Through a succession of different owners and chefs, Chardenoux, now known as Le Chardenoux, has been part of my life in Paris for thirty years. Now this storied old bistro has been rebooted as a fashion-forward restaurant redesigned and redecorated to attract a trendy crowd of younger Parisians. For all intents and purposes, it’s basically become an entirely new restaurant.

This is actually the second revision of this address within the past five years, since chef Cyril Lignac gave it a freshening up and added a fleet of contemporary French dishes to the traditional menu of bistro classics when he originally took it over in 2014. You can read what I thought about this first reboot of what had always been one of my favorite Paris restaurants here: CHARDENOUX, Paris-An Eternally Charming Bistro, B+

On my way to dinner at the new version of Le Chardenoux, I found myself thinking about how restaurants can offer a very intimate reflection of larger changes in the life of any city. My short take on the reset of this restaurant was that the 11th Arrondissement has gentrified so much that the previous version of Le Chardenoux probably wasn’t doing the business that Lignac wanted anymore, and so he decided to completely pivot away from the bistro formula towards a fashion-driven table that would appeal to twenty-and-thirty something Parisians. This tribe isn’t especially attracted to traditional bistro cooking, which explains the new seafood centered menu, which also has a burger and sate chicken for non fish eaters. In their eyes, the Belle Epoque style of the restaurant’s dining room probably also reads more as just plain old rather than charming, hence the new decor by trendy London based interior designer Martin Brudnizki.

Even before Brudnizki got to work, this was already one of the prettiest restaurants in Paris, with a big zinc bar just inside the front door and beautiful and very delicate Belle Epoque floral moulding on the ceiling. Happily, these elements have survived some rather radical Miami Beach style cosmetic surgery, but the serene elegance of the decor has given way to a decor that’s meant to look good in Instagrams. Brudnizki filled the previously empty ceiling medallions with busy murals of trees branches and also added some ornate not correctly scaled Baroque chandeliers and a patterned floor that replaced the original workaday tile. He also added some plump ribbed oversized velvet banquettes and a dimmer switch or two to create a sort of louche lounge atmosphere in the evening. If you didn’t know the restaurant before, it’s pretty. If you did, it’s sort of like Charlotte Rampling has morphed into Kim Kardashian.

Cyril Lignac is a consummate culinary professional, so the food here is good. The menu is divided between three subheads–Shellfish & Crustaceans, Raw & Marinated and Sea & Land, along with a short selection of desserts. Coming for dinner with Bruno, we began with Utah Beach oysters served with small chipolata sausages–a delicious combination, like they do in Bordeaux for me and sea bass carpaccio with olive oil, lemon juice and pink pepper corns for Bruno. Both dishes were well-prepared and attractively presented, but I also couldn’t help but thinking that the new menu requires a lot less cooking time and culinary effort than the one it replaced. In other words, these are simple, high turnover items that an only marginally trained kitchen staffer could easily be trained to make. The bottomline, of course, is that more elaborate cooking is time-consuming, and so expensive.

Judging from the crowd in the dining room, Martin Brudnizki’s decor as bait is having the desired effect. The other diners were young, and there were a lot of logo designer handbags in evidence, which created a see-and-be-seen  atmosphere more like what you find at the Hotel Costes dining room or similarly trendy Paris restaurants such as Monsieur Bleu or Le Girafe than a bistro. Since night clubs have almost become extinct in Paris, restaurants have filled the gap as the main venue for socializing among the city’s bright young things.

My langoustine ravioli with cabbage in a spiced bouillon was pleasant as a main course, as was Bruno’s salmon in Thai (lemongrass and lime leaves) bouillon with cockles. Again, both dishes were nicely prepared and plated, and shrewdly conceived to appeal to the new demographic the restaurant is courting. Other options included a lobster roll, which look rather skimpy on a neighboring table for 27 Euros, deep-fried strips of sole with aubergine tempura, sea bass baked in a crust of salt for two at an eye-watering 90 Euros, and scallops with Jerusalem artichokes, black truffles and dark rum.

The dessert not to miss is the excellent vanilla-cream-filled praline-pecan millefeuille, which is made in Lignac’s very good patisserie just across the street.

The new Le Chardenoux is a pleasant restaurant, which is usefully open daily, but I still felt slightly wistful at the end of my meal here. Why These days I can get a lobster roll at lots of other places in Paris, but it’s increasingly difficult to find a dish like the beautifully made navarin d’agneau I ate the last time I came here. Economic globalization is getting some blowback these days, but food trends have never been more international.

All photos by Thomas Dhellemmes

1 rue Jules Vallès, 11th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-43-71-49-52. Metro: Charonne or Faideherbe-Chaligny. Open daily for lunch and dinner. www.restaurantlechardenoux.com. Average a la carte 60 Euros  www.restaurantlechardenoux.com

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Coming through the door for the first time on a warm Sunday night, Au Petit Panisse delighted me, since it was such a perfect sketch of everything I miss about Paris when I spend a long period of time away from the city. This is because Paris is now where I feel more at home than anywhere else in the world.

Oh to be sure, when I step out of a New Haven railroad train onto the platform in Westport, Connecticut at the end of a summer day and am roused by the tidal saline stink of the nearby Saugatuck river and then slightly stunned by the almost shocking greenery of the town I where I spent my childhood, I’ll always be the boy who grew up here all over again. But then that boy yearned to get on the very same train and take it in the other direction, first west to New York City, and after that, to hopefully light out for parts even further afield, ceaselessly driven by the unslakable wanderlust that is the wick of my curiosity.

Now that I’ve lived in Paris for more than thirty years, though, the exotic and the unknown has to some degree become the country where I was born. And this is why I was possibly even more fascinated by what I heard, saw, ate and learned on a five-day road trip from Sarasota, Florida north to Savannah, Charleston and finally Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida and back again than Bruno was. This is probably because he expected to be discombobulated, whereas I, well, I honestly didn’t know what to expect, since I hadn’t been to those two very beautiful cities on the Eastern Seaboard since I was 22, and I knew nothing of Florida between Tampa and Jacksonville.

“It actually looks sort of like Normandy, doesn’t it#8221; Bruno said when we broke out of the suburban sprawl north of Tampa and found ourselves in some stunningly beautiful countryside with cows grazing in the lush pastures of well-tended farms with split-rail fences. “It does sort of, but I doubt you’ll find anyone making Pont L’Eveque out there,” I replied. And when we stopped for lunch–big juicy greasy cheeseburgers, thank you–the waitress in the Five Guys that was the only viable option we’d seen for two hundred miles, was as charming, warm, friendly and witty as anyone I’ve met in years. “Americans are very polite,” Bruno said, and though I hesitated for a minute, I finally agreed, because yes, we are just so much better than those who occupy our air waves and television screens most often these days.

