Inspite of its dopey name, Kult, the stylish but easygoing restaurant in the just-opened hotel Le Saint, is a welcome new option for good casual dining in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Surprisingly, the restaurant offer in this storied Left Bank neighborhood, the most loved district of Paris for upmarket visitors to the city, is relatively meager. To wit, if you want a good French meal within a five-to-ten-minute walk of the Cafe Deux Magots or the Cafe de Flore, your best choices are pretty much Fish La Boissonnerie, Semilla, Le 21 and, a little bit further afield, the excellent Cafe Trama on the rue du Cherche Midi.

The good-looking new hotel Le Saint was created from a legendary local hotel, the Hotel Lenox, a place I loved, because I lived there for three months in a beautiful duplex suite at the expense of the publishing company I was working for when I first moved to Paris. Day in and day out, the Lenox offered me, a gangly unknowing neophyte, lessons in the ways of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the neighborhood which remains the boiler-room of a certain eternal style of that distinctively Parisian off-center bourgeois chic the world just can’t get enough of.

So what did I learn there in those early days Oh, well, lots of things, but among them, the fact that true beauty is always flawed, personal and a tiny bit eccentric. That charm comes from a dared but never excessively scrutinized mixture of social confidence, verbal wit, graciousness and self-deprecation. And that even if it isn’t always easy, it’s better to listen for a long time rather than to speak too quickly. Oh, and also that opposites are always style friends, as in cheap and expensive, new and old, and bold and conservative. H & M and Hermes, Marks & Spencer and Comme des Garcons, mais pourquoi pas?

My gastronomic lessons in the neighborhood were of less importance, since even in 1986, Saint-Germain-des-Prés wasn’t exactly heaving with good bistros aside from the long gone but still much missed La Cafetière in the rue Mazarine. That said, my take away from Saint-Germain-des-Prés was an infinitely valuable lesson about great French food, which is that the true axis of this country’s exalted cuisine is a triumph of exceptionally good seasonal produce cooked simply.

So after I was seated on a stripped velvet banquette at the end of the bar and watching the bar tenders slowly, slowly, slowly mixing drinks, I wondered, would Kult ‘get’ the food ways of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, or would it be a silly gimmicky place like the Costes brothers glamorous but mediocre La Société?

Even before I glanced at the menu, my expectations were hopeful, however, since I’ve always liked the clean, lucid, well-focused cooking of chef Guillaume Monnet, who cooks at L’Affable, a pleasant nearby modern bistro. He drew up the menu at Kult and put its staff and suppliers in place.

So Monnet knows and understands the eating habits of the locals, or that ur Parisian mix of fashion people, politicians, antique dealers, book editors, expats, and famous faces (Catherine Deneuve, Bernard Henri Levi, etc.) but is also savvy enough to factor the cravings of worldly, wealthy tourists into the mix when he draws up a menu, too. What these people have in common is that they know they should eat healthy but also like to spoil themselves a bit and also love sophisticated but unpretentious comfort food.

So I’d already decided that at the end of a serious bear of a stress-ridden day, I’d throw calories to the winds with foie gras and grilled onions, a superb combination, and then go with a primally pleasing steak tartare with homemade frites when Bruno finally galloped through the door and walked right past me, because he’s getting used to new pair of glasses. He needed a cocktail, we needed a cocktail, and so we did. And they were good, even if the craft aspect of bar-tending always means they take too long to arrive.

Soothed by his Manhattan, Bruno chose the tuna tataki with beets and horseradish cream and the ginger spiked duck breast with carrots and an unexpectedly successful sweet-and-sour sauce. Both of our starters were excellent, since the charred onion gently tempered the barnyard richness of my foie gras and picked onions teased the earthiness of Bruno’s beets and back-stopped the fleshy iodine-rich tuna.

My steak tartare was excellent, or just that carnivore thing you want to eat when you need iron and minerals and don’t have the attention to offer to the elegance of sauce or the flirtatiousness of an unexpected spice or herb. What made it original, though, was the chopped dried fig that had been folded into the meat, an interesting idea that would have been even more effective if it had been a little more subtle, i.e, the fig was too present, since I didn’t really want anything to blunt the taste of my beef.

On the same wave-length of urgent appetite but with a little more wit was Bruno’s duck breast, which came with a lightly crispy skin that had basted the meat with its earthy, flavor-rich fat but was still cooked juicy. Our garnishes were perfect, too–a few salad leaves and double-cooked fries for me, ginger boosted carrot puree for Bruno. I finished up with an unremarkable cheese plate–a shame when you have cheese shops like Quatrehommes and Barthelemy so nearby, but Bruno was pleased with his poached pear with speculoos crumbs (these Belgian spice cookies are the Old World equivalent of graham crackers)  and vanilla ice cream.

Surrounded by an intriguingly Saint-Germain-des-Pres crowd, including a well-known politician with his ambitiously busty transgender girl friend, and an antiques dealer who surprised me by coming to dinner with a wife I didn’t know he had–his boyfriend, however, I’ve known for years–this casual table delivered exactly the kind of uncomplicated good-quality contemporary French meal we’d come here hoping to find. I expect that it will become very popular very quickly, too.

Kult, Hotel Le Saint, 3 rue du Pré aux Clercs, 7th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-42-61-01-51, Metro: Rue du Bac or Saint-Germain-des-Pres. www.lesainthotelparis.com Lunch menu 28 Euros, Dinner menu 38 Euros. Open Tuesday to Saturday for Lunch and Dinner; closed Sunday and Monday.

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Like most Paris brasseries, La Rotonde was founded long before people started going to restaurants for revelations. No, in those days, people went to restaurants to eat, and they pretty much knew what the menu would look like even before they stepped through the door.

When it opened on the boulevard Montparnasse in 1911, the Left Bank neighborhood was just beginning to attract artists like Picasso and Chagall and it was a busy commercial thoroughfare leading to a one of the city’s main train stations. So people went to La Rotonde to eat, to people watch, to while away an hour or two over a coffee or a glass of wine with the distraction of a book or a sketchpad. But most of all, they went to eat, because that’s why you went to brasseries, the brilliant Parisian invention that made dining out a nonchalant metropolitan pleasure by putting it within reach of almost every pocket and every pocketbook. You went because you were hungry and could get something to eat in a brasserie pretty much all day long and often well into the night.

When I first moved to Paris from London a longtime ago, I couldn’t have explained to you what made a brasserie different from a bistro, but I instinctively liked them, especially since I often worked very irregular hours and me and most of my friends were single. So brasseries were our default choice for a meal, the place to go to snuff out a case of Sunday night blues with friends, or unknot my nerves after work with some oysters and a bottle of Muscadet. They were our one-size-fits-all restaurant, and they reliably offered a good time and a decent enough feed for an acceptable price. (Oh, and the difference between a bistro and a brasserie Very simply, bistros specialize in simmered dishes and sauces, brasseries are about fast cooking, like grilling or frying, with a shellfish stand out front and perhaps a choucroute garni on the menu that refers to their original roots as brewhouse restaurants in Alsace).

