Tucked away in a mercifully still ungentrified street in the northern Marais, Parcelles is a very near perfect Parisian bistrot a vins, or bistro with a special focus on wine. It’s immediate charm, which comes from the wake of the addresses that proceeded it at the same address, notably Le Taxi Jaune, is joyously authentic and profoundly Parisian, from the big copper-clad bar to suspended factory lamps and a retro cracked tile floor.

This isn’t some fly-in-amber address, however. Instead, you instantly sense the suave professionalism and seriousness of the staff from the moment you’re seated at a table with a crisp white table cloth. Then there’s the delightful welcome from owner Sarah Michielsen, who’s one of the best young restauranteurs working in Paris today. This is because of her reflexive hospitality but also comes from her extensive experience of running Parisian dining rooms, including, mostly recently, that of Itinéraires, the now closed restaurant of her ex-husband, chef Sylvain Sendra.

Sommelier Bastien Fidelin is similarly cordial and attentive when he comes to the table with his rather fascinating wine list, which features organic and natural wines from all over France and beyond. The importance of his work is reflected by the name of this restaurant, too. In the French terminology of wine-making, a parcelle is a small plot of land with distinctive geographical and geological characteristics that impact the quality and character of the grapes cultivated.

Chef Julien Chevalier’s menu is regularly revised according to what’s seasonal and best in the markets, and his style is wonderfully produce centric. To wit, he aims to enhance the natural flavors of the produce he cooks rather than temper them into other tastes. In this cautiously and hopefully post pandemic moment, this simplicity and authenticity is exactly the way we want to eat right now.

So Parcelles is a sophisticated but relaxed modern bistrot a vins that aspires to and often achieves a wonderfully low-key excellence.

Meeting my friend Tina, another American journalist in Paris with a French spouse,  for lunch we got through a good hunk of media gossip over a glass of excellent Champagne (Elise Deschannes – Essentielle), and decided to order different things to give the menu a broader sampling. My steamed clams in a marine broth with fresh herbs were succulent and remarkably fresh, while Tina’s pumpkin fritters with herbed Fromage blanc were perfectly cooked in a feathery tempura-like batter.

My choice of a main course may have made Tina shudder, but I can’t resist ris de veau (veal sweetbreads), because I love their resonantly carnal taste and texture. Here, they were impeccably cooked, with some light crusting and garnish of fried sage leaves, and served on a bed of buttery potato puree with a beautifully made silken sauce of veal stock and pan drippings. Tina’s guinea hen was a succulent piece of bird with garnishes of spelt risotto, a thick asparagus spear, and some tapenade. Both plates were generously served and the cooking was. light, precise and full of flavor.

The wine I somewhat begrudgingly allowed sommelier Bastien Fidelin to chose–I’d been leaning towards something from the Cotes du Rhone or Languedoc, was outstanding with this meal, too: Saint Veran – 2019 – Les Pommards by Jessica Litaud, an exceptionally talented young winemaker.

We concluded by sharing a truly perfect creme caramel and the fuzz of well-being that follows a delicious and beautifully served meal (N.B. Don’t miss the lemon cream crumble if it’s on offer).

Since I’m still savoring every meal out with a quiet sense of grateful wonderment after the misery of the two restaurant shutdowns in France, I couldn’t help but thinking that it’s restaurants like Parcelles, not the over-hyped tables of the latest winners of the competitive cooking shows on French television, that form the ballast of Paris’s enduring reputation for gastronomic excellence.

Creativity has its place in the kitchen and can be rather fascinating, but Gallic gastronomic classicism delivers a purring pleasure that is truly timeless in its elegance and sensuality.

13 rue Chapon, 3rd Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01 43 37 91 64, Métro : Arts et Metiers. Open Mon-Sat. for lunch and dinner. Closed Sunday. www.parcelles-paris.fr Average a la carte 50 Euros.

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As the months roll by during the second national lockdown of France’s restaurants, I often find myself thinking of chef Mory Sacko and his intriguing restaurant MoSuke. The reason why is that I desperately hope this exceptionally talented young chef’s intriguing restaurant will survive the financial vicissitudes of the greatest crisis to face French gastronomy since World War II, the successive closures imposed by the French government as a way of tamping down the Covid pandemic in France.

This almost all-white dining room with bamboo laminate topped tables, a few bold splashes of color and accessories of colorful African fabric opened in Montparnasse last September, and Sacko was winning rave reviews for his delicate, elegant, and very personal cooking, a fascinating and unique cuisine that reflects his French nationality, the African origins of his immigrant parents and his deep affinity for Japan and Japanese cooking, when he suddenly had to close MoSuke.

“It was very very hard,” he says. “For me, but also for my team, and it’s harder still that we still don’t know when we’ll be able to reopen again,” he told me by phone recently.

To be sure, the very tall (six feet, five inches), lithe and almost preternaturally gracious and poised 28 year old chef, who grew up in the eastern suburbs of Paris with  his eight siblings eating West African dishes like chicken yassa (with lemon and onions), thieboudienne (fried stuffed fish in a tomato-and-vegetable sauce served with rice), and mafé (beef stew in peanut sauce), has hardly been idle in the meantime. Aside from tending to his nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram, he also won a Michelin star in the 2021 guide to France and is the host of a delightful and popular new television show on France 3, Cuisine Ouverte (Open Kitchen) {N.B. This show is in French and you’ll have to create a free account on the France 3 website to watch Sacko live), which debuted on February 28.