The best meal we had during our trip was at The Grey in Savannah, and I loved absolutely everything about this restaurant. The setting in the city’s old Greyhound Bus station has an irresistible tongue-in-cheek charm that’s more pointed than arch–to wit, the free black-and-white postcards they give away here show that this facility was “Whites” and “Colored” segregated in the past, so its history is put forward rather than white-washed; the staff are professional, spontaneous, informed, good-natured and enthusiastic; and most of all chef Mashama Bailey’s food was as full of flavor as it was full of heart, which means it was some of the best eating I’ve done in the United States for a longtime.

And the unpretentious goodness of Mashama’s cooking brings me back to Paris, and specifically to Au Petit Panisse, because chef owner Jeff Schilde may never have met Mashama, but the pair share the same love of really excellent seasonal produce; gastronomic specificity, i.e., the glory of eating food that could only have the same taste if it came from one single place on the planet; and a great big need and desire to make people happy by feeding them well. And in this roiled and roughed-up world, this makes me happier than ever before, because I really believe good food and cooking can create bonds and understanding in even the most improbable of situations.

At our table, though, we didn’t need any help to be happy, since we were five people who adore each other and who were all eager to rabbit on about their different summer holidays now that we were so happily back in Paris. Where had we been Corsica, the south of France, Greece, Le Pyla, Savannah, Charleston, Sarasota, New York City, and lots of weekends away as well, which is why the first gastronomic subject that came up at the table of five people who love good food and wine was, well, natural wine.

“I hate it, I hate the whole thing, it’s so damned pretentious, it rarely tastes good, and it’s too expensive,” said one of my tablemates, and three of the five agreed. “Natural wine (unsulfured), biodynamic wine, organic wine, it’s all become a big pain in the ass,” paried another pal. “Okay, wait–I always prefer organic wines, and biodynamic wine is usually excellent, but the fact that vins nature have become a bristly a priori in so many young Paris bistros is a drag, especially since these wines offer an occasion to charge eye-watering mark-ups,”  said another friend, and I tend to agree with her analysis of the situation. And the Azzoni white from the Ardeche, a vin nature, that we ordered was very good.

One way or another, it was a relief to have escaped from the surrealistic mark-ups on wine that have become the rule in New York City restaurants–it still stings to have paid a thumping $12 for a water glass of very ordinary rose at a West Village bistro, and $60 a bottle for an undistinguished Albarino at a trendy Spanish restaurant on First Avenue was highway robbery, too.  All of which is to say that today Paris is a much more affordable place to eat well at mid-level everyday prices than New York or London, or almost any other major American city.

Since we were five, we basically ate the entire menu at Au Petit Panisse, and enjoyed this witty modern French comfort food made with well-sourced produce. Since I’ve developed a samphire ( a delicious crunchy seaweed) fetish, I ordered that as my starter with a nice milky ball of mozzarella, while the terrine du chef was excellent, too, and a deconstructed oeuf mayonnaise with radishes, crabmeat and powdered almonds was a dish all of us immediately decided to copy at home.

Paris is going through a decidedly tentacular phase at the moment, since octopus seems to show up on almost every menu. Happily, I like it a lot, and it was prepared two ways at Au Petit Panisse, as a starter with heirloom tomatoes and Scamorza, and grilled as a main course with a wonderfully ruddy stew of fresh white Paimpol beans, tomato, fennel and bacon.

Steak tartare was excellent–coarsely chopped to order, seasoned with fresh herbs and piment d’Espelette and topped with a grating of ewe’s milk cheese, a clever idea, while a thick slice of gigot d’agneau (leg of lamb) was grilled and accompanied by lentils with roasted hazelnuts.

Desserts were a perfect hinge between the seasons, too, with Fontainebleau cheese garnished with stewed Mirabelle plums and shortbread and an airy flan scattered with blueberries, raspberries and cookie crumbs.

The dining room here was a charming setting for this meal, too, since an old cafe du quartier had been so lovingly restored, with its original wooden doors being scrapped of paint, the bar buffed up, and the winding metal staircase to the first floor left in place. Service was friendly and efficient, and everyone agreed that it had been worth traveling across town to have dinner here, because the food is as appealing as the atmosphere.

And for my part, I loved the meal, because it made me so happy to be home again.

Au Petit Panisse, 35 rue de Montreuil, 11th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-43-71-37-90. Metro:
Faidherbe – Chaligny or Rue des Boulets. Open daily for lunch and dinner.

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Pickles

On a warm summer night, Le Rigmarole turned out to be a perfect choice for dinner, because Franco-American chef Robert Compagnon’s small plates menu of yakitori, pastas, and tempura was light, bright, fresh and full of flavor. I’d been wanting to get to this place ever since it opened in October 2017, but frequent travel and the long hideouts needed to work on my latest book meant that this took some time. Well, the long wait was more than worth it.

I hugely enjoyed every single one of the nine dishes Bruno and I shared the other night, especially given the fact that our appetites were heat-wilted and balky. In fact, it was almost as though Compagnon had designed a menu that was especially intended to tantalise languid taste buds, since what’s on offer here is comfort food of the highest and most inventive order, and this is why I’ll be eagerly looking forward to eating here again very soon after a much needed summer vacation.

Robert Compagnon became obsessed by cooking with Japanese Bichotan charcoal while working at the famous Yakitori Tori Shin in New York City and decided to return to Paris and open a Yakitori bar of his own. What makes Le Rigmarole very different from the Japanese places that inspired it is that he cooks with superb French produce and is also serious pasta-lover. Also, co-owner Jessica Yang is a very talented pastry chef who formerly worked for Guy Savoy in Paris and at Rebelle and Per Se in New York City, and the delightful Crislaine Medina who runs the front of the house, has helped the owners put together a really excellent wine list, including the lush biodynamic Buteo Gruner Veltliner from Austria that we chose to accompany our meal.

And a quick note here for anyone who might be unfamiliar with Bichotan charcoal. It’s an exceptionally high quality charcoal made from oak and chefs prize it because it burns at a lower temperature than ordinary charcoal for a longer period of time and it doesn’t release any odors, which means that the char on foods cooked over it is strictly the natural flavor of that particular food. This creates a much cleaner finer taste than traditional charcoal.

The menu at Le Rigmarole runs to some twenty small plate dishes meant for sharing, including fish, poultry, meat, vegetables and pastas. You can also order a chef’s tasting menu, but since I’ve become very weary of this gastronomic trope, which is a fixture of young Paris Master Chef type chefs and la bistronomie, or the modern bistro movement, we decided to order a la carte. After all, I know what I feel like eating of a given meal and choice is one of the pleasures of going to a restaurant.

