LE TEMPS DES CERISES, B : A Very Sweet Little Bistro in the Marais

   

    I have to admit that my immediate reaction when I first laid eyes on Le Temps des Cerises in the rue de la Cerisaie in the Marais was wariness. There was just no way any restaurant with a setting as winsomely pretty and well-preserved as this little 18th century house with geraniums in its second-story windboxes and a picture-perfect mosaic facade could possibly be anything but an egregious tourist trap. Except that it isn't. Indeed, my opinion changed from the moment I stepped inside and charming young owner Grégory Detouy welcomed us and promptly brought us an excellent carafe of Rhone valley Viognier, along with some crunchy radishes and a shotglass of salt to dip them in, always a good sign. 

   

  My doubts revived, however, when we studied the menu, because the prices were so reasonable. Again, if this place existed in the sad mad mode of a prima-donna tourist hell-hole like Chartier, it struck me as extremely unlikely that the food could be very good. I kept all of this to myself, though--Bruno had been wanting to try this place, and decided there was some very real consolation in the beauty of the snug old-fashioned dining room with a zinc topped bar just inside the front door, tawny walls, bare wood tables with bent-wood chairs, and a beautiful art-nouveau framed chalkboard on the wall. The appealingly diverse crowd was also almost entirely Parisian, too, and the small packed room radiated an atmosphere of bona-fide bonheur.

  

   

   Detouy returned again to see if we had any questions about the menu. I asked about the specialities of the restaurant and he cited the escargots, boudin noir facon Parmentier (shepherd's pie made with blood pudding) and steak Paname, an entrecote garnished with a vinaigrette of shallots, garlic and fresh herbs. He also told us that he was a chef by training but had fall in love with the idea of running a real old-fashioned bistro while working at Chez Janou, and had decided to take the leap and become an owner when this place became available two years ago. Our curiosity encouraged by several glasses of the good white wine, we continued asking questions and learned that the small charming house was originally built during the Middle Ages, had once been an annex to a Celestine convent and first became a bistro in 1830. To his credit, he also never once let on that he might be impatient or alarmed by these two garulous and slightly bibulous men, Bruno and me.

  

 

 

  Since I've spent so much of the summer traveling outside of France, I was aching for my first course, a grandly Gallic warm salad of Morteau sausage and potatoes, and it was superb--the smoky sausage from the Jura was obviously of good quality, it came with a nice little nosegay of fresh herbs and salad leaves and was very generously served. Bruno liked his seared sliced tuna on eggplant caviar, too, and the contrast between these two dishes well-expressed chef Pascal Brebant's smart menu. Brebant, who trained with Marc Veyrat, offers a run of bistro classics side-by-side with modern dishes like lamb marinated in lime juice with spices and the salmon steak with sage and a Porto vinegar spiked cream sauce that Bruno enjoyed as his main course.

  

   

  I decided to have the Steak Paname (Paname is French slang for Paris) when Detouy told me that it came with freshly cut and fried frites, which are regrettably rare in Paris these days. Thin and often rather leathery, entrecote is not one of my favorite French cuts of beef, especially since it's inevitably overcooked. So it was a terrific surprise when this steak arrived rare and juicy as ordered, with a pile of frites so good I almost had to drive my knife into Bruno's hand to keep him away from them. The shallot-garlic-and-herb vinaigrette that sauced the meat was excellent, too, and was also the detail that made me realize that this an absolutely perfect bistro to send foreigners to. Why?

  

   During the 26 years I've lived in Paris, I've noticed that visitors are often letdown when I take them to a real bistro. This is because many people from big cities all over the world are accustomed to food that's lighter and brighter (in terms of seasonings and garnishes) than what you usually find in an old-time French bistro. The modern palate likes herbs and vivid spices, favors fish and vegetables, and exhibits a preference for briefer cooking times. So Detouy, a shrewd restaurateur, and Brebant, an experienced and talented cook, have pulled off the nifty hat trick of creating their two strut menu and also preserving the warmth and conviviality of a traditional pre-war bistro without creating a pastiche. To be sure, the red-fruit sable we shared for dessert was dull and the bread here could be better, but this is a delightful little bistro, and a place that's instantly won a place on my to-go list, especially since it's open on Sunday nights and is so reasonably priced.

