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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**La Scene, Paris

**KGBbis, Paris

**Pavyllon, Paris

**Maison par Sota Atsumi, Paris

**Shabour, Paris

**Substance, Paris

**Racine, Reims

**A Pignata, Levie, Corsica

**Frevo, New York City

**Stubborn Seed, Miami Beach, Florida

**Ixi’Im, Chochola, Yucatan, Mexico

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

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

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

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Victor and Charly, founders of the Brasserie Bellanger

The recent opening of Brasserie Bellanger is another sign of one of the best dining trends in Paris today–the renaissance of city’s affordable dining scene. This category of restaurants had long been abandoned by most Parisians to backpacking students as the food they served slouched towards mediocrity. Now, though, an excellent variety of new addresses are serving up some very good simple Gallic grub at easygoing prices in lively, friendly restaurants, many of which are also usefully open daily. Brasserie Bellanger, which is an easy walk from both the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est in the 10th Arrondissement, is a very good example.

Brasserie Bellanger opened after the piece on affordable dining in Paris I recently wrote for the New York Times, which you can read here, was published, but it certainly belongs in the company of the tables I reviewed in that article. It has an interesting back story, too. Victor and Charly, two friends who previously worked as chefs in the restaurants of Eric Frechon and Jean-Louis Nomicos, decided they wanted to revive the Paris brasserie by returning it to its original mission–good food at good prices served expeditiously in a comfortable lively setting.

So they carefully scouted a location and then spent a lot of time finding the producers who would supply their restaurant, including a farmer in the Aveyron who sends whole sides of Charolais beef to them in Paris and a fisherman in Ouistreham who delivers direct three times a week. Their poultry comes from the Bresse region, most of their vegetables are grown in the Ile de France, and their butter is made by the Laiterie de Kerguillet in Plouay in Brittany.

They were similarly exigent about the drinks served at their restaurant. The coffee they serve is roasted by Joris Pfaff, a prize-winning roaster, and their 100% malt unfiltered beer is made by the Rabourdin brewery in Courpalay in the Seine et Marne. Organic cider is delivered to the restaurant in kegs from the farm of Père Mahieu in Normandy, and the wine list was drawn up to showcase bottles from small independent producers and features a regularly changing selection of natural wines.

Arriving here for dinner on a hot summer night, Bruno and I were seated on the terrace to profit from a feeble breeze. Sipping Champagne and nibbling delicious truffled sausage from the Perigord while we read the menu, we fell into conversation with a jovial man sitting next to us who told us he lives in the neighborhood and comes several times a week. “The decor is a little bit Disney,” he said of the Brasserie Bellanger interior, “But the food is very good and the staff are lovely.”

The menu was an attractive roster of traditional French comfort food, but the prices were so low that I was instinctively apprehensive about the quality of what would follow. I was quite wrong, as it happily turned out, since our starters of oeufs mayonnaise, celeri remoulade and poireaux vinaigrette were excellent. The celeri remoulade was made with freshly grated celery rave, lightly dressed with real mayonnaise and appealingly garnished with crushed roasted hazelnuts, while the leeks were fresh and pleasantly al dente.

My main course of Lagioule sausage with potato puree garnished with chopped chives and salad for 13 Euros was deeply satisfying, and Bruno loved his summer tartare, which was ground beef with chopped olives, fried capers and green zebra tomatoes with a nice warm thatch of golden frites. Our chatty neighbor’s “poisson du jour” (fish of the day) was a nicely served filet of cod with grated zucchini and cherry tomatoes, too. Portions were generous, and the cooking here is light, fresh and precise.

We concluded our unexpectedly good meal here with a nicely made Paris Brest, and I decided this this would also be the occasion for me to take my first cat photo–the water pitcher on our table. Brasserie Bellanger is a very good bet for simple good-quality French food at very fair prices. N.B. It’s open daily for lunch and dinner and serves non-stop; they do not take reservations.

140 rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, 10th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 07 82 32 92 08, but they do not take reservations. Metro: Barbès Rochechouart or Poissonnière. Open daily. www.victoretcharly.com
Average 20 Euros.

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Astair is the newest address of a trio of the French capital’s most innovative restaurateurs–Jean Valfort, Charles Drouhaut and Jean-François Monfort. This team has real gift for delivering restaurants that hit a bull’s eye in terms of what Parisians want to eat right now (Canard et Champagne and Farago are theirs, too), but their signature talent is the sincere and polished hospitality they unfailingly deliver.

Settling in at this good looking dining room with a natty decor by interior designer Tristan Auer that includes terrazzo floors, ox-blood banquettes and bentwood chairs and an art-moderne style cocktail bar in the middle of the room, we immediately liked the lively and very Parisian atmosphere. Then our waiter, a Frenchman who’d lived and worked in Washington, D.C. for many years, was charming and very knowledgeable about the menu. This was a big help, too, since my mind was racing as I tried to decide what to order. Almost everything on the menu sounded appealing, but the real reason for my slightly frantic indecision was that it’s signed by one of my favorite French chefs, Gilles Goujon, who has three Michelin stars at his superb restaurant  L’Auberge du Vieux Puits in Fontjoncouse in the Aude.

Goujon is that increasingly rare chef in the higher echelons of French gastronomy today, or a cook whose pleasure and purpose is to work in his own kitchen day in and day out rather than build a franchised international empire. He’s as talented as he is modest and friendly, too, which I learned many years ago when I first went to his restaurant for lunch. I was writing something about the best restaurants in the Languedoc just after he’d won his third star in 2010.

Somehow or another, I completely miscalculated how long it would take for me to get to Fontjoncouse from Montpellier, and then I got lost on top of everything else. When I was already forty-five minutes late, I called to apologize and let them know that I was on my way. “No problem at all!” said the man who answered the phone. “Drive carefully, and we’ll see you soon.” It was 1.45pm when I arrived at the restaurant, where the serving hours are normally noon to 1.30pm.

“Welcome!” said Goujon when he came to the table himself with the menu.

Flustered and still flapping, I apologized profusely and suggested that maybe I should just have a single dish, since I’d arrived so late.

“Stop! Please, stop! You are welcome here, and it will be my pleasure to cook for you! No one’s in a hurry today. So take off your watch and put it in your pocket, or you’ll ruin your lunch!” He had no idea that I was a journalist either, in case you’re wondering.

Matted against such kindness, the meal that followed was superb. A coddled egg came with fine slices of black truffle and a thrillingly feral puree of the tuber, plus a warm brioche to mop it all up with. Next, a nacreous rouget filet sat on top of a potato filled with brande de morue surrounded with steamed shellfish and a lashing of saffron rouille; this was one of the best fish dishes I’ve ever eaten, and I’m still yearning to return to Fontjoncouse and eat it again eight years later. That, and a rack of roasted cochon noir pork with a potato puree with boudin and a jus that include the fleshy green Lucques olives from the Languedoc.

When I finally left around 4.30pm, I got sort of teary with gratitude as I unwittingly headed for an entirely different experience, which was an evening alone in a hotel room with a water bed and mirrored walls and ceiling in Gruissan Plage. Needless to say, I wasn’t the one who chose this hotel.

