Prunier is back, and it’s better than ever. Most recently owned by the late Pierre Bergé, founder of the Yves Saint Laurent fashion house with the late designer of the same name, one of the most glamorous restaurants in the world has just reopened under new owners, the Swiss investment group Olma Luxury Holdings, with a new menu by Michelin three-star chef Yannick Alleno.

Laurie Ochoa, Ruth Reichl, Nancy Silverton and me

So when Laurie Ochoa, food editor of the LA Times; writer and editor Ruth Reichl (my old boss at the still lamented GOURMET), baking genius and restauranteur Nancy Silverton and I had one meal alone during the trip we led in Paris and Champagne in October (more on that here https://dinnerwithfriendsabroad.com/), I booked at Prunier, because I knew it would be a festive occasion and wanted to try Alleno’s new menu.

This supremely elegant seafood house and caviar counter just behind the Arc de Triomphe opened in 1924. As I told Laurie, Ruth and Nancy over glasses of Champagne as we began our meal, it was some sixty-three years later that I walked through its doors to meet Yves Saint Laurent, of all people, for lunch.

The reason for this painstakingly negotiated and carefully choreographed occasion with a charming public-relations woman in attendance was an interview I was doing of the designer for a London newspaper after I’d left my job as an editor in the office of Fairchild Publications, the fashion publisher that was once the unforgiving arbiter not only of hemlines and good taste in its garment-industry newspaper Women’s Wear Daily, but the cruel judge of the beau monde’s social cachet in the pages of its slick magazine W.

My English editor wanted something “a little racy and a bit naughty,” but I was wary of delivering these goods, since few people in the world were better protected legally in those days than the late designer. Still, it was an important story for me, and so I was anxious when I showed up for the appointment at the curiously early hour of 11am (“It’s so that Yves won’t be high or drunk yet,” speculated my shrewd friend, the late Christa Worthington).

When I arrived I was stunned by the beauty of the art-deco decor of this place and then dumbstruck and horrified to be ushered to a table a large silver bowl filled with crushed ice and a metal tin nestled in this icy mis en scene. It’s contents were glossy and black, so that even though I’d never eaten caviar before, I knew what it was, and I also knew that it was an extravagance to be personally presented with such a huge serving of this storied delicacy.

Yannick Alleno

Unlike Yannick Alleno, who could probably have finished the entire tin pictured above on his own, I’d never had caviar before and was squeamish about the idea of eating fish eggs.

“Really, Alec!!?#8221; Ruth said.

Yup, really. If I’ve always loved to eat, I arrived in Paris with a pathetically pinched and provincial palate par excellence. Most seafood was off limits, and game was too wild for me.  Thirty-six years later, however, I’ve become an avid omnivore, and so I couldn’t wait to tuck into some of the world’s best seafood at Prunier.

And the interview with Yves Saint Laurent While I busy tasting my first caviar, something I immediately fell head-over-heels in love with, the designer left the table to—I don’t know what, and never returned. So I sat there with the stricken PR woman for another 45 minutes eating caviar, oysters and smoked salmon, and then I went home to call London and explain that the interview had been aborted.

Coming out of the Metro, I stopped at the Felix Potin, a convenience store, in the rue de Babylone, to buy some milk, and going into the shop, I immediately recognized the man at the cash register who was buying a huge amount of cheap candy.

The cashier rang it all up, and spoke the total aloud. The designer stood there blushing and sort of dazed.

I guessed that he had no money on him, and told the cashier I’d pay for the candy. Then Saint Laurent looked at me and smiled sheepishly. “Merci, vous etes gentil,” he said. And then he looked at me again. “I’m very sorry. I’m very sorry,” he said, recognizing me. “I don’t feel well today. I’m very sad and I had nothing to say. My life is very difficult right now.”

A man in a dark suit came into the shop, glanced at the cash register receipt, handed me 200 Francs, and led the designer, who lived just across the street, away.

“I hope you at least enjoyed the caviar,” he said over his shoulder. I did indeed.

All of us started off with l’Oeuf Christian Dior, which is a signature dish on the new Prunier menu. It was a sleight of gastronomic elegance more than worthy of the late designer, too, since it came to the table as a perfectly coddled egg with a generous spoonful of caviar on its crown and a buttoniere of chive in a pool of caviar-speckled cream. Beautiful to behold, it was even better to eat, since following the waiter’s instructions that we dig down to the bottom of the bowl with each spoonful of egg, we discovered the feral genius of this dish, which was a  hidden aspic made with essence of jambon blanc (white ham). In effect, a whole ham had been gently sweated for hours on end and the juices it released had been captured and used to season the aspic. This contrast between the lush iodine-rich caviar and meaty aspic created a perfect and very luscious harmony when napped by the yolk of the egg.

Subsequent starters were superb as well, including the salmon-and-seaweed hand roll Nancy ordered, the langoustine carpaccio with caviar cream that seduced me, Laurie and Ruth.

I knew the minute I opened the menu and saw it that I’d have sole meunière, because it’s one of my favorite of all French dishes, and Laurie had it too, because she feels the same way. Here it was impeccably fresh, perfectly cooked, and beautifully garnished with melted butter, capers, a piece of lemon and a side of ethereal potato puree. Nancy had scallops with seaweed butter and a saffron sauce and Ruth ordered line-caught sea bass with a celery gelee and caviar. All of us were extremely happy with our meals.

None of us had been planning to have dessert until the pastry tray arrived. Assured that the figs were from the south of France and the raspberries from Alsace, we succumbed to these beautifully made tarts, and threw caution to the winds by accepting the suggestion of a glass of Champagne with dessert.

“I think Prunier just be the most beautiful restaurant in the world,” said Ruth And I think she just may be right. One way or another, it’s an excellent choice for that special meal you were planning to treat yourself to in Paris, and it’s also very romantic without making any effort to be so whatsoever.

Yes, it’s very expensive, too, but it’s worth every centime.

And if I may, I’d like to suggest that my gastronomic coming-of-age story MY PLACE AT THE TABLE: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris would be a wonderful holiday gift for food-lovers, Francophiles, and anyone who loves a good read.

16 Avenue Victor Hugo, 16th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-44-17-35-85, Open for lunch and dinner Tuesday-Saturday. Closed Sunday and Monday. Lunch menu 68 Euros, prix-fixe menus 125 Euros, 190 Euros; average a la carte 150 Euros. www.prunier.com

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Substance is such a good restaurant that it’s well worth traveling to a quiet corner of the 16th Arrondissement to discover the sinewy talent of young chef Matthias Marc, 25, a native of the Jura in eastern France. Marc signs many of his dishes with a witty wink at this eastern French region of mountains and forests best-known gastronomically for producing Comte cheese and charcuterie like morteau sausage, but his his sensibility is decidedly cosmopolitan on a solid Gallic base. His cooking is also stunningly precise and intriguingly imaginative. I predict that he’s going to become one of the best chefs in his generation, too.

Marc honed his cooking style when he was working at the very popular Racines des Prés just off the rue du Bac in the 7th Arrondissement, but eager to have his own kitchen, he teamed up with Anthony Pedrosa, who ran the dining at this same restaurant, and Stéphane Manigold, a businessman with a passionate interest in gastronomy to create this excellent new table.

Taking a leaf from Racines, they commissioned interior designer Michel Amarettos to create an intimate modern bistro with a low-key contemporary chic conveyed by an open kitchen that overlooks the dining room, bare tables with white and teal fabric covered Sixties style arm chairs and basket-weave ceramic panels on the walls. Not surprisingly, Substance has been hugely popular ever since it opened a few months ago, and it seems that the 16th Arrondissement, a part of  Paris that’s not usually on my beat, since most of the city’s best young chefs are to be found in double digit arrondissements of eastern Paris like the 11th and 20th these days, is rousing from a certain culinary turpitude with this opening and that of other excellent restaurants like Comice.

