Chefs Galien Emery and Adrien Ferrand @Geraldine Martens

After a lot of trial and error, my favorite delivered food in Paris reliably comes from Brigade du Tigre, an excellent contemporary Asian restaurant run by chefs Galien Emery and Adrien Ferrand near their original modern bistro Eels in the 10th Arrondissement.

Since I love going to Paris restaurants so much, I’ve never been a big fan of takeout or delivered food. This all changed in 2020 when restaurants in Paris were shuttered twice by the government as part of its attempt to reign in the spread of Covid 19 (they’re still closed as of February 25, with no known reopening date on the horizon).

During the first quarantine, we rarely ordered more than a pizza or two, but once the second shutdown hit us, I was honestly a little worn out from being in the kitchen so much, and we started ordering more delivered food. Too often, it was a hope-springs-eternal sort of a story, as harried, underpaid, often probably not even legally employed delivery people came to our door frequently massless with pizzas scrunched up into the bottom of boxes, congealed Asian dishes that no amount of steam or sautéing could bring back to life, and some truly tragic mishaps, like the time we ordered from a well-rated Paris delicatessen in the hopes of having a good pastrami sandwich; what arrived was just plain awful.

To be sure, we’ve had some good experiences with delivered food as well. I have often ordered from Hokkaido, Ippudo and Deux or Trois Fois Plus Piment–all Asian noodle and dumpling restaurants, and their food is reliably good, reasonably priced and arrives promptly and in good condition. Ippudo even does the really smart thing of packing the noodles separately from the soup, so that you can reheat the soup and then add the noodles without overcooking them. But if these Asian meals are great lunchtime feeds, what I’ve wanted is food for dinner that might begin to approximate the unexpected and delicious flavors and textures of what I’d eat in a great Paris restaurant helmed by a talented young chef.

And this is what I’ve found every time I’ve ordered from Brigade du Tigre–delicious and inventive food with bright and vibrant flavors and diverse textures that’s carefully packed and promptly delivered to arrive at my table in as close to possible perfection as it might be if I was eating it in-house at the restaurant.

A little back story on these chefs explains why their cooking is so good. After graduating from the Ecole Ferrandi in Paris, Ferrand spent seven years working for chef William Ledeuil, the first Parisian chef to passionately master the flavors and ingredients of Southeast Asia, first for five years at Ledeuil’s Ze Kitchen Galerie and then as chef at Ze Kitchen Galerie Bis, Ledeuil’s annex table.

In 2017, Ferrand opened his Restaurant Eels, which remains one of the best contemporary bistros in Paris, and then he and longtime friend Galien Emery had the idea of opening a restaurant that would present their take on the kitchens of the southeastern Asian countries and China. Emery had lived in Kuala Lumpur for five years, and so he knew Asian cooking really well. Together the pair traveled in Asia for three months in Thailand, Sri Lanka, Singapore and China then they came home to create their new restaurant.

I wasn’t in Paris in October 2020 when Brigade du Tigre opened, because as soon as the first lockdown ended, we’ve been spending most of our time at our house in a village near Uzes, but as soon as I went back to Paris, I somewhat warily ordered some of their food online. And it was stunningly good.

The day I first ordered from Brigade du Tigre, I kept a web window for the restaurant’s order page open on my computer all day, occasionally rereading the menu again in anticipation and further reflecting on what I’d order, because I wanted absolutely everything.

As much as I love the time I spend in my little village in the south of France, it’s rudely awakened me to the most urgent reasons I’ve spent most of my life in a string of big cities–London, Boston, New York, London, Paris, Prague, Paris. If the ostensible adult reason to move to a big city was for work, the real ones were sex and food, since cities offer such a wealth of delicious possibilities for the latter. Now that I’m married, though, food is more than ever my urban grail, and if they’re some wonderful restaurants in Uzes, Nimes and elsewhere in Le Gard, they’re things I absolutely crave, like everything Asian.

So finally I completed my order: five-spice bao buns (coiled buns made with rice flour, seasoned with five-spice powder and steamed), grilled wild-mushroom ravioli, pickled vegetables, and roast lacquered pork belly with pumpkin, pok choi and rice, and a baba (sponge cake) soaked with sake and garnished with litchis and ginger. Then I set the table and lied in wait, desperate for the doorbell to ring.

When the food arrived, I was so impressed by the tidiness with which it had been packed and also glad that all of the packaging was paper, since meals from too many other restaurants produce a deluge of plastic, which is currently difficult to recycle due to the fact that there’s more supply than demand all over the world. But most of all, I was ecstatic at the pleasure of vibrant resonant flavors that were beyond my capacity to create in the kitchen.

My first meal was outstanding, and so I ordered again the other day and tried a variety of other dishes, including shrimp tartare, crab cake and coconut cake, all of which were delicious.

Some day soon, I hope I’ll be able to actually have the pleasure of eating in the dining room of Brigade du Tigre, but for the time being, I’m just hugely grateful to have access to such good and reasonably priced food by delivery.

And in the meantime, don’t miss their coconut cake if it’s available whatever you order, which you should.

Brigade du Tigre
38 Rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, Paris, 10th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-45-81-51-56. Metro: Grands Boulevards. Regular hours: Open Monday to Friday for lunch and dinner. Current (February 20210 hours: Open daily noon-2.30pm and 5.30pm-9.30pm for takeout and delivery. Average 40 Euros. www.brigadedutigre.fr 

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Victor and Charly, founders of the Brasserie Bellanger

The recent opening of Brasserie Bellanger is another sign of one of the best dining trends in Paris today–the renaissance of city’s affordable dining scene. This category of restaurants had long been abandoned by most Parisians to backpacking students as the food they served slouched towards mediocrity. Now, though, an excellent variety of new addresses are serving up some very good simple Gallic grub at easygoing prices in lively, friendly restaurants, many of which are also usefully open daily. Brasserie Bellanger, which is an easy walk from both the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est in the 10th Arrondissement, is a very good example.

