Arnaud Nicolas @ Anne-Emmanuelle Thion

In Paris, Arnaud Nicolas, 34, has launched a spectacularly succulent revolution at the new restaurant and boutique that bears his name on the leafy Avenue de la Bourdonnais in the ever so discreetly chic 7th Arrondissement.

Arnaud Nicolas @Betil-Balkan

Stopping by this elegant pair of rooms with oak parquet floors, exposed stone walls and beams, and battle-ship gray paintwork for dinner the other night, Nicolas was intently concentrated on cutting a slice of a superb looking pâté en croûte for a older woman with a spun-sugar chignon and a belted calico shirt dress that matched her eyes. I was watching her watching him when she glanced at me and smiled. “This is what I’m having for dinner tonight. A slice of this nice young man’s exquisite pâté en croûte, a green salad and a glass of good wine,” she said with dogmatic satisfaction.

Turned sideways, the poultry pate studded with foie gras resembled a beautiful piece of some rare stone except that it was framed with a delicate envelope of impeccable egg-washed pastry. “You absolutely must try it, Monsieur–it’s exquisite!” said the charming woman. “You know, it’s rather nice to have a new vice, especially at my age!” she added, and exited the boutique with an eager spring in her step. As if it were necessary, she confirmed for me that vanity is a major life force, and later in the evening, I couldn’t help but wondering what she wore during her wonderful little supper. Did she remain in the shirt dress, or maybe slip into something more comfortable, perhaps a shot silk dressing gown she’d bought in Saigon many years ago And what perfume was she wearing I’ll never know, but these new mysteries to gnaw make me love living in a big city.

Bruno and I were ushered into the loft-like masculine-feeling dining room and were studying the decidedly alluring menu over a glass of white wine when Nicolas stopped by our table to comment the menu.

“My idea here is to create a showcase for the great French art of charcuterie and to seduce Parisians into wanting to eat it again,” he explained. “Because so many people have only ever tasted industrial charcuterie, this ancient, delicious and very nourishing part of the French diet has experienced a certain disaffection during the last few years, and this is normal when you see what they sell in supermarkets. The absence of real charcuterie in most towns and cities has been accelerated by a drastic decline in the number of professional French charcutiers. Last year, there were only a thousand students learning to become charcutiers in a country of almost sixty million people. So I want to bring la charcuterie back, to make it modern and appealing in the same way that a new generation of patissiers have renewed the art of pastry in Paris,” Nicolas explained.

I told him that we’d been thinking of starting with the quail-and-dried-fruit pate and the poultry-and-foie-gras one, and he suggested we come to the shop next door to inspect them and see the other possibilities (the restaurant is reached through a door from the shop). Frankly, all of the terrines and pâté en croûte were so beautiful looking we’d have been happy with any of them, but Nicolas suggested he create a sampler for us that would include the two we’d already chosen, plus a little couronne du porc, an all-pork terrine in pastry, and some of his luscious looking head cheese.

Cod with quinoa and wild arugula jus @Anne Emmanuelle Thion

Ducking with grilled onions @ Anne-Emmanuelle Thion

Bruno likes head cheese so much he was practically yelping by the time we returned to the table to taste the white Pic Saint Loup I’d ordered to accompany our meal. For our mains, we agreed to try two of Nicolas’s other homemade victuals, a lobster boudin and a lamb sausage served with a puree of Agen prunes. There were lots of other appealing dishes on the menu, though, including cod with baby artichokes, yellow pollack with cockles and a shellfish jus, entrecôte, and grilled duckling with baby onions.

The two pâté en croûtes were among the most elegant foods I’ve ever eaten. The fragility of their crumbly crust was a perfect foil to the earthy carnal loam of meats they surrounded, and the seasoning of each pate was impeccable. There was no salt or pepper on our table, and not only was none needed, it would have been sacrilegious to use either. The distant sweetness of dried fruit teased the quiet farmyard taste of the quail in the one, while the foie gras was a luxurious emollient to the tender chunks of mixed fowl bound with forcemeat. The head cheese in a parsley-brightened aspic packed a porcine punch, and the pork terrine made with a variety of different cuts–throat, shoulder, leg, etc. was remarkable for being refined and rustic at the same time. This charcuterie was ecstatically good.

It reminded me of the first time I’d ever eaten a real French terrine, as seriously broke student visiting Paris from London where I was sharing an unheated Maisonette with a hot-water-heater the size of small pail with five other people. A friend and I came to Paris on an Inter-rail pass and stayed with his sister-in-law from Philadelphia, who was living on the Ile Saint Louis following a bad divorce. She was a hand-bag designer by trade, but managed to get through a bottle of White Label every day while we were out visiting museums, and because she didn’t cook, she bought prepared food from the traiteur around the corner every night–grated carrot salad, celeri remoulade, marinated artichokes, various cheeses, and, one night, several slices of pistachio-nut studded veal terrine that was staggeringly delicious. In fact, I yearned for that very same pate for years until I found something very close to it a few years ago at butcher Hugo Desnoyer’s boutique in the 16th Arrondissement. Suffice it to say, I am besotted with charcuterie in its every iteration, and I don’t think I’ve ever eaten better in my life than what I had at Arnaud Nicolas’s.

If the lobster boudin was beautifully made, with generous chunks of claw and tail meat suspended in a fine stuffing, we both loved the lamb sausage. The coarse meat was pleasantly lean but very flavorful, with a sauve jus of roast-lamb cooking juices and the Agen plum puree that paired unexpectedly well with this meat. And yet–it occurred to me, I had once had a wonderful lamb tagine with prunes in Fez. Clearly, Nicolas has a sophisticated and world-roving palate.

At the end of our meal we were so sated we just sat and smiled at each other in amiable silence, that great luxury of a happy couple. Then the waiter arrived to talk about dessert. Neither of us really wanted any, but he plied us. “I think our Baba au Rhum is the best in Paris,” he taunted, and after a bit of fascinating chat from him about how rum and tea tasting have a great deal in common in terms of the flavors and aromas one detects, we agreed to split one. And it was sublime.

Though Arnaud Nicolas is not a place to which I will go often, because I want to keep it as a special pleasure, it’s immediately become one of my favorite Paris restaurants.

46 avenue de la Bourdonnais, 7th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-45-55-59-59. Métro : École Militaire. Open for lunch and dinner from Monday to Saturday. Closed Sunday.  Week-day lunch menu 32 Euros, Pirx-fixe menu 35 Euros. Average a la carte 50 Euros. www.arnaudnicolas.paris Google Maps

The post Arnaud Nicolas, Paris | Exquisite Charcuterie and More, A-/B+ appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

@Romain Laprade

The Divellec is one of the most beautiful new restaurants to open in Paris for a very longtime. As wonderfully louche as Studio K.O.’s Miami-meets-1940s Casablanca-in-Paris decor may be, however, what always matters most to me at a restaurant is the food, which is superb. Still, even though the seafood cooking at this venerable old-school  fish house overlooking the Esplanade des Invalides on the Left Bank has been brilliantly rebooted by young chef Matthieu Pacaud, the son of Bernard Pacaud of the three star L’Ambroise on the Place des Vosges, this reopening has gone oddly under-remarked in a city as food-loving and mad for fish as Paris.

Sea bass carpaccio with citrus zest@Jacques Gavard

There are several reasons for this. First, the public relations firm charged with the relaunch emphasized the revived restaurant’s decor over its kitchen. This is doubtless because the chic Paris based Studio K.O. firm, which did the interiors of madly popular Chiltern Firehouse hotel and restaurant in London, also signed the new look for Divellec, too. But unless you’re enough of an interior-design nut to know who Studio K.O. is, it’s hard to see why any restaurant would emphasise its decor–gorgeous though it may be, over its food.

Then the restaurant had also been closed for three years after founder Jacques Le Divellec retired in 2013, so it fell off of a lot of people’s radars, and then those who remembered it, probably had an idea of a place that was slightly stuffy, somnolent and very expensive. Finally, Divellec is located in a very quiet, wealthy, well-guarded, older part of Paris, so it was unlikely to immediately gain much traction with the city’s best young food writers, those types who’d rather go belly to the bar at Clamato.

@Yann Deret

So with all of this in mind on a cold misty Sunday night as Bruno and I walked to dinner here for the first time since the reboot in a companionable silence, my expectations were vague. The truth, you see, is that I’d never actually had a meal at the former Le Divellec, a fusty bastion of politicians and captains of industry at noon, and the same in the evening with their mistresses, that I’d actually enjoyed. To be sure, I had once eaten a sublime grilled lobster a l’Amoricaine here with a stunning bottle of Mersault as the guest of an Irish banker whose freckled cherubic face existed as the perfect foil to his psycho-sexual perversion. But my last meal here, oh at least a good ten years before the lights went out in 2013, was my most memorable, since I had been invited to lunch by one of the most powerful and un-repentently honest food critics in France.