This address is also much appreciated by people staying at hotels in western Paris like the Peninsula, the George V, the Prince de Galles, the Shangri-La and other properties within an easy walk of this address.

Sitting just across from the open kitchen, it was fascinating to watch the ballet of chefs at work in a compact space, and also interact regularly with Anthony Pedrosa, this restaurant’s excellent sommelier, as he regularly visited the restaurant’s wine tower, adjacent to our table. Substance has an exceptionally good wine list, including over 180 different Champagnes. The Champagne selection was drawn up by Anselme Selosse, the cult Champagne producer whose signature wine is called “Substance,” hence the restaurant’s name, and Stéphane  Manigold, and it highlights a variety of ‘grower’ Champagnes, or Champagnes from small producers like Laherte Frères, a small producer based on the Montagne de Reims just outside of Reims. This makes Substance one of the best addresses in Paris for Champagne lovers.

Our meal began with a simple but elegant amuse bouche of smoked cream with salmon eggs and dried pine-needle powder, a garnish that curiously flattered the glossy orange fish pearls with a subtle resinous flavor and also announced chef Marc’s attachment to his native Jura.

The surrounding clientele offered an amusing demographic snap shot of this affluent part of Paris, too. To my left, a table of four forty-something men in jeans and blazers guffawed about their girl friends and a recent weekend in Saint Tropez, several middle-aged couples sat stonily with their heads cocked in different directions as a possible prelude to a divorce, and three well-dressed older ladies with the same meringue-colored hair and expensive pocket books appeared intrigued by the adventure of being in a trendy restaurant. There were several tables of girl friends dining out after work, and here and there, a younger couple that called out the fact that this bourgeois neighborhood has now become a relatively good-value neighborhood on the Monopoly board of Paris real estate.

Still, the aura of entitlement that hovered over most of the tables here brought me back to musing on a subject I’d last visited during an excellent meal at Batard, a “modern European” restaurant in New York City, in February. This is how the clientele of a restaurant can impact on the way you perceive of its cooking and also your experience of being there.

That cold night in New York City, I was dining with a much-loved old friend, and we we were paying our own bill, which was in contrast to the mostly loud, smug expense-account wielding clients in this very pretty dining room. For most of them, it was just another night out on the corporate purse, while for us it was a special occasion, and several times during that meal, I had to actively discipline myself to screen out the officious and reflexively privileged behavior at some of the surrounding tables. You can’t, of course, control who else you’ll be dining with in a public setting, but it certainly can have a very big impact on how much you enjoy your meal, and I also couldn’t help but feel frequently exasperated by the inattention given to some really superb cooking by people who were there not because they wanted to eat well, but because they had the money to pay for it.

This is due to the deep reverence I have for the culinary professions, stemming not only for the hours I’ve spent in kitchens all over the world as a food writer, but also going back to the days when I was variously a prep cook, bus boy and waiter in New England seaside hotels during college summers and also to a stint as a 11pm-5am baker in a New York City kitchen that had me standing warily on the subway platform at West 72nd Street at 5.15am with flour in my hair, an aching back and an adrenaline woke wariness of riding the subway in the dead of night in New York in the 1980s. The short take on all of this Most people have absolutely no clue how hard a kitchen works with the goal of delivering gastronomic pleasure, because if they did, they’d be much much more grateful.

Our starters at Substance were superb. I loved my fluffy squid’s ink gnocchi with a smoked egg-yolk condiment, pickled watercress sauce and a jus de morteau, because it was an earthy and deeply satisfying dish that flashed with culinary wit and invention.

Bruno’s perfectly cooked green asparagus came prepared two different ways–their tips with a tangy ramp cream and their steams chopped and served with trout rillettes with a funky floral hay-infused vinaigrette. This composition was a steely equilibrium of the rustic and the urbane that was a perfect example of Matthias Marc’s cooking, too.

Our main courses were spectacular, too. My rolled John Dory came on a bed of quinoa with fresh celery root pickles, fried capers and a luscious gently cardamom-flavored sabayon. The fish was succulent, and its accompanying condiments added texture and suavely percussive gastronomic punctuation to a brilliantly conceived and executed dish.

Bruno’s roast baby lamb with Comte cheese foam, seared baby onions and more dried pine needle powder was gorgeous springtime eating, too, and a great example of the discreet but wiry sensuality that is a signature of Matthias Marc’s excellent contemporary French cooking at Substance.

There was no way were going to miss the Sao Tome chocolate souffle with bitter cocoa crumble and pine-flavored ice cream for two for dessert either, and it had a funky fruity tropical fruitiness that lofted us us out of Paris to the tiny island in the bight of Western Africa where the cocoa beans were grown.

Substance is an excellent restaurant, and an excellent venue in which to uncork a really good bottle of Champagne.

18 rue de Chaillot, 16th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-47-20-08-90. Metro: Alma-Marceau.         Open for lunch and dinner from Monday to Friday. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Lunch menus 35 Euros, 36 Euros; carte blanche menu 79 Euros; average a la carte 75 Euros. www.substance.paris 

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With the opening of Comice, I’ve finally found a delicious reason to head for the 16th arrondissement, since this restaurant is the suave but relaxed address with outstanding contemporary French cooking this quiet bourgeois part of Paris has so sorely been missing. Traveling to meet a friend here for lunch just before Christmas, I found myself in the midst of a long meditation on my relationship with this part of the city as first I took the Metro many stops west from my home in the heart of the city, and then I walked many long blocks on pavements made pretty but slippery by random collages of the year’s most tenacious yellow leaves finally pelted off the trees by a hard cold early winter rain.

Truth be told, for reasons variously financial, sociological and psychological, this isn’t a part of Paris with which I’ve ever had much kin. To be sure, they’re a few restaurants in this demure, well-tended zone of restrained privilege that I’ve always liked, including Les Tablets de Jean-Louis Nomicos, L’Astrance, Le Stella, Pages, and Monsieur Bleu (more for Joseph Dirand’s sublime decor than the food). But with the exception of the 9th Arrondissement where I live, my axis of good taste has been decidedly tipped towards eastern Paris, or the 3rd,  the 10th, the 11th, the 12th, and more recently, the 18th arrondissements for many years for the simple reason that these are the neighbourhoods of predilection for a whole generation of talented young Parisian chefs. Why That’s easy. These are the quarters where the rents for both flats and commercial spaces are still relatively affordable, which means that they’re also among the youngest parts of the city.

For my part, and as someone who will always be in life-long recovery from a childhood in a safe, well-groomed, and very polite suburb of New York City, I prefer neighbourhoods with more edge and human variety than I’ve ever found in the 16th, and when I was single, I liked living somewhere central that made it easy to walk home after a night out in the clubs. The 16th has also always failed my anonymity test, which is to say people observe one another day in and day out, because these zones are rarely troubled by unknown faces. Myself, I like unknown faces, thrive on diversity, and like my neighbours sparse and mostly kept at a friendly arm’s length.

