LE 6 PAUL BERT - Really Good Modern Bistro Cooking in a Great-Looking Venue, B+

The facade of Le 6 Paul Bert brought Georges Braque to mind

   

   Even though I've lived in Paris for a very longtime and go out at least five nights a week, there are still a few restaurants I always look forward to going to again and again--Le Paul Bert in the 11th arrondissement, for example. I've loved this place ever since the first time I stepped in the door a good five or six years ago, because it is such an almost studiously perfect example of a genus very dear to my heart, the Paris bistro. This place isn't some sort forgotten off-the-radar cat-sleeping-on-a-pie restaurant, though, but instead is an exactingly rendered summary of everything the whole world thinks of when it thinks of Paris bistros, from the saucy service to the zinc bar and wonderfully assorted (but again mostly artfully styled) flea-market enriched decor, and a menu that's meant to be a primer of great bistro dishes but which truth be told, somewhat undershoots this mark for lacking many plats mijotee, or long-simmered stews and casseroles like boeuf bourguignon or coq au vin. Instead, most of the cooking at the Paul Bert consists of prepped starters and a la minute grills, and it's very good indeed.

   

  

   To be sure, I've had good and less good meals at Le Paul Bert, but I have such profound respect for and confidence in owner Bertrand Auboyneau, who also owns the very good Ecailler de Bistrot fish house a few doors down from Le Paul Bert, that when I heard he'd opened at second bistro, Le 6 Paul Bert, it was the first thing I did after returning from a Christmas trip to New York. Because we'd eaten lavishly well in New York, where the occasion was a big birthday for Bruno, he wasn't exactly champing at the bit for anything more than salad at our kitchen table on the night I roped him in trying this new place with me, but all reluctance faded immediately the minute we stepped in the door of this very handsome new restaurant and were promptly seated by a charming young waitress (she and the second server, a nice waiter, get kudos, too, for so cheerfully keeping up with orders in an very busy and challenging dining room--small plates mean a lot more to and fro at the table).

     

  The menu came as a surprise for being an assortment of small plates in the idiom of such recent Paris restaurants as Saturne or Roseval, but these rather cryptically described compositions--as is true at Septime and many other new Paris restaurants, dishes are described haiku style as lists of their ingredients, sounded great, so we quickly decided to go with the 38 Euro 3 plates and dessert dinner menu. We negotiated the who was getting what, and then with a bottle of one of my favorite white Crozes-Hermitage wines (Les Baties from Dard et Ribo) and better bread than I've eaten from Jean-Luc Poujauran in a longtime to keep us happy, I mused on a more immediate dilemma--should I say hello to Le Figaro food critic Francois Simon, who was sitting at the table next to me, or desist for fear of calling attention to him if was hoping to remain as assiduously anonymous as possible; I decided to desist--it was very easy to relax in this exquistely decorated and well-lit room. With a small selection of groceries up front and a service bar, young Quebecois chef Louis-Philippe and sous-chef Elsa cook in a small open kitchen at the head of the room, and tables come in a variety of different sizes, including a rectangular one for six up front.

  

 

   

  Our first two dishes--my 'ravioli' of daikon radish, chopped raw beet, tangerines and oysters in a delightfully gentle citrus vinaigrette, and Bruno's grilled squid in a herb oil coulis with baby salad leaves were beautifully conceived and intriguingly referenced by the subliminal tidal pools of the collective culinary imagination of young chefs around the world. While very much his own creations, these cameos indicated that Louis-Philippe is doubtless aware of what colleagues like David Chang (Momofuku, NYC), René Redzepi (Noma, Copenhagen), and Luke Burgess (Les Garagistes, Hobart, Australia) are doing, to say nothing of other l young turks in Paris, including Gregory Marchand at Frenchie, James Henry at the soon to open Bones, or Braden Perkins at Verjus. To wit, these plates exhibited a suave play of acidities and different textures, were sort of raffishly elegant, and packed some powerful pleasure with the freshness of exquisitely sourced produce.

   

 

  Bruno's next dish, rollmops (herring) with a cucumber pickle, pickled scallion, beets and cream, leapt back across the Atlantic to the deli traditions of Eastern seaboard cities at the other end of the steamboat borne Eastern European diaspora a century ago, especially New York and Montreal, and was really fascinating for being framed by Paris, a city where Ashkenazic dining traditions have been fading for a longtime. I liked my chunky veal tartare, which made me think of the one served at Les Fines Gueules, although the seasoning was off balance due to too much mustard oil. Both dishes were worldly, well-prepared, and in the context of Paris today, shrewdly daring. Or in other words, anyone who knows what's cooking in New York or Stockholm and other cities right now might not find these preparations especially original, but in Paris they politely make a request to change the gastronomic conversation, and that's a good thing. 