So we chose nine different dishes, and our meal began with a pleasant assortment of pickles–radishes, carrots and turnips, and then a baby red-onion tempura that was one of the best things I’ve eaten all year. I’ll come right out with it–even after over thirty years in Paris, I still have an atavistic love of certain low-brow American comfort foods, like onion rings, for example. I love onion rings, and well, these were onion-ring nirvana–such light tempura batter on quarters of tender sweet baby onions with a sprinkling of salt and red pepper brought on bliss. Next, a perfect chunk of salmon yakitori in a dipping sauce of herbed yogurt with a dribble of olive oil, another excellent dish, because the dominant flavor here was that of the firm and very fresh fish.

It was sort of interesting to try and decipher the logic with which the dishes we’d ordered came out, because there definitely was one, and ultimately it shaded from quieter flavors to more assertive ones and then sometimes back again, like a nice little melody After the frank taste of the salmon, for example, the homemade spaghetti with cockles and sea urchin sauce that followed with luscious and umami rich to make it one of the best pastas I’ve ever eaten in Paris.

Next, a pause–skewers of chicken breast with basil leaves and chopped pickled lemon, a brilliant cameo of a dish where every element retained its gustative integrity but played in a charming little skit of different tastes that winsomely flattered each other–the barnyard succulence of the chicken was gently awakened by the heat dimmed basil and flattered by the lemon. This was a brilliant little miniature.

Roasted round zucchini with charred skin and a half a lobster with spingoli pasta followed, and then curls of pork breast cooked on bamboo skewers yakitori style. All three dishes were excellent, especially the lobster, where the flesh of crustacean from Chausey in the English Channel was just pearled, or cooked enough so that it wasn’t raw but was still incredibly succulent and almost crunchy. Our last dish–pork polpette (meatballs) had great base notes that came from the pig’s liver and was politely feral.

Blissfully well fed, we couldn’t manage dessert this time round, but I’m eager to discover Yang’s talent the next time I come here.

An just FYI, Le Rigmarole is open until August 12, and the closes for the summer holiday from Augsut 13-September 11, during which time the team will travel to Taiwan and Tuscany in search of new inspiration.

10 Rue du Grand Prieuré, 11th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-71-24-58-44, www.lerigmarole.com Open for dinner only from Wednesday to Sunday. Average a la carte 50 Euros, chef’s tasting menu 49 Euros.

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The superb modern Franco-Israeli cooking currently being served (until November 2016) by Israeli born chef Tamir  Nahmias at the restaurant Fulgurances in eastern Paris proves that the most important recent gastronomic development in the city is its emergence as the world’s premier culinary talent cluster. To wit, in the same way that ambitious young computer engineers and software developers head for the Silicon Valley in California, Paris has emerged as the quintessential venue for talented upcoming chefs from all over the world.

The ever accelerating internationalization of the city’s culinary talent pool has not only renewed the gastronomic  pre-eminence of the French capital in the 21st century, but the trend has also made Paris an edgy and profoundly original place to eat. And perhaps the best news of all is that this fresh talent is adding a new layer to a gastronomic landscape that may never have been as rich with possibilities, since the spectrum of choices in Paris, from proudly traditional bistros to intriguingly avant-garde pop-ups is unique for a major European city.

Tamir Nahmias

Tamir Nahmias is a perfect example of the young talent migrating to Paris. He worked for three years as second to Gregory Marchand at Frenchie, and also cooked with Adeline Grattard at Yam’Tcha and Pascal Barbot at L’Astrance. And now he’s in Paris to stay, because, he explains, “It’s the most exciting place to cook in the whole world, both in terms of the sophistication of the restaurant-going public and their openess to innovation, but also the quality of the produce, the gastronomic culture of France, and the spectacular community of chefs in the city.”

With this background, Fulgurances, which was opened last October by Hugo Hivernat, Sophie Coribert and Rebecca Asthalter, the same team that publish the gastronomic review of the same name, is the ideal transitional setting for Nahmias as he prepares to open a restaurant of his own sometime later this year (in French, a fulgurance is like a lightning bolt, or a revelation). Nahmias’s stint running the kitchen here–Fulgurances works on the basis of a six-month showcase, allows him to refine his impending menu and also build a clientele before he hangs out his own shingle.

On the basis of the 44 Euro prix-fixe dinner I enjoyed at this charming restaurant the other night, the inhabitants of the 11th Arrondissement–Nahmias plans to stay in the neighborhood, are going to be very lucky indeed, because his very personal metissage of the Israeli and French kitchens is stunningly good and perfectly calibrated. Since I love the big bold flavors of all the kitchens of the eastern Mediterranean–Turkish, Syrian, Lebanese, Israeli and Egyptian, I worried they might be toned down too much here in deference to the perceived timidity of the French palate. Happily, almost every dish we tried preserved the integrity and authenticity of Israeli food at the same time it endowed it with a winsome refinement and casual elegance.

Nahmias’s prix-fixe evolves regularly but begins with a series of mezzes that included the night we were there a supremely tender grilled octopus tentacle with a griddle lemon and some Israeli ketchup; green beans with cherries, almonds and fresh herbs–a wonderfully summery combination; and a superb hazelnut and za’atar garnished beet-and-yogurt puree.

Garnished with a light vinaigrette and capers, grilled white asparagus and red mullet with salad was a pleasant dish, but the stand-out among the main courses was a luscious cumin-scented roasted shoulder of lamb served on a bed of wheat berries and green lentils. The tender meat was wholly redolent of the spices in the glaze that glossed it, and fresh herbs, including mint and parsley, and some appealing freshness.

An outstanding selection of natural wines by the glass was served with our meal, which concluded with a beautifully made apricot tart, and over coffee, I couldn’t help but reflecting that aside from Nahmias’s brilliant cooking, the other reason I’d enjoyed this meal so much was the warmth, professionalism and enthusiasm of everyone who works here. What Hivernat, Coribert and Asthalter have done is unlace the corset of aloofness that too often afflicts young restaurants in Paris, with the result that the ambience in this casual dining room is a reflection of the fact that their customers are warm and contented. It was also clear that this table has become a neighborhood favorite, which creates a good demographic ballast for the kitchen to work with.

Fulgurances is a delightful restaurant, to which I look forward to returning for Nahmias’s cooking before he opens his much anticipated new place, and for the pleasure of discovering the chefs who follow him. It’s also one of the best value meals in Paris right now.

10 rue Alexandre Dumas, 11th Arrondissement, Paris, tel. (33) 9-81-09-33-32, Metro: Rue des Boulets, Open for lunch and dinner Wednesday through Saturday, Closed Sunday-Tuesday, 19, 22€ lunch menus, 44€ dinner menu, www.fulgrances.com

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“Before, there were just a few really good Italian tables in Paris, but they were also really expensive, or the usual neighborhood Italian places, which were generally pretty mediocre,” says Tigrane Seydoux, co-owner with business partner Victor Lugger of the hugely successful new East Mamma restaurant just across the street from the Square Trousseau in the 11th Arrondissement. “So our idea was to open a ‘casual-dining’ sort of restaurant inspired by the trattorias of Italy that offered good food made with really great Italian produce, which we import ourselves, at reasonable prices,” says Seydoux, who adds that his love of Italian food came from growing up in Monaco, “where you probably eat Italian more often than you do French.”