The last time I’d spent any real time in this neighborhood, as in coming here once or twice a week, was over thirty years ago when I’d lingered in an emotionally inappropriate affair, as one does, because the sex was so good. Waiting to cross a street on the way to lunch, this furtive fumbling connection came back to me vividly, but now, instead of making me cringe as it had for so many years before, I finally laughed out loud at the absurdity of the time I’d spent with a handsome Belgian man who’d once been a monk but who had gone on to become an unhappily married insurance executive instead. Doubtless it was this lurid if good-humoured recollection that finally landed me at the door to this notably attractive dining room in high spirits and with a ravenously well-honed appetite, my revenge, perhaps, on the gimlet-eyed concierge in the Belgian’s building who always eyed me through an index finger’s pullback of ivory lace window veneer as Satan himself.

My lunch date from Los Angeles hadn’t arrived yet, so I chatted with the delightful Etheliya Hananova, who explained that she was originally was from Winnipeg but had arrived in Paris with her husband, chef Noam Gedalof, also Canadian, when he got the job as sous-chef to Antonin Bonnet at Le Sergeant Recruteur on the Ile Saint Louis. So I went back to the open kitchen to say hello to Gedalof, and learned that he’d also worked at Thomas’s Keller’s The French Laundry, an experience that he found ‘invaluable’ and had done a stint with chef Pascal Barbot at L’Astrance. “My cooking is all about produce, making it more eloquent while respecting its natural tastes and explained, adding that he enjoyed the challenge of sourcing as much of his produce from small producers he finds himself as possible. “There should be an element of surprise at every meal, and so I don’t want to use the same suppliers everyone else does,” Gedalof said with a smile. An example “The poularde (a chicken that’s more than 120 days old and which has been fed on a special diet) of farmer Simon Graf at La Ferme du Poc in Gascony. This bird is incredibly succulent and has the most amazing flavor.”

So I already knew what I wanted for lunch when the lady in black, chic as ever, finally darkened the doorway and raised my spirits.

“What a good-looking room, ” she said after settling down and inspecting her surroundings. “Who did it#8221; Well, that would be Parisian architect Nicolas Kelemen, with the beautiful flower arrangements coming from the exceptionally chic florist Debeaulieu in the rue Henri Monnier, and the handsome paintings of trees that are the focal point of the spacious dining room in tones of gray, petrol blue, almond and bittersweet by the Berlin based Canadian painter Peter Hoffer. “Chic but relaxed,” she said, adding, “And I’m hungry.”

So we looked at the menu, and decided she’d start with the scallop carpaccio, and I’d go with the foie gras mousse, that we wanted to try the roasted cauliflower, and that then she’d have the Corsican beef filet in Port sauce, and me that bird chef Gedalof had vaunted earlier.

When they arrived, our starters were beautiful. “Let’s hope they taste as good as they look,” said the Los Angelina, taking the words right out of my mouth. And they did. In fact, the purity, precision and humility of Gedalof’s cooking blew on the embers of one of my most cherished gastronomic memories, my first meal at the long gone restaurant Lutece in New York City, a meal that dazzled me with chef Andre Soltner’s discipline and exquisite ability to frame the natural flavors of food by enhancing them. This food was as elegant but quietly modern at Soltner’s cooking had been forty years ago, too, so much so, in fact, that Gedalof could be his students.

And to prove that he’s in a league with Soltner and a savvy student of Thomas Keller as well, a deliriously good next complimentary next course arrived, homemade tagliatelle with shaved truffles, because, as the charming Etheliya Hananova observed, “you can never eat enough pasta, and Noam loves making it.” We stared at the noodles in their mink stole and giggled with pleasure. “Now I know why I got up this morning,” my friend said.

I felt the same way when my poularde arrived. It was the best French fowl I’ve eaten, both in terms of product and cooking, since a tear-inducing poulet de Bresse at Paul Bocuse some five years ago. Impeccably cooked and napped by a velvety jus, it came with quince, buttery brioche toast, and tiny fragile sage-leaf beignets. Cynthia loved her beef with sweet-potato filled ravioli, too (no photo here, because she was too fast for me).

We also loved the bake whole cauliflower with a superb Grenobloise (capers, croutons, lemon) garnish, which we ordered as a side dish.

Gloriously well fed, and for me, perfectly wined, first with a glass of Domaine Ledogar Carignan Blanc and then a lush glass of Arianna Occhipinti SP68 Terre Siciliane from Hananova’s superb wine list, we doubted we could manage dessert, but finally, and very wisely, decided to share brilliant American pastry chef Catherine Takayama’s delicate “greek yogurt panna cotta with a citrus medley” and orange blossom ice cream, a supremely refreshing winter dessert. This was followed by mignardises that defied any attempt to resist temptation, and suddenly it dawned on me that I’d now be spending time in the 16th Arrondissement for reasons more sacred than profane, because Comice is a truly delightful restaurant.

31 avenue de Versailles, 16th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-42-15-55-70. Metro: Jasmin, Mirabeau or RER C Javel. Open for lunch Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Open for Dinner on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Closed on Sunday and Monday. Four course lunch menu 80 Euros, five course dinner menu 120 Euros. www.comice.paris

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Restaurant Alan Geaam is one of the best new restaurants in Paris in 2017, and one of the reasons it’s so good is that you’ve probably never heard of Geaam before. That’s because this amiable, hard-working chef spends all of his time in the kitchen instead of grooming a big ego with public relations like too many other Paris chefs these days. Instead, Geaam, a gentle, shrewd, self-taught chef who was born forty-two years ago to Lebanese parents living in Liberia, is one of the quiet men (and women) of Paris gastronomy. I’ve loved his cooking ever since an initial discovery at L’Auberge Nicolas Flamel, the first Paris restaurant Geaam owned, and have watched his cooking become more and more inventive and appealing as he’s opened two other popular Paris bistros, AG Saint-Germain and AG Les Halles.

“The reason I cook is to make people happy,” says Geaam, who has thus far eschewed becoming a brand-name chef in an age of food-television celebrities and ego-driven gastronomic personnages. To wit, Geaam is not one of those chefs who speak in over-coached talking points but is instead warm and off-the-cuff.

His new place occupies the former premises of chef Akrame Benallal’s old restaurant in the quiet rue Lauriston just beyond the Arc de Triomphe in a part of the city where upmarket restaurants are assured of a good trade at noon by business lunches and a reliable clientele in the evening from nearby hotels and locals in an affluent part of Paris. This part of town  has thus far been overlooked by the rising new generation of chefs who have been so dramatically renewing the city’s gastronomic laurels, probably because the rents are so lofty but also because the natives are generally older and have a decided preference for classical French cooking. Now that looks set to change.

But was this location a gamble for Geaam “I don’t think so,” the chef told me when we chatted before dinner. “I think Parisians in general are adventurous diners, and that the clientele in this quartier will respond my take on relaxed modern French haute cuisine, because these people are worldly and know good food.”

Eye-balling Geaam’s short menu–he offers three tasting menus composed from the two starters, two main courses, a cheese course from the renown cheese-monger Bernard Antony in Alsace, and two desserts, which can be ordered as three, five or seven courses, plus hors d’oeuvres and petit fours,  Everything that night looked good, but I have long since developed a great wariness about tasting menus, which inevitably take too long and either over or under feed you. So Bruno and I decided on the five course menu.

After a round of clever hors d’oeuvres, our first course was a winsome expression of spring–fat green asparagus from Provence, morel mushrooms, a breaded deep-fried quail’s egg, and as a first expression of Geaam’s love of herbs and spices, a few leaves of Thai basil, which added some raciness to the lusciously cosy swaddling on a perfectly made Hollandaise sauce.