  

31 rue de la Cerisaie, 4th, Tel. 01-42-72-08-63. Métro: Saint Paul. Open daily 8am-2am. Lunch menu 13 Euros, Sunday brunch 22 Euros, Average dinner a la carte 30 Euros.

  

   

CIEL DE PARIS--Sky-High Dining That Doesn't Fall Flat, B-

 An almost universally obeyed tenet of the canon of contemporary tourism unfailingly has tourists shopping for a really good view of any place they visit. I suspect this quaint habit dates back to the era of hot air balloons and improvements in the technology of fair ground rides, which made it possible for anyone with a couple of coins to thrillingly see way over the tree tops for the first time, but beyond that there’s probably always been something refreshingly if head-spinningly humbling about a really good view, since they have a way of putting us in our place. 

  In North American cities, meals with views of the dazzling tentacular metropolis below are a dime a dozen, which is why dining with a view strikes many people as hay-seed corny shading to tacky, but as far as I’m concerned I love a great view while dining. The real problem is that no one needs to be told that it’s usually impossible to find a great meal and a great view in the same place.

   Or do they? In Paris, there's Le Jules Verne in the Eiffel Tower, of course, where the food is good but the prices can induce oxygen deprivation, and of course the other problem here is that you don't get to enjoy Paris's most famous landmark, the Eiffel Tower, bien sur, as part of the view since you’re inside it. And this is why I went off to dinner at Ciel de Paris on 56^th floor of the Tour Montparnasse, the seventies vintage high rise opposite the Gare Montparnasse that’s perhaps the most relentlessly loathed building in Paris for dinner the other night, with great curiosity.

One of my oldest French friends, Christophe, a prosperous pharmacist from Bordeaux who’d once been a ballet dancer, was coming to town with his new second wife, and they’d booked for dinner here. “Alec, I know it’s terribly touristy but Stephanie hasn’t been to Paris since she was fifteen, so I thought it might be fun.” I assured him that no excuses were necessary and quietly resigned myself to the fun of meeting the new wife—my guess was that she’d be a busty blonde, as compensation for what I was certain would be a very ordinary meal at best.

  Well, suffice it to say that I was wrong, full stop. Arriving, the restaurant, where I’d once gone for an ill-fated drink many years ago, had been stylishly renovated (by French designer Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance) with a sort of appealingly campy seventies décor entire appropriate to the Tour Montparnasse—flying saucer cut-out lighting, etc., and Stephanie turned out to be chic brunette who owned a bookstore and who talked about her passion for novelist Jonathan Franzen for the first half-hour we were together.  

  Over a good and surprisingly reasonably priced bottle of Champagne, the views of Paris were magnificent, too. When we got around to it, the menu read rather Business Class, but chef Christophe Marchais delivered a fine surprise with a starter of dressed crabmeat with a rich and ruddy gelee d’etrilles (crabs) for me, smoked salmon with an interesting millefeuille of celery root and Granny Smith apple for Stephanie and escargots with little beignets of boned pig’s feet for Christophe. 

  Main courses were pleasant, too, including a perfectly cooked filet of beef in truffle sauce with a very clever ‘risotto’ of finely diced Charlotte potatoes for me, steamed turbot with baby spinach and a seaweed sabayon for Stephanie, and lobster with black rice and fava beans with an vanilla emulsion for Christophe. This was well-conceived and executed fun festive food that avoided the pitfalls of being frilly and silly, which is what too often happens in high-altitude settings.

  A well-served plate of cheeses came from Quatrehommes, and Stephanie’s chocolate dessert looked like a little model of a Le Corbusier’s villa—all planes and panes, but was delicious. Working in tandem with Christophe Marchais, chef pâtissier Baptiste Méthivier’s desserts are studiously art-directed but also delicious.

   So will I be rushing out the door to eat at Ciel de Paris again soon? Probably not, but that’s because I live in Paris. On the other hand, I’d certainly send visiting view hunters here, since the food and service are good, and the prix-fixe menus make it relatively affordable for a meal with such gulpingly good views of the Eiffel Tower and all things beyond.

33 Avenue Maine, 15th, Tel. 01-40-64-77-64, Metro: Montparnasse. Open daily. Prix-fixe menus: 65 Euros, 114 Euros. Late night supper menu (after 11pm): 44 Euros, 50 Euros. Average a la carte 120 Euros.

