Le P’Tit Canon is perfect and very happy example of a good uncomplicated Parisian neighbourhood bistro. It’s a lively friendly well-run place with a pretty Belle Epoque style dining room with a big bar up front where you can stop by on your own for a glass of wine or a quick bite. In less of a rush, you come for a sit-down meal of well-prepared traditional bistros dishes that deliver a solid flush of French comfort-food satisfaction. Prices are reasonable, and the wine list is interesting, from the well-chosen and accessible house wines to better bottles that carry a much gentler markup over retail prices than is usually found in Paris restaurants.

You don’t come here for cutting-edge cooking, but rather for good solid Gallic grub prepared with high quality ingredients. Still, the menu winks at what Parisians like to eat these days, since there are several meal-sized salads on the menu, along with a cheese burger.

So when Bruno came into my office and asked me if I had an idea of somewhere festive and not too expensive where we could good with his mother, visiting from Valenciennes; his sister up from her home in Florence; her son, who’s studying film in Rome, and his Venezuelan girlfriend, also living in Rome and studying medical technology, I immediately suggested Le P’tit Canon. I knew the menu here would please his cassoulet-loving mother and also work for his vegetarian sister, and that the salads would make the students happy. As for me, a good steak tartare was already on my radar, and Bruno loves confit de canard, which is rarely found on Paris menus very often anymore.

“This is just like those Paris bistros you see in the movies,” said Matthias, Bruno’s Italian nephew when we arrived here, a hungry multi-generational group speaking four different languages at the table. “Tres charmant, est bien Parisien,” pronounced Bruno’s mother, who hadn’t been to Paris for several years. So we translated the menu aloud for those who don’t speak French, and everyone found something to make them happy.

The Italians were craving foie gras, which is made in house and served with raisin-bread toast and onion compote or as part of a salade folly (crazy salad)–green beans and mushrooms garnished with foie gras. Bruno couldn’t resist the marinated herring, I love their terrine de campagne and Madame Midavaine fancied some escargots, and his sister opted for the oeufs mayonnaise. Since everyone preferred white wine, and I suspect we’d likely get through several bottles, I ordered a fresh easy-drinking Viognier from the Gard at a very easy-on-the-wallet 21 Euros, and it was very pleasant.

Everyone ordered different main courses from those I predicted, since there were three andouillettes with mustard sauce and frites, a cassoulet, a steak tartare and a salad garnished with goat cheese and salmon. I haven’t gone near an andouillette, a rather pungent tripe sausage, since a first rather unhappy encounter with one the first week I was living in Paris, but they made Bruno, his mother and his nephew happy. Bruno’s sister was quite content with her salad, and his nephew’s beautiful girlfriend loved her steak tartare. For my part, a good ruddy cassoulet with two types of sausage, a generous piece of confit de canard and a generous portion of white beans in a soupy tomato sauce was exactly what I wanted at the end of a busy day when I’d had to walk all over Paris–transit strike oblige, buying last-minute Christmas presents.

At dinner we had an interesting conversation that spun on a question ventured by Bruno’s sister: “What are the two greatest cuisines in the world#8221; she asked us. The Italians all predictably affirmed that the Italian kitchen would be one of them, while Bruno’s mother announced the grandeur of Gallic gastronomy. For my part, I insisted on six: French, Italian, Indian, Moroccan, Chinese and Mexican. And you?

Dessert was a stretch for me, but the Italians couldn’t resist the baba au rhum and a nicely made creme caramel. An inevitable question was directed my way during the sweet stretch of our meal: “Alec, what were your best meals of 2019#8221; Here, in no particular order, are the tables I most enjoyed during the last twelve months

**La Scene, Paris

**KGBbis, Paris

**Pavyllon, Paris

**Maison par Sota Atsumi, Paris

**Shabour, Paris

**Substance, Paris

**Racine, Reims

**A Pignata, Levie, Corsica

**Frevo, New York City

**Stubborn Seed, Miami Beach, Florida

**Ixi’Im, Chochola, Yucatan, Mexico

Our joyous meal concluded with little snifters of Chartreuse, a holiday gift from the charming proprietor of this eminently amiable restaurant, and, as it turned, out exactly what we needed to ended up watching the first two episodes of the new season of “The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel” when we got home. So Le P’tit Canon ably hit its target, and a very good time was had by all.

N.B. This is a great address for a late lunch or dinner, since serving hours are 10.30am to 3.30pm and 6.30pm to 2am.

36 rue Legendre, 17th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-47-63-63-87, Metro: Villiers or Pont Cardinet, Open Monday to Friday for lunch and dinner, Saturday dinner only, closed Sunday. Average 35 Euros. www.leptitcanonparis.fr

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Victor and Charly, founders of the Brasserie Bellanger

The recent opening of Brasserie Bellanger is another sign of one of the best dining trends in Paris today–the renaissance of city’s affordable dining scene. This category of restaurants had long been abandoned by most Parisians to backpacking students as the food they served slouched towards mediocrity. Now, though, an excellent variety of new addresses are serving up some very good simple Gallic grub at easygoing prices in lively, friendly restaurants, many of which are also usefully open daily. Brasserie Bellanger, which is an easy walk from both the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est in the 10th Arrondissement, is a very good example.

Brasserie Bellanger opened after the piece on affordable dining in Paris I recently wrote for the New York Times, which you can read here, was published, but it certainly belongs in the company of the tables I reviewed in that article. It has an interesting back story, too. Victor and Charly, two friends who previously worked as chefs in the restaurants of Eric Frechon and Jean-Louis Nomicos, decided they wanted to revive the Paris brasserie by returning it to its original mission–good food at good prices served expeditiously in a comfortable lively setting.

So they carefully scouted a location and then spent a lot of time finding the producers who would supply their restaurant, including a farmer in the Aveyron who sends whole sides of Charolais beef to them in Paris and a fisherman in Ouistreham who delivers direct three times a week. Their poultry comes from the Bresse region, most of their vegetables are grown in the Ile de France, and their butter is made by the Laiterie de Kerguillet in Plouay in Brittany.

They were similarly exigent about the drinks served at their restaurant. The coffee they serve is roasted by Joris Pfaff, a prize-winning roaster, and their 100% malt unfiltered beer is made by the Rabourdin brewery in Courpalay in the Seine et Marne. Organic cider is delivered to the restaurant in kegs from the farm of Père Mahieu in Normandy, and the wine list was drawn up to showcase bottles from small independent producers and features a regularly changing selection of natural wines.