@Renaud Cambuzat

“Everything chef Ciro Cristiano works with is imported directly from Italy, including our prosciutto, which comes from Bagatto in the San Daniele region, and the wood-burning pizza oven, which was built by Salvatore Acunto in Naples,” says Seydoux proudly. Not surprisingly, this handsome restaurant designed by London interior architect Martin Brudnizki, who’s Jamie Oliver’s preferred designer, has been packed ever since it opened a few weeks ago, with the no-reservations policy leading to a big hungry crowd waiting on the sidewalk outside.

Despite the excellent word-of-mouth on this table, I still couldn’t help but being reflexively skeptical when I came for dinner the other night with Bruno. Why Though hope may spring eternal, my passion for great Italian food has been so consistently disappointed during the twenty-five years I’ve lived in Paris that I make it a point to avoid Italian restaurants here, since what I can cook at home is always so much better. I dislike the fussy, stuffy overpriced Italian places in the 8th and 16th Arrondissements as a general rule–the only exception being Penatti al Baretto, where the food is excellent even if the service is, well, let’s just say over-groomed, and know better than wasting a meal in any of the dozens of neighborhood joints where they sprinkle industrially made pizza dough with grated Emmental–yes, Emmental–on top of a swirl of pre-seasoned tomato sauce that’s bought in huge cans at Metro, the restaurant wholesale supply store that has a lot to answer for.

@renaut cambuzat

If Metro is a big part of the problem with the Italian food in Paris–you can effectively buy almost any Italian dish or sauce ready-made in its aisles, one of the other big stumbling blocks has long been the erroneous but entrenched ideas about Italian food that many Parisians have. To wit, for most, it’s a red-sauce story with pasta and pizza as they main players. That said, it’s doubtless the most popular foreign kitchen in Paris, and though it remains flagrantly overpriced in France, good quality Italian produce is more available today than ever before; I mean, when I first in arrived in Paris, mozarella was an exotic cheese that was hard to find, to say nothing of the now omnipresent burrata.

At East Mamma, the names of the Italian producers that supply that restaurant form an alluring banner at the top of the kraft-paper menus that also serve as placemats, and it’s an impressive list, too, since they’ve not only gone to the trouble of finding organic mortadella, that pistachio-and-fat speckled Emiglia-Romagnan forcemeat meat that became unhappily known as ‘Bologna’ after it crossed the Atlantic and morphed into a cheap lunch-meat staple in the sandwiches of children’ bag lunches, but also bring in the excellent Ortigia line of handmade soaps from Siracusa in Sicily for the restrooms. Touting brand-name produce is, of course, all the rage in Paris right now–is there anyone who dines out regularly left in this city who hasn’t heard of star vegetable growers Annie Bertin and Joël Thiébault, for example#8211;but alas good produce doesn’t necessarily translate to good cooking.

Studying the menu over a spritz–apple-basil for me, and the classic Aperol for Bruno–we decided we’d try the bresaola that the friendly waiter touted–“It’s nothing like regular bresaola, because it’s made with pork” (Oh. Okay. Traditional bresaola is made from air drying beef and comes from the Valtellina region)–and a burrata to start, and then share some pasta and a pizza. The porcine ‘bresaola’ arrived as a plate of appealingly succulent, savory fat-free pieces of cured pork loin, and the burrata pleased by gushing sharply lactic cream when cut into and being remarkably fresh. Other possibilities for the create-your-own antipasti first course included the tempting mortadella, several grades of Italian ham, smoked mozzarella, fresh mozzarella, and Parmesan aged for twenty-four months. Aside from constituting a pleasant bald appeal to anyone’s gluttony, this first course also made it possible to build out for a group, and there were many large groups having dinner here the other night.

All pasta at East Mamma is made freshly daily, and the Bruno’s linguine with San Marzano tomatoes, stratcciatella cheese, a fine grating of lemon rind and several sadly taste-free basil leaves had the reassuring ivory color that comes only when good flour is used, in this casa di Benedetta flour from Altamura.

My big puffy pizza with an alluringly black-blistered crust was excellent, too, although I was a bit puzzled by the decidedly non-Italian scattering of raw button mushroom slices on the pie. The Italians usually prefer their pizzas plain, but if mushrooms are used, they’re generally sott’olio, or preserved in oil. But this ‘White Regina’ made with tomato sauce, mozzarella, Tuscan ham and mushrooms was a perfect expression of the excellent produce used to make it, and was amply large enough not only for one but two. The Trediberri Sauvignon from Le Langhe that I wanted from the excellent list of Italian wines here was out the other night, so we drank a very pleasant San Antonio Scaia Bianca from the Veneto (incorrectly labeled as being Tuscan on the wine list; thanks, Nathalie) instead.

I cringed when I saw a pail of Nutella being brought to a neighboring table–one of the desserts here is an all-you-can-eat smear-it-yourself Nutella pizza, an idea the provenance of which strikes me as decidedly more inspired by The Cheesecake Factory than anything in Italy, but Bruno’s lemon tiramisu was pleasant, with a lemony taste that fell between lemon hard candies and limoncello (too sweet for me, but nicely made and surprisingly light).

Ultimately, East Mamma makes a commendable and generally successful effort to offer some respectably authentic and well-sourced trans-Alpine cooking to the French capital, but I’d never mistake it for a trattoria. It’s much too shrewdly high-concept for that, which is what places it squarely in the camp of the generally welcome new breed of–well, sorry, I hate the term, too–“casual dining” restaurants being brought to Paris by a growing tribe of clever gastronomically alert entrepreneurs with very good taste. So I think almost any Parisian who loves Italian food would be glad if they opened a branch in their neighborhood, and it’s a place I’d go back to again for another simple, pleasant, fairly priced meal.

133 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, 11th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. 01-43-41-32-15. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Average 30 Euros.www.bigmammagroup.com

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Chardenoux has always been a very good bistro. This is saying a lot, too, since it’s also one of the very rare restaurants with which I’ve had a long and consistently happy relationship during the more than twenty-five years I’ve lived in Paris. Oh, to be sure, as is true of most relationships, we’ve had our moments. But the longevity of this connection is precious to me less for its durability than because it’s proven to be so reliably delicious.