The guiding idea of the wryly but accurately named television show is for Sacko to explore the products of the diverse terroirs (specific geographical regions where specific foods are produced according to specific government regulations) of France. The first show was set in Megeve, the tony Alpine resort in the Savoy, and Sacko was a striking screen presence against a backdrop of snowbound mountains. During this show, he met a producer of reblochon, a typically Savoyard cow’s milk cheese, and then a local chef, Emmanuel Renaut, who has three Michelin stars at a the outstanding Les Flocons de Sel. Both chefs then used the cheese to prepare dishes that reflect their style, with Renaut making the hugely lucky Sacko the most sumptuous looking grilled cheese sandwich I’ve ever seen, aka une croûte de montagne. Think sautéed onions, two types of cheese, including Reblochon, and white wine on country bread.

Manioc lacquered with soy sauce, spinach, ginger, coconut

Sacko’s retort was an intricate dish that elegantly expressed the trinity of his gastronomic identity as a Frenchman of African origins who is besotted with Japan. After smoking the reblochon in hay, he liquefied it with sautéed potatoes and onions, added a dab of wasabi, and  siphoned into deep-fried spheres of toasted bread crumbs, which were then perched on sunny yellow pools of beaten egg yolk seasoned with Japanese plum vinegar. Renaut found the dish surprising, but appealing, observing “I was afraid the wasabi would overwhelm the cheese, but it wakes it up.”

This same leitmotif of lyrical but well-reasoned gastronomic invention and iconoclasm was what I found so thrilling when I had dinner at MoSuke with a gastronomically incisive friend last September.

Both of us loved the roasted lobster with facto-fermented peppers, miso and tomato, a sauve and very pretty dish where the miso’s umami teased the sweetness of the lobster and backdropped the gently soured peppers perfectly. This dish was, in fact, a beautiful cameo of where contemporary French cooking is right now–unfailingly elegant in its aesthetics and flawless in terms of its technical skills, but teasingly racy with unexpected flavours and textures and a sort of complicit one-night-stand sexiness.

If I found Sacko’s version of chicken Yassa–chicken with lemon and onions, a signature dish of West Africa, a bit too refined for my tastes, I loved my friend’s sole cooked in a banana leaf with shichimi tōgarashi (a Japanese mix of seven spices) succulent and delicious, as was its accompanying garnish of attiéké, a dish of fermented cassavas pulp popular in the Ivory Coast, garnished with lovage.

And finally, a truly charming dish of marinated pineapple with bissap (hibiscus) sorbet and a candied shiso leaf. This was food unlike anything I’d ever eaten in Paris before, and so I was very curious to chat with the chef at the end of our meal.

When I asked him about his culinary background, he said, “My Mom’s Malian, but she’s also lived in the Ivory Coast and Senegal, so she knows a lot about West African cooking. She’s a great cook, too” he added proudly. After attending hotel school at fifteen, it was while working in the kitchen of chef Hans Zahner at the Royal Monceau hotel in Paris that he first became interested in cooking.

“It was all new for me, because I didn’t have a French grandmother who made boeuf bourguignon every Sunday,” he said with a grin. “We ate African at home and when I went out with friends, it was for fast food. So I learned French cooking through my work, and I have an outsider’s relationship with it. This let’s me be a little irreverent with tradition at the same time that I really respect it,” he added.

When Sacko became sous-chef to Thierry Marx, an ardent Japanophile, at the Michelin two-star restaurant Sur Mesure at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Paris, he discovered the produce and cooking techniques of the Land of the Rising Sun.
“I fell in love with the aesthetics of Japanese cooking, its precision and perfectionism, its cult of the best produce, and its flavors—African and Japanese cooking both prize umami,” Sacko told me. MoSuke, the name of his new restaurant, reflects this passion, too, since it’s an amalgam of his own first name with that of Yasuke, the first and only African samurai, an emancipated Mozambican slave who lived in 16th century Kyoto.

“There’s a big gastronomic romance between France and Japan, because the two countries recognize themselves in each other. I’m sort of the joker in this story, because I approach both of these kitchens as an outsider, and with my knowledge of African cooking and ingredients, I can shake things up and frame their flavours differently,” says Sacko.

Suffice it to say that I am very much looking forward to dining at MoSuke again and that it should be on your go-to list as well for your next trip to Paris, which will hopefully be very very soon.

11 rue Raymond Losserand, 14th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01 43 20 21 39, Metro: Montparnasse-Vaugirard or Gaite. Open Wednesday-Sunday for lunch and dinner. Closed Monday and Tuesday. Average 60 Euros. www.mosuke-restaurant.com

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Chefs Galien Emery and Adrien Ferrand @Geraldine Martens

After a lot of trial and error, my favorite delivered food in Paris reliably comes from Brigade du Tigre, an excellent contemporary Asian restaurant run by chefs Galien Emery and Adrien Ferrand near their original modern bistro Eels in the 10th Arrondissement.

Since I love going to Paris restaurants so much, I’ve never been a big fan of takeout or delivered food. This all changed in 2020 when restaurants in Paris were shuttered twice by the government as part of its attempt to reign in the spread of Covid 19 (they’re still closed as of February 25, with no known reopening date on the horizon).

