BENOIT and LOULOUCAM--A Distinguished Parisian Grandfather (A-/B+) and One of His Yearling Grandsons (B-/C+)

  Over coffee in a cafe, I recently spent an interesting hour chatting with a brilliant and charming journalist for a nicely produced economic journal in Prague who had contacted me for an interview, because Slovak language rights to HUNGRY FOR PARIS were acquired by a Bratislava publishing house when the book was first published.

 

  Food is Petra's beat, and passion, and if she loves Paris like I do, I spent months and months in Prague in the early nineties and have a deep affection for the city and the Czech Republic, so we seemed fated to get on. Usually on the other side of the pen and notebook, I also admired her confident manner and good questions. On my way to meet her, it occurred to me that she'd invariably ask me if Paris is still the world's best food city. And if this is an obviously loaded question, it's a much more complicated one to answer fairly and intelligibly than it may first seem.

 

  Sure enough, no sooner than we'd introduced ourselves and ordered, then Petra shot her first arrow. I won't attempt to recreate my response, except to say that I basically believe that today Paris remains first among many equals, because of the spectacular excellence of French culinary training, a public with a deep knowledge of and pride in the country's gastronomy, and Europe's nec plus ultra produce. I also added that as much as I rejoice in the remarkable talent of young French chefs like Betrand Grebaut at Septime, I despair at the ongoing erosion of traditional bistro cooking in Paris.  Every great food city needs a gastronomic ballast, and for me, in Paris that has always been really great bistro cooking. "So when was the last time you had an excellent traditional bistro meal at a place that you could recommend?" "That would be at Benoit a few weeks ago," I said, with the precision that I had gone expressly to eat the special 100 Euro menu they're offering to celebrate the restaurant's 100th birthday. It was was nearly flawless.

   

   "One hundred Euros...." said Petra. "I know, no small change that," I replied, "But when it's becoming sadly easy to spend 70 Euros on a middling mid-range meal in Paris, I'd rather go out less often and spend more, if I must, to eat well. Today in Paris, it's become very expensive to cook honest traditional bistro food, because it's so time-consuming. To wit, the chef needs to be in the kitchen for long costly hours," I added. "Otherwise, I'm very happy to enjoy some of the city's outstanding and very good value contemporary French cooking."

   

  "Tell me about the meal at Benoit," said Petra, with a faraway look in her eyes. I did, but first I explained that ithis table had been created by butcher Benoit Matray in 1912 and remained in the same family until chef Michel Petit, one of his grandsons, sold it to Alain Ducasse in 2005. Since the transfer, I've always found the food irreproachably sincere but uneven. Now, though, since former sous chef Eric Azoug became head chef, the food is often once again as excellent as it was in the Petit era.

  

  "We ate exquisite rabbit rillettes with hot toast and glasses of Champagne, then Monsieur Bonneau, one of the best maitre d'hotels in Paris, slipped in some Langue de Veau Lucullus, because Bruno, my partner, had become all puppy-dog excited when he spotted this speciality of his hometown of Valenciennes in the north of France on the menu--it's a sort of surprisingly light construction of fine layers of smoked veal tongue bound with a mousse de foie, followed by fat green Provencal asparagus in a truffled mousseline. Real Victor Hugo or Gustave Flaubert food!" "Was there more?" "Bien sur! We had turbans of sole on creamed spinach in a sauce Nantua, which is always made with crayfish, in this case from Lake Geneva, and then roast lamb with baby Spring vegetables." "My God, Alec! Do you have pictures?" 

  

  Side by side we furtively scrolled through the snaps I took that night several weeks ago (the menu, by the way may have changed, should you decide to go, but they'll be offering this centenary feed through the end of the year); these were Petra's favorites.

