Le P’Tit Canon is perfect and very happy example of a good uncomplicated Parisian neighbourhood bistro. It’s a lively friendly well-run place with a pretty Belle Epoque style dining room with a big bar up front where you can stop by on your own for a glass of wine or a quick bite. In less of a rush, you come for a sit-down meal of well-prepared traditional bistros dishes that deliver a solid flush of French comfort-food satisfaction. Prices are reasonable, and the wine list is interesting, from the well-chosen and accessible house wines to better bottles that carry a much gentler markup over retail prices than is usually found in Paris restaurants.

You don’t come here for cutting-edge cooking, but rather for good solid Gallic grub prepared with high quality ingredients. Still, the menu winks at what Parisians like to eat these days, since there are several meal-sized salads on the menu, along with a cheese burger.

So when Bruno came into my office and asked me if I had an idea of somewhere festive and not too expensive where we could good with his mother, visiting from Valenciennes; his sister up from her home in Florence; her son, who’s studying film in Rome, and his Venezuelan girlfriend, also living in Rome and studying medical technology, I immediately suggested Le P’tit Canon. I knew the menu here would please his cassoulet-loving mother and also work for his vegetarian sister, and that the salads would make the students happy. As for me, a good steak tartare was already on my radar, and Bruno loves confit de canard, which is rarely found on Paris menus very often anymore.

“This is just like those Paris bistros you see in the movies,” said Matthias, Bruno’s Italian nephew when we arrived here, a hungry multi-generational group speaking four different languages at the table. “Tres charmant, est bien Parisien,” pronounced Bruno’s mother, who hadn’t been to Paris for several years. So we translated the menu aloud for those who don’t speak French, and everyone found something to make them happy.

The Italians were craving foie gras, which is made in house and served with raisin-bread toast and onion compote or as part of a salade folly (crazy salad)–green beans and mushrooms garnished with foie gras. Bruno couldn’t resist the marinated herring, I love their terrine de campagne and Madame Midavaine fancied some escargots, and his sister opted for the oeufs mayonnaise. Since everyone preferred white wine, and I suspect we’d likely get through several bottles, I ordered a fresh easy-drinking Viognier from the Gard at a very easy-on-the-wallet 21 Euros, and it was very pleasant.

Everyone ordered different main courses from those I predicted, since there were three andouillettes with mustard sauce and frites, a cassoulet, a steak tartare and a salad garnished with goat cheese and salmon. I haven’t gone near an andouillette, a rather pungent tripe sausage, since a first rather unhappy encounter with one the first week I was living in Paris, but they made Bruno, his mother and his nephew happy. Bruno’s sister was quite content with her salad, and his nephew’s beautiful girlfriend loved her steak tartare. For my part, a good ruddy cassoulet with two types of sausage, a generous piece of confit de canard and a generous portion of white beans in a soupy tomato sauce was exactly what I wanted at the end of a busy day when I’d had to walk all over Paris–transit strike oblige, buying last-minute Christmas presents.

At dinner we had an interesting conversation that spun on a question ventured by Bruno’s sister: “What are the two greatest cuisines in the world#8221; she asked us. The Italians all predictably affirmed that the Italian kitchen would be one of them, while Bruno’s mother announced the grandeur of Gallic gastronomy. For my part, I insisted on six: French, Italian, Indian, Moroccan, Chinese and Mexican. And you?

Dessert was a stretch for me, but the Italians couldn’t resist the baba au rhum and a nicely made creme caramel. An inevitable question was directed my way during the sweet stretch of our meal: “Alec, what were your best meals of 2019#8221; Here, in no particular order, are the tables I most enjoyed during the last twelve months

**La Scene, Paris

**KGBbis, Paris

**Pavyllon, Paris

**Maison par Sota Atsumi, Paris

**Shabour, Paris

**Substance, Paris

**Racine, Reims

**A Pignata, Levie, Corsica

**Frevo, New York City

**Stubborn Seed, Miami Beach, Florida

**Ixi’Im, Chochola, Yucatan, Mexico

Our joyous meal concluded with little snifters of Chartreuse, a holiday gift from the charming proprietor of this eminently amiable restaurant, and, as it turned, out exactly what we needed to ended up watching the first two episodes of the new season of “The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel” when we got home. So Le P’tit Canon ably hit its target, and a very good time was had by all.

N.B. This is a great address for a late lunch or dinner, since serving hours are 10.30am to 3.30pm and 6.30pm to 2am.

36 rue Legendre, 17th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-47-63-63-87, Metro: Villiers or Pont Cardinet, Open Monday to Friday for lunch and dinner, Saturday dinner only, closed Sunday. Average 35 Euros. www.leptitcanonparis.fr

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When a rooster crows, the French transcribe the sound it makes as cocorico. Even after living in France for over thirty years, I’ve never quite been able to retool my SONY Walkman ruined Connecticut-born ears to hear that. Mais peu importe, (But that’s of no importance, or, in more current terms, whatever).  Cocorico or cockle doodle do, the crowing bird that’s making Parisians very happy right now is Rooster, chef Frédéric Duca’s charming new bistro in a quiet corner of the 17th Arrondissement.

Duca’s just returned to Paris after a very successful four-year stint as chef at Racines New York, the Lower Manhattan branch of the Parisian bistrot a vins originally founded by Pierre Jancou. Before that he won a Michelin star in 2013 as chef at L’Instant d’Or, a now gone restaurant on the Avenue George V in Paris, began his career cooking with Gérald Passédat at Le Petit Nice in Marseille and then worked as sous-chef at Le Taillevent in Paris under the late Michel de Burgo.

“New York City was fantastic,” said the chef when we chatted before dinner at his good-looking new restaurant, think a sort of a hybrid hipster-inflected Brooklyn-meets-Provence chic. To wit, an antique metal pharmacy cabinet displaying handmade ceramics from Aix-en-Provence and Brooklyn separates the bar from the main dining room.  Fifties retro wall lamps and Scandinavian modern chairs and tables give the space a funky flea-market edge, and the chef himself laid the handsome cream-colored Moroccan tile herringbone pattern floor (“It almost killed me,” says Duca).

“I loved the free-style approach to modern cooking in New York, where chefs draw inspiration from around the world, and this is what I brought back to Paris,” says Duca. “New Yorkers also like primal flavors, a taste they share with people from the south of France,” the Marseille born chef mused. “For better and worse, Paris is more refined. So at Rooster, I’m doing a personal mash on the three cities I’ve cooked in,” he explained.

This means a short menu that features three or four suggestions for entrees, mains and desserts as a way of showcasing Duca’s love of fresh produce and earthy tastes. A perfect example The veal and razor-shell clam tartare garnished with bergamot and grated smoked ricotta that Bruno had as a starter. There’s also a dish for two to share, a roasted shoulder lamb with its kidneys and artichokes on a bed of spelt in a cocotte.

Like so many of the dishes on Duca’s menu that night, my starter was subtly different in this chef’s execution and so a pleasure for anyone weary of the wan and expensive gastronomic mannerism that has come to characterize late-stage bistronomie (modern French bistro cooking) in Paris. In this very clever riff on a classic pissaladière, or southern French tart topped with sautéed onions, black olives and anchovies, Duca replaced bread dough with tart brise (shortcrust pastry) and garnished it with a perfectly cooked rouget (red mullet) filet and some mustard cress. These adds transformed a market snack into a dish that was brawny in a very Mediterranean way, but also surprising delicate and refined.

Probably because he’d been able to read my mind, Duca added a pasta to our meal, too–homemade agnolotti with a vivid stuffing of parsley, sage and button mushrooms, which was served al dente in a gentle but perfectly sharp Parmesan cream. What really made this dish special, though, were nearly transparent ribbons of Lardo di colonnata, which added the perfect amount of salt and texture.

