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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Before I extol Les Delices de Shandong in the 13th arrondissement, it’s obvious that I should offer a glimpse of my credentials as a critic of Chinese cooking, in this case, the superb regional kitchen of Shan Dong. Alas, as much as I feel qualified to write authoritatively on the American, British, French, Italian, Spanish and other Western kitchens, it’s best to admit that my knowledge of Chinese cooking is rather infantile, or to wit, it’s based very much on a personal primal reaction to what tastes good. Oh, to be sure, I grew up eating, and loving, ‘Chinese’ food of a sort, since Sunday night take-out meals from the excellent ‘West Lake’ in downtown Westport, Connecticut next to the public library, and the also good ‘Golden Door’ restaurant in a shopping center on U.S. 1, were a treat I craved as a suburban child with an insatiable hunger for new tastes and flavors, textures and ingredients.

Mom would save the printed takeout menu from one order to the next in a drawer next to the wall-mounted phone in the kitchen, and around about 7pm on a Sunday, I’d poke my head around the corner every five minutes to see if she was sitting at the kitchen table filling out the menu before calling in the order. The only consolation for me if she wasn’t making fat gray Xs with a well gnawed yellow pencil was the possibility we’d be getting pizza instead–Mom understandably felt that she deserved a night off from shopping and cooking for a family of six, so Sunday was often takeout night, and the promise of favorite foreign foods blunted the terrible melancholy I always felt on the 7th day of the week.

We almost always had the same things, too: egg drop soup, egg rolls, shrimp toast, barbecued pork spare ribs, fried rice, Moo Goo Gai Pan (an Americanized version of a Cantonese dish that involved chicken with mushrooms, bamboo shoots, snow peas {mange toute}, and water chestnuts in a tame chicken-broth based sauce), egg foo yung, shrimp with cashew nuts, and broccoli, I think, which no one ever ate, with a grand finale of fortune cookies that no one actually ever ate either. These were great kitchen table meals with plastic packets of the hot Chinese mustard my father liked, sweet ‘duck’ sauce,’ soy sauce and the food packed in waterproof folded square white paper boxes with thin wire handles. LIttle did I know that most of what we were eating was heavily Americanized Cantonese cooking, and in fact, my education in Chinese gastronomy got muscled out of the way in the 70s and 80s by the arrival of lots of other foreign restaurants in Westport–a couple of terrible Mexican restaurants, a prissy French place called Bon Appetit that had–get this, sea salt on its tables, and a flock of salad-bar-anchored steakhouses with Olde Taverne style decors and big pepper grinders on the tables. Amazingly enough, Westport even had a Bulgarian restaurant, the Cafe Varna, where we had cub scout dinners that left a lot of little boys politely alarmed by stuffed grape leaves and other Balkan fare.

Aside from a few shocking forays to restaurants in Boston and New York’s Chinatowns as a college student–‘real’ Chinese food was almost alarming for being so much more vivid–I mean, the chicken tasted like chicken, it wasn’t until I moved to New York after college and was living on the Upper West Side that my Chinese culinary education advanced, and then it was in the blaze of hot peppers unleashed on Manhattan by the sudden popularity of Szechuan cooking, which made everyone rather embarrassedly aware that China had regional kitchens like, um, Italy, and that what we’d thought was Chinese food was tasty but timid stuff shrewdly edited to politely tantalize our wan palates. The Cuban Chinese food in the neighborhood was a fascinating red herring, though, and occasionally, I’d trek down to Chinatown with other broke young friends.