And then it all went wrong during the 1990s when most of the great brasseries of Paris were swallowed up by chains, which increasingly resorted to commissary-supplied kitchens and gastronomic shortcuts to make these places as lucrative as possible. The thing is, of course, is that this didn’t go unnoticed, and like thousands of other Parisians, I sadly gave up on brasseries as their quality tumbled and their prices soared.

A brasserie revival has been in the making for a longtime, with chef Eric Frechon getting things off to a solid start several years ago when he opened Lazare and the Minipalais. Last year, chef Mauro Colagreco of Miramar opened the excellent Grand Coeur brasserie in the Marais. Now Alain Ducasse has a new-style brasserie slated for  Les Halles, which will open this spring, and chef Thierry Marx has another one in the works, Le Train Blanc, for the Gare du Nord later this year.

In the meantime, however, the only possible brasserie I could pull out of my hat when I had to find a place for a “cheerful and lively meal”  at the request of a friend who was inviting me and Bruno out to dinner as a Christmas present on a Sunday night the weekend before New Year’s was, rather guardedly, La Rotonde. I say guardedly because if it’s a popular table with an intriguing tapestry of Parisians and out-of-towners woven from   politicians, show-biz types, captains of industry, a complete alphabet of the French bourgeoisie, plus the happy shot of Lurex supplied by well-bred wide-eyed tourists who are more welcome in town than ever, the service can be luck of the draw, sometimes charming, sometimes bored and brusque, sometimes a mixture of all three.

Protective of my friend’s purse and pride–she’d never ever have let us snatch up the bill at the end of the meal as would be our wont, I knew the three-course 44 Euro prix-fixe menu offered a reliably good feed for the money and also that there are several pleasant reasonably priced bottles on the wine list, too: Mâcon AOC Domaine du Gros Mont, La Roche Vineuse 2014, 28 Euros and an organic Languedoc AOC Hecht & Bannier 2014, for example. So we went.

Wild boar terrine by Gilles Verot

There was a nice buzzy in the room when we came in on a rainy Sunday night, too, and it was the occupants of the booths around us provided an intriguing array of vignettes to decipher as a backdrop to our conversation as we perused the menu, which was encouragingly dotted with dishes that deserved organic shout-outs for their ingredients or brand-name produce, like a veal chop supplied by butcher Hugo Desnoyer. Here a noticeably affectionate and very attractive middle-aged brother and sister on one side of the table and their scowling silent spouses who refused to look at each other on the other. And in that corner, the older man and cute younger boy, both with the telltale wet hair of a recent shower, and across from them, hmmm, a heart-warming example of a very rare Parisian genus, a middle-aged man-and-wife who were clearly still besotted by each other.

So everyone in the room was hungry, if for different reasons and different delicacies, but to start Judy chose the wild-boar terrine from the excellent nearby charcutier Gilles Vérot, and after a lot of silent hemming and hawing on my part–the odds were extremely good that I’d regret my choice, in much the same way I always regret ordering anything called ‘risotto’ in France–I rolled the dice and order the quenelle de brochet gratinée façon manta (fluffy pike-perch dumplings with crayfish sauce, a specialty of the Rhone-Alps region), because I love them and I wanted something light. Bruno shot me a dubious ‘Do you think that’s a good idea#8217; kind of glance but then he followed suit. Fifteen minutes later, all three of us briefly enjoyed a contented silence as we sampled our starters.

The squirt-bottle graffiti–Why I mean, really. Why#8211;of balsamic vinegar notwithstanding, Judy’s terrine was politely feral and had the thrillingly varied texture–by turns emollient and chunky–that displays the charcutier’s true art. Our quenelles had nothing to do with the air-plane catering style dish I feared, but were airy, gently fishy, and napped in a hot sauce Nantua (crayfish cream sauce pinkened by tomato paste) that was just as comforting as a flannel blanket in a tent on a cold night.

Our main courses were nicely executed vieille France comfort food, too, and this is exactly what we wanted on this particular evening. “Isn’t this nice#8221; said Judy after sampling her sea bass filet on a bed of white-and-wild rice in a sauce of preserved lemons. “It reminds me of the good old days when you could just enjoy your food without talking it or photographing it to death.” I nodded, and waited a few minutes before I started snapping away again.

In the same way that I was skeptical about the quality of my quenelles, I had my doubts about ordering an aioli, cod and boiled vegetables with garlic mayonnaise, a provencal dish that’s one of my favorites, in a restaurant where I suspected the uptight fear of bad breath might cause the kitchen to be too light-handed with the garlic. But no. The little sauceboat of mayonnaise packed just the garlicky punch I needed after several days of extravagant Christmas food, including foie gras, seared scallops in a sauce of bergamot and Cointreau that I invented, and lobster (for Bruno’s birthday dinner on December 25–yes, he’s a Christmas baby) all on the same day, and brought me back down to earth, which is where I like to eat best of all anyway.

I was fascinated by Bruno’s perfectly cooked Scottish salmon in a sauce Genevoise with nicely made potato puree, too, because I couldn’t remember ever having sampled this particular sauce, which was invented by Escoffier. When I asked the waiter about it, I was surprised by how accurate and in-depth his explanation was, to wit, “The sauce is made from sauce Espagnole [one of Escoffier’s five mother sauces, a deeply reduced brown sauce alternately made with veal stock or hambone stock], a fumet made from salmon heads, vegetables, white wine and lots of butter, bien sur.” It actually even tasted as though it had been largely made on the premises, too, although many restaurants buy in their fonds de sauces these days. Oh, and by the way, if you’re thinking, hmmm, that salmon’s a rather grand dish for brasserie grub, you’re right, but La Rotonde is very much of a black silk-stockings (and hidden garter belts) kind of a place.

Only one of us could manage dessert (it wasn’t me), so we shared some profiteroles, filled with good vanilla ice cream and lashed with a sauce of Valrhona chocolate, and they were delicious. Served with charm and a deep professional knowledge of proper table service, this meal was the kind of feed upon which the good reputation of French cooking was originally constructed, because what this food says is that you can eat well even when you’re not interested in making a fuss about it or spending too much money.

La Rotonde, 105 boulevard Montparnasse, 6th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-43-26-48-26, Metro: Vavin. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Prix-fixe menu 44 Euros. Average a la carte 60 Euros. www.rotondemontparnasse.com

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In Paris, the assiduously institutionalised exultation of the city’s past poses the same sort of risk as the sugar water in a bee trap. Like many people who live here, however, I forget how easy it is to succumb to the easy nectar of memory and to gloat over the beauty of a place that has pretty much shunned modernity, or at least inside of Le Peripherique, or the beltway that separates the city from the suburbs it ignores.