Brasserie Bellanger opened after the piece on affordable dining in Paris I recently wrote for the New York Times, which you can read here, was published, but it certainly belongs in the company of the tables I reviewed in that article. It has an interesting back story, too. Victor and Charly, two friends who previously worked as chefs in the restaurants of Eric Frechon and Jean-Louis Nomicos, decided they wanted to revive the Paris brasserie by returning it to its original mission–good food at good prices served expeditiously in a comfortable lively setting.

So they carefully scouted a location and then spent a lot of time finding the producers who would supply their restaurant, including a farmer in the Aveyron who sends whole sides of Charolais beef to them in Paris and a fisherman in Ouistreham who delivers direct three times a week. Their poultry comes from the Bresse region, most of their vegetables are grown in the Ile de France, and their butter is made by the Laiterie de Kerguillet in Plouay in Brittany.

They were similarly exigent about the drinks served at their restaurant. The coffee they serve is roasted by Joris Pfaff, a prize-winning roaster, and their 100% malt unfiltered beer is made by the Rabourdin brewery in Courpalay in the Seine et Marne. Organic cider is delivered to the restaurant in kegs from the farm of Père Mahieu in Normandy, and the wine list was drawn up to showcase bottles from small independent producers and features a regularly changing selection of natural wines.

Arriving here for dinner on a hot summer night, Bruno and I were seated on the terrace to profit from a feeble breeze. Sipping Champagne and nibbling delicious truffled sausage from the Perigord while we read the menu, we fell into conversation with a jovial man sitting next to us who told us he lives in the neighborhood and comes several times a week. “The decor is a little bit Disney,” he said of the Brasserie Bellanger interior, “But the food is very good and the staff are lovely.”

The menu was an attractive roster of traditional French comfort food, but the prices were so low that I was instinctively apprehensive about the quality of what would follow. I was quite wrong, as it happily turned out, since our starters of oeufs mayonnaise, celeri remoulade and poireaux vinaigrette were excellent. The celeri remoulade was made with freshly grated celery rave, lightly dressed with real mayonnaise and appealingly garnished with crushed roasted hazelnuts, while the leeks were fresh and pleasantly al dente.

My main course of Lagioule sausage with potato puree garnished with chopped chives and salad for 13 Euros was deeply satisfying, and Bruno loved his summer tartare, which was ground beef with chopped olives, fried capers and green zebra tomatoes with a nice warm thatch of golden frites. Our chatty neighbor’s “poisson du jour” (fish of the day) was a nicely served filet of cod with grated zucchini and cherry tomatoes, too. Portions were generous, and the cooking here is light, fresh and precise.

We concluded our unexpectedly good meal here with a nicely made Paris Brest, and I decided this this would also be the occasion for me to take my first cat photo–the water pitcher on our table. Brasserie Bellanger is a very good bet for simple good-quality French food at very fair prices. N.B. It’s open daily for lunch and dinner and serves non-stop; they do not take reservations.

140 rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, 10th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 07 82 32 92 08, but they do not take reservations. Metro: Barbès Rochechouart or Poissonnière. Open daily. www.victoretcharly.com
Average 20 Euros.

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@ Jeanne Le Louam

Chef Adrien Ferrand

Named for his signature dish–a composition of smoked eel with reglisse  (liquorice root), apples and hazelnuts, Restaurants Eels is the best new table of La Rentree (the Fall season) in Paris. The solid allure of this place is foremost due to the superbly witty, inventive and assured cooking of chef Adrien Ferrand, but also to the beautiful renovation of an old couscous restaurant with a real attention to customer comfort in terms of lighting and noise by interior designer Pascale Perrier and the charming and professional service of the dining room staff.

Arriving for dinner with Bruno, we were immediately impressed by how well-run and professional this new restaurant is for a place that’s only three months old. Even before we’d looked at the menu, this aura of cheerful but steely confidence set table place apart from other young-chef-going-out-on-his-or-her openings. Here, every last detail has been thought through, what from the wood-panelled zinc-topped service bar where Ferrand composes his dishes before they’re served, to the clever black-steel glass racks strategically located around the dining room to save steps and the pretty vases of early autumn wild flowers that decorate the bar. Without coming off as a uniform, the staff wears one, and it’s almost invisible, since the ensemble has a sort of a graduate-student chic created by gray shirts, navy trousers and tobacco-colored leather Oxford shoes. Think sexy nerd.

On a Tuesday night, the dining room, which used to be couscous place and has since been renovated and given a great looking vaguely midcentury retro decor by interior designer Pascale Perrier, was full, with all 42 covers spoken for. In an old high-ceilinged corner shop front like this, this could mean punishing a punishing decibel level, but not here. The tables are widely spaced enough to dampen any din, and the charming maitre d’hotel with a full but neatly trimmed beard volunteered that they are still planning to install more noise-abatement insulation in the near future. The message was clear: This is a restaurant that care very much about its customers.

Smoked eel with apple and hazelnuts @ Pauline Gouablin

As he poured us each an excellent glass of Chardonnay from the Jura, he added that chef Adrien Ferrand’s signature dish is the smoked eel composition, and added that the fish of the day was hake. Without having given it a lot of thought, I had already sampled Ferrand’s cooking when he was cooking at KGB, chef William Ledeuil’s annex table to his excellent Ze Kitchen Galerie, in Saint-Germain-des-Pres. If the food I’d had at several meals there was excellent, Ferrand was still cooking within the gastronomic bookends of Ledeuil’s style.

Here, Ferrand, 25, not only comes into his own with a style that nods at Ledeuil’s fondness for herbs and Asian seasonings, but surprises with suave, deeply reasoned contemporary French dishes that display his own wiry creativity and delicious wit.  After perusing the appealing menu, I chose the carpaccio of red tuna from the Basque fishing port of Guéthary and Bruno decided on the roasted beets with goat cheese. Garnished with caper flowers, Thai basil, roasted cherry tomatoes and tomato marmalade, the unctuous tuna was generously served and had a delicious faint taste of the sesame seed oil, ginger and ponzu vinaigrette in which it had been briefly marinated. Nothing overwhelmed the essential mineral-rich oceanic flavor of this sublime fish, however, and this is why this dish was so outstanding. Bruno enjoyed his beets and goat cheese, but observed that as nicely made and presented as it was, even its fruity blackberry-balsamic vinaigrette couldn’t make it original.