What I remember was the soft stale fishy smell of the dining room, the witheringly haughty service, and an awful lot of bland white sauce lashed all over everything. “How would you describe this meal, Alec#8221; the esteemed critic asked me. “Hotel du Lac,” I replied. He looked blank. “That’s the title of the British novelist Anita Brookner’s novel about a lonely middle-aged single woman who goes on holiday to a sad, sedate, anonymous, expensive hotel on a Swiss lake. She takes all of her meals in the hotel, and even though few of them are described, I imagine that they’d have been like this, soulless under-seasoned over-cooked luxury cooking,” I explained.

No one recognised the critic until after our very disappointing main courses were being cleared away. Then a silent thunder bolt shoot through the room, and a frantic Commedia dell’Arte like performance began when we were served an insanely generous portion of Beluga caviar with shocking speed.

@Romain Laprade

“Oh Mon Dieu,” the critic sighed when the glistening black fish eggs were brought to the table with blinis. “Please….,” he said, waving his hands. “We’ve finished our meal already.” The face of the older waiter who’d just served us was a rigid mask of fear. “I think this might be the best dessert ever invented,” he said, a great line delivered with a poignantly plaintive smile–he was, after all, the solider on the front lines. The half beat of silence encouraged him. “It would be a shame to waste it now,” he said, his body locked in a half-bow. Silence. More silence. A short negative head shake. Several hundred Euros of caviar departed to an uncertain fate, and the scene stirred a ripple in the dining room, a place I always thought of as a theater of unwanted kisses, since the people who paid the bills here were usually avaricious, physically or psychologically, with their guests. You know, the lupine old man with his mistress, the curmudgeonly grandmother making menacing remarks to her grandchildren about the uncertainty of their inheritances, the broken middle-aged couples on the edge of a divorce caused by an infidelity they didn’t have the spleen left to discuss.

This is how restaurants get a reputation in our collective consciousness, with some being tagged as warm and happy, others cold and melancholy. So even if Le Divellec of yore was a storied table that once had a Michelin star, maybe two, and served reliably fresh classically prepared seafood, I think I’d be hard put to find very many Parisians who remember actually having had a good time here. So as we reached the front door, I found myself hoping this curse might have been lifted.

Fair’s fair. Sunday night is not an optimum time to judge any restaurant more ambitious than a brasserie, so as we were seated in a pretty grass-cloth upholstered room with low lighting and lots of plants, I thought, well, what I’m hoping for is just a good meal, not a revelation.

Scallop carpaccio with caviar @ Jacques Gavard

You see the old Le Divellec kind of missed the boat when it came to a sea change in fish cookery that was launched in Paris at the beginning of the 1980s by Gerard Allemandou at La Cagouille and the Minchelli brothers at Le Duc, both in Montparnasse. What they espoused was a bracing just-plucked-out-of-the-sea minimalism that was more Japanese in approach and theory than French.

The self-taught Minchelli, a native of Marseille who now runs Le 21, a confidential and very good little fish house in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, cast off the robes of Escoffier–his sauces, and served fish almost naked.  He invented this dead simple approach to seafood cookery while running his first restaurant, Le Duc, on the Ile de Re, which he later moved to Montparnasse. Long before anyone understood fish would soon become a luxury food, Minchelli was cooking it in such a way as to enhance its natural taste and texture, his reasoning being that it was so good as nature made it that it needed almost nothing more.

Some twenty-five years later, Minchelli’s approach, now adopted by most other Parisian chefs, exhibits its dazzling prescience more strongly than ever. But Pacaud picks up where Minchelli left off is with a new sense of gastronomic wit and puckish aesthetics that this now vintage school of seafood minimalism had been wanting. To wit, yes, we know we should be eating species of fish that are not threatened with extinction, mackerel instead of cod, for example. Yes, we know we should eat lighter, cleaner and less. But on the other hand, even if these lessons have rightly become so integrated into the culinary behavior of modern Paris, it’s still an occasional pleasure to veer off course, or to chose pleasure as a direction over any other point on the compass. So the challenge is to create contemporary fish dishes that don’t mask the natural flavor of the fish but are also inventive, festive, attractive and even a little bit amusing.

This is what I thought while an array of very pleasant hors d’oeuvres began our meal–an oyster napped with peppery watercress sauce and dabbed with herring eggs, a single butter-roasted scallop with a coin of fragrant black truffle and a wood-sorrel corsage. This succession of little dishes did exactly what good hors d’oeuvres always do, which is to offer teasing glimpses of the kitchen’s gastronomic garter belt to excite expectations for the meal to come.

The menu was totally tantalizing, too, especially since I’d decided to play the old what-the-hell card, too. By this I mean, that in today’s world everyone I know is so desperately over-worked to such a degree they rarely take the time to spontaneously enjoy themselves. You know, to just say, ‘Okay, screw it. I’m turning off my phone and my computer until Monday, and I’m just going to have a good time without planning it in advance. We work like dogs, we’re not machines, and if we don’t anoint ourselves with the occasional extravagance, what’s the point of the whole thing, i.e., a career#8221; Bruno looked a bit wan when I suggested we just go ahead and enjoy ourselves, because aside from some reasonably priced prix-fixe menus, the a la carte tarifs are pretty stiff.

I was extremely tempted by the tuna-and-dried-fruit pastilla with a coriander and ‘virgin’ celery reduction to start, but finally settled on ecrevisses, meaty little crayfish from Alpine lakes that are rarely seen on Paris menus, with a passionfruit vinaigrette and a cauliflower ‘zephir’ (sort of a soft custard of the same vegetable) at 65 Euros, while Bruno couldn’t resist the sea bass carpaccio with green apple gelee, crushed mixed peppercorns and citrus zest (38 Euros).

If the sea bass carpaccio was exquisite, my crayfish were too timidly seasoned and the cauliflower cream reminded me more of the old Le Divillec than the new one (and in case you were wondering, yes, it lost its article, ‘Le’ in the reboot and is now known just as Divellec) and was also a bit stodgy eighties vintage Robuchon in logic. Maybe the dish would have worked better if the passionfruit vinaigrette was more vivid, since it was nearly undetectable. That said, the crayfish were succulent, sweet and perfectly cooked.

The wine the natty sommelier suggested, a Romorantin from the upper Loire, was as perfect with his meal as his nimble commentary on the bottle. Without being showy, he mentioned that it had been one of the French king Charles V’s favorite wines and that the region was one of the extremely rare ones in France that had not been devastated by phylloxera in the 19th century, so the ancient root stock of the vines that produced the grapes from the wine was made is as powerful an expression of an intriguing and little known French terroir as one could hope for. Formal though he was, he was a very nice man who allowed as how he’d worked in California for many years and had recently returned to France, too.

The Sunday night tables around us were obviously having a good time, too. The stunningly good-looking just out of bed couple where the gent was clearly terrified of racking up too large a bill, the middle-aged couple who discussed almost every forkful of what they ate with the delightful young maitre d’hotel in a ritual that rippled back to paper road maps and the Michelin red guide on the dashboard, and an Italian mother and daughter from Milano who were insane for the decor and loved the food, too.

Following my crayfish, sole with grilled walnut butter and braised salsify with black truffle was magnificent. The distant sweetness of the nut loved the pearly flesh of the fish and the salsify provided textural contrast with the sole and softly punched its iodine with an earthy gust of truffle. Bruno’s John Dory with steamed shellfish–cockles, mussels, tiny shrimp, in sorrel cream was equally elegant.

Though I wouldn’t have wanted it, a cheese trolley should be proposed at a restaurant du plaisir like this one instead of just an assortment of four already plated cheeses from the admittedly excellent Quatrehommes cheese shop in the rue de Sevres where I whiled away many happy half hours back in the blessedly long-gone days when I used a laundromat just around the corner. So since we were well fed and happy, we decidedly to split a freshly baked individual apple tart with caramel ice cream, and it was lovely.

So here’s what I want next time round: line-fished sea bass cooked in a sea-salt crust and served with a citrus sabayon. But since this flops on the deck at 15 Euros for 100 grams of fish, what I can honestly look forward to the next time I visit Divellec is brunch, which may surprise all of the friends I have who know that I normally loathe this meal (Why The gustatory rewards of being dressed and in a restaurant during brunch serving hours on a weekend are almost unfailingly never worth it, and it’s the worst value for money meal in Paris most of the time, since plain old eggs get kicked upstairs by a factor of ten, sometimes twenty, on what they actually cost).