I don’t think I advanced much, however, until the brilliant and courtly editor for whom I was editorial assistant at Random House invited me out for lunch on a long ago birthday. It was a beautiful Fall day, but I labored in the space of a sudden ill-defined social occasion to create conversation that I thought would interest him as we walked up Third Avenue and then cut across to Shun Yee Palace, where I ate my first Peking duck, a dish so good that I stopped caring if my conversation with a man my father’s age seemed smart or interesting and just ate, greedily wrapping duck, crispy duck skin and finely chopped scallion (perhaps some cucumber, too?) in hot rice-flour pancakes smeared with plum sauce. This was one of the best things I’d ever eaten, and I just couldn’t stop. “The best companions at the table have real appetites,” the editor said eliptically as we were walking back to the office, and if i was momentarily alarmed that he might have found me dull, I also had the rest of our lunch in a brown paper bag to look forward for dinner that night, and instinctively knew I’d have plenty of time to puzzle over his bon mots in the years to come. Suffice it to say that I finally figured out that he loved really good food and was the father of four difficult sons, so the relaxed quietude of sharing a really good meal with someone else who was also immersed in their own pleasure was surely a rarity for him.

Okay, then, enough ambered reminiscence. So am I a reliable judge of Chinese cooking Well, yes, I’d like to think so, and this is why I’d say that if you were only going to go to a single Chinese restaurant in Paris, it should be Les Delices de Shandong, where I ate with Bruno, who lives in terror of red pepper, the other night. I’ve been reading opinions of this place by French colleagues who know a lot more about Chinese food than I do for a longtime, Sophie Brissaud on her P’tit Pois blog foremost among then, and so was really looking forward to this meal. It was superb.

I loved the animation of the brightly lit dining room, and accustomed to the usual get’um in get’em out brusqueness of Asian restaurants in the 13th arrondissement, I was surprised by the polite service. We stared at the menu and negotiated a meal for two very different appetites. I wanted to try the pork-and-cabbage filled dumplings, but agreed to an order of noodles in sesame sauce for Bruno in case the dumplings proved too fiery. Since I didn’t know much about Shan Dong cooking, I just couldn’t assure Bruno that they’d be something he could eat (To learn more about Shan Dong cooking, you might want to watch this YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs0bUhmcBoA). Well, the dumplings, which were filled with delicately tangy (black vinegar, I think) smoky chunky pork and cabbage were spectacular, and the sesame noodles, though much tamer, were good, too, but I wouldn’t feel obliged to order them again if I went back with someone else.

Main courses required similar calculation and negotiation. I had no interest in shrimp with cashews at all, but knew they’d be fine for Bruno if the saute of smoked pork with lots of red peppers, celery, Savoy cabbage, and a few fermented black beans was too potent. Well, it was brilliantly potent–one of the best Chinese dishes I’ve ever eaten, in fact, and with regular slugs of Tsingtao beer, Bruno enjoyed it, too, and we both liked the liserons (oddly called ‘blindweed’ in English, but resembling a sort of leaf-less watercress) in garlicky emerald-green tofu sauce. And the shrimp with stale cashews was desperately bland, almost as though the chef was offended that someone would order something so dull.

On the way home, Bruno, who works in a busy crowded office while I spend my eccentrically quiet and solitary days in flannel pajamas and sweat shirts to a busy rhythm of my own mad making, admitted that the food was very good, but had problems with the noise. It was noisy, but I barely noticed. Instead I was thinking about who I could draft to go back with me to try the soups, the kidneys, the intestines, the carp, and a dozen other dishes I noticed trailing by with avaricious envy. This is a terrific restaurant. And to think it all started out over egg rolls with duck sauce in Greens Farms, Connecticut.

Les Delices de Shandong, 88 boulevard de l’Hopital, 13th, Tel. 01-45-67-23-37. Metro: Campo-Formio. Closed Sunday. Average 25 Euros.

