AU PETIT TONNEAU--Old-School Comfort Food at a Gaullist Redoubt in the 7th, B-

 

  Having lived there for many years, I observed that the 7th arrondissement is actually a mosaic of very different little neighborhoods. The chunk of the 7th between the boulevard Saint Germain and the Seine, for example, is aristocratic in tone but more worldly and cosmopolitan than the haughtier and most decidedly penny-pinching district bound by the rue du Bac, the boulevard Saint Germain, the rue de Sevres, and the boulevard des Invalides. Then on the other side of the Esplanade des Invalides, the 7th becomes livelier and almost friendly in the snug little neighborhood in and around the rue Saint Dominique that's favored by young BCBG singles and couples. As chef Christian Constant has discovered, this turf is actually a good restaurant neighborhood, too, because the well-born execs in the neighborhood eat out a lot and there's also a good tourist trade from all of the small hotels in the neighborhood.

 

  One major demographic layer of the 7th you rarely see in its restaurants, however, are the grand bourgeois and aristo types who inhabit those 250 square meter apartments that have been in the same family for generations on end. Why? They either entertain at their country houses, or in town, like to serve each other Picard (local frozen food chain of surprisingly good quality) food during casual at homes with magnificent silverware and china. Aside from business meals during the week, and the occasional foray to a favorite Chinese hole-in-the-wall, restaurants don't much figure in their lifestyle, because their food tastes are extremely traditional and they are reflexively parsimonious. 

 

  And this is why I immediately found the crowd at Au Petit Tonneau so fascinating at dinner on a Sunday night. Aside from a few tourists, this snug retro bistro in the rue Surcouf was a veritable petting zoo of these bluffly chic, to-live-well-is-to-live-hidden types in all of their splendor--lots of Alice bands for the handsome ladies, raggedy cashmere sweaters and corduroy trousers for the gents, most of whom had the same hair cuts they'd had since they were school boys. And in deference to this crowd, all of the codes of an old-school Paris bistro were most rigorously respected, from the red checked table cloths and napkins to the de rigeur cheap bottles of Bordeaux (AOC Bordeaux Chateau Luby 2009, 18 Euros; AOC Graves Chateau de Lionne 2010, 25 Euros) and a choice of such eternal Gallic garnishes with main courses as braised endives, braised fennel, potatoes dauphinois, sauteed potatoes, rice pilaf.

  

  From a friend who lives nearby, I'd learned the sweet back story on this tiny little restaurant, too. Obliged to sell by poor health, chef owner Ginette Boyer was determined to sell to a woman, because she hoped to preserve the legacy of the cuisine menagere (home cooking) that had won her a devoted following of local regulars through the years. In the end, Arlette Iga, a client of the restaurant, decided to buy, and she's respecting Boyer's wishes by serving the type of uber traditional French comfort food that's become nearly extinct in Paris. 

  

  What's on offer here is actually much better than the cuisine menagere served as such places as Au Pied de Fouet, for example, since the quality of the produce is excellent, and Iga hired chef Jais Mimoun, who trained at the Bristol with Eric Frechon and then worked at Au Repaire de Cartouche to run the kitchen. Mimoun is generally a meticulous chef, too, and seems to have an innate sympathy for the homey cooking that makes the regulars here so happy.

  

 

  Always looking for good Sunday night addresses, Bruno, Laurent, Carole and I arrived hungry and found the relatively long menu immediately appealing. Lentil salad garnished with lardons or crayfish sounded appealing, as did the oeufs en meurette, a dish (poached eggs in red wine sauce) that I can never get enough of, but on a Spring night, they chose the salade d'haricots vert instead, while I decided on white asparagus with Parmesan shavings. Unfortunately, the kitchen had run out of the artichoke hearts that should have garnished the green bean salads, so small curls of roasted tomato were substituted instead. If they were fresh and correctly cooked, the portion of beans was stingy enough to prompt Bruno to make a comment to the waitress, and the price was correctly adjusted when the bill arrived later. My asparagus from the Landes were perfectly cooked and very pleasant in a Xeres spiked vinaigrette with chopped shallots and parsley, but a fourth spear--there were only three--would have communicated a welcome generosity.

  

   

  Bruno and Carole were happy with their grilled tuna steaks with braised fennel, and Laurent liked his duckling, which came with a small ramekin of creamy dauphinois potatoes. Ordered medium rare, my veal chop was seriously overcooked, however, and even though I hate sending food back--it's such a ghastly waste, I didn't want a piece of dried out meal for a hefty 29 Euros. By the time my second chop---thick, juicy and beautifully cooked, arrived, everyone else had finished their main courses a longtime ago. It also would have a nice gesture to serve more of those delicious potatoes, since a single lukewarm spoonful remained for me. And in these details is my main problem with this place. If the service was charming and attentive, and the kitchen clearly works with good quality produce, what's missing here is the reflexive abundance and generosity that such a homey atmosphere usually portends. As things stand, the stingy portions deflate some of the comfort found in otherwise good comfort food, especially at such rather stiff prices (Also to be noted is the fact that the 37 prix-fixe menu was not mentioned when we received our a la carte menus).

