Chef Tom Meyer

Stepping through the front door of talented young chef Tom Meyer’s restaurant Granite in Paris unleashed a rush of memories and also inspired hope during a profoundly testing time. Though the COVID epidemic is still very much with us, as of this writing (December 16, 2021), restaurants in France remain open, with assiduous verification of your vaccination status before you’re allowed inside, and the Gallic gastronomic scene has recovered smartly this year with the opening of many outstanding new restaurants.

Deprived of restaurants for much of 2020, the French have a deeper, fresher and more urgent understanding of how important they are to their well-being today than probably at any time since 1945. This is of course because they love good food so much, but it goes way beyond simple–or complex, gastronomic pleasure. What we all missed terribly last year was the easy conviviality, piquant social voyeurism, and random sociability of dining out, since no other idiom more powerfully feeds and frames the finely grained drama of daily life than a restaurant meal.

So while it was exciting for me to be trying this new restaurant for the first time, it was also a poignant occasion. Because it takes a lot of courage to open a restaurant right now when we’re still pretty much flying in thick fog. The fact that people chose to do so, however, seeds hope, because it implies that this too shall pass, and reminds us that we’ve often been delivered by human ingenuity. Cooking is a act of supreme ingenuity, because it creates pleasure from the essential act of daily nourishment.

And of course I knew this space intimately from its previous iteration as chef Daniel Rose’s restaurant Spring. It’s been completely remodeled and redecorated since Rose cooked here, though, with a sort of Scandinavian modern look of cut-out wooden paneling on the walls and bare wood tables surrounded by cosseting topaz-upholstered pedestal chairs. The open kitchen that was a defining feature of Spring survives, however, as Meyer’s compact and densely populated work space.

Chef Tom Meyer, 30, previously worked as sous-chef to Anne-Sophie Pic at her Michelin three-star restaurant in Valence and was the runner-up finalist in the Bocuse d’Or cooking competition in Lyon in 2019. Meyer was tapped for Granite by restauranteur Stephane Manigold, who has become one of the most astute judges of emerging gastronomic talent in Paris and one of the city’s most innovative taste makers. Aside from Granite, Manigold’s other Paris restaurants include the superb Substance, Contraste, Liquide, Maison Rostang and Bistrot Flaubert.

Knowing and loving the lyrical beauty of Anne-Sophie Pic’s cooking both in Valence and at her Michelin two star restaurant at the Beau Rivage Hotel in Lausanne, it was as fascinating to discern her influence on Meyer as it was to thrillingly discover his own precise, muscular, full-bodied style. I especially appreciated his ability to be elegant without ever becoming fussy or over-complicated.

Meeting a friend for lunch here, we reminisced about the days this address housed Spring and chatted about how much the gastronomic landscape in Paris has changed during the almost twenty years that have passed since it opened. To wit, menus are shrunken and contemporary French cooking spins harder on an axis of local, seasonal produce than ever before. And if Parisians, including me, often go to restaurants for an experience they’re incapable of creating for themselves at home, there is now a prevailing impatience shading to disdain for the excesses of molecular cooking and also what I describe as the difficult Outward Bound dishes in some high profile restaurants in the Nordic countries, which bully people into sort of a cowed submission.

Our first course was a grilled cepe mushroom with a sabayon flavored with meadowsweet, a wild herb, and a sauce of deeply reduced mushroom jus and white miso. A study in chic comfort food, it was a succulent, earthy and sort of moody dish on an early winter day,  Next, sardines with haricots verts, Matcha seasoned pistachio oil and a salad of seaweed, an apparently naive but actually studiously complex constellation of tastes and flavors with a Japanese personality that bewildered at first but ultimately delivered a bracing gust of the sea.

A giant gnocci filled with steamed shellfish and garnished with cockles in a lemony sauce, fennel sprigs and Vietnamese coriander had a homey charm, but was the single disappointment of this meal, because the texture of the pasta was unpleasantly pasty. Sea bream with kale in apple juice with a gelee of lovage was a ravishingly flirtatious and very original dish, and then Meyer pirouetted to towards fiercer funker tastes and textures with a juicy roast pigeon in a sauce of deeply reduced pigeon jus with green cardamom and kombawa (Japanese citrus) garnished with puffed millet and cocoa nibs.

The little filets of the bird were impeccably cooked, and the Asian accents added some brilliant percussion to the sauce.

Desserts were outstanding. The first one was a delicate rice roll enclosing several spoonfuls of rice pudding, with a garnish of a Mirabelle plums stewed with vin jaune, a pleasantly resinous nod at the chef’s home region, the Jura in eastern France. Next, a plush cold mousse of Belizean chocolate, with glasswort, a sea vegetable, and a hot chocolate sauce infused with lemon and orange leaves was bluntly erotic after the muzzling grandmotherly hug of the rice pudding. What Meyer was offering here was comfort and sensuality in equal measure, and these traits seemed frankly perfect in view of the times we’re living in.

Meyer is an extremely gifted chef who will undoubtedly become one of the most influential talents of his generation.

Granite, 6 rue Bailleul, 1st Arrondissement, Paris, Metro: Louvre-Rivoli or Les Halles. Open Monday-Friday for lunch and dinner. Closed Saturday and Sunday.
Tél (33) 01-40-13-64-06, Prix-fixe menus 58 Euros (lunch), 75 Euros (five courses), 95 Euros (seven courses). www.granite.paris

P.S. I’d like to suggest a perfect last-minute gift for everyone who loves Paris, France, French food, restaurants, cooking, travel and a well told tale, which is my new book MY PLACE AT THE TABLE: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris. This is a sort of gastronomic coming-of-age story about how a shy kid from the suburbs of Connecticut–me, pursued his passions to become a famous food writer in Paris. New Yorker food writer Bill Buford says of my book that “it’s a flat-out wonderful read, filled with stories and secrets.”

If you’d like to offer a signed book, please send me a message through this site, and I’ll mail you a signed book plate with any specified inscription or dedication you might require.

In Paris, the book is for sale at the Red Wheelbarrow. You can also order a copy from your favorite independent bookseller, or from Amazon

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The Loire as seen from the dining room at Assa in Blois.

On the overcast autumn day I went to lunch at Assa, I became so mesmerised by the mirrored view of the low gray sky on the skeining waters of the Loire river that my curiosity about the meal to come had sort of gently drifted downstream by the time the first complimentary hors d’oeuvres came to the table. I was here at this Michelin one-star table because I was hungry and hoped, of course, to eat well, but the spare serene Ryokan-like atmosphere and decor of the dining room had me pleasantly day-dreaming and enjoying the calm and new luxury of being in a quiet attractive place that felt safe during these tumultuous times.

This year, for obvious reasons, I’ve been to many fewer restaurants than I’ve frequented in many years. After the lockdown ended in Paris, we migrated south to our house in a little village outside of the beautiful town of Uzes in Le Gard, and though they’re some wonderful restaurants there, we didn’t go out that often. Instead, we cooked. And cooked. And cooked. Since after the year-long renovation of our house, a trio of linked together 15th century stone houses in the heart of the village, we received a voluminous rotation of visitors, including Bruno’s sister who lives in Florence and her two sons, one of whom lives in Rome as a film student and the other who’d repatriated to Italy from Colombia on a humanitarian flight organised by the Italian government, his mother from the north of France, his sister from Paris with her partner, and friends from Paris, Switzerland and the nearby Luberon.