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When a new luxury hotel opens in Paris, aside from filling beds, the utlimate goal is for the property to become a fixture in Parisian life. This aspiration explains the inevitable post-ribbon-cutting cycle of carefully cast cocktail parties–think movie stars, aristocrats, politicians and other brand-name personalities, which are then so breathlessly recounted in major French publications. Myself, I rather doubt that this sort of promotion really accomplishes much, since almost laughingly retouched photos of people like Jacques Lang or Emanuelle Beart sipping Champagne have never filled me with any desire to haunt the same premises. Instead, what attracts me to any new hotel is the perception that it may be birthing a myth or a mystery at the core of its new identity, and this is why I was fascinated by the new Shang Palace restaurant at the Shangri-La Paris hotel when I went to dinner there the other night. Whatever other feints this year-old Asian newcomer may have made at becoming Parisian, I suspect it’s this excellent new “Chinese” restaurant that will accomplish the vital goal of drawing Parisians, so that this pricey palace, like any other new luxury hotel, doesn’t end up feeling like an expensive mausoleum.

Why There’s simply no place like this in Paris, both in terms of the cooking and almost as importantly, the atmosphere, which so completely replicates the look, feel and tone of upmarket Chinese tables in major Asian cities that a meal here is completely transporting, or to wit, for a couple of hours, this restaurant offers an experience of the 21st century codes of luxury and hospitality that are making Asia the new benchmark in the global hospitality industry. And this despite the fact that it occupies a windowless basement space.

But you’ll barely notice the subterranean setting, though, since the room itself is such a tour de force of modern Asian luxury dining–think contemporary crystal chandeliers overhead, gilded serving plates, silver-plated chop stick rests, and flawlessly attentive but exquisitely discreet service.

“This place really does feel just like Singapore or Hong Kong,” said Bruno, and since we’ve traveled extensively in Asia during the last ten years, he knows what he’s talking about. And he was right, too, since the first Shang Palace opened in Singapore in 1974, and more importantly, real Asian luxury has a  different set of codes than the same beast in Europe or America, where the service culture too often shades from haughty to resentful (Europe) or nobly but wearisomely democratic (America)–“You still working on that#8221; Here you really are an honored guest, a drill that our delightful French waitress–a smart young woman who’s traveled extensively in Asia and speaks Mandarin, has got down pat. And it was fun, too, to see a dining room filled with a crowd of Parisian early adapters, or those people who absolutely want to hit the hottest new place in town within a day or two of its opening.

My main hope, however, was that the food would be good, since a city as worldly and wealthy as Paris has sorely wanted for a really good Chinese restaurant for a longtime. So we started with the highly recommended salmon sashimi “Lo Hein,” which came with finely shredded fruit, vegetables (too many carrots), and pleasantly crunchy dried jellyfish in a suave if slightly too sweet sesame based dressing. Wait–sashimi in a Chinese restaurant Well, this is a modern Asian luxury hotel restaurant, so of course there will be a feint or two at the most likely clientele–this dish is probably targeted at Japanese travelers, but if the quality of the fish was excellent, and it tasted very good to me, my guess is that many Japanese diners would find the sauce too present and over-gilding the lily of some really nice fish.

  Next, a half a Peking duck for two, with the first course of course being the bird’s beautifully roasted skin, which we wrapped up in delicate rice-flour pancakes with chopped scallions, cucumbers and a smear of plum sauce: sublime. Next, I was very keen to try the pork with baby clams sauteed with chives and served with steamed oatmeal buns, but our waitress discouraged this choice as being too similar to the duck. So we made a brief detour to a dish of plump scallops served with gingko nuts and sliced green asparagus that must have come from Australia, New Zealand or maybe Peru. Bad ecological karma, the off season asparagus, but a delicate and very pleasant dish–I loved the slight bitterness of the gingko nuts against the sweet creamy foil of the scallops. Then a second round of Peking duck, this time ground duck garnished with pine nuts and meant to be scooped up and eaten inside of parcels of iceberg lettuce. It was very good, but I found chef Frank Xu’s seasoning to be a bit too timid in this preparation, and rather suspect that the overall palate of this kitchen will become bolder once they determine that there’s a real market in Paris for authoritatively seasoned and unapologetically assertive Chinese cooking. That said, the showcased Chinese regional kitchen on offer here is mostly Cantonese, which is far more delicate than that from other parts of China.