When I first began going to Chardenoux, the neighborhood where it’s located deep in the 11th Arrondissement was still quiet and filled with artisans of various kinds–wood-workers, furniture makers, metal casters, jewelers, lamp makers and others–working in local ateliers (workshops). Previously working class, the neighborhood immediately around the Bastille was becoming trendy, however, and the eastern arrondissements of Paris were just at the beginning of the transformation that eventually  made them the younger and hipper half of the city. I was living a tiny apartment next to a convent on the Left Bank. I liked it during the summer, the season of open windows, when I was often awoken by the nuns softly singing hymns. The rest of the year, though, it had the distinct disadvantage of being too far away from Chardenoux.

The chef at Chardenoux then was Bernard Passavant, and the reason I remember his name is that I owe my mad love of foie gras to him. Maybe the second or third time I ever went to Chardenoux, I ordered something called a salade folle, or ‘crazy salad.’ I had no idea what this might mean, so the big mauve slab of foie gras that topped a tidy tumble of chive-flecked match-stick-sized green beans and shaved button mushrooms came as a hugely unwelcome surprise. Why Well, believe or not, back in those days–this was probably 1987–I not only didn’t eat foie gras, but I actively avoided it. Like many suburban Americans, I flinched at anything offal, in fact, but that night I found myself shamed into trying the duck liver by the teasing of the Greek born Paris based men’s underwear designer who was taking me out to a business dinner I’d been avoiding a long time.

“Oh, how patheeeetic!” he said. “I can’t believe it! It’s delicious, a so so so sensual luxury! You must try!” So reluctantly I did, and I’ve never looked back. I also used to love Passavant’s veal with morels; cod with a warm vinaigrette of fresh herbs; “Cervelle de Canut” (silk worker’s brain, canut being Lyonnais slang for silk worker and the term a reference to how hard they once worked in deafeningly noisy mills). which is a Lyonnais cheese speciality of fromage blanc flavored with chives, garlic, shallot, parsley, salt, pepper, oil, vinegar and white wine; and black cherry clafoutis.

Every meal at this beautiful little dining room with a ceiling covered with swirling floral Belle Epoque moldings, a delicate screen of etched and beveled glass and wood panels diving the room in half, and a stone clad zinc topped bar just inside the door was a pleasure. Passavant eventually left, to be replaced by Michel Cornubet, and another chef or two, but the quality of the food remained uncommonly good. When young chef Cyril Lignac took over, however, I had my doubts. I was doubtless not being entirely fair, but his food-television celebrity made me dubious, and I feared an old favorite might be rejiggered into something trendy or fussy or both. Happily, I was wrong–Lignac respected the traditions and spirit of this century old bistro when he took it over in 2008 and painstakingly restored the interior. The food was good, if not better than good, too, but I hadn’t been in here in a very longtime before a recent sunny August day when I was trying to think of a good bistro when I might lunch with a friend visiting from London. The two new places she was keen to try–Le Servan and Restaurant David Toutain, were closed, but knowing how much she loves traditional French bistro cooking and also that they serve outside during the summer when the weather’s good, I booked at Chardenoux, where I hadn’t been for several years, and kept my fingers crossed.

My date was late, but I enjoyed sitting on the terrace on a sunny day mulling over the menu over a cool glass of Chateldon. It was also a pleasant diversion to observe my neighbors, all of whom were seriously enjoying their lunches with a pleasure that was absolutely contagious.

Then Madame arrived, hungry, and we ordered. Since she’s a talented London based cook and food writer, we usually try to order different things, so that we can taste some variety, but on this occasion no one was giving any ground on the starter of coddled egg with girolles, fava beans, and freshly made croutons. We both wanted it, we both had it, and it was superb, since the egg yolk slicked the perfectly braised mushrooms dressed with a little jus de veau and finely chopped shallot, and the favas and croutons added an earthy high note and some texture respectively. Coddled egg starters are surefire crowd-pleasers, since they appeal to something subliminally serene and infantile in all of us, but for them to work, the produce has to be of the very highest quality. Happily, here it was.

Since I’d come into town from the borrowed house in the country 75 minutes outside of Paris just for the day where I spent much of August, I was hankering for fish, since neither of the two larger towns near our hideaway has a fish market anymore, which means the only place to buy fish is at the ice-lined morgue-like counter of the local ‘grand surface,’ or giant supermarket. Having done that once, I’d never do it again, and besides, more pleasure was to be had from having a real live barbecue, which begged for the excellent sausage made by a local farmer or some of his superb free-range pork over and over again. So I chose the cod baked with white miso on a bed of fresh peas with lardons. The gently meaty taste of the miso flattered both the fish and the peas, while the lardons added texture and salt but most all appealed to that deep primal limitless yearning so many people–me very much among them–have for cured pork, aka bacon.

I rather envied Madame her sweetbreads, however, since they came with baby carrots and an elegantly acidulated sauce of chopped capers, lemon and meat juices spiked with tomato and turmeric. They were impeccably cooked, too, but when I tasted them, I immediately found myself thinking that a side of tagliatelle would have been a nice occasion to elaborate the pleasure that well-made sauce. “Some good sturdy noodles would have been nice with this,” Madame suddenly announced, and I laughed, because our friendship was born from the naughty avidity of our shared appetites. “Excellent product, and if at first I found it a little under seasoned, that’s really only because I’m too accustomed to food that’s been over-salted. This is some very suave bistro cooking indeed.”

Madame said she’d been craving a good baba au rhum ever since she’d gotten on the Eurostar in London that morning, so I left it to her, and had a fine slice of Corsican goat cheese with cherry-cinnamon marmalade and salad instead. The baba, which came from Lignac’s bakery across the street, had imbibed a perfect dose of rum-spiked sugar syrup, to which a nice little pour of caramel-and-sulfur scented Martinique rum, the world’s best, because it’s made with fresh cane juice instead of sugar, was deftly added by Madame.

“This rum is superb, so nuanced and ambered but clean tasting,” said Madame, adding, “I’d be half-tempted to tuck the bottle into my handbag and bring it home it’s so good but I rather doubt I’d get away with it.” I didn’t encourage her either, so the rum remained on the table, and after coffee we parted in search of our respective summer siestas, mine swaddled with the pleasure of knowing that one of my favorite Paris restaurants is still so good.

1 rue Jules Valles, 11^th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. 01-43-71-49-52. www.cyrillignac.com Open daily. Prix-fixe menu 39 Euros, lunch menus 22 Euros, 27 Euros.

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Adjacent to the Cirque d’Hiver (Winter Circus), a handsome 1852 arena between the Place de la Republique and the Bastille, the Clown Bar has always been one of the most charming places in Paris for a quick bite and a glass of wine. Now under new management–a dream team that includes Sven Chartier and Ewen Lemoigne from the restaurant Saturne, plus Xavier Lacaud, it’s suddenly better than it’s been for many years. They recruited talented Japanese chef Sota Atsumi, who cooked at Vivant, another intimate little place with landmarked Belle Epoque tiles, to run the kitchen, and Atusmi’s short produce focused menu, which changes often, runs to intriguing small plates, which are easily composed into a pleasant and very satisfying meal.

