Mea culpa, but it’s the middle of winter in Paris when the days seem to last fifteen minutes and everyone I know is sun-and-fun deprived and slammed with work. So you do what you can, which in my case meant an impromptu decision to have a big fat burger for lunch after a morning of appointments in the 10th arrondissement. Truth be told, I’d have preferred the Daily Syrien, for Ahmad’s fabulous falafel and turnip pickles, but it was packed, so I crossed the street to Paris New York, the latest high-concept burger joint in Paris and hoped for the best. The brief menu offered a choice of 4 differently garnished burgers made with Breton Pie Noir beef from Le Poncelet, a prestigious butcher shop, or a portobello mushroom burger; fries; cheesecake; various craft beers; wine by the glass at three different price points, the most expensive being Francis Ford Coppola Diamond Collection red and Newton Chardonnay.

Well, while I was waiting for my burger the place filled up quickly with a gaggle of twenty-somethings who spent a lot of their time poking away at their phones even if they were with friends. So my “Smoky Blue” burger came, and it was so sparsely garnished with the promised Stilton, bacon and onion confit that they didn’t register on the palate. The fries were lukewarm, but pretty good. The lemonade in a Ball Jar, something I haven’t seen since a meal at Mrs. Wilkes Boarding House in Savannah, Georgia twenty years ago, was more Brooklyn than Biloxi–or tart than sweet, and this was a blessing. This meal happened in twenty minutes, left me 15 Euros poorer, and the most interesting thing about it was that I had the opportunity to taste Heinz Balsamic Vinegar Ketchup, which I found surprisingly delicious–I’d assumed it was a no-interest gimmick, and also to realize that I have become hugely weary of the wave of edible Americana that just keeps washing over Paris.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s nice to be able to get a half-decent burger in Paris (none of the burgers in Paris are better than that), since I remember the days when the truly lousy Joe Allen and a couple of other similarly underperforming faux Yankee tables ruled the roost when it came to nostalgic eats. But the phenomenon has now gained so much self-perpetuating momentum it’s becoming a serious bore. I can’t help but thinking that a lot of the clever young backers of the ever-growing number of Paris burger places have realized that they can be real gold mines, since all you need are some good graphics, some better-than-average sourcing, respectable foot traffic in a neighborhood where a lot of people work in front of computer screens, and you’re done, since there sure isn’t any serious cooking going on in any burger shop. I mean, even a really good Croque Monsieur or Madame require more effort.

So this week wasn’t bringing great joy until I went to dinner at Verjus, American-in-Paris chef Braden Perkin’s place in the Palais Royal. Here Bruno and I joined a bunch of old and new friends for a tasting meal in the new and really great looking indigo-painted private dining room Perkins and partner Laura Adrian, Paris’s most charming bar keep, have created on the third floor of their space between the rue Richelieu and the Palais Royal. As soon as I went upstairs and saw this room–and I’m sorry, no photo, but it was so dimly lit that my iPhone, which was all I had on me, was useless, I was delighted, because it can seat 12 at a pinch and so becomes my perfect recommendation for anyone who wants a private space in Paris. I was also happy, because I’ve always liked Braden’s cooking, but in my antic effort to keep up with the new, new, new I hadn’t been here in a year.

So we ate, and it was fascinating to see how Perkins’ style has become quieter, subtler–well, more French, since he first opened. To be sure, each tasting plate is as intricately and logically constructed as a Swiss watch, and most of them induce real pleasure in anyone who was willng to accord them a more than a few very necessary moments of meditation. But even though Braden still looks like an endearing Grant Wood subject circa 2013, a certain sophistication has set in, and this is a good thing. He hasn’t lost the wiry winsomeness he brought with him in his back pocket when he first showed in Paris after cooking in Seattle, but he’s learned a lot. The thing is, though, most of what he’s learned, he’s intuited from the spectularly good French produce he works with–like any seriously good chef, his produce cues him. And in this case, the cue was to turn the flavor spectrums down a few notches so that we could relish the perfect freshness and natural tastes of his produce.

After an amuse bouche of citrus-cured trout with smoked fingerling potatoes and trout roe, we had a superb little clam chowder made with Portuguese cherry stone clams, celery root, thyme oil, wild thyme, lovage, homemade harissa and a crumbly garlic crouton. This was a beautiful little miniature that created a tiny universe of ricocheting tastes which made me think of minnows left behind in a tidal pond. Then a gorgeous slow-cooked egg yolk under a tiny thatch of frisee on a bed of soft polenta with salsify, sweet onions, baby leeks, pumperknickel crumbs and finely chopped kimchi.

Duck breast with winter sauerkraut, orange, rye, and smoked celery root skin–Braden likes smoke, and so do I–came with a brilliant side of baby spinach leaves, hazelnuts, pickled grapes, crimini mushrooms and frozen foie gras shavings that lasted seconds before they dissolved into the leaves while remaining the base note flavor of this terrific little dish.

Braden’s gifted Korean pastry chef Cassandra offered up three desserts, and if all of them were impeccably conceived and executed, the one I liked best was the walnut tart with bergamot jam. All told, this was a fascinating meal, because it highlighted the ways in which a talented and ambitious young American’s cooking has become more gastronomically elegant–bien sur, we’re talking casual elegance here, the longer he lives in Paris.

Daily Syrien, 55 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, 10th, Tel 09-54-11-75-35. Metro: Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, Bonne Nouvelle or Château d’Eau. Open daily. Average 12 Euros.

Khaosan Road, 52 rue Condorcet, 9th, Tel. 01-49-70-07-06, Metro: Anvers, Cadet, Saint Georges. www.khaosan.fr Closed Sunday. Average 35 Euros.