ROSEVAL--A Gourmet Spud in Belleville, B+

   

  I love Belleville, which is where Paris cross-hatches with Greenpoint, or maybe Bed-Stuy, in Brooklyn. What I mean by this is that the neighborhood is a completely unselfconscious showcase of the profoundly tonic human diversity that had me craving life in a big city in preference to the smugly and knowingly exclusive sociology of the Connecticut suburb where I grew up. Though the real-estate clouds are thickening over this still relatively ungentrified part of Paris, the motley quality of the neighborhood's housing stock is likely, I hope, to keep it safe from that woeful process of urban upgrading that replaces artists and moderate-income people with gentry in search of frisky atmosphere. And for the time being, rents that are considerably lower than they are in central Paris mean that creative people can still work and settle here. 

    

  The latest delicious example of Belleville's appeal is Roseval, a new bistro which recently opened in an old neighborhood tavern worthy of a Toulouse Lautrec painting right across the street from the curiously moving--its architecture, church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix. Though this quartier has been chopped up a bit with new HLM (low-income) housing, it retains a feisty proleteriat feel that's profoundly Parisian and a palpable relief from the city's increasingly globalized center. 

  

  Though it's not cheap, Roseval has instantly won a following among young local epicureans, and since Paris is a small city, the gastro cyber tom-toms went off right away adding people from outside the neighborhood. Like me, for example. Arriving on a warm summer night, Richard was waiting for Bruno and me, and as soon as I walked in I liked this place. Why? It's simple (sic), and there was an immediate warm and spontaneous welcome, and not a single note of pretension or attitude to found fluttering anywhere in the room, pretension and attitude being afflictions that can quickly manifest themselves at ambitious young modern bistros in Paris.

  

   

So once we'd sorted out our wines--a great Viognier and a superb Sangiovese from Emiglia-Romagna (how nice to see a foreign wine or two on the list of young Paris bistro) served by Erika, the Columbian born sommelier who previously worked at Le Chateaubriand, our meal kicked off with a very pretty Valentine of a dish--a single flash-grilled langoustine, with a thin veloute of baby peas and a halved raspberry. I didn't find the tastes of this dish fusing together in any particularly noticeable or interesting way, but the veloute was nicely made and our waiter, Clement, set the tone for the evening with his enthusiasm and eagerness for us to enjoy our meal--again, such a relief from the slightly snarky service that too often prevails at this sort of ambitious newborn table.

  

 

   There was a great crowd in the dining room, too, including a young Belgian fashion designer out on a date with a T shirt wearing body-builder, a famous furniture designer who'd nicely taken his bemused old mother out for a nice meal, and a lot of art bods chattering about gallery shows and their summer holidays. Oh, and us? Summer holidays and the T shirt wearing body builder.

  

   Then thunder struck with a dish made from the restaurant's namesake spud--a sublime puree of smoked potatoes with sauteed onions, baby clams and a garnish of buttered bread crumbs. This one was so good that conversation died completely until the three of us had mopped up every drop of the puree from our plates, and while eating, I found myself thinking that even though the duo of chefs in the kitchen--American-born Oxford (UK) raised Michael Greenwold and Italian Simone Tondo have worked at an impressive constellation of some of the best and hippest restaurants in Paris, including Le Chateaubriand, Rino and Caffe dei Cioppi, the gentle suaveness of this dish brought to mind Bertrand Grebault at Septime more than any other chef working in Paris today. 

 

  Our main course--sliced sirloin with anchovy cream, riced and pureed cauliflower and a few tarragon leaves, continued in this same vein of sincerity, a real reverence for the natural tastes of the excellent produce the kitchen works with, a certain earnestly naive aesthetic plating, and a quiet confidence expressed by impeccable technical skills. 

  

   

  An excellent cheese course followed (with more excellent bread from Christophe Vasseur), and then a strawberry-chocolate-praline dessert that I found too complicated. But this muddled finale didn't even remotely diminish the pleasure of the meal that had proceeded it, and I am eagerly looking forward to going back to Roseval as soon as I return from a huge amount of private and professional summer travel--Greenwold and Tondo are very talented young chefs, and this is a delightful restaurant.

  

  1 rue d’Eupatoria, 20th, Tel. 09-53-56-24-14. Metro: Gambetta, Ménilmontant or Couronnes. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Dinner only: prix-fixe menu 35 Euros, with cheese course 42 Euros, with wine pairings 60 Euros or 67 Euros.