In my experience, many young Paris chefs dazzle with their starters and then become more conventional with their main courses, which leads to a polite letdown. Ferrand is the exception. My Iberian pork came with roasted salsify roots and an intriguing autumn barnyard garnish of white beans, corn and girolles. A ruddy jus de viand dressed the meat and an umeboshi (Japanese salted plums) condiments was one of the best garnishes I’d ever eaten with pork, since its salt, umami and puckery sourness were the perfect foil for the rich meat. Bruno loved his lamb with smoked aubergine puree, wilted Pontoise cabbage and tamarind-spiked jus, too.

Since portions here are generous, we split a dessert–a winsomely autumnal dish of baked mirabelles, the tiny little plums from Lorraine, and quetsche (red plums) with hazelnuts, pistachio pound cake cubes, and clover-infused cream. It was delightful, and so was our meal here.

What makes Restaurant Eels such an excellent new table is that the young team behind it deliver a flawless and charming service experience around the outstanding cooking of Adrien Ferrand. And it was while we walking home after dinner that it occurred tome that this level of charm, good humor and precision is much too rare in young chef bistros in Paris. Regrettably often, the staff in such places are so in awe of the chef and his or her kitchen that their service posture is off-handed and haughty, just at the limits of being polite, the supposed justification being that you’re lucky (and barely worthy) to be eating in a place where the chef walks on water (several truly awful meals at Saturne come to mind, but they’re many other offenders).

There’s none of this nonsense at Restaurant Eels, where Adrien Ferrand’s superb cooking is beautifully framed by an exceptionally pleasant customer experience. So go now before it gets any more popular and the prices inevitably go up, since it really is wonderful.

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So there are two things you need to know right away about Les Arlots, an excellent new bistro near the Gare du Nord in Paris. The first is that this tiny place is going to become very popular, so if you want to go, please pause now, pick-up the phone and make a reservation. And the second is that despite its diminutive size, it signals a major change in the gastronomic landscape of Paris. To wit, La Bistronomie, or the modern bistro movement that was born in 1994 when chef Yves Camdeborde (along with other Christian Constant alumni) opened the original La Regalade in a remote corner of the 14th Arrondissement, has now run its course to the extent that many of its memes are becoming embarrassing, even a little irritating.

What made me finally certain about something I’ve been sensing for a while was the avidity with which the four of us savaged every course we ate Les Arlots the other night. To be sure, there were a few dishes on the chalkboard menu that nodded at the better ideas of La Bistronomie, notably beets with goat cheese and a deconstructed fraisier (a strawberries-and-cream dessert usually made with sponge cake but here concocted with crumbled shortbread and dollops of pleasantly acidulated raw milk creme fraiche instead). The fact of the matter, however, is that beyond the catchy (or not so catchy) name, La Bistronomie was always essentially just about applying the basic principles of La Nouvelle Cuisine to bistro cooking, i.e. shorter cooking times; a preference for jus (reductions) over elaborated sauces; the eager use of fresh herbs, citrus and other ingredients that convey bright notes of taste; a respect for vegetables and also the aesthetics of the plate. La Bistronomie also prefers layering or contrasting tastes to those that meld together and would not exist without the skills of the cook. This is why Bistronomique menus can be interesting and refreshing but often lack the gastronomic draft of traditional bistro cooking, which, it would seem, Paris is suddenly craving all over again.

What we yearned for the other night was real food, or mostly traditional dishes that here were beautifully cooked from superb produce and also generously served. I didn’t come to dinner in search of gastronomic revelation, but rather in the hopes of being well-fed in the best French traditions of culinary simplicity by people who honestly love working in a restaurant, whether in the dining room as servers or bar tenders, or the kitchen as chef and assistants.

But what was it exactly that clued me in to the fact that we’d be eating a really really good meal The reflexive unselfconscious friendliness of the dining room staff and the small saucer of excellent slightly warmed Corsican sausage that the kitchen sent out for us to nibble with our Saint Andre Sauvignon, one of the really good natural and/or organic wines from the open-shelf wine list here. Message: We love what we do, and we want you to have a great meal and a good time.

We stared at the chalkboard menu for a longtime before we were able to commit to our respective meals, because there were so many things that all of us wanted. Since pâté en croûte is such a great dish upon which to judge the quality of a bistro, I wavered, but in the end I couldn’t stay away from the langoustines with homemade mayonnaise, partly because I adore them, but also because they’re rarely seen in such settings and these were so reasonably priced at 15 €. What I did not expect was the lavishness of the portion that eventually came my way, or their perfect cuisson, or mayonnaise so good I ended up finishing it up with torn pieces of excellent baguette.

Bruno and Richard loved their marinated raw daurade (sea bream) with a pistou vinaigrette and Roberto his beets and goat cheese with matchsticks of green apple and a few leaves of baby Treviso. Chatting with the lovely waitress when she came to the table with more bread, I learned that the chef here is Thomas Brachet, who had previously worked at La Maison Blanche and the Beef Club. This surprised, because I never found the slightest trace of this brilliant bistro cooking at either of those addresses, so maybe Brachet was just waiting to spread his wings and cook the food he really likes. One way or another, he’s an exceptionally talented chef with an impressive battery of cooking skills and an impressive range within his own solid, earthy style.

Menus often make me fickle. The reason I’d decided I wanted to discover Les Arlots is that several colleagues had been raving about Brachet’s homemade sausage and potato puree, one of my favorite dishes, but when I saw the stuffed cabbage on the menu, I immediately knew there was absolutely no way I wouldn’t be ordering that, and Richard, another member of the ‘To hell with cholesterol’ club, followed suit. It wasn’t a conventional stuffed cabbage, but rather a superb saute of foie gras enriched meat covered with a cap of Savoy cabbage and glossed with a rich jus. And it was so clobberingly good that it brought on a little light-headedness, what with that rich rush of fat, salt and falling-down-a-well depth of resonating umami taste.