It was the next course, though, that showed off Geaam’s now assured confidence and the tender new buds of his very personal gastronomy, cooking that makes references to the lost world of a little boy born to a foreign family living in tropical Africa. A single perfectly cooked langoustine came in a pool of deeply reduced chocolate-colored sauce made from a reduction of the juice of langoustine heads with a green ravioli filled with langoustine capped with a baby beet leaf.  A small fragile ribbon of nori added salt and emphasised the iodine-richness of this intricately imagined and created cameo of tastes and textures. What shrewdly jarred its classicism, however, was the very gentle taste of Vietnamese cardamom in the sauce. Cardamom is not, of course, a seasoning used in French cooking, but it’s deftly used and appreciated in the Middle East, Iran, Pakistan and India.

Humility is one of the most under-rated ingredients in any restaurant kitchen. That’s what I keep thinking during my dinner at Restaurant Alan Geaam, and the dish that will serve as a permanent reference for this verity was the next course in my meal here, pan-fried monkfish with vadouvan, an elegant French curry mix, charred leeks and a roll of leek and monkfish with capers and seaweed. This succulent fish with a delicate perfume of the the Spice Coast of India was elegant, understated and profoundly satisfying, and it was Geaam’s restraint here that made it so good. The vadouvan teased the quiet  sweetness of the fish and the vegetable without disguising their natural flavors, and this ability to enunciate the natural tastes of produce is always the sign of a chef with serious talent.

Next a succulent beef filet with black truffles shavings, a deeply reduced jus and a potato nest garnished with pomegranate seeds, another shy nod at the chef’s heritage. Knowing something about Geaam’s background made the self-effacing elegance of his cooking here that much more poignant. After a childhood in Liberia, the chef lived in Lebanon, the United States, Italy, and the Czech Republic before he arrived in France twenty years ago, not speaking the language and with a pittance in his pocket. He promptly found work in a succession of restaurant kitchens, which began his long self-taught education in French cooking, his passion.

A plate of cheeses–a tangy chèvre and a nutty Emmental, from Bernard Antony, the famous Alsatian cheesemonger, with date chutney, an original and excellent condiment for cheese, followed. Meanwhile, I was almost touched to watch Geaam bashfully presenting himself to several tables as the evening’s dinner service was winding down. An enthusiastic young American couple complimented him on his cooking, and then suggested that he would be a huge success in Los Angeles, where they live. “Thank you,” Geaam replied. “But I am very happy in Paris living my French dream. My passion is French produce and French gastronomy, so I really don’t see myself anywhere else,” he concluded politely.

The pair of desserts that concluded this meal were both artfully angelic in different ways. The first, a composition of pink grapefruit, aloe vera gelee and eucalyptus, was bracingly refreshing, while the second, “honey milk from my childhood” with hyssop ice cream, was nostalgia framed by the exigence of remarkable technical skills and a remarkably astute palate.

As this meal previewed, Alan Geaam has a brilliant future ahead of him.

19 rue Lauriston, 16^th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-45-01-72-97. Prix-fixe menus, 40 Euros, 60 Euros, 80 Euros. www.alangeaam.fr

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On my way to dinner at Le Frank, chef Jean-Louis Nomicos’s very good new restaurant at La Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, I found myself musing on museum dining.

I’ve always had a soft spot for museum restaurants, even if many of them have never previously been very good, because they were such a relief from the long studious hours I was required to spend gazing at saints with arrows sticking out of their sides or fleshy ladies being chased by a satyr or other paintings in the museums I was taken to in various East Coast cities as a boy by my well-meaning mother and grandmother. It’s not that I didn’t like looking at the paintings, but rather that we always stayed much too long, and that the real treat during any visit to the city–mostly New York, but sometimes Boston or Philadelphia–was going to a restaurant. On rainy or snowy days, of which there were many, the ladies in charge often opted for the museum restaurant, however.

So I have vivid memories of the mediocre fried chicken, meat loaf and other hot food served at the now long vanished cafeteria at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. If the food was as dull as the invariably wet-from-the-dishwasher fiberglass tray on which it was pushed down the rails, the restaurant itself was exquisitely glamorous. It was styled like a Roman villa around a central atrium with a big fountain ornamented with verdigris bronze figures, and it used to prick my imagination with yearning to live like an ancient Roman rather than as a boy in a colonial house in suburban Connecticut.

“I bet the Romans didn’t eat meat loaf,” I once said to my grandmother, and my assertion disguised, sort of, as a question elicited a puzzled look from her.

“Well–probably not. But if they did, I expect they’d have covered it with garum,” she said, and puffed her Parliament.

“What’s garum#8221;

“A fish sauce the Romans used to fancy. I expect it tasted a bit like a cross between A1 Sauce and Worcestershire sauce with a lot of anchovy paste.”

Be that as it may, even garum probably couldn’t have rendered the Met’s gray meat loaf palatable, and these feelings of general dubiousness towards museum food remained my a priori until very recently.

Then several years ago, I had a very good meal at the restaurant at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain when it was run by Basque chef Martin Berasategui (it no longer is). This was followed by an excellent lunch at Danny Meyer’s The Modern restaurant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and then a terrific feed at M. Wells Dinette at the MoMA P.S. 1 in Long Island City, New York. Recently I read that chef Michel Bras is running the restaurant at the new Musée Pierre Soulages in Rodez, too.

The museum restaurant, once the last resort dining choice for grandmothers with their grandsons on rainy days, is clearly on a roll.

On a pretty Fall night, the Fondation Louis Vuitton looked like a turfed glass cloud when I arrived, and the only discordant thing about architect Frank Genry’s beautiful building was the huge shiny LV emblem branding the building. Since the name of the museum is the Fondation Louis Vuitton is clearly legible over the front door, this commercial overstatement struck me as a very false note, but from the moment I met Bruno at the restaurant, the habitual elegance of Louis Vuitton came into play.

Beneath a school of softly illuminated Gehry designed school of suspended fishes that looked like a motif from Japanese porcelain, the understated dining room is tucked away behind a gorgeous walnut screen and is furnished with sumptuous gray leather banquettes and gray-leather-and-walnut chairs. Only open for a week that night, it was pulling a stylish Western Paris and suburbs crowd–the couple on one side of us was trying to decide between a winter vacation in the Seychelles or the Maldives, while the two immaculately coiffed and dressed ladies of a certain age on the other flank talked about their dog groomers.

Still, this museum restaurant was off to a much better start than any I’d been to in Paris for a very long time, and they would be Georges, with its appalling service and mediocre food on top of the Centre Pompidou; the equally snooty, over-priced and mediocre Cafe Marly at the Louvre; and the beautiful but underperforming restaurant at the Musée d’Orsay. For openers, Le Frank is beautiful, and with talented and winsomely sincere chef Jean-Louis Nomicos in charge, I knew we’d eat well, and we did, very well.

After an amuse bouche of pleasantly ruddy pumpkin soup with garnishes  of creme fraiche, croutons and baked chestnuts, Bruno tucked into the sea bream carpaccio with marinated carrots, “lemon caviar” (fine grains of lemon pulp), basil and piment d’Espelette, and I chose the egg cooked sous-vide and nestled in a bed of Jerusalem artichoke puree on top of a delicious soubise of onions. The egg came with match-sticks of black truffle and the dish was just as soothing and satisfying as climbing into a hot bath.

As I’ve come to expect from Nomicos, who also runs the very good Les Tablettes de Jean-Louis Nomicos, and whose cooking I’ve known at both La Grande Cascade and then Lasserre, both dishes were impeccably prepared and masterfully seasoned. I couldn’t help but also thinking, however, that this food was rather polite, in terms of being pretty and inoffensive in olfactory terms, and I guessed that the briefing the chef had received from the Fondation probably emphasized the importance of aesthetics and the need for olfactory discretion, too, since the dining room is just off the lobby of the museum. So there was little chance of finding bottles of fresh garum on the tables at Le Frank. Intead, I gather that Louis Vuitton wanted cooking in what it sees as its own image–beautiful, classic, discreetly stylish and carefully crafted. So hold the garlic, and don’t get crazy.