Paris New York, 50 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, 10th, Tel. 01 47 70 15 24   Metro: Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, Bonne Nouvelle or Château d’Eau.

Verjus,  52 rue Richelieu, 1st, Tel. 01-42-97-54-40. Metro: Palais-Royal Musee du Louvre or Pyramide. Dinner only. Closed Saturday, Sunday. Prix-fixe 60 Euros.

The post PARIS NEW YORK–Basta With the Burgers Already! C- ; VERJUS–Chef Braden Perkins is on a Roll, A-/B+ appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

I’m not sure exactly why, but while I was perched on a stool in front of a window overlooking the boulevard at the new Chipotle, I found myself thinking of poor old Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico and his wife, the Belgian born Princess Charlotte whose slippery grip on sanity later in life led her to be known as the ‘Mad Carlotta.’ Don’t worry if Max doesn’t ring a bell right away either, since the paper-punch of historical confetti that had an Austrian aristocrat and naval officer briefly installed (1864-67) as the emperor of Mexico with the benediction and patronage of Emperor Napoleon III of France isn’t well known these days. Maybe it struck a chord with me, however, as an historical footnote on a much earlier failed attempt at globalization?

In any event, the dog days of August and the fact that we’re momentarily gypsies since–surprise, surprise!–the renovation work being done in our flat is taking twice as long as planned, offered a perfect pretext for me to nip around the corner and lose my Chipotle virginity yesterday at lunchtime. To be sure, I’ve spotted branches of this hugely successful American ‘Mexican’ fast-food chain in various U.S. cities, but if I’m in New York or Boston or Philadelphia or, or, or … the last thing in the world I’d ever do is eat at a fast-food place, even one that’s copped a pretty good reputation. I mean can you imagine eating at an Olive Garden in Rome or a Red Lobster in Boston My curiosity had also been piqued and primed by the fact that such estimable Gallic guardians of good grub as Le Fooding and L’Express Styles have actually given this first French outpost of the U.S. chain good reviews. I mean, Le Fooding giving a thumbs up to an American fast-food chain is sort of like a priest admitting that he doesn’t believe in God or Julia Child confessing that Twinkies are her favorite pastry.

So I ducked around the corner from my current temporary digs late in the afternoon after the lunch rush, and was immediately surprised by the friendliness of Chipotle’s staff, who rather poignantly seemed to have realized the only interesting thing about their work is that it offers them a chance to practice their English, since only two of the ten people who went down the rails before me were confirmed Francophones. And these nice young kids speak English really well, too. Anway, with jet-lag firing up my always red-hot appetite for Mexican food, the first thing that kind of let me down was that there weren’t enough side dish possibilities. Okay, chips and guacamole, fine, but what if you wanted to be a total slob and get a side of rice and beans No can do. The beverage selection didn’t set my hair on fire either, since I think you have to have been born below the Mason-Dixon line to like Dr. Pepper and drinking nothing but water with a meal always strikes me as self-flagellantly monastic. Why not create some fabulous faux Mexican non-alcoholic drink with sparkling water and lime cordial Unlike most fast food chains, Chipotle doesn’t try hard enough to up-sell. No cactus-paddle confit tart for dessert, no nothing.

The site of those little molded red-plastic baskets that used to be all over the place in more up-market American fast food places like Howard Johnson’s or Friendlys gave me a happy twinge, though, and after a lot of hemming and hawing I decided on the daily special, which was their ‘lime-marinated’ barbecued chicken burrito. So my server slapped a big flappy burrito on the grill and attended to the serious fillings–I went with the two different offered types of beans, black and pinto cooked with bacon, rice and chicken, and then it was on to the sauce lady with her three degrees of hot sauce, grated cheese, tasteless sour cream, and maybe a few other things. Dosed with what hoped would be seriously hot chile sauce, this nice young woman wrapped up my big load, nestled it into a paper lined red basket, and away I went, my pockets lighter by 11.50 Euros.

A lot has been made about Chipotle’s commitment to well-sourced produce, so I bit into my meal papoose with a lot less reluctance than I’ve ever felt before unknown fast food before. Immediate problem: my entire Mexican-American food pod was lukewarm to cold. And then the flavors seemed out of balance, with several shaded tones of acidity floating on a nobly caliente scrim of chile sauce. Not bad, but not good either. But I kept going, because I was there, and I’d paid for it, and I was hungry.

Then something odd happened. I looked down at my basket and realized I’d been so distracted by the fun of the weirdo people watching provided by les Grands Boulevards that I’d ignored my food pod for a good five minutes, which in my book is the equivalent of being in the middle having sex with someone and suddenly saying, “You know what Let’s just watch TV instead.” Oh, I finished my burrito, and it was sufficiently better than any other American fast-food I’ve ever eaten to mean that Chipotle will score on my radar in airport terminals and places like that, but it’s not a place that’s going to be seeing me again anytime soon.

Walking home, I found myself thinking that the most interesting thing about lunch was that it showcased how good Americans are at inventing highly rationalized production systems. The problem is that they’re almost inevitably deployed towards mediocrity than quality. Now that I’m on a franchised food roll (sic) (sick?), the next time I go to the U.S., however, nothing’s going to keep me away from an Olive Garden or a Red Lobster. I just need to know.

20 boulevard Montmartre, 9th, No public phone, Metro: Richelieu – Drouot, Le Peletier or

Grands Boulevards. Open daily. Average 12 Euros.

