Heading for dinner at Virtus on a rainy Saturday night, I couldn’t help but thinking about how this address in the 12th Arrondissement has always been sort of a cradle for the gastronomic ambitions of foreign chefs in Paris. The first time I went here, I discovered the wonderful cooking of the young Swedish born Petter Nilsson. After he returned to Sweden, there was a brief moment when Italian chef Luigi Nastri took over this kitchen. He was followed by the excellent Sardinian native Simone Tondo, who’s now cooking some superb Italian food at Racines in the Passage des Panoramas. So I hoped the new foreign-born duo who recently moved their restaurant to these premises would live up to the storied past of a restaurant once known as La Gazzetta and now called Virtus.

Coming through the door, I immediately liked the new decor by Argentine interior designer Marcelo Joulia. He’s created a warm and attractive atmosphere with a witty retro under-toe conveyed by antique suspension lamps and flea market ceramics. Tables are generously spaced here, too–a luxury these days, when so many Paris restaurants seem crowded and noisy.

While a friend and I settled in over a glass of very good Chenin Blanc, the eager young waitress implored us to order the seven-course tasting menu. She advised that it would be the best way for us to discover the cooking of the  Japanese born Chiho Kanzaki and Argentine Marcelo di Giacomo, both of whom trained at Mauro Colagreco’s restaurant Le Mirazur in Menton. I replied that we needed more time before ordering. The discussion that followed was a mutual expression of how both of us are weary of tasting menus, which almost always end up lasting too long, overfeeding you and finally leaving you with a muddled  impression of a chef’s cooking.

This is mostly because there’s something too prim and schoolmarmish about the idea that the purpose of a meal is to submit to a demonstration of a chef’s talent. I think most people go out to have a good time and a good meal, which might include a delighted discovery of a new chef’s talent, but on their own terms. Also, for me a good part of the pleasure of going to a restaurant is choosing what I want to eat, especially because I often have an idea or two as to what I might want.

All of that being said, I’d also admit that I’m not a great audience for tasting menus anymore for the simple reason that I’ve probably done too many of them as a food writer. As my friend rightly pointed out, “Maybe if you didn’t go out as often as you do, Alec, a tasting menu might still have a sort of exciting, magical quality to it.” In the end, however, we agreed to the tasting menu, with the caveat that portions should be modest.

As soon as our first course arrived, however, I was very glad we’d signed on for the multi-tiered meal. Accompanied by a spectacularly good and very beautiful brioche roll, scallop ceviche with three different colors of cauliflower and coins of Granny Smith apple was winsomely pretty, thrillingly fresh and beautifully seasoned by a gently acidulated pool of marinade with a subtle bracing dash of lemon verbena. “This is just lovely,” my friend said, and I agreed–the dish was radiant with earnestness and a bashful desire to please.

Bonito with Chinese cabbage, hazelnuts and Pimenton was a superbly conceived dish, too, with a range of textures and palate of flavors that never overwhelmed the taste of the fish, which had been briefly grilled to leave it appetisingly rare. Silently, I concluded that the waitress had been absolutely right–the tasting menu is in fact the best way to experience the sincere, tender, almost angelic cooking of Kanzaki and di Giacomo.

Lotte (monkfish) with daikon and anchovy sauce was a charming dish, too. “You know, I’m actually really enjoying this meal,” my friend remarked. “The portions are perfect, the timing is excellent, service is delightful, and every dish has sort of a shy Faberge like elegance that’s very understated.”

Duck breast with baked pumpkin was a appealing, too, since the barnyard richness of the fowl paired perfectly with the earthy Cucurbita and a scattering of its toasted seeds. And in this dish as in all of those that proceeded it, the near reverence the two young chefs have for the produce they work with created an appealing frame of humility.