So as luck would have it, just before going to dinner at the new version of Le Bon Saint Pourçain, a Saint-Germain-des-Prés bistro I’ve know for years, I’d just read Luke Barr’s fascinating and beautifully written book Provence 1970, which puts the relationships of many legendary American and British food writers under a magnifying glass as they interact during a series of cross-hatching visits to Provence. What especially intrigued me in these pages was that two of my heroes, M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child, were both so wary of becoming trapped by the past. Both women saw that France was changing, in ways both good and bad, and so they sought in their own ways to re-situate themselves in their relationship to Gaul, not loving it less but perhaps not needing it as much as they once had. And both women also felt a powerful eagerness live in the present and discover new things, which struck a chord with me, because so many people, myself included a lot of the time, don’t want Paris to change.

But the city will change, and it does, and often that’s a good thing, especially in the kitchen. And for all of the dozens of very happy meals I’ve had at Le Bon Saint Pourçain through the years, the best dish here was always off-menu, since it was the ineffably charming and rather clubby conviviality of the place. And the food Depending on who was in the kitchen, it was usually just fine, if rarely better than that, or the type of cuisine ménagère (home cooking)  your French maiden aunt might have served you, where the pleasure was derived more from her good intentions than her skills in the kitchen. To be sure, I always liked the leeks in a vinaigrette sauce and the boeuf aux olives (braised beef with green olives), and sometimes there was a good fruit tart to be had as well.

But the best of being here was the banter of François, the beetle-browed owner, and the fun of seeing who else would be there of a given evening, maybe Leslie Caron or Catherine Deneuve or a politician or writer or two, because this was always an ur Saint-Germain-des-Prés kind of place. Happily, David Lanher, the shrewd restaurateur who took this place over, understood all of that, so it was no surprise that he hired a former waiter from the Cafe de Flore to run the dining room, and no one in the dining room did more than bat a complicit eye lash or five the other night when François-Marie Banier came through the door with two friends (and if you don’t know who he is, you can read more about this man, who would have been a wonderful character in a Guy de Maupassant short story, here). I also wouldn’t be surprised if Monsieur Lanher had been behind some last minute accessorising in the dining room as well, see above.

When the waiter came to prop the chalkboard menu up on a chair next to our table, I was extremely curious to see if his next move wouldn’t be to pour us both a welcome glass of white Saint Pourçain wine, since this was one of the hospitality fixtures that distinguished this restaurant for years. Reading my mind, Bruno answered my question. “I don’t think so,” he said, so we had a rather skimpy pour of Petit Chablis instead, and a trip wire went off. As monied and worldly as the regulars at Le Bon Saint Pourçain have always been, they’ve also always been a particularly pennywise crowd who are most expediently seduced by generosity.

So this one little tradition might wisely have been perpetuated, and wines served by the glass should be poured generously. If the menu had very little to do with what had previously been served in this dining room, there was a wink or two at the past, particularly in terms of the marinated leeks in a silky camel-brown Satay like peanut sauce with a coddled egg that I had as my first course. Though it was rather murky looking on a matte black plate, this dish was unexpectedly satisfying–the peanuts actually flattered the vegetable, and everyone loves the drama of slitting open a coddled egg. Bruno’s foie gras with pickled mushrooms was lush, pleasantly salt and peppered, and generously served to boot.

And on a summer night, the discreetly refreshed look of the dining room, with its globe lamps, patches of exposed brick and curtain-less windows (they’d formerly been dressed with the sort of thick lace you might once have seen on your grandmother’s dresser) was appealing in its Gallic simplicity. Our main courses registered as excellent modern French bistro cooking from the moment they arrived at the table, too. My echine de porc (pork shoulder butt) was cooked pink, which is just how I like it in spite of the fact that my mother used to reduce nice pork standing rib roasts to near cinders in the belief that pork had to be nearly incinerated to be safe to eat, and this rosy meat road a bed of sautéed mushrooms and greens lapped with a nicely jus de viande that I’d guess was veal based. Perfectly braised, with a crispy skin, and an identical garnish, Bruno’s free-range chicken was similarly satisfying modern French comfort food, too. And because this was Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where everyone knows the carnal catechism that you should never eat anything starchy or farinaceous in the evening, because it leads, quel horreur, to weight gain, there wasn’t a grain of rice, a potato or a noodle to be found within a block of our table.

As it got later, the early-bird Americans on the terrace left and more and more old regulars arrived in the snug little dining room, eye balling the changes with guarded curiosity, as if still hoping for the best. Since we were at the end of our meal, like the three elegant ladies next to us, we’d spent an evening watching people attempting to diagnose and decide about the change, and every newcomer caused us to exchange fleeting complicit glances. But what consistently brought us to the edge of mirth was the frustration of the regulars at the stingy pours of the wines by the glass–we’d glance at each other, exchange pursed lipped smiles and half nods, and savour this recurring moment, since the few people who still drink in Saint-Germain-des-Prés–so many have lost their toys–are very serious about it.

A good cheese plate and a pleasant modern riff on a baba au rhum (sponge cake with whipped cream and lashings of rum) ended this pleasant if pricey meal, and the grand finale occurred a few minutes later when we were walking to our car and saw Catherine Deneuve peck someone on the cheek before hoping out of his car and immediately lighting a cigarette. Noticing Bruno and me standing there rubber necking, she grinned and said, “Ca va, les garçons#8221; (How’s it going, boys?), which was a rather wonderful conclusion to our Left Bank outing. So the only things that are missing at David Lanher’s reboot of this venerable bistro are the welcome pour of wine, and, I’m afraid, the young eager eyes that would be intrigued by this profoundly Parisian institution but which are very rarely found in gentrified and vaguely geriatric Saint-Germain-des-Prés anymore.

10 rue Servadoni, 6th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-42-01-78-24. Metro: Saint Sulpice or Mabillon. Open for lunch and dinner from Tuesday to Saturday. Closed on Sunday and Monday. Average a la carte 65 Euros.

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Sauteed squid and white beans at Cafe Trama

If all big cities change constantly, there’s one change that I’ve witnessed over the years in all of the cities I know and love best, including Paris, New York and London, that consistently saddens me, and that’s an ever decreasing diversity in their center-city streetscapes. What really brought this thought home was a recent Saturday morning in London when I was walking down Sloane Street and found it transformed in a souless alley of luxury boutiques guarded by security men with little curly black devices in their ears. Sloane Street has always been prime turf, of course, but when I last lived in London a longtime ago, there were still several pubs, a hairdresser and even a convenience grocer on that patch of pricey turf, and now they’re all gone. The same thing’s happened in many parts of Paris and New York, too–rising rents and increasing real-estate values thresh a neighborhood in favor of the same international luxury brand names you see in every city all over the world, and in this process what goes missing are the quirky little shops that give a place its character and also many of the homely ones that sell things you actually might need if you live locally.