The post CHIPOTLE, Paris, C- And if You Think This is a Burrito, Then I’m the Mad Empress Carlotta appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

With the accelerating blurring of work and leisure wrought by Twitter, Facebook, email, text messaging and cellphones eroding the old-fashioned idea of what a vacation could and should be in the United States, there’s something deeply admirable and profoundly charming about the way France defends the sanctity of the summer holiday. And if Paris doesn’t wind down as visibly as it did twenty years ago when shops flaunted the fact that they were closing for a good long time by masking their windows with censorious kraft paper–you’d only know that this was there is if you weren’t in Le Lavandou or Saint-Jean-de-Luz, there’s still a reliable, palpable and quite bracing deceleration of daily life that implicitly authorizes you to be late for and/or leave work early, and to abandon yourself to what you feel like doing–lying on your bed all afternoon reading a great novel, for example, instead of all the dreary things you should be doing (preparing accounts for your tax person, meeting a deadline, sewing a button back on a shirt, going to the gym, etc.). French media follows suit, too, with a winding down of life-style reporting, including restaurant reviewing, which annually yields an inevitable cannon-fire of lists of the nicest places to have a meal outside or the summer’s ‘hippest’ tables.

This summer, the annointed ‘hippest’ table in Paris is Pan, a place in the increasingly hip 10th arrondissement, though not the Canal Saint Martin and vicinity, but rather the rue de Paradis and those streets in and around the rue du Faubourg Poissoniere (For whatever it’s worth, I fear that a tipping point in the vicinity is inevitable within the next year or two, since the unselfconsciousness and alluring grottiness of the neighborhood just won’t be able to withstand this much media attention, especially since this sort of froth fertilizes real-estate prices). Though hipness generally discourages any interest on my part–too many hip restaurants get away with mediocre food, because they’re hip–ever hear of the Costes brothers#8211;a few glowing reviews of this place led me to think it might be a good spot for a much looked forward to tete-a-tete with one of my closest Parisian pals, who, alas, will soon be moving to London. So I met Christian for dinner on a muggy night when both of us would surely have preferred to be sitting outside.

The dining room was beautiful, though, for being an odd and engaging riff on something both Euro fifties via East German design studios–the wallpaper, and sixties–the flea-market faux Danish modern chairs and tables, plus great lighting and a pretty parquet floor. Our server–one of the owners, I think–was friendly, too, so things looked good from the starting block, and I also liked the rather random menu of Mediterranean inspired modern dishes–gaspacho with chorizo, watermelon with marinated feta, etc., and good solid Gallic comfort food. As is increasingly often the case in such ‘young’ restaurants, our starters–Christian went with the delicious pork rillettes–rich, fatty, smoky, and well-textured, and I had the baby artichoke salad on a bed of arugula with a fresh mint vinaigrette but none of the promised Parmesan shavings, were much, much better than our main courses.

I was surprised by the rather audacious pricing of the wine list, too–I mean the rue Martel is still along way from becoming the Avenue Montaigne, and it took a long time for a our wine to come, but again, the service was pleasant, if sort of cheerfully dissheveled. Then our main courses showed up, and the meal fell off a cliff. I ordered fregola (small almond-shaped pasta) with baby clams and tomatoes, while Christian had ricotta-stuffed ravioli. I could see that his ravioli, which came with no trace of the Swiss chard, hazelnuts or sage mentioned on the menu, were egregiously overcooked, because they were stuck together in a clump at the bottom of a small bowl. More charitable than I am, he described them as “okay,” a word I’d never flatter my fregola with. A quick glance at the photo below will document the first problem with this dish–what on earth was the kitchen thinking to garnish a summer pasta with unripe hot-house salad tomatoes Given the difficulty in obtaining good tomatoes in Paris even during the summer, I think I’d have oven-roasted some Roma tomatoes or used snippets of sun-dried ones instead of these hard, flavorless, greenhouse-grow-light red ones. But the real problem was that the pasta was not only so completely overcooked it had the texture of baby food but it had been seasoned with nothing more than cream and salt. So this was hands-down one of the worst dishes I’ve eaten in Paris in months, and despite the fabulous company, attractive setting, and pleasant service, there was just no saving this meal. To be sure, I had read that the dish to order here was the hand-chopped steak tartare, but there was still no excuse for this decidedly unappetizing performance.

Christian and I adjourned to a sidewalk terrace for coffee and another glass of wine, and on the way home, I found myself wondering how on earth anyone could have vaunted the cooking at Pan. And here’s where I found the hitch–in Paris, food writing is more and more often to be found under the umbrella of so-called ‘Style’ supplements instead of in dedicated settings on its own, which means that it has to play some sort of supporting part in the increasingly frantic chase for fashion, cosmetic and perfume advertising placements. This is the only reason I could find that a place like Pan, an instant favorite of the fashion tribe, would ever get such a major look in from the French papers before they signed off for summer. To be fair, however, not all ‘Style’ supplements are joining this game, since Francois Regis Gaudry’s write-up of Pan in L’Express Styles–the best ‘Style’ supplement in France in my opinion, expressed a politely bewildered opinion on this place, too.

PAN, 12, rue Martel, 10th, Tel. 09-52-51-63-70. Metro: Chateau d’Eau or Poissonnière. Open Tuesday-Friday for lunch and dinner, Saturday dinner only, Closed Saturday lunch, Sunday and Monday. Average a la carte 45 Euros.

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Though some friends I’ve sent there have been exasperated by the concept of the blind-folded (i.e. unidentified) tasting menu at La Bigarrade, and more than a few have carped about the prices at this tiny little restaurant in Les Batignolles and also the slightly grand demeanor of the service, for me, it’s consistently been one of the most intriguing and satisfying contemporary French restaurants in Paris, which is why I was horrified when I heard that chef Christophe Pele, who opened the place, was shipping out.