Duca’s a terrific seafood cook and saucier, skills that were deliciously displayed by our mains. Seared scallops topped with a hazelnut viennoise (crushed hazelnuts and a bit of bread crumbs) was a brilliant idea, since the earthy sweetness of the nut flattered the iodine-tinged sweetness of the bivalves, which were framed by roasted Jerusalem artichokes–another tonal echo of the scallop, salsify chips and an umami-rich jus de viande. A beautifully cooked piece of yellow pollack–the fish’s fleshy was pearly even though the skin had been appealingly crisped, offered another riff on the terre-et-mer (earth-and-sea) yin and yang dishes Duca composes with such skill.

I’m sure the beef dish on the menu that night–filet with parsnips, carrots, pickled citrus and a jus de daube would have been excellent–I mean, how could anything with a jus de daube be bad?, but like the true Marseillais he is, Duca exhibits a profound love of fish and seafood.

Desserts were pleasant, too, including Menton lemon cream with meringue, anise-seed sables and olive oil sorbet and bay-leaf panna cotta with cider gelee and Granny Smith apple sorbet.

If this restaurant was in South Park Slope, it would be packed at both lunch and dinner, but because this Paris location straddles the bobo Batignolles and the more bourgeois eastern precincts of the 17th, the sociological shape of the clientele here is still a work in progress.

My hope for Duca is that word of mouth spreads among all of the lawyers and legal types who have left the Palais de Justice on the Ile de la Cite for Renzo Piano’s stunning new building in Les Batignolles and that his restaurant becomes one of their canteens. One way or another, the cocorico-scored-by-Spike-Lee cooking of a chef who still misses his daily bicycle commute over the Brooklyn Bridge will definitely find me in the crowd again soon.

137 rue Cardinet, 17th Arrondissement, Tel. 01-45-79-91-48, Bus 31, 66, 528 – Stop: Parc Martin Luther King. Open Monday to Friday for lunch and dinner. www.rooster-restaurant.com Lunch menus 26 Euros and 32 Euros. Average a la carte 60 Euros.

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Laetitia and chef Romain Brechignac @Lisa Klein Michel

A really excellent recent meal at Le Flaubert, which was originally called Le Bistrot d’a Cote when two-star Michelin chef Michel Rostang first opened it thirty years ago, got me to thinking about the impact of the internet on restaurant writing. To wit, the only reason I had this fine feed at a restaurant I’d once loved but hadn’t been to in over ten years is that some visiting friends from South Africa had been advised to eat there by a good hotel concierge. Otherwise, I am usually so caught up in the cycle of the new, new, new–Hello, SEO (search engine optimisation) that I very rarely find the time to go back to places I’ve enjoyed to see how they might be evolving, holding up, changing.

What this does, in effect, is penalize the careers of established chefs and well-run restaurants, since after the initial blaze of publicity when they open, how do they remain sought-after, talked about, and most of all profitable when the whole dining-out gig is so gamed towards the new To be sure, a great chef can win a solid following of regulars who fill his or her dining room day in and day out, but the ferocity of the new remains hard to overcome, since it’s become a given that novelty is the best driver of cyber clicks, because–it is hoped–they will translate into on-line advertising, assumed to be the last bandage of ever more seriously ailing print publishing.

It’s not that the New hasn’t always driven media, but rather how fierce this has become as we read more and more online, with the websites’ infinite need for fresh content, than we do in print.

As someone who ardently loves good food, my goal here isn’t to open the back of the cyber business models that drive the internet, but to simply observe that they are changing the way we eat in ways which often reward good public relations more than they do good cooking. When it comes to Le Flaubert, I still remember the flutter this place caused when it first opened, because it was so surprising in 1987 that a Michelin two-star chef would turn his hand to affordable everyday dining. But insofar as this idiom is concerned, Michel Rostang is every bit as much a father of “La Bistronomie,” or modern French bistro cooking, as chef Christian Constant and the band of young chefs he trained, notably Yves Camdeborde, Eric Frechon and Thierry Breton.

After the meal I had here the other night, I can also say that this table is not only better than ever but has become one of the finest bistros in Paris. So what lucky happenstance it was that delivered me to its door, and my thanks to my Capetonian friends for getting me back here. As soon as we stepped through the door, the atmosphere was terrific–the dining room had that wonderful winter fug generated by people who are eating and drinking well, and the hostess here, Laetitia, was delightful from the moment she brought us our menus with that sort of saucy, bemusedly wry social posturing that’s bistro service at its best. We ordered glasses of Condrieu, because who wouldn’t, and after they came to the table Laetitia followed with a slice of excellent homemade jambon persille (a Burgundian terrine of chunks of ham in parsley-brightened aspic).

The South Africans were as excited as baby seals to be in Paris again after a very longtime, and since neither of them speak French, I sherpa-ed them through the menu, which left them squirming in their seats with anticipation. And since even after many years as a Parisian, I could never become blasé about the city myself, we were an eager audience when our starters arrived.

Caroline’s mackerel poached in white wine was beautifully plated with pickled vegetables and poached spring onions with an iodine rich seaweed vinaigrette, while Hunter slipped into sort of a monastic meditative bliss as he ate his duck and foie gras pate en croute, which was encased first in buttery pastry and then in a shimmering garter of dark amber aspic–I forked in here, and it was in a mouthful everything that has always defined this restaurant, or a sort of exalted rusticity produced by applying steely haute-cuisine technique to bistro dishes. Much as I adore these friends, it was a struggle against a surge of animal avarice to allow my friends to taste my airy gnocchi a la Parisienne with roasted ceps and sweetbreads, since this was not only one of the best dishes I’ve eaten all year, it was ecstatically consoling on a cold, damp winter night. That said, I hate to think of how I might of reacted if either of them had asked for a second taste.

Our food was so soothing that it allowed us to unload our respective burdens–them, the corruption of the Zuma government, me–well, just guess, without denting our pleasure and move on to happier subjects of conversation, like the beach house that Hunter had designed for them on a pristine stretch of the Indian ocean in Mozambique, one of the most beautiful countries I’ve ever visited, or the intriguing way that Cape Town is slowly but surely recovering its essential DNA as a city once known as “The Tavern of the Seas.” To wit, they said that there’s more racial comity than ever there, and that it’s less and less self-conscious. Caroline asked me about “the handsome Macron” and all of us confessed that we didn’t have a clue as to what Bitcoin might be and couldn’t care less one way or another. We also chatted about the impact of the internet on our lives, the ways we love it, the ways we don’t, with Hunter expressing exasperation that anyone could become famous just for knowing how to grab our increasingly shattered attention spans in cyber space, as opposed to having some real talent.

For mains, Caroline ordered the roasted octopus with artichoke and onions, because, as she later admitted, she’d never eaten octopus before (“it’s odd, but delicious,” was here take on this tentacled treat), and I couldn’t resist the olive-oil poached cod on a bed of Paimpol beans and ceps. Both dishes were made with superb produce, impeccably cooked and deeply satisfying, which put them at a notable difference from a lot of the wearisomely chef ‘bistronomique’ I’ve been eating too often lately.

Hunter went with the daily special, seared scallops with parsnip puree and pickled cauliflower. “It’s rare to find fresh scallops in South Africa, and if you do, they’re no where near as good as these–so firm and such a nice gentle sweet taste,” he said in praise of these succulent marine morsels from Normandy.