During the first quarantine, we rarely ordered more than a pizza or two, but once the second shutdown hit us, I was honestly a little worn out from being in the kitchen so much, and we started ordering more delivered food. Too often, it was a hope-springs-eternal sort of a story, as harried, underpaid, often probably not even legally employed delivery people came to our door frequently massless with pizzas scrunched up into the bottom of boxes, congealed Asian dishes that no amount of steam or sautéing could bring back to life, and some truly tragic mishaps, like the time we ordered from a well-rated Paris delicatessen in the hopes of having a good pastrami sandwich; what arrived was just plain awful.

To be sure, we’ve had some good experiences with delivered food as well. I have often ordered from Hokkaido, Ippudo and Deux or Trois Fois Plus Piment–all Asian noodle and dumpling restaurants, and their food is reliably good, reasonably priced and arrives promptly and in good condition. Ippudo even does the really smart thing of packing the noodles separately from the soup, so that you can reheat the soup and then add the noodles without overcooking them. But if these Asian meals are great lunchtime feeds, what I’ve wanted is food for dinner that might begin to approximate the unexpected and delicious flavors and textures of what I’d eat in a great Paris restaurant helmed by a talented young chef.

And this is what I’ve found every time I’ve ordered from Brigade du Tigre–delicious and inventive food with bright and vibrant flavors and diverse textures that’s carefully packed and promptly delivered to arrive at my table in as close to possible perfection as it might be if I was eating it in-house at the restaurant.

A little back story on these chefs explains why their cooking is so good. After graduating from the Ecole Ferrandi in Paris, Ferrand spent seven years working for chef William Ledeuil, the first Parisian chef to passionately master the flavors and ingredients of Southeast Asia, first for five years at Ledeuil’s Ze Kitchen Galerie and then as chef at Ze Kitchen Galerie Bis, Ledeuil’s annex table.

In 2017, Ferrand opened his Restaurant Eels, which remains one of the best contemporary bistros in Paris, and then he and longtime friend Galien Emery had the idea of opening a restaurant that would present their take on the kitchens of the southeastern Asian countries and China. Emery had lived in Kuala Lumpur for five years, and so he knew Asian cooking really well. Together the pair traveled in Asia for three months in Thailand, Sri Lanka, Singapore and China then they came home to create their new restaurant.

I wasn’t in Paris in October 2020 when Brigade du Tigre opened, because as soon as the first lockdown ended, we’ve been spending most of our time at our house in a village near Uzes, but as soon as I went back to Paris, I somewhat warily ordered some of their food online. And it was stunningly good.

The day I first ordered from Brigade du Tigre, I kept a web window for the restaurant’s order page open on my computer all day, occasionally rereading the menu again in anticipation and further reflecting on what I’d order, because I wanted absolutely everything.

As much as I love the time I spend in my little village in the south of France, it’s rudely awakened me to the most urgent reasons I’ve spent most of my life in a string of big cities–London, Boston, New York, London, Paris, Prague, Paris. If the ostensible adult reason to move to a big city was for work, the real ones were sex and food, since cities offer such a wealth of delicious possibilities for the latter. Now that I’m married, though, food is more than ever my urban grail, and if they’re some wonderful restaurants in Uzes, Nimes and elsewhere in Le Gard, they’re things I absolutely crave, like everything Asian.

So finally I completed my order: five-spice bao buns (coiled buns made with rice flour, seasoned with five-spice powder and steamed), grilled wild-mushroom ravioli, pickled vegetables, and roast lacquered pork belly with pumpkin, pok choi and rice, and a baba (sponge cake) soaked with sake and garnished with litchis and ginger. Then I set the table and lied in wait, desperate for the doorbell to ring.

When the food arrived, I was so impressed by the tidiness with which it had been packed and also glad that all of the packaging was paper, since meals from too many other restaurants produce a deluge of plastic, which is currently difficult to recycle due to the fact that there’s more supply than demand all over the world. But most of all, I was ecstatic at the pleasure of vibrant resonant flavors that were beyond my capacity to create in the kitchen.

My first meal was outstanding, and so I ordered again the other day and tried a variety of other dishes, including shrimp tartare, crab cake and coconut cake, all of which were delicious.

Some day soon, I hope I’ll be able to actually have the pleasure of eating in the dining room of Brigade du Tigre, but for the time being, I’m just hugely grateful to have access to such good and reasonably priced food by delivery.

And in the meantime, don’t miss their coconut cake if it’s available whatever you order, which you should.

Brigade du Tigre
38 Rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, Paris, 10th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-45-81-51-56. Metro: Grands Boulevards. Regular hours: Open Monday to Friday for lunch and dinner. Current (February 20210 hours: Open daily noon-2.30pm and 5.30pm-9.30pm for takeout and delivery. Average 40 Euros. www.brigadedutigre.fr 

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During the year without restaurants, it turns out the last one I would go to in 2020 was the Maison Aribert, a Michelin two-star table in the operetta-set-like little spa town of Uriage-les-Bains, which is a few miles outside of Grenoble in the Vercors.

In retrospect, I wonder if we weren’t guided by some sort of subliminal prescience, since the weekend after our trip away, France entered its second lockdown of 2020 on October 30. Once again, all of Gaul’s restaurants and bars were required to shutdown; as of this date, they are expected to remain closed until at least mid-January 2021. One way or another, we were itching for a change of scene after having spent most of the year in our house in a village outside of Uzes in the Midi after the first lockdown ended in late May.