The fried rice ‘chef’s style’ was excellent, too–light and generously garnished with shrimp and vegetables, and a side of braised black mushrooms and baby bok choy was impeccably cooked. Bruno loved his five-year-old fermented black tea–as did I, but I regretted that the only white wine proposed by the sommelier was an ice-cold (too bad) Puligny Montrachet. With cooking this good, I dreamt of enjoying a nice glass of Trimbach riesling all through the meal. Even the desserts were interesting, notably sticky rice balls filled with black sesame paste.

The Shang Palace is very expensive, so it will remain a very occasional treat for me, but I’m hoping that the presence of a seriously good upmarket Chinese restaurant in Paris will raise the bar on Chinese cooking at less exalted altitudes, and I can’t wait to go back for lunch, when they serve dim sum.

Le Shang Palace, Shangri-La Paris Hotel, 10 Avenue d’Iéna, 16th, Tel. 01-53-67-19-92. Metro: Iéna. Open Thursday – Monday for lunch and dinner, closed on Tuesday and Wednesday. Average 100 Euros.

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France still suffers from a colonial hangover when it comes to the way it perceives of Asia. If the English have rather admirably come to terms with the loss of their vast once-colored-pink-on-maps-of-the-world empire and only occasionally swoon in nostalgia for the Raj, most of the French still see Asia through the opera glasses of folklore and a rather vain nostalgia. To wit, they want the booming continent with the thousands of churning factories that fill our store shelves to be gentle, alluring, sensual and picturesque. And for proof of my postulation, see what reaction you get when you tell the guests at any Parisian dinner party that the population of Viet Nam is significantly larger than that of France.

To be sure, there’s been important immigration from Asia to France for a longtime, but it hasn’t created the tissue of a dynamic Asian culinary in Gaul. Compare Paris’s Asian tables to those in San Francisco or Los Angeles, for example, and the contrast is generally wilting. Why Most Asian restaurant owners still ‘correct’ their food to cater to the French aversion to hot food and strong flavors. Still, when I heard that YOOM, Paris’s first dim-sum restaurant had opened down the street from where I lived, my heart started thumping. I love dim-sum, and one of the best meals I ate in all of 2010 was at the Crystal Jade restaurant in Singapore on a Saturday noon when they serve dim-sum only. In fact, what I wouldn’t give for an order of their Shanghai soup dumplings right this minute.

Anyway, in the hopes of a brief transit away from the Parisian winter and a good feed, my friend Christian and I padded over their for lunch the other day, and arriving, we liked this restaurant in the rue des Martyrs a lot. The gray tile walls and serving plates with vintage lithographs of Asian maidens or stocky Maoist vintage women harvesting corn were amusing, and the service was surprisingly prompt and very friendly.

We settled in over a bottle of Quincy, and promptly ran amok with the menu, since we wanted everything. The first dish that arrived were our orders of won-ton soup, and it was delicious–delicious deeply flavored broth with delicate meat filled won-tons and a nice floating scrimp of chopped green onion and herbs. Then the grilled ravioli showed up–three to an order, and the pleasure needle dipped down a bit. They were just fine, but lacked a real crust and were under-seasoned.

Then the tower of bamboo steamers arrived. Har Gau, delicate steamed dumplings stuffed with minced shrimp, were pretty good, but the chicken Satay ones were a real disappointment–with a texture that varied between grainy and pasty and no taste of Satay (peanut sauce) at all. Mushroom dim-sum, usually made in Asian with a mixture of fresh mushrooms, tasted more of the can that the mushrooms had come in than the fungi themselves, while “tetes de lion,” balls of ground pork rolled in rice and incredibly delicate and flavorful in Asia, had been over-cooked so that the rice was gummy.

If these little mouthfuls were much better than the generally miserable industrially made ones found in most Asian restaurants in Paris, they lacked the lights, depth of flavor and finesse of those you get in Hong Kong or Singapore, where dim-sum is an elegant pleasure-giving art on par with French pastry in its intricacy, imagination and delicacy. In the best Asian dim-sum places, each mouthful is meant to be a brilliantly balanced gastronomic spectrum of distinct tastes and textures; at Yoom, they all started to taste the same after a while.