  

Langue de Veau LucullusAsperges Vertes, Mousseline Truffee

Sole NantuaLamb with Spring VegetablesProfiteroles, or the Temptation of Bruno

  "And do you have a reasonably priced new place that I might try tonight, Alec?" I asked Petra where she was staying, which was with a friend near the Canal Saint Martin, and Louloucam, a very sincere new bistro with an intriguing two-speed menu, or a mix of French classics and some clever modern dishes, by chef Jean Matthieu Frédéric, ex La Tour d'Argent, Le Meurice, and Chez Géraud, immediately came to mind. I'd eaten here with a couch-surfing pal in town from New Orleans on a Saturday night, and we'd loved our fun waitress, who'd lived Australlia for a while, the excellent terrine de foie gras, poached leeks cleverly spiked with lemongrass--now that's one to copy, entrecote with pommes Maxim, and great desserts--poached pear in caramel sauce and cream-filled choux as part of a 31 Euro menu.

  

 

  No, I wouldn't rush across town to eat here, but the excellent quality of Frédéric's produce--his meat comes from the Boucheries Nivernaises, his quick but perhaps appropriately cautious creativity, and the relaxed friendly setting make it both a great neighborhood bolt-hole and a fine coda to those who'd doom-say the French kitchen.

  

Benoit, 20 rue Saint Martin, 4th, Tel. 01-42-72-25-76, Metro: Hotel de Ville. Open daily. Lunch menu 36 Euros, 100th anniversary menu 100 Euros, average a la carte 100 Euros.

  

Louloucam, 264 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin, 10th, Tel. 01-40-34-76-87. Closed Saturday noon, Sunday and Monday. Metro: Jaurès, Louis Blanc or Stalingrad. Lunch menu 16-20 Euros, Dinner menu 31 Euros.

A LA MARGUERITE--The Price Isn't Right in Paris These Days, B-/C+

A Table a la Marguerite

   Last week through this website I received an email from a nice lady in Toronto who'd recently been in Paris and who'd had a very disappointing experience at one of the city's most famous bistros, Chez Georges. Following a response from me, she wrote again, and her message was not only a polite plea in favor of continued exigency and honesty in writing about food in Paris, but an entreaty to remember and respect socio-economic diversity. Here's what she said:

   "What this restaurant, their owners, chef and staff may not appreciate is how rare an opportunity it can be for one to travel to Paris, and to be able to reserve a table at what is reputedly one of the best bistros: one works long hours and saves one’s money for such a trip. The evening of the special dinner is meant to be a memorable occasion with delicious food.  They do need to take care to be reminded that their customers may not be privileged and/or rich, but workers/professionals like themselves who come with respect to appreciate French cuisine of ‘excellence’ , to a place of ‘high standards’.  It was so disappointing."

   Musing on this message, I realized that this was a real cri de coeur, and it really struck home with me, because I still remember sleepless nights in a lumpy New York City sofa bed in a tiny studio apartment in Greenwich Village following the crown molding around the room over and over again and wondering how on earth I'd ever find my way back to Europe on a very modest Assistant Editor's salary. 

  So what she was saying is that much of the Anglophone world's food and travel press has drifted off course in the direction of catering to the 1%, or the world's wealthy, instead of the 99%, which is, of course, where I live. This media tack has been for mostly commercial reasons, of course, and its unintended result is to have fertilized demand for the increasingly rich, diverse, well-produced and ecclectic offer of gastronomic information available on-line. One way or another, I am as deeply committed to good value as I am to good food, and in any event, the two often go together like hand in glove.

  The truth of what my Canadian correspondent was driving at had already been much on my mind during the last few months of Paris reporting, too, because this year restaurant prices have just plain gone through the roof. The Beef Club, Les Jalles, and now the just opened A la Marguerite are all practicing prices that make my head spin, and which also evidence a serious disregard for rapport qualite prix, or value for the money. To wit, A la Marguerite, which is the sister of the very good Les Fines Gueules, is a place where it's really easy to spend 65 Euros/$84 a head on a casual meal.  And if proprietor Arnaud Bradol's sourcing is outstanding, the quality of the cooking just doesn't warrant such vertiginous prices. For much less money, I could eat better at the nearby La Regalade Saint Honore, and kicking it upstairs a bit more, I could go to Yam'Tcha or Spring, also in the neighborhood. 