Nomicos, a gifted and deeply experienced chef, doesn’t have to tack too far from his natural style to satisfy what I’m guessing to be Vuitton’s marching orders either, since a certain visual and gustatory elegance has always been a major part of his signature. But what gives his cooking character is the earthy Mediterranean punctation of his cooking. It was the syncopated crown of black-olive powder that really lit up my steamed sea bass on a bed of finely sliced snow peas with a nicely made sauce vierge,which would have been even better if the tomatoes weren’t so wan. And in Bruno’s braised veal cheek with a ragout of ceps, it was the marigold, another vivid Mediterranean touch–Nomicos is from Marseille–in the sauce that brightened this composition and made it personal. Ultimately, Nomicos’s cooking, whether here or at his own restaurant, is often so choir-boy winsome that I’ve occasionally found myself wondering what he’d cook if he suddenly jumped the gastronomic rails. That’s not going to happen at Le Frank–this restaurant is all about shrewd gastronomic branding, a conceit that’s more Louis Vuitton’s than Nomicos’s–but someday I hope to find out. In the meantime, however, I’ll happily go to any address where Nomicos is cooking and enjoy his craft, because there’s no logical reason to complain about a cook as solidly talented as he is.

Desserts–a sort of post-modern riff on baba au rhum and a clever lemon tart with meringue drops–were beautifully made, too, and if the service still needs some fine tuning, Le Frank is a delightful restaurant and a great night out if you decide to dine here after visiting the museum on Friday, when the museum stays open until 11pm. Note that they serve a light lunch menu and tea-time menu at the restaurant outside of dinner hours, and that it’s simple but very appealing, too.

8 Avenue du Mahatma Gandhi, 16th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-58-44-25-70. Metro: Les Sablons. www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr , Open Wednesday to Sunday from noon to 7pm. Dinner by reservation only Wednesday to Saturday. Average lunch 35 Euros, Average dinner 70 Euros.

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The LiLi Restaurant at the just-opened Hotel Peninsula Paris is an important restaurant beyond the fact it serves some seriously good Cantonese cooking. It’s not much discussed but consider that food is potentially a major instrument of any country’s economic, cultural or diplomatic power. In these terms French cuisine continues to have a glorious international radiance beyond the economic punching weight of France, and one of the most fascinating things to observe at the dawn of this still new century is the accelerating ascendency of Asian cooking. Oh, to be sure, many  Westerners grew up with a vague knowledge of ‘Chinese’ and ‘Japanese’ food, but the popularity of Asian kitchens has now translated to a momentum which means that lemongrass, galangal and other stapes are available at most French supermarkets. And as an Asian food loving American who’s lived in France for a longtime, I think this is wonderful. From my point of view, the growing influence of Asia on what we eat in Paris is welcome, too, and I rejoice at the way that ‘Asian’ food is now being taken seriously rather than hived off as an occasional inexpensive ethnic pleasure as was the case for so many years in France.

To a very great degree, this is a reflection of Asia’s burgeoning economic clout, but on the other hand, you can’t force people to eat food they don’t want. So it’s apparent Parisians, and visitors to Paris, love Asian food in all of its glory, which is why the offer in the French capital is finally leap-frogging the quaintly qualifying ethnic label. A major reason for this is the arrival of Asia’s great hotel chains, which are anointing travel to France for Asia’s new rich and other non-Western travelers for a new century, the 21st century one, with a fresh layer of luxury hotels that are rebooting what luxury means. To wit, if many affluent Asians admire French style and aesthetics, they don’t particularly want to pretend that they’re European aristocrats invited to the party for the price of a bedroom anymore. The faux aristocrat experience worked when the new money was American and South American, but it’s guttering out now as Chinese tourists become the most courted and perplexing new clientele of the French capital. 

And so the recent rush of Asian branded luxury hotel chains into Paris, the latest being the 200 room Hotel Peninsula Paris. For its first European hotel, Hong Kong’s legendary hotel chain pulled out all the stops with near;y $600 million renovation of the former Majestic Hotel, where George Gershwin wrote “An American in Paris” in 1928 and the peace treaty that ended the Vietnam War was signed by Henry Kissinger in 1973. It’s a perfect expression of how the balance of power is shifting between east and west, too, since the mother hotel, the Peninsula Hong Kong, opened in 1928 when Hong Kong was still a British colony and was meant to be “the finest hotel east of Suez,’ in the parlance of the now vanished British Empire.

The designers of the new Peninsula Paris know, however, that everyone loves the implicitly opiate “In the Mood for Love” glamour that Hong Kong in the twenties represents and so this became the decorative theme of LiLi, the hotel’s headliner Cantonese table. To be sure, the decor is also informed by Chinese opera, but the atmosphere is low-lit, sensual and studiously louche, which makes it very alluring. During the summer, the restaurant also serves under the glass canopy  of the adjacent terrace overlooking the Avenue Kleber, too.

The menu here is an extravagant but carefully edited program of temptations that debuts with dim sum, including the juicy Shanghai style soup dumplings below and also other more delicate and tantalizing versions of the genre, including the lobster-stuffed caviar-dressed single dim-sum that was so good I ate it in one excited bite before even thinking to pick up my camera.

We followed the dim-sum with a rotisseried Spanish pluma (pork) and some duck, which was served with sautéed noodles, and then took the waiter’s advice and ordered the chef’s specialty, steamed turbot with red-pepper sauce that was served with some of the best fried rice I’ve ever had. Like all of the food at Lili, this simple dish was beautifully made and made even more luxurious by the use of finest quality European produce. Under some circumstances, European produce might actually undercut the authenticity of a Chinese dish by being too delicate and refined, but in the context of Cantonese cooking, which is so subtle and delicate, it’s a perfect marriage.

The only relative oddity in this suite of dish was the asparagus garnish with the fish, but I suspect it was there for color as much as for taste, the out-of-season quality of the vegetable notwithstanding. The French sommelier, who most recently worked in Melbourne, suggested a Mersault to accompany this meal, and it was a suave and elegant choice with this palate of flavors. His input was also welcome, because the wine list is somewhat confusingly organized according to Chinese characters conveying a specific spectrum of taste, which means a lot of flipping back and forth between different sections to compare and contrast possible wines.

Since the mango pudding that’s chef Chi Keung Tang’s specialty wasn’t available the night I visited, we finished our pleasant and very leisurely meal with some crispy toffee-filled sesame rice balls, a pleasant conclusion to a very good meal. I suspect this elegant restaurant is going to be a major hit of this year’s rentree in Paris.

LiLi Restaurant, Hotel Peninsula Paris, 19 Avenue Kléber, 16th Arrondisssement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-58-12-28-88. Metro: Victor Hugo or Etoile. Open daily for dinner only. Average 100 Euros. www.paris.peninsula.com 

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@ Adrien Durand

As a child of suburbia, I love cities with a passion that goes back to my earliest memories of trips into New York City from our safe and pretty but hopelessly dull nest in suburban Connecticut. I was hugely envious of cousins who were growing up in Manhattan, and once, on the way back to the woods from a Sunday visit to them in the big metropolis, I infuriated my father by suggesting that they were really the lucky ones to live in New York.

