Mieux, which means ‘better’ in English, is a wonderful name for a restaurant, because it declares gastronomic ambition but with a certain appealing humility. This charmingly decorated and cleverly designed bistro just five minutes from my front door in the rue Saint Lazare delivers better than just better, though, since the contemporary French bistro cooking is delicious, and the service is charming. Restaurant Mieux also has a very good wine list.

The bistro, which opened last May, is the project Baptiste Bayle, Giulian Maiuri and Thomas Bonnel, three nice guys who did all of the work of renovating this space themselves, including pouring a cement bar, buffing the Fifties tiles they discovered when they pulled up the floorboards, combing flea-markets for the great-looking bric-a-brac and chairs from a French school that gives this place its homey atmosphere and renovating a secondhand Spaziale coffee machine, which is now used to make great java with Brûlerie de Belleville beans. Guilian, who formerly worked at the Maison Breguet and the Trianon Palace in Versailles, heads up the kitchen.

I first noticed Restaurant Mieux on the way home from doing some errands in the rue des Martyrs, and immediately liking its look and menu, I went in and booked for dinner for me and Bruno that same night. And I marveled at how gastronomic my own neighborhood has become, and in just the terms I like best—intelligently creative contemporary French bistro cooking that highlights carefully sourced seasonal produce and spins on an axis of sincerity and generosity.

Little did I know that the 9th Arrondissement would emerge as one of the best restaurant neighborhoods in Paris when we crossed the Seine from the tiny apartment where we once lived on the rue du Bac and bought our first, and then second, apartments in this arrondissement. But the 9th has turned into a sweet-spot location for restauranteurs, because the offices in this central Paris district assure a busy lunch crowd and then the food-loving locals and tourists from the growing numbers of hotels in this charming part of the city take over in the evening.

Arriving, the welcome was warm and the service immediately warm and alert but relaxed, which explained why the dining room was filled with such a cross-section of residents of the district once known as La Nouvelle Athenes, because so much of its architecture was originally inspired by ancient Greece when this part of the city was first developed from 1819 onwards. During the 19th century, this quartier was popular with artists, writers, musicians and actors, including George Sand, Eugène Delacroix, Alexandre Dumas, Frederic Chopin, Victor Hugo, Théodore Géricault, Pissarro, Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin. It was also known for being a neighborhood of kept women.

This arty liberal tradition lives on in the 9th, which is still home to many writers, photographers, artists, musicians and other creatives, and it’s that increasingly endangered but wonderful thing—a peaceful and unselfconscious historic neighborhood in the heart of a great western city. Gentrification is making it more affluent, but the social tone happily remains unchanged.

The menu here runs to three starters, three main courses and three desserts, sometimes more, which change regularly to reflect the kitchen’s desire to cook spontaneously. “The produce writes the menu here,” our waiter told us when he came to take our order.

On the first night of the year when there was an early autumnal chill in the air and after a summer of salads, I started with the homemade terrine of chicken livers and pork, with the livers adding an earthy unctuousness and the pork some carnal resonance and bite, which came with pickled onions and carrots. Bruno’s bonheur was the veal tartare made with marscapone and seasoned with crushed roasted cashews—an excellent idea, chervil and chives. And because we’d both been curious about the other starter that night, the waiter thoughtfully brought us a little tasting plate of the tomatoes with watermelon, cucumbers, feta, mint and Kalamata olives, a wonderfully refreshing dish that tasted like a happy souvenir of a summer vacation in the Greek Islands.

Our main courses were outstanding, too. Bruno’s free-range pork chop from the Auvergne was succulent and garnished with coarse ground polenta and roasted carrots from the Ile de France and a wonderful saute of wild mushrooms. I was tempted by the risotto with sage butter, zucchini and smoked ricotta, but  I’ve lived in Paris for too long to ever to order this dish in a restaurant I don’t know, because the rice is unfailingly overcooked. So I ordered with maigre (croaker fish) with potatoes, cabbage and clams in seaweed butter, and it was so skillfully cooked that I wouldn’t hesitate to trust the kitchen with rice the next time I come here. Portions were so generous that all we could manage at the end of the meal was a shared portion of stewed juicy ruby-red peche de vigne—the world’s best peaches, with lemon-verbena ice cream and hazelnut crumble. An excellent selection of cheeses was also available.

Restaurant Mieux is a place where you can easily become a regular, and it’s a table I’d happily go on my own, since they have a few spots at the bar for solo diners who’d rather sit on a stool than at a table. It also has several large tables that accommodate groups of six, eight or twelve, which makes it a great choice for an easygoing night out over a very good meal with a group of friends. It’s solidly good but unpretentious restaurants like Mieux which assure Paris’s enduringly superlative gastronomic credentials.

21 rue de Saint-Lazare, Paris, 9th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01- 71-32-46-73.
Métro: Trinite or Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. Open Monday noon-6pm, Tuesday-Friday noon to 1am, Saturday 6pm-1am. Sunday noon-6pm. Lunch menus 21€ and 26€, average a la carte for dinner 40€. www.mieux-restaurant.com

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Juste, a stylish raw bar and seafood takeaway place just down the street from the exquisite neo-classical church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in the 9th Arrondissement, is an address we’ve been meaning to try for a longtime. This is because we both love oysters and liked the idea of a place that offered them outside the usual local context of mostly mediocre brasseries or the expensive fish restaurants.

So when a certain jet-lag induced inertia meant that our larder was still pretty much bare the second night after we’d returned from vacation last week, we called to make sure they were open, and then walked down the pleasantly quiet rue de Châteaudun–normally its a polluted, traffic-choked mess of street that begs the question of why the city of Paris, purportedly so green, doesn’t heal this artery by planting it with trees, to Juste.

Since I’ve told Bruno the story of how I ate my first oyster too many times for him to hear it again, I kept it to myself, but suffice it to say that some thirty years ago during a truant getaway to Cabourg in Normandy, an insistent Frenchman with eyes the same dark green color as the waters of the English Channel cornered me into giving the bivalves a chance.

We’d gone for a long walk on the beach on a beautiful Indian summer day, a pleasure enhanced by the fact we’d both taken sick days in the fullest flush of good health, when we rounded a bend and much to my horror, I saw a sea shack with folding chairs on a little bluff overlooking the dunes. “I bet they’ll have some oysters,” said Marc, and I feared they might, since ever since an unhappy encounter or two with same many years ago in New Orleans, I’d given them a wide berth. Why I thought I didn’t like their slipperiness, strange texture and unappealing gray appearance.