Arriving here for dinner on a hot summer night, Bruno and I were seated on the terrace to profit from a feeble breeze. Sipping Champagne and nibbling delicious truffled sausage from the Perigord while we read the menu, we fell into conversation with a jovial man sitting next to us who told us he lives in the neighborhood and comes several times a week. “The decor is a little bit Disney,” he said of the Brasserie Bellanger interior, “But the food is very good and the staff are lovely.”

The menu was an attractive roster of traditional French comfort food, but the prices were so low that I was instinctively apprehensive about the quality of what would follow. I was quite wrong, as it happily turned out, since our starters of oeufs mayonnaise, celeri remoulade and poireaux vinaigrette were excellent. The celeri remoulade was made with freshly grated celery rave, lightly dressed with real mayonnaise and appealingly garnished with crushed roasted hazelnuts, while the leeks were fresh and pleasantly al dente.

My main course of Lagioule sausage with potato puree garnished with chopped chives and salad for 13 Euros was deeply satisfying, and Bruno loved his summer tartare, which was ground beef with chopped olives, fried capers and green zebra tomatoes with a nice warm thatch of golden frites. Our chatty neighbor’s “poisson du jour” (fish of the day) was a nicely served filet of cod with grated zucchini and cherry tomatoes, too. Portions were generous, and the cooking here is light, fresh and precise.

We concluded our unexpectedly good meal here with a nicely made Paris Brest, and I decided this this would also be the occasion for me to take my first cat photo–the water pitcher on our table. Brasserie Bellanger is a very good bet for simple good-quality French food at very fair prices. N.B. It’s open daily for lunch and dinner and serves non-stop; they do not take reservations.

140 rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, 10th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 07 82 32 92 08, but they do not take reservations. Metro: Barbès Rochechouart or Poissonnière. Open daily. www.victoretcharly.com
Average 20 Euros.

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@Yann Deret

Tinkering with a neighborhood institution is always risky, but the new version of Vins des Pyrénées is a solid success. Why Truth be told, this wonderful old hole-in-the-wall that’s been open in one guise another since 1906 is actually more appealing now than it’s ever been, with much better food than it served in the past, a great-looking new decor that respects its past rather than overwhelming it, friendly service, and a terrific cocktail menu. Best of all, it’s still one of those rare places–for the time being, where you can decide to go at the last minute without having made a reservation (reservations are preferable, bien sur, but sometimes a date just happens, and this place privileges such spontaneity rather than imposing the tyrannical straight-jacket of a reservation on a spur-of-the-moment good time).

  This is a rare good news story, too, at a time when income-inequality driven gentrification continues to ravage the sociological ecosystems of the world’s most desirable cities. Even though Paris is subject to the same forces have sadly dulled and pasteurised so many of the most wonderful parts of New York and London, and the French capital has been less disrupted than those latter two, the Marais continues to go relentlessly upmarket. But at Vins des Pyrénées, owner actor Florian Cadiou has shrewdly respected the enduringly democratic DNA of the quartier enough to draw up a menu that lets you pop in for a single course–maybe their excellent Croque Monsieur made with truffled Gouda, and a glass of wine for twenty euros, which is what goes a bargain these days in Paris.

To be sure, some of the old timers, like the vociferously cranky middle-aged British music critic in a vintage black leather Perfecto jacket and his equally grumpy companion who sat next to us at dinner the other night, won’t be pleased. But hey, the days when Jim Morrison liked to hang out here aren’t coming back. That said, this place still manages to be cool without calling a tedious amount of attention to its hipster cred, and that’s something to be grateful for in an age of wiltingly over-hyped and over-conceptualised restaurants. After all, who doesn’t love an address where you could actually become a regular without having to spend a small fortune or reserve in advance?

@Yann Deret

@Yann Deret

At the end of a busy day, a cocktail seemed like a good idea, and it was, because young bartender Adele Fardeau, ex- Mandarin Oriental Hotel, makes a very fine drink indeed.

Chef Jimmy Ferret @ Yann Deret

@Yann Deret

From the brief modern French comfort food menu by chef Jimmy Reffet, who most recently cooked at Saturne and Terroirs d’Avenir, among other places, we went for the foie gras and the roast lamb croquettes, both of which were excellent. Other tempting starters included marinated leeks with crushed hazelnuts in a sauce ravigote, jambon Basque from the Maison Ospital, and terrine de campagne with homemade pickles.

Main courses of steak tartare and squid stuffed with piquillo peppers, chorizo and fennel were nicely made, too. And in the end, the menu reminded me of the French equivalent of those pleasant if unremarkable neighborhood restaurants with names like the Peacock Feather or the Drink Well and ‘bills of fare’ that ran to cheese burgers and chef salads that you used to find in the West Village in New York City. This genre of now extinct Manhattan table was where the locals went on the way home from work, alone or with a friend, for a cocktail or two and a good simple meal in a place that was friendly and familiar, because the fridge was empty, their bed was empty and/or they wanted some company. Vins des Pyrenees operates on exactly the same wave-length, although the bar upstairs has already become a place where the wild things are, especially the pretty little conservatory cum fumoir.

Le fumoir at Vins des Pyrenees @ Yann Deret

We shared a lemon meringue tart for dessert, and agreed that the only slightly disappointing thing about this place is the wine list, which, given the name of the place, could and should be a lot more interesting. What I’d love to see is a full range of French wines running from the Basque Country to the Languedob-Roussillon and some Spanish wines, too, since the Pyrénées are after all shared by France and Spain.

Vins des Pyrénées isn’t a place you come in search of gastronomic exaltation, but it’s very likeable for so usefully offering a good feed and great drinks seven days a week in one of the most appealing neighbourhoods in Paris.

25 rue Beautrellis, 4th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-42-72-64-94, Metro: Saint Paul, Open daily 7AM–2AM,  Lunch menus 17 and 22 Euros, average a la carte 35 Euros. http://www.vinsdespyrenees.com

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Quality seafood is expensive, and this is why Fichon, a charming restaurant on the back of La Butte, or northern slope of the Montmartre hill crowned by the Sacre Coeur, has become such a hit. It offers an inventive, super-fresh mostly fish-and-shellfish menu for very reasonable prices.

Occupying the former premises of a triangular-shaped hardware store, Fichon is also a perfect example of an accelerating trend that explains why we’re eating better in Paris today than ever before—the renewal of the neighborhood restaurant. To be sure, most Parisian quartiers have a good handful of restaurants, but what’s been changing recently is that these local spots are becoming so much better in terms of quality and also proposing much more interesting and adventurous menus than the bistros of yore. This means that whatever part of the city they live in, most Parisians now have great casual dining at affordable prices right on their doorsteps these days.

