PARIS NEW YORK--Basta With the Burgers Already! C- ; KHAOSAN ROAD--Not My Thai, D ; VERJUS--Chef Braden Perkins is on a Roll, A-/B+

   

  Mea culpa, but it's the middle of winter in Paris when the days seem to last fifteen minutes and everyone I know is sun-and-fun deprived and slammed with work. So you do what you can, which in my case meant an impromptu decision to have a big fat burger for lunch after a morning of appointments in the 10th arrondissement. Truth be told, I'd have preferred the Daily Syrien, for Ahmad's fabulous falafel and turnip pickles, but it was packed, so I crossed the street to Paris New York, the latest high-concept burger joint in Paris and hoped for the best. The brief menu offered a choice of 4 differently garnished burgers made with Breton Pie Noir beef from Le Poncelet, a prestigious butcher shop, or a portobello mushroom burger; fries; cheesecake; various craft beers; wine by the glass at three different price points, the most expensive being Francis Ford Coppola Diamond Collection red and Newton Chardonnay. 

 

  Well, while I was waiting for my burger the place filled up quickly with a gaggle of twenty-somethings who spent a lot of their time poking away at their phones even if they were with friends. So my "Smoky Blue" burger came, and it was so sparsely garnished with the promised Stilton, bacon and onion confit that they didn't register on the palate. The fries were lukewarm, but pretty good. The lemonade in a Ball Jar, something I haven't seen since a meal at Mrs. Wilkes Boarding House in Savannah, Georgia twenty years ago, was more Brooklyn than Biloxi--or tart than sweet, and this was a blessing. This meal happened in twenty minutes, left me 15 Euros poorer, and the most interesting thing about it was that I had the opportunity to taste Heinz Balsamic Vinegar Ketchup, which I found surprisingly delicious--I'd assumed it was a no-interest gimmick, and also to realize that I have become hugely weary of the wave of edible Americana that just keeps washing over Paris.

 

  Don't get me wrong. It's nice to be able to get a half-decent burger in Paris (none of the burgers in Paris are better than that), since I remember the days when the truly lousy Joe Allen and a couple of other similarly underperforming faux Yankee tables ruled the roost when it came to nostalgic eats. But the phenomenon has now gained so much self-perpetuating momentum it's becoming a serious bore. I can't help but thinking that a lot of the clever young backers of the ever-growing number of Paris burger places have realized that they can be real gold mines, since all you need are some good graphics, some better-than-average sourcing, respectable foot traffic in a neighborhood where a lot of people work in front of computer screens, and you're done, since there sure isn't any serious cooking going on in any burger shop. I mean, even a really good Croque Monsieur or Madame require more effort. 

  

Doesn't Look Like Thailand to Me....

 

  The same day that grumpy burger fatigue set in, Bruno galloped through the door at 8pm and wanted to eat Thai food for dinner, because a year ago we had just landed in Bangkok at the beginning of a brilliant three-week trip through Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. The fridge was bare, so I agreed to the idea of going back to a local Thai table where we'd had dinner with four other friends right before Christmas. Despite the fact that an oceanic amount of Domaine d'Uby Colombard-Ugni, a frisky little white at a too friendly 18 Euros a bottle, had been consumed, I had a vague memory--this meal was more about the conversation than the food, of having been surprised by better-than-average eats. I'd also been hugely amused to find myself in a Bobo petting zoo of a restaurant almost without equal in Paris. But would the charm hold a second time?

  

 

  Alas, what followed was a depressingly mediocre meal that made me nearly weepy for REAL Thai food. The green papaya (which was tasteless and soggy, like some kind of food-service-industry pre-prepped product) salad with shrimp (frozen, tasteless, flacid) was seriously underseasoned and the only possible interest of this dish were the freshly roasted peanuts. Vegetable samosas and shrimp ravioli tasted like deep fried paper towels, and the two curries were ordered were made from the same mother sauce, with a good dose of chili oil making mine the three-alarm hot indicated on the menu.

  

  Looking around, I honestly wondered what people were doing here, and then I kind of got it. This is a restaurant that you come to in Ouija Board hommage to that so-long-ago happy-go-lucky back-packing trip during which you let someone give you dread locks on the beach, smoked so much dope one night that you actually ended up having a good snog with the handsome but impossibly poseur Australian surf dude you'd taken an instant dislike to as the caps were being clicked off the first bottles of Tiger beer at the sundown beach party, slept with someone who's name you don't remember today, and picked up a minor social ailment that was the source of excruciating embarrassment when you went to the doctor after getting home to Paris. That was then, and now you're a PR associate, or an assistant editor, or a stylist, or a real-estate agent, and you like coming here because even though this place has absolutely nothing to do with those lost weeks on Kho Cuckoo, it at least reminds you that you were once someone else. Maybe because Bruno has only been to Thailand with me, he disliked this noisy place with slap-dash and off-handed service so much that he told me he'd wait in the street outside while I paid the infuriatingly expensive bill. Khaosan Road is a textbook example of everything that can go wrong with a popular restaurant in a well-heeled Bobo neighborhood in Paris.