But if dinner was excellent, the brunch menu really speaks to me:

Fresh juice

Hot drink

Selection of bread and pastries

Butter and organic jam

Botarga bruschetta

Perfect egg Florentine

Bass ceviche, lemon juice and pink berries

Scallop burger, fresh herbs

Thin apple pie with toffee ice cream

or

Soufflé of chocolate grand cru, Bourbon vanilla ice cream (extra 10€)

49 €

with a glass of Champagne Thienot 65€

So what do you think Meet me there?

Divellec, 18 rue Fabert, 7th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-45-51-91-96, Metro: Invalides. Lunch menu 49 Euros, Initiation menu (four courses served at both lunch and dinner) 90 Euros, Tasting menu – eight courses, served at lunch and dinner. Brunch menu 49 Euros. Average a la carte meal 110 Euros. Open daily for lunch and dinner. N.B. You can make reservations via their website, too: www.divellec-paris.fr

The post Divellec, Paris | High Tide at Les Invalides, or a Brilliant New Fish House, A- appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

Oyster in kiwi juice

An intriguing if imperfect recent meal at the new version of Les Fables de la Fontaine, an expensive Michelin starred fish house founded by chef Christian Constant in its previous incarnation, made me more wiltingly aware of the pernicious effects of listification (if I might invent, I think, a new word) on food writing and the restaurant world than ever before. To wit, if you look at almost any of the lists of the top 50 or top 100 restaurants in the world that are out there, and there are more than you can count, you’ll find Paris invariably does rather poorly in these rankings.

But what does this really mean That Paris chefs and restaurants are less interesting or innovative than those in other cities Well, unfortunately that is the take away from these lists, when the reality is that Paris has never been as gastronomically exhilarating as it is today. Why The city is brimming with new talent from all over the world, and the whole experience of a French meal is being more intensely and incisively scrutinized, tweaked, revised and reinvented than at any time since the last raft of great Gallic chefs, i.e. people like Michel Guérard or Roger Vergé, came on the scene in the early seventies. The new chefs of Paris are obsessively interested in good produce and healthy eating, too.

@AdineMonnier

This demure renaissance ranges from the emergence of a new generation of star chefs like David Toutain (Restaurant David Toutain), Bertrand Bertrand Grébaut (Septime), and Jean-François Piège (Le Grand Restaurant), to the fact that there isn’t a neighborhood in the city that doesn’t have a constellation of small excellent and intelligently inventive new tables, or places like A Mere in the 10th Arrondissement, Le Servan in the 11th Arrondissement (both reviewed on this site) or, somewhat surprisingly, Les Fables de la Fontaine in the 7th Arrondissement.

@AdineMonnier

I say surprisingly, because this ur bourgeois chunk of the 7th Arrondissement has long been both habitually penny-pinching and more comfortable with traditional rock-of-ages French cooking than anything new and off-beat. That said, David Toutain is thriving at his eponymous table in this neighborhood (although I suspect most of his clientele travels from other parts of Paris, Europe and the world) and now Julia Sedefdjian, a twenty-one-year-old chef from Nice who began her career at the restaurant as sous-chef before being promoted, is playing to a packed house seven days a week. Gastronomically, Paris is changing, quickly and almost always for the better.

Sedefdjian’s cooking is assertively original, too, with the starter that Bruno had the other night offering a perfect example of her unselfconsciously frisky creativity. Brightly autumnal, this composition was comprised of tender deep-fried curls of squid garnishing a sunny bowl pumpkin soup along with a shaved roll of butternut squash stuffed with squid and toasted pumpkin seeds. A lot of work went into this dish, which was soothing but saved from being too sleepy by a judicious sprinkling of Espelette pepper. My starter of oysters in their shells on a bed of eggplant puree with kiwi juice and pulp and lemon ‘caviar’ didn’t quite work, because the fruit completely overwhelmed the natural taste of the oyster, but I did discover the very unexpected affinity that kiwis have for these bivalves.

I loved my main course, however, an impeccable and very dainty post-modern version of a grand aioli, or poached cod with vegetables and two sauces, an aioli (garlic mayonnaise) and a roux, which were scattered across the large bright yellow plate in dots. All of the vegetables were perfectly cooked, too, and they ranged from the classics–carrots, leeks, baby artichokes and potatoes–to romanesco and purple cauliflower.

Bruno’s scallops in their shells were succulent, lightly caramelized and seasoned with an evanescent citrus foam which proved that the foams many people are weary of still have a deserved place in the kitchen when a cook is looking to avoid a traditional sauce but wants to add another gentle element of flavor to a dish. The little casserole of wilted baby spinach with homemade croutons was welcome, too.

@AdineMonnier

Since portions are generous, we shared a delicious shortbread based riff on a lemon meringue pie for dessert and finished up out excellent bottle of 2014 Sauvignon Pointe d’Agrume by brilliant Loire Valley winemaker François-Xavier Barc while enjoying the buzz in this busy dining room with a friendly and very motivated young staff. Glancing around, I saw not a single example of that dreaded pleasure-killing local genus–the couple comprised of a bespectacled man in a loden overcoat and his wife with a treasured vintage Hermes scarf and an Alice band in her steel gray hair.

Maybe that’s because these people were at home reading lists entitled “The Seventeen Best Ham Sandwiches in Paris,” “The 33 Cheapest Bistros in the 7th Arrondissement,” “The Six Best Bowls of Onion Soup in France.” Or more likely their absence could be explained by their having been frightened off by cooking that’s as vivid, joyous and inventive as Julia Sedefdjian’s served in a lively dining room where everyone was clearly having a great time. One way or another, the inspired and very hard working Sedefidjian is very much a young chef to sample, savour, sample again and keep an eye on.

131 rue Saint Dominique, 7th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel.: (33) 01-44-18-37-55. Metro: Ecole Militaire or La Tour Maubourg. Open daily for lunch and dinner.  Lunch menu 25 Euros, Carte Blanche menu 70 Euros, average a la carte 50 Euros. www.lesfablesdelafontaine.net

The post Les Fables de la Fontaine, Paris | Julia Sedefdjian, An Audacious New Talent, Debuts on the Left Bank, B- appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

After a morning of musing on the question of where to go to lunch with a friend from London who loves old-fashioned French bistro cooking, the Auberge Bressane suddenly bobbed up in my mind as a possible solution. True, I hadn’t been to this Gaullist gastronomic redoubt in a very longtime, but a quick glance at their menu online left me with a pulse-quickening desire to eat there again. And besides, I’d already allowed the work of choosing a restaurant for us, complicated by the fact that many places are closed on Monday, to take more time than I really had.

The problem, you see, is that I’ve always taken the business of choosing a restaurant very seriously. Not only is there something both sad and vexing about a bad meal eaten anywhere but at one’s own kitchen table (happily, I can’t remember the last time that happened either, although if he were around this afternoon, Bruno would doubtless chime in to reprimand my free-handed tendency with the garlic and the chile peppers when I make marinades), but the remote possibility of a disappointing meal with a friend who loves good food as much as I do is something I’d work to avoid at almost all costs.  It’s complicated, though, since beyond the necessity of great food, they’re many other inputs to be considered as well–the price, bien sur; the atmosphere, which is a unique-to-every-restaurant mixture of the decor, service and clientele; the time allotted for the meal; accessibility; and the personalities and tastes of the other diners. Going to a restaurant is like casting yourself into a play, so it’s generally a good idea to make sure that there’s a role that appeals to you and suits you before you show up.

Of course counter casting can be fun, too, and that’s the sociological posture I chose in deciding to ignore the fact that the Auberge Bressane is so profoundly vieille France, or a bastion of the bourgeoisie, an address favored by penny-pinching aristocrats, and a place popular with conservative blowhard politicians. My friend and I didn’t tick any of these boxes, but we do like a good show and since we’re polite, our shaggier bohemian traits and attitudes can occasionally be concealed behind a scrim of manners. So we settled at a table in the very back of this restaurant with its oak-paneled walls, vaguely Violet-le-Duc mock medieval style woodwork and chandeliers, and all of the coats of arms and signage in typefaces that evoke France in the Fifties and Sixties and got to work with the menu, which looked like a mimeographed page like the ones I dealt with in grade school, minus, that is, the smell of the toner, which I’m certain was potent enough to make any receptive second-grader a tiny bit high.

Since we were both “a la cherche des gouts perdu, ou presque” (looking for the much loved tastes, textures and smells of old-fashioned French bistro cooking), we had to have the salade de pissenlit avec lardons (those big chunks of bacon that are one of the top five reasons with bread, cheese and good cheap wine that I could never leave France) et oeuf poche, or a salad of dandelion greens with chunky bacon and a poached egg in a perfectly made vinaigrette. But what stumped us was that we absolutely wanted three main courses–veal sweetbreads braised in cream with morels, chicken braised in cream spiked with vin jaune from the Jura and morels, and a bouchée à la reine, or a puff pastry filled with chicken, mushrooms, kidneys and other tasty morsels in cream. Oh–do you see a theme emerging here “Bouchée à la reine, that was something I adored when I lived in Paris in my twenties,” said my friend, who had to have it. So then I got it.