Still, this place is definitely a step in the right direction for any Parisian or visitor who really loves dim-sum.

Yoom, 20 rue des Martyrs, 9th, Tel. 01-56-92-19-10. Metro: Le Peletier. Closed Sunday and Monday. Average 35 Euros.

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The red chili pepper garlands are a tip off at L’Orient d’Or

L’ORIENT D’OR

Everyone needs a great failsafe go-to Chinese restaurant in their lives, which is why I was so hopeful when I went to meet my friend Richard for lunch yesterday. He loves Chinese cooking, or all of the cuisines of China, as much as I do and was very keen to share his latest discovery with me, L’Orient d’Or, which is in the 9th arrondissement just a few doors down from the Folies Bergere. On a cold rainy day, I was definitely ready for a wok on the wild side, too, and that’s exactly what I got, since this simple, friendly and very popular restaurant specializes in Hunan cooking, which, as our waiter explained, is characteristically gently acidic in taste and seasoned with garlic, onions, peppers and chili peppers. Or as Chairman Mao, a native of Hunan province, put it: “People from Sichuan and Jiangsu eat pepper, because they’re not afraid of spicy food. People from Hunan eat pepper, because they’re afraid not to eat spicy food. Most of the senior officials of the Communist party are originally from Sichuan, Jiangsu and Hunan provinces. So I’d say that people who like to eat spicy food are the real revolutionaries.”

Since so many Chinese restaurants in Paris play it safe in deference to the presumed timidity of the French palate, I wondered if this kitchen would offer me the fire I was craving, and boy did it deliciously deliver. We started with a refreshing dish of ciboule, or Chinese chives, lightly dressed in sesame oil and flecked with red pepper, and then tucked into some delicious pumpkin beignets. Next, a superb dish of crusty chips of smoked pork with scallions and lots of chili peppers, a fabulous dish that dates back to the Han dynasty, and beautifully sauteed eggplant, also nice and peppery, that came to the table with nary a drop of oil on the dish.

In fact the generally dry nature of the cooking here–as opposed to the usual Chinese fare in Paris, which comes swimming in sauce, was a very pleasant surprise, and I can’t wait to go back and try the chicken Zuo Zongtang, which you have to request in advance and which draws Chinese residents of Paris from all over the city. Richard says it’s crispy on the outside, very tender, and has a well balanced melange of sweet, acidic and peppery flavors, which sounds terrific to me. We drank a very nice Alsatian pinot noir with lunch, and though the list is short, it’s well chosen and the house wines by the carafe are much better than average, too.

L’Orient d’Or, 22 rue de Trevise, 9th, Tel. 01-48-00-07-73. Metro: Cadet or Grands Boulevards. Open Tuesday to Sunday, Closed Monday. Average 30 Euros.

UPDATE (7-17-11): Finally tried the Zuo Zongtang chicken, and it was pleasant, but not remarkable. Much prefer the smoked pork dish, the ciboule, the homemade grilled dumplings, the steamed dumplings stuffed with red rice, and the tofu with ground pork.

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LE VERRE VOLÉ

For anyone visiting Paris, the city’s thriving bistrot a vins scene offers both great eating and excellent value for the money. If Les Fines Gueles near the Place des Victoires is one of my favorite of the new generation of wine-oriented bistros serving good simple market-driven cooking all over town, I’ve also always liked the funky and very trendy Le Verre Volé on a side street near the charming Canal Saint Martin in the 10th arrondissement. The problem with this place, though, was that its popularity has always made it such a challenge to snag a table. Now, though, they’ve just expanded the dining room, which makes it incrementally more possible to enjoy one of Paris’s best bistrot a vins without having remembered to call a week or two a head of time.