 

  So this week wasn't bringing great joy until I went to dinner at Verjus, American-in-Paris chef Braden Perkin's place in the Palais Royal. Here Bruno and I joined a bunch of old and new friends for a tasting meal in the new and really great looking indigo-painted private dining room Perkins and partner Laura Adrian, Paris's most charming bar keep, have created on the third floor of their space between the rue Richelieu and the Palais Royal. As soon as I went upstairs and saw this room--and I'm sorry, no photo, but it was so dimly lit that my iPhone, which was all I had on me, was useless, I was delighted, because it can seat 12 at a pinch and so becomes my perfect recommendation for anyone who wants a private space in Paris. I was also happy, because I've always liked Braden's cooking, but in my antic effort to keep up with the new, new, new I hadn't been here in a year.

 

  So we ate, and it was fascinating to see how Perkins' style has become quieter, subtler--well, more French, since he first opened. To be sure, each tasting plate is as intricately and logically constructed as a Swiss watch, and most of them induce real pleasure in anyone who was willng to accord them a more than a few very necessary moments of meditation. But even though Braden still looks like an endearing Grant Wood subject circa 2013, a certain sophistication has set in, and this is a good thing. He hasn't lost the wiry winsomeness he brought with him in his back pocket when he first showed in Paris after cooking in Seattle, but he's learned a lot. The thing is, though, most of what he's learned, he's intuited from the spectularly good French produce he works with--like any seriously good chef, his produce cues him. And in this case, the cue was to turn the flavor spectrums down a few notches so that we could relish the perfect freshness and natural tastes of his produce.

 

  After an amuse bouche of citrus-cured trout with smoked fingerling potatoes and trout roe, we had a superb little clam chowder made with Portuguese cherry stone clams, celery root, thyme oil, wild thyme, lovage, homemade harissa and a crumbly garlic crouton. This was a beautiful little miniature that created a tiny universe of ricocheting tastes which made me think of minnows left behind in a tidal pond. Then a gorgeous slow-cooked egg yolk under a tiny thatch of frisee on a bed of soft polenta with salsify, sweet onions, baby leeks, pumperknickel crumbs and finely chopped kimchi.   

  

 

  Duck breast with winter sauerkraut, orange, rye, and smoked celery root skin--Braden likes smoke, and so do I--came with a brilliant side of baby spinach leaves, hazelnuts, pickled grapes, crimini mushrooms and frozen foie gras shavings that lasted seconds before they dissolved into the leaves while remaining the base note flavor of this terrific little dish.

  

   

  Braden's gifted Korean pastry chef Cassandra offered up three desserts, and if all of them were impeccably conceived and executed, the one I liked best was the walnut tart with bergamot jam. All told, this was a fascinating meal, because it highlighted the ways in which a talented and ambitious young American's cooking has become more gastronomically elegant--bien sur, we're talking casual elegance here, the longer he lives in Paris.

 

   Daily Syrien, 55 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, 10th, Tel 09-54-11-75-35. Metro: Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, Bonne Nouvelle or Château d'Eau. Open daily. Average 12 Euros.

  

   Khaosan Road, 52 rue Condorcet, 9th, Tel. 01-49-70-07-06, Metro: Anvers, Cadet, Saint Georges. www.khaosan.fr Closed Sunday. Average 35 Euros.

  

   Paris New York, 50 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, 10th, Tel. 01 47 70 15 24   Metro: Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, Bonne Nouvelle or Château d'Eau.

  

   Verjus,  52 rue Richelieu, 1st, Tel. 01-42-97-54-40. Metro: Palais-Royal Musee du Louvre or Pyramide. Dinner only. Closed Saturday, Sunday. Prix-fixe 60 Euros.

VERJUS WINE BAR--Perfect Pours, Great Small Plates, B+

Buttermilk fried chicken 

  Even though I like winter and would find it disorienting  to live somewhere without real seasons, the mid-way point of this leafless gray season in Europe does bring on a certain restlessness. It may be light deprivation--although this winter's been relatively sunny and mild for Paris, or a surfeit of roasted root vegetables, or my hatred of wearing socks, or a combination of all three, but I could use a change of scene, and without buying an airplane ticket or hopping a train, I found one last week when I stopped by the new Verjus wine bar in the Palais Royal. On a wet night, this place was warm, cozy and friendly, and also packed with an outgoing international crowd who were sipping Laura Adrian's excellent wines and snacking on the really delicious small-plates of Braden Perkins, the two comprising the couple who own and run this place. 

