Pickles

On a warm summer night, Le Rigmarole turned out to be a perfect choice for dinner, because Franco-American chef Robert Compagnon’s small plates menu of yakitori, pastas, and tempura was light, bright, fresh and full of flavor. I’d been wanting to get to this place ever since it opened in October 2017, but frequent travel and the long hideouts needed to work on my latest book meant that this took some time. Well, the long wait was more than worth it.

I hugely enjoyed every single one of the nine dishes Bruno and I shared the other night, especially given the fact that our appetites were heat-wilted and balky. In fact, it was almost as though Compagnon had designed a menu that was especially intended to tantalise languid taste buds, since what’s on offer here is comfort food of the highest and most inventive order, and this is why I’ll be eagerly looking forward to eating here again very soon after a much needed summer vacation.

Robert Compagnon became obsessed by cooking with Japanese Bichotan charcoal while working at the famous Yakitori Tori Shin in New York City and decided to return to Paris and open a Yakitori bar of his own. What makes Le Rigmarole very different from the Japanese places that inspired it is that he cooks with superb French produce and is also serious pasta-lover. Also, co-owner Jessica Yang is a very talented pastry chef who formerly worked for Guy Savoy in Paris and at Rebelle and Per Se in New York City, and the delightful Crislaine Medina who runs the front of the house, has helped the owners put together a really excellent wine list, including the lush biodynamic Buteo Gruner Veltliner from Austria that we chose to accompany our meal.

And a quick note here for anyone who might be unfamiliar with Bichotan charcoal. It’s an exceptionally high quality charcoal made from oak and chefs prize it because it burns at a lower temperature than ordinary charcoal for a longer period of time and it doesn’t release any odors, which means that the char on foods cooked over it is strictly the natural flavor of that particular food. This creates a much cleaner finer taste than traditional charcoal.

The menu at Le Rigmarole runs to some twenty small plate dishes meant for sharing, including fish, poultry, meat, vegetables and pastas. You can also order a chef’s tasting menu, but since I’ve become very weary of this gastronomic trope, which is a fixture of young Paris Master Chef type chefs and la bistronomie, or the modern bistro movement, we decided to order a la carte. After all, I know what I feel like eating of a given meal and choice is one of the pleasures of going to a restaurant.

So we chose nine different dishes, and our meal began with a pleasant assortment of pickles–radishes, carrots and turnips, and then a baby red-onion tempura that was one of the best things I’ve eaten all year. I’ll come right out with it–even after over thirty years in Paris, I still have an atavistic love of certain low-brow American comfort foods, like onion rings, for example. I love onion rings, and well, these were onion-ring nirvana–such light tempura batter on quarters of tender sweet baby onions with a sprinkling of salt and red pepper brought on bliss. Next, a perfect chunk of salmon yakitori in a dipping sauce of herbed yogurt with a dribble of olive oil, another excellent dish, because the dominant flavor here was that of the firm and very fresh fish.

It was sort of interesting to try and decipher the logic with which the dishes we’d ordered came out, because there definitely was one, and ultimately it shaded from quieter flavors to more assertive ones and then sometimes back again, like a nice little melody After the frank taste of the salmon, for example, the homemade spaghetti with cockles and sea urchin sauce that followed with luscious and umami rich to make it one of the best pastas I’ve ever eaten in Paris.

Next, a pause–skewers of chicken breast with basil leaves and chopped pickled lemon, a brilliant cameo of a dish where every element retained its gustative integrity but played in a charming little skit of different tastes that winsomely flattered each other–the barnyard succulence of the chicken was gently awakened by the heat dimmed basil and flattered by the lemon. This was a brilliant little miniature.

Roasted round zucchini with charred skin and a half a lobster with spingoli pasta followed, and then curls of pork breast cooked on bamboo skewers yakitori style. All three dishes were excellent, especially the lobster, where the flesh of crustacean from Chausey in the English Channel was just pearled, or cooked enough so that it wasn’t raw but was still incredibly succulent and almost crunchy. Our last dish–pork polpette (meatballs) had great base notes that came from the pig’s liver and was politely feral.

Blissfully well fed, we couldn’t manage dessert this time round, but I’m eager to discover Yang’s talent the next time I come here.