Bruno was very happy with his nicely seared veal steak with baby vegetables and Jerusalem artichoke puree and Roberto, the daintiest eater at the table, was pleased with his rougets. And even though the snug premises were packed tight as a sardine tin, the atmosphere was contagiously jovial, as the nice Italian boys at the table next to us told us not to miss the Fraisier dessert and the quartet behind us couldn’t help but asking us where we from, because their eavesdropping left them curious (Caracas, Cleveland, Connecticut and Valenciennes, s.v.p.).

Even though I’m a journalist, trends per se don’t particularly interest me. That said, the instant popularity of an excellent new bistro like Les Arlots makes it obvious to me that we’re weary of the fiddlier aspects of La Bistronomie, like smears, micro-greens and the artful but often incoherent compositions of a pointillist gastronomy that never quite becomes legible or pleasurable. At Les Arlots, Thomas Brachet has the talent to extract everything that there may be to love about La Bistronomie and apply it to old-fashioned bistro cooking with ardor and talent. This is why I can’t wait to return and try his homemade sausage and potato puree. I know, though, that it’s not going to be easy to get a reservation.

Les Arlots, 136 rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, 10 Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-42-82-92-01, Metro: Rochechouart, Poissonnière or Gare du Nord. Closed Sunday and Monday. Open for lunch and dinner Tuesday to Saturday. Lunch menus 17 €, 20 €; average a la carte 40 €

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@Marie Genin

The Bistro Paradis, a winsome new restaurant on the street of the same name, adds some delicious momentum to the ongoing transformation of a formerly fusty part of the 10^th Arrondissement into a lively new restaurant district with a lot of adventurous and innovative young chefs. Talented Brazilian born chef Alexander Furtado’s delicious and quietly original riff on the cannon of modern French bistro cuisine also demonstrates how alluringly cosmopolitan this cooking has become in Paris at the beginning of the 21^st century. Previously reluctant or resistant when it came to foreign seasonings and ingredients, Parisians have recently embraced them with such wholehearted curiosity that the French capital is quietly becoming almost as wordly at the table as larger cities like New York and London.

Tartare of bass and salmon with lemongrass, ginger and combava @Anabelle Schachmes

“I use typically Brazilian produce like coconut milk and shavings of toasted coconut, guava, mango, acai and pecqui in dishes that are cooked according to the classical French techniques I learned while working at Alain Ducasse’s restaurant at the Hotel Dorchester in London and then at  Christian Constant’s restaurants in Paris,” explains the very friendly Furtado. “Contrary to what many people think, Brazilian cooking is characterized by subtle melded flavors, and it’s not hot, which makes it appealing to the French,” says the chef.

What he’s referring to is a flavor palette that might be described as a spectrum of tropical umami, or sweet savoury often nutty flavors which evoke someplace much sunnier than the rue de Paradis, despite a name that would seem to promise an eternity of pleasure. What’s fascinating about Furtado’s cooking is how easily and alluringly the idiom contemporary French bistro cooking embraces his well-groomed expression of childhood taste memories in a huge, distant and famously sensual homeland, Brazil.

@Annabelle Schachmes

In their own way, Furtado and his delightful partner Yoann Dinh are actually perpetuating the traditional vocation of this part of Paris in a different way. For most of the 19^th century the fetchingly named rue de Paradis was the honeypot destination where bourgeois mothers and their engaged daughters came to shop for the furnishings that presaged, it was to be fervently hoped, a prosperous life of domestic bliss to come.

Due to its proximity to the Gare de l’Est, the gateway to Paris for trains arriving from eastern France where the best French crystal (Baccarat, Saint Louis) and glassware have historically been produced, the rue de Paradis attracted producer showrooms, and these were eventually joined by shops selling porcelain, silverware and almost everything needed to set an impressively respectable table except for the fresh flowers and the fruit and sweetmeats carefully chosen to ornament the epergne in the center of the table.

During the seventies and eighties, the decline of life-styles that regularly required fish fork and knives, much less silver-plated asparagus clamps or at least three different crystal glasses for each place setting–water, white wine and red, dimmed the glamour once reflected upon the neighborhood by the carriage trade, and by the nineties, the quartier had become filled with African hair-dressing salons, Bosnian butchers, and the kebab stands that are the telltale sign of almost any ‘transitional’ neighborhood in Paris. Now, though, the rue de Paradis is peddling good taste again, but in different declensions, including the handsome interior of bleached oak paneling designed by Kristin Gavoille, an architect who formerly worked with Philipe Starck, that has transformed the narrow premises of a former cafe du quartier into a stylish little room with a lot of personality (it’s efficient, too, since there’s a dumb-waiter at the service bar in the middle of the room that sends dirty dishes down to the scullery below–“This was a challenging space to make into a restaurant,” says Yoann Dinh by way of explanation with a grin).

Meeting Grant, an adored but rarely seen Scottish friend who lived in Paris for fifteen years before he inherited a cottage and pub on a remote island and decided to take a crack at a new life, for dinner, I arrived early and enjoyed a glass of white wine and studying the menu for a few minutes by myself. Just as I found myself vaguely wondering if Grant wouldn’t show up wearing a kilt, someone said, “Hey, how are ya, then, ya old cod!#8221;

@Annabelle Schachmes

Knowing we’d talk up a storm, I suggested we focus on the food before the chat began. “You know I love living up on my island, but I do miss the luxury of having a huge choice of good food out the door everyday,” said Grant, who was so hungry he suggested we share three starters, the tartare of salmon and sea bass seasoned with lemongrass, ginger and zest of combava, the artichoke veloute with grilled shrimp and chicken-and-lardo-di-Colonnata quenelles (garnishes above before the soup arrived) and the sauté of wild mushrooms with poached egg and shavings of toasted coconut. If all three dishes were beautifully cooked, the detail that stood out for me was the way the coconut shavings brought both contrasting texture and a very subtly sweet mellowness to the wild mushrooms. Grant agreed: “The whole lot is delicious, but I don’t want you start talking food rot with me or it’ll wreck the meal.”