 

  It was reassuring to see it doing so well, too, because with a couple of exceptions, notably in Le Fooding, it's been rather disappointing to follow the dribble of tepid, pat-on-the-head polite reviews that this terrific restaurant and wine bar opened in December by Americans Perkins and Adrian has received in the French press. I've eaten there several times now, and Perkins's cooking, which was very good the first time I went, just gets better and better, as is generally the case with any solidly good new restaurant, or to wit, it takes time for any chef to settle into a new kitchen and find his or her rhythm.

 

  So what might explain the Gallic reaction to Verjus? I can't say for sure, but it may be a reflection of the great undeclared battle for Google rankings that's quietly being duked out between the robust and intensely reactive Anglophone gastro-blog community in Paris and the rather more lumbering mainstream French food press. There are at least a good dozen excellent well-read English-language blogs covering the Paris gastronomic scene, and they often get there--there being a new restaurant, shop or bar, first, with the result that the reviews which pop up from the churn from Google's search engine are in English not French, and in some quarters, this may rankle to the extent of provoking muted enthusiasm for places that have had major shout-outs from Paris's English-language cyber press.

 

  Be that as it may, I think this critical competition is salutory, because it ultimately leads to better and more varied information for people who care about great eating in Paris, and also that Verjus is a wonderful and important addition to the gastro-scape of Paris. The small-plates menu in the wine bar (open only in the evening from 6pm-11pm) is a great way to discover Braden Perkins's cooking without committing to one of the pricier tasting menus upstairs or remembering to book far enough ahead in advance to snag a table, too, and this grazing format perfect for a night out with friends, too. 

  

  Perkins's small-plates menu is a wonderful series of temptations you can heedlessly abandon yourself to, too:

  

SAVORY

Celeriac dumplings w/ dan-dan sauce, chives & toasted peanuts 7€

Charred broccoli w/ korean rice cake, anchovy, lemon & parm 6€

Pan roasted clams w/ chorizo, lime, chervil & garlic crouton 7€

Buttermilk fried chicken w/ napa cabbage slaw & micro greens 8€

Crispy basque pork belly w/ pickled red chilies & spicy kewpie mayo 8€

Joe’s shoestring fries w/ togarashi & catsup 4€

CHEESE

A selection of cheeses from maison Hisada w/ house accompaniments 14€

SWEET

Silverton’s butterscotch buddino w/ whipped cream 5€

House s’mores w/ Valrhona chocolate 5€

  

Shoestring fries

  

   Settled in with excellent glasses of white Crozes-Hermitage, my friend Corinne kicked off with the roasted broccoli, which was excellent, and I went with the celeriac-stuffed dumplings, an incredibly clever and delicious idea--potstickers filled with slices of cooked celery root perhaps splashed with black vinegar and served with a creamy sesame-peanut-chilie sauce. Unfortunately there weren't any clams the night we came by--this neo-Lusitanian preparation sounded alluring, but the shoestring fries were excellent, and the buttermilk-battered fried chicken with some Asian inflected cabbage slaw and a little corsage of sprouts was superb. In fact, this chicken was so good that it's a good thing this wine bar isn't open at noon, or it would doubtless lure me away from my keyboard at least once a week. We loved the perfectly aged cheeses, and the butterscotch buddino en homage a Nancy Silverton, too, and I once again came away from this address with not only an eager desire to return but an ever-deepening admiration for Perkins's intricate culinary wit.

  

Verjus Wine Bar, 47 rue Montpensier, 1st, No phone, Metro: Palais-Royal-Musee-du-Louvre, Pyramide or Bourse, Open Monday-Friday 6pm-11pm. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Average 20 Euros.

VERJUS Restaurant--A Really Good Public Dinner Party, A-/B+

 

  Unfortunately, I was never able to book a place at The Hidden Kitchen, the running series of private dinner parties cooked and hosted by the hugely talented Braden Perkins and Laura Adrian in their Paris apartment, because I travel so often and these meals were so popular you had to commit weeks ahead of time. Many of my favorite dining companions in Paris had raved about both the food and the hospitality at these meals, however, and so it was with intense curiosity that I went to Verjus, the restaurant the couple have just opened in a passage linking the rue de Richelieu and the Palais Royal for dinner the other night.