I’d read a lot about chef Christophe Aribert, too, and having previously had an only dimly remembered experience of his cooking from the short stint he did as chef at L’Opéra Restaurant, the hapless restaurant now known as Coco at the Opéra Garnier in Paris, I was curious to discover his food. So we left home on a beautiful sunny day when the vineyards surrounding our village had turned into a sweeping bronze-colored carpet rolling off in every direction, including to the distant violet-colored Cevennes mountains on the horizon, and drove north to Valence. The idea was that we’d dine at Maison Aribert and spend the night there, and then visit the Musée de la Grande Chartreuse in Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse and then Chartreuse liqueur aging cellars in Voiron and Chocolats Bonnat, one of France’s best chocolate-makers, in the same town.

As is my predilection, the French countryside read en route as a succession of delicious foods and wines and remembered meals. The Rhone Valley resonated with the names of many of my favorite wines—Chateauneuf du Pape, bien sur, but also Cairanne, Gigondas, Vinsombres, and Beaumes-de-Venise, among others. A sign indicating the route to Sisteron brought back the best lamb I’ve ever eaten, a succulent slow-roasted shoulder of spring lamb from that town at La Bonne Étape, while the exit to Romans, made me want its tiny cheese-filled ravioli, and a sign for Saint Marcellin brought on a desperate craving for one of my favorite cheeses. More discretely, the road leading from Valence to Grenoble was lined with plantations of walnut trees, which produce the best of these nuts to be found anywhere in the world (F.Y.I., French walnut producers in the Dauphine have had a hard time of it in the face of competition from California and China, but their more expensive product, which has an Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée, has an infinitely better flavor and texture).

I also found myself eagerly looking forward to eating a meal I hadn’t cooked, since as much as I love to cook, I’ve never cooked more intensely in my life than I have this year. And recently I’ve been missing restaurants, and not just for their food, but as the most vital social fixture in my life and places that have fascinated and delighted me ever since I was a child.

Before puberty lit the fuse of sexuality, food was the vector for sating whatever awkwardly self-conscious sensuality I may have had, and restaurants offered stages for cameo performances that brought self-affirmation and the hope of a larger and more glamorous existence than those of the adults who surrounded me. To be sure, there actually were some rather glamorous people in our town, but most of them had sort of accidently washed up there after the drama of storms and battles elsewhere made them grateful for its silence and primness, a quality they were also wryly amused by.

So I’ve always loved restaurants, beginning with the homely ones that were only occasionally available to me growing up in southwestern Connecticut. I loved Howard Johnson’s—one of America’s original quality- casual restaurant chains, for its terrazzo floors, fries, burgers and peppermint-stick ice cream drowned with hot fudge sauce; the Apizza Center, which produced some of the best ‘pies’ in the pizza belt of pizza-loving Connecticut; and West Lake, a Cantonese restaurant with exquisitely good food we most often ate spooned out of white-paper takeout containers with little wire handles. Even today, thinking about West Lake’s egg foo yung, shrimp toast, egg drop soup, egg rolls, and shrimp in lobster sauce makes my mouth water.

American restaurant culture really blossomed at the same time that I became more and more interested in food, too. If I discovered my passion for restaurants during a first teenaged trip to Europe in 1972, they became a regular part of my life when I went to college. There were modish places like Fitzwilly’s, the first puckishly hip restaurant in Northampton, Massachusetts with its exposed brick walls, spider plants hanging in macrame holders, cheeseburgers in baskets lined with sheets of waxed paper and then elegant restaurants like the expensive Café Budapest in Boston. Moving to New York City after college, I discovered myself and the great metropolis through its restaurants, including places like
Ruskay’s, the supremely bohemian chic restaurant on the Upper West Side with candles that guttered over glass-topped tables and live musicians in a mezzanine, holes in the wall like the Latino-Chinese Flor de Mayo (www.flordemayo.com) and magnificent but wiltingly expensive French cooking at restaurants like Lutèce.

And then I did it again when I moved to London—discovered a city through its restaurants, and another time when I arrived in Paris in 1986. Now with dusk falling on an October day, I was ready to take on the best table in Uriage-les-Bains.

Set on a hillside, the Maison Aribert occupies a handsomely restored former 19th century curists’ hotel, which now offers very five comfortable rooms with Swedish made Hastens beds and lovely views over the surrounding park. Aribert’s restaurant is located at the foot of the hotel in a newly constructed pavilion that is strikingly covered with rough-sawn chestnut planks.

This project represents a triumphant homecoming for Aribert, who grew up here in the Isere as the son of parents who ran a hotel-restaurant and the grandson of a grandfather who was a vegetable farmer. Cooking was not the first ambition of this mountain man, but when a knee injury doomed his hopes of making a career as a skier, he eventually ended up in the kitchen. He worked at a variety of restaurants in Paris, including the kitchens of the Hotel de Crillon when Christian Constant, the father of the modern bistro movement, was there, and La Tour d’Argent before a desire to return to the mountains he loves so much propelled him to accept a job as sous-chef to Philippe Bouissou at the chic Napoleon III style Grand Hôtel d’Uriage-les-Bains in 1997. The pair of chefs won a Michelin star in 2000 and a second one two years later. Aribert took over after Bouissou retired and the restaurant retained its two stars.
Eventually, though, Aribert wanted his own restaurant, and so the Maison Aribert opened in 2019, and the chef kept the two Michelin stars he’d held in his previous post.