Happily, they’re some streets that resist this process, and among them in Paris are the rue Vignon, which is right in the heart of the city behind the Madeleine, and on the Left Bank, the rue du Cherche Midi. Returning from a trip to the south of France on a recent Friday night, it was a real relief for me to see that so many of the shops I knew on the rue du Cherche Midi during the many years I lived on the rue du Bac are still there as I walked up the street in almost its entire length to meet Bruno for dinner at the charming Cafe Trama. The quincaillerie (hardware store) I always liked for its voyeur-at-a-keyhole glimpse of an orderly French domestic life that eluded me for years is still there just across the street from the ever popular cafe Le Nemrod and even the dreaded laundromat I used to use before fate smiled on me and freed me from that miserable chore–like all city-dwellers without washing machines, I always waited too long and then I always suffered the anxiety of wondering if one of the four dryers serving over a dozen washing machines might be available once my clothes were washed, survives. It sure did put a skip in step to walk by that place, though, and as I headed up the street it was also a pleasure to notice that a lot of new casual dining options have opened along this stretch, including the table that was my destination.

I decided on this new place, because a friend who works at a shop nearby had raved about it and also because it sounded easygoing and straightforward on a Friday night when we were both tired and had already cooked the fridge bare. I got there first and was warmly greeted by an attractive young woman whom I think was Marion Trama–of the celebrated culinary dynasty–and since it was warm, she nicely let me sit at the duece next to the open windows in the main dining room and promptly set me up with a very good glass of Chablis to while away the time over while I waited for Bruno. As the restaurant filled, the crowd was a pleasant mix of local jeunesse dorée, or affluent young locals; shopkeepers; antiquaires; and the sort of arty looking older Left Bank couples who’d be great subjects for a Sempe drawing.

I also liked the relaxed homey atmosphere, the good lighting and a decor that was a mix of tasteful flea-market finds and contemporary furniture, and the chalkboard menu looked appealing, too, for offering a mix of comfort-food classics and modish modern French dishes. As Marion Trama explained to us when she came to take our order after Bruno arrived, the menu was conceived so that you mix and match at will, having, for example, just a salad and some charcuterie, or a proper meal depending on your appetite.

Don’t tell my doctor, but I can never resist oeufs en meurette, or coddled eggs in red-wine-and-bacon sauce, a classic Burgundian dish, when I see them, so they got my dart for a first course, while Bruno had a delicious composition of sauteed squid with fresh white beans from Paimpol in Brittany in a shallow pool of savory slightly smoky bouillon. This was a simple but original and well-conceived dish, and the squid was perfectly cooked. I enjoyed my eggs as well, although the sauce was oddly sweet when I’d have preferred a ruddier range of flavors.

Among a nice run of main courses, including shrimp sauteed with lemongrass and ginger, we both had our hearts set on the steak tartare “à la thaïe,” which translated to coarsely chopped beef from butcher Hugo Desnoyer with a surprisingly successful seasoning of sesame oil, finely diced ginger and lemongrass. I feared that this Asian feint might overwhelm the primal goodness of the beef, but instead it set it into interesting mineral-rich relief, and the accompanying garnishes of mesclun and sauteed potatoes were ideal for their simplicity. With a good bottle of Morgon vieille vignes, this meal was one of those rare and deeply satisfying ones that was as much about being in the right place at the right time as it was the good food.

“I’d definitely come back here,” said Bruno as we shared a slice of pear and mirabelle tart. “The people are nice, the food’s good, the prices are fair, and it’s lively but relaxing.” I agreed, too, and made a mental note that this would be a great place for lunch for anyone touring the Left Bank and also ideal for the same kind of let-your-hairdown tete a tete we’d just enjoyed. It’s true that they’re some nights you just want a good simple meal without a lot of fuss about it, and if you find yourself feeling this way anytime soon, I suspect you’d enjoy the Café Trama as much as we did.

Café Trama, 83 rue du Cherche-Midi, 6th, Tel. 01-45-48-33-71. Metro: Rennes, Saint-Placide or Vaneau. Average 30 Euros.

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Pierre au Palais Royal: Asparagus with aioli Maltais, quails’ eggs, hazelnut gougeres

Though I certainly wouldn’t enjoy a meal in an ugly dining room, and actively avoid places that are too noisy (happily still less of a problem in Paris than in other cities I know well, notably New York and London), I’ll gladly admit, as I have many times before, that for me the appearance of a restaurant very much takes a backseat to the quality of what I find in my plate in terms of my overall judgement of its worth. To be sure there are a few restaurants in Paris–Le Train Bleu at the Gare de Lyon and, once in a blue moon, Vagenende (St-Germain-des-Pres) among them, that I’d go to mostly because they are so beautiful, but otherwise, I’m reflexively willing to overlook an unfortunate decor in favor of good food.

With this established, a recent meal at a Paris restaurant I’ve known for many years, Pierre au Palais Royal, set me to wondering about the advisability of my being so aesthetically forgiving. This first time I came here, sometime in the early nineties, this was a serious old-fashioned wood-paneled restaurant with pale pink table cloths (if memory serves me) and some decorative wrought iron work here and there. It was also among the favorite restaurants of a New York magazine editor, the late David Bruel, for whom I did a lot of work at the time that he was running an excellent travel magazine called European Travel & Life, and I have many happy memories of long jolly defiantly clock-ignoring meals here during which we’d all order foie gras, boeuf a la ficelle (beef tied with a noose of string so that it could be poached in hot bouillon) and at least two bottles of Pommard, followed by what David used to refer to as a snifter of “amber fluid.” No one eats or drinks like this anymore, alas, but I never walk by Pierre au Palais Royal without thinking of–and missing, those bawdy and bibulous evenings.

I gave up on Pierre au Palais Royal after the long-running owner sold it to someone who never really understood why the regulars liked it so much. Instead, he ruthlessly changed both the menu and the decor and scared everyone away. A few weeks ago, however, I read an eloge to this restaurant by French food critic Francois Simon. It made me eager to return to this much-loved old place, and so when a favorite Dutch friend who has just moved back to Amsterdam after many years in Paris and who has told us that he very much misses French food, came to town, I though this would be just the spot for a reunion dinner.

Arriving, we found the very tall Carel blinking and cringing in the harsh spot-lights above a table for four up front. The lighting was so bright, we all felt like we were sitting in a used-car lot, so I politely asked the very nice waitress if it could be turned down. Well, she and a colleague did all they could, but finally it turned out this dreadful lighting could not be adjusted, so the three of us moved to a table in the back of the restaurant, and once my eye balls had cooled off, I was able to see what an unfortunate new decor this place has been given. Think the type of tacky throw pillows embroidered in sequins with nonsensical sayings which are meant to be saucy but come off as more resonantly tacky you might see on a Riviera mega yacht: Bad Girls Have More Fun, and things like that, and worse, all of the chairs and the banquettes were covered in zebra stripe fabric.