 

  

  

  And with the arrival of our third course, something really fun and unexpected happened--I suddenly found myself in the presence of the first Dude Food I've ever eaten in Paris. People in other cities are actually a tad weary of this David Change cum M. Wells style of eating, but for me, a semi-assimilated Parisian, it was mighty fine. Bruno let me taste his succulent pork belly with baby clams and Japanese artichokes (crosnes, in French) and it was terrific--an immaculately conceived and cooked little still life that just left you wanting more. My barbecued pork on a carrot crepe sounded sort of awkwardly effete on the menu--I kept thinking of a high-school quarterback I once knew who is today married to a very handsome stock broker named Tad in Boston, or a study in troubled masculinity, but all of this smoke and mirror action vanished when my critical sensibility was snuffed out by a stroke-my-belly hit of unexpected pleasure. Hey, I know I'm no Dude, but on the other hand I love meat, smoke, everything fried, most fats and anything that's crunchy and edible. I'm trying damned hard to train myself to like healthy food, too, and this is why I loved getting a pass card with the 'carrot crepe,' which was really nicely seasoned root veg mash with some good crusting. So Louis-Philippe knows how to do North American Dude Food to suit a European sensibility, and that's a mighty fine gastonomic hat trick.

  

 

  By now I'd decided I really liked this place, an impression that deepened with a good cheese course (mine) and an odd riff on cannoli, those deep-fried Sicilian pastry treats filled with ricotta and candied fruit that I used to crave in New York's Little Italy and Boston's North End. Here, though, damn it all, cannoli just meant a round tube of caramelized sugar filled with lemony cream. Bruno said it was great, but I was still in athletic- protector mode after my barbecued pork and only wanted to eat all of my really good cheese.

 

  Aside from the charming service, what I most appreciated about this restaurant is that chef Louis-Philippe has the really long gastronomic antennae needed to cook in the context of what's happening all over the world right now, along with a really interesting nascent cooking style of his own and impressively solid kitchen skills, and these are the reasons I predict he'll become an important chef and that this swell little bisto will be packed solid within a week or two as the reviews roll in. It's imminent popularity notwithstanding, I intend to become a regular here, because they're so few restaurants in Paris today that issue themselves the almost nightmarish challenge of changing their menu every day. 

 

 6 rue Paul Bert, 11th, Tel. 01-43-79-14-32. Metro: Faidherbe-Chaligny. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Lunch menu 23 Euros, Dinner menu 38 Euros, average a la carte 40 Euros.  

 

N.B. Several readers have recently reported problems with their reservations L'Ecailler du Bistrot and Le Bistrot Paul Bert, and when I went for my first meal at Le 6 Paul Bert, it took ten minutes to track down my reservation. All of which is to say that they're a bit overwhelmed these days, so to prevent a frustrating disappointment, my advice would be to book well in advance and reconfirm your reservation on the morning of the day you're going.

QUI PLUME LA LUNE: Pretentious and Over-Priced Franco-Asian Cooking, C-

  A long time ago the space occupied by Qui Plume la Lune, a new Franco-Asian restaurant near the Cirque d'Hiver in the 11th arrondissement, was occupied by a very sweet little restaurant called Au C'Amelot, and since this was a place I liked a lot, I set off for dinner with my friend Judy, another very long-time American-in-Paris, with the hopes that we'd find the latest gastronomic incarnation of this narrow dining room with exposed stone walls to be as happy as its predecessor. I arrived before she did, and was immediately puzzled by by the desultory welcome of the two-member team here. Despite having made a reservation, I instantly had the impression of being an intruder on these premises, but I ordered a glass of Quincy and decided that maybe it wasn't them, it was me, since I'd had a very busy and rather trying day. This reflex seemed pretty fair, too, since even before we show up in a restaurant, we're arriving charged with our own good or bad mood.

  Still, I found myself musing over the fact that the first thing any restaurant should do is offer you a warm welcome and assure that you're comfortably seated before your meal begins, but for reasons that escape me, they're a lot of new and very popular restaurants in Paris these days where one feels as though one's presence is an imposition of some sort. To wit, the bluff attitude you experience when you arrives says 'we're hot, we're hip, you're lucky to be here'. For my part, I wilt as soon as I detect this posture, because the most essential motivation of any chef and his team has to be a desire to offer people pleasure and the decision to have a meal in a restaurant is a profoundly optional choice. 