  I didn't know this when I arrived, though, and was musing over the really interesting question of why some restaurants of more or less equal quality thrive while others don't survive--this space was previously occupied by L'Atelier Berger, an earnest restaurant that I went to two or three times after it was opened by a Franco-Norwegian chef a longtime ago but never found compellingly good enough to return to, when I climbed the staircase to the first-floor dining room to meet a friend, Nola Fairhope, who's an old Paris hand like me. We sipped at white Cheverny that wasn't worth 6 Euros for a short pour and studied the chalkboard menu. 

  "Good grief, these prices are rather stiff for a bistro in Les Halles, aren't they?" said Nola. "Hate to be a wet blanket, but I think all of you who write about food have become a bit too cavalier about how expensive many of the city's new restaurants are. You know I can get a very good meal at Lilane, my little local go to behind the Place Monge, for a lot less than we're going to end up spending here."  

   By the time the friendly young waiter came to take our order, I'd already decided I'd pick up the tab for our wine. I'd liked to have invited Nola to dinner for that matter, but unfortunately--contrary to what many people assume, most food writers have only the most paltry of budgets, if they have any at all. So our first courses arrived, white asparagus with a meaty vinaigrette for Nola and seared tuna with an avocado condiment for me. Four spears of asparagus seemed a stingy serving for 12 Euros--a whole botte (bunch) of white asparagus from Greece was on sale for 2 Euros this weeks at Lafayette Gourmet, but they were perfectly cooked and complimented by their sauce. Served cold, my tuna was a bit dull--more my fault for ordering it though than the kitchen's in this case. Still, I was puzzled by the way that this restaurant had almost none of the edgy and delicious mojo of Les Fines Gueules. Obviously, something had been lost in translation here, and it seemed to me that the desire to coin more or less the same formula as that served up at the original restaurant but with a higher price tag was something that wasn't going to fly. Or at least not for me anyway.

  To be sure, my main course--an exquisitely cooked rack of butcher Hugo Desnoyer's lamb on a bed of white beans with piquillo peppers and garlic--was so good that it almost warranted its 29 Euro price tag, but Nola's fish was overcooked and the courgette 'spaghetti,' a fun idea for a home cook perhaps, but a bore in a restaurant for having become such a cliche, was a letdown, especially at 26 Euros. Neither of us much liked the 28 bottle of Papaton, an organic Coteaux de Loir wine that we'd ordered as much by price as anything else, since it remained as rigid and square shouldered a half hour after it had been opened as it was when I took a first slightly fizzy sip.

  Since Nola never eats dessert, and I was so well-fed from my fine rack of lamb, we demured on a sweet and called the meal to a close. "There wasn't much emotion in that cooking," she said as I walked her to her bus, and after it had carried her off into the night, I found myself even more perplexed by the rather charmless offspring of a restaurant that I'd always liked so much than I'd been a few minutes earlier until I finally realized what A la Marguerite was really all about. All of the enthusiasm of really good locavore sourcing and the excitement about organic and biodynamic wine that had made Les Fines Gueules such a hit has been turned into a marketing ploy for a restaurant that's gunning for high-spending hipsters--a jazz club will be opening in the cave here sometime soon, and with Les Halles on a obvious upswing due to the renovation of the ghastly cement wart of a shopping mall that replaced the main food market of the city of Paris in the seventies, it's inevitable that shrewd restauranteurs are already packing into a neighborhood that will surely enjoy a serious redux once the dust has cleared. 

  One way or another, I have to doff my hat to Bruno Doucet and the remarkably good food he continues to serve at the very reasonably priced La Regalade Saint Honore, just a hop, skip and a jump from A la Marguerite. It's my go-to address in their neighborhood.

Restaurant A la Marguerite, 49 rue Berger, 1st, Tel. 01-40-28-00-00. Metro: Les Halles; Louvre-Rivoli; Pont Neuf. Open daily. Lunch menu 29 Euros, average a la carte 65 Euros.   