The head chef here is Delphine Zampetti, the girl friend of chef Inaki Aizpitarte, the chef at Le Chateaubriand, one of Paris’s cult bobo bistros, and she learned her lesson well while working with Raquel Carena at Le Baratin and Inaki. To wit, her food is smart, stylish, international and wryly maternal. But the maman who inspired Delphine doesn’t knit or make jam, instead she wears high-heels, practices Tai-Chi, has a passport full of exotic stamps, and a 24 year old lover.

Le Verre also usefully open on Sundays and many holidays, so after a long absence, I came for dinner with Bruno, Francois and Tina on Armistice Day. The new dining room is a narrow space to the right of the kitchen, and it’s preferable to the busy, lively and often noisy front room if you want to have a quiet conversation. At the back of the space, an international staff works in an open kitchen, while twin etageres displaying the wines served and sold here–they specialize in organic and natural wines, line both walls. The price displayed is the retail price, with 7 Euros added for corkage.

Even though I hadn’t been here in some time, I was hoping that the lamb-and-fig terrine I’d loved the last time I came might be on the menu, but alas, no such luck. So instead, I started with a salad of sliced oranges, flaked salt cod, croutons and black olives, while the others went with the Thai style green papaya and beef salad, finely sliced veal carpaccio with savings of mimolette cheese and grilled octopus with a salad of herbs. With forks and knives flying, we all tried everything, and everything was delicious accompanied by excellent bread the pleasantly fruity organic Saumur Champigny the waiter suggested. Next, it was a neat split between couples, with two having the grilled duck breast with roasted turnips and an intriguing side slaw of sliced radishes and onions in light mayonnaise, and the other pair, the plump and wonderfully tangy saucisse de Toulouse with potato puree and lively little salad of mixed baby organic greens and herbs.

Aside from the fact that this food was well-cooked, politely inventive and of very good quality, what I liked about it was that it was perfect social food, or pleasant comfort food to serve as a backdrop to good conversation and good wine, and the organic Crozes Hermitage, one of my favorite wines, that we drank with our main courses was spectacular.

If the rest of the gang finished up with apple-and-pear crumble and chocolate cream, I chose the cheese–excellent Comte, Abbaye de Citeaux, and Brin d’Amour as my grand finale and enjoyed it very much.  Le Verre Volé a delightful address for a reasonably priced casual meal, and also offers the opportunity to discover one of Paris’s lesser known but trendiest and most atmospheric neighborhoods.

Le Verre Volé, 67 rue de Lancry, 10th, Tel. 01048-03-17-34. Metro: Jacques Bonsergent. Open daily. Average 35 Euros.

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In the meantime, I was happy to join a friend for dinner at the newest branch of Madame and Monsieur Ly’s little empire of Asian restaurants on a lovely Indian summer night when I was dumb with jet lag from having just returned from New York. I’ve eaten at Chez Ly in the Avenue Niel in the 17th arrondissement several times, and not only is the food excellent, if pricey, but Madame Ly is one of the most charming hostesses in Paris. This remarkably hard-working Asian couple–he’s a Vietnamese from Hong Kong and she’s Cambodian, have between them now created four very good Asian restaurants that stand out in the crowd for the fact they use first-rate French produce, eschew the usual dragon-in-the-temple decors of so many Asian eateries in Paris, have excellent service and very good wine lists.

Midway between the ghastly La Defense business quarter and the Arc de Triomphe, Chez Ly Neuilly is run by Monsieur Ly, and it’s a very attractive and comfortable restaurant with good lighting, a nice decor and a very appealing menu.

Chez Ly Neuilly Accompanied by a fine bottle of Chablis, we started with tasty Vietnamese ravioli, excellent steamed Cantonese dim-sum stuffed with chicken, shrimp and vegetables, and a lovely Thai style salad of slivered mango and shrimp, Next, remarkably tender beef (filet) cooked with chives and ginger and an interesting sole in caramel sauce. The very fresh fish had been cut off the bone and cooked tempura style, before being artfully arranged on its skeleton in a light caramel and soy sauce. The precision and quality of every dish proved that this newcomer is every bit the equal of Chez Ly on the Avenue Niel, and though I don’t often–but probably should–think that much about “business” dining, this place is a perfect address for a meal with an agenda.