Two excellent desserts concluded the meal: a poached pear with rosemary cream and yogurt ice cream and a composition of coffee pudding with coconut and pistachio. This meal was a wonderful experience of light, fresh, healthy and intelligently original cooking, which is why it’s a place I’d happily return. It’s also a terrific choice for anyone looking to celebrate a special occasion in Paris without spending an exorbitant amount of money.

My only suggestion would be that aside from the interesting and well-chosen selections of wines by the glass that accompanied our menu, it would be good to propose a single bottle that might accompany the menu for those who don’t want to flit from one wine to another.

29 rue Cotte, 12th Arrondissement, Tel. 09-80-66-08-08. Metro: Ledru-Rollin. Open Tuesday-Saturday for lunch and dinner. Lunch menu 35 Euros. Prix-fixe tasting menu 64.50 Euros, average a la carte 70 Euros. www.virtus-paris.com

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Restaurant Passerini, which occupies a spare but handsomely renovated former cafe in the 12th Arrondissement of Paris near the Marche d’Aligre, one of my very favorite Paris markets, is not only the best new Italian restaurant in Paris but Europe. Now that’s a tall statement, Alec, you might think, but I know it’s true. Giovanni Passerini, the Rome born former chef of Rino, the delightful little bistro in the rue Trousseau where he first won his name and which is now closed, is so solidly talented that he would be a rising star in Italy if he still lived there. And though it’s not my subject here, Paris is on the brink of becoming a city that ranks on par with Rome and Milan as an ultimate destination for outstanding Italian cooking.

Why Well, briefly, Parisians love Italy perhaps more than other European country with the possible exception of Spain, and the current mode among young chefs in Paris for highest quality produce simply prepared to express its essential goodness is every bit as Italian as it is French. In fact, this is approach to cooking is probably even more Italian than it is French, because depending on the region of Italy, the Italians exalt a gastronomic simplicity that’s typified by dishes like a really good insalata Caprese (you know, of course–tomatoes, mozzarella, olive oil, basil, salt), an excellent pizza, or a great risotto.

Well, this is how Paris wants to eat right now–simply, with the alluring sideways twist that Italian cooking is also usually as full of flavor as it is low-fat. For me, this explains everything about the new gastronomic Italianophilia in Paris right now. And even though I rarely recommend foreign restaurants in Paris, because I believe most travelers come to the city bent on eating as much French food as possible, Restaurant Passerini is such a good restaurant that it completely warrants a meal on the carefully plotted dining schedule of even the most discerning Paris bound diner.

Chef Giovanni Passerini

“It’s a lot of pressure for me to represent Italian cooking in Paris,” Passerini said when we crossed paths when I went to his new digs for dinner the other night. But on the basis of the meal I shared with an asutely gastronomic friend  from LA who also lives in Paris, he has nothing to worry about. His food is superb, and the restaurant itself, which channels Gio Ponti and Olivetti, or the great days of Italian design in the Sixties, is a very pleasant space in which to have a meal, especially with its gray terrazzo floors. The only thing that could use some fine tuning is the service, which was regrettably impatient shading to aggressive and even impolite to us, people whose credentials for politeness are beyond all doubt. I worked in restaurants at another time in my life and my scales always bang down hard on the side of the one who’s standing not the one who’s seated, because I know how hard this work is. So was it really too much to expect that our bottle of wine be served before our first courses reached the table?

Happily, a more amenable waiter came to the rescue, and when an order of suppli–breaded deep-fried rice beignets stuffed with roast pork, cheese and tomato sauce arrived at the table, all was suddenly hugely right in the world, especially since we also loved our excellent natural wine from the Alto-Adige region. I’d never seen this ur Roman snack in Paris before, and it was not only thrilling to find it on home turf, but in a version that would be spectacularly good even by Roman standards.

Since our approach to a menu that induced a slightly frantic fit of gastronomic greediness–there were just so many things we wanted to try, we shared most dishes, including a plate of live baby langoustines sautéed in olive oil, garlic and red pepper with a little bit of tomato and some black olives. Here, the sauce was lovely, but the langoustines were either overcooked or past prime, since most of them were disappointingly pasty.