YOUPI ET VOILA--Hurray, and Here You Go! B-/C+

Photo @ Bob Peterson

   Just about the only enjoyable aspect of dinner at the Brasserie Balzar the other night was the wry, nimble and thoroughly professional service which animated an otherwise woefully mediocre and overpriced meal. What made this particular occasion all the more noticeable is that the prevailing service style in so many of the better and more interesting new restaurants in Paris these days lacks any trace of the same tonic and tenacious desire to please and the corollary desire to have a good time together that made this meal a perverse pleasure inspite of the insolently industrial quality of the food. For in France, good service is never a one-way street. In its old-school idiom, or the one I was inducted into over a long learning curve when I arrived in Paris twenty-five years ago, your waiter or waitress wanted both to charm and be charmed--to be sure, you weren't under any obligation to be charming, but the badinage of a successful meal, more common in bistros than in three-star restaurants but always present to some degree, informed every French meal.

  Now, though, this delightful wait style is becoming rare, as is any service style at all, a reflection of the fact that it seems to have been chucked out as silly, bourgeois, stuffy, or a combination of all three, or like, well, whatever. Hey, I'm here to bring you your food, okay? And if you're lucky, and I decide I sort of like you, I might be nice, but if not, I'm just here to bring you your food, okay? And don't think that just because you're paying, you've got any power over me, because I am really not that into serving you because I'm really not into service. You're no better than I am anyway, so don't even think of giving me a hard time, etc., etc. 

  Sigh. So much for what Americans used to call "Old World Charm." In restaurants like this--the newly opened Youpi et Voilà, for example, even if some of the food's good, you barely have the feeling of being in a restaurant. Rather, you've just gone somewhere to eat. So youpi et voilà, or hurray and here you go. Arriving here for dinner the other night with my friend David, we were hungry and in high spirits. I'd just seen his terrific new flat in the 11th, was happy for him, and also thrilled to finally be in Paris for a while after epic professional trips to Asia and South America, and I think that by showing me the apartment, he might have finally seen some light at the end of the long tortured tunnel that's any major renovation project.

  I also love this funky part of the 10th arrondissement, the blessedly less Bobo east bank of the Canal Saint Martin, and any opportunity to gawk at the former headquarters of the French Communist party, one of the most wonderfully weird buildings in Paris. I'd also read that chef Patrice Gelbart, mostly recently cooking in the Tarn, had recently done a guest stint at the wonderful Le Verre Volé, one of the best bistrots a vins in Paris, and that he uses assiduously sourced local-when-possible, almost unfailingly seasonal produce from Terroirs d'Avenir and other small influential provisioners. 

  Arriving, the small storefront dining room looked like many of the other great young-chef restaurants that have opened in Paris recently--Chatomat, Le Galopin, etc., and though it took forever for him to get around to us, our waiter was friendly when he finally showed up and sort of teasingly explained they only serve a single four-course tasting menu in the evening. We nodded. He grinned.... So, I paried, how would we know what wine to order with this mysterious meal.  "Oh, it's vegetables, fish and meat, with a dessert." 

  After a half-hour, our first course showed up--white asparagus with a coddled egg, a slice of delicious country ham from the Lot, and a scattering of chopped black olive, or a pleasant cameo of angelic springtime eating I've eaten in many other places. In the meantime, forty minutes passed, which was fine in a way, because I was enjoying our conversation about, among other things, how massively over-covered the Paris food scene is these days relative to the real interest or importance of what's going on here, but finally I was about to signal the waiter and find out what was going on, when he showed up. "Have you had the fish yet?" Nope. Fifteen minutes later, a small salad of shaved fennel with garlic flowers and a tiny piece of seared bonito arrived. It was fine, but hardly memorable, and by this time, the balking rhythm of this meal and cheerfully amateur and disorganized service was beginning to test our patience. Even though I strenuously dislike stuffy, formal, pretentious service, and am, like David, inclined to be very forgiving of the staff or kitchen to a fault, because I've been the one standing, the one cooking, it was exasperating that our meal had become sort of a very slow rolling catastrophe.

  When it finally showed up, the pan-fried pigeon on a bed of bok choy and wheat berries in a red pepper coulis was delicious. The excellent quality bird had been cooked rare, and the garnishes flattered the thick putty texture of the meat and deepened its fine wild flavor. A glass of red wine, maybe a nice Minervois, would have been terrific with this beast, but I knew we'd be done with the dish before it arrived, and it was getting late.