Despite my protestations that I wasn’t even the least bit hungry–it was only 11am, Marc headed off to the sea shack and waved to me to follow. When I did, I arrived just in time to see him slurping a freshly shucked oyster from its shell. He held one out to me.

“I can’t eat oysters,” I said. ‘For religious reasons.”

“I thought you were a Protestant#8221;

“I am, but I’m a Congregationalist, and Congregationalists should never eat oysters.”

“Oh,” said Marc. “I think I can fix that.” He dipped an index finger in his glass of Muscadet, crossed himself, muttered something, made a moist mark on my forehead, and said, “I’ve made you a Catholic for as long as is necessary for you to eat some of these excellent Norman oysters.”

So I took a swig of wine, slurped an oyster and swallowed it whole. Truth be told, I loved the taste of the sea the little critter left in its wake. “Now, you’ll actually taste one,” Marc insisted, holding out another one. “Just bite it gently once or twice.” Reluctantly, I did, and in that bolt of iodine-richness, a head-spinning passion was born, one that’s never left me and never will. And this gift of oysters was one of the best anyone’s ever made me during my whole life.

Arriving on a warm night, Juste was a relaxed, friendly place, and all of the picnic tables outside were full, so we snagged a first-come, first-serve table by the door with a built-in metal bucket for the empty shells our meal would generate. We also inspected the short but appealing menu, which includes Thaëron oysters from Riec-sur-Belon (the spats are hatched in the waters off Arcachon in the southwest, then the baby oysters are raised near Morlaix in northern Brittany, and finally they’re finished in a bay on the same province’s southern coast).

There was also a lot of other fresh seafood on display, to be cooked and consumed on the premises or for takeaway, including clams, cockles, crab claws, mussels, and other sea treats, plus a big bubbling lobster tank by the counter where you place your order.

So we ordered a dozen on the smaller oysters, and six of the larger ones to start, along with an excellent and very reasonably priced 50cl carafe of white wine from the Domaine de Gournier in Sainte-Anastasie, a village that’s about five minutes from our new house outside of Uzes. I think I just found our house white….

The gorgeous firm oysters were served with good bread and seaweed-flecked butter, and were a revivifying treat, especially during that period of drudgery that follows a vacation, a time of re-accustoming yourself to stress and busyness again and catching up on all those dreary things–bills, taxes, etc., you’d just let go of long enough to have a real vacation.

Then, because we were still hungry that night, we ordered some baby clams in garlic cream sauce and some grilled razor-shell clams, and the freshness of this seafood was exemplary. It was perfectly cooked, too, and the dining room, filled with a mix of office employees who’d ditched their ties and jackets, local residents and tourists, had that nice low-key thrum that fills a room when people are eating well without making too much of a fuss about it. That, you see, is the point of Juste–you come here on the spur of the moment–they don’t take reservations, for some really good, simply cooked (or not cooked) reasonably priced seafood.

Curiosity, and my huge love of seaweed, prompted us to order a side salad of chickpeas, chopped orange, green onions and samphire, that crunchy Breton seaweed I buy whenever I see it in the market, because it makes a terrific garnish for risotto, pasta or grilled meat or fish. The chickpeas were cooked perfectly al dente and the seasoning of this salad was beautifully balanced.

While sharing a baked apple with a lashing of caramel sauce and some creme fraiche, I thought about how Juste is a perfect, sincere, friendly expression of the way Parisians want to eat in their own neighborhoods these days. What we want is really good casual dining with pedigreed produce, affordable prices, friendly service, and a total absence of fussiness or pretention. This is what Juste delivers, and I know I’ll be going there often this Fall.

Juste, 48 rue Laffitte, 9th Arrondissement, Paris, Tél. (33) 09 82 33 93 47. Metro: Notre-Dame-de-Lorette or Chausee d’Antin La Fayette. Open Tuesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner. Monday lunch only. Closed Sunday. Average a la carte 30 €.

http://juste-producteur.com/restaurant/  https://www.facebook.com/RestaurantJUSTE/?fref=ts

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I went to dinner at the Bien Élevé restaurant in Paris the other night, and I was very well fed by both the kitchen’s very good cooking and also the charm of a motivated staff who animate what was once an old café in a gallopingly gentrifying part of the 9^th Arrondissement near the Folies Bergère. Sometimes all I really want is a good simple hospitable meal, and that’s exactly what I found here.

If I’ve thought back on this meal with satisfaction several times since, it’s the calm, sincere nature of the experience itself almost as much as the food that has made me muse. What I’ve been mulling over is that we probably want too much from two things which are very much a part of our daily lives—adjectives and restaurants. The former are, of course, the verbal tools we use to express the superlative, and the latter are public places where we can choose to go to be fed. And on both counts, we seem to want and need too much from both of them.

Consider the case of ‘delicious,’ the most common adjective used to describe a powerfully pleasant experience of eating something. It’s a word that’s become so banalized that I systematically avoid using it in my writing. Then there’s the conundrum of contemporary restaurant reviewing culture and conventions. I read a lot of restaurant reviews of a given week across the media of a half-dozen different countries, and I find many of them so arcane and often arch that a restaurant which quietly accomplishes the task of serving a good meal with polite service in pleasant surroundings is often pushed to the sidelines in favor of places that are either very very good or very very bad (as a word, very still seems to have some permanent credibility but according to the prevailing trends in current usage the word should never be used in pairs, because this is very very bad).

Why adjectives have become so damaged is a bit of a mystery to me, but I think some part of the blame results from the pervasiveness of non-stop advertising that strains to incite and excite new reasons to consume. Everything has to be bigger, brighter, better, sexier, and more exciting, with the result that almost nothing is. Then there’s also the fact that so many of the English adjectives used to describe food are generally so flat-footed when compared to those in Latin languages.

The reason our expectations of restaurant going may have reached the point that a successful meal is defined as a suite of gastronomic revelations leading to rapture is probably because most English-speaking countries are still building their food cultures. Americans, along with Brits, Canadians, and New Zealanders, only began to take food and cooking seriously somewhere in the late sixties and early seventies. In countries like France or Italy that have very ancient gastronomic cultures, there isn’t the same resistance to simplicity found in the U.S. Sometimes, you see, an oyster should just be an oyster, and the French know that.

For my part, having had the privilege of eating the magnificence of the best cooks in Gaul for thirty years, I now find that I’ve fallen more in love than ever with my inner peasant, or that place that posits true good taste in nature, and this is a blessing. What I enjoy more and more is good simple honest food cooked from great seasonal produce with humility, care, and even a little bit of love. These days, I’d rather tuck into a plate of great ham, maybe some Spanish Iberico, French Noir de Bigorre or Prsut from Croatia or Slovenia than anything  ‘creative.’ I crave everything grilled—fish, meat, vegetables, even fruit and cheese. A beautifully made loaf of bread can move me as much as any elaborate sauce, and cheeses—real ones made from raw milk, are the most reliable constellation of gastronomic pleasure I know.