As part of a losing, but hopefully not futile, battle not to become a client of a chain of stores called the Big & Tall Men’s Store, a plus-sized place  where I once worked as a college student for a few weeks one summer–my father insisted I get a job before I went away to my ‘real’ summer job as a waiter on Nantucket, because he didn’t want me “loafing around,” I don’t normally eat dessert. Still the South Africans insisted, so I told them about the first day on the job at the Big & Tall Men’s Store, the only store in a suburban Connecticut strip mall without a front door–the clients parked in back and came in through the back door, presumably because they were too embarrassed to be seen going into such a place, and I was astonished to discover box shorts the size of small circus tents and suits that would fit a redwood.

During the dull hours when there were no customers, I’d sit on a stool by the cash register reading, and then when the door bell rang, signaling the arrival of a client, I never knew what shape of misery I’d find when I looked up, often way up, or wide, often very wide. These men were hurried, furtive shoppers, because they were miserable being in the store and just wanted to get it over with in a hurry. I’d mostly leave them alone, since I knew they wanted as little interaction as possible, but occasionally I’d try to help, especially during the summer, when I’d ask them if they needed a bathing suit, too. Nine out of ten of them were hugely relieved by the suggestion. “Do you sell them#8221; “Yes” “In my size#8221; “Of course,” I’d say, and steer them away from the tropical prints and stripes to the solid colors.

My memory shared as a protest got me no where, though. “Well, you have thickened up a bit since we last saw you (note to self: never be coy about your weight), but that’s no reason not to have dessert with two dear friends,” said Caroline. So I ordered some honey ice cream with roasted prunes and raisins, because it sounded more healthy than anything else. Hunter went with the petits pots de creme au chocolat a l’ancienne (the world’s best chocolate custard) and Caroline, the poached pear with whipped cream and walnuts. And so there was a sweet ending for all of us to a wonderful reunion and an excellent meal.

Le Flaubert – Bistrot d’a Cote, 10 rue Gustave Flaubert, 17th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01- 42-67-05-81, Metro: Pereire, Wagram or Ternes. Open Tuesday to Friday for lunch and dinner. Saturday dinner only. Closed Sunday and Monday. Prix-fixe menus 45 Euros, 36 Euros, 32 Euros, Average a la carte 50 Euros. www.bistrotflaubert.com

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@Pierre Monetta

Papillon, chef Christophe Saintagne’s new bistro in the 17th Arrondissement, brings a bracing shot of hipster energy to a very bourgeois part of Paris. From its cobalt-blue facade to its friendly suspender-wearing waiters and market-driven Nordic inflected modern bistro menu, this relaxed, happy place with a decor of oak tables, parquet floors, and suspended lamps looks like a restaurant you could as easily find in Santa Monica or Sydney as western Paris. And that is a mostly good thing, since this Gaullist redoubt is long overdue for a good social, political and gastronomic shakeup.

Papillon also marks a high-profile change in the life of Saintagne, a talented and hard-working chef who most recently ran the kitchens of the Hotel Meurice under the auspices of Alain Ducasse. Suffice it to say, that Saintagne moved on after the decidedly Machiavellian machinery of the Michelin guide foreshadowed the demotion of this restaurant from three stars to two even before the 2016 Guide was released.

So just an aside here; from my point of view, it would considerably augment the credibility of Bibendum, i.e. Michelin,  if they posted their inspectors’ reports online after their annual guides have come out. This way any curious diner could read their assessment, like you can read my assessments of dozens and dozens of restaurants on this site, and come to their own conclusions. Not showing your cards when you’re in the business of food criticism rather smacks of antiquated king-making in my book. But then the high dudgeon of the guidebook company is notoriously well-known in both media circles and the food world: it may be the wick of their business, but they themselves do not take kindly to criticism.

@ Pierre Monetta

At Le Meurice, Saintagne was deputised to launch Ducasse’s new healthy haute cuisine for the 21st century, and I think he pulled off this very difficult task brilliantly, because health and ecology have not heretofore been among the main reasons people go to haute cuisine restaurants. Bon, for reasons we don’t currently know, Michelin didn’t agree, and since their ratings still have staggering commercial impact in terms of any restaurant’s bottom-line, the deer caught-in-the-headlights was Monsieur Saintagne, which struck me as very unfair, and this is why I went to dinner at this new restaurant with great expectations. Like Steve McQueen in the film that inspired the bistro’s name, Papillon, Saintagne had escaped from the island (McQueen escapes from Devil’s Island, the infamous penal colony off the coast of French Guiana), and I was eager to see what he’d do with his freedom.

Getting there wasn’t easy, because the successful promotion of this new table has completely overwhelmed their ability to do that simplest of tasks to keep the home fires burning–run a reservations book. I must have called a dozen times without ever reaching a live person, and finally, in desperation, I sent an email, which brought the guileless response that they’d been so overwhelmed that they’d stopped answering the phone(!). And yes, they were thinking that they might subscribe to an online reservations service like La Fourchette or some such to make it easier to book a table. I hope they do.

Anyway, we were a great quorum for a meal we’d all been looking forward to, two Franco-American couples who love great food, great wine, and each other. And the evening got off to a nice start when we ordered an excellent bottle of white Cheverny to kick off them meal from the smart and friendly sommelier, who was justifiably proud of his suspenders and his good list. So we scrutinised the short and rather pricey menu and ordered. And some time went by without bread or an amuse bouche, which prices at this level would have cued us to expect.

@Pierre Monetta

Well, Simon, Christian and Bruno loved their starters, the winter vegetable salad with bulgur in a light vinaigrette for the first pair, and marinated salmon with beets for Bruno. And me, well, I kept my mouth shut, since instincts gluttonous and wrong-footed landed me with a banging disappointment.

What was I thinking I’m not sure, but I do love oysters, and oysters Rockefeller and other warm or hot oyster preparations, so I bet my chips on expensive self-indulgence (these tiny bivalves cost twice what the other’s starters came in at) and lost. The oysters were overwhelmed by their tasteless crouton stuffing, and the big stone in the middle of the plate didn’t work for me as decor, because it called attention to the fact the oysters were so  small.

So I hoped for better from my main course and was rewarded by a plate of thinly sliced smoked-in-hay roasted  lamb shoulder that had the fragrance of a summer meadow if you’d drifted off for a nap after a picnic. It was perfectly rare and came with a charming garnish of toasted pine nuts, herbs and capers. The side dish of fregola in a Chinese tea cup of was overcooked and didn’t have much taste, but the meat was excellent, and this was the first dish of the evening where I found myself face-to-face with Saintagne’s formidable skills as a chef again, which made me very happy.

@Pierre Monetta

Oh, and the boys They ate Bigorre pork belly with a garnish of Utah beach oysters, a dish the waiter explained was Saintagne’s hommage to his Norman origins, and whiting on Melba toast spread with tapenade and garnishes of baby spinach and bitter salad. Good food. But everyone had the same reaction beyond the actual quality of the cooking, which was that the portions here are much too small relative to the lofty prices charged, and that this reads as a wilting lack of generosity.

Happily, the cheese course we got up from the table to select from the glass case in the little shop next door that’s part of the restaurant was generously served, and the fromages were excellent. They also came to the table with a bowl of incredibly fresh-and-flavorful-for this-time-of-the-year mesclun.

All told, we enjoyed our meal at Papillon, because Saintagne is a good chef and the service was so friendly and professional. I expect the food will be even better here in six month’s time, too. For this restaurant to succeed, however, they’ll need repeat visitors, and for this to happen, a prix-fixe menu will need to be offered at dinner (there are two set-price lunch menus) and portions will need to grow. As things now stand, the current rapport-qualite-prix (value for money) discourages the evolution of a crucial crowd of regulars in the evening. With these tweaks, however, I this pretty papillon (butterfly) could have a very long life indeed.