It was lovely to share our new nest with all of them, but it also meant an enormous amount of, well, cooking. So by the time I ended up on my own at the table at Assa, I was rather glad of my solitude and the fact that someone other than me would be wielding the pots and pans in the kitchen. In these tumultuous and trepidatious times, being in a restaurant also felt like a very sincere luxury, too, since I love the ritual of sharing a meal with strangers and discovering a new chef. Or in the case of Assa, two chefs, Anthony Maubert and his Japanese wife Fumiko, who run this old riverside auberge they’ve so artfully reinvented for a new century.

When the complimentary hors d’oeuvre that began  the four-course lunch menu I’d ordered arrived, it was so brilliant my attention was promptly summoned back to the table and intensely focused on the beautiful and surprising dish presented on a round slice of tree trunk. Two different types of Loire River freshwater fish were presented, one in a spoon as a little dumpling topped with a coriander leaf and the other in a bath of white miso with pickled turnips and puffed rice. The contrast between the garnishes and the firm gently flavoured white fish was fascinating, because it constituted sort of a compass to follow during the meal to come. Using seasonal Loire Valley produce as its anchor, the Mauberts’ cooking was a vivid set of dishes with elegant but occasionally playful melodies equally inspired by France and Japan. It was also consistently beautiful to behold and plated with a keen aesthetic that heightened the pleasure of the palate.

The first course of my meal was the most profoundly satisfying dish I’ve eaten so far this year. A seared slice of foie gras sat on a gelee of dashi and was topped with grilled shiitake mushrooms and raw button mushrooms, with a sprinkling of matcha adding color and a pleasant whispering astringency to this umami-rich dish, a perfect expression of autumn in the French countryside.

The very impressive resumes of the Maubert really showed through in a main course of whiting with roasted celeriac, roasted celeriac-and-buckwheat cream, tender cabbage leaves, citrus caviar, tempura celery leaves and broccolini, goji berries, toasted buckwheat and coins of daikon, too. Anthony Maubert previously worked at Lasserre, Le Manoir du Lys, La Vague d’or in Saint Tropez, Marc Veyrat and Michel Bras. Fumiko Maubert trained as a dietician in her native Japan and then followed her love of gastronomy to France, where she has worked at Lasserre, the Hotel de Crillon and Michel Bras.

If I recognised the poignant reverence Bras has for the vegetal world in the Mauberts’ cooking and enjoyed their visual exuberance, which recalls the baroque style of chef Arnaud Donckele at La Vague d’Or, their style is completely their own. They clearly love vegetables and herbs, too, but as vividly flavoured as the composition of ingredients surrounding the perfectly cooked whiting was, it was also a very legibly healthy dish, where a gustatory coherence was created by the contrasts of the natural flavors and textures of the ingredients in the dish instead of a butter-rich sauce. Fumiko Maubert has a deep interest in making contemporary French gastronomy as healthy as possible while still delivering gastronomic originality and pleasure at the table.

The cheese course continued the meal’s themes of discovery, beauty and originality guided by a rudder of good health. Shavings of aged Loire Valley goat cheese topped some freshly made tofu on tamarin to offer a study in the lactic differences and similarities between animal and vegetable milk. This dish came with a side garnish of crispy puffed rice grains and a bowl of warm fresh goat milk, and it was satisfying and rather fascinating in an alluringly monastic way. A dessert of matcha, azuki bean paste and lemon was so appealing that I promptly ate it without taking a photograph.

Loire Valley wines, including a superb Vouvray, one of my favorive wines, were served by the glass, and the male dining room staff dressed with the straw boaters the French call canotiers and sky-blue cotton trousers were prompt, efficient and warm. During a very challenging year, this was the best meal meal I’ve had so far and one that was deeply nourishing in a variety of ways.

Assa is very much of a destination restaurant, so if you’re looking for a revivifying break in the country in France this autumn, book here and stay at the charming new Les Sources de Cheverny hotel, which is only about a twenty minute drive from the restaurant in the forest.

189 quai Ulysse Besnard, Blois, Tel. (33) 02-54-78-09-01. Open Wednesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner, Sunday lunch only. Closed on Monday and Tuesday. Prix-fixe menus, 62 Euros, 74 Euros, 88 euros, 92 Euros, 114 Euros, Average a la carte 121 Euros.   www.assarestaurant.com 

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Ever since I’ve had teeth, few foods have more reliably made me happy than pizza, and this is why the pizza at pizzaïoulo Giuseppe Cutraro new Peppe Pizzeria in the 20th Arrondissement not far from the Père Lachaise Cemetery made me ecstatic last weekend. With my appetite honed by the recent weeks of being locked up in my Paris flat, I was yearning for some really really really good pizza, because most of what was available through Paris food-delivery apps was pretty mediocre. And the inexplicable international popularity of several huge American pizza chains notwithstanding, there are few things sadder than mediocre pizza.

When I think about it, I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like pizza, because not liking pizza would be as life-threatening and pleasure-killing as saying you didn’t like flowers or kisses. But as a native of southwestern Connecticut, the original home of great pizza in the United States (I expect some cat calls and blow back for this assertion, but it’s true), I’m grew up as a pizza connoisseur, and that was long before I finally made it to Naples and had a first head-spinning experience of the real McCoy, the sultry and stunningly delicious Margherita–just dough topped with crushed tomatoes, mozzarella di buffalo, and a fresh basil leaf of two before a turn in the blister-inducing inferno of a Napolitan beehive pizza oven.

I’d been reading about this place in just before le confinement (quarantine) shut down almost every restaurant in Paris, and I’d decided I’d be willing to travel halfway across Paris to taste the pizza that had won Giuseppe Cutraro, aka Peppe, the “World Champion of Contemporary Napolitan Pizza 2019-2020.” (“The Art of the Napolitan Pizzaïoulo” has figured on UNESCO’s World Heritage list since 2017). To be perfectly honest, it sounded, well, strange. To wit, this pie was sauced with yellow Sicilian tomatoes, topped with mozarella di buffala and provolone, Tuscan ham aged for 36 months, almond slivers and fig jam. But before you conclude that I’m a hidebound purist, I’d quickly tell you that one of my all-time pizzas was and is the one served at Frank Pepe Pizzeria in New Haven, Connecticut, which is topped with little-neck clams from Rhode Island and is just stunningly good.

So “Hawaian  pizza” topped with ham and pineapple and pizzas topped with salad, any kind of salad–absolutely not, but if you respect the pizza as a sort of brilliant blank canvas awaiting the humble new gustatory brush strokes of a real artist, sometimes pizza innovation works out spectacularly well. Like Frank Pepe’s clam pizzas or Giuseppe Cutraro astonishing delicious ‘World Champion Pizza.” The reason this pizza is so good is the same reason that any dish anywhere in the world succeeds, which is that it offers such an exquisitely subtle but still legible compilation of tastes that unite in perfect harmony. The almonds Texture. The yellow tomato sauce Low-acidity to balance the sweetness of the sparingly applied fig jam. The two cheeses Different textures and salinities. Try it, you’ll like it is all I can say.

The other thing that makes Peppe Pizzeria’s pizzas so good is that they allow the dough, which is made from flour imported from Naples, to ferment before kneading it and slapping it around, so that the rolled crust is filled with air pockets and the base is exceptionally light and thin.

Peppe did a stint at Keste on Bleecker Street in New York City’s West Village and also worked in Switzerland before he came to Paris to work as a pizza-maker for the Big Mamma Group in Paris, which has seven Italian restaurants in the capital, one each in Lille and Lyon, and two in London. Peppe wanted his own place, though, so he opened at the end of January, and the restaurant had been packed at lunch and dinner until the lockdown came in mid-March.