So off I went to meet Bruno for dinner at the Bien Élevé, because our relationship is gastronomically democratic. To wit, I impose a lot of meals on him, so occasionally, when we’re not cooking at home, which we both love to do, and I’m not intending to review a restaurant, we’ll just plain go out like most people do, and on this particular night his express wish was for some really good meat.

This is what the Bien Élevé (the Well Bred) specializes in–really good meat. Charming newbie restaurateurs Arthur Lecomte and Dimitri Aboulker threw over the corporate world to open a restaurant, because they like good food so much. Wisely, they decided to keep their first foray simple by concentrating on sourcing some really good meat. The beef that is the star of the menu comes from a farm run by the Bouchez family in Châteauneuf in the Nord Pas de Calais, and it’s Black Angus. Otherwise, chef Thibaut Eurin’s menu also proposes succulent porc noir from the Bigorre and free-range Licques poultry, along with a regularly changing pasta or fish for those who aren’t carnivores.

Helpfully egged on by Lecomte, we decided to share a côte de boeuf , or a rib steak for two. Knowing it would be a hefty, we shared some Bigorre ham and a slice of excellent terrine de campagne as starters, and then the meat arrived.

This beef was exquisitely succulent with a gently chewy texture and a depth of primal mineral-rich bovine flavor that I’ve rarely ever tasted before. First it was presented whole, and then it came back to the table in generous slices with a trio of sauces we ignored (although the Béarnaise was clearly homemade and pinch hit as the perfect dipping sauce for some excellent frites), chunky fries, and a puree of parsnips garnished from fresh white beans from Paimpol in Brittany.  Good simple cooking from excellent produce all across the board.

As a last act, we shared the baba au Chartreuse, the latter being the potent green herbal elixir made by monks in eastern France. It came with a ruffle of whipped cream and some chopped pear. The fruit was pleasant enough, but didn’t seem necessary for any other reason than to make a feint at something healthy in the home stretch.

The walk home after dinner was a very happy one, since we left the table sated and also quietly elated by the good simple meal we’d just enjoyed. I didn’t see a vision of the Madonna on the way home, and as far as I know, Bruno didn’t either. Instead, we shared a quiet companionable silence kindled by deep affection and the well-being brought on by a very good meal.

47 rue Richer, 9^th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. 01-45-81-44-35. Metro: Le Peletier or Grands Boulevards. Open Tuesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner, closed Sunday and Monday. Lunch menu 19 Euros, average a la carte 40 Euros. www.bieneleve.fr

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In Paris, the new Salsamenteria di Parma is a very reasonably priced trattoria specialising in the delicious foods of Parma and the famously gastronomic Italian province of Emilia-Romagna. It’s an exceptionally clever and surprisingly good “fast casual” restaurant, too. I say surprisingly good, because for such honest well-cooked food made from expensive pedigreed mostly Emiglia-Romagnan produce the rapport-qualite prix (value for money) is especially impressive.

Beyond the quality of the food, I find this restaurant fascinating from a commercial and marketing point of view, too, because it so astutely satisfies the big demand for good, healthy, promptly served food in a large city like Paris with some welcome originality. The previously existing lunchtime offer in this 9th arrondissement neighborhood with many offices in the heart of Paris not far from the big department stores and the Opera Garnier ran to a dulling culinary refrain of gussied up burger joints trying and failing to sling a ‘Brooklyn’ attitude;  overpriced salad joints hiding their mediocrity behind jaunty graphics and insistent claims of healthy eating; sad Chinese traiteurs where the food sits in big aluminium trays inside of neon-lit glass cases, something that’s always made me wonder if there might not be a single huge factory somewhere in the suburbs of Paris cranking out these dishes in industrial quantities; and a couple of cafes still serving steak-frites type menus to that diminishing number of Gauls who still like a little glass or two of red wine with lunch and perhaps a Gauloise with their post-prandial coffee.

In contrast, the shopfront premises of Salsamenteria di Parma are decorated with big wheels of Parmesan over the bar and whole Parma hams hanging from hooks on the walls, and there’s a mixture of opera and sixties Italian pop on the soundtrack. The wooden tables are covered with the mustard-colored paper mats you often find in Italy and set with scodella (white china bowls) from which to drink your wine–most of the wines served here are Lambruscos and other rustic and rather raspy Emilia-Romagnan ones. The menu is structured to make it as easy to have a quick bite as it is to enjoy a larger fuller meal, including tempting offers of those foods urbanites around the world seem to love the most these days–garnished flatbreads, garnished salads, and pasta, and also features many dishes that are perfect for sharing, especially the charcuterie and cheese assortments.

To be honest, I doubt I’d have been tempted by this place if it hadn’t been chosen by a visiting friend from Milan who already knew and loved these restaurants for the simple reason of having been so very often disappointed by the Italian food in Paris (the latest letdown was La Comedia in the 5th Arrondissement, where the waiter tried to bully me into buying a 68 Euro bottle of Amazon with the promise of a ‘special gift’ and became sullen, even borderline rude when I declined this laughable suggestion; otherwise, the food here is served in buffoon-ishly massive portions to compensate for its mediocrity and lack of taste).  “This is real Italian, Alec,” insisted Anna. “The company is based in Parma, which I’m sure you know is the headquarters town of the Barilla group, and I think they’ve learned the good lessons of Barilla and avoided the bad ones.”

She’d also chosen this restaurant as the venue for a quick lunch during a one day visit to Paris, and because we hadn’t seen each other in a longtime, I went. Aside from the wine, it was very good. In the Italian tradition of the coperto (coverage charge), we paid one Euro for bread and salsina, a dipping sauce of pureed pepper. We also ponied up another Euro per portion the artichoke and red-onion-and-balsamic sauces. They were all good, as were the Caprese di Parma, freshly sliced Parma ham with mozzarella on a bed of arugula with red peppers in oil and the Poker di Culatello, a tasting plate of culatello ham and other charcuterie.

Anna works in fashion and she talked a blue streak about how much trouble the Italian industry is having competing with illegal copy-cat producers in Asia and hand-work in places like Morocco or Sri Lanka that costs a fraction of what it does in Italy. Finally, she sighed and said: “Well, the one thing they can’t copy is our food. Or maybe they can, but it won’t taste as good as it does when it’s real Italian.” She also told me a strange but revealing little anecdote about how her uncle, an eyewear designer, had lost his job working for a huge well-known Italian eyewear manufacturer, been out of work for four months, and was then contacted by the Chinese company that has been causing his former employer so many problems to work for them as a designer from his home in Ancona. “Un mondo cosi strani!” said Anna; ‘Such a strange world.’