Warned off making my gastronomic observations public, I quietly enjoyed my cod in a lush ‘moqueca’ style sauce. In Brazil, a moqueca is a stew of salt-water fish cooked in coconut milk with tomatoes, onions, garlic, coriander and a little palm oil, and if Frutado’s version was much more refined than the rough-and-ready versions I’ve sampled in beachside restaurants near Recife, it was similarly luscious and deeply satisfying. Meanwhile, grunting Grant across the table was so happy with his marinated steak with manioc fries and a sauce of meat drippings boosted by acai berries (big, healthy fruits that come from Brazilian palm trees) that he got through it before I could exasperate him by trying to photograph the dish. “That was lovely,” he said, warning again, “But that doesn’t mean I want to talk food rot.” Instead he regaled me with the story of his latest affair, this time round with a young Presbyterian minister. “It’s a lot easier to be a poof up in Scotland these days than I thought it would be,” he said.

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much of the desserts, because most hard-working young chefs don’t have the time or staff to soar at the sweet end of the meal and the ones I’ve had in Brazil were often too sweet for my tastes. So I let Grant go for the banana eclair and settled on some nice ‘pudim,’ or the nice eggy version of creme caramel you find in Brazil and Portugal, with beads of sweet potato marinated in caramel. They were both very good in different ways. The eclair showed off Furtado’s wit and capacity for being a very good student, since there was so much Gallic learning on display in this politely sideways presentation, and the pudim offered up the touchstone of why his food is so good: he has a maternal desire to make people happy and feed them well, and this observation is of course intended as a very big compliment. Or for a more succinct take on the evening from Grant: “Cool operator decor, great grub, sweet young guys–I’d go back.”

Bistro Paradis, 55 rue de Paradis, 10^th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 07.71.01.32.26 or 0 01.42.26.59.93. Metro: Cadet or Poissoniere. Open from Tuesday through Saturday for lunch and dinner. Lunch menu 23 Euros, Average a la carte 40 Euros. www.bistroparadis.fr

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This past summer I wrote a happy piece for the Wall Street Journal about the quickening bistro revival in Paris. Since then the trend has gained even more momentum and also attracted the attention of other food writers, which is a wonderful thing, because it attests to the enduring popularity and improving prospects of the cooking that’s the ballast of the French kitchen, bistro food, bien sur. Now, with the opening of chef Daniel Rose’s new 29 seater table La Bourse et La Vie, it looks like another nearly extinct Paris restaurant idiom, the bistro de luxe, or an upmarket bistro specializing in la cuisine bourgeoise, is slated for a comeback.

If you’re wondering what the difference is between regular bistro cooking and cuisine bourgeoise bistro cooking, the latter is more refined, delicate and likely to make use of luxurious produce than its ruddier and more rustic gastronomic sibling. A perfect example of la cuisine bourgeoise is the riff on artichoke hearts and foie gras served by Rose’s wife, Marie-Aude Mery, who runs the tiny kitchen at the couple’s new restaurant, which is open for breakfast and lunch as well as dinner.

At a restaurant like Chez Pauline, a bistro de luxe in the rue Villedo, long gone but for years a standard-bearer of la cuisine bourgeoise, along with tables like Pierre au Palais Royal and Le Recamier in the days when it was run by Burgundian chef Martin Cantegrit, the firm fleshy artichoke bottoms would have been filled with foie-gras mousse. The base-note tastes of artichoke with its false sweetness and foie gras with its soft waxiness and barnyard funkiness have always paired beautifully, but what improves the dish at La Bouse et La Vie is that the foie gras is served in generous slabs. This rescues this dish from the somewhat elderly lack of texture from which it suffered in its classic version, and to flirtatiously temper the richness of this plush pairing, it’s accompanied by almost aspic-like shallot vinaigrette, a brilliant detail.

So it’s this type of exceptionally shrewd cooking that makes the new version of La Bourse et La Vie such an exciting addition to the Paris restaurant scene. It’s a sexy little restaurant, too, with a gun-metal gray interior by interior architect Elliott Barnes, former partner of the late Andrée Putman, that highlights its best feature, the original 1820s vintage moldings that surround the mirrors which visually amplify the diminutive space of the former stationer’s shop. A few other details wink in sort of a coy post-modern way at the decorative idioms of the traditional Paris bistro, including a heavy velvet draft-blocking curtain at the door, a zinc bar and the modern globe lamp lighting fixtures designed by Italian designer Gina Sarfati in 1965.

Stepping through the door with Bruno, we ran right into the indefatigably cheerful Daniel Rose, who brought us a giant gougère, or puffy cheese-blazed choux pastry, to nibble on with our glasses of Domaine de la Taille aux Loups sparkling wine, a favorite from the Loire.” And then a bit of banter. “This tastes like it was made with Dorie Greenspan’s recipe,” I said to Daniel. “Yup, I pinched her recipe!” True or false, it was delicious, as was the mackerel poached in white wine, a dainty version of a bistro classic, that Bruno ordered as his starter (I, of course, had the artichoke hearts with foie gras, which were superb).

Continuing to indulge my retro culinary curiosity, I had the filet de canette a l’orange, another gloriously rock-of-ages but recently little seen glory of Gaul, and it was an exquisite bird–tender, juicy, cooked perfectly rare with a light golden crust on its skin and a silken sauce of pan-drippings and stock very discretely flavored with orange (I suspect that finely chopped dried orange zest had been made into an infusion and then added to the sauce at the last minute, lest too much heat dull its quietly refreshing citrus brightness). As profoundly satisfying as the duckling may have been, however, what really raised my pulse rate was the superb accompanying side dish of sautéed ceps and figs, a brilliant garnish for the bird.