So we settled on two starters signed by Goujon, linguine with squid’s ink and a ragout of squid cooked with cardamom for me and a coddled egg with wild mushrooms and brioche for Bruno.

If both of these dishes were excellent, the subtle flavor of the cardamom in the creamy squid ragout and the way it married with the the perfectly al dente pasta made this one spectacular. Other available starters were resolutely French, including oysters, escargots and frog’s legs.

Though the lamb shank with eggplant, pickled lemons, tomatoes and North African spices is usually served for two, they kindly made an exception for me, and I loved the way the differing tones of acidity in the lemon and tomato cut the richness of the fork-tender meat, while the aubergine soaked up its luscious cooking juices.

Bruno opted for the Bulinade de la Côte Vermeille, another Goujon dish and a ruddy fish soup of filled with mussels, cuttlefish, monkfish cockles and sliced potatoes. “What makes it different from a bouillabaisse is that it tastes like there’s some lard (bacon) in the sauce, and it has stronger flavors of pepper, probably Piment d’Espelette, and garlic than a bouillabaisse does. It’s delicious, but I wish it came with some croutons to mop up the soup a little bit more,” he said.

Rather embarrassingly, I guess I’d stared so hard at our neighbor’s roasted quail with grapes and figs that she asked me if I’d like to try some, and for the first time in as long as I can remember, I allowed pure desire to override the ancient curse of my self-deprecating good manners. “Yes, please, if you don’t mind, just a little piece,” I said. It was a good call on my part, too, since the bird was juicy and gently gamey and the resinous flavors in the hot fruit flattered it perfectly.

Though portions here are hefty, sheer gluttony had us finishing up with a very good fruit-garnished baba au rhum for me and an excellent fig tart for Bruno that vanished before I’d even thought to photograph it.

Beyond the dishes by Gilles Goujon, the menu also offers sole meunière, calf’s liver deglazed with vinegar, grilled sole and cote de boeuf–either Charolais or Salers, for two. What’s interesting here, too, is the way that menu shows off how the gastronomic boundaries of the brasserie are being revised for the 21st century–now many brasseries are offering simmered dishes that were once more often found in bistros alongside such brasserie standards as grilled fish and meat. “Young Parisians have fallen in love with the urban glamour of the brasserie–their liveliness and brisk service, but they don’t necessarily want to eat choucroute garni like their parents did. This is why we asked Gilles Goujon to work with us at Astair–we wanted to create an offer that’s more gourmand,” explained Jean Valfort.

They certainly succeeded, which is why Astair is one of the very best of the new brasseries that are so successfully rebooting this much loved Metropolitan idiom.

Astair, 19 Passage des Panoramas, 2nd Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33)09.81.29.50.95. Metro: Richelieu-Drouot. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Lunch menus 15 Euros, 20 Euros, 25 Euros, Average a la carte 65 Euros. www.astair.paris

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Tucked away in one of the ancient and atmospheric side streets that survived the massacre of Les Halles*, the great central food market that was once ‘the Belly of Paris,’ La Poule au Pot is a long-running address that once attracted a bon-vivant crowd of celebrities and night owls with a comforting version of the dish from which it takes it name. Now, happily, it’s been saved from becoming yet another clothing boutique or sandwich shop–the most common fate of any commercial space that changes hands here today, by talented chef Jean-Francois Piège. Piège, 47, has three other excellent restaurants in Paris–Restaurant Jean-Francois Piège, his gastronomic table; Clover Grill, a steakhouse that’s also near Les Halles; and Clover Green in Saint-Germain-des-Pres. This fourth restaurant, however, is the one that feels like the most personal expression of the chef and the traditional French cooking he loves.

I’ve been smitten by Piège’s cooking ever since I first discovered it back in the days when he was head chef at Les Ambassadeurs, the now-defunct restaurant of the Hotel de Crillon. If I loved the wit of his deconstructed spaghetti carbonara–a chunk of crispy pork belly accompanied by a fragile parmesan cartridge that contained the pasta, just napped with cooking water, butter and black pepper, and love what he does at eponymous his Michelin two star restaurant, La Poule au Pot is the table that most deliciously reveals this amiable chef.

Chatting with the chef when I went for dinner with Bruno the other night, he told me, “My idea was to serve the food that I grew up eating in Valence. I love this cuisine bourgeoise French food, and this is a profoundly French restaurant.” To that end, he freshened up the old restaurant without jarring the wonderful 1950s ambience created by mirror-tile covered pillars, floral wall paper, a work-a-day tile floor, wooden chairs, or the big wooden-boxed table radio on the copper bar where little brass plaques bear the names of famous patrons of yore, many of them show-business people most English-speakers won’t know. Adding an amusingly populaire aural note to this mis-en-scene, the restaurant’s soundtrack is the seventies and eighties Pop music Piège grew up on, a detail I like, because it basically tells you, Don’t take this place too seriously–you’re here to have a good time. And we did, a very good time.

We were happily eating some oeufs mimosa–here stuffed eggs topped with riced egg yolk, chives, and finely chopped crackling, an excellent idea, with a flute of Champagne when all of a sudden a guest at the large table of ten on the wall across from us stood up and started singing opera. He had a beautiful voice, and he sang for a good five minutes, which stopped the restaurant in its tracks as patrons and waiters listened appreciatively. Who was he and why was he singing I have no idea, but I did see a couple of excellent bottles of red Burgundy on the table where he was sitting. Beyond that, La Poule au Pot in its new version remains the same bastion of complicit conviviality that it’s always been, or a far cry from the kind of modern Paris bistro where the waiter feels that it’s incumbent upon him to explain the chef’s ‘concept.’

Looking at the menu, it was tough for us to decide what we would eat, since we pretty much wanted everything. But finally Bruno chose the split and roasted marrow bones and me the galantine de canard, a vieille France marvel that’s much too rarely seen on Paris menus these days. Bruno went into a sort of Cro-Magnon trance eating his bones, while I drifted off into a reverie of gastronomic content induced by the beautifully made and perfectly seasoned galantine, a coarse pistachio-studded fowl forcemeat surrounding a lobe of foie gras and garnished with radishes and a gorgeous amber gelee of deeply flavored duck stock.

And because Piège is a reflexively generous man, a quality very much reflected by his cooking, he also sent out an order of frog’s legs en persillade (garlic, parsley, butter) for us to share. These succulent little morsels came from frogs raised in his native Drome, and they were tender and had the subtly mossy taste of a clean country pond.

On the way to dinner, I had every intention of having the poule au pot, or chicken poached in bouillon with vegetables, but since Piège has sensibly decided to serve it only during the cooler months, I had a perfect excuse to zero in on the blanquette de veau–veal in a creamy sauce with baby vegetables and mushrooms, here served with steamed rice, although I was sorely tempted by the turbot with hollandaise sauce. This gentle beautifully made stew was as happy and consoling as a grandmother’s hug, too.

Meanwhile, after dithering between the veal sweetbreads with girolles and the merlan (whiting) frit, Bruno chose the latter, which came to the table with fried parsley and tartare sauce and was good eating on a warm summer night.