Next we shared some pumpkin-filled tortelli with butter and grated Parmesan and a Maialata, a tasting plate of roasted culatello ham and two types of sausage with nicely made potato puree.

Served within the space of 75 minutes, the meal concluded with some chocolate ‘salami’–a loaf of chocolate, meringue, and hazelnuts, and two good coffees.

Walking home past the local salad bars, Chinese traiteurs, etc. I found myself wondering why no clever young Frenchman or French woman hasn’t conceptualised some branch of French cooking to appeal to the ‘fast-casual’ segment of the market. There are such rich possibilities to decline for such a concept from the regional kitchens of France, and since most of the 33 million tourists who make Paris the world’s most visited city would like to eat French food most of the time while they’re in town, it would seem that the market for such a product is huge.

It also occurred to me that the Italian concept as it now exists would also be a really big hit in the U.S., U.K., and most other European countries and would also work really well in airports and train stations, etc., so it has huge potential. So until the day that a French version of Salsamenteria di Parma comes into existence, I’ll happily return to this cheap and cheerful little restaurant when I have a request for a quick but satisfying lunch instead of a more leisurely traditional restaurant meal.

Aside from the fact that I’ll never be a fan of Lambrusco, or any other Emiglia-Romagnan wine for that matter, and the music was just a little too loud, I enjoyed this place and tip my hat to the clever team who invented this mini-chain of restaurants, since in Italy where the first one opened in Parma, there are now two branches in Milan, one in Cannes and this latest one in Paris, with more coming soon.

40 rue Saint-Georges, 9th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-48-24-58-94. Metro: Trinite d’Estienne d’Orvre, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette or Le Peletier. Average 20 Euros.  www.salsamenteriadiparma.com  Also in Cannes: 86 rue Meynadier, Cannes, Tel. (33) 04-93-99-66-67.

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So I’m having a cautious flirtation with Faggio, the ur hip new pizzeria in ur hip Pigalle in Paris. I’m not sure if it will last for lots of different reasons, but for the time being I’ve found a pizzeria that makes me really happy. The thing is, though, when it comes to pizza in Paris, I’ve fallen in and out of love dozens of times. The reason is that I come from the best pizza belt in the United States, or the long urbanized band of the American East Coast that runs from Boston to Baltimore and which luckily received millions of Italian immigrants a century ago. This is why every major city in this zone-Providence, Rhode Island; New Haven, Connecticut; Trenton, New Jersey, etc.-has at least two or three seriously good pizzerias. And this is why I’ve never found a pizzeria in Paris that measures up to my American baseline, the late and hugely lamented Apizza Center in Fairfield, CT, which predictably bit the dust after an ill-fated attempt to make it modern. much less those I’ve so rapturously eaten in Naples.

Those were the pizzas we ate as a family on Sunday nights, and I loved going with my father to pick them up, since I was as fascinated by the inferno-like coal-burning pizza oven as I was by the teenagers on dates, greaser boys with tattoos and girls with teased hair and dark eyeliner. I loved sitting in the second front seat of my father’s Saab, too, with the three cardboard boxes piled on my knees, and the smell of hot cardboard mixing with those of melted mozzarella, yeasty dough, and the sharp tomato sauce that came out of big cans with Italian writing on them was my favorite perfume of desire before puberty. Ultimately, it was that tomato sauce that made these pizzas so good, since it was sharp, almost acidic, and a perfect foil for the mozzarella and occasional garnishes of crumbled Italian sausage with fennel seeds or mushrooms, real mushrooms, not canned, that had been hand sliced and sauteed.

In Paris, I liked the pizzas at Chez Bartolo in Saint-Germain-des-Pres until they became absurdly expensive and the service so aggressively unfriendly that this little place became infrequentable, and Da Mimmo, which I stopped going to for the same reasons. Il Brigante in Montmartre is still pretty good (the pizza-maker at Faggio used to work there), as is La Briciola, but I find the quality at Al Taglio isn’t what it was. And I won’t pay the eye-watering prices they charge at the dreadfully named Pizza Chic either.

Recently, though, Paris has been in the midst of a wonderful little pizza revolution, as a variety of excellent new pizza places open to rival the sad-sack addresses found all over the city–you know, the places that use frozen dough, pre-shredded mozzarella, cheap tomato sauce and pizza-makers without work permits. Several months ago, I liked the pizza at East Mamma but what I’ve really been wanting is a great pizza place that’s within a ten-minute walk of my front door in the 9th Arrondissement, or a perfect bolt-hole pizza place for a Sunday night.

I’d been hearing good things about Faggio in the neighborhood, so last night we ankled over there for dinner. Arriving, I had SoPi (South of Pigalle, as this almost comically trendy neighborhood has become known) on my mind, and so I was amused when we were lucky enough to find a table in the white-tiled back dining room with its Edison bulb fixtures, and Bruno guilessly remarked: “This place makes me think of New York.” And of course it did, because the room was full of men with Rutherford B. Hayes beards, including owner Fabien Lombardi, ex-bartender and co-founder of l’Entrée des Artistes, and young women with jeans with artfully ripped knees.

What augured better for dinner were the bags of excellent quality Italian Caputo flour stacked on the floor adjacent to the tiny kitchen with its tiled wood-burning pizza oven. Ignoring the three starters, we ordered a Regina topped with Prince de Paris ham, mozzarella and mushrooms for me, and a Montanara, with Parma ham and delicious smoked stracciatella for Bruno, and amused ourselves by watching the local fauna in the exposed brick-walled room during the long wait before the pizzas arrived.

When they finally did show up thirty-five minutes later, they were very good, but we’d drunk deep into our bottle of biodynamic white from the Veneto, which is exactly what happened the other night during dinner with friends at Dilia, a new Italian bistro in Menilmontant. To wit, hipster tables seem to assume an amiably blithe indifference to the apparently dispensable niceties of good service. At Faggio, it wasn’t that anyone was unfriendly, but rather that no one was going to acknowledge that you’d had a long wait before being fed. And of course the wine list was really top-heavy in terms of pricing, since the only way to make the rent if you’re running a pizzeria in Paris is to sell a good amount of pricey wine. So our bill for two pizzas and a bottle of wine was 58 Euros, and the very good white I chose was one of the least expensive.