An just FYI, Le Rigmarole is open until August 12, and the closes for the summer holiday from Augsut 13-September 11, during which time the team will travel to Taiwan and Tuscany in search of new inspiration.

10 Rue du Grand Prieuré, 11th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-71-24-58-44, www.lerigmarole.com Open for dinner only from Wednesday to Sunday. Average a la carte 50 Euros, chef’s tasting menu 49 Euros.

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I’ve been in love with Brittany for nearly thirty years, which isn’t surprising, because I grew up in New England. From my very first visit, this friendly delightfully shaggy and craggy green Celtic province of western France that’s lapped on its back and belly by the Atlantic Ocean has always struck me as an even better version of my own much loved home turf. Why Well, the food, among other things.

If I’ve always loved the tourist Brittany of crepes, oysters, langoustines and homard (lobster) a l’amoricaine, over the course of the decades I’ve lived in France, Brittany has become one of France’s foremost gastronomic regions. Today it rivals, maybe even trumps, parts of Gaul with more established and deeply rooted gastronomic cultures, places like Burgundy and Provence, for example.

These were the thoughts that were bobbing around in my head as we greedily scarfed down a half dozen wild oysters on the edge of the port of Cancale before heading to a superb Sunday lunch at La Table de Breizh Café on a beautiful recent summer day. Since I first dined here a year and a half a go, Japanese chef Raphaël-Fumio Kudaka’s restaurant has become one of my favorite tables, and I was looking forward to having a meal here with Bruno, who loves Breton produce and Japanese cooking as much as I do.

Arriving, we were the first customers of that Sunday lunch service, so we eschewed the Japanese style tables, and opted to sit at the counter where we could watch Kudaka and his team at work and also enjoy the sweeping views and salty breezes of the aquamarine-colored Bay of Mont Saint Michel , which was dotted with exposed oyster parks at low tide.

Since there are only two tasting menus available here on Saturday and Sunday, 75 Euros or 135 Euros, it was easy enough to make a choice. With a train ride back to Paris before us after lunch, and having lavishly well eaten during the previous days, we went with the former, to which we added a tempura course at a supplement. That taken care of, I was able to explain the genesis of this restaurant to Bruno.

After hotel school in Dinard, Breton Bertrand Larcher worked in Switzerland and then moved to Tokyo, where he opened that city’s first Breton crêperie in 1996. Eventually he returned to France and opened crêperies in Cancale, Saint-Malo and Paris that rebooted a genre made stale by tourist induced mediocrity by using seriously good quality produce, much of it organic, and making his crêperies into little showcases for the superb foods of his home province. When Larcher met Raphaël-Fumio Kudaka, who had previously worked with Olivier Roellinger in Cancale, they decided to open a restaurant where Kudaka would cook his own very personal Breton-Japanese cuisine.

The opening course of the meal was a spectacular composition of grilled chicken and shelled lobster with toasted buckwheat grains and a thatch of cucumber, snow peas, kohlrabi, coriander, ginger and parsley in a miso-spiked vinaigrette anointed this perfect coupling of products from the Armor, the Breton word for “land near the sea,” the Argoat, “land of the forest.” This is the recurring yin and yang of a meal at La Table de Breizh Café–creating perfect balance in dishes that include both Brittany’s superb fish and shellfish and its extraordinary meat, vegetables, fruit and dairy produce, and it’s also the defining signature of contemporary Breton cooking across the province.

“I couldn’t imagine what Breton and Japanese food might have in common,” said Bruno, “But now it seems quite logical,” as he said as he tucked into a deep-fried scallop roll on a cushion of dried tofu in a deeply reduced lip-smackingly gelatinous sauce of shellfish bouillon. Both kitchens are informed by a great humility, venerate the produce they work with, prize subtlety, layer textures and are aesthetically alert without ever becoming twee.

The tempura plate included a slice of creamy Japanese eggplant (aubergine), a jalapeño pepper, a cube of tofu, a slice of shrimp mousse bound in a ribbon of leek, and, best of all, a crispy bon-bon of veal sweetbread wrapped in a shiso leaf; this was a brilliant dish, because the gently mentholated taste of the shiso tempered the rich animal custard without overwhelming its delicate earthiness.