Meanwhile, across the table, Bruno was quietly enjoying Rose’s clever contemporary revision of one of the all-time greatest bistro dishes, pot-au-feu. Rose didn’t say so, but his fresh and very inspired take on this cold-weather classic would seem to have been inspired by two other now rarely served but decidedly delicious cuisine bourgeoise dishes, boeuf a la ficelle, or beef poached in bouillon, and quasi de veau bourgeoise, the ‘quasi,’ or top of a leg of veal, simmered in broth with vegetables. In Rose’s dish, the quasi was served rare, with bone marrow, poached flank steak, cabbage, carrots, celery and a crispy galette of calf’s head topped with sauce gribiche, and the bouillon was delicately perfumed with chopped mint and lime zest. This exquisite dish was accompanied by some pommes boulangères–potatoes baked with butter and bouillon on a bed of sautéed onions, that I couldn’t keep my fork out of.

Beyond his talent in the kitchen, what Rose excels at is hospitality, and his desire to spoil and amuse his guests creates an atmosphere here that’s at once confidential, charming, and ur worldly in the most Parisian of ways, no mean feat for a guy who hails from the American Midwest. The charming sommelier and an excellent wine list abetted the pleasure of this feast as well..

When we arrived, Bruno spotted a pretty tarte au citron on the end of the zinc service bar and immediately asked that a portion be set to one side. So when it came to the table, he devoured it so quickly, I had no time to take a picture of it, much less taste it. I believe him when he said it was very good, although he did insist that his own is better, and I can attest to how excellent his lemon tarts always are. And me, in a happy way-we-were sort of haze brought on by the fact that this meal had conjured up memories of favorite meals and dishes I hadn’t though about in a very longtime, I tucked into what just might have been the best crème caramel creme I’ve ever had. It was rich, eggy, creamy and redolent of vanilla, and the only thing that could possibly have made it better was a stronger taste of burned sugar in the sauce, but that’s a personal preference. And in keeping with the don’t ask, don’t tell theme of enjoying the evening rather than trying to safe-crack every recipe, I didn’t ask Rose if this gorgeous custard hadn’t also received a big dollop of crème fraîche in addition to the usual cream and milk, but the fluffy pillowy texture made me think it had.

La Bourse et La Vie is a wonderful restaurant.

La Bourse et la Vie, 12 rue Vivienne, 2nd Arrondissement, Paris, tel. (33) 01-42-60-08-83, Metro: Bourse, Palais Royal-Musée du Louvre, Quatre Septembre. Open Monday-Friday for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Closed Saturday and Sunday, Average a la carte 45 Euros.

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Most animals hibernate during the winter, but not me. My annual digestive downtime occurs every August during the ten days I spend in a small Catalan beach town. While I don’t actually stop eating, I do look forward to the invigorating simplicity of the food I eat there. To wit, after dining in Paris and many other large European cities all year long for professional reasons, it’s a pleasure to eat pan tomate, the olive-oil-and-garlic anointed tomato-juice smeared toast beloved of the Catalans, to make a whole meal of nothing but clams steamed in a little oil, garlic, parsley and white wine, and eat no dessert more complicated than melon or the succulent peaches that grow in the hills nearby. Stepping to one side and eating simply isn’t only a pleasure, however, but a necessity, because I feel it’s incumbent upon me to sit down to any meal I might write about with a real appetite, sincere enthusiasm, and honest curiosity, because cooking is such hard work that it would entirely unfair to present myself at the table otherwise.

It’s always exciting to return to Paris after this much loved annual break, too, since while I’m away my palate eventually begins to crave food that’s more creative and complex than what I can find in the beach town, and this is why I was looking forward to dinner at A Mere, a contemporary French table that opened a few weeks ago in the gastronomically blossoming 10th Arrondissement, when I went the other night. Bruno was already drinking a nice glass of Austrian Grüner Veltliner, a preview of the excellent wine list created by Mikaël Grou, a sommelier who had previously worked at Le V at the Hotel George V, when I arrived. “We’re back to menu haiku again,” he said, pushing the nine-entry menu–three starters, three mains, three desserts–across the bare wood table to me. By this he meant that the dishes were somewhat obliquely described as just a list of three ingredients.

I knew what he meant, which is the rather tedious tendency of many young Paris chefs to mystifying menu minimalism,  but in this instance, I wasn’t bothered, because this verbal feint was actually pretty accurate when our first courses arrived. The only important ingredient that hadn’t been listed in my starter described as ‘Tomatoes Green Zebra, Lieu, Cassis” (Green Zebra tomatoes, yellow pollack, currants) was faiselle, or the softy runny white cheese that provided the lactic base backdrop that allowed the varying tones of acidity in the other ingredients to become so interesting. The variety of texture in this dish made it exciting, too, since the currant skin and seed brought more mouth feel to the raw marinated fish and the pulpy tomatoes. Lemon balm leaves and flowers (Melisse, in French) provided some puckishly pertinent punctuation to this dish, too.

Entitled “Figue, Anguille, Roscoff,” (Fig, eel, pink Roscoff onion from Brittany), Bruno’s first course was similarly lush from the percusion created by a similarly construed construction of perfectly ripe fig, smoked eel, tiny cubes of Ossau Irate cheese and petals of gently sweet Roscoff onion. Tellingly, though, the waiter was visibly disappointed that we had so ably deciphered ‘Roscoff,’ without his help. And this made me wonder once again why young chefs attach such a fierce importance to the idea of ‘surprise’ in their cooking, since ultimately I’d rather be delighted than surprised, and the back-up insistence on surprise often seems more a out of ego than a desire to please ones clients.

Then again, many young Paris chefs actually loathe the idea of trying to please their clients, preferring to believe instead that people come to them on bended knee for magic-show-like manifestations of their brilliance. Sometimes this happens, sometimes the construction resembles the last scene of the “Wizard of Oz” more than it does any revelation in a temple, but one way or another, the two starters cooked by young Brazilian born chef Mauricio Zillo were pretty brilliant and incredibly original despite the fact that he’s worked in a suite of famous kitchens, including Paul Bocuse, Santi Santamaria (in Dubai), Arzak, and Rebelot in Milan.