After dinner, I wasn’t sure if I’d go back, but today I know that I would, since it’s lunchtime and I want nothing more than a pizza Montanara to magically appear on my door step. Next time round, though, I’d probably do take away, and I might also tell the owner that his probably knowing jeu de mot of the restaurant’s name isn’t very funny. In Italian, the official meaning of faggio, is beech, as in a beech tree, but it has another slang meaning as well. Per ‘The Urban Dictionary:’ “Faggio: Scooter from the GTA video game series. It is a derogatory, effeminate play on the name of the Italian scooter brand Piaggio, as scooters (sometimes referred to as vespas) are generally perceived to be only a slightly less emasculating mode of transportation than the segway, the pink tricycle, or an electric barbie car. Secondarily, It can be interpreted as a clear insult directed at the effeminate owners of such modes of transportation (see artfag). Examples: “This beige cream faggio certainly is a slow and gay mode of transportation,” or “That faggio owner certainly looks gay slathered in beige cream.”

72, rue de Rochechouart, 9th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-40-37-44-02. Metro: Anvers or Poissoniere. Open Monday and Thursday-Sunday for lunch and dinner. Closed Tuesday and Wednesday. Average 20 Euros (without wine) 

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Chef Marc Favier’s new restaurant Bouillon in the 9th Arrondissement in Paris has been getting very good reviews, but while I liked it, I’m not sure I’d go back. Why It’s expensive for what it serves, and I found a perceptible lack of generosity in the restaurant’s DNA. To wit, there was no amuse bouche, or little madeleines served with the coffee. Instead, the waitress offered a jar of cheap brightly colored hard candies that were of no interest whatsoever, and when we didn’t finish our 50 Euro roast duck, the leftovers were spirited off to the kitchen while I was outside taking an urgent phone call and Bruno was in the WC; they might have made for a nice parmentier du canard the following day and should have been offered.

So am I right and the others who liked it more eagerly wrong No, since there’s broadly no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ when it comes to having an opinion of a restaurant. What brought this to mind was an interview I did the other day, when one of the journalists told me that she’d had lunch with a French food critic who “really didn’t like Hexagone,” a place I’ve recently reviewed on this site and like very much. Pause. Longer pause. I wasn’t sure what she was after, so I finally said “Chacun a son gout,” and left it at that.

Of course everyone has a right to their own opinion, and that’s what makes reading restaurant reviews both useful and interesting, since you can usually tease out some sort of reliable truth from the considered judgments of a group of experienced food writers and critics. The thing is, the sacking of critical expertise brought on by the internet and crowd-sourced reviews is still having a huge impact on the way we think about food and judge restaurants for the simple reason that most of the English speaking world has always disdained arts de vivre experts as being pretentious and bit too fancy for their own good. The internet has put this suspicion of pointy-headed experts on steroids, with all sorts of attempts to extrude the truth about food and eating out of the general public through means that are occasionally statistical but more often just everyman (or woman)-gets-a-turn-at-the-mike. So that’s where we are today, and the complicated and finely tuned balance between the subjective and the objective that’s at the heart of all professional reviewing, whether the object being reviewed is a play, a film, an automobile or a meal, goes missing. And this is not a good thing, either for anyone who loves great food or for the chefs who produce it.

For my part, these days in Paris, when prices have been rocketing up at an eye-watering rate, I find myself becoming more exigent than ever for the simple reason that we’re good cooks, so when I go out, I’m not only looking for good food, although that’s always my priority, but charm, generosity, atmosphere and value-for-the-money. Otherwise, I’m very happy to go down the road for a good bottle of wine and a nice sea bass or pork roast and hit the pots and pans in my own kitchen. What I’m less likely to do, however, is roast a duck, since weekday dinners usually have to be a bit more expedient than that with Bruno often getting home late from work, and so I was totally game when he suggested we have the roast Bugaud duck with baby potatoes, jus de viande and salad.

While the duck was roasting, we nibbled on some stale bread while waiting for our starters, a ‘Coca’ for Bruno and some ham with guindillas, or Spanish pickled green peppers for me. Coca is a Catalan dish of flatbread with various different possible garnishes, so I asked the waitress if the chef had worked in Spain. “Mais non!” she replied, explaining that he was from the Roussillon, or that leaf shaped southeastern corner of France that the Spanish ceded in 1642 after the Thirty Years war. To do this day, though, it has a decidedly Catalan tint, and given the prosperity of Catalonia and the allure of Barcelona, the Roussillon is increasingly being drawn back to its Catalan roots for reasons both cultural and economic.

Bruno’s Coca was a curious hybrid of French and Catalan when it arrived, since it was made with puffy pastry instead of the flatbread the Catalans use. Then it was topped with sautéed onions and an anonymous sort of fritto mist, a few squirt-bottle blazes of anchovy cream and some fresh herbs. “It’s okay,” said Bruno when I asked, and I offered the same response re my plate of curiously wan-tasting ham. When I asked the waitress where the ham was from, she replied, “France!” So I left it at that.

The duck was a beautifully roasted bird when it came to the table in an enameled yellow casserole some minutes later. Some people looking at the photo may conclude that it was under-cooked, but the French like their duck rare, and I agree, since the bird loses all of its flavor and juicy goodness when it’s overcooked. If the salad garnish was a nice idea, the somewhat crudely carved bird awkwardly sat on top of a generous pile of baby potatoes in a lush and deeply flavored jus de viande.

All things being equal, this was not a very successful or logical presentation, since the bird seemed crammed into the casserole and it was difficult to get at the nice little nest of spuds below. The other thing that went missing, however, was the flickering sense of having ordered anything special. I don’t expect that a bistro with a single server could possibly undertake table side carving every time an order for the bird comes in, but there should have been some cue from the staff and the kitchen that they knew we had decided to treat ourselves to something nice. The duck was delicious, and so it should have been for 50 Euros, but deprived of any sense of the ceremonial, our pleasure was somehow dented.

So since the desserts weren’t very appealing, we concluded our meal with a coffee, and then refused the canister of hard candies which were presented when the bill–over 120 Euros for two starters, the duck, a small bottle of water and a very good Cotes du Roussillon–came to the table. For the same money, I’d have happily gone back to Clover, Jean-Francois Piege’s delightful new bistro in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, or Le Bon Georges, our local go-to bistro, or the wonderful nearby Pantruche if it hadn’t become so difficult to get a table there.

A proper restaurant meal is almost always an optional choice, and this is why a certain joyful ceremoniousness and generosity is required to make it a success.