Dessert seemed a long shot for us after being so lavishly well-fed, but we decided to share the sampler of three tarts. This turned out to be a wise decision, too, since the apple tart was one of the best I’ve ever eaten, I loved the big juicy blackberries on another, and the chocolate tart had a gently bracing bitterness and was perfectly made.

“This was the food that made me move to France,” I told Piège at the end of our meal. “It’s the French food I like best, too,” he replied, bashfully but obviously happy to have created so much pleasure. Walking home on a summer night with a moon in the sky, I also wondered at how fresh this cooking seemed. But this just goes to show that if you live in Paris for over thirty years like I have, what’s old invariably and quite wonderfully becomes new again. On the fulcrum of great Gallic cooking, it’s the city’s old-school cooking that not only balances the new, but makes the new both possible and interesting until it stops being new, and you start craving the edible varities of tradition again.

*The original market, a handsome cluster of glass-and-cast-iron Baltard pavilions, was destroyed after Paris’s wholesale food businesses were moved to suburban Rungis in 1969 and a notably ugly ill-conceived urban renewal project built–a modern mostly subterranean retail mall and transport hub, on the site. It’s recently been renovated with an undulating yellow-lollipop glass roof, an arguable improvement, but the gardens that surround the mall are still a torn up mess, perhaps awaiting a final redesign when tycoon Francois Pinault’s new museum of modern art opens in the former Bourse du Commerce.

9 rue Vauvilliers, 1st Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-42-36-32-96. Metro: Les Halles or Louvre-Rivoli. Open daily. Prix-fixe menu 48 Euros. Average a la carte 75 Euros. www.jeanfrancoispiege.com

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After reading several positive reviews of Jacopo, the new moderately priced bistro by Thibault Sombardier, a media-loving young chef who has a Michelin star at the seafood restaurant Antoine and who was also a contestant on Top Chef, the French dueling chefs television show, I met a friend for dinner with high expectations. The address in the rue Vernet in the 8^th arrondissement seemed to auger well, too, since this street had once been the location of one of my favorite Paris restaurants, Les Elysees du Vernet at the Hotel Vernet when several superb chefs—notably Bruno Cirino of L’Hostellerie Jerome in La Turbie, successively made it a dark-horse favorite with a beautiful setting under a verriere (glass ceiling) design by Gustave Eiffel (this restaurant still exists and is today known as Le V, but I have no opinion on it today, since I haven’t dined here in at least ten years).

On the way to dinner I also found myself thinking that a decent bistro in this business-and-tourist district of the 8^th Arrondissement along the Champs Elysees might spare some other hapless debutant visitor to Paris the ordeal that befell me on my first night in the French capital (mind you, I’m still eternally grateful to this day that my parents considered this trip to Europe to be an essential part of the education of their four children). On that steamy August night, however, a reunion meal was on the horizon, since my mother, two brothers and me were meeting my father and sister at a hotel just off the Champs Elysees after having traveled on our own for two months.

During those two months when Mom ran the show, we’d eaten exceptionally well, too, including a superb meal at Cipriani in Venice and another one at the Hotel Sacher in Vienna. For the occasion of her children’s first night in Paris, my mother, who had decided to throw caution to winds and spend a good chunk of an inheritance on this trip, had booked us at La Tour d’Argent. She wanted us to have an experience of French haute cuisine, the view of Notre Dame and the Seine by night, and the dozens of intricately stitched lessons in gastronomy, worldliness and gallantry such a meal would surely offer.

Steak at Jacopo

Lemon tart at Jacopo

Suffice it to say, my late father quickly reasserted himself as the family’s final arbiter of all things financial and told my mother to cancel the reservation, because it was, in his view, an absurdly extravagant and foolish place to take adolescent children. “Why don’t you children wait for us in the lobby downstairs,” my mother suggested.

So we sat in a strange row of four armchairs upholstered in some prickly fabric, and eventually they emerged from the elevator, my mother with tear-streaked cheeks first. We ended up walking down the street our hotel was located on and having a meal at the very same Pizza Pino that still exists at the corner of the Champs Elysees and the rue Marignan today (for the uninitiated, Pizza Pino, is a French pizza chain that’s not even on par with such sorry options as Pizza Hut or Sbarro). For ferocious pizza-lovers from the American state that has the best pizza in North America—that would be Connecticut, thank you, this meal was so mind-bendingly bad that it brought on a bout of collective hilarity that disguised, if not completely healed, the conjugal tug of war that had just taken place. To this day, I remained convinced that any cook who puts canned pineapple rings on a pizza is in need of a urgent psychiatric treatment, however.

Who knows, I thought as I arrived at the door of Jacopo, maybe if half-decent reasonably priced French food had been easy for us to find all of those years ago, my Parisian learning curve would have had a different point of departure. As is my habit, I read the menu before going inside to meet my friend, and it looked promising—there were lots of things I’d happily eat—and it was indeed quite reasonably priced, too. The long narrow dining room was rather odd-looking, however. With exposed cement walls and ceiling, bright modern lighting fixtures, dark stained parquet floors and Navy blue Fiberglas chairs at small metal edged tables, it looked more like a sports bar in a Sunbelt city than a bistro.

The joint was jumping, though, with a happy mixture of after-work office friends, tourists, and some French out-of-towners who’d must have heard about the place via word-of-mouth. Over a nice pour of Petit Chablis for 7 Euros a glass, a price that sort of par for the game in any central Paris neighborhood if you’re drinking better than plonk, my friend and me studied the menu and the crowd. We were fish out of water here, you see, because like most Parisians, we almost never find ourselves on the Champs Elysees for any reason that doesn’t have to do with some business-specific errand. Though the city of Paris has made a huge effort to enhance and renew the appeal of the avenue, it’s just not a place Parisians gravitate to, because they’ve long since written it off as tourist turf, or sort of a much better looking and considerably less illuminated Gallic version of Times Square in New York City.

I decided to order a meal that was as French at Vercingetorix, the great hero of the Gauls. To wit, onion soup and blanquette de veau, while my friend opted for the oeufs mayonnaise—hard-boiled eggs with mayonnaise, another dish as Gallic as Charles de Gaulle’s nose, and cod persille (parsley butter with tomatoes and bread crumbs). Then I glanced at the wine list, which was where I expected the restaurant would be making its margins, and they so they did. If there was one white at 25 Euros a bottle and a red at 24 Euros, it was an expensive roster, an off-page nod at the rents in this very expensive part of Paris and perhaps targeted at a business crowd at noon. Still, two people having a three-course meal and sharing a bottle of wine could get away for about 35 Euros a piece here, and cheaper still with just a glass of wine with their meal.

Salmon tartare

That’s when it occurred to me: We were having dinner in a French version of the Olive Garden (a popular chain of moderately priced fast-casual Italian restaurants in the United States), or a sort of fast casual pastiche of a real bistro designed to deliver familiar affordable indigenous comfort food at easy prices in a setting that forsook the touristy memes of white laces curtains and red-checked table cloths. And this is when the meal suddenly became really interesting, because even if the French supposedly consumed more hamburgers last year than they did jambon beurre, the famous sandwich made with baguette, ham and salted butter, the success of this no-reservations restaurant is a reflection of a deep yearning for the type of traditional French dishes that few middle-class people in France have the time to prepare anymore and which are now most often found in a handful of expensive tourist-oriented bistros in Paris. But would the food be good at Jacopo?

