Notes for Friends, Honestly

What I tell my own family when they ask: the quiet nights, the champagne question, and the small truths of the room.

Tuesday and Wednesday. I will say it plainly: if your dates are free, take a Tuesday or a Wednesday. The weekend house is magnificent but it is a machine at full throttle — every table, every stool, the parterre breathing shoulder to shoulder. Midweek the same show plays to a room with air in it; the cast is fresher, the service is quicker, and your evening costs the same for noticeably more comfort. The regulars knew this. Now you do.

On the champagne question — whether the finer bottle is worth the difference — I will be honest the way I was at the plan. The house champagne is perfectly good; the upgraded bottle is genuinely better. Whether it is that much better is arithmetic only your table can do. What I noticed over the years is that nobody ever remembered the bottle, and everybody remembered the bucket — the silver, the ice, the little ritual of it arriving at the table as the lights went down. The ritual is included either way. Spend as you feel; you are not buying the memory, only the label.

Dinner or no dinner — the question I was asked most. If food matters to your evening, take the dinner; the service is good and the hour of candlelight before the show is genuinely lovely. If the show itself is everything, the nine o'clock with drinks alone is a complete evening, and you eat better elsewhere on the hill before you come. The wrong choice is trying to do both cheaply and resenting both.

Small truths: arrive fifteen minutes before you think you must, because the cloakroom queue is a fixture of the place as much as the mill. Photographs during the show are forbidden and genuinely enforced — the ushers are kind but they are everywhere. The ladies' powder room descends a staircase and there is a queue at the interval; the one behind the balcony is half the length and nobody uses it. And the souvenir photographs taken at the door cost more than you expect and are worth exactly the smile in them.

Last: do not try to do Montmartre, dinner and the show all in one breath. The quartier deserves its own evening. See the show the night you come, and give the hill a day of its own — the artists' square, the vineyard, the view from the parvis. The cabaret will still be there; it has been there since before my grandmother was born, and it does not hurry for anyone.

And because honesty is the point of this page: what I would skip. The premium souvenir bundles sold in the foyer — charming, but the photograph at your own table is the one that matters. The interval ice cream, eaten standing up in a crush — take your champagne instead and let the interval be an interval. Any add-on that promises a better view than the room itself gives; the room's geometry is fixed and no upgrade changes physics. What I would never skip: the cloakroom (a coat on your lap through a two-hour show is a small misery), the first glass taken slowly while the house fills, and the walk back up toward Abbesses afterward, however short. The show ends at the curtain; your evening ends where you choose to let it.