Fortunately, however, it was easy to continue working on a takeout basis, so the place has thrived even during the challenging last few months. When we arrived to collect our two pizzas, an order of carpaccio with arugula and a tiramisu the other night there was a huge line of people waiting to collect their pizzas. So we bought two deliciously yeasty Napolitan beers and enjoyed the fresh air of a mild May evening until our order came up and we bolted back across Paris to tuck into our pizzas.

Ever since I ate the lone remaining slice of our Margherita for breakfast the following morning, I have been permanently craving this pizza and ruing the fact that Peppe Pizzeria doesn’t deliver. One way or another, I’ll be back again soon, and maybe next time I’ll try the truffle pizza, which is topped with “truffle cream” (hmmm….), sautéed mushrooms, fresh stracciatella from Puglia, crushed hazelnuts and freshly shaved Italian truffle. The ‘Piccante”–tomatoes from Puglia, mozzarella di buffalo di Campania, Calabrian spianata (spicy salami), pickled onion and shavings of Pecorino Romano DOP speaks to me, too. And a friend who lived nearby says that the gnocchi alla Sorrentina are outstanding, too.

I look forward to the day that we can dine in Peppe Pizzeria’s spacious dining room, too, but in the meantime, the friendly crew behind the tiled open kitchen should get used to seeing my pizza-loving face.

Peppe Pizzeria, 2 Place Saint-Blaise, 20th Arrondissement, Tel. 01-45-35-59-13. Metro: Gambetta or Porte de Bagnolet. Open Tues-Sun for lunch and dinner. Closed Monday. Average 30 Euros. www.peppepizzeria.fr

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Chef Franco Sampogna

Canvas by French painter Toma-L

After a superb dinner at Frevo, a wonderfully chic speak-easy restaurant tucked away behind an art gallery on Eighth Street, I was elated for three reasons. The first is that Brazilian born chef Franco Sampogna’s contemporary French cooking is so luminous and logical but sensual and succulent. Then there’s the easygoing stylishness of this intimate low-lit counter-style open-kitchen restaurant with eighteen seats at the stone-topped bar and a six-seat chef’s table and the terrific serving team, who hail from France, Portugal, Brazil, and even Connecticut, like me. This charming and talented staff exultantly showcases the fact that even in these tumultuous times, the U.S. remains a magnet for ambitious and talented people, in the best traditions of the country’s history. Finally, this restaurant proved to me that some thirty-three years after I’d folded the wretched sofa bed of my studio at 189 Waverly Place closed for the last time and moved  to Europe, Greenwich Village retains a vital wick of creativity despite the fact that it’s gentrified so much I probably could never live in the fabled neighborhood I’d once so loved ever again.

So Frevo is a votive candle of a restaurant that defends both New York City’s gastronomic credentials and its ability to incubate creativity through its defining DNA of curiosity, tolerance, and ambition. To understand the reasons why such an address is so especially uplifting in New York today, consider that two of the city’s great defining institutions Dean & DeLuca and Barneys are damaged and diminished for a variety of reasons explained in this excellent article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/nyregion/dean-deluca-barneys-bankruptcy.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage

Foie gras with dried fruit, pistachio and Nori ribbons

Acting on a heads up from a Parisian colleague who now lives in New York City–“This restaurant is really really good, Alec,” she told me, Bruno and I braved our jet-lag and headed downtown for dinner at  Frevo the night we arrived in the U.S. in early August. In the Fifth Avenue bus, I quietly hoped the prix-fixe tasting menu wouldn’t overwhelm us, since we were hungry but decidedly not in the mood for one of those twenty-course tasting menus that have become the bane of modern gastronomy in many European countries.

When I asked my Parisian colleague for more details, she explained that chef Franco Sampogna had had a brilliant career in France and most recently worked as a chef on Long Island and on private yachts. Sampogna moved to France when he was 17, went to hotel school in Nice, and then worked for a constellation of great French chefs, including  Fabrice Vulin at La Chèvre d’or, Guy Savoy at his namesake restaurant, and Alain Ducasse at the Hotel Plaza Athénée.

Arriving, the restaurant was hidden behind a vest-pocket art gallery displaying the works of French painter Toma-L, who takes his inspiration, the nice young woman in the gallery explained, from Joan Miró and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Then she opened a secret door behind one of Toma-L’s paintings and ushered us into the back-room.

Green peas with coconut foam and pistachios

Seated, the French sommelier started us off with a welcome pour of Chartogne-Taillet Saint Anne Champagne. These bubbles paired perfectly with a tangy amuse-bouche of crunchy quinoa salad, a nod at one of the signatures of Sampogna’s cooking, which is healthy eating. Then the meal debuted with a delightful composition of crabmeat, curry, and broccoli topped with Kaluga caviar. Legible, luxurious and bashfully elegant, this dish previewed the themes of the excellent five-course meal that followed.

It wasn’t just the food that made me happy here, though. Even if they came from all over the world, the crowd sitting belly up to the counter was a Greenwich Village crowd par excellence–friendly, unpretentious, nonchalantly stylish, witty, and hungry for life, whether with a five-dollar bill or a Platinum card packed in their pockets.

Chatting with Margot, a single middle-aged lady from Montreal on my right, she told me that she’d been feeling a bit blue after a divorce and had decided she needed “a dose of New York, because New York always works for me–I just love this city so much, always have, always will, ever since I arrived for the first time by bus after a horrendously long journey from the crap town I grew up in Quebec. That said, the Village has changed a lot, because of real-estate, yes, but also since it seems to me that people much younger than me don’t know how to have fun–they’ve lost all of their recklessness.”  I loved this observation, so I told her about the head-resting-on-a-roll-of-toilet-paper naps I’d take at lunchtime in a bathroom stall when I was an editorial assistant at Harper & Row and had come to work after a 45 minute nap and a shower following a night at Studio 54, and also one of my favorite summer nights in the Village. I was stumbling home from a bar around 3am on a night when it was probably 100 degrees F. A large crowd was gathered on the sidewalk in front of a building just before the fire house on Christopher Street and Greenwich Avenue. Curious, I joined them and asked someone what was going on. “Sshhhh!” she said.

So then I heard the wild moans of a woman and grunts of a man making love in an apartment with their windows wide open on a summer night back in the days when a lot of people, like me, could neither afford to buy an air-conditioner or operate one. The sensual panting and screaming rose and rose, and when the woman finally climaxed, the crowd below applauded and laughed. “What a lucky lady,” said the woman who’d hushed me when I arrived. The Montrealer loved this story and replied with one of her own about having sex on the steps of the Salvation Army building on 14th Street with the Pakistani man who’d just sold her a pack of cigarettes in an all-night shop. “My best idea Probably not, but such amazing sex for both of us.” So I love Greenwich Village as one of the world’s greatest urban neighborhoods and always will, just like Margot from Montreal.

Foam hating has become a trope of modern American food writing, but foam can actually be a perfect vector with which to convey flavor without resorting to a sauce. This is what passed through my mind as we tucked into an angelic dish of green peas from the Union Square market topped with tufts of coconut-milk foam–a shy nod by Sampagno at the cooking of his native Brazil, and pistachios. The peas were so fresh and sweet that even butter would have been superfluous, but intriguingly, the taste of coconut teased their herbaceousness and underlined their natural sugar.