Our first courses were not promising, to say the least. My onion soup was unpleasantly sweet, which made me less unhappy that it had been served in such a stingy bowl, and was garnished with a large obviously pre-made crouton topped with dried out melted cheese. More puzzlingly, the oeufs mayonnaise were frankly terrible; the three egg halves (what happened to the fourth one?) were overcooked and topped with a thick flavorless foam that had no resemblance to mayonnaise whatsoever. “You can’t expect miracles for these prices,” my pal commented as she observed my optimism deflating. Except, that is, when you can.

My blanquette de veal was so good that I knew that if I found myself at lose ends for a meal in this part of town, I’d pop in to Jacopo again just to eat this delicate stew of tender meat, onions, mushrooms and carrots in a silken and light but flavorful cream sauce.

“This is really good,” I told my pal.

“No!”

“Yes! Have a taste,” I said, and she did.

“It is good, but my fish is overcooked and has no flavor.”

A shared and rather sad baba au rhum concluded this gastronomic foray, and I went off into the night undecided about the utility of this place, because on the one hand, it was better than the fast food places and chain restaurants on the Champs Elysees, and also relatively affordable, and on the other, the cooking was decidedly hit and miss.

Fast forward two weeks. On a rainy day around noon, I found myself in this neighborhood again when I went to collect a travel visa from an embassy located here, and as it started to pour, I found myself standing hungry near the doors of Jacopo just as it opened for lunch, and thought, Why not?

This time round, a steamed artichoke with a vinaigrette sauce as a starter, chicken breast in a nicely made sauce with baby lardons and mushrooms and surprisingly good frites brought on the same sort of pleasantly muddled satisfaction I used to feel many many years ago when I ate at…Howard Johnson’s, the sadly now defunct, solidly middle-class, middle-of-the-road Quincy, Massachusetts based restaurant chain that passed as a treat for their fried clam plates and peppermint-stick ice cream with hot fudge-sauce sundaes.

Everything wasn’t good at Howard Johnson’s—you had to know what to order, and the same thing is true of Jacopo, which is nobly catering to a similar demographic niche, too. To wit, if you know what you’re doing, you can have a perfectly pleasant meal here, especially for this part of Paris. My late father would have loved it.

5bis rue Vernet, 8^th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-42-89-20-22, Metro: George V. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Average 35 Euros. www.jacopo.fr

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In taking over the kitchen at Racines, a charming bistrots a vins ( a bistro that specializes in wines) in the Passage des Panoramas, talented chef Simone Tondo returns to his roots in more ways than one. Just after arriving in Paris, Tondo worked alongside chef Sven Chartier when the latter ran the kitchen here, so this new chapter in his career is a homecoming of sorts. And then there’s the chalkboard menu, which offers a brilliant market-driven selection of mostly Italian dishes, including several from Tondo’s native Sardinia (many of the wines are Italian, too).

Happily, these dishes display the same earnest, endearing, elegantly earthy style of suave comfort-food cooking that is Tondo at his best. In fact at lunch there the other day, I found his food to be more confident and more assured than ever, which makes for a change from the last time I sampled his cuisine. To wit, Tondo recently had an eponymous restaurant in the 12th Arrondissement where I found his bistronomique (modern French bistro cooking) cuisine too complicated and lacking the imprint of his personality to be really convincing. To be sure, the food he cooked there was good, because he’s an excellent cook, but I missed the sheer charm and amiability of the dishes I ate the first time I discovered his cooking some six years ago.

Grilled langoustines @ Alexander Lobrano

After working in a variety of kitchens, including Cracco in Milan, Mirazur in Menton and with Giovanni Passerini at Rino in Paris, Tondo first really came on the Paris dining scene in 2012 when he launched an excellent restaurant, Roseval, deep in the 20th Arrondissement with British chef Michael Greenwold (today it’s called Dilia). Dining there with friends on an early summer night, we were dazzled by the excellent produce, imaginative culinary constellations of taste and texture, and the stunningly precise cooking times this pair managed to achieve in a tiny  galley kitchen. The dish that stopped the conversation that evening was one I still crave–a gossamer puree of smoked potatoes with sautéed onions, baby clams and a crunchy veil of buttered bread crumbs. The crustaceans’ juices spiked the potato and the crumbs added some provocative texture to a dish that was apparently angelic, but stealthily quite sensual. Sliced sirloin with anchovy cream and riced and pureed cauliflower and a scattering of fresh tarragon leaves strewn across the plate was outstanding, too, as was pork with smoked eggplant, pomelo, fingerling potatoes and dill.

I ate often at Roseval until the pair of chefs went their own ways and sold up, with Tondo eventually opening his own place in the space formerly occupied by Gazetta, the contemporary bistro of chef Peter Nilsson in the 12th. And now following that adventure, it was a pleasure to find Tondo in this charming new setting with the delightful Stephanie Rockford running the dining room.

While we were settling in over very good glasses of Chenin Blanc, Tondo sent us a pair of grilled langoustines to nibble on, and they were superb–napped with excellent olive oil, perfectly cooked, delicately perfumed with rosemary. And so we ended up sampling all of the first courses on the menu that day, including a gorgeous Mozzarella, treviso with speck and a superb plate of Italian charcuterie, including some of finocchiona, or fennel-seed seasoned salami, that’s reason alone to buy a plane ticket to Italy. Not pictured: the best polpette (meatballs) I’ve ever eaten.

While we were enjoying these starters, it occurred to me that Tondo has picked up exactly where Pierre Jancou, the trend-setting founder of Racines, left off when he sold the place. To wit, the kitchen here is based on excellent seasonal produce prepared in such a way as to enhance its natural tastes. The brute goodness of nature was the axis of Jancou’s cooking here, and Tondo has revived this gastronomic orientation, with the additional skill of having a native’s knowledge of the Italian produce he serves and prepares.

And it was while tucking into Tondo homemade pasta with a stunningly good tomato-sausage sauce that I found myself thinking that we’re hungry for real food again. Not chef’s food, not swirls and pearls and powders and fronds, but the type of food that’s cooked with love in family kitchens. That’s what Tondo is offering here, and it’s quite wonderful. My more calorically cautious pal enjoyed her seared scallops with mesclun, too.

Lavishly well fed by the end of his meal, because Tondo is such a reflexively generous cook and host, we decided to share a single dessert. And because my friend probably knows more about dessert than anyone else I’ve ever met, I let her chose one for us.

Truth be told, I wasn’t that excited when she went for the tiramisu, probably because I’ve had so many mediocre ones along the way. But she hit real bull’s eye with this one, because she said, “This is really exceptional. It’s so light, and it shows that a dessert which has become a stereotype can be wonderful again if it’s made with great produce and care.” The great produce in this case is a special marscapone that Tondo imports from Italy himself, and he whipped it into such an airy lactic cloud that it might have blown right off the plate if a stiff breeze had come along. Dusted with good cocoa, it was delicious.