 

  Arriving, I loved this dining room immediately, since it overlooks the Palais Royal and the Theatre du Palais Royal just across the street through huge picture windows, and mismatched flea-market chairs were stationed at smooth oak tables. Somehow it didn't really feel like a restaurant, though, maybe because the atmosphere was so much more relaxed, and because it quickly became apparent that all of the usual role play incumbent in dining out had been rather refreshingly jettisoned. I was mulling this over, in fact, over a flute of very good Champagne before dinner when Bruno said, "This place doesn't really feel like a restaurant." I asked him why. "They're not doing all of the formality and rites of a restaurant," he said. "Instead it's kind of like being at someone's house."  

  

  We decided to order the four-course 55 Euro menu--the other option at this dinner-only address is the 70 Euro six-course meal, and a bottle of Jurancon Sec instead of the 30 or 40 Euro wine-option. Our meal began when Braden arrived tableside with an amuse bouche--two baked baby beets lightly sprinkled with caraway seeds on bamboo skewers in a shallow glass dish filled with froathy buttermilk. What I liked best about this debut was that this trio of flavors--so unexpected in Paris, astutely referenced the cooking of Central Europe--Poland, Lithuania and beyond.

 

  Next, a really brilliant little miniature as our first course--roasted baby leeks with a quail's egg, Israeli couscous, oven-dried radicchio leaves and a scattering of ash I'd guess was made from the trimmed green of the leeks. This was a fascinating composition, at once feral and very comforting, sort of like a detail from a Breughel painting of a winter feast in the Low Countries. Bread was served alongside this course, which put Bruno at ease, too. He'd have been happier if the bread had come with the beets, and since I like buttermilk a lot, so would I. With food this intricate, I also found myself wishing that the menu had been left behind as sort of a program for the meal.

  

 

 

  A superb chunk of baked just smoked salmon garnished with flying fish eggs and accompanied by tofu flan with a corsage of salad leaves and fennel bulb shavings followed, and it was such an immensely little satisfying dish I found myself really regretting that I'd never been able to attend one of Braden and Laura's dinner parties. This was, in fact, dinner party food, or the dinner party food of powerfully talented cooks, because it was so much more immediate, fragile and personal than restaurant food. Meanwhile, Bruno was still meditating over the identity of this place. "The waitresses serve like it's a private home. They're very sweet, but they don't survey the table to see if you need anything else (we never did, actually, since Perkins's seasoning is impeccable) and they don't explain what they're serving to you either," he observed. And I found I agreed with him even though I usually dislike the sing-song recitations that occur in restaurants when a dish is served. Here, though, I wanted more detail but ultimately didn't mind some mystery either.

   

 

  Perkins himself served the final main course, a perfectly roasted chunk of pork belly with carrots cooked in carrot juice. The gentle bitterness of a spray of a frisee sprinkled with crumbled salted ricotta served as the sophisticated foil for the sweetness of the carrot, which elongated the carmelized juices of the meat. This dish was so brilliantly balanced as to be almost algebraic, but remained friendly and sincere rather than cerebral. 

 

  After a brilliant cheese sampler for two from Hisada, the cheese salon run by Japanese maître-fromagère Sanae Hisada next door, dessert--chocolate ganache with beet sorbet, drops of citrus coulis and a dose of fennel was, in the context of the way our meal began, a sort of fairy-tale happy ending, since we'd returned safely after several adventures and some magic to the same place where we'd begun. Fascinating though it was to discover the affinity between beets and chocolate, I found the fennel, an echo of the caraway in the amuse bouche, a bit too potent. This was a deeply imagined and magnificently executed meal, though, and if Perkins is doing this well a week after opening and the substantial change, in both logistical and psychological terms, of moving from a small, controlled dinner party format to a much larger public one, this restaurant is going to become hugely popular.

   

  Note, by the way, that Perkins and Adrian also run a sister wine bar--it's also called Verjus, with a small plates tasting menu just below their main table, so you can come here to sample Perkins's cooking if you can get a reservation in the main restaurant, which has a rather complicated reservation system--you can only book at 7pm, 7.30pm or 8pm, very early for Paris, or come for a second seating on a first-come, first-served basis. A communal table is also available.

 

  Verjus,  52 rue Richelieu, 1st, Tel. 01-42-97-54-40. Metro: Palais-Royal Musee du Louvre or Pyramide. Dinner only. Closed Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Four courses 55 Euros, Six courses 70 Euros.

 

  Verjus Wine Bar, 47 rue Montpensier, 1st, Tel. 01-42-97-54-40. Metro: Palais-Royal Musee du Louvre or Pyramide. Closed Saturday and Sunday.