Given the prices practiced here, and the equally misconceived serving style–the earnest and adorable young staff have been coached to behave in a solemn and very old-school way, which is the second seriously wrong footed aspect of the reboot here, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could imagine a congruence between the likely lunch crowd of world-class taste-makers in the design and fashion fields, French government officials, and seriously top drawer executive brass from a cross-section of businesses and such a silly and unoriginal decor.

In fact given the fact that Carel is a massively distinguished museum curator and art-historian, I couldn’t help but flinching on his behalf as I first took in the decor of this place.

Fleetingly, I thought of doing a bolter, but since we’d already ordered glasses of Champagne, this would have been complicated, plus it was raining that night and all of us were tired and hungry. So we stayed put. And in any event, the menu read well. So it was fat lukewarm green asparagus from the Luberon with hazelnut-studded goyeres, quails’ eggs and a sublime hybrid sauce–an aioli (garlic mayonnaise, bien sur) that had been thinned with a sauce Maltaise, a brilliantly old-fashioned sauce–hollandaise to which blood-orange juice has been added, that one almost never sees anymore, for me and Carel, and a tarte Tatin of boudin noire, red onion confit and shallot cream for Bruno.

Both of these starters were superb–spectacular produce perfectly prepared as part of intelligently creative compositions of balanced taste and texture. So I asked about the chef and was told that he’s a young Englishman of Polish origins, Konard Ceglowski, who worked at Gordon Ramsay and Simpson’s in London before he crossed the Channel to work at the Meurice and then as the last chef at Jacques Cagna before it closed.

Red mullet with fava beans and feta mousse

Crayfish stuffed rabbit with sauce Nantua

So the three of us had three different main courses. Carel had the grilled red mullet filets from the Ile d’Yeu with tapenade, fava beans, and feta mousse, while Bruno chose the crayfish-stuffed rabbit with fresh linguine and a tarragon-spiked sauce Nantua (a lovely old-fashioned crayfish cream sauce). Again, both of these dishes were excellent–perfect cooking times, exquisite produce, and delightfully off-center takes on Escoffier style French culinary classicism. I loved my line-caught Breton John Dory with baby squid, pousse pied (crunchy seaweed), and rosemary-scented grocchi, too. There was an impressive amount of work in this dish, and the quality of the produce was excellent, too.

To conclude, I finished up the rest of our excellent white Saint Joseph with a well-chosen and generously served cheese plate, while Carel had the brownie with sugar-syrup poached fennel and peanut butter ice cream and Bruno pounced on the honey-bergamot cheese cake with rhubarb compote and sour cherry ice cream. With delicious food, excellent service and terrific company, this was a delightful meal, and Pierre au Palais Royal once again wins a place on my go-to list for a seriously good sit-down feed. Oh, and did I mention that the decor here seems to take a leaf from a Las Vegas cocktail lounge?

Cockles with seared onions

Meanwhile, over on the Left Bank, there’s some terrific news from Fish La Boissonerie, one of the most popular restaurants in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, this Spring. To wit, with the arrival of young Ducasse trained Japanese chef Taku Sekine, Drew Harre and Juan Sanchez’s place has suddenly become one of the best modern bistros in Paris.

Dining with Bruno, Dorie and Michael the other night, we ate our way through almost the entire menu, which the very serious and earnest young Mr. Sekine told us will be changing every two or three days, and were hugely impressed. Our meal began with Chawanmushi with cockles, a sublime and very delicate steamed Japanese egg custard with tiny salty shellfish, and a complimentary starter of lamb sweetbreads with green asparagus in a brilliant sauce of cider and pan drippings.

Kimchi soupCoddled eggYellow pollackRoasted lamb

Other stand-out dishes from an excellent meal included a kimchi soup with grilled pork breast; coddled egg with parsley root, Swiss chard and roasted garlic; yellow pollack with curried cauliflower, garbanzo beans, and lime condiment; and roast lamb with baby peas and gnocci. Not only was the produce used in every dish uniformly excellent, but the intringuingly international flavor palates were impeccably mastered, too.

Fish has always been an exceptionally convivial restaurant with an outstanding wine list and just-fine food. With the handsomely renovated dining room–the lighting is now vastly improved by a row of retro globe lamps overhead, and Sekine leading a hugely talented team in the kitchen, it suddenly becomes a serious destination restaurant. This will inevitably make it a lot busier, which means that locals used to ambling in the door and finding a table would now be well-advised to book in advance.

Pierre au Palais Royal, 10 rue de Richelieu, 1st, Tel. 01-42-96-09-17. Metro: Louvre-Rivoli, Palais Royal, Closed Saturday lunch and Sunday. Lunch menu 33 Euros, prix-fixe menus 38, 44, 70 100 Euros, average a la carte 70 Euros. www.pierreaupalaisroyal.com

Fish La Boissonerie, 69 rue de Seine, 6th, Tel. 01-43-54-34-69. Metro: Mabillon, Saint-Germain-des-Pres. Open daily. Prix-fixe 35 Euros.

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As someone who passionately loves good food, there’s nothing I find more fascinating than the privilege of visiting a working restaurant kitchen. When they’re busy and well-directed, working kitchens often offer the same magnificent but unselfconscious spectacle of the physical and cerebral metaphysically melded together as one finds at the ballet, the difference being that dance is usually better lit and deprived of the same olfactory teasing a kitchen subjects you to.

So I was delighted when the friend who’d invited me to the ‘Diner des Chefs’ four-handed dinner cooked in tandem by chefs David Toutain (Agape Substance) and Alexandre Couillon (La Marine) wangled us behind the kitchen doors for a few minutes before we ordered our meal. This was a special night in the kitchen of Le Premier, one of the two open-to-the-public teaching restaurants at the Ecole Ferrandi, the school of culinary trades in the 6th arrondissement which has recently trained many of the most distinguished chefs in France, including Adeline Grattard (Yam’Tcha), Bertrand Grebaut (Septime), William Ledeuil (Ze Kitchen Galerie), Francois Pasteau (L’Epi Dupin), and Matthieu Viannay (La Mere Brazier, Lyon), among many others. Just before the night got very busy, the last prep was being done in this immaculate kitchen by a bunch of poignantly eager, intense and very serious young students under the direction of the school’s permanent fulltime teaching professors, while Toutain and Couillon met with students in smaller groups to go over the details of the plates they’d be cooking and serving together.