With a terrific list of natural and organic wines, and Stephanie Crockford’s lovely service style and great sense of humor, Racines is just the kind of place where it would be easy to become a regular. So bravo to Simone Tondo, who is cooking better than ever.

8 Passage des Panoramas, 2nd Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-40-13-06-41. Metro: Bourse or Richelieu-Drouot . Open for lunch and dinner from Monday to Friday. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Average meal 35 Euros. www.racinesparis.com

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With the opening of Comice, I’ve finally found a delicious reason to head for the 16th arrondissement, since this restaurant is the suave but relaxed address with outstanding contemporary French cooking this quiet bourgeois part of Paris has so sorely been missing. Traveling to meet a friend here for lunch just before Christmas, I found myself in the midst of a long meditation on my relationship with this part of the city as first I took the Metro many stops west from my home in the heart of the city, and then I walked many long blocks on pavements made pretty but slippery by random collages of the year’s most tenacious yellow leaves finally pelted off the trees by a hard cold early winter rain.

Truth be told, for reasons variously financial, sociological and psychological, this isn’t a part of Paris with which I’ve ever had much kin. To be sure, they’re a few restaurants in this demure, well-tended zone of restrained privilege that I’ve always liked, including Les Tablets de Jean-Louis Nomicos, L’Astrance, Le Stella, Pages, and Monsieur Bleu (more for Joseph Dirand’s sublime decor than the food). But with the exception of the 9th Arrondissement where I live, my axis of good taste has been decidedly tipped towards eastern Paris, or the 3rd,  the 10th, the 11th, the 12th, and more recently, the 18th arrondissements for many years for the simple reason that these are the neighbourhoods of predilection for a whole generation of talented young Parisian chefs. Why That’s easy. These are the quarters where the rents for both flats and commercial spaces are still relatively affordable, which means that they’re also among the youngest parts of the city.

For my part, and as someone who will always be in life-long recovery from a childhood in a safe, well-groomed, and very polite suburb of New York City, I prefer neighbourhoods with more edge and human variety than I’ve ever found in the 16th, and when I was single, I liked living somewhere central that made it easy to walk home after a night out in the clubs. The 16th has also always failed my anonymity test, which is to say people observe one another day in and day out, because these zones are rarely troubled by unknown faces. Myself, I like unknown faces, thrive on diversity, and like my neighbours sparse and mostly kept at a friendly arm’s length.

The last time I’d spent any real time in this neighborhood, as in coming here once or twice a week, was over thirty years ago when I’d lingered in an emotionally inappropriate affair, as one does, because the sex was so good. Waiting to cross a street on the way to lunch, this furtive fumbling connection came back to me vividly, but now, instead of making me cringe as it had for so many years before, I finally laughed out loud at the absurdity of the time I’d spent with a handsome Belgian man who’d once been a monk but who had gone on to become an unhappily married insurance executive instead. Doubtless it was this lurid if good-humoured recollection that finally landed me at the door to this notably attractive dining room in high spirits and with a ravenously well-honed appetite, my revenge, perhaps, on the gimlet-eyed concierge in the Belgian’s building who always eyed me through an index finger’s pullback of ivory lace window veneer as Satan himself.

My lunch date from Los Angeles hadn’t arrived yet, so I chatted with the delightful Etheliya Hananova, who explained that she was originally was from Winnipeg but had arrived in Paris with her husband, chef Noam Gedalof, also Canadian, when he got the job as sous-chef to Antonin Bonnet at Le Sergeant Recruteur on the Ile Saint Louis. So I went back to the open kitchen to say hello to Gedalof, and learned that he’d also worked at Thomas’s Keller’s The French Laundry, an experience that he found ‘invaluable’ and had done a stint with chef Pascal Barbot at L’Astrance. “My cooking is all about produce, making it more eloquent while respecting its natural tastes and explained, adding that he enjoyed the challenge of sourcing as much of his produce from small producers he finds himself as possible. “There should be an element of surprise at every meal, and so I don’t want to use the same suppliers everyone else does,” Gedalof said with a smile. An example “The poularde (a chicken that’s more than 120 days old and which has been fed on a special diet) of farmer Simon Graf at La Ferme du Poc in Gascony. This bird is incredibly succulent and has the most amazing flavor.”

So I already knew what I wanted for lunch when the lady in black, chic as ever, finally darkened the doorway and raised my spirits.

“What a good-looking room, ” she said after settling down and inspecting her surroundings. “Who did it#8221; Well, that would be Parisian architect Nicolas Kelemen, with the beautiful flower arrangements coming from the exceptionally chic florist Debeaulieu in the rue Henri Monnier, and the handsome paintings of trees that are the focal point of the spacious dining room in tones of gray, petrol blue, almond and bittersweet by the Berlin based Canadian painter Peter Hoffer. “Chic but relaxed,” she said, adding, “And I’m hungry.”

So we looked at the menu, and decided she’d start with the scallop carpaccio, and I’d go with the foie gras mousse, that we wanted to try the roasted cauliflower, and that then she’d have the Corsican beef filet in Port sauce, and me that bird chef Gedalof had vaunted earlier.

When they arrived, our starters were beautiful. “Let’s hope they taste as good as they look,” said the Los Angelina, taking the words right out of my mouth. And they did. In fact, the purity, precision and humility of Gedalof’s cooking blew on the embers of one of my most cherished gastronomic memories, my first meal at the long gone restaurant Lutece in New York City, a meal that dazzled me with chef Andre Soltner’s discipline and exquisite ability to frame the natural flavors of food by enhancing them. This food was as elegant but quietly modern at Soltner’s cooking had been forty years ago, too, so much so, in fact, that Gedalof could be his students.

And to prove that he’s in a league with Soltner and a savvy student of Thomas Keller as well, a deliriously good next complimentary next course arrived, homemade tagliatelle with shaved truffles, because, as the charming Etheliya Hananova observed, “you can never eat enough pasta, and Noam loves making it.” We stared at the noodles in their mink stole and giggled with pleasure. “Now I know why I got up this morning,” my friend said.

I felt the same way when my poularde arrived. It was the best French fowl I’ve eaten, both in terms of product and cooking, since a tear-inducing poulet de Bresse at Paul Bocuse some five years ago. Impeccably cooked and napped by a velvety jus, it came with quince, buttery brioche toast, and tiny fragile sage-leaf beignets. Cynthia loved her beef with sweet-potato filled ravioli, too (no photo here, because she was too fast for me).

We also loved the bake whole cauliflower with a superb Grenobloise (capers, croutons, lemon) garnish, which we ordered as a side dish.

Gloriously well fed, and for me, perfectly wined, first with a glass of Domaine Ledogar Carignan Blanc and then a lush glass of Arianna Occhipinti SP68 Terre Siciliane from Hananova’s superb wine list, we doubted we could manage dessert, but finally, and very wisely, decided to share brilliant American pastry chef Catherine Takayama’s delicate “greek yogurt panna cotta with a citrus medley” and orange blossom ice cream, a supremely refreshing winter dessert. This was followed by mignardises that defied any attempt to resist temptation, and suddenly it dawned on me that I’d now be spending time in the 16th Arrondissement for reasons more sacred than profane, because Comice is a truly delightful restaurant.