Bouillon, 47 rue de Rochechouart, 9th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 09-51-18-66-59. Metro: Poissonnière, Anvers, Cadet, Closed Sunday and Monday. Lunch plat du jour 14 Euros, average a la carte 50 Euros.

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Fennel cream soup with shaved fennel, crabmeat and hazelnuts

It was good news last winter when I heard chef Franck Baranger had opened Caillebotte, his second restaurant in the 9th Arrondissement of Paris where I live. Why I love Le Pantruche, Baranger’s first bistro, and as a Parisian for almost 30 years, I find the work of the 19th century painter Gustave Gaillebotte, who’s well-known in the U.S. for canvases like “Paris Street, Rainy Weather” (1877) in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, more astutely and sentiently summarizes the city I live in than almost any other. This is because Caillebotte was working in the ‘new’ Paris that had just been created by Baron Haussmann, an elegant city of new bourgeois rigor, the carefully constructed good bones of which survive to this day.

So I wondered if Baranger’s food might be as ur Parisian as Caillebotte’s paintings, and after nearly a year of frequenting this restaurant, I’ve decided this modern bistro cooking actually does say a lot about Paris today, since Bobo poses–a recherché gastronomic connoisseurship among them, are basically just a re-coining of the codes of the French bourgeoisie for a new century, the 21st one.  My slowness in deciding about this restaurant actually answers a variety of questions I’m often asked about how I work, too. To wit, how do I go about judging a restaurant?

Suffice it to say that if I always want to give any chef the benefit of the doubt, I’m more likely to err in your favor. Whether you’re traveling to Paris from Sydney as a first-time visitor to the city or just going out the door to the Metro as a local, I really want you to have a good meal.

So if I have any doubts or reservations, I’ll go back to a restaurant again and again until I’m certain it’s a place I can solidly recommend. In this instance, I know Baranger is a very talented chef, but if the first three meals I had at Caillebotte were pleasant they never measured up to the excellence of Le Pantruche. So I assumed the kitchen needed some time to settle in, and I kept going back. Every time I went, the food was incrementally better, but as friendly as the service usually was, it lacked the professionalism of Le Pantruche. This meant the food often came to the table from the open kitchen lukewarm, and it that it was often a trial to flag someone down for more wine, water or a salt shaker. Then, too, several of the staff members here do that thing that drives me and other long-term foreign residents of Paris mad, which is insist on speaking to you in English the moment they detect the faintest trace of an accent.

I know, I know, a case could be made that they’re trying to be helpful, but my most recent meal here, the dinner for six during which I finally decided that I really like this place,  the linguistic pushback made everyone (three Americans, an Englishwoman, and a Venezuelan) but the Valenciennes born Bruno unhappy. What one does in such a case, however, is insist, and insist we did, until the message was somewhat grudgingly received that we preferred to speak French. And with this seen off, we ate very well indeed.

Since we were six, we managed to eat our way through the entire menu that night as well. If I loved my white asparagus with grilled cuttlefish in meat juice and ricotta with salmon eggs–a dish that beautifully straddled the end of spring and the beginning of a cool, wet, slow starting summer in Paris this year, the tomato-loving Bruno and Roberto both pounced on the heirloom tomatoes in a bouillon enhanced vinaigrette with a nice chunk of poached skate. Richard described his luminous looking cream of fennel soup with shaved fennel bulb, crabmeat and crushed roasted hazelnuts as “consoling and sort of elegant in a low-key way,” and the other two were delighted by a deconstructed brandade de morue (salt-cod with mashed potatoes and garlic) that read as salt-c0d garnished with a slow-cooked egg yolk and crunchy salty samphire (a sea plant) in a pool of beautifully made potato soup.

There were five main courses on the menu that night, including lamb sweetbreads (doubtless from Terroirs d’Avenir) prepared a la meuniere with raw and cooked artichokes and a blue-cheese crumble, white tuna with baby peas and lemon verbena, and free-range pork with sweet-potato puree with grilled sesame and Swiss chard with pan drippings. With me as the exception–I had the braised lamb with aubergine mousse line, which was delicious but a dark and murky looking plate of food that needed a third garnish with more texture and color, everyone else had the hake with potatoes, cockles and razor-shell clams in a lactic but iodine rich foam. And before anyone gets exercised about the foam, a contemporary cooking feint that’s becoming a lightning rod for gastronomic animosity, let me say that it worked perfectly on this dish for the very reason that chefs fell in love with foam to begin with–it conveys flavor without the heaviness of a more conventional sauce.

Desserts were homey but clever, like recipes you’d find in the trendier young French food magazines: roasted apricot with ‘crumble’ and marjoram ice cream, sautéed cherries with marscapone and vanilla ice cream, and chocolate mousse with tonka-bean sauce and praline.

There was a nice atmosphere in the dining room as we ate, and the people-watching was first-rate, too, especially at the bar, where locals can show up alone or with a friend without a reservation, a very clever idea that anchors the restaurant firmly in the quartier.

So if Caillebotte painted a canvas of this namesake table in the 9th Arrondissement today, would it have as much Parisian resonance a century later as his superb painting “The Floor Scrapers” There’s no way of saying for sure, but my guess would be, yes, since this dining room says so much about how affluent Parisians like to eat today and the crowd offers a perfect tableau of the neighborhood. One way or another, it’s nice to have another first-rate and fairly priced local.

Caillebotte, 8 rue Hippolyte-Lebas, 9th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. 01-53-20-88-70  Metro: Notre-Dame de Lorette, Saint-Georges, Cadet or Le Peletier Closed Saturday and Sunday. Lunch menu 19 Euros, Prix-fixe dinner menu 35 Euros, Average a la carte 40 Euros.

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No, the better way to see how well a city eats is to go into its neighborhoods and sample the places the locals go to all of the time, a place like Le Bon Georges, for example. No surprise in this strategy, bien sur.

For lots of reasons, the most obvious being that I’m constantly sampling new places or checking up on tables I recommend in HUNGRY FOR PARIS, I’m not really a regular, as such, at any Paris restaurant. And yet in deference to the indefatigable Bruno, who dutifully accompanies me to remote corners of the city on tasting missions night after night when he’d much rather be eating at home, I’ve somewhat improbably become something of a regular at Le Bon Georges, a place I’ve now been over a dozen times since it opened this past winter. Understandably, he loves the idea of going someplace he knows and likes with good, solid, simple food. And so when I recently returned from a fascinating but challenging-in-the-last-act trip to Fez to report on a new restaurant there (the bus from Beauvais airport to Paris is a circle of hell that Dante missed, since it has some of the rudest and most inefficient service of any public transport I’ve ever used in my life), Bruno blessedly collected me from the Porte Maillot, and told me he’d booked at Le Bon Georges.