Papillon, 8 rue Meissonier, Paris, 17th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-56-79-81-88. Metro: Wagram. Open Monday-Friday for lunch and dinner. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Lunch menus: 28 Euros, 36 Euros. Average a la carte dinner 65 Euros.  www.papillonparis.fr

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Though Gare au Gorille is both a bad pun** and the title of a 1952 song by French musician Georges Brassens, what you really need to know is that it’s also the name of a charming and very good new bistro in the Batignolles district of the 17th Arrondissement in Paris. And that this engaging address comes with an impressive pedigree  which really delivers, since chef Marc Cordonnier was formerly Bertrand Grébaut’s sous-chef at Septime, where his business partner and good-natured maitre d’hotel Louis Langevin was sommelier and picked up the relaxed but gracious serving style created at that restaurant by Théo Pourriat. Finally, if you have any interest in dining here any time soon, it might be a good idea to take a pause and pick up the phone, since it’s very quickly become almost as popular was Septime itself. Be forewarned that they don’t answer during serving hours, which can make it even more of a vexing challenge to snag a table here, too..

Having persisted, I bagged a table and found myself walking up the rue de Rome on a rainy night to meet Bruno for dinner. Despite its grand name, this street parallels the broad, deep, stone-lined train cut that leads into the Gare Saint Lazare, and several times I stopped to watch the wonderful urban spectacle created by an arriving or departing train. Since every lit window in every train car framed a miniature portrait on someone on a journey, there was something winsomely fascinating about these metropolitan film strips, which also brought Eadweard Muybridge to mind. Many people seem to find this scenery a bit drab, but not me. Instead, I found myself envying the people who occupied a high apartment with a large artist’s studio window overlooking the tracks, since the promise of travel, the fact of travel has been such a life long passion of mine. With no train ticket in my pocket that night, I was, however, looking forward to a good meal, but found myself vaguely wondering if this popular new spot would be one of those places where I’d encounter a display of bored and sort of slatternly hauteur from the young staff for being fifteen minutes late.

Happily, nothing could have been further from the case. As soon as I stepped in the door to this warm rail-carriage-like room with white walls, a stone floor accented with black slate spades, suspension lamps with Edison bulbs and a couple white tabled tiles up front by the service bar at the head of the dining room, the welcome was warm and service was cheerful, informative and prompt. In fact it was some of the best service I’ve had in Paris in a long time and made me think yet again that a new generation of restaurant owners and their staffs have coined a terrific new style of Gallic hospitality that’s warm without being familiar, alert without being intrusive, consistently well-informed and charmingly good-humored. So maybe we can put out to pasture the dog tired idea of Parisians as being ill-tempered and off-handed once and for all. Since they’re not. These days, they’re most often lovely.

The dinner menu is constructed as a generous list of small plates, and then two more substantial meat entrees to be shared by two, and possibly garnished with pommes darphin, grated sauteed potatoes rather like a Swiss rosti but finer, and a butter-glazed vegetable plate. So we chose three small plates, and our meal began with a succulent composition of beef carpaccio, sea urchin tongues, pickled red onion, shaved cauliflower and mustard greens that looked like some kind of edible Christmas decoration and woke up to become something satisfying with the addition of a tiny pinch of requested sea salt. Next, one of the the best duck terrines I’ve had during all my years in Paris with a lush garnish of quince and garlic puree decorated with carrot coins. Rich, emollient and distantly redolent of the barnyard like any great terrine, this one was a homely Gallic triumph so good that we briefly considered ordering another portion.The arrival of a dish of coques (cockles) sauced with their own pimeton (smoked paprika) spiked juices and strewn with tiny chunks of chorizo and sliced shallots saw off that idea, because the succulent crustaceans were generously served and their taste profile tacted away from fine French farm food. As delicious cameos of modernity, tradition and cosmopolitan, this appealing trio beautifully summed up the range of the kitchen here, however. Refreshingly, Cordonnier, who trained at Alain Passard’s Arpege, is an experienced and adroit young chef who steers clear of the provocative style of his Top Chef (a French culinary television show that aspires to a king-making influence) anointed colleagues. Instead, his compass in the kitchen is the pleasure of his clients. Fancy that!

The aged Norman steak for two was a fine mineral rich slab of beef garnished with grilled shallots, and it was generous enough to tip us into a doggy-bag request (the leftovers became an excellent steak sandwich with a smear of Gold’s horseradish cream the next day). While we were eating, Bruno asked me a question that’s come over the transom a few times recently: “How do you chose which restaurants to review on your blog and which ones to mention on your Facebook page (HungryforParis,HungryforFrance) #8221; I explained that with dozens of restaurants opening in Paris every week, I review the ones I deem to be most important in longer format here, and mention other good ones on my Facebook page, which is more of a news feed.

So why did I chose Gare au Gorille The chef ‘s background was promising, the Batignolles neighborhood is emerging as a great new food destination in Paris, and I know that the world has an insatiable appetite for seriously well-prepared and fairly priced contemporary French bistro food. Gare au Gorille doesn’t pretend to be blazing new local food trends or making a statement, thank goodness, but instead aspires to feeding people well in a pleasant setting with very amiable and professional service.

In the interests of research and in deference to Bruno’s sweet tooth, we shared a slice of lemon tart garnished with miniature meringues and pomelo segments, and though it won’t find it’s way on to the cover of a food magazine anytime soon, it was nicely made and very satisfying. With an excellent wine list–we drank a terrific Greek red, a 2011 Oenos – Xinomavro Naoussa, and a convivial atmosphere in the dining room, Gare au Gorille will doubtless become just as popular as Septime, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be willing to continue making the necessary effort to land a table here, because this is exactly the kind of restaurant that inspires an instant desire to become a regular.

**Be careful of the gorilla

68 rue des Dames, 17th Arrondissement, Tel. 01-42-94-24-02, Metro: Rome, Open Tuesday-Saturday for lunch and dinner, Closed Sunday and Monday. Average lunch: 25€
Average dinner: 50€ for two small plates and a shared main course, without wine. 

The post Gare au Gorille, Paris–A Great New Beast of a Bistro in Les Batignolles, B+ appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

After working for twelve years in Barcelona, Parisian-born chef Ludovic Dubois, son of the distinguished fromagere Martine Dubois, has returned to Paris and opened Les Poulettes Batignolles. It’s a good-looking modern bistro in a quiet side street with a very appealing Catalan inflected contemporary menu. “I really like the way the Catalans marry seafood and meat,” says Dubois, who runs the kitchen while his Catalan wife Judith Cercos, former sommelier at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Barcelona, supervises the dining room and excellent wine list. “I also developed an appreciation of arroz (rice), in all its many possible incarnations while living in Catalonia, an experience that tutored me in the Mediterranean palate,” adds the amiable Dubois, who apprenticed with Jacques Cagna and Michel Rostang before going off to Spain, where he cooked at the El Palace Hotel, among other kitchens.

Going to meet Marie, the lovely friend who tipped me off to this new address, for dinner on a frosty early winter night, I found myself thinking about how much I like Les Batignolles, a dense village-like neighborhood in the 17th arrondissement that only became part of Paris by decree of Napoleon III in 1860 and which is bisected by the train cut going into the Gare Saint Lazare. The old train yards at the north end of the neighborhood were intended to become the site of the Olympic village, had Paris’s bid for the 2012 games succeeded. Instead, they’re being redeveloped into a new urban neighborhood centered on a large garden named in honor of Martin Luther King. What will doubtless change this part of the city a lot is the arrival of all the courts now found on the Ile de la Cité in a new set of buildings, La Cité Judiciaire, which will open in 2017. For the time being, though, it’s a companionable and unpretentious old Paris neighborhood with a real vie de quarter, or neighborhood life, and with its chic pair of teal blue dining rooms, retro lighting fixtures, warm friendly service, and interesting menu, Les Poulettes Batignolles has immediately become a local hit with an enthusiastic following of regulars.