“New York is a terrible place to raise children,” he said as an edict, and I squirmed in the back seat and asked him why if this was true my aunt and uncle had decided to bring up my cousins there. “The city is dirty, crowded, unsafe and noisy, and it’s filled with all sorts of strange people,” he said, which suddenly crystalized all of the reasons I loved it so much. Then he added, “You’re too young to understand why it’s so awful anyway.” I don’t remember what I said next, but I really got his goat. “That’s enough of that, young man! The subject is closed. New York is filled with oddballs and perverts.” Well, that did it. I made up my eight-year-old mind on the spot to move there as soon as I possibly could, which I did immediately after graduating from college in even more woesomely bucolic and wholesome Amherst, Massachusetts. And through stints in New York, London, and Paris, with long spells in Prague, Rome, Boston and other cities, I’ve never looked back on my urban ardor.

Instead, I’ve become a permanent student of cities, observing them, trying to understand and decipher them, and delighting in their differences. It’s so innate to me that I rarely even notice it anymore, but the other night when I went to meet a friend for dinner at Monsieur Bleu, the stunningly beautiful new restaurant in the Palais de Tokyo, I found myself meditating on exactly why this restaurant is suddenly so exciting to Parisians this Spring while I waited for my friend to show up, and I didn’t have to think very long. As surely as they require supplies of clean water and electricity, along with police forces, street cleaners, and green spaces, all great cities need a regularly renewed wick of glamour to sustain their own myths. And during a difficult spring in Paris, what with the wretched weather, the limping economy, the strident public argument over gay marriage, and the woeful state of French politics, this restaurant comes along as a big votive candle placed on the altar of Parisian elegance, Parisian chic.

@Adrien Dirand 

With a truly brilliant design by architect Joseph Dirand, this is not only the most beautiful restaurant to have opened in Paris for a very longtime, but the first one in ages that appeals to all of the different tribes of style-setters who make Paris Paris. To wit, you’ll see beautifully groomed as almost only French women can be middle-aged press attaches having dinner with their luxury-brand manager husbands, bien sur, but you’ll also see scruffy social media czars who usually hang out in the 10th arrondissement, hen parties from Neuilly with an alphabet of head-spinningly expensive designer hand bags, film-makers, architects, well, a whole panoply of creative Parisians who are sort of surprised but mostly delighted to be finding themselves in the same room.

As someone who is still surprised that he was once regularly let in to Studio 54 in New York City (I mean, come on, I must been the only person on the dance floor in penny loafers–we’re talking dork with a big D), it’s amazing how often restaurant and club owners forget that the best way to light up the night is with go-for-broke off-the-wall social casting. To wit, there’s nothing duller than eating a meal in a room full of people who are just like you, so for the fashionable restaurant Monsieur Bleu aspires to become–it’s white-hot now, but will this last#8211;someone with a genuis-level understanding of Parisian sociology has to become the master mixologist.

For now at least, it’s that trendy new place in Paris people very often ask me to recommend. Or a restaurant which is every bit as much about design, atmosphere and people-watching as it about the food, which is just fine, if rather expensive. Young chef Benjamin Masson, a shrewd and solid Breton, came from Petrus, the luxury brasserie in the 17th, and so had ample experience in terms of cooking for a crowd like this one. The menu’s sort of fascinating, too, since it’s such a singular snap shot of what Parisians like to eat right now, in 2013, when they let their hair down.

They’re a few predictable surprises, like the box of modish American comfort foods–bacon cheeseburger, fried chicken sandwich, lobster roll (written in English), and a feint or four at the continuing popularity of westernized Asian dishes (turbot in a teriyaki jus) and Italian cooking in Paris. But what I liked best is the good Gallic grub–a Parmentier of Ospital boudin noir, steak tartare, frogs’ legs with garlic and parsley, and a sublime calf’s liver with a sauce of pan juices elongated with a bit of pomegranate juice (gotta get those anti-oxidants into the act somewhere).

Sorry, I didn’t do any photos of the food. My iPhone was almost out of juice that night, and beyond that, the lighting in this restaurant is so golden-glow perfect that my fumble-fingered attempts at photography probably wouldn’t have looked like much. Instead, I just enjoyed the charming company of my friend Karen and a simple if very pleasant meal. Oh, to be sure, I’d have liked a little more foie gras in my warm salad of baby new potatoes with a soft boiled eggg, and her dressed crab with coriander, beet roots and wasabi was timid. But my roast chicken with morels was a succulent French bird, and her calf’s liver came rare as ordered with silky potato puree. The caramel sundae with caramelized pecans hazelnuts propelled me back to being the exasperating boy I was when I irked my erroneously well-intentioned father by challenging his decision that we should live in the suburbs, and Karen kvelled over a slice of Rachel’s cheese cake.

Since I hadn’t intended to write about this meal, I had to call the press officer for pictures the next day. And when they came, I understood exactly why I’d love these rooms so much. Joseph Dirand has sure-footedly reprised the interrupted glamour of the late art deco, early art modern Palais de Toyko by making it modern, warmer and comfortable. And in doing so, he leapt over some seventy-five years or longer during which almost anything decorative in interior design or architecture was disparaged. With their Lalique (original) inserts, green marble, and brass ocean-liner lanterns, these dining rooms are a sight for sore eyes and a real balm for anyone who’s hoping that this still cutting-its-teeth new century might see a modern revival of the Gallic genuis for sensuality in interior design.

My priority when I go out after-hours is seriously good food, but this restaurant is so alluring that if the weather, or rather, when the weather changes this summer, I look forward to organizing a mid-summer’s night party with a bunch of friends on the terrace in front of the restaurant and enjoying one of the best views of the Eiffel Tower in Paris (next time round, I’ll go for the tuna tartare and sea bream with artichokes, too, come to think of).

@Adrien Durand

Monsieur Bleu, 20 Avenue du Président Wilson, 16th, Tel. 01-47-20-90-47. Metro: Alma-Marceau. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Average a la carte 65 Euros. www.monsieurbleu.com 

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Often there’s no faster route to high spirits than a sudden surge of spontaneity and a good dose of extravagance (deeply considered penuriousness somehow just never seems to work). So on a gloomy Saturday morning, Bruno and I set out on a gastronomic expedition that I was certain would raise our weather-dampened spirits. We were heading to the new butcher shop that Hugo Desnoyer had opened in such a remote and very quiet corner of the remote and very quiet 16th arrondissement that it barely seemed like Paris when we got there.

Or at least the Paris I know, but then everyone inhabits the same city differently. Almost from the moment I arrived here in 1986, I developed an indifference shading to aversion to the 8th and 16th arrondissements, which have always struck me, with the exception of certain small neighborhoods, as epitomizing a certain bourgeois smugness. And since none of my friends live in this part of the city and most of them feel the same way that I do, I very rarely find myself in these western arrondissements. Still, there’s some handsome architecture deep in the 16th, and it’s also very green. And at this time of year, rain-filled lilacs are tumbling over wrought iron fences, and you catch a glimpse of an occasional bank of peonies on a private garden here or there. (Oh, how lovely it would be to have a private garden in the city! But failing that, I’m awfully glad to have the Jardins de Luxembourg).

In any event, Monsieur Desnoyer’s new butcher shop turned out to be neat as a pin, and the staff just as polite and helpful as they are at Tiffany’s—if you find other similarities between these two businesses, you’re not wrong either. But our destination was the solid butcher block table d’hotes on a raised platform in a corner of the this immaculate white space. What we’d decided, you see, was to take ourselves out for a carnivore’s feast, something Desnoyer only previously offered in a do-it-yourself version.