Hungry that night, we decided upon the eight-course 200 Euro Menu Degustation, even though I had a qualm or two. One of the many things I’ve learned most intently during a year that’s been nearly devoid of restaurants is that most tasting menus are much too long and over-wrought. This is because they’re the apotheosis of what I describe as show cooking, or a carefully plotted culinary performance that’s intended to make you marvel. In contrast, traditional cooking follows established recipes with the intention of feeding you something deeply satisfying and delicious. The best cooking, of course, manages to do both, to wit, leave you deeply admiring of the chef’s imagination, originality and technical skills at the same time that you’re swooning from some spectacularly good food.

Since the world has so tilted towards show cooking for the last thirty years, a development accelerated by the fairy-tale version of what it means to be a cook peddled with such success by food television, I somehow expected a Byronic flourish as our meal at Maison Aribert began that night. But I was wrong. Aribert’s first dish was as poignant as a naked angel. A small piece of locally raised trout had been cooked to the texture of a cloud, which was made earthbound only by the earthiness of a pleasantly puckering sorrel sauce, fine slices of turnip, blanched cabbage leaves and nasturtium flowers.

Next, a more assertive dish of beets teased by the gentle heat of horseradish and the sweet astringency of a black currant sauce. And the chef played on with a superb dish of brook trout dressed in a bright green sauce of parsley and haricots verts that registered on the palate some kind of vegetal version of mink.

The scales tipped back and forth between the earthy and the empyrean again with a coddled egg with wild mushrooms and herbs being followed by a buckwheat tartelette filled with the perch bellies on a bed of sauteed white onions under a fluffy duvet of celeriac foam. As exquisite as all of these dishes were, at this point in the meal I found myself thinking of something chef Yannick Alleno once said to me, which is that eventually during a tasting menu you have to reach a place where you feel you’ve arrived at the main course; otherwise the meal becomes completely ephemeral and more than a little effete.

Almost on cue, I was served a filet of poached roasted local free-range chicken with a lush dark- brown sauce made from the bird’s own jus seasoned with lemongrass and savory. This was the destination of the meal, and it was a potently lyrical expression of both Aribert’s superb technical skills and his deep love of the terroir of La Chartreuse.

Now with the chef off stage, the meal concluded with an expectedly brilliant cheese trolley—this little resort town is surrounded by some of the greatest cheese-producing towns of France, and then an oddly abstract three-part dessert, which included a chocolate composition and another one of
pleasantly tart apples.

The only blemish on our meal was the decidedly dyspeptic sommelier; otherwise it was a wonderful experience, which proved that Aribert is doubtless well on his way to winning a third Michelin star. N.B. Though hardly cheap, it’s also worth pointing out that this tasting menu at Maison Aribert was relatively good value for the money when compared to what a similar meal would cost in Paris or on the Cote d’Azur.

280 Allée du Jeune Bayard, Uriage-les-Bains, Tel. (33) 04 58 17 48 30, www.maisonaribert.com, Lunch menus 99 Euros and 125 Euros; dinner menus 150 Euros, 180 Euros, 200 Euros.

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With the opening of Pavyllon, chef Yannick Alleno has created a convivial new casual restaurant that aims to make his cooking available to a broader public than the one that can afford his Michelin three-star table upstairs at the lovely Pavillon Ledoyen in the gardens of the Champs Elysees. “Pavyllon is sort of my laboratory,” says Alleno, who seems to inherently understand that French haute cuisine is searching for relevance in a new century. Pavyllon occupies a sunny pretty room overlooking the gardens at the same address.

Why Haute cuisine dining, the traditional pinnacle of the French food chain, has not only become exorbitantly expensive but seems sidelined in a city where they’re so many brilliant young chefs serving spectacularly good and much more affordable food in relaxed and charming restaurants like Septime or the recently opened Maison pat Sota Atsumi.

To wit, I don’t go to Paris haute cuisine restaurants very often anymore, but having been to six or seven of them recently as part of a magazine assignment, I couldn’t help but thinking that I could have eaten just as well–if not better, at a variety of restaurants that would have cost a quarter of what any of these exalted meals did. There was a time when an haute cuisine meal was sort of like going up in a hot-air balloon, or a rare, extravagant and thrilling expedition that offered an enlightening Olympian view of the dining landscape below by dint of serving meals that were so much more head spinningly special, refined, sensual and original than anything you’d probably eaten anywhere else for a very longtime. With a few exceptions, I don’t find that to be true anymore, and I also think that the tight formal formatting of the haute cuisine meal is something that rarely delivers much joy anymore.

These three-star tables are under a huge amount of financial pressure not only because of their exorbitant labor costs, but also because the clientele that can afford Paris haute cuisine dining these days has changed so much. The old-school mix of French clients and foreigners from the U.S., the U.K. and other European countries has diminished at the same time that more and more haute cuisine diners are Asian, Russian, Middle Eastern and hailing from other places with booming economies and very different dining habits and palates. And many customers are also health conscious and environmentally aware in ways that are challenging a concept of luxury dining defined by such foods as foie gras, caviar, sea bass, and other haute cuisine standards.