Since Marie once lived in Barcelona, and I’ve spent a lot of time there through the years and it’s one of my favorite cities, it was fun to discover the original but subtle cooking of Dubois and decipher the Catalan influences in various dishes. The Catalan love of seafood–Barcelona is still going mad for sushi and ceviche–was beautifully expressed by an impeccably fresh sea bass tartare seasoned with seaweed and garnished with several types of fish eggs, while the artichoke hearts and salad leaves that came with a coddled egg in bread crumbs with tartare sauce–a perfect tapas sort of dish–reminded me of the tidy lovingly tended vegetable farms seen from the airport train that still fill the flat fertile plains between the city and its airport. This proximate patchwork of farms also explains why the produce in Barcelona is so good. In Paris, however, it comes from the rue de Levis market street where Dubois does his shopping every morning. “My cooking is completely market-driven, so I really need to see and smell and touch the produce myself. It just wouldn’t work for me to be supplied by Rungis (the big wholesale market outside of Paris, bien sur),” said the chef. One way or another, I’m a hopeless sucker for tartare sauce, especially when it’s homemade–this might be explained by the fact that I liked this condiment as much if not more than the fried-clam strips once sold by Howard Johnson’s, a once-upon-a-time sincere Boston-based restaurant chain specializing in respectable quality American comfort food.What Howard Johnson’s never had, however, was the rich, melted-in-your-mouth jamon, or ham, which melded this dish together with a plucky porcine punch. With the possible addition of some good Cabrales, or Spanish blue cheese, I’d happily eat this perfectly pitched umami-rich soft ball for lunch everyday for the rest of my life.

Beyond the pleasure of Marie’s company–she’s not only beautiful but absolutely fascinating–the recurring reason for the strong sense of well-being all during my meal at this restaurant was the warm unselfconscious reflexive hospitality of Judith Cercos, a woman who deeply loves both wine and seeing the pleasure her shrewd choices bring to other people. I was too engaged by Marie and Bruno to break away from the good time I was having at the time, but later, I did find myself musing on the odd Paris phenomenon of restaurants that are run by people who would appear to find their customers a dreadful nuisance just for the fact that they’ve come through the door–Jadis and Saturne came to mind. In any event, the Domaine Giudicelli wine Judith served with our main courses was one of the best viniferous discoveries of the year for me, because I’d never have first guessed that it was a Corsican Patrimonio, because it was so supple and suave, but when we all paid it the attention it deserved, it had a lot of Mediterranean character and was a brilliant food wine.

In the quiet calendar of Parisian gastronomic pleasures I’ve learned so deeply it’s become the second much-loved almost subliminal alphabet that informs my daily life, few things are more welcome than the gusty arrival of seasonal crustaceans like oysters and scallops on the city’s menus. Perhaps with this in mind, but also likely guided by compasses of nostalgia with different true norths–hers, an old relationship; his, a lifetime of holidays spent on Catalan beaches over a span of more than forty years from the days of tents and ice cream cones purchased by Father to friskier adventures in Barcelona and Sitges–Marie and Bruno had the ‘creamy’ rice garnished with grilled artichoke hearts, mushrooms, squid, octopus, lobster and langoustines. What are I yearned for were the sweet fleshy Erquy scallops, which came cooked in their shells with breads crumbs, buttery leeks and a natty garnish of chives. “Rather nice, isn’t it, to be in a dining room where a pair of tattooed forearms fits in just as well as an Hermes pocketbook, isn’t it#8221; Bruno said, and it was true that there was a rare and bracing variety of Parisians around us who were keenly enjoying their food as much as we were.

Since my sweet tooth, such as it exists, keens most to all forms of burnt sugar, aka caramel, then fruit, and finally really potent dark chocolate, I let Bruno and Marie rush in when it came to choosing a dessert–vanilla rice pudding with dulce de leche for her, and New York cheesecake for Bruno, who’s been obsessed by same ever since a first ecstatic artery-clogging encounter at the Carnegie Delicatessen in New York City a few months after we’d first met 17 years ago. Oh. And me I know what a serious cheese mistress Ludovic Dubois’s Mom Martine is, so there was no way I’d pass up her Vacherin, that sublimely runny high-altitude cow’s milk dairy balm that’s in season right now, especially since it meant I could lay claim to the rest of the Patrimonio.

After dinner Ludovic Dubois came out of the kitchen to greet his customers, and watching him with Judith Decros, I finally got the X factor that makes Les Poulettes Batignolles so irresistible. This restaurant is an expression of their love affair, which they kindly decided to share with all comers. So if you want a really good and original won’t-break-the-bank holiday meal this year, I think you’d do very well at this charming table.

10 rue de Chéroy, 17th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. 01-42-93-10-11. Metro: Rome or Villiers. Closed Sunday and Monday. Open Tuesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner. www.lespoulettes-batignolles.fr Average lunch 30 Euros, Average dinner 40 Euros.

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A handsome new park is emerging on the northern edge of Paris in the 17th arrondissement, and it’s named for the American civil-rights leader Martin Luther King. Only a few acres of the new green space built on former rail yards are now open, but the park is beautifully landscaped and will be the centerpiece for a whole new quartier when it’s completed in 2015. For the moment, just a few of the new buildings surrounding the park have been finished, but one particularly good-looking HLM (subsidized housing units) houses not only a bunch of Parisians who must be delighted by their new lodgings, but one of the best modern bistros to have opened in the city recently. It’s called Coretta, after Martin Luther King’s wife, and it’s run by the very talented chef Mexican born chef Beatriz Gomez and her husband Matthieu Marcant, and since they’re already very busy with their excellent restaurant Neva Cuisine in the 8th arrondissement behind the Gare Saint Lazare, they’ve hired chef Jean-François Pantaleon, formerly of L’Affable in the 7th arrondissement, to chef their new table.

Curiously, I first heard about this restaurant from my friend Pascale, an architect who lives in the neighborhood and who praised the design of the duplex space as one of the best she’d recently seen in Paris–most of the time friends recommend their latest discoveries to me because they loved the food. So I did some research, and when I realized that it was a new address from Gomez and Marcant, I booked immediately, since Neva Cuisine is one of my favorite modern bistros in Paris, not the least of the reasons being that it has one of the best young pastry chefs in Paris, Yannick Tranchant , with whom Gomez worked when both of them were in the kitchens of La Grande Cascade.

When Bruno and I showed up at this duplex space on a recent early Spring night, we immediately loved the decor, too. On the ground floor, they’re a couple of tables and a bar and then upstairs, a striking dining room with spiralling oak-panelled beams and a grid of spot-lights over head. The glass walls offer nice views over the adjacent park, too, and this very successful study in eco-conscious modernism was more reminiscent of Santa Monica than Paris, which immediately led us to a conversation about how Paris should or could be modern. Bruno’s looking forward to a show at Le Petit Palais called “Paris 1900,” which opens on April 2 and will showcase Belle Époque Paris, the city that was a global beacon of modernity in all realms, and as much as he loves the carefully preserved beauty  of central Paris today, he worries that the city is becoming too museum-like and would love to see some bold smart urbanism in the French capital at the still newly hatched beginning of the 21st century. Myself, I’m a little more cautious, since I already suspect that the remodelling of Les Halles is going to be a serious disappointment–why, oh why didn’t it occur to anyone to include a major new food market in this project#8211;and so much recent urbanism and architecture in the city is underwhelming, including, for example, the bleak Bibliotheque Nationale in the 13th arrondissement. And while we’re at it, would the powers that be please tell Burger King to get the signs out of the windows of their restaurant at the Gare Saint Lazare, so that this elegant facade isn’t punctuated by big entreaties to eat a Whopper.

