”When a person’s mid-life crisis kicks in, they usually go and buy a fast car or a motorcycle, but I picked up my suitcases and moved from Paris to Zadar and opened the first French bistro in town last week. A good start to your 50’s, right?” winks the lovely Anges Negre, a Parisian of Croatian descent who decided to sell everything she had in the French capital and embark on a journey into the unknown with her husband Remy, two daughters, Lison and Valentine. Now she is an business owner in Croatia.
As Novac/Matea Gugic writes on the 3rd of September, 2019, Agnes’ mother is Croatian, from Novigrad near Zadar, and by her father is a Parisian. Her parents met in France when her mother went there” just to learn the language for two months” only to eventually fall in love and stay in France. They used to come from Paris every year to their mother’s hometown, to the Adriatic sea, which Anges fell in love with so easily. She says she would always feel heartbroken when the holidays were over and when she had to return to Paris. It was as if she knew that one day she would return here and stay forever, writes Zadarski.hr.
Her parents came back to her mother’s hometown and now live a classic Dalmatian life in Novigrad, eating fish and making olive oil.
”The desire to live here, in a small town by the sea, was constantly burning in me. But it’s very easily to just get into certain habits and fall into a comfort zone, which is difficult to escape from later. I worked as a primary school teacher, I educated my girls, we lived a normal life, urban and fast-paced, as one does in big cities, and the turning point in my decision to relocate was the 2015 terrorist attacks at Le Bataclan Concert Hall. We are frequent concert goers, but, well, that night my girls and I were not there. I realised that I didn’t want to live in fear, anxious about my children coming home alive. It simply became survival, it wasn’t normal,” Anges explains frankly and honestly, as she remembers the day of her departure from Paris with a pit in her stomach.
”My girls hated me at that moment. I think I was the worst mum in the world for them. Just imagine telling teenage girls to say goodbye to their friends, loves, hobbies, and life in the most famous city in the world. They don’t speak Croatian, not a word, but they understand a lot. But I still think the decision to relocate was the right one. I believe they will understand that when they grow up,” Agnes says.
On her 50th birthday, she turned her love of cooking into a business.
Back in Paris, I got used to eating in various restaurants, Turkish, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Greek… I wanted to actually give Zadar something new, different, something that isn’t already there. A touch of France in the middle of the Peninsula. This city is always evolving and deserves a richer offer. I hope that with this, I started a bit of a trend, and that someone else will dare to open something that’s a little bit off the city’s regular offer,” she points out.
She adds that the little bistro, which goes by the cute little name “Oh la la,” was decorated in a cool and modern way, just like the French do it. However, it’s easy to assume that it was certainly not easy for her to open a place in Croatia…
Oh, how right that assumption was!
“If someone had told me that it would take so much time, nerves, and money to open a small bistro, I don’t know if I would ever try. I honestly did think about just giving everything up and going back to where I came from! With all the problems, I don’t speak Croatian very well, and I have a hard time coping with this official dictionary, so I had to bring my 80-year-old mother to help me fill out the forms,” recounts Agnes, talking about only a small part of her bureaucratic agony in Croatia which began in February this year, and only ended recently, a few days ago when she finally opened the door to her bistro.
After all, that’s all behind us, so now my husband and I can only devote ourselves to cooking and running our business. We’re waiting for you!” laughs Agnes, toasting with a glass of prosecco at the coloruful table of a small French bistro in the heart of Dalmatia.
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