“You need some good meat and a nice bottle of wine,” he said, and his diagnosis was pretty accurate, since a heavy travel schedule had  been depriving me of both. The pretty dining room, which had previously been the venue of the clubby and over-rated trattoria Dell’Orto, was packed when we arrived, and we had a warm welcome from proprietor Benoit Duval-Arnould, a smart and charming restaurateur who’s done a better demographic analysis of the neighborhood he chose to set up shop in than anyone else I can think of in Paris in a longtime. To wit, Benoit aced its bobo appetite and gastronomic ticks, including a preference for pedigreed produce. Benoit, who trained as an agricultural engineer and who once worked for the Campbell’s Soup Company (Campbell’s owns the Leibig brand of soups in France), decided to bail on a successful corporate career, and it turns out he’s a natural in the restaurant business.

Benoit is extremely observant, reflexively generous, and good at casting, whether its his chef, Anton Guillon, who formerly cooked at Les Enfants Rouges, or his suppliers, who include the ever more omnipresent Joel Thiebault (the truck farmer from the Yvelines who supplies many young Paris chefs with locally produced seasonal produce, for those who don’t already know him), fish from Terroirs d’Avenir, and mostly importantly among many other good producers, beef from Alexandre Polmard, a farmer in the Meuse region of La Lorraine who raises Blonde d’Aquitaine cattle. Beef, you see, is the star product at Le Bon Georges, and the rich mineral taste of Polmard’s dense but intriguingly tender garnet-colored meat got my mouth to watering as soon as Bruno told me where we were going.

So we eye-balled the chalkboard menu, and Bruno lunged at the brioche with lobster, while I wanted a last feed of good white asparagus from Les Landes before the season ended. Bruno was happy with his brioche, which I’d have spread with something a little more emollient than just butter, and I liked my roasted asparagus with a well-made hollandaise sauce, but would have happily eaten more than the rather modest portion of four spears.

Tempted by a steak, I ended up with steak tartare–it’s just so good here, as are the home-made frites that accompany it, and Bruno did same. But Benoit decided to spoil us with baby carrots cooked in butter and a side of one of the best gratin dauphinois I’ve had in ages. Philippe and Natalie Gard’s Coume Del Mas – Schistes – Collioure 2013 went down a real treat, too, which is why we decided to end this very satisfying meal with some cheese, a perfectly ripened brie stuffed with walnuts for me and an ash-rolled chèvre for Bruno.

In Paris, we eat very well indeed.

45 rue Saint Georges, 9 Arrondissement, Tel. 01-48-78-40-30. Metro: Saint Georges or Pigalle. Open Monday to Friday for lunch and dinner. Sunday dinner only. Closed Saturday and Sunday lunch. Lunch menu 19 Euros. Average a la carte 65 Euros. http://www.lebongeorges.com 

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When I was growing up in Westport, Connecticut there was a wonderful old farmstand on the Post Road (U.S. 1) called Rippe’s that sold fresh corn, tomatoes and bunches of twine-bound zinnias grown in the fields out back. During the Fall, an ancient cider press filled big glass jugs with delicious caramel-colored cider made from apples that came from the farm’s orchard, along with gourds and pumpkins, and then Rippe’s annual season ended for the year after a few weeks of selling locally grown Christmas trees, pine boughs, holly and mistletoe. Rippe’s is long gone–a gated condominium community now occupies the former farmland–but several years after it vanished, I was amused to discover that Westport had acquired a new store called Hay Day (now also closed), which was a highly styled but completely ersatz riff on a real farmstand. What the new store told me was that someone had figured out that there was money to be made from the nostalgia people feel for real farmstands, a genus that could no longer be sustained in this wealthy suburb due to exploding land prices.

This same strange and strained convergence of forces that replaces the authentic with a pastiche of what’s gone missing is also at work in Paris right now, and a perfect example is Buvette, a new cafe-restaurant cum wine bar in the alarmingly ever trendier 9th arrondissement where I live. Odd though it may sound, it’s the Paris branch of a France inspired restaurant in New York City’s West Village by the same name and it has the same owner, American chef Jody Williams. Stranger still is that the reason I was incited to visit what I assumed would be another Bobo corral in South Pigalle is that French friends who’d been to New York recently came back raving about William’s original address.

So on a rainy night, I met a friend for dinner, and as soon as I came through door, I was impressed by the impeccable mis en scene of this place, which looks as though it had been sourced from the Williams Sonoma, (the upscale U.S. kitchenware purveyor) and West Elm (the urban hipster home-furnishings supplier) catalogs. Apples were piled in pretty pyramids on the bar, which was awash in very handsome glass cake and pastry stands displaying various desserts. There was something rather Hollywood set-decorator about the shiny stamped tin ceiling–handsome though it might be, and the globe lamps, though, and good-looking though the room was, it looked like it might be a Paris set for a Woody Allen film. The crowd of stylishly dressed bobo locals paying as much attention to their iPhones as their dining companions might have come from central casting, too.

The format of the menu here is small-plates grazing, something I’m always wary of, since so often after meals like this one, I find myself wanting to make some spaghetti around midnight, but the pretty little menus offered a variety of nice-sounding dishes, and we agreed to just order away and share. The first course that arrived at the table was a nicely made slice of terrine, which was served with good bread and garnishes of whole-grain mustard, cornichons and Kalamata olives. Since I love these olives, I didn’t mind the fact that they’re not a particularly French garnish for a terrine, and similarly, I loved the streaky bacon wrapped around the well-seasoned terrine, which actually reminded me more of a very well-made meat loaf than something a master charcutier like Gilles Verot might produce.

Unfortunately, the Croque Forestière–a Croque, or toasted bechamel and grated cheese topped sandwich, that followed was a big disappointment. It lacked the lush emolience of a really good croque–a fried egg might have helped, but there wasn’t one, and the bread was sliced too thick, the Forestière, or wild mushroom, filling had more texture than taste, and it was awkward to eat on a small plate that came with the same olives and cornichons that became the recurring gastronomic punctuation of this meal.

Hachis parmentier, one of my favorite cuisine ménagère dishes, was oddly interpreted here, too. Made to order in a small shallow dish, it had none of the alluring juiciness of a proper long-baked hachis parmentier and instead was just a mound of mashed potato sitting on a bed of underseasoned chopped beef. The walnut oil used to dress a chewy brussels sprout salad had gone off, and a tartine of purple kale ordered out of curiosity came as a woefully unseasoned mounded of chopped vegetable on another piece of thick bread.