At Fichon, for example, the starters we chose to begin our meal were some superb wild oysters from Normandy and a portion of succulent pink shrimp with homemade mayonnaise, an uncomplicated but delicious debut to our meal. Matthieu, the proprietor, was formerly in the wine trade, which explains why this place has such an interesting list. I was surprised to see a Croatian white among the seven foreign vintages proposed and asked about it. “It’s a terrific wine for seafood, fresh, just the right amount of acidity, a little iodine in the nose, because the vineyards are near the sea, and pleasant notes of green apple and drying hay,” he explained, quietly accurately, since this 25 Euro bottle of 2013 Krauthaker – Grasevina – Korija was delightful with the shellfish.

There were many other good-value bottles on this interesting list, too, including a 2013 Cour-Cheverny from Domaine des Huards (24 Euros) and a pleasant 2015 Kritt Pinot Blanc, Marc Kreydenweiss (24 Euros). The most original splurge bottle among the whites, though, was the lush biodynamic 2014 Coteaux d’Aix-en-Provence from Domaine La Coste, the spectacular wine estate with a world-class collection of contemporary art and a just opened new hotel, which I think is one of the best new places to stay to have come along in France for a longtime, just north of Aix-en-Provence.

After doing all of the renovations necessary to create this handsome restaurant with exposed stone walls, a blue fish-scale tiled bar and retro chrome wire seats with peach and turquoise cushions, the team had a set back when the co-op board of the building in which they’re located refused to allow them to install the exhaust fans necessary for using a grill. This explains why most of the seafood on the menu is raw, steamed or just briefly seared, but in the end the constraint hardly crimped their style, since what’s on offer from the recently arrived new chef, young Japanese chef Katsuhiko Sato, who formerly worked for Yannick Alleno, is light, inventive and appealing.

My chunky tuna tartare came with garnishes of Granny Smith apple cut into matchsticks, steamed cockles and squid’s ink mayonnaise that was one of the best uses of this product I’ve ever found. Spared the usual heat, the ink retained a potent oceanic lushness that made me wonder why more chefs don’t use it in cold dishes. Bruno’s sea bream carpaccio was a similarly attractive and generously served presentation of impeccably fresh fish with beets, radishes, and grated poutargue.

On a future visit, I’d happily try the steamed skate wing with Chorizo, Brussels sprouts and a Xeres spiked ricotta cream, while Bruno says he’d angle for the sea bass ceviche with red onion, lime juice, green Tabasco, coriander and passionfruit. And just on the off chance your dining companion is not a fan of shells and fins, truffled burrata, beef carpaccio with trout eggs and pine nuts, and a changes-daily vegetarian plate are also available.

Adding to the pleasure of this meal was the busy happy atmosphere in this understandably popular place and the alert and notably friendly service. We finished up with an excellent cheese plate for me and a clever riff on cheese cake that came with an Oreo crust and beet coulis.

Aside from tucking this address aside for a return visit for myself, I’ll definitely be recommending as a great lunchtime option for anyone who’s planning to explore Montmartre, one of Paris’s most charming and emblematic neighborhoods.

Fichon, 98 rue Marcadet, 18th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 09-70-94-52-14. Metro: Jules Joffrin. http://www.fichon.fr Open Tuesday-Saturday for lunch and dinner. Closed Sunday and Monday. Average three-course meal 30 Euros.

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@Stephane Adam

Canard & Champagne, a new restaurant in the Passage des Panoramas in Paris, has a very clever concept. Occupying the magnificent landmarked former premises of an 18^th century stationery shop with black-and-white marble floors and a magnificent carved wooden shop in the moody Passage des Panoramas, this casual convivial place specializes in two of the most quintessentially French products imaginable, duck and Champagne. It’s the brainchild of shrewd young restauranteurs Jean Valfort, who previously launched Blend, Paris’s first gourmet burger chain, and Pierre Dutaret, who comes from a famous foie-gras producing family in southwestern France.

Bar at Canard & Champagne @ Stephane Adam

“Our concept is unabashedly cocorico (this is how the French hear the crowing of the cock that is their national symbol, and the word is also slang for patriotism),” says the amiable Valfort. “We also wanted to promote Champagne as a table wine, or a wine that pairs well with food. Too many people think of it only in terms of being a party drink or a special-occasion quaff, but it goes so well with a variety of different foods, including duck and foie gras, the staples of our menu,” he added.

Indeed, it’s easy to order here since you have a choice of two starters—excellent foie gras that comes with an intriguing chutney of fruit and nuts or a green salad, three main courses—magret de canard (grilled duck breast), confit de canard (duck preserved in its own fat) or a steak. Desserts come from the Boulangerie BO in eastern Paris, and they’re superb, especially the Madagascar vanilla and chocolate tarts. And to add to the fun of a meal here, the sommelier is happy to suggest a different Champagne for each course.

What I was not expecting when I went to dinner here with Bruno was an abrupt and very powerful experience of time travel triggered by taste memory.

In fact it was the appropriately goose-bump inducing mineral-rich succulence of the juicy magret de canard (duck breast) that sent me musing in some very murky layers of memory. The stunning deliciousness of this ur French fowl, which was served with potatoes and a flute of delicately fruity Champagne that flattered the bird perfectly, unexpectedly equipped me with a sort of impromptu sextant which made it possible to measure a large stretch of lapsed time with amazing accuracy and flinchingly tender perceptivity.

If one sharp point of the instrument was stuck in the flesh of the duck the other night, the other was more randomly pinned rather precariously to a summer night on Quogue, Long Island in the late 1960s. Here, in a great gray hen of a wood-shingled Victorian summerhouse, I ate my first duck.

The bird in question had been purchased from the big duck-shaped cement shop—a masterpiece of American roadside kitsch that all of us loved, in the back country behind Quogue back in the days when the hot summer air on Long Island still smelled pungently, almost sulfurously of potato fields and there were enough duck farms around so that ‘Long Island duck’ was a designation on New York City menus.