  

 

  While deciding on dessert, I was astonished to overhear a man at a neighboring table (not pictured here) tell his tablemates that now that the Socialists were in power, you could be sure that all of the other parasites--Jews, foreigners and homosexuals, would soon be swarming over the government. And so it goes in the deep 7th arrondissement, but one way or another, I'd had my eye on the raspberry sable all night long, and it was superb--a beautifully made crust with tangy berries on a bed of creme fraiche. The chocolate mousse and lemon tart were very good, too.

 

  With a single bottle of very nice white Saint Joseph at 26 Euros, our bill worked out to be 55 Euros a head, which was rather a lot for what we'd eaten. So would I come back? Well, yes, I probably would, since the new team has only been in the saddle for a couple of weeks, and they clearly have a real desire to please. In a certain mood, I also love such homely old-fashioned French food, and were I to come at noon for the 22 Euro lunch menu or opt for the 37 Euro dinner menu--both three courses, it works out to be a decent buy for a meal that also offers such a profoundly Parisian atmosphere and an alternately intriguing and alarming keyhole's view of life in the 7th arrondissement.

  

20 rue Surcouf, 7th, Tel. 01-47-05-09-01. Metro: Invalides or La Tour-Maubourg. Closed Monday. Lunch menu 22 Euros, Dinner menu 37 Euros, a la carte 50 Euros. 

L'AFFABLE--Good Modern Bistro Cooking but Lacking Affability, B-

 

  While Yves Camdeborde rightly gets major credit for brilliantly shaking up the definition of what a Parisian bistro should and could be when he opened the original La Reglalade in 1992, there were lots of other places that were pushing the envelope in Paris at the same time. On of them was L'Oeillade (The Wink) in the rue de Saint Simon in the 7th. I was living in the rue du Bac then, and went to L'Oeillade often when it first opened, because the chef so deftly applied the best innovations of la nouvelle cuisine (remember that old chestnut?) to traditional bistro cooking with always interesting and occasionally delicious results. Or to wit, he served  stock-based sauces rather than cream-enriched ones, made liberal use of fresh herbs, reduced the cooking times of meat, fish and vegetables, and didn't hesitate to jolt a traditional French recipe with herbs, spices or ingredients from foreign kitchens. In particular, I remember a sublime saute of veal and al dente Spring vegetables brightened by a generous pinch ras el-hanout, the profoundly aromatic blend of spices used in the Moroccan kitchen. 

 

  Unfortunately, L'Oeillade eventually developed sort of an arch vieux garcon (batchelor) personality and the prices went up a lot, so I stopped going. I guess I wasn't the only one either, since it closed down sometime back, but this affluent neo-aristocratic corner of Paris desperately needed a good bistro, so I wasn't suprised when a friend who still lives in the neighborhood--the brilliant Franco-Portuguese daughter of my old concierge who's now a very successful business lawyer, mentioned that the lights had gone at these premises again and suggested dinner.

 

  Her and my friendship blossomed inspite of her fiendishly nasty mother, who was my concierge for years and who has now retired to Porto, because I used to give her all of my old English-language magazines when she was in high school and studying l'anglais and also during long lazy August morning chats when we were often the only people in the building back in the days when Paris went into a month-long summertime coma. Ana loves to read; I love to read. She loves good food; I'm obsessed by it, etc., so eventually a real friendship was born despite the fact that my land lady somehow got wind of our having become pals and told me in incredulous tones that becoming friends with your concierge's daughter is a real ça ne se fait pas, or something that just isn't done. So another thing Ana and I would seem to share is a certain social seditiousness.

 

  In any event, the new place is called L'Affable, and it looked affable indeed when I showed up for dinner the other night, with a great new decor of milk-glass globe lamps and geranium-colored banquettes and an oh-so-7eme crowd of loden coat, cashmere sweater, Moncler parka and Hermes scarf wearers of various ages and both sexes. There was a real buzz in the room, too, but even though Ana and I were fifteen minutes late after having had a glass of wine in a cafe nearby first, the owlish owner told us our table wasn't ready and walked away, which hardly got things off to an affable start. There was no one at the bar to get a glass of wine from, so we stood and chatted rather awkwardly for another fifteen minutes and finally I suggested that we decide on a plan B if we weren't seated within another fifteen minutes. 