When the waiter came, I explained we’d start with the salade and a bouchée à la reine, which we’d like to split, and then I’d have the poulet and Madame the ris de veau (I wanted the ris de veau, too, but the resident of any city always cedes the mutually desired dish to the visiting guest when it’s a question of this being one of those meals where you want to taste as many things as possible).

We nibbled homemade gougères and sipped our excellent Crozes-Hermitage until our first course arrived. And the pleasure of seeing my friend, ditching my computer in the middle of the day, and the enchantingly unselfconscious fly-in-amber atmosphere of this restaurant quietly guardedly raised my hopes while we waited for our first courses to arrive. And then they did, and because we’re both obsessed, the first thing we cooed over the beautifully made and presented salad, a relatively easy hat-trick in the large scheme of things, and turned our attention to the bouchée à la reine with both of us wondering exactly the same thing: Was the pastry homemade?

Examining the bottom of the pastry cap, it was yellow and beautifully laminated, so we were delighted to conclude that it really was homemade, something the waiter later confirmed. The contents of the puffy case were succulent and individually cooked–the fowl needing more heat, for example, than the kidneys–and a there were a lot of expensive morels in the composition, too. “This really is lovely, and so is the salad,” said my friend, and I relaxed into the knowledge that we’d have both a good meal and a good time.

With the possible exception of the price–there’s an excellent value 24.50 Euros lunch menu, but it’s expensive to order a la carte, which we did–everything about this meal pleased. Served in a copper saucepan, her sweetbreads had a very light golden crusting and the texture of set custard, as they should, and came with a side of homemade mashed potatoes that I suspect might have been gently goosed by a little celery root, and she loved them. The mountain of hot homemade fries with my chicken was a treat, and the farmyard bird was pleasantly firm, lean and gently gamey.

We ate and we talked and we laughed and we gossiped and we kept going. And then I noticed we’d finished our wine, and when I looked over my shoulder to find the waiter so that we could see dessert menus, the restaurant had already emptied. But never once during this meal did we have the impression of being rushed, and having launched our meal just a little after 1pm, it was 3.15pm when we ordered a baba au rhum, one of our mutually favorite desserts, to share.

Staring at the fleur-de-lys motifs and the ship symbol of the city of Paris woven into our jacquard tablecloth, it occurred to me that this might be a perfect setting for a freemasons’ luncheon, but this idle thought vanished with the arrival of one of the best baba au rhum I’ve ever eaten. The particularities of this one were that it was homemade and that there tiny black currants suspended in its eggy crumb.

The service was cordial and attentive throughout this meal, and stepping out into the bright sun on the sidewalk after three hours of gastronomic ardors brought on a version of the deliciously selfish and evanescent melancholia that can follow some good rutting. So after saying good-bye to my friend, who was sensibly going to try and walk down some part of the quart of cream she’d just consumed by returning to the flat where she was staying by foot, I raced home by Metro to try and meet a deadline. And to console myself before I got to work, I read the weekly lunch menu at the Auberge Bressane, usually posted on their site, and thought: Anyplace that serves up ‘Poireaux Mimosa” (Poached leeks with riced hard-cooked egg) and pot-au-feu as part of their 24.50 Euro lunch menu is going to be seeing me again very soon. And the 29.50 Euro “Menu du Dimanche” will tempt me back soon, too, both for the food–maybe a green bean and mushroom salad, coq au vin, and crepes flamed with Grand Marnier, and the show this place offers when the usual posse of God-fearing locals take their doddering elders out for some air and a meal. And come to think of it, I hope someone will kindly do the same thing for me when that day dawns.

L’Auberge Bressane, 16 Avenue de la Motte-Picquet, 7th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-47-05-98-37. www.auberge-bressane.com, Open Sunday to Friday for lunch and dinner. Saturday dinner only. Lunch menu 24.50 Euros. Sunday prix-fixe menu 29.50 Euros. 

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Maigre (croaker fish) in nasturtium sauce with shaved radishes

Clover, Jean-François Piège‘s new table in  Saint-Germain-des-Prés, is the bistro this storied Left Bank neighborhood has been wanting for a longtime. Think of this intimate forty-square meter place as sort of a post-modern Brasserie Lipp, or a place that offers a deep experience of the moods and mores of this chic and still intellectually vibrant part of Paris. Happily, however, they part ways entirely when it comes to their menus, since Piège’s witty, delicious and intriguingly wholesome contemporary French cooking couldn’t possibly be more different from the generally tired and over-priced brasserie standards served at Lipp, a handsome but faded local institution that’s stood still as such fashion-alert places like the Emporio Armani Caffé and Ralph’s have succeeded in luring away its clientele of editors and style mavens. What they have in common, though, is the way they present a cameo version of the neighborhood–sepia-toned and contemporary, respectively, and distill its allure into a restaurant experience.

Piège’s take on Saint-Germain-des-Prés is worldly, stylish, convivial and decidedly gourmand. It’s also very personal. When he told me about the project last summer, he said he wanted to create a place that was “homey, warm and a little bit like a club, a place where people who love good food might make new friends.” This was very much my experience when I went to dinner here with Bruno a few days after it opened the week before Christmas. Piège’s delightful wife Elodie greeted us with a warm smile when we entered this very intimate place with an intriguing decor of walls covered half in white tile, half with diamond-shaped wooden marquetry. The produce the kitchen was using that evening was handsomely displayed as a set of still lives inside of two glass-fronted stainless steel cabinets, and beyond the long row of tables lining the wall, a crew of cooks was busily at work in the kitchen, which is completely open and takes up most of the back of this long narrow space.

No sooner than we were seated, our neighbors to my left, a very friendly couple from Montpellier, struck up a conversation, explaining that they’d come to Paris specifically to eat at the restaurant, because it was Madame’s birthday and Madame has always loved Piège’s cooking. Anyone who knows Paris well knows that this is not a common occurrence in a Paris restaurant, and so I was even more surprised when the young couple on the other side of us engaged us in conversation just as the first course in a menu of seven arrived, puffed roasted quinoa wafers and black-sesame-and-eggplant puree, which were pleasant nibbling with a glass of Champagne. They’d read about the restaurant in Le Figaro, and also fans of Piège’s, they’d booked right away as well.

When we finally resumed our own conversation with the arrival of a second course, a ‘foie gras without the gras,’ or a rich liver pate served on a wooden cutting board with fine slices of homemade cured pork belly, toast, and decorative sprigs of spruce, Bruno spoke to me in English: “Quite a friendly place, isn’t it#8221; I knew he feared we might be over engaged by our neighbors throughout the meal, but the two couples had astute psychic antennas enough to leave us in piece when we began eating this interesting composition of tastes and textures.

A little silence also allowed me to muse even this early in the meal that Piège had devised an entirely different cooking style for this restaurant from those at his two other tables, Thoumieux, a stylish modern brasserie, and the superb Restaurant Jean-Francois Piège, both in the 7th Arrondissement on the rue Saint Dominique. Demonstrating a keen understanding of the gastronomic preoccupations that make Germano-Pratins (as residents of Saint-Germain-des-Prés are known) tick, this bold modern kitchen is clearly seeking to reinvent the Rabelaisian pleasures of traditional French bistro food for a new era that’s increasingly attuned to environmentalism and good health; this means, of course, a diet that includes much less meat, or perhaps banishes it altogether, and more organic vegetables, whole grains and seafood from sustainable fisheries.

This is not an easy thing to do, of course, since much of the consoling richness of great old-fashioned bistro cooking comes from the French genuis for rendering the juices, collagen and fat of meat into sauces. As I’ve experienced at other Paris restaurants where chefs are grappling with the same challenge, the most present danger in this new cuisine of admirably good intentions is that it can often look or taste austere. This is not the case at Clover, which may be the most successful restaurant in Paris today in terms of the doubly virtuous diet (it’s good for you and for the earth). Piège’s cooking is provocative, since it often ventures away from anything familiar, but deeply considered and as reverent of Gallic culinary tradition as it is attuned to the new realities that are changing, and which will continue to change, the way we eat now and in the future.

So with all of this in mind, I was surprised by how delicious the food became after a quiet and somewhat ascetic debut. Meaty little mussels anointed with horseradish cream–a brilliant idea, since it flattered their sweetness by providing it with a foil–came on a plate-sized shoreline decorated with slices of the big green globe radish that’s at the top of vegetable style charts in Paris this winter, and then a French take on shabu-shabu cooking–a big hot block of pink granite on a stainless steel platter–arrived crowned by a pair of shucked scallops on a bed of red-beet jam. Next, a small steamed filet of maigre (croaker fish) garnished with shaved radishes in a vivid yellow chive-flecked pool of gently astringent nasturtium jus.