So we settled in at the table, and decided to share the faux-filet for two with a very good bottle of Haute Cotes de Beaune. No sooner than we’d ordered than the handsome and courtly Monsieur Desnoyer arrived with a complimentary plate of charcuterie, not because he knows me from a hole in the ground, but rather because with the opening of this new address, the butcher’s shop where he began his career as an apprentice many years ago and is now the boss, he’s celebrating his good fortune and hard work by sharing. Not only was it a generous and charming gesture, but it reminded me of why he’s my favorite Paris butcher. In the suddenly testosterone jumped up big bad ego world of star butchers in Paris, Desnoyer is the quiet man who gets on with his craft and who’s real pleasure is in selling people the very best meat he can possibly find.

There were three other people sitting at the table, and if we were reciprocally polite, no conversation with our neighbors occurred until a kindly and very familiar looking man and an Asian friend sat down at the table, and I racked my brains trying to figure out why I knew him. When our meat arrived and we grinned wolfishly, he wished us a “Bon appetit!,” and we fell into conversation. He told us he owned a a little restaurant on the Left Bank, a steakhouse, and I suddenly recognized William Bernet, the owner of the wonderful Le Severo in the rue des Plantes. Mais bien sur! He’d come along for lunch to support his star supplier, and because these two gents are really good friends beyond anything having to do with commerce. So then he ordered a really good bottle of Burgundy, and insisted we try it, and the table suddenly became very jolly as a previously shy crew recognized one another as lovers of la bonne chère (and chaire).

Just as our meat arrived–a sublime and perfectly cooked piece of Limousin beef so big we took half of it home and ate it for the next three days (here, parsimony is much advised as the basis for real delectation), the brilliant and voluptuous Valerie Solit arrived for lunch. Perched on six inch heels, wearing a turban and a sexy but demure A-line coat dress the likes of which I surely hadn’t seen since some long distant Easter Sunday, Solit, with her sapphire eyes, galvanized the shop. A charming lady, she’s a press attache, and among her clients are the Federation Francaise de Boucherie, so of course she was coming by Hugo Desnoyer’s new shop for Saturday lunch and to see how her chou-chou was getting on. I didn’t dare photograph her, by the way–I just don’t see myself brandishing my iPhone, which is all I had with me that day, at such a lovely lady, but there’s always Google for the curious.

William Bernet nicely offered us a bit more of his wine, which we refused (uniquely out of politeness, since it was superb), and an atmosphere of great conviviality blossomed during what had unexpectedly started to feel like some sort of primal tribal feast. I was delighted by the only element of our meal that wasn’t animal derived–a copy-this-idea medley of tiny new potatoes and radishes sauteed in salt butter, but by the time we’d eaten half of our steak, it didn’t even occur to me to wonder if there was a dessert option on the brief table d’hotes menu.

During lunch, we’d discussed what we’d agreed would be our v. reasonable butcher’s order. It was, we decided, time to stop being so open-handed everytime we went shopping together for food and wine, we really needed to start saving more money, and after such a good lunch, it would surely be easier to be more reasonable. So we joined the polite but wide-eyed line of customers waiting to be served. Staring into the cases at Desnoyer, one’s pulse really does quicken, too, which is why our very recent self-exortions promptly derailed the moment a polite young butcher in a pressed white jacket started serving us. So we’d have a veal chop, and some of that goreous jambon a l’os (ham on the bone), and a slice of the pistachio-studded veal terrine, which I just can’t resist, and some of the head cheese Bruno likes. Oh, and also that nice little rack of lamb, and the pork loins look good, too, and finally another faux filet to put in in the freezer.

Watching the butcher trim the meat that needed it (before he weighed it, thank you), and then wrap it–first in waxed white butcher’s paper, then in brown paper, before he tied it up with red string and wrote the name of the contents on the edge of the package in loopy black script, I was very happy, since the precision of these details communicated an ample but humble pride. And he also took the time to offer a warm, low-rolling set of suggestions as to how the morsels we were buying might best be cooked. So not only had I just eaten a wonderful lunch, and not only did I know I’d be eating very well again for a few weeks to come, but I so admired the art and grace with which these butchers practiced their craft. Of course we left after paying a big thumping bill, but that’s okay, because we actually don’t eat very much meat anymore, and besides that, the only logo sweat shirt I think I’d ever be comfortable wearing would probably say: Carpe Diem.

Boucherie Hugo Desnoyer Table d’Hotes, 28 rue du Docteur-Blanche, 16h, Tel. 01-46-47-83-00. Metro; Jasmin or Ranelagh. Average a la carte 50 Euros. Lunch only. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.hugodesnoyer.com Reservations essential.

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“No conversational subject warns the world that you’re a bore faster than the weather,” my perspicacious paternal grandmother once cautioned, and she was right, of course. So let me fleetingly mention that the weather in Paris this summer has been just awful, since you need this back story to understand why I enjoyed dinner in the gardens of the Saint James Club in the plummy 16th arrondissement so much the other night.

Urban dining al fresco, you see, is one of the grand Gallic pleasures of a Parisian summer. Not only is it the height of corny romance–and no harm done for it, either–but being seated outside on a Parisian sidewalk, or even better in a private garden, allows you to study and savor the city and its inhabitants in a way that you just can’t do when you’re in motion. Before I moved to Paris, I had little experience of this particular summertime pleasure, since the cities I’d lived in previously–Boston, New York and London, just never embraced the cult of fresh-air gastronomy the way that Paris has. That being said, the regrettable little fly-in-the-ointment about outdoor dining establishments in Paris is that they often serve expensive and rather mediocre food, something they rightly calculate they can get away with when the mercury rises and everyone wants to sit outside and enjoy a breeze.

All of this rattled around in the back of my mind when my friend Corinne suggested dinner at the Saint James Club, an elegant semi-public semi-private club cum hotel in the 16th arrondissement. Last winter, the hotel was much in the French press after a visually bubbly makeover by a Franco-American decorator named Bambi Sloan. Now, apparently, a new chef, Virginie Basselot, had left a previous post at the Bristol working with Eric Frechon to take over the kitchen here. One or two early reviews of her cooking were so harsh as to be not entirely credible, but still…this place wouldn’t be cheap, and what if the thumbs-down reviewers weren’t all wrong So I fretted, because they’re few things in the world that make me more violently despondent than a bad expensive meal.

On the other hand, I hadn’t seen Corinne for a while, and when I checked the weather forecast, the day she’d suggested was forecast to be hot and sunny. So I threw my hat in the ring, I mean after all, how bad could the meal actually be?

Arriving, the Saint James Club was impressive and a tiny bit intimidating, but after coming through the front door, I was surprised by a warm greeting from an attendant, who immediately escorted me to the garden terrace behind the limestone mansion where my friend was waiting. Along the way, I made a note that this place has one of the best looking hotel bars I’ve ever seen in Paris.

The garden terrace was full, with people having drinks at white wrought iron tables, and three large hot-air-balloon-like pavillions, a reference to the fact that this address was the site of Paris’s first aerodrome, and the place from which hot-air balloons, known as Montgolfières in French, first lifted, or drifted, off. On a warm night, gentle gusts of linden-flower perfume from trees in this very green corner of Paris seemed to have dopped the well-dressed crowd into a relaxed good humor, and seated with Corinne, we sipped Champagne and eyeballed the appealing, if–as I expected, rather fearsomely priced menu. And yet, it was a beautiful night, and the occasional bout of extravagance is vitally tonic, so I decided not to fret the prices, and just have what I hoped would be a good meal.

