The marvels of French Onion Soup
Memories of La Bonne Soupe and Madame Tall.
When I was in 6th grade, I began to learn French. I was at a small private school in Jamaica, Queens called Highland, a beautiful little place filled with a diverse community of kids from every sort of background with amazing teachers who were a little off kilter, but in a good way.
My favorite teacher happened to be my French teacher, Madame Tall. Interestingly, she was quite tall, over six feet. She was thin and straight like a ruler, with a long elegant neck and a cropped cap of dark hair, like a French starlet from the ‘20s.
She spoke with a lilting French accent, her voice rich and creamy, like she had maybe taken voice lessons with Julia Child. She was kind and cheerful, warm and encouraging, visibly excited by the opportunity to teach a full flock of middle schoolers a language they had never spoken before. How wonderful.
She called us by French names, mine was Judith (say zhoo-DEE), and taught us the language by engaging our young spongy language-loving brains. In other words, she taught us French with puppets.
Every day, after lessons of grammar and vocabulary, she would move our desks into a large round circle and take out the puppet theater. We would write and perform our plays in French, workshopping them together with a partner, and then, when we were ready, we would perform, crouching behind the large wooden theater, letting our stories unfold. I still remember the puppets, small and gentle little cloth bodies with big wobbly heads, and the way I tried to fit two fingers into each of the arms and one up into the head to get the best range of expression and emotion from the lifeless little dolls. They were quite awkward, like us.
Madame Tall’s puppet shows were everything – funny and silly, exciting and confidence-boosting collaborations that taught us everything about the language – how to think, how to write, how to express, how to tell a story. But we never realized we were learning. That was the hat trick.
One day Madame Tall explained the puppets were getting a rest; they would be shelved for a bit while we moved onto something else. That something was the French Restaurant. Madame Tall explained that to truly learn French we must also learn about the food; about the culture of eating in Paris. We spent a week discussing bistros, brasseries, and boulangeries, the classic dishes, the ingredients; and the necessity of good bread and salty butter.
She brought in cheeses and croissants, baguettes and boudin, anything that was easy to pack up and share with a hungry group of junior high school students. We learned how to navigate a menu in French and how to order and interact with servers without relying on our native tongue.
The culmination of this exercise, she told us, would be a trip to a French restaurant in New York City; a table had been reserved for us where the staff expected us to read French menus and to order in French. We were instructed not to come to school in sweatpants and not to speak English. We could not wait.
On the arranged day, a cold one in the winter in 1984, we boarded the F train in bulk, boys in stiff dress shoes and pants with pleats, girls in tights, leg warmers, and dresses with large shoulder pads. We bundled up and headed from 179th Street in Queens to 57th Street in midtown; our destination: La Bonne Soupe, a classic bistro Madame Tall assured us was as French as possible this side of the Atlantic.
I can still remember sitting on the leather banquette against the wall surrounded by my friends – Derek, Octavia, Walter, Dylan, James, Jackie, Marciano, Melissa, Mayumi, and Gazala. All of us kids, in various states of explosive pimply puberty and blinding insecurity, giggling in anticipation of the famed Onion Soup and the Beef Bourguignon, the garlicky escargots, the moules in their pot with fennel and white wine, staring down the trays of frites ferried with regularity through the aisles of the tiny restaurant, leaving a trail of fried salty air in their wake.
I can recall the exact phrase I used to order my soup: “Je voudrai un soup l'oignon, s’il vous plaît.” I was so nervous. I was speaking in French! But someone understood me! Wow! Amazing. Just amazing.
We tried all the dishes, though we did not care for the snails; they were deemed too weird. But the French Onion Soup was a universal hit – and how could it not be, with its blanket of gooey cheese, pulled up on spoons in melting ribbons like taffy to our mouths, revealing hunks of soft broth-soaked bread and tangles of caramelized onions, and a deep rich soup that tasted sweet and buttery, nothing like the pale limp chicken soup I was used to. If this was soup, I was ready to go on a liquid diet. To this day, some 40 years later, now a food writer, it remains one of the most memorable meals of my life.
This week, on Sunday I returned to La Bonne Soupe with Eiji for dinner before Alvin Ailey, a tradition that also began when I was 13. As we settled in at our table, I mentioned to the hostess that the last time I had been in I was with my middle school French class. I told her that back then, we had all ordered in French. She laughed and said the servers no longer spoke French, maybe one did, she wasn’t sure. Things had changed.
So we ordered in English. It didn’t matter. The charm was still there. The memory of that day crept in; it sat beside me while I ate with Eiji – two beautiful bowls of onion soup crowned with bubbly golden gruyere, a tray of escargots tucked into pods of garlicky oil stained green with parsley, a sleeve of thin and crispy salty fries, a fat ice cream stuffed profiterole drizzled with fudgy hot chocolate sauce.
It was wonderful, the food, particularly that soup, so unapologetically cheesy, buttery and rich, like a puffy coat on a bitter cold winter night; and sharing it with Eiji, remembering back to when I was his age and sitting in possibly that very same seat. I could hear Madame Tall’s voice in my head, calling me Judeeee and laughing with us as we passed plates around the table, complementing us all on our French, encouraging us to keep ordering and eating.
I wish I could have called her and shared the moment, but I couldn’t. Madame Tall died in January 2023 at the age of 95. I read her obituary on a Highland alumni Facebook page, and learned so much more about her than I did when I was in 6th grade. She had moved from Europe to the US at the age of 12 when it became too dangerous for Jewish families to remain. The obituary continued: “She attended Northfield Mount Hermon and Denison University, where she acted in many theatrical productions. After college, Natasha worked as a secretary. She raised her two daughters in Hollis, Queens. When they were young, she decided to return to work, and although she had never taught or taken an education class, Natasha, with her ever present chutzpah and charisma in hand, was hired as a French teacher. She was immensely creative and well loved by her students.”
There will never be a time when I pierce through the raft of melted cheese crusting the top of a bowl of French Onion Soup and won’t think of her and those puppet shows and how lucky I was to know her, to be her student. And isn’t that what food does? It holds memory, like a vault; it stashes it inside, secreted in the cheese and the butter and the onions, and keeps it there, waiting for you, until the next time.
You are such an exquisite writer - thank you for sharing this great story. And now I really am in the mood for french onion soup!
So many great memories of La Bonne Soupe! I need to make an excuse to come to Midtown to go there this winter for a lunch. And still such a deal! I miss its sister resto, La Fondue, which was right next door. That was a fancy night out in my college days in the early 1990s: $15 for 3 courses and a small carafe of wine.