Next, an impeccable Hudson River Valley foie gras made with dried figs, apricots and pistachios, and then the dish that put Sampogna’s haute cuisine credentials on full display–halibut with braised fennel in a fennel jus. The fish was perfectly cooked just past opalescent and had a pleasantly crispy skin, and the jus was a silken umami-rich stole that luxuriously flattered the fish without overwhelming its natural flavors. This was one of the most deeply satisfying dishes I’ve eaten in a longtime, because it was such a brilliant example of the camouflaged simplicity that is defining characteristic of the very best French haute cuisine cooking.

Colorado lamb was perfectly cooked and served with a lamb caillette, or patty of ground lamb, cracked wheat, roasted tomato and yogurt foam, and the meal concluded with a refreshing composition of lemon, lime and almond.

It wasn’t until we stepped back through the ‘secret’ door into the art gallery and then out on to Eighth Street that I fully realized just how far away this meal had transported us, since for three very happy hours we’d been inside a cosseting cocoon of chic with a cast of charming people who poured us spectacular wines and cooked us a sublime meal. Frevo is a delightful restaurant, and Samogna’s decision to try his luck in New York is very much France’s loss and America’s gain, since this very talented young chef has a brilliant future in front of him.

Frevo, 48 W 8th St, New York, NY 10011, USA, Tel: (001) 646-455-0804, Email: reservations@frevonyc.com, www.frevonyc.com  Open Tuesday to Saturday, 6-10pm; Tasting menu: $124 per person

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Substance is such a good restaurant that it’s well worth traveling to a quiet corner of the 16th Arrondissement to discover the sinewy talent of young chef Matthias Marc, 25, a native of the Jura in eastern France. Marc signs many of his dishes with a witty wink at this eastern French region of mountains and forests best-known gastronomically for producing Comte cheese and charcuterie like morteau sausage, but his his sensibility is decidedly cosmopolitan on a solid Gallic base. His cooking is also stunningly precise and intriguingly imaginative. I predict that he’s going to become one of the best chefs in his generation, too.

Marc honed his cooking style when he was working at the very popular Racines des Prés just off the rue du Bac in the 7th Arrondissement, but eager to have his own kitchen, he teamed up with Anthony Pedrosa, who ran the dining at this same restaurant, and Stéphane Manigold, a businessman with a passionate interest in gastronomy to create this excellent new table.

Taking a leaf from Racines, they commissioned interior designer Michel Amarettos to create an intimate modern bistro with a low-key contemporary chic conveyed by an open kitchen that overlooks the dining room, bare tables with white and teal fabric covered Sixties style arm chairs and basket-weave ceramic panels on the walls. Not surprisingly, Substance has been hugely popular ever since it opened a few months ago, and it seems that the 16th Arrondissement, a part of  Paris that’s not usually on my beat, since most of the city’s best young chefs are to be found in double digit arrondissements of eastern Paris like the 11th and 20th these days, is rousing from a certain culinary turpitude with this opening and that of other excellent restaurants like Comice.

This address is also much appreciated by people staying at hotels in western Paris like the Peninsula, the George V, the Prince de Galles, the Shangri-La and other properties within an easy walk of this address.

Sitting just across from the open kitchen, it was fascinating to watch the ballet of chefs at work in a compact space, and also interact regularly with Anthony Pedrosa, this restaurant’s excellent sommelier, as he regularly visited the restaurant’s wine tower, adjacent to our table. Substance has an exceptionally good wine list, including over 180 different Champagnes. The Champagne selection was drawn up by Anselme Selosse, the cult Champagne producer whose signature wine is called “Substance,” hence the restaurant’s name, and Stéphane  Manigold, and it highlights a variety of ‘grower’ Champagnes, or Champagnes from small producers like Laherte Frères, a small producer based on the Montagne de Reims just outside of Reims. This makes Substance one of the best addresses in Paris for Champagne lovers.

Our meal began with a simple but elegant amuse bouche of smoked cream with salmon eggs and dried pine-needle powder, a garnish that curiously flattered the glossy orange fish pearls with a subtle resinous flavor and also announced chef Marc’s attachment to his native Jura.

The surrounding clientele offered an amusing demographic snap shot of this affluent part of Paris, too. To my left, a table of four forty-something men in jeans and blazers guffawed about their girl friends and a recent weekend in Saint Tropez, several middle-aged couples sat stonily with their heads cocked in different directions as a possible prelude to a divorce, and three well-dressed older ladies with the same meringue-colored hair and expensive pocket books appeared intrigued by the adventure of being in a trendy restaurant. There were several tables of girl friends dining out after work, and here and there, a younger couple that called out the fact that this bourgeois neighborhood has now become a relatively good-value neighborhood on the Monopoly board of Paris real estate.

Still, the aura of entitlement that hovered over most of the tables here brought me back to musing on a subject I’d last visited during an excellent meal at Batard, a “modern European” restaurant in New York City, in February. This is how the clientele of a restaurant can impact on the way you perceive of its cooking and also your experience of being there.

That cold night in New York City, I was dining with a much-loved old friend, and we we were paying our own bill, which was in contrast to the mostly loud, smug expense-account wielding clients in this very pretty dining room. For most of them, it was just another night out on the corporate purse, while for us it was a special occasion, and several times during that meal, I had to actively discipline myself to screen out the officious and reflexively privileged behavior at some of the surrounding tables. You can’t, of course, control who else you’ll be dining with in a public setting, but it certainly can have a very big impact on how much you enjoy your meal, and I also couldn’t help but feel frequently exasperated by the inattention given to some really superb cooking by people who were there not because they wanted to eat well, but because they had the money to pay for it.

This is due to the deep reverence I have for the culinary professions, stemming not only for the hours I’ve spent in kitchens all over the world as a food writer, but also going back to the days when I was variously a prep cook, bus boy and waiter in New England seaside hotels during college summers and also to a stint as a 11pm-5am baker in a New York City kitchen that had me standing warily on the subway platform at West 72nd Street at 5.15am with flour in my hair, an aching back and an adrenaline woke wariness of riding the subway in the dead of night in New York in the 1980s. The short take on all of this Most people have absolutely no clue how hard a kitchen works with the goal of delivering gastronomic pleasure, because if they did, they’d be much much more grateful.

Our starters at Substance were superb. I loved my fluffy squid’s ink gnocchi with a smoked egg-yolk condiment, pickled watercress sauce and a jus de morteau, because it was an earthy and deeply satisfying dish that flashed with culinary wit and invention.

Bruno’s perfectly cooked green asparagus came prepared two different ways–their tips with a tangy ramp cream and their steams chopped and served with trout rillettes with a funky floral hay-infused vinaigrette. This composition was a steely equilibrium of the rustic and the urbane that was a perfect example of Matthias Marc’s cooking, too.

Our main courses were spectacular, too. My rolled John Dory came on a bed of quinoa with fresh celery root pickles, fried capers and a luscious gently cardamom-flavored sabayon. The fish was succulent, and its accompanying condiments added texture and suavely percussive gastronomic punctuation to a brilliantly conceived and executed dish.

Bruno’s roast baby lamb with Comte cheese foam, seared baby onions and more dried pine needle powder was gorgeous springtime eating, too, and a great example of the discreet but wiry sensuality that is a signature of Matthias Marc’s excellent contemporary French cooking at Substance.

There was no way were going to miss the Sao Tome chocolate souffle with bitter cocoa crumble and pine-flavored ice cream for two for dessert either, and it had a funky fruity tropical fruitiness that lofted us us out of Paris to the tiny island in the bight of Western Africa where the cocoa beans were grown.

Substance is an excellent restaurant, and an excellent venue in which to uncork a really good bottle of Champagne.