There’s also a deep terrace on the quiet street out front, and this has instantly made this beloved address even more popular than ever with a diverse but stylish crowd of Parisians. Coming for dinner the other night with Bruno after I’d returned from New York City the same day, we toyed with the idea of the terrace, but sat inside instead to enjoy the beautifully restored little dining room, a real triumph of French Belle Epoque decor with a glass ceiling in the bar area painted with a circus theme and a wall of tiles from Sarreguemines, the northern town that was once one of France’s great ceramics towns, with a frieze of clowning clowns behind the big zinc bar. The last time I came here, the room, which had been closed for a while, still had walls that were amber tinted by years

of cigarette smoke, but that’s all gone now, and the sleek contemporary furnishings, including tables with the silverware tucked away in secret compartment, are flattered by the vintage setting.

We started with a plate of two-year-aged Basatxerri ham from the Basque Country and some delicate herb strewn camembert croquettes, both of which went well with aperitifs of Edelzwicker and a Viognier from the Languedoc. The hors d’oeuvres were good, but lest I bring the natural wine (unsulfured) crowd down on my head, I couldn’t help but thinking that not all wines are better in their ‘unadulterated’ form, since oxidation can mask the nuances of gentler cepages (grape varieties).

Even though they arrived at the table stone cold, an order of grilled langoustines from the Breton port of Le Guilvinec were superb–sweet, cooked just to that perfect point where the tail meat had pearled, and garnished with a winning simplicity of salt, a little lemon, a few needles of fresh rosemary. Getting things to the table warm will be a recurring challenge here, since the kitchen is in the basement, but our second starter, bonito in a bracing foam of fresh horseradish, a really inspired idea, since the raciness of the root met that of the fish, didn’t suffer a temperature problem and was a succulent dish, which might only have been improved by being served with some hot toasted country bread.

Turbot with razor-shell clams, white asparagus and rhubarb in salted butter was one of the most satisfying dishes I’ve had  for a long time, since the product was impeccable and the constellation of tastes made sense on the palate but was pushed just off-center enough by the rhubarb to be unexpected. A brilliant puree of dates and yuzu played the same role with an exquisitely well-made pithiviers de canard, or ground duck in a little dome of buttery golden pastry.

“Natural wines often taste the same to me,” Bruno said of our white Haute Cotes-du Beaune as we finished it up with a good cheese course. I suggested that maybe if he’d learned to drink natural wines before ‘traditional’ ones he might feel differently, although I personally find it really interesting to pinch hit between them and liked this provocatively different orange-colored quaff from the terrific little wine list.

A caramelized pignoli nut tart filled buckwheat flavored pastry cream was the happy ending to this excellent meal where the only recurring problem was the timing of the service, not just in terms of hot dishes delivered cold but some slackness that jarred the rhythm of an otherwise excellent meal. All told, it’s really heart-warming to see this delightful little corner of Paris renovated and rebooted in the service of seriously good food and wine once again, and I know it’s going to become a new Sunday night favorite, especially during the summer when the terrace is open. N.B. They also serve breakfast, since this place functions as a cafe cum wine bar between lunch and dinner serving hours.

Clown Bar, 114 rue Amelot, 11th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. 01-43-55-87-35. Metro: Filles du Calvaire, Saint-Sébastien-Froissart, or Richard Lenoir. Open Wednesday to Sunday for lunch (noon-2.30pm) and dinner (7.30pm-10.30pm). www.facebook.com/pages/CLOWN-BAR-PARIS/1443072882610254 Average 40 Euros.

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For some time now, many French food writers have been exasperated by the metronome of criticism that’s been coming from their American peers ever since journalist Arthur Lubow startled everyone by claiming the best gastronomy in Europe had migrated south of the Pyrenees in a profile of Ferran Adria for the New York Times in 2003. The idea that French food is not as good as it used to be but even often rather mediocre had been bandied about in food circles for a while before the Lubow lightning bolt struck, but by the time New York based journalist Michael Steinberger‘s book “Au Revoir to All: Food, Wine and the End of France” was published in 2009, kicking French food in the shins as a has-been cuisine had become a veritable cottage industry. Smashing idols is sort of thrilling, of course, but in this instance, not particularly accurate, as I concluded in a piece I wrote on Steinberger’s book for the late and still lamented Gourmet in 2009. And yet the beat goes on, with Steinberger recently doubling back to revisit his thesis in a story for the New York Times.

The prevailing cardinal point expectation of so much English language food writing and criticism since the English speaking world became seriously interested in food a generation ago is never called into question, however, and that is a shrill insistence on the new. Restaurants must be new, cooking styles must be new, and creativity is demanded at torrential strength at all times. The most damning thing that can be said of any city or country in terms of its food is, “There’s nothing new happening there.” And this is one of the reasons that France was set up for a fall after the excesses of “La Nouvelle Cuisine,” which began so auspiciously and then veered off in a Mannerist direction that made it easy to spoof and even easier to avoid. This last great Gallic feint at the new, however, completely changed the way that France eats today. It just took a good twenty five years to come into focus, which is what happened when the basic precepts of La Nouvelle Cuisine–jus and bouillons instead of heavy sauces, fresh herbs, shorter cooking times, etc. were adopted wholesale by the generation that saved the French bistro by reinventing it, chefs like Yves Camdeborde, Thierry Breton, Eric Frechon (now at Epicure at the Hotel Le Bristol), and others. Now a second generation of chefs are practicing this reinvented bistro cooking and pushing it further in terms of making it more cosmopolitan, healthy and produce-centric.

Walking down the rue Saint Maur to what turned out to be an excellent dinner at Le Servan, a recently opened bistro, on a pretty early summer night, I found myself musing on the Gallic sense of aggrievement as expressed this week by the very good writer François-Régis Gaudry, critic for L’Express Styles, in his column (one thing we both agree on is that Takao Takano in Lyon is a superb chef, since I named him as one of my best meals of 2013) and also by Alexandre Cammas, who runs Le Fooding, the self-styled voice of ‘young’ gastronomy in France, in a recent rant. If they’re things about the local food scene that rankle–this summer, Paris looks set to be subjected to a ‘gourmet’ popcorn trend, or deeply alarm–the demise of a proper cheese course in most of the capital’s restaurants, the fact of the matter is the food in Paris today is better and more interesting today than it’s been at anytime since I moved here in 1986. To be sure, I regret the continuing disappearance of traditional bistros, since I love this food with a passion, but on the other hand, Paris is teaming with new talent right now, and young chef Tatiana Levha, the chef at Le Servan is a perfect example. So the French are justified in feeling ruffled. Unfortunately, however, it’ll take some time to get the word out, and editors to call off the dogs.