PAN--Hip and Hyped, C-; La Bigarrade--Take Two, and Still Terrific, B+

  With the accelerating blurring of work and leisure wrought by Twitter, Facebook, email, text messaging and cellphones eroding the old-fashioned idea of what a vacation could and should be in the United States, there's something deeply admirable and profoundly charming about the way France defends the sanctity of the summer holiday. And if Paris doesn't wind down as visibly as it did twenty years ago when shops flaunted the fact that they were closing for a good long time by masking their windows with censorious kraft paper--you'd only know that this was there is if you weren't in Le Lavandou or Saint-Jean-de-Luz, there's still a reliable, palpable and quite bracing deceleration of daily life that implicitly authorizes you to be late for and/or leave work early, and to abandon yourself to what you feel like doing--lying on your bed all afternoon reading a great novel, for example, instead of all the dreary things you should be doing (preparing accounts for your tax person, meeting a deadline, sewing a button back on a shirt, going to the gym, etc.). French media follows suit, too, with a winding down of life-style reporting, including restaurant reviewing, which annually yields an inevitable cannon-fire of lists of the nicest places to have a meal outside or the summer's 'hippest' tables.

  This summer, the annointed 'hippest' table in Paris is Pan, a place in the increasingly hip 10th arrondissement, though not the Canal Saint Martin and vicinity, but rather the rue de Paradis and those streets in and around the rue du Faubourg Poissoniere (For whatever it's worth, I fear that a tipping point in the vicinity is inevitable within the next year or two, since the unselfconsciousness and alluring grottiness of the neighborhood just won't be able to withstand this much media attention, especially since this sort of froth fertilizes real-estate prices). Though hipness generally discourages any interest on my part--too many hip restaurants get away with mediocre food, because they're hip--ever hear of the Costes brothers?--a few glowing reviews of this place led me to think it might be a good spot for a much looked forward to tete-a-tete with one of my closest Parisian pals, who, alas, will soon be moving to London. So I met Christian for dinner on a muggy night when both of us would surely have preferred to be sitting outside.

  The dining room was beautiful, though, for being an odd and engaging riff on something both Euro fifties via East German design studios--the wallpaper, and sixties--the flea-market faux Danish modern chairs and tables, plus great lighting and a pretty parquet floor. Our server--one of the owners, I think--was friendly, too, so things looked good from the starting block, and I also liked the rather random menu of Mediterranean inspired modern dishes--gaspacho with chorizo, watermelon with marinated feta, etc., and good solid Gallic comfort food. As is increasingly often the case in such 'young' restaurants, our starters--Christian went with the delicious pork rillettes--rich, fatty, smoky, and well-textured, and I had the baby artichoke salad on a bed of arugula with a fresh mint vinaigrette but none of the promised Parmesan shavings, were much, much better than our main courses.

 

   I was surprised by the rather audacious pricing of the wine list, too--I mean the rue Martel is still along way from becoming the Avenue Montaigne, and it took a long time for a our wine to come, but again, the service was pleasant, if sort of cheerfully dissheveled. Then our main courses showed up, and the meal fell off a cliff. I ordered fregola (small almond-shaped pasta) with baby clams and tomatoes, while Christian had ricotta-stuffed ravioli. I could see that his ravioli, which came with no trace of the Swiss chard, hazelnuts or sage mentioned on the menu, were egregiously overcooked, because they were stuck together in a clump at the bottom of a small bowl. More charitable than I am, he described them as "okay," a word I'd never flatter my fregola with. A quick glance at the photo below will document the first problem with this dish--what on earth was the kitchen thinking to garnish a summer pasta with unripe hot-house salad tomatoes? Given the difficulty in obtaining good tomatoes in Paris even during the summer, I think I'd have oven-roasted some Roma tomatoes or used snippets of sun-dried ones instead of these hard, flavorless, greenhouse-grow-light red ones. But the real problem was that the pasta was not only so completely overcooked it had the texture of baby food but it had been seasoned with nothing more than cream and salt. So this was hands-down one of the worst dishes I've eaten in Paris in months, and despite the fabulous company, attractive setting, and pleasant service, there was just no saving this meal. To be sure, I had read that the dish to order here was the hand-chopped steak tartare, but there was still no excuse for this decidedly unappetizing performance.   