31 avenue de Versailles, 16th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-42-15-55-70. Metro: Jasmin, Mirabeau or RER C Javel. Open for lunch Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Open for Dinner on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Closed on Sunday and Monday. Four course lunch menu 80 Euros, five course dinner menu 120 Euros. www.comice.paris

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Arnaud Nicolas @ Anne-Emmanuelle Thion

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

Arnaud Nicolas @Betil-Balkan

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

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

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

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

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

Cod with quinoa and wild arugula jus @Anne Emmanuelle Thion

Ducking with grilled onions @ Anne-Emmanuelle Thion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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As Jean-Francois Piège has proven once again at the Clover Grill, his casually chic and wonderfully convivial new grill restaurant in an ancient side street in Les Halles, he’s not only a superb chef but a brilliant restauranteur. If this convergence of talents might seem logical, even natural, the truth is that many gifted chefs are actually pretty hopeless when it comes to doing the social, aesthetic and financial engineering necessary to create a successful restaurant.

Piège created the Clover Grill, a handsome space with a jet-engine strength ventilation system, which means you’re spared the curse of most Paris grill and meat restaurants–your coat smells like the meal you just ate for a week afterwards, with his wife Elodie, and the décor here is an expression of their assured and winningly witty good taste. The Pièges play with some tongue-in-check retro references to the decors once commonly found in French bistros and hotels with cabbage-rose wallpaper (Everyone old enough to have done a Eurail trip around Europe with a backpack or, in my case, ghastly tweed-sided American Tourister suitcase, will doubtless feel the twinge of a long dormant visual memory stirring when they spot this murky floral wall covering in the cozy second dining room here; for me, it’s an instant ticket to a triangular shaped Lyon hotel room next to the train tracks with those hateful hard round pillows called a traversin rolled up in the top of the bottom sheet and a sink but no toilet in the corner), honeycomb tile floors, wainscoting, globe lamps and other Gallic memes, but have the gift of making it all seem fresh and modern, too. This comes from the excellent lighting, beautifully made modern chairs and tables, and puckish fun of including a once shunned object like a Napoleon III faience plant stand in a decidedly hip décor.

The look of the place is important, too, because it tells you why you’re here, which is to have a good time. This is, in fact, the Piège’s welcome new take on the type of fashionable night-on-the-town Paris restaurant that hasn’t really been seriously updated since the Costes Brothers unleashed their formula of louche decors, snippy service and commissary style disco food on the French capital in the 1980s.

At the Clover Grill, however, not only do the room and the crowd look great, the service is charming and they serve the kind of good honest uncomplicated food you look for in a grill restaurant. That said, the bonus here is Piège’s consistent and admirably restless culinary creativity, which shows up most legibly in the starters.

Arriving for dinner the other night, we were offered a choice between the two dining rooms—the low-lit one with a Sputnik style ceiling-mounted lighting fixture and that memory-stoking wallpaper, or the bar room. We chose the latter, since it offered good sight-lines of the long great looking marble bar where you can also sit for a meal and a bartender from the Experimental Cocktail Club group mixes up some seriously good drinks, including the pimenton sprinkled Pisco sour I had to take the edge off of a long day, and the open kitchen where meat and fish are grilled over charcoal or cooked on a rotisserie in the back of the room. The cocktail was served with a nice complimentary hors d’oeuvre of spelt wafers, radicchio fronds and citrus crème, which pleasant provoked the appetite without exhausting it.

Hungry and unable to make up our minds, we settled on three starters, celeriac cooked like a baked potato in the cinders of the grill and then served with a black-truffle-and-Parmesan butter, mackerel marinated in white wine and served on canapés of grilled Koshihikari rice with horseradish, and “Comme une Pizza,” a brittle sphere of pizza dough—an idea Piege perfected when he was chef at the Brasserie Thoumieux, with sliced scallops, onions, truffles and bacon.

Though grilled fish and lobster are offered, as well as rotisserie-cooked duck, Bresse chicken and roast lamb for two, beef is the meat of the matter here, and though I love a good cote de boeuf, I was eager to try the two meats that Piege himself recommended to us when we chatted with him—the Noire de la Baltique beef and the Black Market beef from Australia, so I went with a contre-filet of the former and Bruno an entrecote of the latter, which we ordered rare.

As I’ve learned from finding myself in the middle of the road between a European preference for beef of texture and character and an American adulation of tenderness, tastes in beef are ferociously national and personal. Last year I wrote a piece on the great steaks of Europe for the Wall Street Journal, and it elicited some serious braying from North American readers who rejected the idea character could count for as much as tenderness. Here the story goes that a lot of the beef in Europe is unpleasantly tough, as opposed to the great feed-lot- fattened cuts-like-butter beef produced in the U.S. The point of my piece, which so many missed, is that for me the best beef exhibits an equilibrium between North American and European preferences, or is flavorful and textured but not tough.

Enjoyed with a glass of the very good Muscadet suggested by the savvy female sommelier here, our starters were excellent, and so they should have been for the hefty tariffs they carry. With just a single 69 Euros prix-fixe menu being the only alternative to a la carte, this new place is definitely going to be the province of the well-heeled. Then our steaks arrived with baby potatoes roasted in goose fat, and they were huge.

A first taste of my Noire de la Baltique contre filet (sirloin) made me head spin because it was so sapid. It’s flavor was potently mineral rich and ever so slightly fermented, even faintly winey and gamey, with a subtle nose of the beech-wood shavings on the floor of the room in which it had aged for two months in Hamburg and also notes of iodine, which led me to guess (correctly) that the aging atelier was somewhere in that city’s port district. There was a little bit of a mystery here, however. When we inspected the beef on display in the glass-fronted display cabinet in the back of the bar room, it had a label that said “Born, raised and slaughtered in Germany.” The only other restaurant I’ve been to that serves this beef, Beef in Geneva, which is supplied like Piège by the Metzger brothers butcher shop in Paris, identifies it as being Polish.

Whatever its provenance or biography may be, however, the Noire de la Baltique is some spectacularly good meat, and we both liked it better than the Australian Black Market beef, which had the somewhat overwhelming fatty richness of certain Japanese breeds. But again, beef preferences are personal in the most ornery of ways.

Aside from the two breeds we tried, the Clover Grill also proposes Bavarian beef (Simmenthal), Black Angus from Kansas, and Genisse de Boeuf (from heifers that have not yet calved) from the Limousin, Auvergne (Salers) and Charolais. A choice of four different sauces are also offered to garnish your meat: black Sarawak pepper, Bearnaise, Bercy (red wine with bone marrow and shallots), and a stunning reduction of macerated black currants and blackberries that’s the single most exciting steak sauce I’ve ever tried anywhere. This is because the jam-like depth of the red fruits meet the winey taste of the meat perfectly but without muddling it with red-wine tannins. When I asked Piège about this sublime sauce, he said his mother and grandmother used to make it in the Drome, the region in the Midi where the chef grew up in Valence, as another way of fully using the seasonal harvest of these berries.