Clearly, Alleno had all of this in mind when he opened Pavyllon, which serves dishes like beets with chocolate nibs, black olive pistou and ricotta for 21 Euros. He also decided on a counter-service only format, which isn’t new–Joel Robuchon got there first with his L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon, originally in Paris, and now in many other cities, including New York. Perched on a powder-blue velvet-upholstered stool at Pavyllon, you watch your meal being made in the open kitchen on the other side of a wide stone counter, and service is amiable and complicit, a sharp contrast to the drilled, cool and relentlessly calibrated service at many haute cuisine restaurants. “The idea of this place is for people to have a good time,” says Alleno, a remark that sort of underlines how this goal has become so muddled elsewhere.

This restiveness about the future of French haute cuisine is not new–the estimable food critic Francois Simon often complained that haute-cuisine meals were too long when he wrote for Le Figaro and Le Monde, and other chefs, like Pascal Barbot, have wondered about its rote rituals, but it’s become more general. Barbot, for example, serves fresh fruit at the end of a meal at his three-star restaurant L’Astrance, because as he once told me, all of the mignardises and chocolates are just too much. “And does anyone really want a pre-dessert#8221; he once asked me, referring to the appetiser dessert that proceeds the main one at many haute cuisine tables. “It’s all just too much,” he said.

As is true of any laboratory, some experiments are better than others. At a recent meal at Pavyllon, I loved the tart spinach soup with a tiny knob of scamorza and burned nutmeg and the oyster beignet with smoked pike perch eggs, but found the pike perch mousse lined with brioche crusts and celeriac extract a bit timid.

I’ve known Yannick Alleno’s cooking ever since he cooked at the Hotel Scribe many years ago and have always admired his talent, which continues to evolve in interesting ways. So it was interesting to see him riffing on his fascination with Asian cooking via a small plates format at Pavyllon. Some dishes are angelic to the point of being a little plain, like turbot with vegetable ‘pearls’ and salicorne with an herbal jus, while others are succulent and deeply satisfying, including a luscious stroganoff of Wagyu beef under a thatch of celeriac matchsticks and potato straws. The perfect pour with the stroganoff is a glass of the superb Saint Joseph that Alleno is now making with Michel Chapoutier.

Pithiviers of duck and foie gras by chef Sota Atsumi at Maison par Sota Atsumi

On another visit–and there will be one, I’d love to try the boudin noir (black pudding) with suckling pig chops and the Pithiviers of marinated hare with a jus royal, because these pastry tourtes, which are happily very fashionable in Paris this Fall, can be ecstatically good; the best one I’ve had recently was the magnificent duck, foie gras and spinach filled tourte served with quince puree at Maison par Sota Atsumi. I’d also be curious to sample Alleno’s pumpkin-stuffed tortellini and his gluten-free tagliatelle with corn extraction, caviar and crispy chicken skin.

Desserts are excellent, too, including caramel ice cream with Amarena cherries and candied hazelnuts. The wine list is outstanding, too, and they pour a great selection of wines by the glass. Service is eager and charming, too. Usefully, this restaurant is open daily for lunch and dinner, too, and you can book online, which makes it a great option for solo dining. As a laboratory for the future of French haute cuisine, Pavyllon is an interesting and appealing restaurant with some imaginative and technically impressive cooking.

Pavyllon, Carré des Champs-Elysées, avenue Dutuit Metro: Champs-Elysées-Clemenceau, Tel. (33) 01-53-05-10-10, www.yannick-alleno.com/fr/restaurants-reservation/pavyllon Open daily for lunch and dinner. Lunch menu 68 Euros, Prix-fixe menus 145 Euros, 235 Euros, Average a la carte 150 Euros.

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Because 2019 is still so new, telling you the meal I had at Ibrik Kitchen the other night was one of the best I’ve had all year doesn’t deliver adequate praise for the excellent “neo-nostalgic” Romanian cooking of chefs Ovidio Malisevschi and Bogdan Alexandrescu a.k.a. Dexter chef (check out his Instagram feed: https://www.instagram.com/dexterchef/). So instead I’ll only say that this dinner was not only the best non-French meal I’ve had in Paris during the last twelve months, but one of the best ones full stop. In fact, this art-gallery-like little restaurant on a side street in the Sentier came as a delightful surprise in almost every way. And now when people ask me what ‘foreign’ kitchens I recommend eating during a trip to Paris, Romanian will now join the usual Israeli, Moroccan, Tunisian, Laotian and Vietnamese.

@Pierre Lucet Penato

This is because these two guys have found a way to serve up the cooking of their homeland that has a frankly brilliant gastronomic equilibrium between tradition and modernity. To wit, they’ve managed to make dishes like sarmale (stuffed cabbage rolls) lighter and fresher without losing their authenticity, and they are also keenly attuned to the aesthetics of the Instagram era.

Further, this pair are a happy testament to one of the best things about eating in Paris today, which is that the city has never been more of a beacon for ambitious young gastronomic talents from all over the world. They come here, like Ovidio Malisevschi, to attend cooking school–the Cordon Bleu in his case, and then stay on to do a stage (apprenticeship) or two–he cooked with Frederic Simonin and at La Dame de Pic, Anne-Sophie Pic’s place in the rue du Louvre, before launching projects of their own.  For his part, Bogdan Alexandrescu, one of the best young chefs of his generation in Romania and a star of Master Chef Romania, is a native of Cluj, the beautiful city in northern Transylvania, and recently attended l’Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes du Goût in Paris.

