What could be more Parisian than a Parisian bistro? High stools at a polished zinc bar, small tables, tightly packed rattan chairs, all facing the street. Le Mistral, at the corner of the rue des Pyrénées in Belleville ticks all these boxes so thoroughly that it could be awarded world heritage status. Yet it, and so many places like it, also tell a story about historic and modern migration to the French capital, which can still sometimes be glimpsed in the food the bistros serve.  

Their story began back in the 19^th century, when the people of Paris were busy inventing our modern concept of a restaurant. While the idea of dining in travellers’ inns had long existed and some fine dining spots were emerging for the upper classes, the notion of going out to eat in your home town was new to most people – and instigated, partly, by the kitchen staff of so many noble houses being left unemployed following the French revolution. 

Also important in creating the scene was a huge wave of internal movement as country dwellers from around France headed toward the newly industrialising cities in search of jobs and money. Among the largest groups of these were people from the south west regions of Aubrac and the Aveyron, beautiful areas of the mountainous Massif Central that were notoriously hard to farm and thus very poor.

When these people came to Paris, however, it was not to cook, but rather to sell charcoal. These migrants began establishing businesses across the city known by the same name they called themselves – les bougnats. While customers waited in these for their charcoal, the bougnats offered them pitchers of their own regional wines.

Before long, Parisians were coming to the bougnats only for the wine. As their popularity grew, the Aubracois and Aveyronnais migrants began providing simple dishes of their local food as well.

It was from this that the institution of the Paris bistro was born, and soon spread around the city. Café Flore, Brasserie Lipp, Le Dôme, and more, names now scored into the cultural history of the city and the world, all were run by people who came originally from outside Paris’s borders, from the distinctly non-Parisian world of the Massif Central. 

Over time, of course, the dishes served in such places strayed away from regional recipes, and the familiar menus of modern Paris, with their croque monsieurs, omelettes, and steak frites took their place. In Le Mistral in Belleville, however, the traditional flavours are preserved. 

Aligot is a combination of potato and cheese in nearly equal measure. It is flavoured by garlic, then mashed smooth like velvet. It is an ancient dish that was once served to pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago as they tramped their way across the austere hillsides of the rural south. 

“It would have been everywhere in Paris once,” Le Mistral’s owner told me with a sigh. “Now, in most places, you only have fries.”

The hidden impact of migrants on Paris cuisine did not stop in the 19^th century, however, as I discovered in Le Mistral’s kitchens themselves. For as with so many restaurants in the city dedicated to sustaining traditional flavours, here was staffed by a Sri Lankan chef. 

Statistics are hard to come by, but it’s reasoned there are between 50,000 and 100,000 Sri Lankan migrants living and working in the French capital today, almost certainly the city’s largest non-French-speaking group.  

With language skills not an essential qualification for entering the restaurant trade, many have ended up in kitchens out of necessity, starting in the same role George Orwell once worked when writing Down and Out in Paris and London, the dishwasher and general dogsbody referred to as a plongeur.

This was how Le Mistral’s chef started out, cleaning pots at the famous Deux Magots café on the Boulevard Saint Germaine, former haunt of Hemingway and Sartre, and yes, owned by people from the Aveyron. There, he learned the tastes and skills of southern cooking, before moving to Le Mistral to head a kitchen of his own. 

He explained to me the secrets of a perfect aligot, with as much passion and strictness as any Aveyron-born Frenchman talking about the dish of his homeland. 

“The potatoes should be boiled for a long time,” he explained, “for much flavour is brought out by boiling and they must be very soft before you start to mash.” 

He continued, outlining further small tips passed down through tradition that help the dish find its final form: that the potatoes should be placed back on the heat after draining, so that they are as dry as they can be before you add the butter. But only a very small amount of butter, because “Aligot is about the cheese. It should be 70 per cent potato, 30 per cent cheese.”

The cheese used in aligot is Tomme de Vache, a mountain cheese found across the hilly regions of France’s south. It is mild yet sour, just on the crumbly side of rubbery, and it must be stirred hard into the potato until it starts to disappear, until the ingredients begin to combine, to transform into cuisine. 

At last, I sat down to eat what had been created. The mixture wrapped about my fork like glue, though at the same time clung to the plate in strings as though reluctant to part from it. 

The first bite was rich and warm, with a sophistication that belied the dish’s simple, hearty ingredients: the tastes of the potato and cheese still distinct as themselves, yet coming together in a unique combined flavour. Like the bistros themselves, it was something of a paradox. 

The aligot tasted too rural to be truly of Paris. Here was a dish that belonged resolutely in a Massif Central shepherd’s hut, to be eaten with a gale outside and a goat at your feet. 

And yet its presence here, made perfectly by a man from Sri Lanka, spoke of this apparently traditional city’s willingness to accept, imbibe, and adapt flavours from beyond its limits. To make them in some way its own.

Moveable Feasts: Paris in Twenty Meals by Chris Newens is published by Profile Books