18 rue de Chaillot, 16th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-47-20-08-90. Metro: Alma-Marceau.         Open for lunch and dinner from Monday to Friday. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Lunch menus 35 Euros, 36 Euros; carte blanche menu 79 Euros; average a la carte 75 Euros. www.substance.paris 

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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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With a menu of artisanally made pastas napped with vibrant Asian inspired sauces and a sidewalk terrace on the quieter end of Boulevard Saint Germain in the 5th Arrondissement, chef William Ledeuil’s restaurant Kitchen Ter(re) is the best new restaurant in Paris this summer. Ledeuil, one of the most consistently amiable and innovative chefs in Paris, already has two excellent Left Bank tables–Ze Kitchen Galerie, his first one, and KGB (Kitchen Galerie Bis), Ze Kitchen’s Galerie’s more casual and less expensive little brother, both of which are on the rue des Grands Augustins in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Coquillette pasta with green curry and basil

Ledeuil’s new place was born from a chance meeting arranged through one of his suppliers, Michel Bachès. Bachès, whose farm is located in Eus near Perpignan, supplies Ledeuil with the citrus fruits that are a key ingredient in his cooking, and he was the one who introduced him to Roland Feuillas, a miller and baker in Cucugnan in twenty miles northwest of Perpignan. “I was immediately fascinated by Roland’s work,” says Ledeuil. “He makes his own flour from heirloom grains that he grows himself and then he grinds them with an old stone millstone. The quality of the flour is exceptional, but it was when I tried his pasta (Dentelles de Cucugnan) that I had the idea of creating a new Paris table that would serve Feuillas’s original pasta and some new ones that we invented together.” What drew Ledeuil to Feuillas’s pasta is that it’s made without eggs, just stone-ground flour from ancient grain varieties and water, and so has an exceptional capacity to absorb the flavors of the bouillons and sauces that have made his reputation. “It has an exceptional texture when cooked and a suave nutty taste,” the chef added.

Ledeuil has long been intrigued by Asian herbs and cooking techniques, especially those of Thailand, and they’ve come to define his inventive, bright, flavorful cooking ever since he left his post at Les Bouqinistes and opened his own restaurant next door in 2001. Among his favorite ingredients are galangal, basil, ginger, Japanese seaweed, lemongrass, coconut milk, and coriander, and he also uses a variety of typically southeast Asian cooking techniques, including steaming, bouillons, marinades and juxtapositions of raw and cooked ingredients in the same dish to create a contrast of textures. Long before the now rather worn out term ‘fusion’ began to be batted around, Ledeuil was deeply involved in inventing his own hybrid kitchen, and the surprise is that his cooking is still as intriguingly vivid and refreshing as it was when I first tasted it nearly twenty years ago.

The menu at Kitchen Ter(re) is short, seasonal and exceptionally vegetarian friendly. Executed by chef Bruno Laporte, it’s also piquantly cosmopolitan, because Ledeuil’s culinary imagination and very personal gastronomic logic roves the world in search of inspiration. Spain, Morocco and Korea have all inspired dishes at Kitchen Ter(re).

Some dishes involve new spices, herbs and products, largely from Asia; some feature different and unexpected juxtapositions of products, textures and preparations –raw and cooked, for example, and and some involve different cooking techniques, including steaming, poaching in aromatic bouillons, and marinades. But all of them reflect Ledeuil’s savvy gastronomic logic in creating intriguing new dishes for the 21st century.   

Stopping by for dinner with Bruno on a breezy summer night, the windows of the enclosed terrace were open and tables had been set out on the sidewalk. Aside from his superb cooking, I was immediately reminded of two other reasons I’ve always liked his restaurants–service is exceptionally friendly and well-trained, and the dining room was light, clean and modern, with well-spaced terrazzo topped tables with steel chairs, good lighting and a stylish but low-key decor that takes its cues from local art galleries.

Since both of us were eager for a lighter starter that night, we chose the gaspacho and the steak tartare as our starters. Both are wonderful dishes, but only Ledeuil could have produced a gaspacho with such a deep vibrant depth of flavor, since this lush poppy-colored soup had ringing tones of varying acidity and was brilliantly revivifying on a warm night. The steak tartare was excellent quality hand-chopped beef with a dressing of mostarda, or Italian mustard syrup, dabs of soft Pimenton spiked Sobressada, a soft pork sausage from Mallorca. It came under a thatch of fresh herbs that included shiso, Thai basil, and Italian basil, plus a scattering of chopped green onion and crushed hazelnuts. All of these garnishes flattered the beef, and this dish was so good I later suggested to Ledeuil that he also offer it as a main course.

Among the five pastas, all of which are identified according to the grain they were made from, I had my eyes on the Dentrelle de Cucugnan with cuttlefish, tomato and Galanga, while Bruno was eye-balling the Coquillette with green curry and basil. My frilled pasta came with tender pieces of cuttlefish, Nori, and a tangy sauce that probably included piquillo peppers, tomatoes and pickled lemon. Ultimately, it was Ledeuil’s very own mash on the fact that pasta is loved and eaten in many different cultures around the world in different shapes and with different garnishes, and it was excellent. Bruno’s coquilllettes had been cooked in Thai bouillon and also had a fascinating depth of flavor. What both of us liked was the ‘mache,’ or toothsomeness of this pasta, which was cooked al dente and had a quiet but appealing taste of the grain from which it was made.

A really good dessert always does that best of things, which makes you glad you ordered it in spite of a certain diffidence about eating too much and calories. And this is exactly what Ledeuil’s sublime summer concoction of Strawberry and kefir ice cream with melon and white peaches in verbena broth accomplished for me. To wit, I didn’t thinkI wanted it, but was hugely glad I’d caved after it came to the table, since the mixture of fruity tastes and textures backdropped by the verbena was one of the best summertime desserts I’ve had in a longtime. What I loved about it is that it was simple–with resonances of those fruits I loved best during childhood summers, but complex and racy at the same time.

Bruno loved his pandanus-flavoured coconut milk soup with raspberry coulis, too. Pandanus had nothing to do with my childhood summers, or Bruno’s either for that matter, since he’s from Valenciennes on the Franco-Belgian border. Instead this curiously flavored fruit that has a taste that’s at once resinous and then softened by notes of banana and strawberry is is native to Malasia, eastern Australia, and the Pacific Islands. The raspberry coulis cut the base notes of sweetness in this dish with a welcome acidity and also made familiar.

“Pandanus! Goodness! Sounds like something from Rikki-Tikki-Tavi (the short story from The Jungle Book from Rudyard Kipling) might have eaten,” said my mother in New England, when I got home and returned the three messages that she’d left while we were out for dinner. Well, yes, and that’s just the point. They’re almost no boundaries in the kitchen anymore thanks to chefs like William Ledeuil, and this makes the beginning of the 21st century in Paris a particularly exciting place to eat.

26 boulevard Saint Germain, 5th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-42-39-47-48. Metro: Maubert-Mutualite. Open Tuesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner. Closed Sunday and Monday. Average 50 Euros. www.zekitchengalerie.fr

https://www.facebook.com/Kitchen-Terre-254725888344694/ 

N.B. As of this writing, Kitchen Ter(re) will be open almost all summer long, closing only from August 15-19.