@Pierre Lucet Penato

To be honest, on a rainy Tuesday night, I headed out to meet my friend Agathe for dinner at this new place with modest enthusiasm, because it just seemed so unlikely I’d find food anywhere near as good as the home cooking I enjoyed at several guest houses during a trip to Transylvania, one of the most beautiful destinations in Europe and a place with landscapes on par with those of such famously scenic places as Tuscany or the Loire Valley, last October. Why This type of sincere, hearty, rustic farm cooking almost invariably loses its character when it’s translated to a big-city setting in a foreign country. And memories of my very occasional meals at the other Romanian restaurant I know in Paris, a long-running place on the Left Bank that’s gone slightly senile, dampened my expectations, too. Still, Agathe’s father is Romanian, so she knows this cooking from vacation visits back to the handsome city of Brasov.

Just a few weeks after the holidays, my appetite was skittish, too, but my friend, who has recently moved to the lively young neighborhood with a lot of good restaurants that the Sentier (2nd Arrondissement) has become, insisted I’d be happily surprised. Sitting in the Metro, though, I found myself musing on my first experience of Eastern European cooking at the long-gone Cafe Barna, a Hungarian place in Westport, Connecticut, which served up a memorable annual Cub Scouts banquet of soggy dolma (stuffed grape leaves), alarmingly scarlet goulash and stuffed cabbage that was more like meat loaf draped with wilted cabbage leaves than the real McCoy. Still, it was quite a gust of gastronomic exoticism for me as a seven-year-old kid.

@Pierre Lucert Penato

Over an excellent glass of Slovenian white wine, we perused the menu, and I recognized some of the decorative totems of the dining room from travels in Romania, including a hairy mask from the Murmes region, the tell-tale heart shape decoration on a hand-forged wrought-iron coat rack–it’s a traditional motif in Hungarian speaking regions of Romania, and a couple of willow-switch fly swatters on the wall. Then we ordered from our charming waitress and were engrossed in conversation when our first courses arrived. Immediately I knew this would be a wonderful meal.

I’d ordered pastramă, the roasted Romanian brined beef known as pastrami in most English speaking countries, and it came to the table in a bell jar filled with fragrant fumes. When the smoke cleared, I found myself before a pretty little pile of sliced beef garnished with black Transylvanian truffle shavings. Served with excellent bread from Terroirs d’Avenir, the meat was succulent, gently brined and full of flavor. My friend’s starter–mămăligă cu smăntănă, or cornmeal porridge shaped into patties, then grilled and garnished tangy sour cream, was almost miraculously light and tasted pleasantly of toasted grain. Both dishes were winsomely impressive in terms of their presentation and the quality of the produce the chefs worked with (most beef served here comes from the celebrated Polmard butcher, dairy goods from Laiterie Les Fayes).

During dinner, I also talked about my recent trip to Transylvania, and how good the food had been. What’s been driving this transformation is tourism, and especially agro-turismo style rural guesthouses established in some of the region’s most beautiful villages, including Copsa Mare and Viscri. Much had changed since I’d first visited the region in 2012 to write this article for SAVEUR Magazine: https://www.saveur.com/article/Travels/Eternal-Terrain But better still, most things hadn’t, including the small-scale traditional agriculture and the way so many people still grow and produce much of the food they eat themselves.

Our main courses were excellent, too, with a remarkable lightness and freshness continuing to be the signature of this kitchen. What I especially loved about my sarmale was that the cabbage leaves had been brined before being stuffed, which added a bracing tang of ferment to a dish that’s otherwise as gentle and consoling as a baby’s flannel blanket. The funky garnish of crumbled pork crackling was very welcome, too.

With a pronounced taste of green peppers, Agathe’s chicken goulash displayed the heterogeneity of the Romanian kitchen, which has been heavily influenced by Hungary, Austria, its Balkan neighbours, and most recently, Greece and other Mediterranean countries, especially Italy. The ethnic diversity of the country, which once had a large Jewish population and still has sizeable minorities of Hungarian speaking Szeklers, Moldovans, and Gypsies, is reflected in its cooking, too. In Transylvania, another local cooking tradition is that of the ‘Saxons,’ or German-speaking colonists from the Moselle valley, Luxembourg and the Rhineland who were invited to settle on what were then the lands of the Hungarian crown beginning in the 12th century. They arrived with their food ways, including a love of charcuterie and smoked meats and herbs like lovage and marjoram. When the Communist Ceaușescu regime collapsed in 1989, approximately half a million Saxons fled to a newly reunified Germany under the German nationality law known as Auslandsdeutsche, which offers citizenship to ethnic Germans wishing to repatriate to Germany.

“What makes this dish more Romanian than Hungarian is that it doesn’t include lashings of paprika and sour cream the way it might in Hungary. Instead, the vegetables–onions, tomatoes and peppers have been slowly stewed into almost a thick jam to which the chicken was then added to cook. This explains its succulence and richness,” Agathe observed. Served with  homemade potato puree, it was deeply satisfying, as was the organic Hungarian red wine from Sopron that we drank with this excellent meal.

While we ate our main courses, I had been eyeing the delicious looking beignets being shared by the couple at the table next to us. Called papanaș in Romanian, they’re filled with fromage blanc, garnished with jam or jelly, and they’re irresistible. Since we were lavishly well-fed, we decided to share a dessert, and since it was Agathe who had shared this discovery with me, I let her chose our sweet finale. “You have to try the pistachio cake,” she said, and a large slab of this dense, pudding-like cake filled with fruit and pistachios and topped with a simple sugar glaze and more pistachios arrived at the table. It was so good, I was almost tempted to order a piece to bring home, but caloric caution had me think the better of this indulging this yearning.