And for those whose only priority is great eats and who don’t want to leave central Paris, Chez Ly in the Avenue Niel is just the ticket.

Chez Ly Neuilly, 42 Avenue Charles de Gaulle, Neuilly, Tel. 01-55-62-33-88. Metro: Sablons. Open daily. Average 45 Euros.

Chez Ly, 95 Avenue Niel, 17th, Tel. 01-40-53-88-38. Metro: Pereire. Open daily. Average 45 Euros.

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One of the most gratifying recent developments in Paris is the dramatic and often delicious renewal of the city’s gastronomic under-brush, or neighborhood bistros. These aren’t often places that a visitor to the city will find worth traveling across town for, but if you happen to be staying locally, it’s terrific to have a couple of better-than-average bistros just out your door.

In the 6th arrondissement, perhaps the most seriously gastronimically challenged turf in Paris these days because of the fact that rents are so high, the local clientele needed to sustain a good restaurant has been thinned out by absentee owners of pied a terre, and so many of those who do live locally, work late, and so don’t do restaurants during the week much anymore, and/or go away to their country houses on the weekend, it was nice to find a very pleasant new bistro in the rue Sainte-Beauve the other night. Just a door or two down from Le Timbre, a really outstanding vest-pocket bistro, Moustache is a quietly stylish place with a New York State of Mind vibe created by wooden floors, a brick wall behind the bar, and a crowd that might be found in Soho if they weren’t all wearing suits and often ducking out to the sidewalk every few minutes for a smoke.

Eating off of the very short menu the other night, Bruno and I enjoyed the marinated salmon with mesclun and a very good Asian accented salad of perfectly cooked squid and shrimp on wafer-sliced zucchini, followed by a wonderful steak tartare with very good frites and sea bass filet with lime and wok-sauteed vegetables. Having had rabbit for lunch, I wasn’t tempted by the terrine du jour, a rabbit one made by star charcutier Gilles Verot, who supplies New York based French chef Daniel Boulud with charcuterie for his Bar Boulud restaurants in New York and London, but the fact that he is a fourniseur of this relaxed, friendly, quietly hip place is a sure sign of how seriously they take their food.

If my steak tartare was excellent, Bruno’s bar filets were a bit anonymous and sad. I always ask if any fish filet is “sauvage” (wild, as opposed to farm-raised) in Paris these days, where industrially produced fish becomes ever more the norm, but even though the answer was that it was “bar de ligne,” or line-caught individually landed fish, I had my doubts. These filet were just too tidy and tame in taste to persuade me that they might have been wild. Still, the service was charming, the bread good, and the chalkboard wine-list a nice compendium of well-chosen bottles.

Moustache may not be a destination restaurant, but if  your’e staying on the Left Bank in Saint Germain or Montparnasse, it’s a nice place for a relaxed contemporary French meal, even if a bit over-priced.

Moustache, 33 rue Sainte-Beuve, 6th, Tel. 01-42-22-56-65. Metro: Vavin. Closed Saturday lunch and Sunday. Average 40 Euros.

The post CHEZ LY, An Excellent Asian in Neuilly, B+; MOUSTACHE, A Pleasant Bistro du Quartier, B- appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

This unfortunate state of affairs is why I was very curious when a friend from Hong Kong recently recommended the Bistrot de Pekin in the 8th as serving some of the most authentic Chinese food in town. The location just steps off the Champs Elysees in a neighborhood of offices and hotels wasn’t encouraging, but we decided to give in a try on a rainy Sunday night in the hopes of discovering a Chinese place we could really love. Though it’s one of the hoariest cliches in the book, it was immediately encouraging to arrive at this friendly, attractive place with tall-backed Chinese chairs at tables lined with bamboo matting and peach walls and find that it was mostly full of Chinese patrons.