Among the four desserts proposed, the stand-out is the rotisserie-roasted pineapple, which would seem to be painted with butter and sugar, so that it caramelizes while it roasts to end up with a taste that reminded me of my mother’s pineapple-upside-down cake, with it’s winking red maraschino cherry ‘eyes’ inside of each pineapple ring embedded in the delicious gooey caramel topping. To cut its sweetness, it comes to the table with a scoop of freshly made lemongrass ice cream, which is delicious. Otherwise, the smoked chocolate tart with a sable crust and hay-flavored ice cream was pleasant, but I can’t see myself ordering either the churros or the grilled banana ‘facon split’ the next time I come here. There will be a next time, too, since I’m curious to see what the 20 Euro burger is like, and I’m already craving another taste of that uniquely luscious Noire de la Baltique beef.

Clover Grill, 6 rue Bailleul, 1^st Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-40-41-59-59, Metro: Louvre-Rivoli, Open Monday to Saturday for dinner. Closed Sunday. Lunch from Monday to Saturday from January 1, 2017. Average 70 Euros, www.clover-grill.com

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Chez la Vieille has reopened, and this is very good news for anyone who loves the earthy voluptuousness of authentic old-fashioned French bistro cooking as much as I do. We have Chicago born chef Daniel Rose to thank for this welcome and very artful revival, too. Rose is the one who loved this place enough to give it a new life (it’s been closed since 2012), so he staffed it up with talent from his restaurant Spring, just around the corner, including chef Oleg Olexin and Remi Segura, who’s signed the great wine list and runs the two dining rooms.

This has been quite a year for Daniel Rose, too. Hot on the heels of his huge critical and commercial success with Le Coucou, the new French restaurant that I think is the best one in New York City, it looks like he’ll also succeed where so many others have failed by successfully resurrecting one of the most legendary bistros in Paris, Chez la Vieille. Since the original ‘vieille’ (old woman), the famously ornery Adrienne Biasin, hung up her apron and retired over twenty-five years ago, many have tried to keep the fires burning at this snug place once beloved of politicians and show-biz types on a street corner just a couple of blocks the old Les Halles market, which was destroyed in a mad act of municipal vandalism in 1969 when it was transferred to a complex of new buildings tragically out of sight and out of mind of the famously food-loving city in suburban Rungis.

But after Marie-Josee Cervoni, the woman who took over from Biasin when she retired, sold up, everyone who followed in the foot steps of these two ladies failed, including the mercurial chef Michel del Burgo, a flash-in-the-pan eighties wonder boy, and several Japanese chefs, probably because the duplex space is not an easy one to make work, but perhaps most of all because to no one’s surprise without la vieille there was no Chez la Vieille. Several people tried to carry on proposing the lavish hors d’oeuvres course for which this restaurant was famous—herring in cream, celeri remoulade, terrine de campagne, marinated anchovies, grated carrots, potato salad with chunks of cervelas sausage and chopped cornichons, and more, but rather than reading as an offering of maternal abundance as it had in the past, it came off as too much food. It also required too much fussing and fiddling from waiters exasperated by the challenge of circulating these bowls and platters to tables both downstairs and up.

But most of all, the demise of Chez la Vieille signaled that even in Paris life had moved on from the days that anyone could get away with pilfering the whole afternoon necessary to eat and enjoy a meal here. Because when Adrienne Biasin, a.k.a. “la vieille,” was in the kitchen, lunch was a lavish high-cholesterol pageant that ended with the grand finale of a big snifter of Armagnac to celebrate the deliciously anarchic decision to throw all professional responsibilities and personal cares to the winds in favor of a thumpingly good feed that was often followed by a good long nap or maybe some furtive fumbling with someone you weren’t married to in a chilly just-rented hotel room

For my part, I had no idea what I was getting into when a visiting London newspaper editor I occasionally free-lanced for invited me to lunch and asked me to find us a place that served “old-school Cro-Magnon bistro food” and also had a decent wine list. In November 1986, I’d only lived in a Paris for six weeks, so I did some research and finally settled on Chez la Vieille, calling three days ahead of time to book for lunch. I’d never been and was keen to try it.

A gruff-sounding woman answered the phone. I explained that I wanted to book a table for two at 1pm three days forward.

“Mais vous etes qui?” (Who are you?), she asked.

I was dumbfounded. Maybe I’d dialed the wrong number?

“Why should I give you a table I don’t think I know you….”

“I hope you’ll give me table, Chere Madame, because I’ve been told your cooking is so good, and I’d be grateful for the opportunity to discover it.”

“Are you a politician You speak like you’re a politician, a lot of shit coming out of your mouth.”

“No, I’m not a politician, I work as an editor in the Paris offices of an American publishing company, and I’ve just moved here from London.”

“Putain qu’on mange mal a Londres!” she said, and I laughed (Oh Fuck do you eat badly in London!). “You’re not English are you?”

“No, “ I told her.

“Okay then, you can come. What’s your name?”

“Alexandre.”

“Okay, see you Friday. Don’t be late, though, or I’ll give your table to someone else,” she said and hung up.

So on a chilly day when I saw Paris nude for the first time—the city’s trees had finally lost all of their leaves, I stepped through the door of this restaurant into warm invisible veils of melted butter and simmering beef, and ran right into a woman with small sharp brown eyes and a prominent nose in a well-worn apron that slouched on her bosom.

She eyeballed me and went for my sartorial jugular, or the much loathed camel’s hair polo coat from B. Altman department store in New York City that my mother had insisted on buying me when I went off to Amherst College in western Massachusetts as a freshman. A more inappropriate garment for that occasion is still hard to imagine, and in fact, the real challenge even today is to divine a situation in which this insanely foppish piece of clothing might have ever been appropriate to the life of a seventeen-year-old boy. It was, however, the only outwear I owned at the time aside from a suede jacket that reeked of sex and cigarettes.

“Alors, c’est quoi ca,” she said, flipping her dish cloth at my coat. “Vous etes un notaire, vous J’espere que non, car ils baisent mal, tous, ils baisent mal.” (Are you a notary I hope not, because they’re bad lovers, all of them), she said and chuckled. Oh was she having a good time with me, surely among the most impossibly naïve and wide-eyed creatures who’d ever graced her door. And in retrospect, I can’t say I blamed her, because even though I didn’t realize it immediately, repeated exposure to her painfully accurate teasing made me usefully aware of the tapestry of public vulnerabilities I was displaying in broad daylight following to my recent move to France. To wit, I was self-conscious, often lonely, and wrong-footed by a recurring lack of self confidence. Or in other words, I was rather lost.

Shaking her head, she took my coat, and then she led me by the hand–her grip was firm–into the dining room.

“Who are you having lunch with?” I explained the British editor.

“You’re not having sex with him, are you?”

I blushed and guffawed. “God, no!” She joined in with a cackle and clapped me on the back.