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Restaurant Alan Geaam is one of the best new restaurants in Paris in 2017, and one of the reasons it’s so good is that you’ve probably never heard of Geaam before. That’s because this amiable, hard-working chef spends all of his time in the kitchen instead of grooming a big ego with public relations like too many other Paris chefs these days. Instead, Geaam, a gentle, shrewd, self-taught chef who was born forty-two years ago to Lebanese parents living in Liberia, is one of the quiet men (and women) of Paris gastronomy. I’ve loved his cooking ever since an initial discovery at L’Auberge Nicolas Flamel, the first Paris restaurant Geaam owned, and have watched his cooking become more and more inventive and appealing as he’s opened two other popular Paris bistros, AG Saint-Germain and AG Les Halles.

“The reason I cook is to make people happy,” says Geaam, who has thus far eschewed becoming a brand-name chef in an age of food-television celebrities and ego-driven gastronomic personnages. To wit, Geaam is not one of those chefs who speak in over-coached talking points but is instead warm and off-the-cuff.

His new place occupies the former premises of chef Akrame Benallal’s old restaurant in the quiet rue Lauriston just beyond the Arc de Triomphe in a part of the city where upmarket restaurants are assured of a good trade at noon by business lunches and a reliable clientele in the evening from nearby hotels and locals in an affluent part of Paris. This part of town  has thus far been overlooked by the rising new generation of chefs who have been so dramatically renewing the city’s gastronomic laurels, probably because the rents are so lofty but also because the natives are generally older and have a decided preference for classical French cooking. Now that looks set to change.

But was this location a gamble for Geaam “I don’t think so,” the chef told me when we chatted before dinner. “I think Parisians in general are adventurous diners, and that the clientele in this quartier will respond my take on relaxed modern French haute cuisine, because these people are worldly and know good food.”

Eye-balling Geaam’s short menu–he offers three tasting menus composed from the two starters, two main courses, a cheese course from the renown cheese-monger Bernard Antony in Alsace, and two desserts, which can be ordered as three, five or seven courses, plus hors d’oeuvres and petit fours,  Everything that night looked good, but I have long since developed a great wariness about tasting menus, which inevitably take too long and either over or under feed you. So Bruno and I decided on the five course menu.

After a round of clever hors d’oeuvres, our first course was a winsome expression of spring–fat green asparagus from Provence, morel mushrooms, a breaded deep-fried quail’s egg, and as a first expression of Geaam’s love of herbs and spices, a few leaves of Thai basil, which added some raciness to the lusciously cosy swaddling on a perfectly made Hollandaise sauce.

It was the next course, though, that showed off Geaam’s now assured confidence and the tender new buds of his very personal gastronomy, cooking that makes references to the lost world of a little boy born to a foreign family living in tropical Africa. A single perfectly cooked langoustine came in a pool of deeply reduced chocolate-colored sauce made from a reduction of the juice of langoustine heads with a green ravioli filled with langoustine capped with a baby beet leaf.  A small fragile ribbon of nori added salt and emphasised the iodine-richness of this intricately imagined and created cameo of tastes and textures. What shrewdly jarred its classicism, however, was the very gentle taste of Vietnamese cardamom in the sauce. Cardamom is not, of course, a seasoning used in French cooking, but it’s deftly used and appreciated in the Middle East, Iran, Pakistan and India.

Humility is one of the most under-rated ingredients in any restaurant kitchen. That’s what I keep thinking during my dinner at Restaurant Alan Geaam, and the dish that will serve as a permanent reference for this verity was the next course in my meal here, pan-fried monkfish with vadouvan, an elegant French curry mix, charred leeks and a roll of leek and monkfish with capers and seaweed. This succulent fish with a delicate perfume of the the Spice Coast of India was elegant, understated and profoundly satisfying, and it was Geaam’s restraint here that made it so good. The vadouvan teased the quiet  sweetness of the fish and the vegetable without disguising their natural flavors, and this ability to enunciate the natural tastes of produce is always the sign of a chef with serious talent.

Next a succulent beef filet with black truffles shavings, a deeply reduced jus and a potato nest garnished with pomegranate seeds, another shy nod at the chef’s heritage. Knowing something about Geaam’s background made the self-effacing elegance of his cooking here that much more poignant. After a childhood in Liberia, the chef lived in Lebanon, the United States, Italy, and the Czech Republic before he arrived in France twenty years ago, not speaking the language and with a pittance in his pocket. He promptly found work in a succession of restaurant kitchens, which began his long self-taught education in French cooking, his passion.

A plate of cheeses–a tangy chèvre and a nutty Emmental, from Bernard Antony, the famous Alsatian cheesemonger, with date chutney, an original and excellent condiment for cheese, followed. Meanwhile, I was almost touched to watch Geaam bashfully presenting himself to several tables as the evening’s dinner service was winding down. An enthusiastic young American couple complimented him on his cooking, and then suggested that he would be a huge success in Los Angeles, where they live. “Thank you,” Geaam replied. “But I am very happy in Paris living my French dream. My passion is French produce and French gastronomy, so I really don’t see myself anywhere else,” he concluded politely.

The pair of desserts that concluded this meal were both artfully angelic in different ways. The first, a composition of pink grapefruit, aloe vera gelee and eucalyptus, was bracingly refreshing, while the second, “honey milk from my childhood” with hyssop ice cream, was nostalgia framed by the exigence of remarkable technical skills and a remarkably astute palate.

As this meal previewed, Alan Geaam has a brilliant future ahead of him.

19 rue Lauriston, 16^th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-45-01-72-97. Prix-fixe menus, 40 Euros, 60 Euros, 80 Euros. www.alangeaam.fr

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@Romain Laprade

The Divellec is one of the most beautiful new restaurants to open in Paris for a very longtime. As wonderfully louche as Studio K.O.’s Miami-meets-1940s Casablanca-in-Paris decor may be, however, what always matters most to me at a restaurant is the food, which is superb. Still, even though the seafood cooking at this venerable old-school  fish house overlooking the Esplanade des Invalides on the Left Bank has been brilliantly rebooted by young chef Matthieu Pacaud, the son of Bernard Pacaud of the three star L’Ambroise on the Place des Vosges, this reopening has gone oddly under-remarked in a city as food-loving and mad for fish as Paris.

Sea bass carpaccio with citrus zest@Jacques Gavard

There are several reasons for this. First, the public relations firm charged with the relaunch emphasized the revived restaurant’s decor over its kitchen. This is doubtless because the chic Paris based Studio K.O. firm, which did the interiors of madly popular Chiltern Firehouse hotel and restaurant in London, also signed the new look for Divellec, too. But unless you’re enough of an interior-design nut to know who Studio K.O. is, it’s hard to see why any restaurant would emphasise its decor–gorgeous though it may be, over its food.

Then the restaurant had also been closed for three years after founder Jacques Le Divellec retired in 2013, so it fell off of a lot of people’s radars, and then those who remembered it, probably had an idea of a place that was slightly stuffy, somnolent and very expensive. Finally, Divellec is located in a very quiet, wealthy, well-guarded, older part of Paris, so it was unlikely to immediately gain much traction with the city’s best young food writers, those types who’d rather go belly to the bar at Clamato.

@Yann Deret

So with all of this in mind on a cold misty Sunday night as Bruno and I walked to dinner here for the first time since the reboot in a companionable silence, my expectations were vague. The truth, you see, is that I’d never actually had a meal at the former Le Divellec, a fusty bastion of politicians and captains of industry at noon, and the same in the evening with their mistresses, that I’d actually enjoyed. To be sure, I had once eaten a sublime grilled lobster a l’Amoricaine here with a stunning bottle of Mersault as the guest of an Irish banker whose freckled cherubic face existed as the perfect foil to his psycho-sexual perversion. But my last meal here, oh at least a good ten years before the lights went out in 2013, was my most memorable, since I had been invited to lunch by one of the most powerful and un-repentently honest food critics in France.