Since our meal that first night was good, but suffered from some imprecisions and wasn’t up to the level of Neva Cuisine, I held off from writing about this place until I’d been back a few times, delicious research indeed. Now that the kitchen is really up-and-running, I can whole-heartedly recommend this place, and since they’re planning to serve on the broad terrace out front when the weather gets better, I suspect that it’s going to become even more popular.

My favorite starter here is the superb composition of miso-glazed mackerel with Granny Smith apples and ginger, a beautiful cameo of clean and complimentary tastes that is one of those rare dishes that’s as healthy as it is satisfying. I also like the smoked eel with veal and a creamy horseradish sauce spiked with Massala, and Pantaleon also does some of the best foie gras I’ve had in while, which comes to the table with pomelo relish and slices of toasted brioche.

Main courses further reveal the edgy cosmopolitan personality of a menu written haiku style, or as slightly cryptic lists of ingredients, which is very modish in Paris right now. I like the signatures of Pantaleon’s cooking, though, which run to an avowed love of vegetables and fruit, a percussion of different acidities, and a love of smoke and charring. Pairing cod demi-sel with vegetable pickles was an inspired idea, especially since the kohlrabi, carrots and radishes had only been pickled enough to brighten but not overwhelm the fish, and duck roasted duck with grilled shallots and pears and just a dribble of jus was suave and satisfying compilation of tastes and textures, too.

I certainly detected Yannick Tranchant’s clever hand in my favorite dessert here, too–a sable biscuit topped with poached pineapple and lime cream, which was refreshing and healthy while still delivering on the ‘treat factor,’ or that child-like flash of pleasure that comes from eating something sweet and special, that distinguishes all good desserts.

And since I love sticky buns of any stripe or kind, the “Cinnamon Box,” a studious Gallic take on this pastry most often eaten for breakfast in North America, was fine by me even after dinner, and it was fun to pluck the hot, fluffy beautifully made caramel brioche out of the tin in which they were served and dredge them in the accompanying plate of freshly made vanilla ice cream.

Service here if prompt and friendly despite the complicated logistics due to a kitchen on the first floor, and the wine list is short but includes several great bottles, including François Chidaine’s Montlouis les Choisilles and two good pours by the glass from Yves Cuilleron–his Les Candives red and Roussane VDF white. Les Batignolles has been short a signature table since chef Christophe Pele left La Bigarrade, so this place has received a warm welcome from the neighborhood, and I have a hunch it’s going to become an institution in this pleasant and rapidly evolving corner of Paris.

Coretta, 151 rue Cardinet, 17th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. 01-42-26-55-55. Metro: Brochant. Average 40 Euros. Closed Saturday lunch and Sunday. www.coretta.fr

The post CORETTA, Paris–A Very Good Contemporary French Restaurant in an Up-and-Coming Part of Town, B+ appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

There’s something chimerical about contemporary Italian cooking, and a partial explanation for this was once provided to me by chef Giovanni Passerini of the excellent restaurant Rino in Paris. Passerini, a Roman, told me he’d moved to Paris, because “Romans only want to eat their own cooking. Parisians are much more receptive to invention and innovation.” In my own experience as someone who visits Italy regularly, the conundrum of modern Italian cooking definitely stems to some degree from the culinary conservatism that Passerini pointed out, but also seems to be attributed to the fact that La Nouvelle Cuisine had an even great impact on Italy than it did in France. To wit, so many of the restaurants that the major Italian guides rate most highly still practice a sort of mannerist modern cooking that espouses the worst of Nouvelle Cuisine fussiness without embracing the really important things it changed.

To be sure, there are several wonderful exceptions to this retro rut. Massimo Bottura’s Osteria Francescana in Modena is not only one of the best restaurants in the world, but one of the most consistently interesting and audacious, and I also really like Cristina Bowerman’s restaurant Glass in the Trastevere district of Rome. But during visits to Milan, Verona, the Italian Lakes and Venice last year, most feints at anything contemporary were disappointing, usually because they were more exercises in style than taste and often came off as sadly deracinated. So after several recent excellent Italian meals in New York, London and Paris, it occurs to me that the future of the Italian kitchen is as likely to be played out beyond the country’s borders than it is within them, since due to both the country’s poor economy and it’s prevailing preference for traditional cooking, many talented young Italian chefs go abroad to work.

Still, it was a real surprise the other night when Bruno and I went to Viola, a new restaurant in the Batignolles in Paris, and stumbled upon some good and rather interesting contemporary Italian food. Truth be told, I wasn’t especially keen on this adventure–the address had been recommended by a friend of Bruno’s from the gym, and I don’t really like going out much on Sunday nights–but in the interest of fairness, I said “Sure” when he bounced into my office and suggested it. “It’s always good to put a zig-zag in the routine, no#8221; said Bruno, and so a zig-zag it was. After all, I cringe a little when I think of the dozens–okay, hundreds–of times he’s uncomplainingly accompanied me of a given evening when I knew he’d have been much happier at home eating a salad. When we arrived, the place seemed vaguely familiar, and despite the fact that it’s been attractively remodeled with an appealing sort of loft-like neo-industrial decor, I recognized it as the former premises of Le Bistral, a contemporary French bistro that I always wanted to be better than it ever was.

The service was immediately friendly, and the very pleasant waitress proposed a variety of really good organic and ‘natural’ (un-sulfured) Italian wines by the glass, so things got off to a good start, since good Italian wine is still much too rare in Paris. Then the menu looked, well, interesting, and a decided, and welcome, departure from the usual miscellaneous pasta-and-pizza jumble typical of neighborhood Italian restaurants in Paris, a city that’s still waiting for a seriously good Italian restaurant, and this despite the fact that the most Parisians know and love Italy and its food. 

Since both of us wanted the shrimp tartare with grapefruit, Bronte pistachios (from the Sicilian village of the same name) and seaweed, we agreed to do what Bruno describes as a “Fifty-Fifth,” or to share our starters. So I ordered the scallops, which came corseted with ribbons of lardo di colonnata on a bed of lentils. Though the green apple fins flanking the tartare were an unnecessary Memphis style flourish, the tartare was excellent, with the pistachios and pureed seaweed amplifying the natural sweetness of the shrimp and the grapefruit adding a pleasantly tart foil to the richness of this composition. The scallops–nicely seared–were excellent, and the lardo was a great idea, since it brought them some salt and linked them to the earthiness of the lentils and the superfluous shavings of Burgundian truffle, which tasted like wet leaves.

Our main courses were pleasant but less vivid than our starters. My crab and eggplant stuffed paccheri were good but lacked an ingredient that might have brought their tastes into higher relief–maybe finely chopped preserved lemon or some capers. Bruno had the lamb two ways–an excellent lamb tartare and a beautifully cooked and very tender filet that had been rolled in crushed pistachios. Again, I didn’t see the point of the pistachios, but the garnish of Emiglia-Romagnan pumpkin puree with miniature finials of fresh treviso was an excellent idea.

As soon as I saw it on the menu, I knew Bruno would go for the homemade panettone with panettone ice cream as surely as he knew I’d conclude with some cheese. I’d have liked a more robust assortment of cheeses, including several different Peccorino–they were good but tasted rather alike, but the panettone and its accompanying ice cream were superb. I was impressed not only by the intelligent inventiveness of this cooking, but also the fact that the chef–Vicenzo Patruno–had gone to the trouble of sourcing so many signature Italian ingredients, including the Bronte pistachios, but also red onions from Tropea in Calabria.

