When a rooster crows, the French transcribe the sound it makes as cocorico. Even after living in France for over thirty years, I’ve never quite been able to retool my SONY Walkman ruined Connecticut-born ears to hear that. Mais peu importe, (But that’s of no importance, or, in more current terms, whatever).  Cocorico or cockle doodle do, the crowing bird that’s making Parisians very happy right now is Rooster, chef Frédéric Duca’s charming new bistro in a quiet corner of the 17th Arrondissement.

Duca’s just returned to Paris after a very successful four-year stint as chef at Racines New York, the Lower Manhattan branch of the Parisian bistrot a vins originally founded by Pierre Jancou. Before that he won a Michelin star in 2013 as chef at L’Instant d’Or, a now gone restaurant on the Avenue George V in Paris, began his career cooking with Gérald Passédat at Le Petit Nice in Marseille and then worked as sous-chef at Le Taillevent in Paris under the late Michel de Burgo.

“New York City was fantastic,” said the chef when we chatted before dinner at his good-looking new restaurant, think a sort of a hybrid hipster-inflected Brooklyn-meets-Provence chic. To wit, an antique metal pharmacy cabinet displaying handmade ceramics from Aix-en-Provence and Brooklyn separates the bar from the main dining room.  Fifties retro wall lamps and Scandinavian modern chairs and tables give the space a funky flea-market edge, and the chef himself laid the handsome cream-colored Moroccan tile herringbone pattern floor (“It almost killed me,” says Duca).

“I loved the free-style approach to modern cooking in New York, where chefs draw inspiration from around the world, and this is what I brought back to Paris,” says Duca. “New Yorkers also like primal flavors, a taste they share with people from the south of France,” the Marseille born chef mused. “For better and worse, Paris is more refined. So at Rooster, I’m doing a personal mash on the three cities I’ve cooked in,” he explained.

This means a short menu that features three or four suggestions for entrees, mains and desserts as a way of showcasing Duca’s love of fresh produce and earthy tastes. A perfect example The veal and razor-shell clam tartare garnished with bergamot and grated smoked ricotta that Bruno had as a starter. There’s also a dish for two to share, a roasted shoulder lamb with its kidneys and artichokes on a bed of spelt in a cocotte.

Like so many of the dishes on Duca’s menu that night, my starter was subtly different in this chef’s execution and so a pleasure for anyone weary of the wan and expensive gastronomic mannerism that has come to characterize late-stage bistronomie (modern French bistro cooking) in Paris. In this very clever riff on a classic pissaladière, or southern French tart topped with sautéed onions, black olives and anchovies, Duca replaced bread dough with tart brise (shortcrust pastry) and garnished it with a perfectly cooked rouget (red mullet) filet and some mustard cress. These adds transformed a market snack into a dish that was brawny in a very Mediterranean way, but also surprising delicate and refined.

Probably because he’d been able to read my mind, Duca added a pasta to our meal, too–homemade agnolotti with a vivid stuffing of parsley, sage and button mushrooms, which was served al dente in a gentle but perfectly sharp Parmesan cream. What really made this dish special, though, were nearly transparent ribbons of Lardo di colonnata, which added the perfect amount of salt and texture.

Duca’s a terrific seafood cook and saucier, skills that were deliciously displayed by our mains. Seared scallops topped with a hazelnut viennoise (crushed hazelnuts and a bit of bread crumbs) was a brilliant idea, since the earthy sweetness of the nut flattered the iodine-tinged sweetness of the bivalves, which were framed by roasted Jerusalem artichokes–another tonal echo of the scallop, salsify chips and an umami-rich jus de viande. A beautifully cooked piece of yellow pollack–the fish’s fleshy was pearly even though the skin had been appealingly crisped, offered another riff on the terre-et-mer (earth-and-sea) yin and yang dishes Duca composes with such skill.

I’m sure the beef dish on the menu that night–filet with parsnips, carrots, pickled citrus and a jus de daube would have been excellent–I mean, how could anything with a jus de daube be bad?, but like the true Marseillais he is, Duca exhibits a profound love of fish and seafood.

Desserts were pleasant, too, including Menton lemon cream with meringue, anise-seed sables and olive oil sorbet and bay-leaf panna cotta with cider gelee and Granny Smith apple sorbet.

If this restaurant was in South Park Slope, it would be packed at both lunch and dinner, but because this Paris location straddles the bobo Batignolles and the more bourgeois eastern precincts of the 17th, the sociological shape of the clientele here is still a work in progress.

My hope for Duca is that word of mouth spreads among all of the lawyers and legal types who have left the Palais de Justice on the Ile de la Cite for Renzo Piano’s stunning new building in Les Batignolles and that his restaurant becomes one of their canteens. One way or another, the cocorico-scored-by-Spike-Lee cooking of a chef who still misses his daily bicycle commute over the Brooklyn Bridge will definitely find me in the crowd again soon.

137 rue Cardinet, 17th Arrondissement, Tel. 01-45-79-91-48, Bus 31, 66, 528 – Stop: Parc Martin Luther King. Open Monday to Friday for lunch and dinner. www.rooster-restaurant.com Lunch menus 26 Euros and 32 Euros. Average a la carte 60 Euros.