Up to this point, our meal had been more or less fat-free, so it was a small thrill to spend some of this gastronomic virtue on an exquisitely made wild duck tourte, which came to the table with a small salad of frisee and received a sexy shower of black truffle shaved table side before we tucked in. The buttery pastry dome elongated the pleasure of the duck meat, gizzard, and foie gras filling, which was gently earthy and perfectly textured.

And the trope of gastronomy that’s good for you made a triumphant but delicious closing statement with dessert, which was a baked jumbo sweet banana squash from Joël Thiébault that had been drizzled with rum and vanilla before being oven-roasted and which came to the table with freshly made custard ice cream and caramelized crumbs and toasted pumpkin seeds.

Piège says that he’ll be constantly revising the menu at Clover, a name he chose because he’s a collector of four-leaf clover objects, and that he finds it “challenging but exciting” to be inventing a new healthy and distinctly French style of bistro cooking. “I think it will be possible to retain and enhance all of the things Parisians have always loved about bistros and bistro cooking, but adapt them to a new century,” says the chef, and we’re the ones who’ll be lucky enough to find out how he’ll continue to do this as this excellent little restaurant grows.

Restaurant Clover, 5 rue Perronet, 7th Arrondissement, Tel. 01-75-50-00-05. Metro: Saint-Germain des Prés, Mabillon or Rue du Bac. Closed Sunday and Monday. Lunch menus 28€ and 42€; Dinner menus 58€ and 73€ www.jeanfrancoispiege.com 

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@stéphane bahic

It’s hard for me to say exactly when my deep love of good food first surfaced, but suffice it to say that the thing that interested me most when our local newspaper arrived on Wednesdays were the school-lunch menus, which were published weekly so mothers could decide what days they’d pack a lunch for their kids or let eat the hot meal at school. My first school, the Greens Farms Elementary School, had a crew of smiling Italian ladies in hairnets who cooked everything from scratch, so the food was usually delicious. They made lasagna, spaghetti and meatballs, baked zitti, grilled Italian sausages with peppers, and lots of other hearty, healthy dishes, including corned beef and cabbage for Saint Patrick’s Day, and once when my mother ate with us in the cafeteria before an afternoon field trip to a nearby dairy farm, she got up at the end of the meal and went into the kitchen to thank the cooks. I’d returned to the rails for a spoon for my butterscotch pudding, and so witnessed the scene. Abashed by my mother’s thanks, one of the cooks replied, “You’re very welcome, Ma’am, but it’s a privilege to feed the children,” she said.

Similarly, I loved going to restaurants, which was an infrequent pleasure for me as a child, and not only because they offered an opportunity to eat things like egg rolls or fried clams (Howard Johnson’s) that Mom didn’t make at home, but because they were so interesting. I loved watching the people, catching snatches of other people’s conversations, observing all of the little dramas unfold all around the room–here a birthday party, there a quarrel or a romance. I couldn’t have expressed it this way then, but aside from the food, what I fascinated me was that every restaurant is like a little theater where you can glean a lot of information about where you are.

All of this came to mind the other night when I went to the Bistrot Belhara, a very good new bistro deep in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. I lived in the 7th arrondissement for many years, first on the rue Monsieur and then on the rue du Bac, and so I was sort of bemused to find the same cast of characters who populated my life for many years. While waiting for Bruno, I listened to the cashmere sweater drapped couple next to me planning a golf holiday in Mauritus, while the quartet to my right was fulminating about Francois Hollande. There were at least a half-dozen velvet covered Alice bands in the room and tight chignons galore. On a weekend night, the coat tree just inside the door was hung thick with loden, Barbours and vintage Burberry, as if many of those dining in this snug but handsome old-fashioned dining room with stenciled tile floors and bare wood tables were planning to head off to hunting parties in the Sologne after dinner. All told, the clientele presented such an intricate and irony-free tapestry of the habits, manners and preoccupations of the French bourgeoisie that it would have made great material for a sociological dissertation.

As I sipped a glass of white wine and studied the menu, I wondered what sort of gastronomic baseline chef Thierry Dufroux would chose to cater to such a crowd. On the one hand, he’s had a really distinguished career cooking in the kitchens of the Grand Hotel du Palais in Biarritz, Michel Guerard, Bernard Loiseau and Alain Ducasse in Monaco, and on the other, every chef surely has to do some sort of culinary calculus in terms of what’s likely to please customers from the neighborhood in which he or she has chosen to locate. To be sure, there are some addresses that will pull people from all over Paris if the food’s good enough, and which will ring bells in the foreign press, but before that happens, he or she is very much dependent pleasing the locals. And as I know not only from the dozens of Sunday lunchs to which I was invited to by the Englishman and his French wife who were one set of landlords while I lived in the 7th–I’ll still never forget my astonishment when I realized one warm May afternoon when their windows were tightly closed and the radiator in the dining room was still hissing that they were mutedly making an attempt at match-making between me and their shy sturdy scholarly daughter–and many years of living in the 7th, what makes these people happy is a penny-wise vieille France cuisine bourgeoise.

The menu read well, though, and the restaurant was packed, so I guessed we’d eat well. In the meantime, the cordial waiter answered a question I had even before I’d asked it when he told me that the restaurant’s Moroccan sounding name actually refers to a type of very tall wave in the Bay of Biscay off of Saint-Jean-de-Luz in the Basque Country, a reference that might seem obtuse until you’re reminded that the chef worked in the Basque country for years and that it might be very roughly transliterated into “High Tide.” Once Bruno finally arrived from the distant suburb of Paris where he’d currently working, we ordered, and a homey well-made amuse bouche of butternut squash soup with brousse de brebis (fresh ewe’s milk cheese) and croutons announced the beginning of a very good meal.

As part of the 38 Euro prix-fixe menu, Bruno’s terrine of pheasant and patridge with foie gras was beautifully made and had a politely feral and charmingly bosky flavor, with twin tridents of Romaine referencing the fact that Dufroux had done time with Ducasse. And in a similarly autumnal register, my scallop stuffed ravioli in a light veloute of cepes might have made a pious old maid blush with pleasure and was just the sort of dish that the locals would love, because they’d never get up to anything this elaborate in the kitchen themselves. This dish tipped the kitchen’s hand, too, since it tacked safely away from cooking that might jar conventional ideas of French gastronomy while heading squarely towards a welcome haven of technical perfection and generosity informed by a well-disciplined creativity and the use of excellent produce.

Our main courses were excellent, too. Bruno’s flaky golden petit pâté chaud was the type of exquisite dish that many of the other habituees of this restaurant that night might have enjoyed back in the sigh-inducingly long gone days when they could still afford full-time cooks, and it was filled with hashed duck and foie gras, one of the best pairings ever imagined in France. While Bruno was in a gamey mood that night, I couldn’t stay away from the escaloppe of veal sweetbreads, unctuously cooked to the texture of a nervy custard and garnished with baby potatoes and some Bayonne ham. In an inspired sleight of simplicity, the silky salty ham flattered the sweetbreads, and the appropriately unassuming sauce of deglazed pan drippings did what a sauce should do, which is meld the dish together. This preparation was perfect summary of Dufroux in the kitchen, too–casually elegant, technically perfect, and respectfully traditional with a tweak of irreverence to make it his own. Small wonder then that this restaurant has so impressively established itself as a neighborhood favorite within months of opening, and this while walking the tight-rope of an affluent but reflexively parsimonious clientele who are wary of anything that wanders too wide of the mark of traditional French food.

I don’t own a loden coat, and I’m not planning on buying one anytime soon either, but I really enjoyed this meal too, and not just for Dufroux’s cooking, but for the alert, gracious service and the fact that even though it’s not a bargain address, it’s remarkably good value for the money given the caliber of the cooking.

With no trace of being tongue-in-cheek, the grand finales of our meal were vieille France enough to make me chuckle. Bruno had a Mont Blanc–pureed sweetened chestnuts topped with whipped cream and little fluttering shreds of gold leaf, and I had a fluffy rice pudding with caramel sauce, raisins, hazelnuts, pine nuts and pistachios. So everything about this restaurant is sincere and wholesome, and it’s not only a good choice for a supremely French bistro meal with sly haute-cuisine credentials, but a fascinating place for some sociological sleuthing if you agree with me that there’s nothing better than a neighborhood restaurant in any city for an intriguing keyhole wide view or two of local life.