  It had taken two hours and fifteen minutes to reach this dish, and even though I can spend hours on end at the table, this kind of short-order cooking didn't justify so much downtime. Dessert, a soggy slice of griddled spice cake with rhubarb compote was dull, and we paid the bill, and dashed off into the night in different directions to catch the last Metro. 

 I've since spent a week puzzling over this meal, and have concluded the crew here would be much happier if they were cooking and serving their friends instead of running a general-public restaurant, and also that the metier of waiter or waitress that France so brilliantly perfected over the course of many centuries is in danger. Oddly enough, in fact, with the exception of a brilliant maitre d'hotel at the new fish resaurant Helen in the 8th arrondissement, the last few times I've experienced the sort of serious, charming service that used to be a signature of Gallic gastronomy were in New York and Buenos Aires. 

Youpi et Voilà, 8 rue Vicq d'Azir, 10th, Tel. 01-83-89-12-63. Metro: Goncourt, Château Landonor Colonel Fabien. Closed Sunday and Monday. Lunch menu 20-25€; plat du jour 15 €- prix-fixe dinner menu 36€. 

LES JALLES--A Cool-Operator Bistro de Luxe, B-

   Arriving for dinner at Les Jalles with Julie, a delightful English woman who lived in Paris for many years before recently moving to her husband's native Sydney, and my Alabamian pal Judy, I parted the heavy velvet drapes at door of this storefront restaurant in the rue des Capucines and immediately drank in the decorously provocative atmosphere of a pleasantly perfervid dining room with good lighting--maybe even the best lighting I've seen in a new Paris restaurant for many years, engineered to induce a certain sensualist's nostalgia for the twenties Paris of writer Djuna Barnes and Nancy Cunard. The mis-en-scene was so lush, in fact, that I instantly thought of the brilliant photographs of Brassai in his book Paris de Nuit and also of the harmlessly risque Proustian vintage 'art' postcards that once got a rise out of corpulent old gents with pince nez. So this artfully staged space intends to flatter anyone who walks through the door by casting them into a public tableaux that's knowingly freighted with sexual mystery and, surely to a lesser degree, possibility.

   Thing is, the three hungry and bedraggled journalists we were didn't add any kindling to this beautifully laid but unignited fire, and most of the other clients didn't either, since they seemed to have come through hotel concierges or because they work for the banks and luxury goods companies in nearby offices and know proprietresses Magalie Marian and Delphine Alcover's other terrific restaurant, the Bistrot Volnay, just around the corner. The Bistrot Volnay often has an attractive and appealingly louche crowd, so perhaps these types will try the new address, if they're not scared off by the desire-wilting prices practiced here.

  But wait! What about the food? Oh, right, the food. Well, as none of us work for BNP Parisbas or have the evident wealth of the Middle Eastern gent who was drinking something vivid and green on crushed ice in a snifter with dinner and who kept showing off the emergency navigation locator system on a steel watch as fat as an oyster, we dithered like pensioner librarians, constructing our meals from the tarif backwards, rather than the poetry forward. So Julie demured on a starter, which was a shame, and Judy and I both had the baby fava bean veloute with ravioli stuffed with fresh chevre and sarriette at 15 Euros a serving. 

  The soup was pleasant enough, but needed salt and more depth. While our plates were being cleared, however, I saw our main courses already coming up through the window pass of the kitchen, and stepped on the brakes. We weren't, I told the waiter, in a hurry, and in fact, as a group of friends who hadn't seen each other for a very longtime, we truly didn't want to be rushed. He shrugged--"But your plates are ready, and the service is like that in France."  Or you're a dim-witted foreigner who wouldn't know better. But we did actually know better, and we well and fully stopped the insanity-in-the-making of an hour-long dinner. 

  When we discussed it, the ladies wondered if they weren't trying too hard to turn tables, but I didn't think that was it. Rather, the newly opened kitchen hasn't found its rhythm yet, and neither has the service--I haven't been in a Paris dining room in years where there were so many staff, racing about and almost bumping into each other at the same time that wine remained unpoured and bread baskets empty. I also think this place has been doped by a few very good early reviews and has gotten a bit ahead of itself.

