the building has not moved, and neither has the cellar below it, where the stairs and the bottles have stayed in the same stone.

It opens on few days. Tuesday to Saturday only; lunch begins at twelve and finishes at two, dinner starts at seven and runs past midnight. A date worth having has to be built around that timetable rather than the other way round.

Older than most of Paris

In the sixteenth century, under Henri III, a man called Rourteau opened an inn on the bank of the Seine, opposite the quay where wine was unloaded and just inside the Porte Saint-Bernard. It served the people around the king. The small Tournelle castle beside it was built of stone from Champagne and caught the light with a silver shine, and the inn took that name for its own.

The fork is said to have appeared at a French table here for the first time. People ate with their hands then; to keep the white ruff at his collar clean, Henri IV used a fork at a dinner, and the story went round Paris afterwards. He came back often and ordered a chicken dish from Africa. The same king gave the house the right to hang a coat of arms.

From Richelieu to the Revolution this was where a serious dinner was eaten. The Duke of Richelieu gave a banquet for forty at which every dish on the table was beef, cooked thirty different ways. After the Revolution the house was rebuilt by Lecoq, who had cooked in the imperial kitchens, and the room went back to the work it had been doing.

In 1867, the year Paris held its world fair, the Café Anglais was at its height. Alexander II of Russia, the tsarevich who became Alexander III, King Wilhelm I of Prussia and Bismarck sat at one table, and the chef Dugléré cooked for them. The meal has been called the dinner of the three emperors ever since, and the recipes from that kitchen came to this house with the Terrails.

One duck, one number

In the middle of the nineteenth century Frédéric Delair moved from maître d'hôtel to owner and fixed the method for the house's duck in blood, which has carried his name since: canard Frédéric Delair. He carved it at the table with a fork, the knife never touching the plate, the slices falling as they were cut. He also began numbering every duck sold, and the count has run on without a break.

In 1911 André Terrail, grandfather of the present owner, bought the house from Delair and brought two things with him: Dugléré's recipes and the rare old bottles left behind by the neighbouring shop. In 1947 he passed it to his son Claude, who opened a second house in Tokyo and took the restaurant past its four hundredth year. Claude died in 2006 and his son André took over; the family is on its third generation.