  Then Judy arrived, and as we studied the menu, I knew she wouldn't be happy about the prices--there was a two-course 43 Euro menu, a 53 Euro menu--two courses and cheese or dessert, and a 63 Euro four course menu. Many of the dishes were rather mysterious sounding but it didn't occur to the waitress or the restaurant manager to explain them, so we had a lot of questions when the latter came to take our order. Responses were terse, and a request for a carafe of water was met with exasperation, since we'd already been asked several times if we wanted mineral water, which we didn't.

  So we ordered and chatted about the ridiculousness of the San Pellegrino restaurant awards, an annual rating of the world's 100 best restaurants that has produced risible results year in and year out. Le Figaro's fearsome food critic Francois Simon wrote a spot-on post about same the other day, and Judy had a good laugh when I showed her the list of the "World's Best Restaurants." Among other truly ludicrous results, it seemed nuts that London's Hibiscus should have ranked higher than Restaurant Alain Ducasse au Plaza Athenee. Perhaps what's most surprising about these rankings, however, is the attention they receive.

  Then our amuse bouches arrived, and as best we could fathom, these identical dishes were comprised of a small piece of barbecued eel on a bed of wilted bean sprouts and cabbage in a bright red sauce that was described as a reduction of red wine, but had been sweetened with something, probably Mirin. Our bouches were not amused, but our first courses did offer a chuckle when they arrived.

Scallops with primitive radio transmiter  Judy's pair of seared scallops sat on two little beds of anonymous sweet baby-food-like puree and were accompanied by a small salad of purslane and a ball of sorbet in a bamboo holder with two strands of toasted soba topped with a tangle of purslane, an object that resembled some sort of primitive radio transmitter. My tataki of salmon proved a better choice, although it was rather monastic--a slab of lightly griddled salmon garnished with a generally appealing assortment of baby vegetables, including an asparagus spear, several Jerusalem artichokes, a baby carrot, a radish, a green onion, several fronds and that dead giveaway of a young chef trying too hard, a starchy purple potato.  

Salmon tataki   If my salmon was pretty to look at, generously served, and intelligently sourced, it was also decidedly ascetic. I had chosen this restaurant because I'd liked the cooking of chef Jacky Ribault when he cooked at Shozan in the 8th. Ribault has an impressive resume, too, having cooked at Taillevent, Pierre Gagnaire, Arpege and with Pierre Herme, so I was expecting some really interesting food. Neither of these dishes delivered, but to be fair, I'm not a great fan of sorbets as a garnish and my palate prefers umami and salt to anything sweet in the context of savory food. 

  Main courses were peculiar as well. Judy's small pieces of poached sea bass were topped with strawberries, an idea that pleased neither of us, and came in a small white pond of timid tasting liquid at the bottom of which was a very good puree of fresh peas. 

Sea bass with strawberries--why? My lamb was perfectly cooked rare, tender and flavorful but unappealingly slathered with an unpleasant green paste, tinted by Matcha tea, but not tasting of same, and the garnish was identical to my first course. An orange sauce added some color to the black plate but had no discernible flavor.

Lamb with legumes bis  Since the service seemed to grow tetchier as the evening progressed, and it was a beautiful warm night, we decided to stop here and head for a sidewalk terrace on which to enjoy a coffee. Cheerfully received at the nearby (and good) Vache Acrobate, it was a relief to get a breathe of fresh air, and to have escaped from the precious and slightly hostile atmosphere of Qui Plume la Lune. I don't know who plumes (plucks) the moon, but I do know who plucked us, and I couldn't help but contrasting this disappointing meal with a delicious dinner I'd had on Wednesday at La Regalade Saint Honore, which I reviewed here last Spring. We were eight at this dinner, and aside from an imprecision here and there--David's cabillaud demi-sel was too salty, the food was delicious and the prix-fixe menu at 33 Euros remains one of the best buys in Paris, especially when you can get at dishes like scallops with Parmesan and tiny croutons, black rice with shrimp and garlic chips, and Ospital pork belly with lentils. So again, bravo to chef Bruno Doucet!

Scallops with Parmesan at La Regalade Saint Honore

Qui Plume la Lune, 50 rue Amelot, 11th, Tel. 01-48-07-45-48. Metro: Sebastien-Froissart. Open Tuesday-Saturday. Closed Sunday and Monday. Prix-fixe menus at 43 and 53 Euros, lunch menu 23 Euros.