A friend who lives locally reassured me that Yasuhiro Kanayama, the Japanese chef who has replaced Pele, is equally brilliant, however, so I brow-beat Bruno–who also gets impatient with long drawn-out tasting menus, into going for dinner the other night. And we had a superb meal, which debuted with an avocado curl with fresh coriander and a cumin biscuit and continued with micro-planed cauliflower with shaved squid and an exquisite crabmeat with vanilla-spiked sabayon. The rhythm of the meal was impeccable, too, with these sublime little cameos arriving at exactly the moment that you’d quietly decided you’d like something more.

Though compatible with Pele’s approach, Kanayama’s cooking is actually much subtler and even more quietly provocative when it comes to sensual contrasts of texture, as seen in a sublime little dish of lobster with grilled banana in lemon-verbena foam (who’d have guessed that the acetone in the banana would flatter the lobster’s natural sweetness so suavely?).

Turbot with bonito broth and smoked eggplant (below) nodded at the Japanese palate without making some sort of awkward Occidental mannerist feint (much too often the case when Western chefs fiddle with Asian food).

Juicy pigeon breast with cockles and tamarind paste was elegant and deeply satisfying, too.

Bruno, the dessert lover in our duo, deemed the chocolate cake with Matcha powder and cream reason alone to return to La Bigarrade. All told, a really superb meal, and if David Toutain at Agape Substance is the one who pulls off this sort of gastro snap-shot performance better than anyone else in Paris right now, La Bigarrade remains an urgently well-recommended restaurant in my book.

La Bigarrade, 106 rue Nollet, 17th, Tel. 01-42-26-01-02. Metro: La Fourche. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Prix-fixe menus 35 Euros, 55 Euros (lunch), 65 Euros, 85 Euros.

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After dinner at the new The Beef Club the other night, however, I’m starting to have some serious doubts about what this trend means for Paris. If the food scene in every major city is in constant evolution, Paris isn’t every major city. It’s much smaller than London and New York, and without the same jumped-up financial sectors as those two cities, there’s less money to spin the wheels of the local restaurant industry, which is already struggling for a variety of distinctly local factors like the moronic 35 hour work week (whoever France’s next president may be, I hope they’ll renounce this daft Ruby Goldberg feint at economics once and for all).

What this means is that a big trend here has a lot more impact that it would in a larger city with a more lavish expense-account dining culture. A perfect–and rather sorry–example is the fact that almost everytime a neighborhood cafe or brasserie is remodeled these days, it turns up with a faux Costes brothers restaurant style decor. Though they’re definite signs Parisians are finally becoming bored by the Costes restaurants, the ripple effect of their success is still being copied everywhere. They were the ones who pioneered the local idea of well-sourced brand-name products instead of real cooking, and they also launched a whole sad battery of recipes that are more about assembling things on plates–salmon tartare, sliced tomatoes and mozzarella, etc., or just plain applying some heat here and there than are about the transformational art of cooking. And the new wave of Paris burger restaurants and steakhouses are basically just taking a leaf from the same playbook, since they’re all about prestige sourcing, too–meat from star butchers like Yves-Marie Le Bourdonnec or Hugo Desnoyer, plus a smattering of tantalizing culinary snobberies like moutarde de Meaux or Ogleshield cheese, and the smart art of grilling.

So the menu at The Beef Club offers a rather wilting and warning boilerplate of things that are likely to become ubiquitous in Paris, and what bothers me most about this is that they’re not French. I’m very far from being a gastronomic protectionist, but I honestly don’t understand why the beef served at The Beef Club comes from farmer Tim Wilson’s farm in Yorkshire (yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s grass-fed and the breeds are different from what you find in France, but so what–give me Bazas beef or Charolais or Blonde d’Aquitaine any day), but most of all I just don’t get this completely misbegotten and off-kilter version of a New York City steakhouse cross-bred with some wispy English version of same  and then lightly extruded through a French sensibility. Paris already has several superb steak restaurants, like Le Severo, so why do we need the Peter Luger modeled, super market-researched The Beef Club when what we’re really short of in the City of Light these days are good French bistros?

On the basis of the crowd there the other night–lots of younger affluent but fashionably bedraggled Parisians who checked their iPhones and Blackberries constantly through dinners with which they mostly drank Coca-Cola Light, I am light years away from being part of the target demographic. Still, I might have liked this place if the food had been better than average and the service half-decent. Since starters were expensive and neither original nor very appealing–Caesar salad, Scotch Egg with salad, and grilled rabbit livers, among others, we went directly to the main courses.

   I had a very sorry 23 Euro “Beef Burger” (as the Brits call hamburgers, a puzzling but precious little beat of verbal snobbery), a tasteless and rather overcooked burger on a stale roll that exhibited almost none of the promised garnishes of “bacon, grilled onions, lettuce, pickles, red leicester, ogleshield and sauce maison au whisky” and a side of ho-hum frites cooked in duck fat. The others had steaks, which were good, but in no way memorable, and we drank the cheapest red on the wine list, a Gigondas at 29 Euros.

To be fair, service was doubtless off its game because the restaurant had been reconfigured to accomodate two large tables of French food bloggers, but the amateurish and absent-minded behavior of everyone who waited on us drove Michael and Dorie right up the wall. We glanced at the menu for dessert–cheesecake, bien sur; chocolate mousse with crushed pecans and salted caramel sauce; or a fruit salad on a bed of passionfruit mousse, and decided to pass.

“I hate this restaurant,” the normally sugar-sprinkled Dorie exclaimed while we were waiting for the bill, which a waitress finally deposited on the table with an, “Et voila!”

