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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Mea culpa, but it’s the middle of winter in Paris when the days seem to last fifteen minutes and everyone I know is sun-and-fun deprived and slammed with work. So you do what you can, which in my case meant an impromptu decision to have a big fat burger for lunch after a morning of appointments in the 10th arrondissement. Truth be told, I’d have preferred the Daily Syrien, for Ahmad’s fabulous falafel and turnip pickles, but it was packed, so I crossed the street to Paris New York, the latest high-concept burger joint in Paris and hoped for the best. The brief menu offered a choice of 4 differently garnished burgers made with Breton Pie Noir beef from Le Poncelet, a prestigious butcher shop, or a portobello mushroom burger; fries; cheesecake; various craft beers; wine by the glass at three different price points, the most expensive being Francis Ford Coppola Diamond Collection red and Newton Chardonnay.

Well, while I was waiting for my burger the place filled up quickly with a gaggle of twenty-somethings who spent a lot of their time poking away at their phones even if they were with friends. So my “Smoky Blue” burger came, and it was so sparsely garnished with the promised Stilton, bacon and onion confit that they didn’t register on the palate. The fries were lukewarm, but pretty good. The lemonade in a Ball Jar, something I haven’t seen since a meal at Mrs. Wilkes Boarding House in Savannah, Georgia twenty years ago, was more Brooklyn than Biloxi–or tart than sweet, and this was a blessing. This meal happened in twenty minutes, left me 15 Euros poorer, and the most interesting thing about it was that I had the opportunity to taste Heinz Balsamic Vinegar Ketchup, which I found surprisingly delicious–I’d assumed it was a no-interest gimmick, and also to realize that I have become hugely weary of the wave of edible Americana that just keeps washing over Paris.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s nice to be able to get a half-decent burger in Paris (none of the burgers in Paris are better than that), since I remember the days when the truly lousy Joe Allen and a couple of other similarly underperforming faux Yankee tables ruled the roost when it came to nostalgic eats. But the phenomenon has now gained so much self-perpetuating momentum it’s becoming a serious bore. I can’t help but thinking that a lot of the clever young backers of the ever-growing number of Paris burger places have realized that they can be real gold mines, since all you need are some good graphics, some better-than-average sourcing, respectable foot traffic in a neighborhood where a lot of people work in front of computer screens, and you’re done, since there sure isn’t any serious cooking going on in any burger shop. I mean, even a really good Croque Monsieur or Madame require more effort.

So this week wasn’t bringing great joy until I went to dinner at Verjus, American-in-Paris chef Braden Perkin’s place in the Palais Royal. Here Bruno and I joined a bunch of old and new friends for a tasting meal in the new and really great looking indigo-painted private dining room Perkins and partner Laura Adrian, Paris’s most charming bar keep, have created on the third floor of their space between the rue Richelieu and the Palais Royal. As soon as I went upstairs and saw this room–and I’m sorry, no photo, but it was so dimly lit that my iPhone, which was all I had on me, was useless, I was delighted, because it can seat 12 at a pinch and so becomes my perfect recommendation for anyone who wants a private space in Paris. I was also happy, because I’ve always liked Braden’s cooking, but in my antic effort to keep up with the new, new, new I hadn’t been here in a year.

So we ate, and it was fascinating to see how Perkins’ style has become quieter, subtler–well, more French, since he first opened. To be sure, each tasting plate is as intricately and logically constructed as a Swiss watch, and most of them induce real pleasure in anyone who was willng to accord them a more than a few very necessary moments of meditation. But even though Braden still looks like an endearing Grant Wood subject circa 2013, a certain sophistication has set in, and this is a good thing. He hasn’t lost the wiry winsomeness he brought with him in his back pocket when he first showed in Paris after cooking in Seattle, but he’s learned a lot. The thing is, though, most of what he’s learned, he’s intuited from the spectularly good French produce he works with–like any seriously good chef, his produce cues him. And in this case, the cue was to turn the flavor spectrums down a few notches so that we could relish the perfect freshness and natural tastes of his produce.

After an amuse bouche of citrus-cured trout with smoked fingerling potatoes and trout roe, we had a superb little clam chowder made with Portuguese cherry stone clams, celery root, thyme oil, wild thyme, lovage, homemade harissa and a crumbly garlic crouton. This was a beautiful little miniature that created a tiny universe of ricocheting tastes which made me think of minnows left behind in a tidal pond. Then a gorgeous slow-cooked egg yolk under a tiny thatch of frisee on a bed of soft polenta with salsify, sweet onions, baby leeks, pumperknickel crumbs and finely chopped kimchi.

Duck breast with winter sauerkraut, orange, rye, and smoked celery root skin–Braden likes smoke, and so do I–came with a brilliant side of baby spinach leaves, hazelnuts, pickled grapes, crimini mushrooms and frozen foie gras shavings that lasted seconds before they dissolved into the leaves while remaining the base note flavor of this terrific little dish.

Braden’s gifted Korean pastry chef Cassandra offered up three desserts, and if all of them were impeccably conceived and executed, the one I liked best was the walnut tart with bergamot jam. All told, this was a fascinating meal, because it highlighted the ways in which a talented and ambitious young American’s cooking has become more gastronomically elegant–bien sur, we’re talking casual elegance here, the longer he lives in Paris.

Daily Syrien, 55 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, 10th, Tel 09-54-11-75-35. Metro: Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, Bonne Nouvelle or Château d’Eau. Open daily. Average 12 Euros.

Khaosan Road, 52 rue Condorcet, 9th, Tel. 01-49-70-07-06, Metro: Anvers, Cadet, Saint Georges. www.khaosan.fr Closed Sunday. Average 35 Euros.