As is very often the case with this thrummingly eager and strivingly creative style of cooking, the main courses were less interesting than the starters. Bruno’s dish of lamb sweetbreads with roasted cauliflower, candy beets, rhubarb and muscat grapes was the more successful of the two, since the sweetbreads and the cauliflower flattered each other and the various fruits add acidity and bite respectively. The waiter explained that my veal breast had been “cooked at a very low temperature for a very longtime, which has changed its texture.” Perhaps. But not in any toothsome way, since the meat had become rather curiously dried out and compact. Still, it has a nice concentrated flavor that was drawn out by garnishes of grilled baby fennel and beans, but the mirabelle plum foam failed to provide the sweet-and-sour punch that would have given this dish more relief.

None of these flaws detracted from the fact that both dishes were pleasant if not exactly revelatory, and they also offered more insight into Zillo’s winsomely turgid culinary imagination, which was quickly back on course with our desserts.

I couldn’t resist “Reine Claude, Groseille, Mimolette” (Reine Claude plums from Lorraine, currants, and Mimolette cheese ice cream), because I love all three of these ingredients and they promised such an intriguingly seasonal panoply of tastes. The dish turned out to be a clever but very logical constellation of well-balanced flavors, too, since the sweet stone fruit loved the salt and nutty taste of the cheese in the ice cream.

Despite the gorgeous juicy peaches, Bruno’s “Peche de vigne, reglisse, noisettes”  (peaches, liquorice, hazelnuts) didn’t mull together to produce the same pleasure my dish did. The liquorice was barely present, which was probably just as well, since I can’t quite fathom why a perfectly ripened peach would have been flattered by this flavor, and the coffee-seasoned pastry cream seemed pretty extraneous.

All dishes demonstrated that Zillo is a really interesting chef with a wonderful mastery of technique and a nervy new mastery of the scores of taste and texture. I didn’t find a signature in his cooking, yet, but I knowing nothing about his mother, I can only assume that the word play in the restaurant’s name refers to his evident love of differing tones of bitterness and acidity as his vector of expression. Already a very good chef, he’s obviously going to become a serious culinary contender in Paris.

A Mere, 49 rue de l’Échiquier, 10th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-73-20-24-52. Metro: Poissonnière, Bonne Nouvelle, or Château d’Eau, Open Monday to Friday for lunch and dinner. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Average three-course meal 35 Euros. www.amere.fr

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With the opening of Restaurant 52 Faubourg Saint Denis, a studiously hip bistro with non-stop service, shrewd restauranteur Charles Compagnon continues to define the emerging culinary style of Paris’s rapidly gentrifying 10th Arrondissement.

This new place, which occupies a former butcher shop on the Faubourg Saint Denis neighborhood’s busiest shopping street, expands on the style he originally launched when he took over L’Office, the still very good modern French bistro that brought an initial gust of hip into a quiet faded residential corner of the quarter then dominated by Kosher bakeries and butchers. Next Compagnon opened Le Richer, a sort of a Parisian version of a New York coffee shop cum London gastro pub a few blocks away, and now with 52 Faubourg Saint Denis he’s built out his popular formula even more concisely.

In much the same way that New York based restauranteur Danny Meyer’s Union Square Cafe in New York City defined the gastronomic personality of the Union Square neighborhood when it was in the earliest stages of its now fulsomely achieved gentrification, Compagnon is framing a distinctive restaurant idiom for the 10th Arrondissement.

It’s a real winner, too. This place has the same in-the-raw industrial chic as the other two addresses, with a polished cement floor, walls that are still attractively scared by the now exposed grout of the demolished tile work of the butcher shop which formerly occupied the premises, and a an eye-catching bar where you linger over a drink or have a proper meal. Compagnon lived in New York–where he worked at the James Beard Foundation–for several years, and he has proved to be a good student of the myriad styles of casual eating venues that make that city so interesting.

To wit, Compagnon has gambled that young Parisians will like the idea of a relaxed friendly no-reservations-required restaurant with healthy, affordable, interesting contemporary cooking as much as New Yorkers or Londoners do. And they do. But this address is also a really appealing address for visitors to Paris, since it’s open daily from 8am to midnight–they serve light eats outside of the main lunch and dinner serving hours, the prices are relatively reasonable, and it offers a keyhole view of one of Paris’s most interesting neighborhoods right now.

The menu is short–four starters, four mains, four desserts–but the prevailing gastro gestalt is modern French comfort food, and this the kitchen does very well indeed.

Stopping by for a Sunday supper with Bruno on a rainy autumn night when we were just way too lazy to cook, I couldn’t stay away from the raviol0 (giant ravioli) with an egg yolk and soft cheese tucked inside and garnishes of croutons, cooked and raw mushrooms, and cubes of ham in a buttery, foamy sauce made with good bouillon.

Bruno was happy with his oddly named ‘maki’ (open sandwich) of cucumber, radishes, and horseradish cream, but I found it rather too cerebral and lacking in flavor. A smear of pureed seaweed was probably intended to add some balance to this dish, but as delicious as the condiment was, this one undershot the mark for me.

My slow-braised pork belly had a nice crust from a turn on the grill, though, and came to the table with refreshing garnishes of salad with a lively vinaigrette and a lush herbal persillade.

Bruno loved his beautifully cooked duckling breast–crispy skin, juicy bird–with torn kale, turnips, a scattering of corn kernels, a few pickled grapes and a light sauce of pan juices, and it was probably more revealing of the kitchen’s style than anything else we ate during this pleasant meal. The menus in all of Compagnon’s restaurants spin on an axis of good product and the logical compositions of taste and texture that inform well-reasoned home cooking as opposed to restaurant food.

What makes the difference Some subtle stripe of sincerity and an endearing lack of polish that pleasantly errs on the side of food you might very conceivably have cooked yourself if you were a really good cook. And as far as I’m concerned, this is a real sweet spot, too, since the ubiquity of restaurant going in most large Western cities is today as much a reflection of being time short as it is an expression of bourgeois leisure. If you’re an overworked professional in a big city today, you go to restaurants often, maybe even too often, and so it’s really nice to come across food that is more about making you happy than it is about expressing the chef’s ‘vision’ or ‘personality.’