With an an average meal running at least 60 Euros a head at The Beef Club, I couldn’t help but comparing this place to La Rotonde, where I’d had dinner a few nights before with Bruno. There, in a grand old dining room with a decor recalling the first-class dining carriages of another era–brass coat rails and fringed silk-shaded lamps, it was a pleasure to sink into an atmosphere so profoundly Parisian. To be sure, tourists fill the glassed in terrace of this historic Montparnasse brasserie, but the low-lit booths in back are still the haunt of a cross-section of Gallic captains of industry and Left Bank power brokers, and the impeccably calibrated service–polite, alert, vaguely deferential and exquisitely wry, couldn’t possibly be more old school French, which meant that I just lapped it up.

I’d hadn’t been to La Rotonde in at least twenty years, and so had almost no memory of the food whatsoever. And truth be told, I wasn’t expecting much, because I never expect much from Paris brasseries anymore. So what were we doing here Bruno was craving oysters, I was hungry for meat, it was late, and we’d just been to a gallery show of a friend’s photographs around the corner. So Bruno went with the 39 Euro menu, which brought him six Quiberon oysters, sea bass in preserved-lemon sauce on a bed of wild rice and one of the best millefeuilles I’ve had in Paris for a very longtime.

I went with some oysters, too, and then had an outstanding steak tartare made with beef from butcher Hugo Desnoyer and so generously served I almost couldn’t finish it. The tartare came with beautiful little mesclun salad and freshly made frites, and even though the ever dieting Bruno wasn’t drinking that night in penance for a lot of Sagrantino recently consumed in Umbria, I was able to make myself happy with a little 25 cl carafe of white Macon to start, and then the same measure of a good inky Colombo cotes du Rhone before I forced Bruno to share his millefeuille with me.

You won’t get to eyeball the millefeuille, because our pretty blonde waitress knowingly and neatly divided it in half before she served us, and it looked so good that I immediately devoured my half before thinking to record it for posterity. If the menu at La Rotonde name dropped a bit–the Saint Marcellin was from the cranky La Mere Richard in Lyon, sorbets from Berthillon, veal chop and a few other tasty morsels from Hugo Desnoyer, what I quickly understood was that the quality of this restaurant is so supervailing you really don’t even need these hang tags. I can’t remember the last time the little playing-card squares of rye bread served with an order of oysters were actually good–they’re invariably stale and taste like baked dust, but here the bread was delicious. So the next time I’m hankering after a meaty comfort-food feed, I’ll give a definite miss to all of the new ‘Anglo-Saxon’ restaurants in Paris, and head for La Rotonde, where I’ll order the 39 Euro menu, and have the following meal.

1) Terrine du moment de Gilles Vérot

2) Gigot d’Agneau de Lozère (Hugo Desnoyer) rôti aux herbes, jus et garniture

3) Baba au vieux rhum ambré

I’m really looking forward to it, too.

The Beef Club, 58 rue Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1st, Tel. 09-52-52-89-34. Metro: Les Halles, Louvre-Rivoli. Dinner only, Tuesday to Saturday. Average 60 Euros.

La Rotonde, 105 boulevard Montparnasse, 6th, Tel. 01-43-26-48-26. Metro: Vavin. Open daily. Prix-fixe menu 39 Euros. Average a la carte 50 Euros.

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Le Procope

Having written about Paris restaurants for many years, I’ve learned that there’s nothing more unwelcome than the relentless expert. To wit, if many friends seek me out for restaurant advice, others are less passionate at the table than I am and are more interested in just having a good time. So when I sense this to be the case, I leave my expert’s hat on the hook at home, and head off to dinner for the pleasure of good conversation more than anything else. Sometimes it’s actually a real treat to let someone else chose where we’re going to eat anyway, and sometimes it’s oddly useful for me to end up in a place that it would never have occurred to me to set foot in either, a case in point being Le Procope, the storied restaurant a few steps from the Odeon on the Left Bank.

I wound up in this place, which claims to be one of the oldest restaurants in Paris dating to 1686 when a Sicilian named Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli opened a cafe here, because an old room-mate from New York was in town with his two teenaged kids and was staying nearby. He told me that he’d made a reservation for dinner, because he was sure that I tire of doing same and he wanted his sons to get a taste of French history over what would hopefully be a good meal. I mumbled something about not having been there in many, many years, sort of vaguely hoping he’d get the hint, but let it drop when he didn’t.

One way or another, it was great to see him again and to meet his boys, really good kids from Providence, Rhode Island who were winsomely wide-eyed during their first trip to Paris. Brad’s done quite well since we used to make casseroles from the cocktail sausages I’d purloined from book-launch parties I’d been invited to as a lowly editorial assistant at a big publishing company in New York–we were both broke all of the time in those days, and generously treated us to a nice bottle of Champagne to start the evening. Suffice it to say, that the the company and these bubbles were the highlight of the evening, and that I found myself cringing all through the meal at the thought this these three nice men would go away thinking that this was Parisian food.

My oysters were milky and carelessly shucked, my trout was mushy and had an odd metalic taste, everything was grimly overpriced, and the service conveyed an almost oddly fascinating message of bored disdain. I didn’t ask the Rhode Islanders about their food, but they volunteered that it was “okay,’ which is a polite American way of saying not very good.