I came along with the list of dishes to try that had been jotted down by my friend, and after a fair amount of discussion with the waitress to make sure we’d get these and not some of the dumbed down dishes purveyed to the French clientele, we sipped an anonymous but decent red wine by the carafe (6.50 Euros for a half liter) and waited hopefully. The meal got off to a very promising start with fat noodles in a wonderfully fiery peanut and sesame sauce, a Szechuan dish that I used to eat often when I lived in New York. Next, a really excellentsoupe Pekinoise, thick, cartilege rich broth that was wonderfully tangy with vinegar and filled with black mushrooms, fresh slivered bamboo shoots, and shirred egg. The raviolis grillee were excellent, too–obviously homemade and seasoned with garlic, ginger and Chinese herbs.

When the main courses arrived, it was apparent we’d grievously over-ordered–portions here are generous, but I loved the tetes de lion, giant pork meat balls with chopped water chestnuts adding some texture to the soft, nicely seasoned pork, a fiery marmite de boeuf (casserole of beef and Chinese cabbage in chili oil rich broth) and delicious bok choy sauteed with garlic. Inevitably, I saw all sorts of wonderful looking dishes being delivered to neighboring tables, so I look forward to eating my way through the long menu here during the months to come, and also to stopping by for one of the very good value lunch menus. Eureka! Real Szechuan cooking in Paris.

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The 10th arrondissement is one of my favorite parts of Paris, especially the area in and around the rue du Faubourg Saint Denis, which has the brilliant antic human variety that’s always made me love living in a big city. Here is urban life at its most wonderfully variegated–one block devoted entirely to African barbers and beauty shops, another lined by Turkish cafes, here a Serbian-Bosnian-Croatian epicerie, there a restaurant teasingly called El Papi Chullo.

A sure sign that one of the last authentically populaire districts of central Paris is beginning to evolve, however, is the very popular Le Napoleon, a corner cafe that smart and very amiable Polish-born Frenchman Rafael Grusziewicz remodeled and relaunched after ten years of working in various different Costes brothers restaurants and a stint in New York that included waiting at La Goulue. “The neighborhood is starting to stir,” says Grusziewicz, “and for me, it’s just perfect right now. You have a great mix of young and old, gay and straight, rich and poor, people from all over the world, and it’s feels friendly, tolerant and creative. This is the vibe I had in mind when I bought what was a faded old corner cafe and turned it into a neighborhood hangout.”

Open daily from 8am to 2am, it’s become a real local institution and is especially busy at noon, when it slings one of the best hamburgers in Paris, a big fat juicy baby with a half decent bun. To be sure, it’d be better with a slice of real sharp cheddar and a bit of real bacon, but the burger itself is very, very good, and comes with good frites and a side of very tasty coleslaw if you want it. Otherwise, the menu is a happy and reasonably priced top of the charts of local comfort food, including roasted goat cheese and salad, terrific cheese and charcuterie boards, a tofu burger, club sandwiches, steak tartare, tarte tatin, tiramisu, and fromage blanc bio. They also serve brunch on the weekends, and food until midnight. “I wanted to do a happy, honest, reasonably priced place with good quality, nothing fancy, nothing gastro, but good, and a place where everyone would feel welcome,” says Grusziewicz. To which I’d reply Mission Accomplished, if the phrase didn’t have such horrendously tragic resonances, so how’s about “Bull’s Eye, and well done,” instead.

Bistrot de Pekin, 38 rue de Ponthieu, 8th, Tel. 91-42-56-50-86. Metro: Franklin D. Roosevelt. Open daily. Avg 30 Euros.

Le Napoleon, 73 rue du Faubourg Saint Denis, 10th, Tel. 01-47-70-21-36. Metro: Chateau d’Eau. Open daily. Avg 20 Euros.

The post Le Bistrot de Pekin, authentic Szechuan cooking: B+; Le Napoleon, fun and very decent burgers: B appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.