 

  Happily, we were, and our waitress was delightful. She apologized for the wait, offered us glasses of very good Pouilly Fume, and set us up right away with excellent hot bread and very good butter. Ana started with a superb terrine de foie de volaille that was brilliant seasoned with a crushed five-spice blend (fennel, star anise, Szechuan pepper, cinnamon and cloves), while I went with a curious sounding steamed egg with salmon, which turned out to be delicious. The egg and several thick chunks of salmon were steamed, garnished with a foamy cream sauce and sprinkled with crushed bacon. This dish was so good, in fact, that I'm sure I'll attempt to recreate it myself, since it'd be a terrific main course for a weekend brunch.

 

  Our 23 Euro bottle of Bordeaux, one of their cheapest bottles, was excellent, too, and reminded me that I have to make more of an effort to overcome my reflex to drink Rhone Valley wines and embrace the Bordelais. Between courses, I sporadically eavesdropped on a spirited and very interesting conversation about the new French version of the Huffington Post at the table next to us--this quartet had trouble imagining how the admirable Anne Sinclair, Dominique Strauss-Kahn's long-suffering wife, could possibly do an objective job, but I never missed a word of Ana's hilarious accounts of her frequent business trips to Saudi Arabia and Qatar--she goes so often that actually owns one of the bizarre full-body swimming costumes women must wear to swim in public there, and her frustrations at not being taken seriously by the Middle Eastern men she often works with, and we also talked up a storm about food and wine, as we always do.

  

 

  I also found myself hoping that my main course--Argentine beef filet with a citrus vinaigrette, would be as good as my starter, and especially since I'd rather have had the more interesting sounding pork belly with a salsify tatin, but that was sold out by the time we were seated. Well, the beef was excellent--very rare, tender and full of flavor in a light lime vinaigrette with slivered snow peas (mange tout) mixed with bean sprouts and crushed peanuts, a terrific garnish, and Ana loved her grilled scallops with lozenges of roasted red beet in a tangy and light-as-down yuzu fumet. No photos of same, because someone well-known in the room apparently had a fit when he or she saw me wielding a camera--I suspect L'Afffable has instantly become popular both with politicians from the nearby Assemblee Nationale as a place to dine with other pols and/or their mistresses and probably also a locally living celebrity or two. But I did manage a last snap of the friendly folks on the other side of us.

  

  We finished up with a fine plate of cheeses from the nearby and tres snob Bathelemy for me and a pear poached in spiced red wine with excellent shortbread ice cream for Ana. This was intelligent, imaginative, well-prepared food, so I finally asked the waitress who was in the kitchen, and she explained that chef Jean-François Pantaleon had previously cooked at Apius in the 8th and had teamed up with the owlish guy at the door who wasn't very affable--Olivier Helion, to create this chic little bistro that's a gang-busters success. 

 

  Over coffee, I asked after Ana's mother, as I always do, and we had a good laugh, as we always do, since this subject is the only taboo between us. I rather suspect that I was the proxy for the fury Maman felt when the Porto cobbler she was madly in love with as a young woman moved to Brazil with a policeman rather than sucuumbing to her charms, but who's to say. And don't even think of asking me how I found this out.

  

   Walking home on a rainy night after dinner, I mused over the cooking at L'Affable, which, while modern and pleasant, certainly isn't breaking any new ground. Instead what it reveals is how much the Parisian definition of bistro comfort food has evolved during the last twenty years. In 1992, almost no one had ever heard of Tonka beans (the sweet vanilla tasting bean that's so very modish in Paris right now), appearing on the chalkboard menu as a foamy emulsion on half-salted cod steak, or the combava, a sort of gnarly lime-like citrus fruit, that was used in the sauce on my beef. If the lessons of nouvelle cuisine first began to be well and truly integrated into modern French bistro cooking twenty years ago, a sourcing revolution has made the world's produce affordable to almost any Parisian chef and an increasingly well-traveled and novelty oriented public is ever on the alert for exotic new tastes and textures. Contemporary French bistro cooking has thus become so profoundly cosmopolitan that is runs a vague but still acceptable risk of becoming deracinated.

 

  So would I go back to L'Affable. Well, yes, I probably would, with my trailing reluctance being about their prices, which are stiff, and the hospitality style. The waitresses are charming and hard-working but a small stylish Left Bank table like this one needs seriously charming and customer-oriented service if it's going to turn into a long-running address.

L'Affable, 10 rue de Saint-Simon, 7th, Tel. 01-42-22-01-60. Metro: rue du Bac. Closed Sunday and Monday. Lunch menu 26 Euros, average dinner a la carte 50 Euros.