In the meantime, though, there’s something sort of delicious in the relative confidentiality of knowing that the food in Paris is so brilliant right now. Consider Le Servan, where Tatiana Levha jolts the idiom of contemporary French cooking with regular references to her Philippine background. Levha trained at Arpège and L’Astrance before opening her own restaurant, and the lucid way she composes her dishes is based on a clear love of the produce she cooks with and the impressive battery of technical skills that inform her cooking, which becomes personal and original when she sautés cockles in pungent fish sauce and garnishes them with fiery bird peppers and basil. This dish was one of the ‘zakouskis,’ or hors d’oeuvres–the word is Russian or Polish, a reference to another part of Levha’s heritage, that begin the concise menu here, and it amply accomplished what an hors d’oeuvre is supposed to do, which is introduce the chef and prime your appetite for the meal to follow. I also liked the other one we ordered, radishes with a soft herbal green herring butter, a franker reference to central Europe.

Tatiana’s sister Katia runs the dining room, a light airy space with beautifully Belle Epoque moldings, big picture windows and hand-painted ceiling medallions that express the winsomeness that’s at the core of this restaurant’s personality. Tables are closely spaced, but the atmosphere is relaxed, and the service is exactly what one hopes it will be in any restaurant–warm, alert, and serious but good humored. Dining with another English speaker, I actually couldn’t help but thinking it was a relief to be spared the shirty attitude too often meted out to foreigners in hip restaurants. Instead, Katia, who runs the excellent mostly all organic and/or natural  wine list and who previously worked at Le Baratin, is a gracious and attentive hostess, and the rest of the staff take their cues from her, too.

After the first nibbles, we had roasted white asparagus with a nicely made beurre blanc, poutarge, and oven-dried sage leaves that added little to an otherwise appealing dish and a pleasant Asian inspired salad of cuttlefish, celery, pomelo, and roasted peanuts. The latter dish lacked the depth of balanced umami flavor I’ve come to expect from similar Asian style salads in Thailand, Laos or Vietnam, but perhaps this seasoning had been dialed down in deference to the French palate.

Our third suite of courses was superb. Roasted quail in an adobo marinade, adobo being the Philippine sauce made with soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, black peppercorn, and bay leaves, was tender and richly flavored, and roast lamb shoulder came with a beautifully made sauce and a welcome garnish of Bibb lettuce salad. A single cheese was offered that night–a Loire Valley chèvre, and desserts were the least interesting part the meal–there was a praline tart on offer and my friend had strawberries with pistachios while I ate cheese, but I was impressed by Tatiana Levha’s cooking and am convinced of her talent. I look forward to going back to this table and recommend it to anyone who’s sincerely curious about how Paris is eating right now.

32 rue Saint Maur, 11th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. 01-55-28-51-82. Metro: Rue Saint Maur (3), Père Lachaise (2,3), or Voltaire (9). Closed Sunday and Monday, Average 35 Euros.

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Just ten minutes from La Bastille, Les Déserteurs is a perfect example of the new generation of neighborhood bistros that have been renewing Paris’s gastronomic credentials during the last ten years.  Though this culinary renaissance has been happening in broad daylight for a while, the rest of the world has yet to catch on. This is probably all for the best insofar as we Parisians are concerned, however, since a sudden spotlight on one of these newcomers can instantly make it impossible to get reservation within the normal timeframe of being able to predict your appetite for a given type of meal. Then, too, the necessity of booking months ahead of time for a meal in a recently lionized local bistro invariably encourages such heightened expectations that one’s easily set up for a fall. To wit, under these circumstances, being very good just isn’t enough. Instead, a meal is expected to deliver an almost transcendental experience, which is a pretty heavy burden for almost any young chef. And for a diner, too, since sometimes it’s just a nice to go out for a good meal. Period.

Even before I arrived at this new table, the former premises of chef Giovanni Passerini’s restaurant Rino, on a sunny May day, I expected to like it solely on the basis of its puckish name. Before they opened here, you see, Daniel Baratier and Alexandre Céret were second chef and sommelier, respectively at Le Sergent Recruteur, a wiltingly pretentious place on the Ile Saint Louis that assiduously follows the pointless pleasure-slaying old-school drill of what the French refer to as a repas gastronomique (gastronomic meal). These are rather wearisome experiences happily reserved for infrequent ‘special occasions,’ since the point of such a severely orchestrated meal is that you must bow down to the meal meted out by the chef and servers and be politely grateful for it the whole time, too. So even before I’d seen what these guys had gotten up to, I liked them a lot for being deserters. The simple fact of the matter these days is that almost no one likes a long, fussy, formal meal with too much to eat anymore.

Arriving, Passerini’s Rino had been redecorated out of existence, and in its place was a handsome earth-tone bistro with oak tables and beautiful carefully sourced tableware, including gorgeous Nontron knives (see photo of asparagus), which are made in the Perigord, and stunning Belgian faience. I was meeting a friend for lunch, a rare treat, since lunch always plays a winning joker in the poker of my usual self-discipline during the day, and glancing at the 28 Euro lunch menu, it looked liked we’d eat well. For a restaurant that hasn’t even been open for a month, this place felt pleasantly settled, and it was full and playing to an interesting looking crowd who clearly knew that the owners have a good reputation.

Then Alexandra showed up, and after chatting for a few minutes, I found myself charmed by her intelligence and wry but blowsy humor the way I am every time we get together, which isn’t often, because we’re both so busy. We were talking about summer vacations and the pleasure of just getting in the car in the France and just driving out into the countryside without too much of a plan, when our first course–four perfectly cooked green asparagus with a garnish of wild asparagus, a ramp leaf and a few dots of a delicious sauce made from Japanese salted plums–arrived. It was beautiful, generous, and charming for displaying such shy culinary creativity–the sauce. So we ate the vernal spears and went back to our chat, with me urging her to read James Salter‘s A Sport and a Pastime for a gluttonously beautiful and moistly inspiring description of one way and one reason for doing off-the-cuff travel in France.

Our main course–merou (grouper) on bed of fresh peas and baby fava beans–in a gently tangy yuzu foam–was excellent, too. At some point while I was eating this fish, a great sense of well-being over-came me, because I was being well-fed, something that doesn’t happen often enough in new Paris bistros. I’m not referring to the cooking in this instance, but rather the fact that chef Daniel Baratier had eschewed the unfortunate practice of creating arcane compositions of off-beat ingredients artfully arranged on the plate–here a shaved bamboo shoot, there a few borage flowers, with a sprinkling of pursalane, flying fish eggs and a poached quail’s egg–in favor of generously served, well-cooked easily understood dishes that were deeply satisfying.