Originally from Puglia, Patruno, 28, worked at the Hotel Monaco in Venice, the Armani Caffe restaurants in Milan and Paris, and then served as chef at Il Viccolo for seven years before being drafted as head chef for Paris’s first bistronomique (modern bistro) Italian table,. While I didn’t agree with the gastronomic logic of everything he did during this meal, he’s clearly a talented chef with a large future in front of him, and I’ll happily return to this pleasant little restaurant to experience his well-grounded imagination again.

80, rue Lemercier, 17th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. 01-42-63-59-61. Metro: Brochant or La Fouche. Open daily. Prix-fixe menus, lunch–18 Euros, 22 Euros; dinner, 29 Euros, 36 Euros. Average a la carte 40 Euros. www. restaurant-viola.com

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When a beneficent old friend from L.A. with a hefty expense-account called and suggested dinner on Sunday night not too far from his hotel in the 17th arrondissement, I had to think for a while. I hadn’t been wearing my restaurant cap for a couple of weeks after the holidays–like many food writers I know, I’d been eating very simply and leaving the corkscrew untouched in the kitchen drawer for a while after being rather too lavishly well wined and dined during the previous couple of weeks. Then, too, the fact that he’s also a vegetarian threw me a curve ball, the first one being that it was a Sunday night.

Myself, the one thing I knew I was really in the mood for the other night were oysters, and maybe a nice grilled sole, and this got me to thinking. Though they’re several brasseries that might have been an obvious choice in the 17th, I find myself mostly giving a wide birth to them these days, because their quality seems to have declined almost as quickly as their prices have been going up. As luck would have it, a friend who lives in the 17th called for a chat that afternoon, and I asked her if she had an idea. “What about Dessirier#8221; she said. “It’s expensive, but there’s also a 48 Euro menu that’s great value for the money.” I probably wouldn’t have thought of chef Michel Rostang’s seafood brasserie on the Place du Maréchal Juin, but a quick glance at their website made my mouth water, so I booked Gregor and I for dinner and spent the rest of the afternoon looking forward to some oysters.

@CBiesla 

Gregor, whom I’ve known since Junior High School in Connecticut, was waiting for me when I showed up late, having taken the trouble to try and look half-decent after a wonderful for being so rare lazy Sunday afternoon reading a great book–Any Human Heart by William Boyd. Ever since we were kids, he’s always been one of the nattiest men I know, and now that he’s a very successful art dealer in Los Angeles, I fully expected he’d be dressed to kill. He didn’t disappoint me either, with a beautifully cut Tom Ford suit and some new Berluti shoes, and even beyond his expensive clothing, he radiated the aura of someone who’s powerfully confident in his own success. As we perused the menu and ate very good cod rilettes on zucchini mousse while sipping flutes of Champagne, I became aware of the fact that the beautiful woman with a much older man across the aisle couldn’t take her eyes off of him, which wasn’t surprising, because with a Norwegian mother and Russian father, he’s tall and very handsome, with wavy blonde hair, a Roman nose and green eyes.

Though the 48 Euro menu would have suited me to a T–I could have had oysters and then a cod aioli, one of my favorite dishes of cod with garlic mayonnaise, and a baba au rhum, he batted away this suggestion and insisted we order a la carte. There was a brilliant selection of oysters available, including meaty beauties from Utah Beach in Normandy, and a line-up of pedigreed bivalves from famous producers, including Gillardeau and David Hervé from the Marennes Oleron, Prat-ar-Coum and Cadoret from Brittany, and Florent Taboureich from the Etang de Thau. What really caught my eye, though, were the Spéciales Perles de l’Impératrices by Joël Dupuch, an amiable sixth-generation oyster farmer from Arcachon in the southwest who also has a very good seafood restaurant in Bordeaux, Joël D. You don’t see them that often in Paris, and they’re just plain superb. So it was the Empress’s pearls for me and then grilled sole with sauteed spinach, while Gregor was keen for something “very French” and ordered the lobster vol au vent and scallops with garnishes of brussels sprouts and chopped Morteau sausage and potato puree. To my delight, he chose a really good bottle of white Givry, and we were off.

“I wish she’d stop staring,” he said while we were waiting for our main courses. “I think I must be one of the very few men in Paris who isn’t interested in cheating on his wife,” which makes sense, since she’s a delightful Argentine woman who’s also a very talented painter. While we were waiting for our food, he pulled an iPad out of his bag and asked me if I’d have a look at the work of some of the artists he represents. Not everything he showed me was to my taste, and when I told him, he looked serious. “The problem right now is that there’s too much money chasing too little talent,” he said gravely. “They’re so many new museums being built all over the world, and they all need something to hang on their walls. This is why we’re all so desperately on the look-out for new talent.”

When the charming head waiter showed up with our starters, we promptly sailed away from the gravity of the current state of the American art world and had one of the best seafood meals I’ve ever eaten in Paris.

The only thing that disappointed me about my big meaty oysters with their resonant tones of salinity is that there were only six of them, while Gregor loved his vol au vent, which fascinated me for the remarkable precision with which the lobster claw, langoustines, quenelles, coques, and mussels that composed it had been cooked. “This was exactly the kind of thing I had in mind during the long flight from California. How amazing it would be to live in a city with seafood of this quality!” I offered that in my opinion Paris is the best seafood city in Europe, since at it’s very best, at Dessirier, for example, the city’s shellfish and fish are supplied by small boat fisherman who catch by line, as opposed to nets, to preserve the quality of the fish, and it’s sourced from both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Then no one in the world produces better than oysters than the French, and their mussels are excellent, too.

“Well, we’ve certainly come a long way from the Clam Box,” said Gregor, referring to an old-line seafood place in the town where we grew up. “I was telling my kids that I hoped I’d see you, and that you were the only person I knew who’d eat anything when we were growing up. Do you remember the first time we ever had sushi when we went into New York#8221; I did. Gregor’s aunt took us to a sushi place in New York where I ate my first sea urchin when I was fourteen, and he spent most of the meal surreptiously moving the contents of his plate to mine, because he couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of raw fish. “My aunt sure loved you for that sea urchin, Alec!”

On a Sunday night, most of the other diners at this attractive restaurant with a contemporary decor punctuated by pops of color were well-dressed couples, including many men in suits even on an off-hours evening, but to my relief–I’d worried that this rather bourgeois power-brokers’ table might be stuffy–the atmosphere was relaxed, and the waiters courteous, alert and good-humored.

One way or another, it was delightful to see Gregor and nothing could have stopped me from enjoying an impeccably grilled sole with racy black scoring. Gregor was very happy with his seared Norman scallops and the gently smoky taste of the Brussels sprout and Morteau garnish flattered their sweetness, too.

We finished up this excellent meal with a baba au rhum, which I lashed with a couple of squirts of superb deep amber Martinique rum that pleasantly smelled like an old leather-bound book, and an elegant little Grand Marnier souffle for Gregor. After dinner, he nicely waited with me for my bus (I know he was puzzled as to why I didn’t just hop in a taxi, but I calculated that a point-blank return to reality was the best idea after the feast he’d so generously offered us). “That was such a nice meal, Alec. I really enjoyed it, and it was such an interesting mixture of old-fashioned and modern fish cookery,” he said as my bus barreled towards us. And in the bus, I thought about how he’d said more than he might have known, since Michel Rostang’s seafood brasserie really does offer a clever two-stroke experience of great French fish cooking–the traditional version with sauces and the minimalist version that’s been championed for some twenty plus years by restaurants like Le Duc and the now gone Paul Minchelli. Here, you can have it your way, and that’s the whole point of this privileged place. For my part, it was a felicitous discovery, since given the prices for top-drawer fish in Paris these days, the 48 Euro menu is such a good buy that I certainly intend to be back here again in the near future.