 

   Christian and I adjourned to a sidewalk terrace for coffee and another glass of wine, and on the way home, I found myself wondering how on earth anyone could have vaunted the cooking at Pan. And here's where I found the hitch--in Paris, food writing is more and more often to be found under the umbrella of so-called 'Style' supplements instead of in dedicated settings on its own, which means that it has to play some sort of supporting part in the increasingly frantic chase for fashion, cosmetic and perfume advertising placements. This is the only reason I could find that a place like Pan, an instant favorite of the fashion tribe, would ever get such a major look in from the French papers before they signed off for summer. To be fair, however, not all 'Style' supplements are joining this game, since Francois Regis Gaudry's write-up of Pan in L'Express Styles--the best 'Style' supplement in France in my opinion, expressed a politely bewildered opinion on this place, too. 

PAN, 12, rue Martel, 10th, Tel. 09-52-51-63-70. Metro: Chateau d'Eau or Poissonnière. Open Tuesday-Friday for lunch and dinner, Saturday dinner only, Closed Saturday lunch, Sunday and Monday. Average a la carte 45 Euros. 

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   Though some friends I've sent there have been exasperated by the concept of the blind-folded (i.e. unidentified) tasting menu at La Bigarrade, and more than a few have carped about the prices at this tiny little restaurant in Les Batignolles and also the slightly grand demeanor of the service, for me, it's consistently been one of the most intriguing and satisfying contemporary French restaurants in Paris, which is why I was horrified when I heard that chef Christophe Pele, who opened the place, was shipping out. 

  A friend who lives locally reassured me that Yasuhiro Kanayama, the Japanese chef who has replaced Pele, is equally brilliant, however, so I brow-beat Bruno--who also gets impatient with long drawn-out tasting menus, into going for dinner the other night. And we had a superb meal, which debuted with an avocado curl with fresh coriander and a cumin biscuit and continued with micro-planed cauliflower with shaved squid and an exquisite crabmeat with vanilla-spiked sabayon. The rhythm of the meal was impeccable, too, with these sublime little cameos arriving at exactly the moment that you'd quietly decided you'd like something more.

    Though compatible with Pele's approach, Kanayama's cooking is actually much subtler and even more quietly provocative when it comes to sensual contrasts of texture, as seen in a sublime little dish of lobster with grilled banana in lemon-verbena foam (who'd have guessed that the acetone in the banana would flatter the lobster's natural sweetness so suavely?).

   Turbot with bonito broth and smoked eggplant (below) nodded at the Japanese palate without making some sort of awkward Occidental mannerist feint (much too often the case when Western chefs fiddle with Asian food).

    Juicy pigeon breast with cockles and tamarind paste was elegant and deeply satisfying, too.

  Bruno, the dessert lover in our duo, deemed the chocolate cake with Matcha powder and cream reason alone to return to La Bigarrade. All told, a really superb meal, and if David Toutain at Agape Substance is the one who pulls off this sort of gastro snap-shot performance better than anyone else in Paris right now, La Bigarrade remains an urgently well-recommended restaurant in my book.

 La Bigarrade, 106 rue Nollet, 17th, Tel. 01-42-26-01-02. Metro: La Fourche. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Prix-fixe menus 35 Euros, 55 Euros (lunch), 65 Euros, 85 Euros. 

LES 110 de TAILLEVENT--An Expensive Hommage to Bacchus That's Just Not A Corker, C+

   

  Since this particular meal would not only include the discovery of an impressively pedigreed new restaurant but a reunion with Roger and Adelyn, two wonderful friends from Australia who have a huge knowledge of and enthusiasm for good food and wine, I was really looking forward to dinner at Les 110 de Taillevent the other night. This just-opened brasserie de luxe has replaced Taillevent's first off-spring, L'Angle du Faubourg, just around the corner from la maison Mere, and it was conceived with the specific vocation of pleasuring vinophiles by pouring some 110 different bottles of wine from the Taillevent cellars by the glass in 7 or 14 centiliter pours.