Paris New York, 50 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, 10th, Tel. 01 47 70 15 24   Metro: Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, Bonne Nouvelle or Château d’Eau.

Verjus,  52 rue Richelieu, 1st, Tel. 01-42-97-54-40. Metro: Palais-Royal Musee du Louvre or Pyramide. Dinner only. Closed Saturday, Sunday. Prix-fixe 60 Euros.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1) Terrine du moment de Gilles Vérot

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

3) Baba au vieux rhum ambré

I’m really looking forward to it, too.

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

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

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Since I’m unapologetically obsessed by good food, it amost never happens that I leave the house without knowing where I’m going to eat. Most of the time, in fact, my destination has been carefully researched, and when possible, I love reading a menu online beforehand, partly to tease my appetite but also because this way I can construct my meal meditatively before being distracted by a waiter or a waitress or the good conversation of a friend. This advance planning isn’t only because I absolutely hate the idea of having a bad meal, but is also due to the fact that even in Paris the odds are so hopelessly stacked against spontaneity. These days, just winging it almost never works and reservations are almost always required.

Last night, though, I’d gone for drinks with my friend Christian, and both of us had been too busy to do any restaurant research beforehand. Since we were meeting near the Place des Victoires, I’d vaguely thought that it might be useful for research purposes to see what the food’s like at Le Grand Colbert these days, although I very much doubt it’s good (if you’ve been lately, please let me know if I’m right or wrong), and also knew that we could always go to Les Fines Gueles, a bistrot a vins that we both love.

Unfortunately, it got late on this rainy night, and Les Fines Gueles was packed when we swung by, so I was thinking that maybe Citronelle & Galanga, a good Vietnamese, would do the trick, and we were on our way over there when we noticed the brightly lit shopfront of a new business in the rue d’Argout and wandered over to see what it was: a new burger joint. But not just any burger joint–and they’re lots of those in Paris these days (see: http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/eurofile-the-new-american-tastemakers-in-paris/?ref=food). Instead, this was a small room with a very good looking and well-dressed crowd sitting on oak stools at oak tables tucking into big juicy burgers made with meat from Yves-Marie le Bourdonnec, one of city’s very best butchers. And it glowed with a certain irresistibly bluff urban chic.

The menu looked terrific, too, and we instantly decided to give it a try. The two young owners couldn’t have been more welcoming when we stepped inside either, so we stood and started drinking a fabulous bottle of Bordeaux while we waited for a table. Chatting with the French owners, we found out that one of them had lived in California, the other New York, and that they’d recruited the delightful Camille Malmquist, an American in Paris baker and blogger, to do their baking for them, including the best hamburger buns I’ve ever eaten, and, later, a superb miniature cranberry topped cheesecake.

I was all set for a “Cheesy”–a burger made from a specially composed mix of ground beef from Le Bourdonnec with English cheddar, bacon, homemade barbecue sauce, onion, pickles and iceberg lettuce–never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I’d actually want to eat iceberg lettuce, which is just about the only salad I knew as a child when Mom would cut a head into wedges she called ‘hearts of lettuce’ and we kids called hunk o’ let, slathered with either Stop & Shop Italian dressing or Marie’s blue-cheese dressing, but to our despair, they were sold out of everything but the “Sweet,” a monthly special veal burger with garnishes that were vaguely inspired by Vietnamese Bánh Mì sandwiches, to wit, carrots, pepper and mint, but also grilled Parmesan shavings, chorizo (which I never found) and arugula. Ditto the sweet potato fries–all they had left were regular fries, but they were homemade.

Even though I’d have liked this magnificent mound of meat cooked much rarer, this little baby turned out to be a beauty of a burger, and the fries were terrific, too. The oak stools were sitting on were carved with a stylized version of a burger, the service was just charming, and if we weren’t already in the thrall of Bacchus, they had a great short list of beers we could have been sipping. Chatting further with the owners, they explained that they want Blend–the name is intended to refer to Le Bourdonnec’s ‘secret’ mix of meats, to be a showcase for the “friendly, fun, alert, involved” service they both enjoyed so much when they were living in America. Oh, and if this place is a success, which is more than likely to be, they bashfully admitted they’d open other branches of Blend in Paris, and then maybe beyond.

We finished up with Camille’s superb little cheesecake, and on the way home, I marveled at the fact that hamburgers have become so popular in Paris–when I moved here 25 years ago, they were still a poorly prepared novelty item at places like Joe Allen’s in Les Halles, and also that the city now has some really good burger places. So what happened Well, lower airfares have meant that a whole generation of younger Parisians have fallen madly in love with New York, and lacking the stern gastronomic codes of their parents, they eagerly embraced the city’s comfort foods, which seem so redolent of a certain personal liberty.

And what about me Was it heresy for anyone who’s lucky enough to live in Paris to chose a nice juicy burger over a perfectly roasted chicken or a cast-iron casserole of boeuf bouguigon Of course not, since the hunger before any meal is an evanescent expression of who and how you are at that moment. The most powerful cardinal points of any good appetite–novelty, adventure, nostalgia and biological cravings beyond my capacity for scientific analysis, gently pricked by such keening qualities as rarity and a desire for self-expression, should never be ignored, and last night, the proper prescription for me was a really good burger. Amazingly enough, in Paris now you can get one. And hats off to Camille Malmquist again for those amazingly good hamburger buns.

44 rue d’Argout, 2nd, Tel. 01-40-26-84-57. Metro: Bourse, Sentier or Les Halles. Open daily. Average 25 Euros.

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