9 place du Maréchal Juin, 17th, Tel. 01-42-27-82-14, Metro: Pereire. Open daily. Prix-fixe menus 38 Euros (two courses), 48 Euros (three courses). Average a la carte 75 Euros. www.restaurantdessirier.com

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With the accelerating blurring of work and leisure wrought by Twitter, Facebook, email, text messaging and cellphones eroding the old-fashioned idea of what a vacation could and should be in the United States, there’s something deeply admirable and profoundly charming about the way France defends the sanctity of the summer holiday. And if Paris doesn’t wind down as visibly as it did twenty years ago when shops flaunted the fact that they were closing for a good long time by masking their windows with censorious kraft paper–you’d only know that this was there is if you weren’t in Le Lavandou or Saint-Jean-de-Luz, there’s still a reliable, palpable and quite bracing deceleration of daily life that implicitly authorizes you to be late for and/or leave work early, and to abandon yourself to what you feel like doing–lying on your bed all afternoon reading a great novel, for example, instead of all the dreary things you should be doing (preparing accounts for your tax person, meeting a deadline, sewing a button back on a shirt, going to the gym, etc.). French media follows suit, too, with a winding down of life-style reporting, including restaurant reviewing, which annually yields an inevitable cannon-fire of lists of the nicest places to have a meal outside or the summer’s ‘hippest’ tables.

This summer, the annointed ‘hippest’ table in Paris is Pan, a place in the increasingly hip 10th arrondissement, though not the Canal Saint Martin and vicinity, but rather the rue de Paradis and those streets in and around the rue du Faubourg Poissoniere (For whatever it’s worth, I fear that a tipping point in the vicinity is inevitable within the next year or two, since the unselfconsciousness and alluring grottiness of the neighborhood just won’t be able to withstand this much media attention, especially since this sort of froth fertilizes real-estate prices). Though hipness generally discourages any interest on my part–too many hip restaurants get away with mediocre food, because they’re hip–ever hear of the Costes brothers#8211;a few glowing reviews of this place led me to think it might be a good spot for a much looked forward to tete-a-tete with one of my closest Parisian pals, who, alas, will soon be moving to London. So I met Christian for dinner on a muggy night when both of us would surely have preferred to be sitting outside.

The dining room was beautiful, though, for being an odd and engaging riff on something both Euro fifties via East German design studios–the wallpaper, and sixties–the flea-market faux Danish modern chairs and tables, plus great lighting and a pretty parquet floor. Our server–one of the owners, I think–was friendly, too, so things looked good from the starting block, and I also liked the rather random menu of Mediterranean inspired modern dishes–gaspacho with chorizo, watermelon with marinated feta, etc., and good solid Gallic comfort food. As is increasingly often the case in such ‘young’ restaurants, our starters–Christian went with the delicious pork rillettes–rich, fatty, smoky, and well-textured, and I had the baby artichoke salad on a bed of arugula with a fresh mint vinaigrette but none of the promised Parmesan shavings, were much, much better than our main courses.

I was surprised by the rather audacious pricing of the wine list, too–I mean the rue Martel is still along way from becoming the Avenue Montaigne, and it took a long time for a our wine to come, but again, the service was pleasant, if sort of cheerfully dissheveled. Then our main courses showed up, and the meal fell off a cliff. I ordered fregola (small almond-shaped pasta) with baby clams and tomatoes, while Christian had ricotta-stuffed ravioli. I could see that his ravioli, which came with no trace of the Swiss chard, hazelnuts or sage mentioned on the menu, were egregiously overcooked, because they were stuck together in a clump at the bottom of a small bowl. More charitable than I am, he described them as “okay,” a word I’d never flatter my fregola with. A quick glance at the photo below will document the first problem with this dish–what on earth was the kitchen thinking to garnish a summer pasta with unripe hot-house salad tomatoes Given the difficulty in obtaining good tomatoes in Paris even during the summer, I think I’d have oven-roasted some Roma tomatoes or used snippets of sun-dried ones instead of these hard, flavorless, greenhouse-grow-light red ones. But the real problem was that the pasta was not only so completely overcooked it had the texture of baby food but it had been seasoned with nothing more than cream and salt. So this was hands-down one of the worst dishes I’ve eaten in Paris in months, and despite the fabulous company, attractive setting, and pleasant service, there was just no saving this meal. To be sure, I had read that the dish to order here was the hand-chopped steak tartare, but there was still no excuse for this decidedly unappetizing performance.

Christian and I adjourned to a sidewalk terrace for coffee and another glass of wine, and on the way home, I found myself wondering how on earth anyone could have vaunted the cooking at Pan. And here’s where I found the hitch–in Paris, food writing is more and more often to be found under the umbrella of so-called ‘Style’ supplements instead of in dedicated settings on its own, which means that it has to play some sort of supporting part in the increasingly frantic chase for fashion, cosmetic and perfume advertising placements. This is the only reason I could find that a place like Pan, an instant favorite of the fashion tribe, would ever get such a major look in from the French papers before they signed off for summer. To be fair, however, not all ‘Style’ supplements are joining this game, since Francois Regis Gaudry’s write-up of Pan in L’Express Styles–the best ‘Style’ supplement in France in my opinion, expressed a politely bewildered opinion on this place, too.

PAN, 12, rue Martel, 10th, Tel. 09-52-51-63-70. Metro: Chateau d’Eau or Poissonnière. Open Tuesday-Friday for lunch and dinner, Saturday dinner only, Closed Saturday lunch, Sunday and Monday. Average a la carte 45 Euros.

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Though some friends I’ve sent there have been exasperated by the concept of the blind-folded (i.e. unidentified) tasting menu at La Bigarrade, and more than a few have carped about the prices at this tiny little restaurant in Les Batignolles and also the slightly grand demeanor of the service, for me, it’s consistently been one of the most intriguing and satisfying contemporary French restaurants in Paris, which is why I was horrified when I heard that chef Christophe Pele, who opened the place, was shipping out.

A friend who lives locally reassured me that Yasuhiro Kanayama, the Japanese chef who has replaced Pele, is equally brilliant, however, so I brow-beat Bruno–who also gets impatient with long drawn-out tasting menus, into going for dinner the other night. And we had a superb meal, which debuted with an avocado curl with fresh coriander and a cumin biscuit and continued with micro-planed cauliflower with shaved squid and an exquisite crabmeat with vanilla-spiked sabayon. The rhythm of the meal was impeccable, too, with these sublime little cameos arriving at exactly the moment that you’d quietly decided you’d like something more.

Though compatible with Pele’s approach, Kanayama’s cooking is actually much subtler and even more quietly provocative when it comes to sensual contrasts of texture, as seen in a sublime little dish of lobster with grilled banana in lemon-verbena foam (who’d have guessed that the acetone in the banana would flatter the lobster’s natural sweetness so suavely?).

Turbot with bonito broth and smoked eggplant (below) nodded at the Japanese palate without making some sort of awkward Occidental mannerist feint (much too often the case when Western chefs fiddle with Asian food).

Juicy pigeon breast with cockles and tamarind paste was elegant and deeply satisfying, too.

Bruno, the dessert lover in our duo, deemed the chocolate cake with Matcha powder and cream reason alone to return to La Bigarrade. All told, a really superb meal, and if David Toutain at Agape Substance is the one who pulls off this sort of gastro snap-shot performance better than anyone else in Paris right now, La Bigarrade remains an urgently well-recommended restaurant in my book.

La Bigarrade, 106 rue Nollet, 17th, Tel. 01-42-26-01-02. Metro: La Fourche. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Prix-fixe menus 35 Euros, 55 Euros (lunch), 65 Euros, 85 Euros.

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