Sunday suppers: If you're in Paris, you're invited

PARIS — It's Sunday night, and in apartments all over the city, people are sitting down to dinner, perhaps with friends, sharing good food, wine and lively conversation.

Wouldn't it be fun to score an invitation? Maybe discover a new neighborhood and see what it's like inside those old buildings with the big wooden doors?

Better yet, why not just invite yourself?

Two American Southerners living in Paris welcome you to do just that.

My watch is running fast, so when I knock on Jim Haynes' door for an 11 a.m. interview on a Saturday, it's really 10:40 a.m., and he's still in his purple bathrobe, pajamas and slippers.

Three young houseguests from Scotland and England lounge on the couch below a poster that reads: "Jim's plan: Stay home and get paid."

One offers to run out for croissants; another jumps in the shower. Haynes puts the kettle on for tea.

At 73, reading glasses pushed down over his nose, mustache in need of a trim, he looks more like a college professor relaxing on his day off than a man preparing to have 60 people over for dinner the next day. But then, he's had a lot of practice.

A Louisiana native retired from a teaching job at the University of Paris, he's been hosting a Sunday dinner for 30 years in his apartment in the Left Bank neighborhood of Alésia for anyone who wants to come.

Sunday soirées

Paris dinners

• Chez Jim: Jim Haynes' Left Bank atelier at 83 rue de la Tombe Issorie in the 14th district of Paris becomes a salon for dinner and conversation every Sunday at 8 p.m. See www.jim-haynes.com for reservation details, or phone 011-33-1-43-27-17-67. Donation is 25 euros ($33.75, based on current exchange rates of $1.35 to one euro). Includes drinks.

• Chez Patricia: Patricia Laplante-Collins hosts "Paris Soirées" at her Right Bank apartment at 13 rue de Mulhouse in the second district. Sunday dinners start with a cocktail hour at 6:30 p.m. Donation is 20 euros ($27). She also hosts Wednesday cocktail networking gatherings and a Saturday "Singles Aperitif," both 15 euros ($20.25). See www.parissoirees.com to make a reservation, or call 011-33-1-43-26-12-88.

Artists, musicians, actors, teachers and friends of friends from around the world, most of whom have never met, mingle elbow-to-elbow over a stand-up meal in a combination kitchen/studio atelier no bigger than some living rooms.

All anyone has to do is go to his Web site and click on "Come to Sunday Dinner!" then call or e-mail him for a reservation. Short notice is OK. The first 50 are welcome, often more. Haynes asks for a 25-euro ($33.75) donation. "Or," he says, "they can pay what they can afford."

His cellphone rings as we sit down to talk. Six cans of chestnut cream and two boxes of instant mashed potatoes sit on the kitchen counter.

"Hi, Roseanne? ... Four people? OK. What are their names? Haynes scribbles "Laura from Romania" on a scrap of paper. The phone rings again.

"Hello. ... Where are your friends from? Two from Munich. OK. You know the door code. Ciao."

Southern hospitality

Across town, Atlanta native Patricia Laplante-Collins browses the street-market stalls on the rue Montorgueil lined with cafes and shops selling fine foods. She gathers an armful of leeks and decides that a gratin will be on the menu for the Sunday soirées she hosts weekly on the third floor of her Right Bank apartment in the garment district of Santier.

Laplante-Collins came to Paris 23 years ago as a student at the Sorbonne and has lived in New York, Italy and Sweden. Inspired by ex-pat American women such as Gertrude Stein and Nathalie Barney, who opened their homes as gathering places in the 1920s, she organized African-American-themed literary salons in the mid-1990s.

Those evolved into weekly Sunday gatherings focused on topics ranging from art to astrology. Her dinners (20 euro/$27 donation) include a cocktail hour, followed by introductions and a program with an English-speaking guest, often an author, artist or musician.

Haynes has as many as 150 in summer when there's extra room outside in the courtyard. Laplante-Collins' soirées are more intimate, usually around 20-25.

She loves to cook. He doesn't, but has friends who do. She uses stemware. He uses plastic glasses. The food's good at both places. The wine flows, and most everyone speaks English. Chez Jim or Chez Patricia. You choose. Both dish up Southern hospitality with a French twist, and if you're in Paris on a Sunday, you're invited.

Chez Jim

When I arrive back at Haynes' house for dinner Sunday, he's traded his purple bathrobe for a checkered apron.

His front door opens onto the kitchen from a hallway on the first floor of a century-old building meant to house studios for sculptors.

"Gamay or merlot?" he asks, going into the foyer to fill a glass from a box of red wine. The space by the stairwell doubles as a bar on Sundays, and no, the neighbors don't mind. Madame Peaupert, in her 80s, sometimes comes over to help chop onions or garlic.