   After our main courses arrived, though, a ripple  of private pleasure passed around our table, since the food here is actually quite good. Though the portion was scanty--they were scallops, rather than the usual nice fist-sized organ, my ris de veau were at once crunchy--the breading, and creamy, the veal sweetbreads themselves, something only a very talented chef could pull off, and Judy loved her big thick pearly white chunk of cod with cooked and raw (thin shavings) of asparagus in a well-made jus de viande.  Julie was a bit less enthusiastic about her steak, which came with a potato gratin rather parsimoniously garnished with morel mushrooms for 33 Euros. 

  We liked our Givry, one of the least expensive reds on their list but still in the 40 Euro range, and service was very pleasant for having been tinkered with. Dessert? No, that didn't come to pass, but here's the menu:

  As it was, Julie was off to meet friends for a nightcap, and no one really wanted to be hit up for another 14 Euros. "Restaurant prices have gone through the roof this year in Paris," Judy observed, while we waited for her bus, "And apart from the perspicacious Philippe Toinard in A Nous Paris, the food critics don't quite seem to want to understand that anything over 50 Euros is quite a lot of money for most people for a single meal." She was right, of course, which made me a bit melancholy on the walk home. If the food was good, what I really liked at Les Jalles was the atmosphere, which isn't something I'll be able to avail myself of very often. 

Les Jalles, 14 rue des Capucines, 2nd, Tel: 01-42-61-66-71.  Métro: Opéra or Madeleine. Open daily for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Average a la carte 65 Euros.

AXURIA--The Discreet Charm of a Neighborhood Restaurant, B+

   If you write about food, there just have to be alot of feral moments, or hours, every week where your passion for taste trumps absolutely everything else you should be doing. These can't be planned, they just happen. And I love it when they do. Since it's been raining and cold in Paris for weeks on end now, the other day, I fired up the computer, made a double espresso, read the NY Times, the Washington Post, and lots of other stuff, went back into the kitchen to make another tall Moroccan tea glass full of nerve thunder, and suddenly found myself spending the next three hours cooking up an impromptu black-bean soup that used up a lot of new garlic, two must-eat-now fennel bulbs, lots of pimenton, and all of the stock that I'd made from simmering a winter's worth of old Parmesan rinds with a ham bone and some fennel seeds for an entire Sunday. I didn't use a recipe, I just cooked on a hunch, adding a can of Italian plum tomatoes, some of the wild oregano I'd harvested in Greece last summer, and a little bit of thyme. 

  I chopped, and I stirred, and I skimmed, and I tasted and tasted, and finally, once the beans were soft, I went back to work, let the whole shebang cool down, and got a lot of work done knowing that I'd have a pretty amazing lunch ahead of me. And the soup was just superb, so good, in fact, that I probably should have written down what I was doing, but I didn't, so it'll be sort of a one-off until the next time I find myself with all of the same ingredients and the same manic desire to cook.

  In a similar vein, if you stop by this site from time to time, you know that I go to restaurants a lot, and you also know that I love them, but the vigilance of eating in a restaurant for professional reasons is often at odds with the off-the-cuff pleasure of sitting down at the table with friends and just having a good meal, a good time. What reminded me of this was the terrific dinner I had the other night at Axuria. One of Bruno's oldest friends in the world, a lovely lady pharmacist with whom he grew up in the same small city in the north of France, lives just across the street from this restaurant and runs the nearby Pharmacie Boucicault. So I think she was probably the one who mentioned that a good restaurant had popped up their neighborhood. One way or another, Bruno's working like a mad man on a huge consulting project in the 15th right now, and often runs late. Since I'm writing another book and he's so busy, we actually even end up with an empty fridge from time to time, which is just about the worst thing that can happen in a life where you and your partner are sane, solvent and heathy.

  But when it sort of did the other night, I suggested we go to Axuria, since my Metro ride from home would give him the time to finish his work by about 9.15pm, and then we'd hopefully meet for a good feed. Arriving, the trendy lounge decor of this restaurant made me a little wary, but the welcome was warm and a quick eyeball of the menu made me hopeful. Agreeing to knock the edges of our mutually macramed nerves, we ordered glasses of Champagne, which was excellent and came with hot miniature grated-cheese topped wands of pastry and excellent ham. The dining room was packed, too, always a good sign, and from where I was sitting, I was also able to see just how successful the service was. Even though there were probably 60 people in the room, no one ever poured their own wine, faced an empty bread basket or idled too long over an empty plate.