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Julia Sedefdjian

In Nicoise dialect, a ‘baieta’ is a little kiss. In Paris, Baieta is brilliant young chef Julia Sedefdjian’s new restaurant in the Latin Quarter and a place where any meal has the poignancy of receiving a succession of little kisses. This is because Sedefdjian’s personal riff on the cooking of Nice, her hometown, and Provence is so sincere, succulent, sunny, shyly sensual and stunning in its technical perfection. And all this is from a chef who is only 23 years old and who won her first Michelin star while cooking at Les Fables de la Fontaine when she was 21 (she started at the restaurant when she was 17 and became its chef at 20).

Sedefdjian created her restaurant with Sébastien Jean-Joseph and Grégory Anelka, two colleagues she met while working at Les Fables de la Fontaine. Jean-Joseph is her sous-chef, while the charming and very friendly Anelka runs the dining room. She calls them “my brothers,” and the three of them are depicted in a drawing by their favorite tattoo artist on the dining room wall.

While you read the menu at Baieta, several little hors d’oeuvres are served to pique your appetite. Sedefdjian’s take on pissaladiere, the sautéed onion, black olive and anchovy tart of Nice–something I love, was excellent on a focaccia like base.

The menu was very tempting, too, especially for someone like me, who loves the food of Nice and southern France, all those wonderful dishes that are found in one of my favorite cookbooks, La Cuisiniere Provencale by J.B. Reboul.

When he came to take our order, Grégory Anelka told us that the two signature dishes here are the “Jaune d’oeuf croustillante,” a starter, and the “Bouillabaieta,” Sedefdjian’s version of bouillabaisse. We decided we’d try them both, and also the caramelised pork belly with celery rave puree, peanuts and an herby green sauce and cod with cockles on a bed of Sardinian fregola pasta with artichokes and olives under a cloud of preserved garlic. The one dish that I’d been hoping to find on the menu, Sedefdjian’s superb version of a classic aioli–cod with vegetables and potatoes with garlic mayonnaise, wasn’t an option, but I’m hoping it will appear on a future menu, since I’ve never forgotten how good it was since I had it at La Table de la Fontaine when she was cooking there.

While we waited over a glass of white wine, both of us noticed something else very special about this restaurant, which is that it has a noticeably happy, relaxed ambience. This is a welcome new trend in Paris, where serious food is increasingly being freed of a conventional corset of formality and stilted pleasure-wilting self-importance.

The egg yolk in a crunchy sphere showed off just the fact that Sedefdjian is an inventive, hard-working and very talented chef with a huge future. When it arrived at the table, my first reaction was to admire it, but I wondered if it would all come together on the palate. It did. Served on a bed of smoked and raw haddock, the yolk spilled out on to the fish, poached leeks and seaweed vinaigrette when the sphere was pierced and bound this homey and deeply satisfying dish together.

The caramelised pork belly was a beautiful plate of food, too, with tender chunks of pork glossed in a beautiful jus, celery rave prepared three ways–as chips, in seared cubes and as a puree, and the green puree of ramps (l’ail des ours, garlic of the bears) was a perfect foil for the wonderfully fatty meat.

“Both of these dishes could be served in a haute-cuisine restaurant,” Bruno observed, and he was absolutely right. Happily, however, they’re available at a charming place without the stratospheric prices associated with that most exalted and so rarely experienced level of French cooking.

Our main courses were stunning. The ‘Bouillabaieta” was an especially good dish, since Sedefjdian had recomposed it, cooking the fish and shellfish separately and then combining it with a potato-puree thickened fish stock that was accented by little toasts with rouille served on the side. What made this so excellent is that the fish didn’t lose their natural flavors to the single ruddy stew, as is usually the case, but remained firm and bright with flavor.

The cod was outstanding, too–a thick perfectly cooked slice of impeccably fresh fish on a bed of al dente fregola with steamed cockles and razor-shell clams, artichokes and slivered olives under a veil of garlic. Here the flavors complimented each other rather than melding together, another example of Sedefjdian’s respect for the produce she works with.

What also impressed about this meal was the excellence of its rhythm. On a very busy night–many tables turned twice, the timing–both in terms of cooking and serving, was flawless. In fact, the only thing about this meal that I found unimportantly wanting was the wine list–to wit, I’d have loved to eat this food with a nice bottle of Bellet, the wine from Nice, but none was to be found on the list.

Our desserts were excellent, too. I loved my delicate fennel spiked sable topped with dots of lemon cream and meringue, while Bruno tucked into a cheeky poached pear with a tuile that stuck its tongue out at him and was garnished with a pool of chestnut ice and chestnut coulis.

Sedefdjian is one of the best young chefs in a new generation who are revisiting the regional roots of French cooking to renew the luster of Paris as the Old World’s pre-eminent dining destination, and I am certain that she will become a chef on par with predecessors like Paul Bocuse and Joel Robuchon–she’s just that good. So go now to catch a rising star and have a really lovely meal without a wound to your wallet.

The view from the loo

5 rue de Pontoise, 5th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-42-02-59-19. Metro: Maubert-Mutualite. Open for lunch and dinner Tuesday to Saturday. Closed Sunday and Monday. Average 45 Euros. www.restaurant-baieta-paris.fr

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