Bistrot Belhara, 23 rue Duvivier, 7th, Tel. 01-45-51-41-77. www.bistrotbelhara.com Metro: Ecole Militaire. Open Tuesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner. Closed Sunday and Monday. Prix-fixe 38 Euros. Average 40 Euros.

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This year in Paris, a late, damp and often overcast Spring has been pushing and pulling my appetite in all different directions. To be sure, I’ve eating as much French grown asparagus–both green and white, as I can get my hands on, but the gray skies and cool temperatures have left me yearning for sturdier comfort food than I’m accustomed to craving at this time of the year. Then I went to dinner the other night at Les Climats, a very pleasant new restaurant in one of my favorite restaurant venues in Paris, the elegant Belle Epoque dining room of a handsome old dormitory building that once housed young single ladies who worked for the P.T.T. (Poste Telegramme, Telephone), and found my seasonal groove again.

In the early nineties when this place first became an open-to-the-public restaurant, it was called Le Telegraphe, and it enjoyed a two or three year run as one of the most fashionable restaurants on the Left Bank, despite the fact that the food was never better than a little better-than-average. Tipped off by a friend who lives nearby that it had recently re-opened yet again–it’s been through several middlingly successful incarnations since it was Le Telegraphe, Bruno and I decided to treat ourselves to what we hoped would be a good dinner on yet another drizzly cool Friday evening. I knew nothing about the chef, but my friend did tell me that it had a ‘lush’ decor and that the wine list was all Burgundies, right down to a Cremant du Bourgogne instead of Champagne, and since I find Burgundies, especially white ones, absolutely perfect drinking for Spring, I thought we might be able to will the season into existence over a good glass of Burgundy or two.

Arriving, we had a choice to two different settings, the dining room up front with lots of scarlet wing chairs with leopard print trim and some very beautiful Secessionist style art-nouveau reproduction chandeliers, or a pretty terrazzo-floored terrace with white wicker chairs and a greenhouse walls overlooking the lush courtyard back garden where meals are served at noon only in deference to the neighbors. Since the dining room was one of those spaces that look too designed to be comfortable, we opted for the terrace, with its mix of British colonial and art-nouveau references.

Over a glass of very good Cremant de Bourgogne–I long ago learned that these sparkling wines not only offer exceptional value for the money but are often excellent, we studied the menu, which had clearly been been constructed to flatter the restaurant’s remarkable wine list. Willing summer to begin, Bruno ordered the sea bream carpaccio on a bed of razor-fine cucumber scales garnished with ambered colored gelee flavored with Xerex vinegar, a brilliant idea, and I had an impeccably well made Opera de foie gras on a bed of spice-bread sponge with Gewurtztraminer gelee. The steely artistry present in both of these dishes made me curious about the chef, and whom our very nice waiter informed me is Phan Chi Tam, a young Frenchman of Vietnamese origin who had most recently been working for Thierry Marx at Sur Mesure, his restaurant at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Paris.

The smart counter-casting of the eager young serving staff, most of whom commute to this plush corner of the Left Bank from far afield suburbs, leavened the atmosphere of the restaurant in a useful way as well. To wit, even the stuffiest B.C.B.G. poseurs were guilessly brought to heel by the sincerity of this trying-so-very-hard-to-please young crew.

Our main courses were excellent as well. Bruno loved his steamed turbot with baby clams and a rich foamy dashi broth and was delighted to get his hands on a glass of the same sublime Puligny Montrachet I’d had with my foie gras (in addition to the spectacular wine list, they also offer a terrific variety of pours by the glass). My veal tartare, a fine foil for good wine, was coarsely chopped excellent quality meat that was garnished with a puree of fava beans and baby peas and very timidly seasoned with a little bit of citrus zest. Even though it was lovely with a glass of Hautes Cotes de Beaune, a little pinch of piment d’Espelette and a light sprinkle of coarse sea salt with sea weed would have given this fine product more personality.

Desserts were excellent, too, including the Pierre Herme inspired litchi and fresh raspberry macaron I enjoyed and a lime-flavored ‘boule de neige’ (frozen dairy confection) with ginger-and-passionfruit coulis that Bruno chose. Though it’s rather expensive at dinner–you could easily spend 130 Euros a head with a glass of wine or two, I suspect this sophisticated, worldly and well-conceived place will be hugely popular this summer at noon, when they serve two reasonably priced prix-fixe lunch menus (36 Euros and 45 Euros) in their secret garden. And after all of the years during which this type of restaurant–serious tables with seriously good French cooking for a well-heeled and well-dressed clientele, have been dying out, it’s nice that even during this balkish Spring, a welcome trend to their renewal continues not only with the charming Les Climats, but Goust and places like Les Tablettes de Jean-Louis Nomicos, this latter restaurant being a real forerunner of this gastronomic redux.

A few days later, an old friend came to town and expected me to pull a rabbit out of a hat. She’d read about Septime, which is probably at the top of the list of almost every visiting foreign food-lover this Spring, and wanted to go for dinner. Needless to say, Septime had been full for dinner that night for many weeks, but as it happened, I’d read that chef Bertrand Grebaut had designed a menu that’s being served at Wanderlust until June 21, and never having been to this table at the curious-looking lime-green Cite de la Mode et Design perched on the banks of the Seine near the Gare d’Austerlitz, I booked us a table.

Arriving, I could see that Laurie hadn’t changed a bit from the days that we worked the night shift at a bakery on the Upper West Side of New York. Her blonde rasta plaits were bundled up in a sort of scarlet do-rag and she still sported the same surgical steel ring in one nostril that she had all those years ago. As serious but slightly crazy kids who liked to have a good time, we spent many lost nights together at Paradise Garage, a big thumping night club on the Hudson, before she moved off to the woods of Pennsylvania with a Puerto Rican lady mechanic. These days, though, she lives in Austin with her cow-girl partner, whom I’ve never met, and we hadn’t seen each other in well over twenty years. “Well, aren’t you looking all Euro guy these days, Babe,” she said and gave me a hug. I noticed that she’d put on a fair amount of weight, inevitable, it seemed, for a professional baker, but certainly wouldn’t have said a word about it to her. “Hey, you’ve, um, filled out a bit, huh! You used to be skinny as a reed, but your face still looks good.” Small mercies, or something.

Both of us liked the restaurant, any airy open space with an outdoor terrace, too cold for that night, overlooking the Seine and a staff of good-looking hipsters who also happened to be incredibly professional about their work. After we’d muddled the passage of time a bit with Bourbon cocktails–a sort of a riff on a Julep, we ordered, and if the food lacked a little bit of the finesse of Grebaut himself, it was still delicious and more generously served than what you get a Septime.

I loved the buttered bread crumb garnish on veal tartare (I’m single-handedly denuding the pastures of France this Spring) on potato puree with tassels of fresh tarragon, since it was sensual study in textures within a shy band of flavors, and Laurie, who says she misses really good fresh fish in Austin, was delighted by her sea bream tartare.

Our main courses were very good, too. A perfectly cooked cod steak with a mussel-garnished vinaigrette and grilled baby fennel for me, and baby chicken with faiselle and new potatoes for Laurie. “I love this food. It’s generous and hearty, but delicate and original, too,” said Laurie.

When I asked her if she wanted dessert, she shook her head and said no, “I need a smoke, and I have a little surprise for you.” So I invited her to dinner and paid the bill, and then we found a bench on the quai next to the Seine and she got out a tin of the oatmeal cookies she’d carried all the way from Austin and a little bottle of Southern Comfort. “You’ve probably gotten too fancy for Southern Comfort, but I’m here to remind you that you used to love a Southern Comfort and Coke when we’d go clubbing.”

I don’t like Southern Comfort anymore, as it turns out, but Laurie’s cookies were delicious. She’s still a wonderful friend, too, and Wanderlust is a great idea for anyone who wants to eat Bertrand Grebaut but can’t land a reservation at Septime. Oh, and as their guest-chef menu rolls on into the summer, the next up will be Christophe Pellet, who used to cook at La Bigarrade in the 17th arrondissement.

Les Climats, 41 rue de Lille, 7th, Tel. 01-58-62-10-08. Metro: Solferino. Open daily. Lunch menus 36 Euros, 45 Euros. Average a la carte dinner 120 Euros. www.lesclimats.fr 

Wanderlust, 32 Quai d’Austerlitz, 13th, Tel. 01-70-74-41-74. Metro: Gare d’Austerlitz. Open daily: Lunch noon-3pm, dinner 8pm-midnight, Sunday brunch noon-4pm. Lunch menu 20 Euros, 25 Euros; dinner menus 35 Euros, 40 Euros. www.wanderlustparis.com

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Ever since he took over the original La Régalade in the 14th arrondissement from founding chef Yves Camdeborde in 2004, Bruno Doucet has continued to delight bistro-loving Parisians with his shrewd and technically impeccable modern French bistro cooking. First he rebooted the menu at La Regalade, making it brighter and more modern than what Camdeborde had originally been doing, and then he opened a branch, La Régalade Saint-Honoré, in the 1st arrondissement.