  We ordered, and since they were so busy, we started with an excellent the-kitchen-needs-time complimentary first course of fish soup that tipped its hat at chef Olivier Amestoy's origins for having such a racey but quiet nervous system of piment d'Espelette at the bottom of deeply reduced and beautifully made fish stock. The white Gaillac, one of the best buys on the list at 27 Euros and a favorite of mine, was a charmer with the soup, too, but also made us happy with our starters, an exquisite composition of seared foie gras and artichokes barigoule for me, and a swell dish of "BBQ" gambas (prawns) on a bed of quinoa for the infinitely more health-alert than I am Bruno (I'd hop into the Seine tomorrow morning if I ever saw myself headed for an 'assisted living' situation where the bread comes sealed in little plastic pillows, rice pudding is the recurring dessert, and a request for a glass of wine would elicit a lot of you-naughty-oldster tutting from a bunch of nurses who were otherwise quietly doing tequilla shots around the corner).

 

  Health--the whole concept winds me up, since I've stopped doing so many things I used to enjoy to kneel at its altar. In any event, I can't imagine that my brilliant and long-suffering MD ("Alec, more exercise, less cheese, less wine, less meat, less salt, less...") would have ever raised an eyebrow at the likely farmed but still good sea bass stuffed with herbs and Swiss chard in a pastry wrapper on a bed f potato puree that I had as a main course, or the unrelentingly nutrition-conscious Bruno's swordfish steak in a lemony sauce with spring vegetables. Both were impeccably well-cooked--we actually discussed the advisability of the swordfish, since it always comes to the table overcooked, and beautifully seasoned.

  When the amiable Monsieur Amestoy came out to greet a couple of tables--aside from his good cooking, this intimate place in a quiet residential neighborhood only stands a chance of working if the locals like him, I nearly grabbed his apron strings to have a chat. Turns out this awfully nice guy is a good-natured Basque who most recently cooked at Chez Les Anges before deciding to go out on his own.

  So how did we end up here, the charming Monsieur Amestoy parried, and Bruno grabbed the bone and told him about his dear friend the pharmacist, whom he of course knew and liked. Echoing things that she'd said about running a successful neighborhood business, he told us that he'd wanted to drop the souffle that Bruno was imminently to be served from the menu, but the regulars were having none of that. "What I know is that good cooking is maybe half of what will make this restaurant work," said Amestoy. "You can't run a successful restaurant without liking people and wanting them to be happy, and you also can't forget that the meal begins the moment someone comes through the front door. Do you feel relaxed? Do you feel happy? This sets up your meal, bien sur."

 

  Whie we were so happily chattering away, our desserts showed up, and M. Amestoy immediately excused himself. "Enjoy, please, while they're fresh and warm," and so we did. I loved my moelleux caramel au beurre salé, crème glacée noisettes, although I sort of wanted to see a flood of melted salted butter caramel spill into the plate when I cut into it--in fact, I'd like to die in a flood of melted salted butter caramel, but it was still quite good. And Bruno had the souffle, and I could see by the furrowed V between his brows that he didn't want to be interrupted during the first minute or two after he'd doused it with the accompanying shot of Grand Marnier. So I waited. "You know what's nice is that I finally enjoy souffles. All of those years in the north of France when they were the baited breathe grande finale to first communion lunches and other soi-disant important meals almost ruined them for me by association, but they're actually such a treat." I dug spoon in too, and yes, they are awfully nice. Just like a really serious, well-drilled, and honest neighborhood restaurant in Paris, Axuria, for example. It's a place I'd cross town to eat at again soon, especially with our most local friends Carole and Laurent.

Axuria, 54 avenue Felix Faure, 15th, Tel. 01-45-04-57-59. Metro: Boucicault. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Two-course lunch menu 22 Euros, Two-course dinner menu 26 Euros (35 Euros for three courses). Average a la carte 40 Euros.