Back at the table with several other friends, we sipped Champagne and enjoyed the expectant atmosphere in a dining room that’s unlike any other in Paris–the lighting may be a little harsh, but the joyous sort of maternity-ward atmosphere here just brims with expectation and a desire to please, and the first indication that this would be a slam-dunk of an evening in terms of great food was a stunningly beautiful little amuse-bouche of dressed crabmeat in a pool of deeply reduced shellfish bouillon by David Toutain. Then while waiting for our first course, our table with British, Brazilian and American guests, shared an interesting conversation on the current state of food in Paris–even if the quality of the food in its brasseries and cafes remains pretty much appalling, the city’s in the midst of a pretty spectacular revival of the neighborhood bistro recoined for a new century, and just exactly why this revival is taking place. Well, we didn’t really have to look very far or very hard for an answer to this last question: the awesome and thoroughly admirable rigor of a classic French culinary education equips young chefs who train at the Ecole Ferrandi to spread their wings with real confidence, because they know how to do everything. And armed with a deep knowledge of the past, it’s easier to dare a bit of modernity and succeed. One of the huge global misapprehensions about professional cooking is that it’s all about creativity (much of this nonsense comes from the inane cooking shows that have become so popular). It’s not. Instead it’s all about a relentlessly rigorous execution of technique and ferociously exigent and ingenious sourcing…with a just pinch of creativity.

For the first course of this special meal, we had a choice between ‘egg, corn, cumin seeds’ or ‘sea scallop, parsnip, blueberry,’ or Toutain and Couillon respectively. On a raw night, anything with an egg was irresistible to me, and the exquisitely comforting little dish that arrived is something I could eat a pair of everyday for breakfast for the rest of my life–a perfectly poached egg yolk on a sunny creamy bed of corn pudding with wands of cumin-spiked corn bread. Next up, a choice between scallops with romanesco (green cauliflower) and Madras curry or cod with butternut emulsion, goat milk and mint. Both dishes were excellent, and emblematic of the type of superb contemporary French cooking students at the Ecole Ferrandi are learning today.

Though this dinner was a one-off event, it still served as a discreet showcase of the skills of the current class of students at the Ecole Ferrandi, and they cook to such an exceptionally impressive level that I’m really looking forward to coming back for a ‘normal’ service.

A superb composition of rosy veal with bluefloot mushrooms in clove emulsion and a gorgeous chocolate-caramel-coffee-cream pastry with clementine-pear coulis round-out this excellent meal, an evening of real charm heightened by flawless service and the awareness that we were some of the luckiest guineau pigs in Paris. The friend who invited me advised me to try dinner on Monday or Tuesday at the more intimate Le 28 the next time I come, which I’ll look forward to, but the other mental note I made is that the 25 Euro lunch menu at Le Premier is excellent value for money in a setting where the tables are widely spaced and there’s lots of sunlight during the day. So it’s an original and very convenient spot for a business meal or a tete a tete on the Left Bank. And of course the implicit fun of dining here is that you may very well catch a rising star before he or she becomes fodder for the Michelin guide.

L’Ecole Ferrandi, 28 rue de l’Abbe Gregoire, 6th, Tel. 01-49-54-17-31 (mornings only) or email resaresto@ccip.fr. for reservations in the school’s restaurants. Mo Saint Placide or Rennes. Opening hours: Le Premier – Tues-Fri for lunch, 25 Euros; Occasional Thursdays for dinner, 40 Euros; Le 28 – Wed-Fri for lunch, 30 Euros; Mon, Tues for dinner, 40 Euros. www.ferrandi-paris.fr

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After dinner at the new The Beef Club the other night, however, I’m starting to have some serious doubts about what this trend means for Paris. If the food scene in every major city is in constant evolution, Paris isn’t every major city. It’s much smaller than London and New York, and without the same jumped-up financial sectors as those two cities, there’s less money to spin the wheels of the local restaurant industry, which is already struggling for a variety of distinctly local factors like the moronic 35 hour work week (whoever France’s next president may be, I hope they’ll renounce this daft Ruby Goldberg feint at economics once and for all).

What this means is that a big trend here has a lot more impact that it would in a larger city with a more lavish expense-account dining culture. A perfect–and rather sorry–example is the fact that almost everytime a neighborhood cafe or brasserie is remodeled these days, it turns up with a faux Costes brothers restaurant style decor. Though they’re definite signs Parisians are finally becoming bored by the Costes restaurants, the ripple effect of their success is still being copied everywhere. They were the ones who pioneered the local idea of well-sourced brand-name products instead of real cooking, and they also launched a whole sad battery of recipes that are more about assembling things on plates–salmon tartare, sliced tomatoes and mozzarella, etc., or just plain applying some heat here and there than are about the transformational art of cooking. And the new wave of Paris burger restaurants and steakhouses are basically just taking a leaf from the same playbook, since they’re all about prestige sourcing, too–meat from star butchers like Yves-Marie Le Bourdonnec or Hugo Desnoyer, plus a smattering of tantalizing culinary snobberies like moutarde de Meaux or Ogleshield cheese, and the smart art of grilling.

So the menu at The Beef Club offers a rather wilting and warning boilerplate of things that are likely to become ubiquitous in Paris, and what bothers me most about this is that they’re not French. I’m very far from being a gastronomic protectionist, but I honestly don’t understand why the beef served at The Beef Club comes from farmer Tim Wilson’s farm in Yorkshire (yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s grass-fed and the breeds are different from what you find in France, but so what–give me Bazas beef or Charolais or Blonde d’Aquitaine any day), but most of all I just don’t get this completely misbegotten and off-kilter version of a New York City steakhouse cross-bred with some wispy English version of same  and then lightly extruded through a French sensibility. Paris already has several superb steak restaurants, like Le Severo, so why do we need the Peter Luger modeled, super market-researched The Beef Club when what we’re really short of in the City of Light these days are good French bistros?

On the basis of the crowd there the other night–lots of younger affluent but fashionably bedraggled Parisians who checked their iPhones and Blackberries constantly through dinners with which they mostly drank Coca-Cola Light, I am light years away from being part of the target demographic. Still, I might have liked this place if the food had been better than average and the service half-decent. Since starters were expensive and neither original nor very appealing–Caesar salad, Scotch Egg with salad, and grilled rabbit livers, among others, we went directly to the main courses.

   I had a very sorry 23 Euro “Beef Burger” (as the Brits call hamburgers, a puzzling but precious little beat of verbal snobbery), a tasteless and rather overcooked burger on a stale roll that exhibited almost none of the promised garnishes of “bacon, grilled onions, lettuce, pickles, red leicester, ogleshield and sauce maison au whisky” and a side of ho-hum frites cooked in duck fat. The others had steaks, which were good, but in no way memorable, and we drank the cheapest red on the wine list, a Gigondas at 29 Euros.

To be fair, service was doubtless off its game because the restaurant had been reconfigured to accomodate two large tables of French food bloggers, but the amateurish and absent-minded behavior of everyone who waited on us drove Michael and Dorie right up the wall. We glanced at the menu for dessert–cheesecake, bien sur; chocolate mousse with crushed pecans and salted caramel sauce; or a fruit salad on a bed of passionfruit mousse, and decided to pass.

“I hate this restaurant,” the normally sugar-sprinkled Dorie exclaimed while we were waiting for the bill, which a waitress finally deposited on the table with an, “Et voila!”