What I remember was the soft stale fishy smell of the dining room, the witheringly haughty service, and an awful lot of bland white sauce lashed all over everything. “How would you describe this meal, Alec#8221; the esteemed critic asked me. “Hotel du Lac,” I replied. He looked blank. “That’s the title of the British novelist Anita Brookner’s novel about a lonely middle-aged single woman who goes on holiday to a sad, sedate, anonymous, expensive hotel on a Swiss lake. She takes all of her meals in the hotel, and even though few of them are described, I imagine that they’d have been like this, soulless under-seasoned over-cooked luxury cooking,” I explained.

No one recognised the critic until after our very disappointing main courses were being cleared away. Then a silent thunder bolt shoot through the room, and a frantic Commedia dell’Arte like performance began when we were served an insanely generous portion of Beluga caviar with shocking speed.

@Romain Laprade

“Oh Mon Dieu,” the critic sighed when the glistening black fish eggs were brought to the table with blinis. “Please….,” he said, waving his hands. “We’ve finished our meal already.” The face of the older waiter who’d just served us was a rigid mask of fear. “I think this might be the best dessert ever invented,” he said, a great line delivered with a poignantly plaintive smile–he was, after all, the solider on the front lines. The half beat of silence encouraged him. “It would be a shame to waste it now,” he said, his body locked in a half-bow. Silence. More silence. A short negative head shake. Several hundred Euros of caviar departed to an uncertain fate, and the scene stirred a ripple in the dining room, a place I always thought of as a theater of unwanted kisses, since the people who paid the bills here were usually avaricious, physically or psychologically, with their guests. You know, the lupine old man with his mistress, the curmudgeonly grandmother making menacing remarks to her grandchildren about the uncertainty of their inheritances, the broken middle-aged couples on the edge of a divorce caused by an infidelity they didn’t have the spleen left to discuss.

This is how restaurants get a reputation in our collective consciousness, with some being tagged as warm and happy, others cold and melancholy. So even if Le Divellec of yore was a storied table that once had a Michelin star, maybe two, and served reliably fresh classically prepared seafood, I think I’d be hard put to find very many Parisians who remember actually having had a good time here. So as we reached the front door, I found myself hoping this curse might have been lifted.

Fair’s fair. Sunday night is not an optimum time to judge any restaurant more ambitious than a brasserie, so as we were seated in a pretty grass-cloth upholstered room with low lighting and lots of plants, I thought, well, what I’m hoping for is just a good meal, not a revelation.

Scallop carpaccio with caviar @ Jacques Gavard

You see the old Le Divellec kind of missed the boat when it came to a sea change in fish cookery that was launched in Paris at the beginning of the 1980s by Gerard Allemandou at La Cagouille and the Minchelli brothers at Le Duc, both in Montparnasse. What they espoused was a bracing just-plucked-out-of-the-sea minimalism that was more Japanese in approach and theory than French.

The self-taught Minchelli, a native of Marseille who now runs Le 21, a confidential and very good little fish house in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, cast off the robes of Escoffier–his sauces, and served fish almost naked.  He invented this dead simple approach to seafood cookery while running his first restaurant, Le Duc, on the Ile de Re, which he later moved to Montparnasse. Long before anyone understood fish would soon become a luxury food, Minchelli was cooking it in such a way as to enhance its natural taste and texture, his reasoning being that it was so good as nature made it that it needed almost nothing more.

Some twenty-five years later, Minchelli’s approach, now adopted by most other Parisian chefs, exhibits its dazzling prescience more strongly than ever. But Pacaud picks up where Minchelli left off is with a new sense of gastronomic wit and puckish aesthetics that this now vintage school of seafood minimalism had been wanting. To wit, yes, we know we should be eating species of fish that are not threatened with extinction, mackerel instead of cod, for example. Yes, we know we should eat lighter, cleaner and less. But on the other hand, even if these lessons have rightly become so integrated into the culinary behavior of modern Paris, it’s still an occasional pleasure to veer off course, or to chose pleasure as a direction over any other point on the compass. So the challenge is to create contemporary fish dishes that don’t mask the natural flavor of the fish but are also inventive, festive, attractive and even a little bit amusing.

This is what I thought while an array of very pleasant hors d’oeuvres began our meal–an oyster napped with peppery watercress sauce and dabbed with herring eggs, a single butter-roasted scallop with a coin of fragrant black truffle and a wood-sorrel corsage. This succession of little dishes did exactly what good hors d’oeuvres always do, which is to offer teasing glimpses of the kitchen’s gastronomic garter belt to excite expectations for the meal to come.

The menu was totally tantalizing, too, especially since I’d decided to play the old what-the-hell card, too. By this I mean, that in today’s world everyone I know is so desperately over-worked to such a degree they rarely take the time to spontaneously enjoy themselves. You know, to just say, ‘Okay, screw it. I’m turning off my phone and my computer until Monday, and I’m just going to have a good time without planning it in advance. We work like dogs, we’re not machines, and if we don’t anoint ourselves with the occasional extravagance, what’s the point of the whole thing, i.e., a career#8221; Bruno looked a bit wan when I suggested we just go ahead and enjoy ourselves, because aside from some reasonably priced prix-fixe menus, the a la carte tarifs are pretty stiff.

I was extremely tempted by the tuna-and-dried-fruit pastilla with a coriander and ‘virgin’ celery reduction to start, but finally settled on ecrevisses, meaty little crayfish from Alpine lakes that are rarely seen on Paris menus, with a passionfruit vinaigrette and a cauliflower ‘zephir’ (sort of a soft custard of the same vegetable) at 65 Euros, while Bruno couldn’t resist the sea bass carpaccio with green apple gelee, crushed mixed peppercorns and citrus zest (38 Euros).

If the sea bass carpaccio was exquisite, my crayfish were too timidly seasoned and the cauliflower cream reminded me more of the old Le Divillec than the new one (and in case you were wondering, yes, it lost its article, ‘Le’ in the reboot and is now known just as Divellec) and was also a bit stodgy eighties vintage Robuchon in logic. Maybe the dish would have worked better if the passionfruit vinaigrette was more vivid, since it was nearly undetectable. That said, the crayfish were succulent, sweet and perfectly cooked.

The wine the natty sommelier suggested, a Romorantin from the upper Loire, was as perfect with his meal as his nimble commentary on the bottle. Without being showy, he mentioned that it had been one of the French king Charles V’s favorite wines and that the region was one of the extremely rare ones in France that had not been devastated by phylloxera in the 19th century, so the ancient root stock of the vines that produced the grapes from the wine was made is as powerful an expression of an intriguing and little known French terroir as one could hope for. Formal though he was, he was a very nice man who allowed as how he’d worked in California for many years and had recently returned to France, too.

The Sunday night tables around us were obviously having a good time, too. The stunningly good-looking just out of bed couple where the gent was clearly terrified of racking up too large a bill, the middle-aged couple who discussed almost every forkful of what they ate with the delightful young maitre d’hotel in a ritual that rippled back to paper road maps and the Michelin red guide on the dashboard, and an Italian mother and daughter from Milano who were insane for the decor and loved the food, too.

Following my crayfish, sole with grilled walnut butter and braised salsify with black truffle was magnificent. The distant sweetness of the nut loved the pearly flesh of the fish and the salsify provided textural contrast with the sole and softly punched its iodine with an earthy gust of truffle. Bruno’s John Dory with steamed shellfish–cockles, mussels, tiny shrimp, in sorrel cream was equally elegant.