These two dishes were so good, in fact, that I momentarily suspended my recent aversion to single-choice tasting menus–choice is part of the fun of going to a restaurant, after all–and foamy sauces, because I admired his good intentions and gastronomic logic. Since we were having such a nice time–a good bottle of Montlouis, oblige–we added a cheese course to the menu–brocciu, or Corsican ewe’s milk cheese with a soft ricotta like texture, which came with a dribble of olive oil and a delicious powder of black olives, salt and sugar.

Dessert was excellent, too–poached rhubarb with rusk crumble and vivid sorrel ice cream, and because I was enjoying myself so much, I ate it without taking a picture. So you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you it was good. By now it was 15h45–we like to eat, and we like to talk–and I’d have been too embarrassed to order coffee if we we’d been the only ones left, but fortunately we weren’t. The couple sitting along the wall behind Alexandra appeared to be enjoying themselves as much as were were, too.

When Alexandre Céret brought us our coffee, we chatted a bit, and I told him that it was a great idea for the two of them to have gone AWOL. He frowned briefly. “Well, we went away to do better, that’s why,” he said seriously. And so they have.

Les Déserteurs, 46 rue Trousseau, 11th Arrondissement, Paris; Tel. (33) 01-48-06-95-85
Metro: Ledru Rollin, Faidherbe – Chaligny, or Charonne. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Les-Déserteurs/690121837711787 Closed Sunday and Monday. Prix-fixe lunch menu 28 Euros, average dinner 50 Euros.  

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I liked this place from the moment I stepped in the door, too, since the welcome was friendly, and the dining room had a funky easygoing charm created by a sixties retro bar, flea-market furniture and some curious psychedelic posters on the walls. We sat next to a couple who were obviously on a date–they were both conspicuously well-dressed for a Sunday night and had that flush of awkwardness that radiates from a tentatively minted couple, and even though it’s not generally a good idea when we’re going to order a bottle of wine, we threw caution to the winds and decided to have a cocktail from the list that was provided as soon as we were seated. As Bruno noted, the bartender seemed really serious with his shaker, and was also carefully bruising fresh herbs and carving curls of citrus, so we expected the drinks would be good, and they were. He ordered a Margarita, which made me smile, because it seemed such an unlikely prelude to dinner on a winter night, but an affectionate bemusement at one another’s gastronomic habits is something to be expected between two people who’ve been at the table together so often over the course of many years. I said nothing about the Magarita–it was his choice, but when I ordered a tasty little number that was Bourbon based, he said, “I think Bourbon is in your D.N.A.,” and I took it affectionately, especially because it’s true. Both of my very different grandmothers were enthusiastic Bourbon drinkers, and if my usually abstemious mother goes for a drink in a restaurant, it’s always a Bourbon on the rocks. 

The short menu was appealing, too, and the waiter made a point of telling us that Saïto Terumitsu, the young Japanese chef here, had mostly cooked at the Mandarin Oriental and that their vegetables come from Terroir d’Avenirs, meat from the Coq Saint-Honoré, bread from the ovens of Thierry Breton at Chez Michel and coffee from et La Brûlerie de Belleville, an auspicious bouquet of pedigrees. Bruno ordered the sautéed vegetables with a sublime Maltaise sauce (Hollandaise spiked with citrus), and I decided on the marinated salmon, which came with garnishes of creme fraiche, violet mustard and vegetable ‘coins,’ and was impeccably fresh and generously served in two thick slices. Pretty to look at, the vegetables, including radishes, cauliflower, beets, and leeks, had been individually cooked to differing degrees of doneness to create a pleasant variety of textures, and they also packed a lot of taste.

Both dishes were so artfully presented that I found myself returning to a recent how-many-angels-are-there-on-the-head-of-a-pin set of musings on what a Michelin star means these days.  To wit, Terumitu’s cooking was so precise and unassumingly original that it would probably have seemed even more impressive in a fancier setting, and given the quality of the cooking in many modern Paris bistros today, it’s surprising that more of them don’t have Michelin stars. That said, Bibendum, the guide’s pneumatic mascot, does seem to have made a feint in this direction with the 2014 France Michelin Guide, since Septime won a much deserved Michelin star this year.

Two things consistently abetted the pleasure of this meal, too–the attentive friendly service and the fact that as far as I could tell, the date at the table next to ours seemed to be working out pretty well, or at the very least this pair seemed to have discovered one another’s senses of humor by the time they got to dessert, because the sweet end of their meal was punctuated by regular laughter. There was a fair amount of laughter at our table, too, which made it easier to tell Bruno about how incredibly well I’d eaten during my week in Barcelona without making him too envious either. Matt Goulding, of the superb travel blog website roadsandkingdoms.com, made a superb Asian meal one night, the charming Tara Stevens introduced me to the wonderful Bar Mut on another night, and suave Barcelona based Danish gastronaut Kristian Brask Thomsen took me on a spectacular tapas tour that ended at 4am and left me with a permanent life-long craving for mountains more of the tiny deep-fried rabbit ribs served with aioli at Lolita Taperia.

Okay, maybe Bruno was feeling a little envious by the time I recounted the spectacular tapas I’d eaten at Tickets, but with the arrival of our main course, we tacked back to Parisan shores with some really excellent food. My lieu jaune (yellow pollack) had a golden crust and came with a healthy but succulent thatch of green vegetables, including brussels sprouts, pea shoots, beans, spinach and snow peas that was glossed with a chlorophyll rich green drizzle that melded the dish together and a sprinkling of crushed toasted pistachios that add both texture and richness to a dish which proved that good nutrition and gastronomy need not be incompatible. Cooked rare and accompanied by an exquisitely light sauce of roasting juices, Bruno’s duckling was excellent, too.

Aside from the immediate pleasure of good food, these dishes were gratifying for confirming the truth of what I’d been telling everyone about the food in Paris these days all week in Barcelona. Because it’s true that the best food in Paris right now isn’t found at at the cluster of addresses with multiple Michelin stars that loom over the city like some sort of Gallic Mount Rushmore but in the spectacular constellation of excellent contemporary bistros that are found all over the city and which increase in number with week that goes by, Blue Valentine being a perfect example.

We shared an all chocolate dessert to conclude this very good meal, which ended on a rather ill-advisedly bibulous note when we accepted the owner’s generous suggestion that we sample his Italian fruit brandies from the Veneto. “I hope we get to go back there, that was a really good meal,” said Bruno in the car on the way home, a reference to the fact that I’m often so busy trying new tables that we rarely get back to those we liked, but in this instance, I promised him would, and I’m looking forward to it.

13 rue de la Pierre Levée, 11th Arrondissement, Tel. 01-43-38-34-72. Metro: Parmentier or Republique. Lunch menu 19 €, dinner menus 29-36 €-54 €  Closed Monday and Tuesday www.bluevalentine-restaurant.com

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