The last dish was the most Breton of the meal and also demonstrated Kudaka’s ability to sublimate the region’s best produce through his deep knowledge of both French cooking and the Japanese kitchen. The impeccably cooked rack of Breton pork came with a blaze of red miso on its crown of crunchy golden crackling and was garnished with Paimpol beans, romanesco, seaweed, purslane and a slice of excellent head cheese topped with a wasabi-spiked sauce gribiche. What made this composition so deeply satisfying was that it had nothing to do with ‘fusion’ cooking but reflected an almost painterly understanding of taste, since the umami-rich miso and racing wasabi were such distinctive and quietly exhilarating signatures.

Though the Japanese have an admirable capacity to master the technical skills necessary to become great pastry chefs, the seductive drama that’s at the heart of creating great pastry does not figure into their gastronomic geometry as the grand finale of a meal. Instead, Japanese desserts are intended to be as sincere, consoling and innocent as a kiss from your grandmother. And this was exactly the winsome pleasure delivered by a composition of cheesecake like tofu flan, peach and red miso ice cream, and poached white peaches.

Adding to the experience of Kudaka’s spectacularly good cooking, service at this restaurant is very Breton, which is to say professional, friendly and good-humored, and there’s an excellent wine list–we drank a beautiful 2013 Gauby Vieilles Vignes Blanc with our meal–and a superb selection of sakes.

La Table de Breizh Café, 7 quai Thomas, First floor, Cancale; Closed Tuesday and Wednesday. Lunch menu 38 Euros (Monday to Friday only), Prix-fixe menus 75 Euros, 135 Euros. Tél. (33) 02-99-89-56-46. www.breizhcafe.com 

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Taking its name from the Japanese word for gingko trees, this is a pleasant little spot with a pull-up-a-chair sushi counter just inside the front door where exceptionally talented sushi man Aroun Tanovan, a Laotian who trained as Tokyo’s prestigious Tsukuba cooking school, deftly and passionately plies his trade.

Stopping by for a quick bite on a snowy night–par for the course in Paris this winter, Bruno and I had been looking forward to some miso soup, some sushi and tempura, but they only serve set price menus in the evening, so we both went with the assorted sushi and sashimi plate, which was beautiful to behold when Tanovan delivered two of them to our table and quite rightly advised us to taste everything before using any soy sauce. It was a guilty pleasure to eat some silky red tuna sashimi, and the yellow tail and scallop sashimi were exellent, too. Right away, we were impressed with the quality of the produce here, and the obvious art that had gone into composing these plates, too. Sushi with deep-fried shrimp topped with a silky slice of salmon and soft-shell crabs with avocados and sea-urchin cream was outstanding, as was the entire assortment. Bruno echoed my only complaint on the way home, too, when he said, “I could easily have eaten more.”

Though I drank a nice dry Asahi beer with my meal and skipped dessert, the wine list was compiled by Thierry Desseauve of the excellent Bettane & Desseauve wine guide, and desserts are by Gabrielle Jones, who was pâtissière at the Ritz. All told, this is an excellent little address and a place I’ll look forward to returning to soon and often.

Icho, 3 Rue des Tournelles, 4th, Tel. 01-44-78-03-92. Metro: Bastille. Closed Sunday. A la carte 35 Euros. Assorted sushi and sashimi menu 30 Euros.

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Much too often, the tone of books about living in Paris by Americans runs to treacle or battery acid, with most of the herd tending to the former rather than the latter. What Lebovitz has penned instead is a nuanced and very personal take on Paris. As he said to me over lunch several weeks ago, “Many Americans spend a week in Saint Germain and think they’ve been to Paris, which makes about as much sense as saying you know Hawaii after a visit to Waikiki.”

Refreshingly, the epicenter of Lebovitz’s Paris are the city’s 11th and 12th arrondissements, where he continues to perfect his terrific recipes–they’re many of them interleaved through the chapters of this memoir as well–in the tiny kitchen of his apartment, shops at the wonderful Marche d’Aligre and deepens his gastronomic knowledge by working at a poissonerie and a chocolate shop.