Haynes pulls a dozen baguettes from a bag and asks for help slicing. He'll make chicken or fish for 80 in a pinch, but he recruits friends to cook most of the time. Volunteering tonight is his British friend Antonia Hoogewerf.

Fifteen bags of salad greens and three bags of pine nuts sit on the kitchen table. A vat of green beans boils on the stove. Four seafood pies warm in the oven. A chocolate and chestnut cream dessert chills in the fridge. Most furniture has been shoved aside. Someone puts the coat rack in the bathtub to make extra room.

As the first of the expected 64 guests start arriving around 8 p.m., Haynes sits down on a stool and checks names off a list with a pink magic marker.

No one has name tags, so he shouts out introductions.

"Peter, meet Carol!" I turn and talk with Peter Walford, from Los Angeles. Haynes was a friend of his father's, and he's known him since he was 17.

"He's very good at getting people to relax," he says. Walford works for a cable-television company in Amsterdam and comes to the dinner whenever he's in Paris.

"Put your stuff down and start talking," Haynes calls to no one in particular.

This is a man who packs much into life. He was stationed with the U.S. Air Force in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he founded an alternative theater company and paperback bookshop. Later, he moved to London. In the 1960s, he helped start a newspaper in Amsterdam dedicated to sexual freedom and traveled to Poland, Hungry and Romania to write travel books.

The dinners began after he settled in Paris 35 years ago to teach courses in media studies and sexual politics. A houseguest offered to cook for Haynes' friends to repay him for his hospitality. Twenty-five came. "It was the best meal of my life," he says, and the soirées became a regular event.

Helpers serve buffet-style, starting with the salad, then the main course and dessert. By the time the evening winds down around 11 p.m., I've met a Japanese medical researcher working in Paris, a French woman who owns vineyards in Burgundy, a Grammy nominee from California with spiked hair and white leather boots and a Polish woman in a stunning fur hat.

Haynes estimates he's hosted more than 100,000 people over the years, most of whom he never met until they knocked on his door.

"The number of marriages, love affairs, friendships, apartments that have come out of these dinners ... I can't count them."

Married once, he lives alone, but only technically. Rarely is he without a houseguest or two. He travels and writes, but connecting people is what he does best and seems to enjoy most.

"That's what he does," says his friend Antonia. "That's the essence of Jim."

Chez Patricia

The subject might be mountain climbing in Nepal, French cooking, art collecting or photography. Patricia Laplante-Collins spikes her evenings with the intellectual equivalent of an after-dinner drink.

As an only child growing up in Atlanta, she would host imaginary tea parties after church on hot Sunday afternoons. After moving to France, she arranged fund-raising events for American organizations and trained at Le Cordon Bleu and La Varenne cooking schools. A 1994 dinner she hosted for the novelist Ernest Gaines kicked off a series of African American Literary Soirées. Eight years ago, she founded Paris Soirées and began opening her home for various types of get-togethers, with the goal of exploring new ways for ex-pat Americans to connect.

The speaker on the Sunday I invite myself to dinner is Y. Euny Hong, a young Korean-American author who's written her first novel, "Kept: A Comedy of Sex and Manners."

Helping out in Laplante-Collins' cubbyhole of a kitchen is Robert Jonathan Frost, a chef who lived for a time in Port Angeles and once cooked at the Space Needle. He's making a Persian eggplant dish and a cold spinach dip to go with the leek gratin and bowls of red beans and rice.

Frost sets appetizers on the coffee table as Laplante-Collins, looking relaxed in a lace top and black pants, circulates.

"Tonight we're having a kind of free-flowing dinner," she announces. Guests help themselves to wine and settle into chairs and sofas in a large living room with tall windows and wooden floors. "We'll add stuff as we go along until people aren't hungry anymore, and then we'll have dessert."

She introduces me to Jim Hill, a Boeing executive working in Paris, and I recognize Elliott Hester, an American travel writer and author of "Continental Drifter," a book about quitting his job as flight attendant and living as a vagabond traveler.

A Parisian doctor introduces himself. I meet an Indian pharmaceutical executive from New York in town for the weekend, and exchange cards with a French filmmaker.

As a child, Laplante-Collins overheard her friend's sister talking about how she spent her junior year abroad wandering through the Latin Quarter and going to cafes.

"I was so fascinated by what she had to say, I said to myself, 'I've got to do that.' "

She went to school, worked as an au pair, married a Frenchman and made Paris her home. Now in her late 40s, she seems to have settled in.

"When I first came, it was very hard to meet people," she explains to the group.

"It still is," someone says. That is, of course, unless it's Sunday and you're having dinner with Patricia or Jim.

Carol Pucci: 206-464-3701 or cpucci@seattletimes.com