With an an average meal running at least 60 Euros a head at The Beef Club, I couldn’t help but comparing this place to La Rotonde, where I’d had dinner a few nights before with Bruno. There, in a grand old dining room with a decor recalling the first-class dining carriages of another era–brass coat rails and fringed silk-shaded lamps, it was a pleasure to sink into an atmosphere so profoundly Parisian. To be sure, tourists fill the glassed in terrace of this historic Montparnasse brasserie, but the low-lit booths in back are still the haunt of a cross-section of Gallic captains of industry and Left Bank power brokers, and the impeccably calibrated service–polite, alert, vaguely deferential and exquisitely wry, couldn’t possibly be more old school French, which meant that I just lapped it up.

I’d hadn’t been to La Rotonde in at least twenty years, and so had almost no memory of the food whatsoever. And truth be told, I wasn’t expecting much, because I never expect much from Paris brasseries anymore. So what were we doing here Bruno was craving oysters, I was hungry for meat, it was late, and we’d just been to a gallery show of a friend’s photographs around the corner. So Bruno went with the 39 Euro menu, which brought him six Quiberon oysters, sea bass in preserved-lemon sauce on a bed of wild rice and one of the best millefeuilles I’ve had in Paris for a very longtime.

I went with some oysters, too, and then had an outstanding steak tartare made with beef from butcher Hugo Desnoyer and so generously served I almost couldn’t finish it. The tartare came with beautiful little mesclun salad and freshly made frites, and even though the ever dieting Bruno wasn’t drinking that night in penance for a lot of Sagrantino recently consumed in Umbria, I was able to make myself happy with a little 25 cl carafe of white Macon to start, and then the same measure of a good inky Colombo cotes du Rhone before I forced Bruno to share his millefeuille with me.

You won’t get to eyeball the millefeuille, because our pretty blonde waitress knowingly and neatly divided it in half before she served us, and it looked so good that I immediately devoured my half before thinking to record it for posterity. If the menu at La Rotonde name dropped a bit–the Saint Marcellin was from the cranky La Mere Richard in Lyon, sorbets from Berthillon, veal chop and a few other tasty morsels from Hugo Desnoyer, what I quickly understood was that the quality of this restaurant is so supervailing you really don’t even need these hang tags. I can’t remember the last time the little playing-card squares of rye bread served with an order of oysters were actually good–they’re invariably stale and taste like baked dust, but here the bread was delicious. So the next time I’m hankering after a meaty comfort-food feed, I’ll give a definite miss to all of the new ‘Anglo-Saxon’ restaurants in Paris, and head for La Rotonde, where I’ll order the 39 Euro menu, and have the following meal.

1) Terrine du moment de Gilles Vérot

2) Gigot d’Agneau de Lozère (Hugo Desnoyer) rôti aux herbes, jus et garniture

3) Baba au vieux rhum ambré

I’m really looking forward to it, too.

The Beef Club, 58 rue Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1st, Tel. 09-52-52-89-34. Metro: Les Halles, Louvre-Rivoli. Dinner only, Tuesday to Saturday. Average 60 Euros.

La Rotonde, 105 boulevard Montparnasse, 6th, Tel. 01-43-26-48-26. Metro: Vavin. Open daily. Prix-fixe menu 39 Euros. Average a la carte 50 Euros.

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So it was with a somewhat anguished reluctance to be critical that I met my friend Christian for dinner at Juan and Drew’s new place, Semilla, just a few doors away from Fish la Boissonerie, the other night. I really wanted the food to be good so that I wouldn’t enter that awkward twisting-in-the-wind space between being a good egg–they’re too many fawning Paris food websites around, and doing my job as a writer. The problem, you see, is that if the food hadn’t been good, I’d have to say so irregardless of what feathers might be ruffled in the small pond of people who write about restaurants in English in Paris. So do I like being critical–not especially, but it comes with the territory, and I got used to it a longtime ago, since I learned this job while working for one of the best  restaurant critics to have come along in my lifetime, Ruth Reichl, of the late and but still lamented GOURMET Magazine.

Since Christian likes white Cheverny, we tucked into a carafe of same–wines on the terrific list at Semilla, which means ‘seed’ in Spanish, come by the glass, carafe and bottle and are well-chosen and reasonably priced, especially for this expensive Paris turf. Since we hadn’t seen each other in ages, we were chatting up a storm and almost chronically incapable of paying attention to the menu and ordering dinner, but then the somewhat theatrical impatience of the waiter, who had been here since the days that this space was the never very good Le Temps Perdu, brought us in for a landing.

Okay, so we’d start with half portions of the smoked salmon and the Corsican charcuterie from Pascal Fiori, and then share an order of the griddled shitake mushrooms, before rather unimaginatively both having the blanquette de veau with a side of ratte potatoes with braised garlic. To be sure, there were lots of other terrific sounding dishes on the menu–among them, a rib steak for two with bordelaise sauce, squid risotto with a persillade, and yellow pollack with celery puree and meat jus, but since both of us had been traveling non-stop for the previous couple of weeks, this was one meal where we wanted to eat what we wanted to eat (I remain alarmingly convinced that I consumed at least an entire cow during my recent trip to South America). And in the meantime, this place looked great, with big exposed shiny metal ventilation ducts overhead and exposed stone walls, or more new Barcelona bistro than Paris actually, and the crowd was lively, keen and attractive. In fact for a brand new restaurant, this place already felt like a neighborhood institution, which was very telling.

I could easily have eaten a platter of the nice meaty shitake mushrooms, but we decorously made due with three, which were dressed Spanish style with good oil, Xeres vinegar and chives, and then we greedily tucked into one of the best blanquette de veau I’ve ever had, tender veal in a silken gently acidulated sauce with shavings of green asparagus, fava beans and other Spring vegetables. This dish was so good, in fact, that I momentarily drifted out of our conversation, carried downstream by the thought that this is a restaurant that I know I’ll be eating in often during the months to come and so really looking forward to seeing how the menu evolves through the seasons. I was also musing that this just might be the best new Sunday night address in Paris when Christian lasooed me back to our conversation. “This is just so good,” he said, noting that it was the first time his appetite had quickened since having caught a bug while traveling in Asia.

So now I was curious about who was in the kitchen and asked the heroically theatrical waiter. He explained that it was a young team of chefs from the first-rate Ecole Ferrandi, which is probably where I’d go in Paris today if I wanted a serious professional culinary formation, under the auspices of Meilleur Ouvrier de France (MOF) Eric Trochon: Somehow this didn’t surprise me, because this food was so fresh, sincere, tender and young. Desserts sound terrific, too–citrus-fruit soup with orange-flower ice cream, shortbread with lemon cream and meringue, aloe vera cream with exotic fruits and a caramel tuile, but lavishly well fed and happy, we decided to share a nice assortment of cheeses from Quatrehomme and take a walk on the sweet side of things next time round. One way or another, this is a terrific restaurant, and a stand-out in a city where there’s a brilliant and ever burgeoning offer of cosmopolitan bistro cooking with good old-fashioned French bones.