My parents had been dispatched on a five-week Mediterranean cruise by my grandmothers to mend a marriage that would remain rudderless, and we—me, my two brothers and my sister—went to stay with our adored Grandmother Jean in this huge but wonderfully shabby place with lots of clam-shell ash trays, board games missing cards and other bits and pieces, paperbacks swollen from humidity in lop-sided bookcases and wobbly wicker furniture with hard kapock pillows covered in faded floral patterns. During the week, my heart-stoppingly handsome second cousin Bart—his beauty came largely from his Argentine mother rather than any blood line we shared—took me and my brother John to the beach club, where we spent the whole day in the sea like seals while he chatted up and conquered one pretty blonde au pair girl after another. Meanwhile, my younger brother and sister splashed the minnows and each other in an inlet at the bottom of the lawn where my grandmother could keep an eye on them.

If the weeks were peaceful, the weekends were agitated, because my aunt, a then unmarried book editor who lived in New York City, would come for the weekend with one friend or another and often a pair of boys to boot. While we were content with the cleaning woman’s wonderful fried chicken and potato salad, or hot dogs and hamburgers, this wouldn’t do for the Manhattanites, which is how I found myself sitting at the dining room table starting into a plate a piece of duck, the hairs on its skin still visible and its gray meat napped by the orange sauce someone had attempted to improvise with orange marmalade, Dijon mustard and some Port.

All of the adults came to the table with the remains of their cocktails, watered down by ice cubes that had melted to the size of aspirins. It was a sweltering night, and the sad little fan someone had put on a side chair near the table only really served to remind all of us of just how hot and uncomfortable we really were.

I thought the duck was loathsome—it was too gamey for my pre-adolescent palate, the meat was stringy, and the sauce was at once too sweet and too tart. I noticed that Bart, the apple of my eye, wasn’t eating his bird either, and that my grandmother had laid her silver over her duck to unconvincingly disguise the fact that she’d barely touched it, and to make sure no one thought she was going back to it, she’d already lit a Parliament.

“Alec, you’re always so curious at the table—why haven’t you eaten your duck?” asked my aunt.

“It tastes awful,” I said, and the conversation stopped. All of the adults at the table except my grandmother insisted I be punished for my rudeness.

“Oh, well, my lambs, it’s such a warm night, and maybe duck isn’t something that children are necessarily going to enjoy,” my grandmother started equivocating. But the little mob was not to be stopped, which is why I was sent to bed early without dessert.

I was in my room sitting on the window sill next to the screen window listening to the crickets in the night and hoping I might catch another tantalizing glimpse of Bart taking a shower in the chauffeur’s apartment over the garage where he was staying before he went out, as he did every night, when the door opened. I knew it was my grandmother from the orange point of her lit cigarette as she advanced through the dark. “Here you are, darling.” She’d come up the back stairs to bring me a bowl of vanilla ice cream with butterscotch sauce. We sat next to each other on my bed while I ate my ice cream and she smoked, her ashes falling somewhere in the dark.

“Mother! Mother?! Where are you We’re waiting to start the game,” my aunt called from down the hall. “Alright, sweet dreams, darling, and I’ll see you in the morning,” she said, kissing me on both cheeks. She started away, and then she turned back, “Oh, and one more thing,” she whispered. “Don’t write off duck entirely based on the one we had tonight. It can be delicious when it’s cooked properly the way they do it France. You’ll see one day, I’m sure you will.”

And so I did.

Nothing preserves memory better than scent, food and music.

57 Passage des Panoramas, 2^nd Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 9-81-83-95-69, Metro: Richelieu-Drouot, Grands Boulevards, or Bourse. Open Tuesday to Sunday, noon-12am. Closed Monday. Lunch menus 17.50 Euros, 20.50 Euros; prix-fixe menu 26 Euros; desserts 8 Euros. www.canardetchampagne.com

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Inspite of its dopey name, Kult, the stylish but easygoing restaurant in the just-opened hotel Le Saint, is a welcome new option for good casual dining in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Surprisingly, the restaurant offer in this storied Left Bank neighborhood, the most loved district of Paris for upmarket visitors to the city, is relatively meager. To wit, if you want a good French meal within a five-to-ten-minute walk of the Cafe Deux Magots or the Cafe de Flore, your best choices are pretty much Fish La Boissonnerie, Semilla, Le 21 and, a little bit further afield, the excellent Cafe Trama on the rue du Cherche Midi.

The good-looking new hotel Le Saint was created from a legendary local hotel, the Hotel Lenox, a place I loved, because I lived there for three months in a beautiful duplex suite at the expense of the publishing company I was working for when I first moved to Paris. Day in and day out, the Lenox offered me, a gangly unknowing neophyte, lessons in the ways of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the neighborhood which remains the boiler-room of a certain eternal style of that distinctively Parisian off-center bourgeois chic the world just can’t get enough of.

So what did I learn there in those early days Oh, well, lots of things, but among them, the fact that true beauty is always flawed, personal and a tiny bit eccentric. That charm comes from a dared but never excessively scrutinized mixture of social confidence, verbal wit, graciousness and self-deprecation. And that even if it isn’t always easy, it’s better to listen for a long time rather than to speak too quickly. Oh, and also that opposites are always style friends, as in cheap and expensive, new and old, and bold and conservative. H & M and Hermes, Marks & Spencer and Comme des Garcons, mais pourquoi pas?

My gastronomic lessons in the neighborhood were of less importance, since even in 1986, Saint-Germain-des-Prés wasn’t exactly heaving with good bistros aside from the long gone but still much missed La Cafetière in the rue Mazarine. That said, my take away from Saint-Germain-des-Prés was an infinitely valuable lesson about great French food, which is that the true axis of this country’s exalted cuisine is a triumph of exceptionally good seasonal produce cooked simply.

So after I was seated on a stripped velvet banquette at the end of the bar and watching the bar tenders slowly, slowly, slowly mixing drinks, I wondered, would Kult ‘get’ the food ways of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, or would it be a silly gimmicky place like the Costes brothers glamorous but mediocre La Société?

Even before I glanced at the menu, my expectations were hopeful, however, since I’ve always liked the clean, lucid, well-focused cooking of chef Guillaume Monnet, who cooks at L’Affable, a pleasant nearby modern bistro. He drew up the menu at Kult and put its staff and suppliers in place.

So Monnet knows and understands the eating habits of the locals, or that ur Parisian mix of fashion people, politicians, antique dealers, book editors, expats, and famous faces (Catherine Deneuve, Bernard Henri Levi, etc.) but is also savvy enough to factor the cravings of worldly, wealthy tourists into the mix when he draws up a menu, too. What these people have in common is that they know they should eat healthy but also like to spoil themselves a bit and also love sophisticated but unpretentious comfort food.