Since I knew Passerini had opened a fresh pasta shop near the Marche d’Aligre several months ago, I certainly wasn’t going to let the pasta course slip by, and the freshly tagliolini with red shrimp from Sicily, dried peppers from Crusco and sumac was easily the best pasta dish I’ve ever had in Paris. The texture of the pasta was springy and al dente, the Sicilian shrimp were sweet and succulent in a way no imported long-distance crustacean from Asia, Africa or Central America could ever be, and the addition of sumac–ever so slightly chewy, pungent, and fragrant with a perfume that mixes dried black cherries and tobacco with pine needles and roasted red peppers, was sublime.

After the hors d’oeuvres, starters, pastas and main courses, there is a large section the menu devoted to dishes to be shared among four or more, including brill with lemon sauce; turbot with lemon sauce; roasted pigeon; lobster; and whole ducks and guinea hens. Since all of these dishes would have been too much for us as a deuce, I doubled back to a starter for my main course–veal sweetbreads with spring vegetables that included lava beans and peas in a suavely acidulated sauce of cooking juices and citrus (lede photo in this post). Madame chose the exquisitely roasted Challans duckling with baby onions and olives. Both of these dishes again explained the heightened magnificence of Passerini’s Italian cooking in Paris, to wit, he uses the very best French produce with Italian culinary logic, and it produces some spectacular food.

We concluded with a cheese plate that would have been better had it included more of the great Italian cheeses that are still woefully under-represented in Paris, and the only dessert that night was a baba au rhum with unpasteurized ivory-colored cream and fresh strawberries.

If the service at this restaurant will doubtless benefit from some inevitable and necessary fine-tuning–almost every restaurant is a little ragged when it’s just out the gate, this table is a real gift to Paris and a poignant expression of how the French capital continues to attract, groom, discipline, teach and cherish the world’s most ambitious young chefs. We’re lucky that Giovanni Passerini is one of them.

Restaurant Passerini, 65 rue Traversière, 12th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-43-42-27-56, Metro: Ledru-Rollin, http://passerini.paris/  Open for lunch Wednesday to Saturday, dinner from Tuesday to Friday. Saturday night, the restaurant becomes an Enoteca, or wine bar, with no reservations and a small-plates menu. Average 45 Euros.

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It was a nice surprise when I learned that L’Amarante, chef Christophe Philippe’s new bistro in a quiet street not from from the Bastille, is open on Sunday nights. Why If Monday and Saturday are my least favorite nights of the week to go out to dinner in Paris, because Monday always feels forlorn and there’s rarely much fresh fish available, and Saturday is too amped up and noisy, my two favorite nights are Thursday and Sunday. On Thursdays, the average Parisian restaurant kitchen is well limbered up and provisioned and the crowd in the city’s dining rooms is still mostly Parisian and in a good mood with just a day left before the weekend. Having a good dinner out on Sunday usually succeeds in dispelling the wistfulness the day can induce by occasionally being being stitched with intimations of mortality conveyed by religion and the fact of an imminent return to work. Sunday nights out feel sort of confidential, too, since most people tend to stay home and get to bed early in preparation for the week to come. Me, I’ve always liked swimming upstream and throwing such sensible cares to the winds, especially if it means I’ll have a good meal.

So Bruno and I met our friends Carole and Laurent for dinner at this L-shaped thirties vintage bistro with a big service bar at the joint between its two small dining rooms with bare wooden tables and red banquettes, and I was intrigued to find it busy with an intriguingly diverse-looking crowd of epicures who clearly hadn’t come here by chance. For ever so many reasons, the four of us make a good quartet at the table. Carole and Bruno have known each other since they were children in Valenciennes, a pleasant hard-working little city on France’s border with Belgium, and Laurent and I always have fun talking about our increasingly distant pasts as reckless feckless creatures of the night in our twenties and thirties, love good wine, are interested in politics, love good food, and enjoy affectionately teasing Bruno and Carole about being from Valenciennes (Laurent is a native Parisian, and I am a child of that part of New England that has been ingested by greater New York, Fairfield County, CT). And we all have different appetites. Bruno loves organ meats, Laurent’s wild for game, Carole will only eat fish, and I’m the omnivore sticking my fork into everyone else’s plates.