If he mostly enjoys his new life in Paris, he also discovers that the rose has a few thorns. The ACCUEIL (welcome) desk of any French department store, or the customer-service department, is unfailingly the least welcome place one can imagine, and Parisian grocery stores, specifically the FRANPRIX chain, are small, filthy, inhospitable, and poorly stocked when compared the average American or English super market (yes, yes, yes, the city has wonderful outdoor markets and great specialty shops, but everyone needs a good grocery store). He also ponders the peculiar incapacity of Parisians to understand or respect the American/British habit of standing in line, and rues the ambient aggressiveness of Parisians in any public setting. (He missed a couple of my pet peeves, including pay toilets in train stations and the general Parisian indifference to environmentally correct behavior like recycling and conservation). The coffee in Parisian cafes is generally ghastly, too, and hand-held shower attachments (as opposed to wall mounted) are a miserable inconvenience.

In general, however, he finds the city utterly delectable, and after five years here, he considers himself a dyed-in-the-wool Parisian. How did he know that he’d become a Parisian He realized it the day that he took a shower and put on a clean shirt just to take out the garbage–as he quickly learned, appearances are everything in Paris, and this is one of the reasons that the city is such a lovely place to live. Clerks in pastry shops tie up your purchases in beautiful paper pyramids, the fromages really are fantastic, and oh the pastry shops!

A treat to read, LIVING THE SWEET LIFE is also a great source of insider’s tips–Lebovitz divulges that the city’s best hot chocolate is to be found at the tiny Patisserie Viennois in the 6th on the rue de l’Ecole de Medecin and his favorite chocolatier–Patrick Roger in the 16th. As always, Lebovitz’s recipes are both tempting and impeccably written. Just in time for summer, this is a great arm chair read that will tantalize anyone who is planning a trip to Paris as much as it amuses anyone who knows the city well. I highly recommend it.

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Since I’ve lived in Paris, the rue Saint Anne has quite wonderfully become the city’s preeminent Japanese restaurant zone, which is a real boon to anyone looking for a cheap, expedient and delicious feed in the heart of the city. The challenge, of course, is to know which of these places are the best. A big fan of gyoza (grilled Japanese dumplings) and noodles, I’ve been assiduously and very happily eating my way through the area for years, and finally have discovered what I think is the best noodle-gyoza restaurant in Paris–Hokkaido. I went for lunch on this rainy Saturday, and there was already a line at the door when we arrived. A mixture of Japanese residents of Paris and Asian food-lovers, they all clearly knew that this simple, busy place serves outstanding food. Today we scarfed down a double portion of gyoza (God are they good), and then Bruno has udon noodles sauteed with vegetables and beef and I went with the tonkatsu (fried breaded pork cutlet) in a bento box on rice with enoki mushrooms and a lightly scrambled egg. Both dishes were absolutely delicious, and lunch for two with two mugs of green tea was less than 30 Euros, making this place one of the best bargains in Paris. 14 rue Chabanais, 2nd, Tel. 01.42.60.60.95. Metro: Quatre Septembre or Pyramides.

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Since it regularly breaks my heart to see visitors to Paris falling prey to the myriad tourist-trap restaurants in Saint Germain des Pres, I follow new openings in this neighborhood with extra vigilance, always hoping that maybe another good new place might be added to the short roster of honestly good restaurants in this eternally popular part of the city. Thus I was hopeful when I walked by the great-looking new l‘Atelier Mazarine on the rue Mazarine a few days after it opened. Off I went with my friend Judy who lived nearby, and we settled into high stools with low backs in the narrow dining room with high hopes. Low lighting, exposed stone walls, reasonably friendly service, and a country ham in a brace on the long counter that runs the length of the space were encouraging, and the short menu was interesting. Alas, things went off the rails right from the start. Judy’s lightly grilled tuna came with a drab eggplant salad and a strangely fermented pistachio crumble–a composition that had no coherence whatsoever, and my grilled shrimp were a bore. Next, overcooked John Dory with a silly “vegetable sausage” for Judy and an awful griddled veal tartare with Parmesan for me. Drinking the cheapest red on the menu and skipping dessert, we still end up spending over a 100 Euros, which made this place not only a disappointment but an expensive misfire. So give it a miss and head for the excellent L’Epigramme (9 rue Eperon, 6th, Tel. 01-44-41-00-09. Metro: Odeon. Booking essential) instead.

L’Atelier Mazarine, 43 rue Mazarine, 6th, Tel. 01-43-54-12-43. Metro: Odeon.

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