So I’d already decided that at the end of a serious bear of a stress-ridden day, I’d throw calories to the winds with foie gras and grilled onions, a superb combination, and then go with a primally pleasing steak tartare with homemade frites when Bruno finally galloped through the door and walked right past me, because he’s getting used to new pair of glasses. He needed a cocktail, we needed a cocktail, and so we did. And they were good, even if the craft aspect of bar-tending always means they take too long to arrive.

Soothed by his Manhattan, Bruno chose the tuna tataki with beets and horseradish cream and the ginger spiked duck breast with carrots and an unexpectedly successful sweet-and-sour sauce. Both of our starters were excellent, since the charred onion gently tempered the barnyard richness of my foie gras and picked onions teased the earthiness of Bruno’s beets and back-stopped the fleshy iodine-rich tuna.

My steak tartare was excellent, or just that carnivore thing you want to eat when you need iron and minerals and don’t have the attention to offer to the elegance of sauce or the flirtatiousness of an unexpected spice or herb. What made it original, though, was the chopped dried fig that had been folded into the meat, an interesting idea that would have been even more effective if it had been a little more subtle, i.e, the fig was too present, since I didn’t really want anything to blunt the taste of my beef.

On the same wave-length of urgent appetite but with a little more wit was Bruno’s duck breast, which came with a lightly crispy skin that had basted the meat with its earthy, flavor-rich fat but was still cooked juicy. Our garnishes were perfect, too–a few salad leaves and double-cooked fries for me, ginger boosted carrot puree for Bruno. I finished up with an unremarkable cheese plate–a shame when you have cheese shops like Quatrehommes and Barthelemy so nearby, but Bruno was pleased with his poached pear with speculoos crumbs (these Belgian spice cookies are the Old World equivalent of graham crackers)  and vanilla ice cream.

Surrounded by an intriguingly Saint-Germain-des-Pres crowd, including a well-known politician with his ambitiously busty transgender girl friend, and an antiques dealer who surprised me by coming to dinner with a wife I didn’t know he had–his boyfriend, however, I’ve known for years–this casual table delivered exactly the kind of uncomplicated good-quality contemporary French meal we’d come here hoping to find. I expect that it will become very popular very quickly, too.

Kult, Hotel Le Saint, 3 rue du Pré aux Clercs, 7th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-42-61-01-51, Metro: Rue du Bac or Saint-Germain-des-Pres. www.lesainthotelparis.com Lunch menu 28 Euros, Dinner menu 38 Euros. Open Tuesday to Saturday for Lunch and Dinner; closed Sunday and Monday.

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@Marie Genin

The Bistro Paradis, a winsome new restaurant on the street of the same name, adds some delicious momentum to the ongoing transformation of a formerly fusty part of the 10^th Arrondissement into a lively new restaurant district with a lot of adventurous and innovative young chefs. Talented Brazilian born chef Alexander Furtado’s delicious and quietly original riff on the cannon of modern French bistro cuisine also demonstrates how alluringly cosmopolitan this cooking has become in Paris at the beginning of the 21^st century. Previously reluctant or resistant when it came to foreign seasonings and ingredients, Parisians have recently embraced them with such wholehearted curiosity that the French capital is quietly becoming almost as wordly at the table as larger cities like New York and London.

Tartare of bass and salmon with lemongrass, ginger and combava @Anabelle Schachmes

“I use typically Brazilian produce like coconut milk and shavings of toasted coconut, guava, mango, acai and pecqui in dishes that are cooked according to the classical French techniques I learned while working at Alain Ducasse’s restaurant at the Hotel Dorchester in London and then at  Christian Constant’s restaurants in Paris,” explains the very friendly Furtado. “Contrary to what many people think, Brazilian cooking is characterized by subtle melded flavors, and it’s not hot, which makes it appealing to the French,” says the chef.

What he’s referring to is a flavor palette that might be described as a spectrum of tropical umami, or sweet savoury often nutty flavors which evoke someplace much sunnier than the rue de Paradis, despite a name that would seem to promise an eternity of pleasure. What’s fascinating about Furtado’s cooking is how easily and alluringly the idiom contemporary French bistro cooking embraces his well-groomed expression of childhood taste memories in a huge, distant and famously sensual homeland, Brazil.

@Annabelle Schachmes

In their own way, Furtado and his delightful partner Yoann Dinh are actually perpetuating the traditional vocation of this part of Paris in a different way. For most of the 19^th century the fetchingly named rue de Paradis was the honeypot destination where bourgeois mothers and their engaged daughters came to shop for the furnishings that presaged, it was to be fervently hoped, a prosperous life of domestic bliss to come.

Due to its proximity to the Gare de l’Est, the gateway to Paris for trains arriving from eastern France where the best French crystal (Baccarat, Saint Louis) and glassware have historically been produced, the rue de Paradis attracted producer showrooms, and these were eventually joined by shops selling porcelain, silverware and almost everything needed to set an impressively respectable table except for the fresh flowers and the fruit and sweetmeats carefully chosen to ornament the epergne in the center of the table.

During the seventies and eighties, the decline of life-styles that regularly required fish fork and knives, much less silver-plated asparagus clamps or at least three different crystal glasses for each place setting–water, white wine and red, dimmed the glamour once reflected upon the neighborhood by the carriage trade, and by the nineties, the quartier had become filled with African hair-dressing salons, Bosnian butchers, and the kebab stands that are the telltale sign of almost any ‘transitional’ neighborhood in Paris. Now, though, the rue de Paradis is peddling good taste again, but in different declensions, including the handsome interior of bleached oak paneling designed by Kristin Gavoille, an architect who formerly worked with Philipe Starck, that has transformed the narrow premises of a former cafe du quartier into a stylish little room with a lot of personality (it’s efficient, too, since there’s a dumb-waiter at the service bar in the middle of the room that sends dirty dishes down to the scullery below–“This was a challenging space to make into a restaurant,” says Yoann Dinh by way of explanation with a grin).