I was keen to come here, because I’ve loved Christophe Philippe’s cooking ever since I first discovered him in a tiny plain dining room in the 5th Arrondissement over ten years ago. This is why I included him in HUNGRY FOR PARIS and why this address has long been one of my permanent recommendations in this part of the city. Now, though, he’s crossed the river and set up shop in this new place with a very different menu from the one he served in the Latin Quarter. And he’s cooking better than ever.

Reading the short menu while we waited for Laurent and Carole, I was sort of intrigued by its plainness. The dishes were very simply described and happily made no mention whatsoever as to whom had supplied what. I say happily, because I am adamantly opposed the creeping brand-name-ization of food that’s occurring in France. i.e. Hugo Desnoyer steak with carrots from Annie Bertin in a sauce of Bleu d’Auvergne from Bernard Anthony. If a steak is really good, why do I need to know the name of the butcher it came from Ditto a plate of carrots or a piece of cheese. The trope of reciting suppliers is one of the tireder ones of ‘La Bistronomie,’ and it was during the course of an excellent dinner at L’Amaranthe that I realized just how weary and wearisome La Bistronomie has become (For anyone who doesn’t know the term, it was coined over ten years ago by the most infelicitously named French food guide Le Fooding to indicate a modern style of bistro cooking, and Le Fooding reviews religiously recite the names of all the brand-names butchers, bakers, vegetable growers, etc. who supply any restaurant in lieu of saying anything more insightful about the cooking). To wit, I’m tired of squiggles, smears, gratuitous fiddly scatterings of micro-cress, etc. and a dinner of supposedly awe-inspiring small-plates that follow this format often leave me tempted to cook some pasta or make a sandwich when I get home.

Musing on this over a glass of excellent Chardonnay from L’Allier, part of an interesting offer of mostly organic and natural wines from lesser known wine producing regions of France, I remembered something chef Yannick Alleno had said to me last year. “There’s got to be that place in any meal where people feel they’re being fed. You can do all sorts of interesting first courses, but everyone will still subliminally be waiting for the main event, the dish you can sink your teeth into,” he said, and I agree. Still, even the simple language of Phlippe’s menu might have held a disappointing surprise, because so many chefs have adopted another dulling cliche of La Bistronomie, which is to just list the ingredients of a dish, as in ‘beef, beets, banana,’ with no reference to their possible transformation by cooking.

So for starters we ordered escargots, foie gras, and tongue with horseradish mayonnaise and salad (Carole didn’t get a starter), and the only surprise here was that the escargots came to the table sans shell as a sauté in a bright green and wonderfully garlicky persillade with the same excellent and incredibly fresh mesclun salad that garnished the tongue. Or actually, all three of these dishes were a surprise, because the corresponded exactly to the way they’d been described on the menu. And they were delicious classic French preparations cooked according to a textbook perfection from superb produce. In fact my foie gras was the best I’ve eaten in a very long time for being so lushly barnyard ruddy but also so miraculously free of nerves, and even the accompanying toast was perfect–slightly sour country bread topped with a brown lace of crusting.