She poured me a glass of wine and came back with a saucer of sliced sausage. She gazed at me for a minute, and then she said, “Why are you so sad when you’re so pretty?” I was spared the torture of finding an answer to that question–I didn’t think of myself as sad, and I certainly didn’t see myself as pretty, when the leonine English editor fumbled his way through the heavy curtains at the door into the dining room. And we ate. And ate. And ate.

First the hors d’oeuvres, then the boeuf aux carottes Adrienne insisted on serving me, and paupiettes for the Anglo editor.  I didn’t want beef braised with carrots, because I’m not a big fan of carrots, and I had my eye on the roasted veal, but served with wide-cut homemade noodles, this beef—cheeks and breast, braised in beef bouillon with white wine, carrots, onions, garlic, and a smear of tomato paste was so deeply comforting, it made me teary eyed. Though she loved to preen as a crotchety, even difficult, old lady, this wiry woman cooked with love, and once she’d made up her mind about you, she was fiercely protective and deeply loyal. This was what dawned on me as I ate the beef, which was so tender it cut with a fork, in a sauce that had a tantalizing equilibrium between the sweetness of the onions and carrots and the acidity of the tomato and wine. The editor loved his paupiettes—veal cutlets stuffed with forcemeat and tied into lard-barded bundles with fine string—in Port sauce with baby vegetables, too. Adrienne’s crème caramel was the best I’ve ever eaten until very recently at La Bourse et La Vie, which is also owned by Daniel Rose, and bien sur the meal ended with Armagnac, and, rather horrifyingly, some tears.

The London editor had recently founded out that his wife was having an affair with the builder hired to do some work on their house in Hampstead. And when he’d challenged her about it, she’d told him she was leaving him for the new man who was handy with a hammer. Awkwardly, I tried to console him, and was only delivered when he glanced at his watch and realized he had to rush out the door to get his train at the Gare du Nord. So he flung two five-hundred-franc notes on the table and was gone.

Adrienne told me that she didn’t have the right notes to give me change for bill, which was somewhere around 675 francs. So I told her to keep the money on account as a credit for my next meal there, an idea that pleased us both a lot. I went back a week later and spent the remaining 325 francs and more. And this became a happy Friday habit.

So I wondered what to expect on my way to Chez la Vieille the other night. How retro would Rose go in resurrecting this restaurant And actually, how retro did I want him to go?

On the one hand, memory has anointed Adrienne Biasin’s cooking with gold leaf, but walking down the avenue de l’Opera on a cool night, I couldn’t help but daring myself to admit that sometimes her cooking could be a little bit, well, a little bit bland. And as much as I loved her, I never loved the dining rooms—the big bar downstairs took up too much room, upstairs felt like right field, and the lighting was terrible in both rooms.

Well, first things first. Interior architect Elliott Barnes new look for the restaurant is pretty brilliant.

Barnes has retained with the white-gray-and-black tiles of the downstairs dining room, but cleared out the tables downstairs in favor of a handsome new bar made from tin and light wood with a rank of bar stools where you can sit for a drink or a meal. Upstairs, reached as always via the stairwell of this 16^th century house, the high ceilinged dining room with only eighteen covers has been painted tea blue and kitted out with banquette seating along one wall, modern sconces designed by Barnes, and a chain-mail chandelier overhead that struck me as incongruous in this setting.

Helmed by chef Oleg Olexin, the menu is intelligently concise but very appealing. Dismissing options like the Utah Beach oysters from Normandy, the sardine rillettes with seaweed butter, and the bibb lettuce salad with chicken gizzards, we ordered starters that seemed more likely to honor the late Madame Biasin and also show off the kitchen’s talent.

And indeed the unctuous duck terrine ‘Adrienne’ shot me back through time in the most ruthless of ways, since this soft but firm slab of minced duck meat, organs and fat has the kind of low-ball barnyard funk that Madame Biasin always made her signature. Here the terrine comes with a racy beet-juice red grated horseradish condiment and onion jam; both are excellent. Bruno’s Puy lentils with two soft slabs of foie gras were a sexy upstairs-downstairs pair, too—two perfect products that flattered each other in a horny rural coupling.

When it came to ordering mains, we side-stepped the highly recommended coquelet a la diable, knowing that we’ll eat here again soon, in favor of two dishes I perceived as urgently expressing both Rose and Biasin—bouillon with spaetzle, grilled bacon and a poached egg and blanquette de veau, which in English rather insipidly translates as veal in cream sauce but is in reality just so much more than that. Done well, which is a real art, this dish of tender meat with baby onions, the occasional carrot, and miniscule button mushrooms is just about as comforting as being swaddled in white flannel sheets, put in a cradle and rocked in front of a wood fire by your grandmother on a rainy night. Rose is also rightly obsessed by the restorative qualities and pleasures of an honest long-simmered bouillon, and the one served here stands out as the single best comfort food to be found anywhere in Paris this winter.

What makes it even more interesting is that it’s a dish that Adrienne Biasin would probably never have served, since for her it would have felt unfinished. She would have wanted to whip the egg into the sauce rather than leave it whole, for example, and might have been puzzled by the grilled bacon as well, not knowing, of course, that bacon and eggs is one of the most essential and primal comfort-food pairings in the entire English-speaking world. But this deeply restorative dish, a preparation as restaurant (the old French word  for ‘restorative,’ and yes, the genesis of the modern word for a public place to eat, since the original ones in Paris served variously garnished bouillons) as any hundred patented modern medicines, displays Rose’s profound knowledge of French cooking and its history, and also the nimble outsider’s irreverence that allows him to tinker with a cuisine he has succeeded at making his own.

Remi Segura’s off-list Domaine Ganevat Chamois du Paradis Cotes du Jura was a superb suggestion for this meal, and his service was all easygoing charm throughout a meal which I’d criticize in only two places. The garnish of Basmatic rice with toasted almonds and snipped apricot to be eaten with the blanquette de veau came in a tiny dish and was awkward to eat from. When I mentioned this, I was told that I should have dumped the rice into the cast-iron Staub casserole the blanquette de veau came in and eaten out that directly. This would have been complicated in a variety of different ways, since it would take forever for the whole dish to cool off enough to eat, it would be complicated to try and cut chunks of meat in sauce in a high-sided casserole, and the deliciously crunchy almond chips would lose their role if soaked in sauce. So better in my opinion to serve the rice in a larger side dish so that the pleasure of the blanquette can be parsed out.

Given the generous portions here and the heartiness of the cooking, we decided to split a portion of rice pudding with crushed praline rose (almonds in a pink-colored hard candy sugar shell, a popular comestible in Lyon) at the end of the meal. For me it was too sweet and too mushy, and I’d have liked a little bit of crunch from freshly crushed pralines to contrast with the soft, creamy rice. These are quibbles, however, since Chez la Vieille is not only an excellent restaurant but quite possibly a better one than it was under the aegis of the late Adrienne Biasin, who would doubtless also be glad to know that I gave my much loathed camel’s hair coat to a clothing bank a good twenty-five years ago and that I’ve never ever had sex with a notary.

1 Rue Bailleul, 1st Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-42-60-15-78. Metro: Louvre. Open Tuesday through Saturday for lunch and dinner. Closed Sunday and Monday. Average 45 Euros.

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