Meeting Grant, an adored but rarely seen Scottish friend who lived in Paris for fifteen years before he inherited a cottage and pub on a remote island and decided to take a crack at a new life, for dinner, I arrived early and enjoyed a glass of white wine and studying the menu for a few minutes by myself. Just as I found myself vaguely wondering if Grant wouldn’t show up wearing a kilt, someone said, “Hey, how are ya, then, ya old cod!#8221;

@Annabelle Schachmes

Knowing we’d talk up a storm, I suggested we focus on the food before the chat began. “You know I love living up on my island, but I do miss the luxury of having a huge choice of good food out the door everyday,” said Grant, who was so hungry he suggested we share three starters, the tartare of salmon and sea bass seasoned with lemongrass, ginger and zest of combava, the artichoke veloute with grilled shrimp and chicken-and-lardo-di-Colonnata quenelles (garnishes above before the soup arrived) and the sauté of wild mushrooms with poached egg and shavings of toasted coconut. If all three dishes were beautifully cooked, the detail that stood out for me was the way the coconut shavings brought both contrasting texture and a very subtly sweet mellowness to the wild mushrooms. Grant agreed: “The whole lot is delicious, but I don’t want you start talking food rot with me or it’ll wreck the meal.”

Warned off making my gastronomic observations public, I quietly enjoyed my cod in a lush ‘moqueca’ style sauce. In Brazil, a moqueca is a stew of salt-water fish cooked in coconut milk with tomatoes, onions, garlic, coriander and a little palm oil, and if Frutado’s version was much more refined than the rough-and-ready versions I’ve sampled in beachside restaurants near Recife, it was similarly luscious and deeply satisfying. Meanwhile, grunting Grant across the table was so happy with his marinated steak with manioc fries and a sauce of meat drippings boosted by acai berries (big, healthy fruits that come from Brazilian palm trees) that he got through it before I could exasperate him by trying to photograph the dish. “That was lovely,” he said, warning again, “But that doesn’t mean I want to talk food rot.” Instead he regaled me with the story of his latest affair, this time round with a young Presbyterian minister. “It’s a lot easier to be a poof up in Scotland these days than I thought it would be,” he said.

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much of the desserts, because most hard-working young chefs don’t have the time or staff to soar at the sweet end of the meal and the ones I’ve had in Brazil were often too sweet for my tastes. So I let Grant go for the banana eclair and settled on some nice ‘pudim,’ or the nice eggy version of creme caramel you find in Brazil and Portugal, with beads of sweet potato marinated in caramel. They were both very good in different ways. The eclair showed off Furtado’s wit and capacity for being a very good student, since there was so much Gallic learning on display in this politely sideways presentation, and the pudim offered up the touchstone of why his food is so good: he has a maternal desire to make people happy and feed them well, and this observation is of course intended as a very big compliment. Or for a more succinct take on the evening from Grant: “Cool operator decor, great grub, sweet young guys–I’d go back.”

Bistro Paradis, 55 rue de Paradis, 10^th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 07.71.01.32.26 or 0 01.42.26.59.93. Metro: Cadet or Poissoniere. Open from Tuesday through Saturday for lunch and dinner. Lunch menu 23 Euros, Average a la carte 40 Euros. www.bistroparadis.fr

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In Paris, the new Salsamenteria di Parma is a very reasonably priced trattoria specialising in the delicious foods of Parma and the famously gastronomic Italian province of Emilia-Romagna. It’s an exceptionally clever and surprisingly good “fast casual” restaurant, too. I say surprisingly good, because for such honest well-cooked food made from expensive pedigreed mostly Emiglia-Romagnan produce the rapport-qualite prix (value for money) is especially impressive.

Beyond the quality of the food, I find this restaurant fascinating from a commercial and marketing point of view, too, because it so astutely satisfies the big demand for good, healthy, promptly served food in a large city like Paris with some welcome originality. The previously existing lunchtime offer in this 9th arrondissement neighborhood with many offices in the heart of Paris not far from the big department stores and the Opera Garnier ran to a dulling culinary refrain of gussied up burger joints trying and failing to sling a ‘Brooklyn’ attitude;  overpriced salad joints hiding their mediocrity behind jaunty graphics and insistent claims of healthy eating; sad Chinese traiteurs where the food sits in big aluminium trays inside of neon-lit glass cases, something that’s always made me wonder if there might not be a single huge factory somewhere in the suburbs of Paris cranking out these dishes in industrial quantities; and a couple of cafes still serving steak-frites type menus to that diminishing number of Gauls who still like a little glass or two of red wine with lunch and perhaps a Gauloise with their post-prandial coffee.

In contrast, the shopfront premises of Salsamenteria di Parma are decorated with big wheels of Parmesan over the bar and whole Parma hams hanging from hooks on the walls, and there’s a mixture of opera and sixties Italian pop on the soundtrack. The wooden tables are covered with the mustard-colored paper mats you often find in Italy and set with scodella (white china bowls) from which to drink your wine–most of the wines served here are Lambruscos and other rustic and rather raspy Emilia-Romagnan ones. The menu is structured to make it as easy to have a quick bite as it is to enjoy a larger fuller meal, including tempting offers of those foods urbanites around the world seem to love the most these days–garnished flatbreads, garnished salads, and pasta, and also features many dishes that are perfect for sharing, especially the charcuterie and cheese assortments.

To be honest, I doubt I’d have been tempted by this place if it hadn’t been chosen by a visiting friend from Milan who already knew and loved these restaurants for the simple reason of having been so very often disappointed by the Italian food in Paris (the latest letdown was La Comedia in the 5th Arrondissement, where the waiter tried to bully me into buying a 68 Euro bottle of Amazon with the promise of a ‘special gift’ and became sullen, even borderline rude when I declined this laughable suggestion; otherwise, the food here is served in buffoon-ishly massive portions to compensate for its mediocrity and lack of taste).  “This is real Italian, Alec,” insisted Anna. “The company is based in Parma, which I’m sure you know is the headquarters town of the Barilla group, and I think they’ve learned the good lessons of Barilla and avoided the bad ones.”

She’d also chosen this restaurant as the venue for a quick lunch during a one day visit to Paris, and because we hadn’t seen each other in a longtime, I went. Aside from the wine, it was very good. In the Italian tradition of the coperto (coverage charge), we paid one Euro for bread and salsina, a dipping sauce of pureed pepper. We also ponied up another Euro per portion the artichoke and red-onion-and-balsamic sauces. They were all good, as were the Caprese di Parma, freshly sliced Parma ham with mozzarella on a bed of arugula with red peppers in oil and the Poker di Culatello, a tasting plate of culatello ham and other charcuterie.