Semilla, 54 rue de Seine, 6th, Tel. 01-43-54-34-50 . Metro: Mabillon, Odéon & Saint-Germain des Prés. Lunch menu 19 € (starter, main course), dessert 8 €, a la carte 20-50 €.

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I’m usually a little wary of dining on the rue Guisarde, which is part of the lively little precinct of bars and pubs that comprise a still very popular party destinations for unattached twenty and thirty something Parisians, because this ‘hood is more about booze than good food. But motivated by potent Hellenic cravings, and curious, we decided to give this small place the benefit of the doubt.

With an exception or two, Greek cooking is badly represented in Paris, with all of those ratty restaurants in the Latin Quarter with identikit kebab menus constituting the real nadir of a generally lackluster local offer, but Evi Evane surprised right off the bat because it was a very pretty dining room with old stone walls, a beamed ceiling and well-set tables. This was a chic Greek. The welcome was warm, too, and most importantly of all, it smelled good as soon as we opened the front door. And even the Retsina that we drank as an aperitif while nibbling fat Kalamata olives tasted good–I’d sworn this stuff off ever since an imprudent New Year’s Eve on Corfu many years ago had nearly left me and my friends walking with white sticks.

The menu was appealing, too, and the presence of many AOC (Appellation d’Origine Controle) ingredients was a promising sign as well. When I mentioned the feta from Limnos specified on the menu, the waiter explained that chef Dina Nikalaou, a well-known Greek culiinary personality who divides her time between France and Greece, and her sister Maria, who runs the traiteur, import much of their produce directly from Greece. So Bruno began with the best white tarama I’ve ever tasted–an airy cream of salted cod eggs, bread crumbs, milk and olive oil subtly brightened by microscopic pieces of pickled lemon and served with the first pita bread I’ve ever had in Paris that didn’t have the texture of a hot floor tile. My shrimp saganaki was superb, too–crunchy shrimp in an anise-spiked tomato sauce with melted chunks of feta, which is a brilliant cooking cheese even if most people know it only from Greek salads.

Though very tempted by the stifado rabbit with feta polenta, I couldn’t resist the soutzoukakia, or delicate baked veal meatballs with tomato sauce and good thick yogurt and a nice side of rice with Corinth raisins and pine nuts. Though I’d learned how to make them from the wife of the butcher we go to in Paros, these were, I’d humbly admit, much better, with an almost creamy texture that has somehow or another eluded me. Bruno loved his fig-stuffed pork loin, too, and both dishes were generously served and exuded the gentle solicitude of good Greek home cooking instead of the anonymity of precisely prepared restaurant food.

I’d very much have liked to try the plate of three different Greek cheeses, but being amply well-fed, I finished up with portokalopita, a warm orange cake with chocolate ice cream that also conveyed the maternal good intentions of the kitchen here, and Bruno chose the sampler of Greek yogurt with three different toppings–honey and walnuts, strawberry preserves, and black cherry preserves. “It was like a little trip to Greece,” Bruno said when we traded this sunny dining room for the wet sidewalks of Paris, and he was right. This was an excellent meal, and I look forward to returning to try the Nikalaou’s moussaka, a favorite dish I never order in restaurants, because it’s invariably gorged with oil. I’m sure it would be good here, and it’s great to know that there’s a place in Paris I can head to when I get a craving for sincere, serious and solacing Aegean cooking.

10 rue Guisarde, 6th, Tel. 01-43-54-97-86. Metro: Mabillon or Saint-Germain-des-Pres. Closed Sunday and Monday. Average 35 Euros.

————–

Sometimes it’s best to be laconic. I love Vietnamese food, as do some friends who were recently visiting from California, and this is why we ended up at Le Lotus Blanc, a dusty little restaurant in the 7th arrondissement just a few steps from their hotel. Suffice it to say that they were seriously jet-lagged, but game for dinner, because this was the only night that cross-hatched in our schedules. I hadn’t been here for many, many years, and quickly realized why–though our nems were decent enough, the steamed Vietnamese ravioli came to the table in an alarming bath of murky water and had no taste whatsoever. Travers de porc, or spareribs, turned out to be gristly, boneless pieces of pork with a slightly gritty texture and no hint of the lemongrass mentioned on the menu, curried shrimp with mint tasted like the peppermint candies left behind by turndown service in a motel, and slabs of tofu came in a variant of the same unfortunate sauce. I probably wouldn’t even bother to mention this place were it not for the fact that I happened to notice a framed TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence 2011 on the wall amidst snap shots of Jacques Chirac and various other politicians who’ve dined here. The moral of the story Be very wary of the gastronomic endorsements of the French political establishment.

Le Lotus Blanc, 45 Rue Bourgogne, 7th, tel. 01-45-55-18-89. Metro: Varenne or Solferino. Closed Sunday. Average 35 Euros.

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Brilliant young chef Alexandre Gauthier has just opened eight striking new ‘huttes,’ or cabins, designed by architect Patrick Bouchain, and as long as you pack a good book or two, you’ll have a terrific time here, since these a cozy, all black roosts that come with iPod dock, televisions, coolers stocked with Ch’Ti beer, apple juice and mineral water, and soaking tubs set next to picture windows that overlook the surrounding meadows.

Avocado and monkfish in seawater

The main reason you’ll be here, though, is to eat, since Gauthier is one of the top five young chefs working in France today. Stopping by for dinner the other night, I had an astonishingly good and absolutely fascinating meal in this three century old auberge’s striking new dining room. Dinner began with sea bass carpaccio interleaved with razor-fine slices of nectarine, and continued with a suite of superb dishes, among them a cube of avocado and monkfish in a shallow pool of sea water, green pea gnocci with pea shoots, frog’s legs meuniere, roasted lobster served in smoldering boughs of juniper, and rare beef with salicorne (seaweed) and a nest of grated potatoes in a gentle garlic cream. I loved the grande finale of this meal, too, which occurred when a beautiful young waitress arrived and threw of a transparent sugar globe full of sorrel mousse into plate. Both of us laughed, and the refreshingly astringent mousse was a brilliant conclusion to this meal.

Green pea gnocci with pea shoots

In addition to his 110 Euro eleven-course tasting menu, Gauthier also offers eight dishes for 85 Euros and an a la carte menu. And if you decide you want something tamer, Gauthier also runs an excellent rotisserie restaurant, Froggy’s Tavern, five minutes away in the charming town of Montreuil.

La Grenouillère, La Madelaine-sous-Montreuil, Tel. 011-33-3-21-06-07-22, Closed March, 20 December-4 February, Tuesday and Wednesday except July-August, www.lagrenouillere.fr

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