   

  Arriving, I loved the new look of this always rather awkward space by omnipresent interior designer Pierre Yves Rochon, who seems to have designed almost every new hotel to have opened in Paris during the last five years. Here, it looks as though he may have been channeling the great Alsatian marquetry artist Spindler, since the room radiates warm wood tones, has golden lighting and clubby leather upholstered chairs. Roger, Adelyn and Swiss friend Maeggie were already seated and sipping Champagne when Bruno and I arrived, and happiness and hilarity reigned as Roger and Adelyn gifted me with two different types of Sarawak pepper--doctors both, they'd been at a medical conference in Borneo on their way to Paris. It took a while--an unfortunate foreshadowing of the service to come, but Bruno and I finally received our glasses of Champagne, which no one bothered to ID, a surprising slip up in a restaurant dedicated to viniferous connoisseurship.

   When I opened the menu, my heart sank a bit, too, since prices were hefty, and Roger had already gallantly insisted on taking us all to dinner. Still, I thought, at least the food will be good in a restaurant under the aegis of Taillevent, especially since I've always loved chef Alain Solivérès's cooking (the actual chef at Les 110 de Taillevent is Emile Cotte, who previously worked at Le Pre Catalan, Meating, and several other Paris tables). A different selection of four wines by the glass had been selected to accompany starters, fish, meat, cheese and desserts, but off the menu, a much larger number are available by the glass and the bottle. Studying the different possible wine pairings, I immediately realized how hard it would be to make this restaurant work properly. Unless you're serving experts or confident know-nothings, wine by the glass at high prices needs a fair amount of cheerful and patient explanation--why, exactly, is one wine perhaps a better choice than another, etc., an exercise that be both fun and elucidating if the staff have both the personality, expertise, and time to carry it off. Given the very diverse starters at our table, I quickly decided we'd be better off drinking by the bottle, however, and so ordered a lovely white Bellet to go with our first courses. Alas, our first courses arrived before our wine, and the special glass of Jurancon that Roger wanted with his foie gras required further prompting.

  

 

   I loved my sauteed squid with gently smoky sun-dried tomatoes on a bed of salad leaves, and the bone-dry Bellet paired perfectly with this starter, too. Bruno's smoked salmon was pleasant, but not very generously served; Adelyn described her dressed crab with fennel and dill as "timid," which, knowing her, really meant, slightly disappointing; Roger wolfed down his foie gras with apricot chutney, and Maeggie seemed pleased with her cold pea soup. As the cruise director for this meal, however, my enthusiasm was rapidly waning. The food was pleasant but undistinguished, and it was completely maddening to have to keep asking for our wine to be poured. No serious sommelier should ever have allowed that 90 some odd Euro bottle of Bellet to get ice cold in a bucket, either.

 

  Our main courses continued the debuting theme of the meal, too--good quality produce prepared with admirable professional precision but no noticeable signature, a point-blank absence of creativity, and a deflating lack of generosity in terms of garnishes and side dishes. An up-market restaurant spinning on an axis of sophisticated food-and-wine pairings should practice a reflexive abundance and aspire to an ambient joyousness, both sorely lacking here. Knowing how much the Aussies love good wine and wanting them to drink things they might not easily find in a small town down under, but also respectful of the melting point of Roger's charge card, I chose a Saint-Péray as our next bottle. And it was delightful. Never once, however, did the truly charmless sommelier engage with me or anyone else at the table about what we were drinking, although he needed to be reminded three times before the long-suffering Roger finally got the stiffly priced glass of Pommard he'd wanted to drink with his rack of lamb.

  

 

  Adelyn was happy with her sole meuniere, which cost something like 60 Euros; Bruno had a dainty little vol au vent (and some soup when we got home); Maeggie went with the merlan Colbert (breaded whiting with a nice caper mayonnaise and fried parsley), and I ordered the ugliest dish of the evening, which was steamed cod with a stingy morel or two, several spears of asparagus and what I think may have been the same jus de viande sauce that garnished Bruno's vol au vent. 

  

  Since the desserts weren't particularly interesting, we shared two different cheeses--an organic Sainte Maure and a superb 26 month old Comte, and called it quits. Because of the lively conversation and some good wine, I think everyone enjoyed the evening, but regretted having chosen this expensive and joyless place for a very special occasion and would be disinclined to return.

  

Les 110 de Taillevent, 195 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, 8th, Tél. 01-40-74-20-20. Metro: Courcelles or Georges V. www.taillevent.com. 39 Euro prix-fixe menu, Average a la carte 75 Euros.