And then we ate roasted veal with Jerusalem artichoke puree, sole with crispy wands of panisse, or chickpea flour fries, and quail. The bird and the roast were lightly garnished with deglazed cooking juices, the sole with good salted butter, nothing more. And these dishes were magisterial in their simplicity, which cloaked a mixture of sincerity and extreme technical precision. It was rather awing, actually, that a chef as good as Philippe had decided he was content just to cook, and cook brilliantly, rather than invent. A mania for invention has been the axis of contemporary French bistro cooking for a longtime, and if it occasionally results in some brilliant dishes at restaurants like Septime, Le Servan, Restaurant David Toutain and a few others, more often then not, these evanescent mannerist compositions leave behind no gastronomic memory whatsoever.

So on this Sunday night we were really well fed, and it made us happy, so we concluded our meal with one of the best chocolate mousses in Paris (Bruno, Carole), because it’s made with Claudio Corallo’s sublime chocolate from Sao Tome et Principe, and orders of Comte and Camembert (Me and Laurent, respectively, and of course we shared). Christophe Philippe is a cook, not a chef, and that’s a compliment.

4 rue Biscornet, 12th Arrondissement, Paris Tel. (33) 07 67 33 21 25. Metro: Bastille. Closed Wednesday and Thursday. Lunch menu 19 Euros, average a la carte 45 Euros.

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Salt-marinated salmon with citrus cream and favas at Will

Recently I’ve been thinking something’s gone very wrong with the whole process of going out to a restaurant for a meal. Consider this Tweet from Jay Rayner, the Guardian‘s excellent food critic, this morning: “25 minutes of hold music that crackles and breaks up. an online booking system that claims to have no tables. credit card numbers mandatory.” Needless to say, all the poor man was trying to do was make a reservation.

When I first started going to restaurants with any regularity, the only ones that required reservations were the fancy French places on the East Side of New York where I booked lunch for the editor for whom I was working as an earnest but hopelessly incompetent assistant. With the hind sight of years, I’m very grateful to this brilliant gentleman, the late Joe Fox, too, since he might have fired me on the spot for being such a stunningly incompetent typist. Instead, he just shook his head in disbelief at the completed letters I brought in for him to sign. “Good God, Alec! How did manage this This line drops down, jumps back  up, drops down again, and then flies off the page!” White-Out, a correction fluid in a little bottle with a brush, had recently been invented, and I availed myself of it with such regularity that Mr. Fox used to refer to my letters as my “canvases.” As he grumbled once or twice, the only reason he kept me on was that he liked my reader’s reports. These were the summary outlines that I’d do when I finished reading a manuscript from the huge pile of submissions under my desk, and they ended with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ recommendation. Needless to say, this reading was the most interesting part of my editorial assistant’s job.

My luck was in working for such a brilliant and ruthlessly demanding editor–I learned as much about writing during the year and a half that I was his assistant as I had in four years at a small liberal arts college in New England with a vaunted reputation, and also the fact that every once in a very blue moon–maybe because it was my birthday or his lunch date had cancelled and he liked good food much too much to let that keep him away from Le Veau d’Or or any of the other places he went regularly to let this be an obstacle, I’d be invited out to lunch. These infrequent but much yearned for meals were the beginning of my more serious education in French cooking, too.

In my own life, though, I wasn’t going to fancy French places, but fashionable restaurants frequented by Manhattan’s night-life crowd–Ruskay’s on the Upper West Side where I lived, Raoul’s in Soho, the long-gone Cafe Geiger on East 86th Street for delicious German home cooking,  a couple of cheap Italian joints in Greenwich Village, Cuban-Chinese places on Broadway, and delicatessens. We almost never made reservations in those days, but always found a table when we came in, which meant we ate where we felt like eating that night and what we felt like eating that night. To be sure, there were places like Lutece, the brilliant little French place on the East Side or, later, Chanterelle in Soho, that you had to book weeks ahead of time, but they were high-brow exceptions.