Oddly enough, part of our conversation during dinner turned to what Brad, a marketing man, calls ‘Zombie’ brands, or brands that live off of their names after having long since relinquished the quality or distinction that made them well-known. We agreed that L.L. Bean, the Maine sporting goods and sportswear company, is a sorry example of same. Both of us grew up respecting the no-nonsense, profoundly American quality of the goods they sold, most of which were once made in factories in Maine. Now a quick flip through an L.L. Bean catalogue reveals that almost everything they sell, including their famous moccasins and other shoes, is made overseas. It’s a shame, too, because so many of their designs were iconic Americana, and it always felt good to order from this catalogue in the past, knowing that their well-crafted and fairly priced goods were providing a livelihood for someone. Sadly, my most recent experiences with L.L. Bean have put me off the company completely.

Walking home after dinner, I veered between a deep pleasure at having seen an old friend and the feeling of having been well and truly had, for we had eaten in a ‘Zombie’ restaurant, or a place where there’s almost no pride or passion in the kitchen but which is instead content just to knowingly coast along serving tourists who’ll never come back. Unfortunately, Paris has a fair number of Zombie restaurants, notably La Coupole, Mollard, Le Petit Zinc, and Brasserie Flo, among others. Unfortunately the Zombies survive due to out of date guidebooks, good locations, and cozy relationships with nearby hotels. Whenever I can, I call out a Zombie, because I find it heart-breaking that people should waste a meal and hard-earned money in these places, so please do everyone a favor and call out egregious Zombies of your own experience.

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Still, I found myself musing over the fact that the first thing any restaurant should do is offer you a warm welcome and assure that you’re comfortably seated before your meal begins, but for reasons that escape me, they’re a lot of new and very popular restaurants in Paris these days where one feels as though one’s presence is an imposition of some sort. To wit, the bluff attitude you experience when you arrives says ‘we’re hot, we’re hip, you’re lucky to be here’. For my part, I wilt as soon as I detect this posture, because the most essential motivation of any chef and his team has to be a desire to offer people pleasure and the decision to have a meal in a restaurant is a profoundly optional choice.

Then Judy arrived, and as we studied the menu, I knew she wouldn’t be happy about the prices–there was a two-course 43 Euro menu, a 53 Euro menu–two courses and cheese or dessert, and a 63 Euro four course menu. Many of the dishes were rather mysterious sounding but it didn’t occur to the waitress or the restaurant manager to explain them, so we had a lot of questions when the latter came to take our order. Responses were terse, and a request for a carafe of water was met with exasperation, since we’d already been asked several times if we wanted mineral water, which we didn’t.

So we ordered and chatted about the ridiculousness of the San Pellegrino restaurant awards, an annual rating of the world’s 100 best restaurants that has produced risible results year in and year out. Le Figaro’s fearsome food critic Francois Simon wrote a spot-on post about same the other day, and Judy had a good laugh when I showed her the list of the “World’s Best Restaurants.” Among other truly ludicrous results, it seemed nuts that London’s Hibiscus should have ranked higher than Restaurant Alain Ducasse au Plaza Athenee. Perhaps what’s most surprising about these rankings, however, is the attention they receive.

Then our amuse bouches arrived, and as best we could fathom, these identical dishes were comprised of a small piece of barbecued eel on a bed of wilted bean sprouts and cabbage in a bright red sauce that was described as a reduction of red wine, but had been sweetened with something, probably Mirin. Our bouches were not amused, but our first courses did offer a chuckle when they arrived.

Scallops with primitive radio transmiter  Judy’s pair of seared scallops sat on two little beds of anonymous sweet baby-food-like puree and were accompanied by a small salad of purslane and a ball of sorbet in a bamboo holder with two strands of toasted soba topped with a tangle of purslane, an object that resembled some sort of primitive radio transmitter. My tataki of salmon proved a better choice, although it was rather monastic–a slab of lightly griddled salmon garnished with a generally appealing assortment of baby vegetables, including an asparagus spear, several Jerusalem artichokes, a baby carrot, a radish, a green onion, several fronds and that dead giveaway of a young chef trying too hard, a starchy purple potato.

Salmon tataki   If my salmon was pretty to look at, generously served, and intelligently sourced, it was also decidedly ascetic. I had chosen this restaurant because I’d liked the cooking of chef Jacky Ribault when he cooked at Shozan in the 8th. Ribault has an impressive resume, too, having cooked at Taillevent, Pierre Gagnaire, Arpege and with Pierre Herme, so I was expecting some really interesting food. Neither of these dishes delivered, but to be fair, I’m not a great fan of sorbets as a garnish and my palate prefers umami and salt to anything sweet in the context of savory food.

Main courses were peculiar as well. Judy’s small pieces of poached sea bass were topped with strawberries, an idea that pleased neither of us, and came in a small white pond of timid tasting liquid at the bottom of which was a very good puree of fresh peas.

Sea bass with strawberries–why? My lamb was perfectly cooked rare, tender and flavorful but unappealingly slathered with an unpleasant green paste, tinted by Matcha tea, but not tasting of same, and the garnish was identical to my first course. An orange sauce added some color to the black plate but had no discernible flavor.

Lamb with legumes bis  Since the service seemed to grow tetchier as the evening progressed, and it was a beautiful warm night, we decided to stop here and head for a sidewalk terrace on which to enjoy a coffee. Cheerfully received at the nearby (and good) Vache Acrobate, it was a relief to get a breathe of fresh air, and to have escaped from the precious and slightly hostile atmosphere of Qui Plume la Lune. I don’t know who plumes (plucks) the moon, but I do know who plucked us, and I couldn’t help but contrasting this disappointing meal with a delicious dinner I’d had on Wednesday at La Regalade Saint Honore, which I reviewed here last Spring. We were eight at this dinner, and aside from an imprecision here and there–David’s cabillaud demi-sel was too salty, the food was delicious and the prix-fixe menu at 33 Euros remains one of the best buys in Paris, especially when you can get at dishes like scallops with Parmesan and tiny croutons, black rice with shrimp and garlic chips, and Ospital pork belly with lentils. So again, bravo to chef Bruno Doucet!