Anna works in fashion and she talked a blue streak about how much trouble the Italian industry is having competing with illegal copy-cat producers in Asia and hand-work in places like Morocco or Sri Lanka that costs a fraction of what it does in Italy. Finally, she sighed and said: “Well, the one thing they can’t copy is our food. Or maybe they can, but it won’t taste as good as it does when it’s real Italian.” She also told me a strange but revealing little anecdote about how her uncle, an eyewear designer, had lost his job working for a huge well-known Italian eyewear manufacturer, been out of work for four months, and was then contacted by the Chinese company that has been causing his former employer so many problems to work for them as a designer from his home in Ancona. “Un mondo cosi strani!” said Anna; ‘Such a strange world.’

Next we shared some pumpkin-filled tortelli with butter and grated Parmesan and a Maialata, a tasting plate of roasted culatello ham and two types of sausage with nicely made potato puree.

Served within the space of 75 minutes, the meal concluded with some chocolate ‘salami’–a loaf of chocolate, meringue, and hazelnuts, and two good coffees.

Walking home past the local salad bars, Chinese traiteurs, etc. I found myself wondering why no clever young Frenchman or French woman hasn’t conceptualised some branch of French cooking to appeal to the ‘fast-casual’ segment of the market. There are such rich possibilities to decline for such a concept from the regional kitchens of France, and since most of the 33 million tourists who make Paris the world’s most visited city would like to eat French food most of the time while they’re in town, it would seem that the market for such a product is huge.

It also occurred to me that the Italian concept as it now exists would also be a really big hit in the U.S., U.K., and most other European countries and would also work really well in airports and train stations, etc., so it has huge potential. So until the day that a French version of Salsamenteria di Parma comes into existence, I’ll happily return to this cheap and cheerful little restaurant when I have a request for a quick but satisfying lunch instead of a more leisurely traditional restaurant meal.

Aside from the fact that I’ll never be a fan of Lambrusco, or any other Emiglia-Romagnan wine for that matter, and the music was just a little too loud, I enjoyed this place and tip my hat to the clever team who invented this mini-chain of restaurants, since in Italy where the first one opened in Parma, there are now two branches in Milan, one in Cannes and this latest one in Paris, with more coming soon.

40 rue Saint-Georges, 9th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-48-24-58-94. Metro: Trinite d’Estienne d’Orvre, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette or Le Peletier. Average 20 Euros.  www.salsamenteriadiparma.com  Also in Cannes: 86 rue Meynadier, Cannes, Tel. (33) 04-93-99-66-67.

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In France, the cold weather always makes me hungry for Alsatian food, which I recently satisfied with two excellent meals at JY’s and Wistub Brenner during an overnight trip to Colmar. With the reopening of its superb Musée Unterlinden, which houses the magnificent Issenheim altarpiece in a medieval chapel that was once part of a 13th century convent, Colmar has to be the best weekend away this winter (you can read what I wrote about the newly expanded museum here). If you visit before December 31, 2015, you’ll also have the pleasure of the city’s five Christmas markets, which sell festive goods like Christmas tree ornaments but also beautifully made metal toys, wooden housewares, jam and other preserves, and the raw-milk munster cheese and smoked marinated pork loin that I bought at the Geismar stand in the Marché de l’Ancienne Douane on a refreshingly brisk Sunday afternoon when I’d walked over to have a look at the museum before a guided visit the following morning.

That evening, I decided I’d put the holiday throngs at arm’s length by having dinner at JY’s, the Michelin one star restaurant that is probably the best restaurant in Colmar. It occupies a very pretty old half-timbered house on the banks of the Lauch river, which would have you expecting a sort of Hansel & Gretel decor once you get inside. Instead, chef Jean-Yves Schillinger, a native of Colmar who lived and cooked in New York City for several years, opted to create a sleek open kitchen and a relaxing streamlined sort of modern lounge-bar look for his restaurant. I hadn’t been here for a very longtime, so I came to the table hungry, curious and already knowing what I would order, since I delight in the voyeurism of stalking a menu online before I actually arrive at a restaurant. The marinated salmon I’d already picked out was superb, too, and came with enlivening garnishes of horseradish cream, diced beets and cucumbers, rye bread crumbs, mustard cress, and little dots of pleasantly puckery lemon curd.

On a rainy Sunday night, there was something hugely pleasant and peaceful about sitting by myself (I almost wrote, ‘alone,’ but then realized this word unfortunately has a melancholy ring to it for most people) at a large table spread with a crisp white cloth and being a spectator to both what was going on in the open kitchen and the tables that surrounded me on. Nearby, the conversation of a well-heeled foursome see-sawed between the recent French elections and plans for various winter vacations (Megeve, Mauritius–Colmar is a very bourgeois sort of town). There were also two deuces, one a contagiously jolly British husband and wife who were very much enjoying their wine, and the other, an older French pair who seemed to have exhausted all possibilities for conversation many years ago and so studiously avoided each others eyes. I often found the woman looking at me during the course of my meal, and after sending three polite smiles her way, she finally responded with a little grin that sent a blaze of color up her cheeks.

For my part, I was supremely happy with my pan-roasted ris de veau, which arrived riding a little canapé of pain perdu in the middle of a foamy masala sauce that brilliantly and very unexpectedly magnified its earthy but delicate taste. The long flavors of the spice mix–masala comes in infinite variety, but the percussion of this blend came mostly from tumeric, cinnamon, clove, and ginger–were cleverly punctuated by a gremolata, and the succulent organ meat was fancifully fenced in with a ring of gnocchi and dots of pureed pea. This was easily one of the best dishes I’d eaten all year, a delight redoubled by the fact that I’d been looking forward to it ever since I’d boarded a very early train at the Gare de l’Est in Paris for the three-hour journey to Colmar.

When I learned that the comté has been aged by Bernard Antony, one of the greatest affineurs of cheese in France, whose cellars are found in the little Alsatian village of Vieux-Ferrette, I wasn’t going to miss this opportunity, since Antony’s specialty is comet, one of my favorite cheeses. A very generous portion arrived with garnishes of cider sauce and apple in mustard syrup, which were interesting but unnecessary, since the cheese itself was so good.

And because Schillinger is a generous man whose pleasure in practicing his metier is first and foremost in making other people happy–as opposed to impressing them with his talent, ample though it may be–my coffee came to the table with an Hermes orange box of mignardises and a tree decorated with chocolates and cookies, a charming conclusion to an excellent meal.