Now in New York, London and Paris, a reservation is essential, and depending on the city, obtaining and maintaining one requires a varying but usually large and often irritating amount of effort.  I’m very sympathetic to the problem of no-shows, those ne’er do wells who can punch a painful hole in a restaurant’s fragile bottom-line, but on the other hand, why do I have to call back to confirm the reservation In London recently, I found a message on my silenced cellphone–I’d turned it off during a meeting and the lunch that followed–briskly informing me that my reservation had been cancelled, because I hadn’t returned the confirmation request within a two-hour window. Enough said on this subject, but if only the entire restaurant world would shift over the winningly efficient services of Open Table, La Fourchette and other online booking engines.

So what happens if it’s a pretty spring night in Paris on a Friday, and you suddenly decide you want to go out for a good meal Well, you’re not going to Le Chateaubriand, Septime, Spring or Verjus at the last minute, but with a little luck, you might snag a table at Will, a good looking new bistro that recently opened near the Bastille. “Oui, bien sur, une table pour deux sans problemes,” said the pleasant-sounding man who answered the phone, and two hours later, I guessed that the restaurant down the road with the bright green chairs out front was Will, and I was right.

“Sit wherever you like,” said the same charming man I’d spoken to earlier, a warm invitation that immediately made a nice change from the strategized seating plans in so many restaurants these days. The spare but attractive dining room, which not unpleasantly reminded me of what restaurants once looked like in East Germany, was already half full, and was evenly divided between couples on what appeared to be on dates and middle-aged ones who’d been together for a longtime, which is what I guess we were. The crowd matched the arty look of the room, with its Fifties wooden chairs and tables and lighting fixture that might once have been in East German president Erich Honecker’s office, and the single waitress was as pleasant as the maitre d’hotel when she came with two glasses of Jacky and Pascal Preys’s very good Silex Touraine we’d ordered as an aperitif.

Although the 45 Euro prix-fixe menu (you can also order a la carte) was brief, neither of us had any trouble deciding on a meal that pleased us. My salt-marinated salmon was succulent, generously served and nicely garnished with a citrus coulis and a few fava beans, and Bruno liked his maigre (croaker) carpaccio with shaved radishes, mustard cress, avocado, poppy seeds and a light soy based dressing. Both dishes were made with excellent product, suavely seasoned and displayed good culinary logic. The accompanying bread was excellent, too.

I’d been curious about chef William Pradeleix’s cooking for a while, too. Most recently, he cooked at the nearby Manger, and before that he’d had a Marco Polo career that included stints at the St. Regis in Bora-Bora with Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the Mamounia in Marrakech, and the Connaught in London with Hélène Darroze. Though Pradeleix has a style of his own, it was probably Vongeritchten’s limpid, produce-centered approach to cooking that had marked him the most, or at least on the basis of my main course, a square of pork belly with a crust of golden crackling and a garnish of grilled baby artichokes, the delicately acidulous vegetable creating a perfect foil for the rich meat. Bruno’s duck breast had a scored crust of flavorful fat, was cooked rare and came with a side dish of romanesco, that vegetable that looks like it was born of furtive coupling between broccoli and cauliflower, and a light sauce of pan drippings.

Well-fed, for dessert, we split a cardamom-flavored panna cotta with mango ice cream and roasted pineapple that brought Mom’s pineapple-upside-down cakes of yore to mind–nicely candied and lightly caramelized fruit, which came to the table under a flirtatious but extraneous pane of carmelized sugar. With friendly and alert service, this was a very good meal, and my only reservations about this place are the short wine list, which will hopefully grow longer and more interesting, and a wish for a more extensive selection of cheeses for anyone ordering cheese instead of dessert. Otherwise, I’m shopping an excuse to find myself in this neighborhood again sometime soon so that I can enjoy the same great cooking as part of the good-value lunch menu.

Will, 75 rue Crozatier, 12th Arrondissement, Tel. 01-53-17-02-44. Metro: Ledru-Rollin or Faidherbe-Chaligny. Closed Sunday and Monday dinner.  Lunch menu 19 Euros, prix-fixe dinner menu 45 Euros, average a la carte 45 Euros.  

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