Though I wouldn’t have wanted it, a cheese trolley should be proposed at a restaurant du plaisir like this one instead of just an assortment of four already plated cheeses from the admittedly excellent Quatrehommes cheese shop in the rue de Sevres where I whiled away many happy half hours back in the blessedly long-gone days when I used a laundromat just around the corner. So since we were well fed and happy, we decidedly to split a freshly baked individual apple tart with caramel ice cream, and it was lovely.

So here’s what I want next time round: line-fished sea bass cooked in a sea-salt crust and served with a citrus sabayon. But since this flops on the deck at 15 Euros for 100 grams of fish, what I can honestly look forward to the next time I visit Divellec is brunch, which may surprise all of the friends I have who know that I normally loathe this meal (Why The gustatory rewards of being dressed and in a restaurant during brunch serving hours on a weekend are almost unfailingly never worth it, and it’s the worst value for money meal in Paris most of the time, since plain old eggs get kicked upstairs by a factor of ten, sometimes twenty, on what they actually cost).

But if dinner was excellent, the brunch menu really speaks to me:

Fresh juice

Hot drink

Selection of bread and pastries

Butter and organic jam

Botarga bruschetta

Perfect egg Florentine

Bass ceviche, lemon juice and pink berries

Scallop burger, fresh herbs

Thin apple pie with toffee ice cream

or

Soufflé of chocolate grand cru, Bourbon vanilla ice cream (extra 10€)

49 €

with a glass of Champagne Thienot 65€

So what do you think Meet me there?

Divellec, 18 rue Fabert, 7th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-45-51-91-96, Metro: Invalides. Lunch menu 49 Euros, Initiation menu (four courses served at both lunch and dinner) 90 Euros, Tasting menu – eight courses, served at lunch and dinner. Brunch menu 49 Euros. Average a la carte meal 110 Euros. Open daily for lunch and dinner. N.B. You can make reservations via their website, too: www.divellec-paris.fr

The post Divellec, Paris | High Tide at Les Invalides, or a Brilliant New Fish House, A- appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

Restaurant Passerini, which occupies a spare but handsomely renovated former cafe in the 12th Arrondissement of Paris near the Marche d’Aligre, one of my very favorite Paris markets, is not only the best new Italian restaurant in Paris but Europe. Now that’s a tall statement, Alec, you might think, but I know it’s true. Giovanni Passerini, the Rome born former chef of Rino, the delightful little bistro in the rue Trousseau where he first won his name and which is now closed, is so solidly talented that he would be a rising star in Italy if he still lived there. And though it’s not my subject here, Paris is on the brink of becoming a city that ranks on par with Rome and Milan as an ultimate destination for outstanding Italian cooking.

Why Well, briefly, Parisians love Italy perhaps more than other European country with the possible exception of Spain, and the current mode among young chefs in Paris for highest quality produce simply prepared to express its essential goodness is every bit as Italian as it is French. In fact, this is approach to cooking is probably even more Italian than it is French, because depending on the region of Italy, the Italians exalt a gastronomic simplicity that’s typified by dishes like a really good insalata Caprese (you know, of course–tomatoes, mozzarella, olive oil, basil, salt), an excellent pizza, or a great risotto.

Well, this is how Paris wants to eat right now–simply, with the alluring sideways twist that Italian cooking is also usually as full of flavor as it is low-fat. For me, this explains everything about the new gastronomic Italianophilia in Paris right now. And even though I rarely recommend foreign restaurants in Paris, because I believe most travelers come to the city bent on eating as much French food as possible, Restaurant Passerini is such a good restaurant that it completely warrants a meal on the carefully plotted dining schedule of even the most discerning Paris bound diner.

Chef Giovanni Passerini

“It’s a lot of pressure for me to represent Italian cooking in Paris,” Passerini said when we crossed paths when I went to his new digs for dinner the other night. But on the basis of the meal I shared with an asutely gastronomic friend  from LA who also lives in Paris, he has nothing to worry about. His food is superb, and the restaurant itself, which channels Gio Ponti and Olivetti, or the great days of Italian design in the Sixties, is a very pleasant space in which to have a meal, especially with its gray terrazzo floors. The only thing that could use some fine tuning is the service, which was regrettably impatient shading to aggressive and even impolite to us, people whose credentials for politeness are beyond all doubt. I worked in restaurants at another time in my life and my scales always bang down hard on the side of the one who’s standing not the one who’s seated, because I know how hard this work is. So was it really too much to expect that our bottle of wine be served before our first courses reached the table?

Happily, a more amenable waiter came to the rescue, and when an order of suppli–breaded deep-fried rice beignets stuffed with roast pork, cheese and tomato sauce arrived at the table, all was suddenly hugely right in the world, especially since we also loved our excellent natural wine from the Alto-Adige region. I’d never seen this ur Roman snack in Paris before, and it was not only thrilling to find it on home turf, but in a version that would be spectacularly good even by Roman standards.

Since our approach to a menu that induced a slightly frantic fit of gastronomic greediness–there were just so many things we wanted to try, we shared most dishes, including a plate of live baby langoustines sautéed in olive oil, garlic and red pepper with a little bit of tomato and some black olives. Here, the sauce was lovely, but the langoustines were either overcooked or past prime, since most of them were disappointingly pasty.

Since I knew Passerini had opened a fresh pasta shop near the Marche d’Aligre several months ago, I certainly wasn’t going to let the pasta course slip by, and the freshly tagliolini with red shrimp from Sicily, dried peppers from Crusco and sumac was easily the best pasta dish I’ve ever had in Paris. The texture of the pasta was springy and al dente, the Sicilian shrimp were sweet and succulent in a way no imported long-distance crustacean from Asia, Africa or Central America could ever be, and the addition of sumac–ever so slightly chewy, pungent, and fragrant with a perfume that mixes dried black cherries and tobacco with pine needles and roasted red peppers, was sublime.

After the hors d’oeuvres, starters, pastas and main courses, there is a large section the menu devoted to dishes to be shared among four or more, including brill with lemon sauce; turbot with lemon sauce; roasted pigeon; lobster; and whole ducks and guinea hens. Since all of these dishes would have been too much for us as a deuce, I doubled back to a starter for my main course–veal sweetbreads with spring vegetables that included lava beans and peas in a suavely acidulated sauce of cooking juices and citrus (lede photo in this post). Madame chose the exquisitely roasted Challans duckling with baby onions and olives. Both of these dishes again explained the heightened magnificence of Passerini’s Italian cooking in Paris, to wit, he uses the very best French produce with Italian culinary logic, and it produces some spectacular food.

We concluded with a cheese plate that would have been better had it included more of the great Italian cheeses that are still woefully under-represented in Paris, and the only dessert that night was a baba au rhum with unpasteurized ivory-colored cream and fresh strawberries.

If the service at this restaurant will doubtless benefit from some inevitable and necessary fine-tuning–almost every restaurant is a little ragged when it’s just out the gate, this table is a real gift to Paris and a poignant expression of how the French capital continues to attract, groom, discipline, teach and cherish the world’s most ambitious young chefs. We’re lucky that Giovanni Passerini is one of them.

Restaurant Passerini, 65 rue Traversière, 12th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-43-42-27-56, Metro: Ledru-Rollin, http://passerini.paris/  Open for lunch Wednesday to Saturday, dinner from Tuesday to Friday. Saturday night, the restaurant becomes an Enoteca, or wine bar, with no reservations and a small-plates menu. Average 45 Euros.

The post Restaurant Passerini, Paris | The Best New Italian Restaurant in Europe, A- appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.