This is, in fact, where I think much of the best cooking in Paris is coming from right now–that place where a professional culinary education intersects with an earnest desire to leave people feeling well-fed in the broadest sense of a restaurant meal. Examples Le Servan, Restaurant Pages, and all of Charles Compagnon’s tables.

Restaurant 52 Faubourg Saint-Denis, 52 rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, 10th Arrondissement, Paris, No phone. Metro:  Strasbourg-Saint-Denis. Open daily from 8am to midnight. Lunch service from noon to 2.30pm, dinner service from 7pm-11pm. Average meal 35 Euros.

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Walking home from dinner at Restaurant Encore, a new contemporary French bistro with a Japanese chef, the amiable and earnest Yoshi Morie, in the 10th arrondissement last night, I gave a lot of thought to the meal I’d just eaten. Overall, it was pleasant, and I liked the space, a former kosher butcher shop in the rapidly gentrifying rue Richer, and the service, which was really charming, a lot. The impact of the food, however, a suite of tasting plates as part of the 48 Euro prix-fixe dinner meal, was so evanescent that it made only the most fleeting of impressions. To be sure, Morie, who formerly cooked at Le Petit Verdot on the Left Bank, works with impressively pedigreed produce from a prestigious roster of suppliers, including Joel Thiebault (vegetables), Annie Bertin (vegetables and herbs), Terroirs d’Avenir, butcher Hugo Desnoyer, and the Pain des Amis bakery for bread, and several of the dishes we ate were momentarily interesting, but these fragile compositions worked like haiku, offering a brief moment of sudden clarity before rapidly fading away.

This is the challenge of the Pointilist style of contemporary French bistro cooking that’s practiced at so many of the most popular and successful recently opened tables in Paris. For these gastronomic slide shows to work, they have to be vivid–even when they’re being gentle, deeply imagined and sort of revelatory in some fleeting way, often by introducing unexpected or unknown ingredients or creating really fascinating contrasts of flavor and texture. When these small plates sequences work, they can be really spectacular, too. Chef David Toutain pulled this style off brilliantly when he was cooking at L’Agape Substance (he’s since moved on, taking the magic with him), Bertrand Grebault masters it remarkably well at Septime, too, as does Daniel Rose at Spring and Braden Perkin at Verjus, and other chefs, including Michael Greenwold and Simone Tondo at Roseval, have moments of greatness as well–their smoked potato puree with baby clams was one of the best things I’ve eaten in several years. But ultimately, unless the chef is seriously gifted, these meals fade like dew. When I replay all of the small plates tasting menus I’ve had during the last couple of years, only a very few dishes remain in memory. Daniel Rose’s sea bass with cold-smoked tomatoes and salicorne in a pool of soothing boullion at a recent lunch was an exquisite dish, and I loved chef Louis Philippe’s barbecued pork with a carrot crepe at Le 6 Paul Bert, along with almost everything else I’ve ever eaten there, because of he’s a master of differing tones of acidity, the use of smoke as a seasoning and has a deft touch with herbs and unexpected garnishes.

Unfortunately at Encore, our first dish (or was it our second?) set the tone for the meal that followed. A few small cubes of melted brie from Quatrehommes were garnished with borage, which has the wonderfully startling taste of oysters; wood sorrel; and a shred of pickled shallot. It was an unusual little composition but faltered for being void of any real gustatory logic. The cubes of seared tuna with tomato coulis that followed were succulent but most interesting for their appealing garnish of fresh dill, an herb still infrequently used in the French kitchen, but there wasn’t any real percusion to this dish.

Made with excellent meat from Hugo Desnoyer, a teaspoon or two of veal tartare was served with mussels, which were too timid to create the terre et mer contrast found in a dish like veal-and-oyster tartare, a modern classic which has often turned up on the menus of contemporary Parisian bistros. This dish was pretty to look at and good enough eating, but small-plates menus come with an implicit promise of amazement, which didn’t happen with this dish, or my main course, two small pieces of bavette with rather incoahate garnishes of white currants, black berries and a single grilled shallot similarly underwhelmed. My Kansan dinner date’s sauteed cod with baby leeks was similarly timid, and I couldn’t help but thinking of something that chef Yannick Alleno said during a recent chat, which is that every meal needs the anchor of generously served main course so that you know you’ve been fed. Likewise, several Alain Ducasse dictums ricocheted around in my mind–“Fushion leads to confusion,” and “More than four ingredients, and a dish is too complicated.”

Maybe this meal would have surprised and delighted me more if I hadn’t already eaten in so many other restaurants with small-plates prix-fixe menus. But ultimately I couldn’t find any real logic in this succession of culinary cameos, and pleasant enough though they were, they rarely had enough personality to distract us from our conversation. In fact, the only things I’m likely to remember about this place in two week’s time are the soulful icon of the smooth old wooden butcher’s block incorporated into the bar, the excellent white Gaillac we drank, the exceptionally alert and friendly service, and the pleasure of a long shaggy-dog kind of chat with a good friend. I don’t doubt that Yoshi Morie is a sincere and talented chef, but I’d want him to find his own unique culinary signature and dare some livelier music on the plate before I returned for an encore, especially at these prices.

And the last thought I had before I got home was that the pervasiveness of the suppliers I mentioned earlier is having sort of a dulling and homogenizing effect on Paris’s gastronomic landscape. All of them supply superb produce, but when it reaches a point that I can identify Terroir d’Avenir produce blind-folded (well, almost), it strikes me that it might be time for some of these young Turks to diversify their order books.

Encore, 43 rue Richer, 9th, Tel. 01-72-60-97-72. Metro: Le Peletier, Grands Boulevards or Cadet. Lunch menus 25 Euros, 30 Euros; Dinner menus 48 Euros, 76 Euros. Open for lunch from Tuesday to Friday. Dinner from Monday to Saturday. Closed Sunday.

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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.

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.

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