LOOKOUT FOR GREAT FOOD
Evelyne Putman’s Chattanooga French Cooking
Café Francais: Tres Bien!
Café Francais is not the only “French” restaurant in Chattanooga, but
it is the only one with a genuine, authentic French-born chef: Evelyne
Putman.
Madame Putman is a native of La Rochelle, a charming seaside city
on the Atlantic coast of France that fell under the heavy hand of German
Nazi occupation during World War II. She was born to a well-to-do family
that had its own chef, which accounts for the fact that her English-born
husband had to teach her how to cook an egg. Evelyne may have had no clue
how to prepare food in her youth, but times have certainly changed! 
Her father was in real estate and owned a fishing fleet, and her mother served in the French underground during the war. La Rochelle was a major German submarine base, and at one point the German commandant appropriated the family chateau for his headquarters. Later she came to New York, totally unfamiliar with the customs and food of her new country. She remembers going out to eat her first American meal, and sipping a bowl of something she thought was soup. Then the waiter told her it was actually a bowl of salad dressing! Her unfamiliarity with the local table fare did not last long.
Surrounded by fried chicken, fried fish, and hamburgers, she laughs and says “When I came to this country I got hungry!” That began her odyssey from kitchen neophyte to chef par excellent.
One imagines that in order
to survive in this land of processed milk and processed honey, Evelyne
had to learn to cook or starve. She began preparing food for her family
and friends, moved with her husband to Chattanooga in 1972, and opened
a cabaret called the Moulin Rouge. When asked how she got here she smiles
and says, “I fell from the plane!” She liked Chattanooga, and her restaurant
featured such fare as French onion soup, shrimp, and jazz music. The clientele
steadily grew, and visitors from out of town discovered it. One night
when the piano player was slow in arriving, she heard someone else banging
out tunes. It turned out to be jazz legend Dave Brubeck, who was in town
to hear one of his sons perform. He returned several times over the years.
And as the years passed, Evelyne started other restaurants, always serving authentic French food, and sometimes including a bakery or antique shop. Like a self-taught musician she didn’t learn to cook from recipes but from experimentation. If she liked a dish, she learned how to make it taste right. “When I came to this country they didn’t know what a croissant was. They didn’t know what a quiche was,” she remembers. Though American palettes have matured considerably over the years, she doubts that French food will ever be as easy to find as Italian or Mexican, simply because it is so labor intensive to prepare. Even the “French” food we think so much of, such as French bread, is a pale imitation because it isn’t prepared correctly. We tend to make French Bread with milk, not with water as they do in France.
In the past Evelyne has owned and operated restaurants in Chattanooga
that have been fully staffed with a chef, wait staff, and a hostess. Now,
her 
Café Francais might best be described as a “boutique” restaurant. She
does all the cooking and waiting on tables. It seats only l5 patrons, in
a truly intimate setting designed to allow quiet conversation and a leisurely
dining experience. Some seating is also available out doors. She prefers
that evening diners call ahead for reservations. No reservations are required
for lunch. “I buy my food fresh, in small quantities, and that is the way
I prepare it,” she says. Starting over because diners are tardy ruins the
experience for them- and her! She makes every effort to prepare French
food in the French way; there are no hamburgers and ‘French” fries available
at Café Francais. A favorite among patrons is the Chateaubriand, a creation
from the Napoleonic era that is a not a cut of beef but a way of preparing
grilled beef tenderloin. She has also learned over the years that tastes
come and go. Bouillabaisse, a traditional fish stew originating in the
port city of Marseille, seems to have fallen out of f[l]avor, so she rarely
prepares it.
Café Francais has attracted the attention of more than food lovers. A few years ago the producers of one of the Rush Hour movies, starring martial arts acrobat Jackie Chan, took the restaurant’s menu and copied it for use as a model in the film.
Evelyne Putman clearly is devoted to her passion: cooking French food in a traditional manner for those who appreciate it. And she also does not like anyone in her kitchen- they tend to get in the way as she quickly rushes around preparing everything. She’d like to find a house where she could live upstairs and run her restaurant below. As for retiring, she says simply, “If I retire I might get bored. What would I be doing? I love to cook and watch people eat my food. I enjoy doing this!”