For anyone who hated trekking to the outer reaches of the 14th arrondissement–and most people did, this second address was a real blessing, not only for its convenient location, but also because the contemporary bistro cooking served here is so outstanding. Now Doucet’s launched a third address, La Régalade Conservatoire in the gorgeous new Hotel de Nell, which opened two weeks ago and has already become one of the hottest boutique hotels in Paris.

Arriving with Bruno, Tina and Francois on a wintry night, we had a drink in the bar with a glass room behind reception, and enjoyed the gorgeous hand-made oak furniture that is a major component of the interior design that brilliant designer Jean-Michel Wilmotte did for the hotel. Here, Wilmotte, black-and-white checkerboard floor, solid oak chairs, and tables with beige runners create an atmosphere that’s profoundly Parisian, but modern by teasing the usual nostalgia this term so often implies when used in a decorative context with strong graphics and a rigorous Zen design aesthetic. This is the second restaurant I’ve recently dined in by Mr. Wilmotte–the last one was Yannick Alleno’s Terroir Parisien, and I have to say that he’s become one of the best restaurant designers working in Paris today.

Doucet’s menu for this handsome dining room rolled out some terrific new dishes I’d never seen before, too. What I really wanted was the creamy cauliflower, Stilton and bacon soup that Tina had, but since I’m still flogging some of the caloric discipline I learned during a week of low-calorie thalassotherapy in Brittany, i went with the marinated scallops with Granny Smith apples and aged Comte in a fine cubed hash adding texture and a gently acidic bite to the creamy scallops under a thatch of frisee dressed in chive oil. I also loved the quiet daring of pairing cheese with scallops, since according to conventional Gallic kitchen wisdom the only dairy produce appropriate for this shellfish is cream. Instead, the comte deliciously enunciated the natural creaminess (sic) of the scallops.

After our main courses, a few sticking points registered. When the delightful hotel manager excused himself and went home, service fell off a cliff in the dining room, with the waiters clustering behind the bar like a bunch of crows and almost pointedly ignoring their customers, and this was after they’d failed to present the complimentary terrine that’s one of the signatures of a La Regalade meal without being prompted. The bread was also dull, and lighting in this dining room needs to be tweaked, since the built-in ceiling spots cast small short hard beams of light instead of illuminating the room gently and thoroughly. And as good as the food is and as attractive as Wilmotte’s dining room may be, this place has very little atmosphere. All of these flaws will doubtless be remedied as the restaurant settles in, however.

Our main courses were excellent. Francois tucked into a big juicy steak sliced and presented on a mound of stewed beef cheeks and carrots in a red-wine enriched jus; Bruno and loved our griddled half-salted cod with a pistachio crust on a bed of winter vgetables and shellfish (mussels and cockles) in a delicate shellfish bouillon, and Tina wolfed down a grilled breast of veal with winter vegetables.

Rice pudding with caramel sauce, a classic La Regalade dessert, and pomelo-and-pineapple fruit salad with excellent ginger sorbet concluded this very good meal, which had a particularly festive air for me and Bruno, since this new branch of La Regalade is a very easy walk from our front door.

The following night, after we’d both had non-stop days during which neither of us had time to shop, we decided to meet for dinner somewhere midway between Bruno’s office and our apartment. I asked Bruno if he had any ideas. “That’s your job,” he said. Oh, okay. Well, I left it until the last minute, and then was trying to think of someplace relaxed, pleasant and reasonable on the Left Bank, no small order, when it occurred to me that it had been years since we’d been to L’Affriole, a long-running and very good bistro in the 7th run by chef Thierry Verola, who’d worked with Alain Senderens a longtime ago. So I booked us there, and our first surprise was that the warm honey-and-ochre vaguely provencale dining room of yore had vanished in favor of a good-looking and much hipper decor that referenced various Fifties French classics–the green chairs have the shape and design of those found in public parks like the Jardins du Luxembourg or French classrooms, and the tile walls and factory-style suspension lamps also had an appealing retro look.

The chalkboard menu offered all sorts of appealing choices that night, but both of us started off with the butternut veloute, which was rich and pleasantly garnished with Savoy cabbage, and then Bruno had sea bass with a red wine sauce and winter vegetables en cocotte, and I continued on my cod bender with a perfectly cooked filet in a creamy soubise sauce. Our desserts were excellent as well–ile flottante with creme anglaise for Bruno and apple-and-raisin compote for me. All told, with its warm friendly service and reasonably priced wines, L’Affriole is a very good neighborhood bistro that well deserves its swarming crowd of regulars.

L’Affriolé, 17 Rue Malar, 7th, Lte. 01-44-18-31-33. Metro: Pont de l’Alma Closed Sunday and Monday. Lunch prix-fixe two-courses 26 Euros, three-courses 30 Euros; Dinner prix-fixe 36 Euros.

La Régalade Conservatoire, Hôtel de Nell,  7-9 rue du Conservatoire, 9th, Tel. 01-44-83-83-60. Metro: Bonne Nouvelle. Closed Saturday lunch and Sunday. Prix-fixe 35 Euros.

The post LA REGALADE CONSERVATOIRE – Another Superb Performance from Chef Bruno Doucet, B+; L’AFFRIOLE – In Top Form After All of These Years, B appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

   

For many years, Le Bistro de Breteuil has been a very well-liked restaurant in the silk-stocking 7th arrondissement due to its lovely location overlooking the Place de Breteuil, its charming sidewalk terrace for al fresco dining in good weather, and most importantly of all, its perfectly decent good value prix-fixe menu. For 42 Euros, you got an aperitif, starter, main course, dessert, half-bottle of decent plonk, and a coffee, and the quality was respectable enough so that it pulled as many staffers from UNESCO and parsimonious loden-wearing owners of those vast neighboring flats overlooking the ur-bourgeois Avenue de Breteuil as it did tourists. It was also a perfect place for any group dinner, because there wouldn’t be any tiresome haggling about who owed what, and offered some of the best people watching in Paris.

Lobster Bellevue with a macedoine of Thiebault vegetables and homemade mayonnaise

Now, restaurateuers Willy Dorr and his son Garry have rebranded this address, along with three of the other bistros they own, and the reboot means a new name, Le Grand Bistro Breteuil, and a new decor–out goes the sort of anonymous, inspired by one of those Louis somethings decor in favor of a louche lounge look that spins on a black, red and white color scheme and low lighting, an effect that comes off as both aspirationally Costes and urban Saint Tropez. They’ve also given the place a serious gastronomic gussying up in terms of a new 42 Euro menu that represents the apotheosis of a seemingly accelerating local trend towards giving a big shout out to one’s brand-name suppliers. So on the new menu at Le Grand Bistro Breteuil you get oysters from David Herve, vegetables from Joel Thiebault, olive oil from the Chateau d’Estoublon, cheese from Marie-Ann Cantin, Poujauran bread and butter from Jean-Yves Bordier. You can also order a steak, veal chop or pigeon sourced from star butcher Hugo Desnoyer for a 9 Euro supplement to the main menu, or content yourself with meat from Frank Samoyeau.

I have very mixed feelings about the branding game, since on the one hand, all of the people mentioned above do seriously excellent produce, and it’s extremely important to make people aware of all of the variables that can affect the quality and healthfulness of what they eat, and yet on the other hand, the whole branding business seems to be getting wearisomely out of hand. I mean even the lousy little menus on Air France now note the brand names of all the spirits, soft drinks and liquors they serve, i.e. Cola de Chez Pepsi, or some such. And the simple fact of the matter is that branding has always been designed to incite and assure loyal consumption of the branded product, whether its laundry soap, a hotel room, or, more recently, a restaurant meal. When it comes to cooking, however, you can stock a kitchen with all of the super-luxe pedigreed produce you like, but it’s sort of a lost cause, if the cook isn’t any good. And much more alarming than that, in some restaurants, branded produce seems to be intended as some sort of surrogate for real cooking. Or in other words, ‘Well, of course it’s going to be good! it’s Poulet Bio du 9eme Arrondissement d’Alec Lobrano (TM)!”

Anyway, I’ve never counted my chickens before they’ve hatched, and since they’re not going to as long as I’m living in Paris, I went off to meet a bunch of friends for lunch at Le Grand Bistro Breteuil with a lot of curiosity. Would this be an If-it’s-not-broken, don’t-fix-it story, or a substantial improvement to a deservedly long-running restaurant?