Scallops with Parmesan at La Regalade Saint Honore

Qui Plume la Lune, 50 rue Amelot, 11th, Tel. 01-48-07-45-48. Metro: Sebastien-Froissart. Open Tuesday-Saturday. Closed Sunday and Monday. Prix-fixe menus at 43 and 53 Euros, lunch menu 23 Euros.

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On the way to this pretty art-deco brasserie in front of La Bourse in the 2nd arrondissement, I couldn’t help but being a tiny bit anxious about our decision, however. Why Most Paris brasseries have become caught in a no-go inflection point between their ever rising prices and the mediocrity of their food. I always remember Le Vaudeville as being a rare exception to this sad rule, but would I be disappointed?

After three hours of airplane air, we asked to sit outside on the terrace, and the hostess who promptly set our table and brought our menus was one of the friendliest and most cheerful people I’ve come across in a Paris restaurant in a very long time. So we ordered a dozen Gillardeau oysters with a carafe of Reisling, and then two steak tartares with two glasses of Guigal red Cotes du Rhone, a typical brasserie meal if ever there were one. The waiter brought good rolls and foiled wrapped knobs of salted Isigny butter to the table with our white wine, and breaking bread, and smearing it with good French butter, made us suddenly happy to be home. The oysters, which arrived in a heart beat, were absolutely delicious–fleshy, sweet and brilliantly briny.

The steak tartare was good, too, although an infuriating change in the format of the Heinz Worcestershire sauce bottle–they’ve enlarged the opening to the size of penny in an obvious attempt to get people to use more of the stuff, meant that both of us flooded our otherwise very nicely seasoned chopped steak with too much of this famous brown sauce that’s wonderful in small doses but downright foul in larger ones (at least you’ve been warned). Not having had any red wine for ten days–if I found several Greek roses that were great drinking, their reds are just too potent in hot weather for me, meant that the Guigal Cotes du Rhone drank like velvet, too. To be sure, the accompanying frites were cooked on the premises but definitely not home-made–too bad, but our mesclun salads were impressively fresh and seasoned with a light hand.

At 130 Euros, this was hardly a cheap feed, but at least it delivered exactly what a good Parisian brasserie should, which is good quality food with fast friendly service and the extra fun of the sort of intriguingly odd-ball crowd you’ll always find sitting down to dinner at 10.30pm. Now if Le Vaudeville can do it, and do it well, why are almost all other Parisians brasseries so damned dismal (I wouldn’t go to La Coupole at gunpoint, for example, to say nothing of Le Boeuf sur le Toit, La Lorraine, Brasserie Flo, well, you get the point.)

Le Vaudeville, 29 Rue Vivienne, 2nd, Tel. 01-40-20-04-26. Metro: Bourse. Open daily, noon-3pm, 7pm-1am.

Prix-fixe menus 24.50 Euros, 31.50 Euros. A la carte 55 Euros.

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Le Cirque d’Hiver  I love the neighborhood in and around the rue Amelot, including the fanciful Cirque d’Hiver, a charming oval polygon of a building that was constructed in 1852 as a sop to restive working-class Parisians. The idea of the building, now mostly used for fashion shows and other special events, was that it would house circuses and other amusements in the pre-cinema middle of the 19th century, and this explains its wonderful Wedgewood style friezes and neo-classical grandeur.

I hadn’t seen the Cirque in a while, but it happens to be next door to the new Les Enfants de Paris, a peculiar new Franco-Brazilian restaurant that unfortunately shows off all the reasons that hybrid bar-restaurant-night-club places just never work, especially in Paris. Arriving for dinner, the sidewalk out front was packed with smoking singles, and if I’m more tolerant of tobacco smoke than most people, the restaurant itself had the sour stink of their fags, not a pleasant detail as one studied the menu. The waitress mentioned that this is the sister restaurant of the popular Les Enfants Terrible in New York City, but it had none of the buzz of its trans-Atlantic cousin and offered far less value for money.

Since I love Brazil and enjoy Brazilian food, I was sort of looking forward to dinner here, but unfortunately, aside from the well-made cocktails from an extensive and expensive list, a lot gets lost in translation. My Bouchées bresiliennes, deep-fried nuggets stuffed with chopped chicken, had a pasty consistency, and the dipping sauce in a shot glass filled with lots of whole coriander seeds was too timid to add much interest. Next, Bobo de camarão, or frozen prawns in a pumpkin colored soup of coconut milk devoid of much flavor and accompanied by dried out Basmati rice and a silly shot glass of coriander-flavored whipped cream.

Bobo de camarão avec son emulsion de coriandre et riz basmati

At 18.50 Euros, I’d have been much happier with a steak tartare at my corner cafe La Rotonde, and the only useful, if rather deflating, idea I took away from this meal is that Paris still lags very much behind such cities as New York and London when it comes to offering seriously interesting ethnic eating. Aside from some fine North African restaurants and a few good Asian places, Indian food in Paris is generally depressingly mediocre, Latin American cooking comes across only in the most Disney-esque of cliches, with local Mexican cooking being downright awful, and the African food in Brussels is times better than Paris. And the only explanation I could hazard for this paucity of good foreign restaurants is that if the Parisian palate is more adventurous today than it was when I moved here almost 25 years ago, the French are still very much less venturesome at the table when it comes to international cooking than Berliners, Amsterdamers, Londoners, New Yorkers and San Franciscans. Thinking back on a brilliant Kurdish meal I recently ate in Stockholm, I can only hope this may change, since an edgy chef like Korean-American David Chang probably still wouldn’t get much of a look in in Paris today.