While my friend was off in the men’s room, the handsome well-dressed older French professional woman who was dining alone next to us volunteered her verdict on Buvette. “It’s very pretty, mais un peu Disney, and even though the young staff are sweet, they need a real cook in the kitchen,” she said. The off-center strangeness of eating what Americans think of as French country food in Paris was somewhat blunted by the very good chocolate mousse with which we finished our meal, but I left with over fifty fewer euros in my wallet–the wines by the glass are expensive here–and had to fight off off the temptation to whip up some spaghetti carbonara when I got home. Ultimately, the hugely popularity of this address has more to do with its admirable success as an exercise in style–it really is very pretty–and the demand for places with non-stop serving hours than it does with a successful gastronomic signature.

28 rue Henri Monnier, 9th, Tel. 01-44-63-41-71. Métro: Saint Georges or Pigalle. Open non-stop from 10am to midnight, Tuesday through Sunday, Closed Monday. Average 35 Euros.

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Unfortunately it doesn’t happen very often, which is why I appreciate the very rare pleasure of spontaneously deciding to try a restaurant in Paris even more. As a food writer, you see, I’m obviously obliged to keep up with the latest new addresses, and since I don’t like going to restaurants on the weekend if I can avoid it–as a rule of thumb, Parisians generally cook or entertain at home then, which leaves the city’s restaurants to suburbanites or tourists, and I’m also too busy to go out to lunch, this leaves me five available meals per week to test the latest openings. This may sound adequate, but recently a whole week went by during which I didn’t find a single meal that was worthy of writing up here, even if only in negative terms.

Yesterday, though, after we couldn’t get into “Mud,” which opened here yesterday, Bruno and I decided to go for a long walk after having spent a print-drunk day at home. Knowing that the fridge was bare, I hoped the Tunisian green grocer at the bottom of the rue des Martyrs would be open so that we could buy some asparagus and rustle up a simple dinner at home. But he’d already closed, so we keep walking up the rue des Martyrs with the idea of doing sort of a H shaped walk home. Along the way, I found myself regretting the two branches of Fuxia that have opened here–the food’s okay, but it is a chain, and also thinking that it had been a very long time since I’d last eaten at Le Cul de Poule, which was packed last night. The menu there didn’t really speak to me, though, and Bruno had already said he didn’t want to eat at a restaurant, so we keep moving, and then it started to rain again, so we stopped under the awning of La Table des Anges to wait out the shower, and of course I read the menu posted outside. It looked really good, and there was a reasonably priced 32 Euro prix-fixe, so I turned to Bruno, who said “Non” even before I’d opened my mouth. “Well, why ‘Non,’ We don’t have anything to eat at home, it’s getting late, I’m hungry, this place looks good.” “We still have some salad.” He could live on lettuce and other leaves, but I can’t and won’t so I told him I’d invited him to dinner and stepped inside.

Seated at a wooden table with Kraft paper place mats by one of friendly owners, who immediately brought us a complimentry serving of speck and salami to nibble while we studied the menu, I liked the look of this place. The exposed stone walls gave it a warm atmosphere, and the slicing machine by the chalkboard announcing the daily specials inspired confidence, too. Still, tempted though I may have been, I was not going to order langoustine risotto in a Paris restaurant I didn’t know–I’ve had good risotto exactly once in Paris during twenty-five futile years of trying, and so instead decided on the asparagus veloute and the brandade de morue, which is one of my favorite dishes. Bruno chose the homemade duck terrine and the quenelles de brochet (pike perch dumplings), and we ordered a bottle of Fleurie, a perfect Spring time wine, from the short but interesting wine list. Happily, the bright cherry-jam nose of the Fleurie dissolved whatever peevishness Bruno was still nursing over this impromptu dinner outing, and then things took a decided shift for the better when our starters arrived.

Studded with pistachios, Bruno’s duck terrine was homemade, beautifully seasoned (thyme, green pepper corns), generously served and accompanied by a ramekin of tangy onion jam. My froathy soup had a superb depth of flavor, too, and the bread served with these dishes was excellent crusty baguette with a lacy crumb and a faint perfume of wood smoke. I overheard the couple sitting in the corner across from us congratulating themselves for having found this place, too, and grinned as I watched the owner serving them each a complimentry tot of fiery hazelnut eau de vie that had been made by monks somewhere in the Yonne. I hoped we’d get to taste it, too.

Since brandade de morue, that sublime mixture of baked olive-oil lashed whipped potatoes, salt cod and garlic that’s perhaps best sampled in Nimes, can be a sorry business when it’s not made with real care, I hoped our luck would hold with the main courses. Ditto Bruno’s quenelles de brochet, which can be leaden and tasteless when made from industrial ingredients in industrial quantities. This apprehension surely explained Bruno’s alarm when the waiter revealed his enormous quenelle in a covered Staub casserole. As if reading his mind, however, he reassured Bruno that it was homemade and also explained that the accompanying sauce had been made with broth and a little cream but no flour. The quenelle’s delicate sauce was also garnished with mushrooms, carrots, baby onions and a potato.

Potently garlicky and almost airy in its lightness, the brandade was superb, as was Bruno’s quenelle. When we claimed a well-fed pause before dessert, the owner returned to the table with two glasses of Fleurie from another producer, a thoughtful gesture, and we complimented him over his chef. “Thank you, yes, he’s very talented,” said the proprietor, who told us his name is Yan Duranceau, a young up-and-comer who has already worked at Le Grand Véfour, the Plaza Athénée and Taillevent.

Both of us finished up with fine slices of brebis d’estive, which is made by Christine Arripe at her Ferme de la Montagne Verte in the Ossau valley and shipped directly to this restaurant in Paris. The particularity of this rich but subtle ewe’s milk cheese is that it’s only made during the transhumance period from June to September in the up-mountain valleys of the Bearn. Not surprisingly, it has won a Slow Food label, and it’s just superb.

And finally, two slugs of that mysterious hazelnut eau de vie, which made our eyes water and tasted exactly the way a rafter in the attic of Burgundian barn might if you gave it a good lick–grass, dust, caramel, smoke, it was just lovely, and we walked home with the fuzzy happiness of having inadvertently discovered a delightful new everyday restaurant in our neighborhood embroidered with the warm halo induced by the monks’ skills with a still.

La Table des Anges, 66 rue des Martyrs, 9th, Tel. 01-55-32-24-89. Metro: Pigalle or Notre Dame de Lorette

www.latabledesanges.fr, Closed Sundays and Mondays. Lunch menu 16 Euros, prix-fixe menu 32 Euros. Average a la carte 45 Euros.

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