After a wonderful visit to the Musée Unterlinden the following day, I was a man on a mission when I arrived at Wistub Brenner, because I love traditional Alsatian food, which has become almost impossible to find in Paris at any real level of quality. This popular little place had been cleverly redecorated in a sort of clever post-modern riff on the traditional folklore-rich decors that characterize these restaurants where Alsatians go to feast on their own comfort foods. It was gluttonous of me to be sure, but then I long ago decided that a good bout of gluttony not only makes me very happy but is, by my lights, good for my health, because I only ever react this way when the food is of exceptional quality (okay, with the possible exception of a bi-annual gorging on the dip made with sour cream and packets of alarmingly chemical-rich Lipton’s Onion Soup). So I ordered the onion tart, which came with a garnish of very fresh salad in a mustardy vinaigrette, to start. It was very good, too, since eastern France loves and excels at making all manner of egg rich open tarts, including quiche Lorraine, bien sur.

And then, well, who in their right mind would visit Alsace without having at least one good choucroute garni, the region’s great monument to good winter-time eating and a mound of gently brined cabbage topped with different types of charcuterie and a waxy potato or two. If you love pork–as smoked bacon, smoked cumin-flecked sausage, smoked pork loin, frankfurter-like saucisses de Strasbourg, etc., as much as I love pork, this will make you very happy indeed. The cabbage dampers the richness of the meat, which, depending on the cut, requires a smear or two of nostril-clearing mustard, and the potato adds some texture and somehow goads you on.

“Eh bien, vous l’avez bien apprécié!” said the waitress when she cleared my nearly empty plate, and yes, I had very much appreciated it indeed, enough, in fact, to know that I’d be missing it all winter, or at least until my next to trip to Colmar, one of the most avidly gastronomic little cities in France.

JY’s, 17 Rue de la Poissonnerie, Colmar, Tel. (33) 03-89-215-360. Open Tuesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner (Also open on Sunday’s while Colmar Christmas markets are open, November 21, 2015-December 31, 2015). Prix-fixe menus 43 Euros, 64 Euros, 92 Euros, average a la carte 100 Euros. www.jean-yves-schillinger.com 

Wistub Brenner, 1 rue Turenne, Colmar, Tel. (33) 03-89-41-42-33. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Prix-fixe menus 24.20 Euros, 25.20 Euros, 29.40 Euros www.wistub-brenner.fr 

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Up in Menilmontant, the over-night success of the oddly named Dilia, a new bistro serving stiffly priced prix-fixe menus of contemporary Italian cooking, offers proof that a strong whiff of La Vie Boheme remains irresistible to the world’s style setters. Occupying the same simple little neighborhood tavern that formerly housed Michael Greenwold and Simone Tondo’s Roseval, Dilia has become every bit as much of a modish address as its predecessor since it opened a few weeks ago.

The nervy contemporary Italian cooking of chef Michele Farnesi, who previously cooked at Pierre Jancou’s restaurant Heimat, a place that’s never really caught on, is very good, too. But during a recent dinner here with Bruno and another Parisian couple, it was apparent that most of the people in this small and rather cramped dining room with plank floors, bare white walls and zero décor beyond the light fixtures, weren’t in the room because of the food, but because they’d heard or read somewhere that it was the place to be.

Such is the immediacy of the world’s gastronomic media these days, in fact, that the gas has rarely been turned on more than once or twice at any half-decent new Paris restaurant before it becomes fodder for the insatiable maw of media, more multifaceted than ever in this world of blogs and user-driver or crowd-sourced restaurant sites than ever before. This rabid appetite for the new is wonderful in many ways, because it demonstrates just how deeply engaged by good food a huge swathe of the general public in every country in the world has become, but on the other hand, its king or queen-making powers are frequently deleterious to fragile, newly born restaurants.

Consider our meal at Dilia, for example. We arrived pretty much on time, and because several of us had to get up early the following morning, we chose the four-course 44 Euro tasting menu and ordered an unexpectedly excellent bottle of biodynamic white wine from Emiglia-Romagna, a part of Italy I generally associate with Sangiovese. A sort of fiddly forgettable amuse bouche came to the table, and then a bottle of wine later, or forty-five minutes on a Friday night when we were all unwinding, the first course arrived at the table, fluffy beet-juice-tinted gnocci garnished with chopped oysters and horseradish. It was good product rendered into pleasant, well-made and puckishly creative food—the taste spectrum of this dish might best be described as sort of a Mediterranean riff on borscht, but it wasn’t quite enough to completely dispel the gathering mists of exasperation that had installed themselves at our table, and this despite the fact that we very much enjoy each others company and hadn’t seen each other for several months.

And so it went, successive overly long unacknowledged lapses of time passing between each course, which meant too much wine and more exasperation. Sensing the kitchen was clearly overwhelmed, but instinctively protective of any chef, because I know how grueling their work really is, I attempted to mollify the bridling nerves of the other three with only partial success. Mono-tonal in a rather Japanese sort of a way, our next course was seared rascasse (scorpion fish) with white bean puree and sautéed kale, bien sur. Again, nice cooking, but lacking the gastronomic wiring that a little dab of wasabi or green pepper would have provided if the same dish had been served by a Kyoto chef.

With the main course yet to arrive, it was clear this place just wasn’t baking right as a restaurant experience, which was a shame, since Farnesi’s food is so good and the service is amiable and well-intended but unhappily lacking in the prevailing professionalism needed to deliver the experience of a meal that’s both pleasant and relaxed.

The best dish of the evening, a beautifully pan-roasted pigeon with ceps and a lushly herbaceous green coulis, was, however, more than enough to make me willing to return to Dilia for another meal in the future. And if Bruno might be up for second experience of this table, I don’t expect that our friends would be, since a certain impatience had long since shaded into irreparable aggrievement by the time this succulent dish arrived. Dessert was a dully foamy thing, and we were finishing our wine and waiting for the bill when the chef came out, knelt down tableside and asked one of my friends, one of the world’s best-known food bloggers, how it was that he’d happened to come here. I cringed for both Farnesi and my friend, but there was nothing I could do for either of them at this point.

In any event, he’s a solidly talented cook with some great ideas, and his team is lovely, and once they find someone to make all the pieces fit together, Dilia just may become a restaurant that solidly lives up to all of the early hype. (Full disclosure: I included Dilia in a round-up of new restaurants in the New York Times that ran long after I had eaten here; so I can’t really claim much authorship in terms of the manic buzz that surrounded this place the night I went to dinner).

Dilia. 1 rue d’Eupatoria, 20th Arrondissement, Paris, Tél. (33) 09-53-56-24-14. Open Tuesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner. Closed Sunday and Monday. Métro: Ménilmontant, Lunch menus 16 Euros, 19.50 Euros; dinner menus 44 Euros, 60 Euros. www.dilia.fr

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