Les Enfants de Paris, 116 rue Amelot, 11th, Tel. 01-47-00-70-74. Metro: Filles de Calvaire. Open 5.30pm-2am. Average a la carte 40 Euros.

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Studying the 28 Euro lunch menu, I dipped a soggy cucumber stick in a little pot of herbed creme fraiche, and quietly noted that it had no taste at all, a warning signal as it turned out, since the meal that followed was dishearteningly mediocre at best. I started with a dish that could have been wonderful–pot au feu vegetables with a coddled egg and a sharp mustard sauce, while the others went with gaspacho they judged disappointing, and marinated herring, which I found well cooked but underseasoned. Meanwhile, if the accompanying egg was perfectly cooked runny, my vegetables had almost no taste whatsoever. Next up, steamed salmon (bland), chicken (dry), and, for two of us, boeuf bourguignon, a dish I crave whatever the weather.

At its best, this brilliant standard bearer of French cooking is tender, redolent of wine and completely irresistible. Here, the sauce was decent but the beef was stringy and dried out, almost as though it had been cooked independently of the sauce, which even made me wonder if a) it hadn’t been assembled at the last minute, and b) if the sauce had been made on the premises.

I finished this lackluster meal with some Ossau-Iraty with black cherry jam, and had to send it back immediately, since the salad was a little clump of wilted, partially rotten leaves. When the plate returned, I ignored the new salad in favor of the cheese and found it completely tasteless. The others enjoyed their chocolate mousse, which was very good, but none of us would return to this restaurant before the kitchen starts to make a real effort in terms of the quality of both its produce and its cooking.

La Gauloise, 59 Avenue de la Motte-Picquet, 15th, Tel. 08-99-69-81-79. Metro: La Motte Picquet Grenelle. Lunch menus 22 and 28 Euros, Avg a la carte 45 Euros. Open daily.

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Yesterday, it was with a mixture of excitement and apprehension that I met friends at the newly opened and much anticipated Spring, chef Daniel Rose’s superb looking restaurant in the rue Bailleul. I’ve missed Rose’s cooking ever since he closed his little place in the rue de la Tour d’Auvergne near me in the 9th arrondissement, and have been following the birth of the new place with keen interest.

In the Metro on the way to lunch, however, I couldn’t help but hoping that the food would be as good, or even better, than I remembered it. Well, let me stop right here and say that you should pick up the phone and book here immediately: Spring, 6 rue Bailleul, 1st, (33) 1-45-96-05-72. springparis.blogspot.com. This place is going to be taken by storm and one of the best things about lunch yesterday was that I was able to make a dinner reservation in person for next week, which is when I’ll do a proper review.

Our lunch as privileged guinea pigs was sensational. Rose plans to build his lunch menu around bouillon with different garnishes (pigeon, grilled chicken, baby vegetables from Joel Thiebault), which you can then expand with a variety of small plates according to your appetite. As he explains, the bouillon is meant to be “restaurant,” or restorative, and also channel the fact that the original restaurants in Paris specialized in bouillon.

We started with melon with garlicky lomito (cured pork loin) and lime zest, a perfect summer palate teaser, and then ate smoked eel with gently pickled baby eggplant, flash grilled shrimp on a bed of baby fennel salad, trout with avocado slices and coriander flowers, and then the best bouillon I’ve ever had in my life–deep, ruddy, potent and profoundly soothing, with grilled chicken and tiny vegetables. Desserts were superb, too, including a brilliant preparation of raspberries in a light cool syrup of lemon verbena and white peaches, black cherries with fresh almonds (sublime combination), and a deconstructed lemon tart with chocolate shortbread crumbs. All told, it was damned good meal in a stunningly attractive space, and most of all, it was really fun, with a great soft soul soundtrack in the background, terrific wines–an Alsatian pinot noir (I was dubious about this one, but it was terrific) and an Austrian Gruner Vertliner, and the pleasure of watching the kitchen team work in their brand new open stainless steel kitchen.

A few weeks ago, Rose told me that he wanted to reboot Paris restaurants for the 21st century. Well, he has, and I can’t wait for dinner next Saturday night.

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Alas, aside from the very pleasant service, our meal went asunder the moment our first courses arrived–horribly overcooked ravioles de Royans (wonderful little ravioli from the Dauphine region stuffed with tangy cheese) in a completely unseasoned cream sauce and a sad looking bowl of vegetable soup with no garnish whatsoever.

Next, dried out confit de canard with an avalanche of baby potatoes, instead of the to-be-preferred pommes sardalais (made with duck fat and garlic), a decent but dull onglet de veau, and for me a very sad blanquette de veau. Blanquette de veau, veal stewed in lemony cream sauce with mushrooms, is one of the my favorite dishes, and this take was light years from anything I’d ever call by the same name–dry, stringy chunks of veal in a decent but underseasoned brown sauce with mushrooms and, oddly, carrots.

Pain perdu (French toast, which the French eat as a dessert instead of a breakfast meal) came with a thin almost tasteless caramel sauce, and ultimately the only redeeming things about this meal were the restaurant’s stunning interior, the nice service, good company and a nice bottle of Quincy.

Chez la Vieille, 37 rue de l’Arbre Sec, 1st, Tel. 01-42-60-15-78. Metro: Louvre-Rivoli. Avg 70 Euros.

Pharamond, 24 rue de la Grande Truanderie, 1st, Tel. 01-40-28-45-18. Metro: Etienne Marcel or Les Halles. Prix-fixe menu 28 Euros, lunch menu (two courses) 18 Euros, a la carte 50 Euros.

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