Corinne started with a poignantly sincere and very generously served dish of fresh peas in a velvety and bright green pea broth with a flan of onions and a garnish of fine briefly sauteed ribbons of Black Forest ham, which was delicious, while I was warned off of my first choice–the poached egg and white asparagus in arugula juice, by a snatch of conversation from a neighboring table–the asparagus came chopped up in a timidly flavored green soup with an over-cooked egg, or so I heard, and went with the tartare of wild sea bass with wasabi root and herb crumpets instead. I only order any kind of tartare (raw meat or fish) in an establishment I trust, so this turned out to be a very well-rewarded act of faith–microplaned wasabi root underlined just how impeccably fresh this fish was and the warm crumpets were homemade and redolent of chives and thyme.

The service was absolutely delightful, too–prompt and very charming, and so we were in fine fettle when our main courses arrived. Corinne had an exquisitely beautiful chunk of snowy white cod on a fine confetti of green vegetables glossed with lemon-balm butter, a truly ideal dish for a blistering night, while I chose the rack of lamb. The lamb was pleasant enough–a well-trimmed little rack of lamb, but the accompanying lime-zest spiked hummus was underwhelming. The dish that I’d come back here to eat this summer–and I would return, is definitely the cod.

Working our way through an excellent bottle of Saint Aubin, one of the last reasonably priced Burgundies, we both decided on the stewed raspberries and rhubarb with fontainbleau cheese–a sublimely airy whipped cream like cheese with a nice lactic bite, a perfect dessert on such a warm night. And then we dawdled over coffee, which was served with a nice selection of little nibbles, before Corinne finally glanced at her wrist and saw that we needed to make a move if we were going to get the last Metro. The bill Oh well, it was about 130 Euros a piece, but this interlude was still less expensive and perhaps vastly more refreshing than an overnight trip to Barcelona might have been, as the Cinderella factor of finding ourselves waiting for the train in a hot tunnel emphasized. Sometimes, in fact, there really is no place like home, especially when there’s such a talented and gentle-spirited cook in the kitchen and you can linger in a beautiful garden for a suite of midsummer hours.

Saint James Club, 43 avenue Bugeaud, 16th arrondissement, Tel. 01-44-05-81-81. Metro: Porte Dauphine. Open to non-members only for dinner from Monday to Saturday and for Sunday brunch. Reservations required. Average a la carte dinner 100 Euros.

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Her father once owned a chain of shoe stores in Brooklyn, and the first time I met him, I was wearing a pair of loafers with a hole under my big toe in one sole. As an editorial assistant in New York City, I lived meagerly from pay check to pay check, and I was waiting for my next check to take my one pair of good shoes to the cobbler. Anyway, I trekked out to Brooklyn on a snowy day for a fantastic dinner and a night of brilliant conversation with my pal and her book-and-opera loving parents. Mrs. Schindelheim made the best pot roast I’ve ever eaten, with a superb homemade chicken-and-vegetable soup to start.

A few days later, I got home from work and was vexed to find a note in my mailbox indicating that I had a package to pick up. My post office on the Upper West Side had a beautiful W.P.A. facade, but permanent lines and some of the crankiest clerks I’ve ever met, so I dreaded this errand and just hoped it wouldn’t be an invitation to a new discotheque sent in a long paper roller, a really bad idea that prevailed in New York in the early eighties. Instead, I was surprised by a neatly wrapped kraft paper carton with no return address. When I tored it open at home, I found a pair of fleece-lined bedroom slippers and a sturdy pair of ankle-high leather boots, with a card that said, “Dear Alexander, Please keep your feet dry this winter, and get your shoes fixed! Love, Mr. and Mrs. Schindelheim.”

So I would have racked my brains to find the right place for these lovely people, but as it turns out, I didn’t have to. Just a week earlier, I’d been to Antoine on the banks of the Seine not far from the Place de l’Alma and just across the river from the Eiffel Tower a week earlier on a Sunday night and had some terrific seafood. So I gave my pal the address and told her send her parents my best regards. An hour later, she called back and said that they’d be very disappointed if I didn’t join them for this meal.

Well of course I would. So I was sitting there enjoying a glass of white wine, thinking about how much better this restaurant is now than it was when it was a pretentious and very expensive place called Le Port de l’Alma, and watching the action in the busy kitchen through a large pane window giving on to the dining room when they arrived. Both of the Schindelheim parents were wearing hats like they always did, but I got a twinge when I saw that he was walking with a cane.

After a round of hugs, they settled in and cooed over the view of the Eiffel Tower across the river. “I hope the view doesn’t mean we’re paying extra,” Mr. Schindelheim wise-cracked, and I told him that if Antoine isn’t cheap, it’s worth it. “And in any event, good fish in Paris is a luxury,” I added, setting up Mr. Schindelheim, who patted his daughter, an eye surgeon with a German husband, on the hand, and said “Sorry, darling, but we’re going to spend if all before we go,” he chuckled. “See Alexander, the cane doesn’t mean a thing. I’m still sharp as a tack.”

So we drank Champagne–my treat, and as I knew she would, Mrs. Schindelheim remembered how her daughter and me had first met. Briefly, I was working as a temp for a secretary in the order department of the International Paper company who had been mugged when she went to the ladies room via a pantyhose sale at Lord & Taylor, and my friend, then a would-be painter with a fierce punk look, had been dispatched by the same agency to do some similarly mind-numbing job for a woman on maternity leave. “She told us that she’d met someone very nice at work when she came home for Sunday dinner,” Mrs. Schindelheim said, and her husband horned in, “She’s always been a bad judge of character.” I translated the menu for them, and all three of them remarked on how friendly and attentive the young servers were after we’d ordered.

“No wonder you’ve filled out so much, eating good food like this everyday,” Mr. Schindelheim said after he tasted his fish soup, which I’d had the week before–a rich, smooth, leaf-brown potion spiked with saffron and tasting deeply of rock fish. I liked my dainty beignets of langoustines and sole wrapped in feather-light golden leaves of pastry and served with an imaginative mango dipping sauce, and my friend loved her tartare of sea bream with lemon-verbena oil–“This fish is really, really fresh,” she said, surprised. “I was afraid that because it’s Sunday….” she trailed off.

Aside from the impeccable freshness of the fish, the great service, and the view, what I like most about this place is that the kitchen pratices an intelligent contemporary French seafood cookery that privileges the natural taste of their produce without overwhelming it, a perfect example being my thick and impeccably cooked chunk of sea bass from Saint Gilles Croix de Vie in the Vendee. It had been sealed inside of a glass casserole with pastry and organic baby vegetables with a little butter and a pinch of herbes de Provence and sea salt, and it was excellent. The obvious idea of this cooking method was the fish would create its own sauce, and it did.

“This is delicious,” Mrs. Schindelheim said of the sea bass grilled over sticks of wild fennel and served with an unctuous puree of ratte potatoes from Le Touquet that she shared with her husband. “I was afraid it would be all fancy and French, but it’s so light and subtle.” My friend liked her steamed sole with a sauce corail and squid’s ink gnocci, too. All of us finished up with excellent cheeses from Quartrehomme, and when Mr. Schindelheim told the waiter that the 36 month old Comte was one of the best things he’d ever eaten, he came back with another slice on a side dish. Mr. Schindelheim ate it, too, inspite of his wife’s raised eyebrows.

“So, an eye surgeon and a food writer–you kids ended up doing okay,” Mr. Schindelheim said while I walked them over to the Place de l’Alma to get a cab. “Of course, some grandchildren would have been nice, and I’m still waiting for Alexander to write a novel, but that was a very good dinner.”

Antoine, 10 Avenue de New York, 16th, Tel. 01-40-70-19-28. Metro: Alma Marceau. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Average 75 Euros.

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