Well, I have to hand it to the Dorrs and to their culinary consultant, the charming and very talented chef Jean-Jacques Jouteux, since the food here is not only solidly good but even a little better than that for the fact of being made with such high quality ingredients. And the service is charming and well-drilled, too, which makes this place just the ticket for the very same demographic it so thoroughly pleased before being revised. To be sure, this is a meat-and-potatoes restaurant and not a place to come in search of cuisine d’auteur, and I also have a feeling that some of the locals aren’t going to like the rather flashy new decor. But putting that to one side, Le Grand Bistro Breteuil has been successfully retooled as a useful work horse of a restaurant for a century when Paris cooking is so auspiciously shading towards the locavore, organic and generally healthy. And hey, where else are you going to find black Hawaiian sea salt on the table without boarding the hot-air balloon of haute cuisine?

For an extra 4 Euros, I got a huge plate of French (as opposed to eastern European) girolles as a starter, an excellent buy in my book, while pals were delighted with their lobster Bellevue–a real Belle Epoque beauty of a dish, that one (+9 Euros); Thiebault vegetables with sauteed squid; and very good foie gras. None of these dishes bore any particular chef’s signature, but rather they demonstrated a well-disciplined kitchen, solid technical competence and honest respect for product.

Main courses were first-rate, too, including my perfectly cooked Desnoyer veal chop, an estimable grilled sole with beurre noisette, griddled sea bass with sauce vierge and a very good Desnoyer steak sauteed with Sarawak pepper. Appealing side dishes added to the festive, generous nature of this meal, too–you get a choice of potato puree made with Bordier butter, real frites, wok-sauteed Thiebault vegetables, sauteed spinach with green onions or arugula dressed with Chateau d’Estoublon olive oil and organic lemon.

The house Bordeaux was just fine, and we hemmed and hawed over the dessert selections for a while, because there were so many things that sounded good. In the interest of research–visitors to Paris just love crepes Suzette, and I do, too, I ordered same, while the others had the daily special of baba au rhum, a superb tarte fine with organic apples and freshly made vanilla ice cream, and profiteroles with more of that just-made vanilla ice cream and Valrohna chocolate sauce.

So, great food No, but good food, and with that swell terrace, late serving hours seven days a week, and a 19 Euro children’s menu, all I can say to the Dorrs is, shame about the decor, but hey, come on, baby, light my fire; this is a respectable and very useful restaurant.

3 Place de Breteuil, th, Tel. 01-45-67-07-27. Metro: Duroc or Sèvres – Lecourbe. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Prix-fixe menu 42 Euros, average two-course a la carte 34 Euros.

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After a first visit to Restaurant Philippe Excoffier, I was underwhelmed by the cooking of the chef who ran the kitchens of the American Embassy in Paris for many years and who recently published a book of recipes of the dishes he cooked there for Dorothy Stapleton, the wife of the man George W. Bush sent to France as his ambassador. That early summer night, the dishes that Bruno and I ate with old friends from Los Angeles left us diffident at best. Charles and Kato were off to Switzerland to see her father early in the morning, though, and the three of us had most recently shared an exceptionally good meal at El Faro in Cadiz a few weeks earlier. So I later wondered if perhaps there wasn’t something disjointed about the casting of this evening, which might have been unfair to the chef?

Ever since I almost jumped out of my shoes at the deep intimacy implied between my nationality and the man I consider to be the worst president in American history conveyed by the table loads of silver-framed Bush family photographs I spotted while wandering through the public reception rooms at the U.S. Embassy in Paris during those dark years, I’ll admit I’ve harbored a certain a piori hostility towards anyone who might even have remotely abetted this destructive and wrong-footed presidency. With the distance of several weeks, however, I realized that the prejudice I brought to dinner that night was as unfair as any prejudice always is, since a prejudice is a prejudgment in advance of rational facts or meditated and learned experience.

So when a recently divorced friend from Philadelphia whom I hadn’t seen in years cast up in town the other night and invited me to join her at this restaurant around the corner from her hotel–Main Line ladies seem to be genetically wired to love the rue Saint Dominique and environs, I accepted with alacrity. To be sure, I had doubted my own first reaction to Excoffier enough to have remained silent about that meal in print, but as more time passed, I was actually a bit embarrassed that I should have so muddled food and politics, and very much felt that this particular chef deserved a fairer assessment than what I might have meted out the first time round.

On the way to dinner, I wondered what condition I might find Cynthia in, since she’s a mother of four, and she’d been married for thirty years. Well, I almost didn’t recognize the svelte and very young looking blonde at a table by the door as my old pal when I walked in–she’d always been a bit zaftig, so I guess we’ve swopped rolls, and she was in fine fettle, having just moved into Center City Philadelphia from the suburbs to launch a new handbag business.

I asked her why she’d chosen this restaurant, and she said she wanted something “dressier” and better than a bistro but not too expensive or stuffy, and that this place had been suggested by French friends. As we sipped a glass of Champagne while studying the menu, three little amuse bouche arrived–a delicious red pepper cake, two melon balls and a basil leaf on a tiny wooden spear–very ’embassy,’ that; and a miniature canoe filled with very processed eggplant cream, and it occurred to me that her Gallic pals had hit the nail on the head in sending her here, since this place ticked all of the required boxes–nicely lit and decorated room with a long banquette for the ladies, 37 Euro prix-fixe menu and reasonable wine list, and an atmosphere that was formal (a little too much so for my tastes, actually) but relaxed.

Our zealously well-mannered first courses–there was nary a flavor or a texture in either dish that could possibly have offended or displeased anyone, were beautifully cooked and plated, and I could just imagine them in the light of a silver candelabra on a broad backdrop of embassy damask embroidered with American eagles. I was surprised that my goat-cheese stuffed ravioli were served room temperature, but with a pleasant garnish of rehydrated chopped dried fruit and a persillade, it was great Indian summer eating. My only editing here would be to eliminate the squirt-bottle baroque flourish, because it always reads as both eighties and institutional to my eyes. Cynthia was delighted with her gently lime spritzed sea-bream-and-avocado tartare, too.

“You know what, though–I might have added a little pimenton to this dish,” Cynthia paried after our plates were cleared, and I could tell she was wondering if I knew what it was. “But why would you put hair pomade in a fish tartare#8221; “No! No, it’s not a hair pomade, Alec, it’s–” “Smoked paprika, and a pinch would have been a nice idea in that dish.” “We have some brilliant Spanish restaurants in Philadephia these days, which is how I know about pimenton–isn’t it funny, for years and years, anything special in Philly was French, but now we’ve become completely promiscuous.” “Have you#8221; “No! Oh, no! I’m talking about restaurants.”

Our main courses were gorgeous haute bourgeoise dinner party dishes, too. As much as I adore old-fashioned bistro cooking, I’ve also been missing the type of haute bourgeoise cooking you used to find at restaurants like Le Recamier, Le Mercure Galant, Pierre au Palais Royal and all of those grown-up and worldly restaurants that used to form the middle-aged gut of the Paris food tree. In fact, I think a lot of people miss this cooking, which is why it’s quietly coming back and Excoffier’s restaurant is likely to become a solid word-of-mouth success over the next few months.

My veal sweetbreads could have been crispier but the pool of Port sauce that surrounded them on their mirepoix island was superb–lush with a distant velvet of Port and politely primal from a base of deeply reduced veal stock, and Cynthia was delighted with a thick slice of pearly wild seabass with cocoa beans and a corsage of finely sliced fennel bulb.

Our desserts–roasted figs for me, a pistachio millefeuille for Cynthia, were charming for being both delicious and so firmly in the firmament of embassy row cum cuisine bourgeoise classics. Cynthia was spot on, too, when she said, “This food reminds me of what you used to get at the old Le Bec Fin,” the city of Brotherly Love’s long-time temple to Gallic gastronomy, which closed, and then re-opened this past June. According to her, the new Le Bec Fin is very good and doing quite well, which makes me think that people all over the world are hungry again for the kind of black silk stocking cooking that Excoffier serves at his nice little restaurant.

Since I enjoyed ‘Last Tango in Paris’ a lot more than ‘The Sound of Music’ (although I liked them both), I don’t know that I’d go here often, but I’m very glad that this restaurant exists–it’ll be perfect for dinners like the one I had here with Cynthia and also for business dining. Excoffier is a consummate culinary professional, too, and as it turns out from a long chat when he made his rounds at the end of the evening, a really nice guy, so I’ll never think of him as a Bush baby again. He’s much too good a cook for that.

18 rue de l’Exposition, 7th, Tel.01-45-51-78-08. Metro: Ecole Militaire. Closed Sunday and Monday. Prix-fixe menu 37 Euros, average a la carte 40 Euros. www.philippe-excoffier.fr (on-line reservations on website, too)

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