So the next time I come for a meal here, I already know what I’ll be having–whatever ciorba, or soup, is on the menu, the grilled trout, and an order of papanaș.

Oh, and by the way, in case you were wondering, an Ibrik is a small fluted metal pot with a long handle used to make Turkish coffee, which is very popular in certain parts of Romania, large swathes of which were once part of the Ottoman Empire.

9 rue de Mulhouse, 2nd Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-70-69-42-50. Metro: Bonne Nouvelle. Open Tuesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner. Sunday for brunch and dinner. Closed Monday. Lunch menu 15 €, average a la carte meal 40 €  www.ibrik.fr 

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Heading for dinner at Virtus on a rainy Saturday night, I couldn’t help but thinking about how this address in the 12th Arrondissement has always been sort of a cradle for the gastronomic ambitions of foreign chefs in Paris. The first time I went here, I discovered the wonderful cooking of the young Swedish born Petter Nilsson. After he returned to Sweden, there was a brief moment when Italian chef Luigi Nastri took over this kitchen. He was followed by the excellent Sardinian native Simone Tondo, who’s now cooking some superb Italian food at Racines in the Passage des Panoramas. So I hoped the new foreign-born duo who recently moved their restaurant to these premises would live up to the storied past of a restaurant once known as La Gazzetta and now called Virtus.

Coming through the door, I immediately liked the new decor by Argentine interior designer Marcelo Joulia. He’s created a warm and attractive atmosphere with a witty retro under-toe conveyed by antique suspension lamps and flea market ceramics. Tables are generously spaced here, too–a luxury these days, when so many Paris restaurants seem crowded and noisy.

While a friend and I settled in over a glass of very good Chenin Blanc, the eager young waitress implored us to order the seven-course tasting menu. She advised that it would be the best way for us to discover the cooking of the  Japanese born Chiho Kanzaki and Argentine Marcelo di Giacomo, both of whom trained at Mauro Colagreco’s restaurant Le Mirazur in Menton. I replied that we needed more time before ordering. The discussion that followed was a mutual expression of how both of us are weary of tasting menus, which almost always end up lasting too long, overfeeding you and finally leaving you with a muddled  impression of a chef’s cooking.

This is mostly because there’s something too prim and schoolmarmish about the idea that the purpose of a meal is to submit to a demonstration of a chef’s talent. I think most people go out to have a good time and a good meal, which might include a delighted discovery of a new chef’s talent, but on their own terms. Also, for me a good part of the pleasure of going to a restaurant is choosing what I want to eat, especially because I often have an idea or two as to what I might want.

All of that being said, I’d also admit that I’m not a great audience for tasting menus anymore for the simple reason that I’ve probably done too many of them as a food writer. As my friend rightly pointed out, “Maybe if you didn’t go out as often as you do, Alec, a tasting menu might still have a sort of exciting, magical quality to it.” In the end, however, we agreed to the tasting menu, with the caveat that portions should be modest.

As soon as our first course arrived, however, I was very glad we’d signed on for the multi-tiered meal. Accompanied by a spectacularly good and very beautiful brioche roll, scallop ceviche with three different colors of cauliflower and coins of Granny Smith apple was winsomely pretty, thrillingly fresh and beautifully seasoned by a gently acidulated pool of marinade with a subtle bracing dash of lemon verbena. “This is just lovely,” my friend said, and I agreed–the dish was radiant with earnestness and a bashful desire to please.

Bonito with Chinese cabbage, hazelnuts and Pimenton was a superbly conceived dish, too, with a range of textures and palate of flavors that never overwhelmed the taste of the fish, which had been briefly grilled to leave it appetisingly rare. Silently, I concluded that the waitress had been absolutely right–the tasting menu is in fact the best way to experience the sincere, tender, almost angelic cooking of Kanzaki and di Giacomo.

Lotte (monkfish) with daikon and anchovy sauce was a charming dish, too. “You know, I’m actually really enjoying this meal,” my friend remarked. “The portions are perfect, the timing is excellent, service is delightful, and every dish has sort of a shy Faberge like elegance that’s very understated.”

Duck breast with baked pumpkin was a appealing, too, since the barnyard richness of the fowl paired perfectly with the earthy Cucurbita and a scattering of its toasted seeds. And in this dish as in all of those that proceeded it, the near reverence the two young chefs have for the produce they work with created an appealing frame of humility.

Two excellent desserts concluded the meal: a poached pear with rosemary cream and yogurt ice cream and a composition of coffee pudding with coconut and pistachio. This meal was a wonderful experience of light, fresh, healthy and intelligently original cooking, which is why it’s a place I’d happily return. It’s also a terrific choice for anyone looking to celebrate a special occasion in Paris without spending an exorbitant amount of money.

My only suggestion would be that aside from the interesting and well-chosen selections of wines by the glass that accompanied our menu, it would be good to propose a single bottle that might accompany the menu for those who don’t want to flit from one wine to another.

29 rue Cotte, 12th Arrondissement, Tel. 09-80-66-08-08. Metro: Ledru-Rollin. Open Tuesday-Saturday for lunch and dinner. Lunch menu 35 Euros. Prix-fixe tasting menu 64.50 Euros, average a la carte 70 Euros. www.virtus-paris.com

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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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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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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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