Prunier is back, and it’s better than ever. Most recently owned by the late Pierre Bergé, founder of the Yves Saint Laurent fashion house with the late designer of the same name, one of the most glamorous restaurants in the world has just reopened under new owners, the Swiss investment group Olma Luxury Holdings, with a new menu by Michelin three-star chef Yannick Alleno.

Laurie Ochoa, Ruth Reichl, Nancy Silverton and me

So when Laurie Ochoa, food editor of the LA Times; writer and editor Ruth Reichl (my old boss at the still lamented GOURMET), baking genius and restauranteur Nancy Silverton and I had one meal alone during the trip we led in Paris and Champagne in October (more on that here https://dinnerwithfriendsabroad.com/), I booked at Prunier, because I knew it would be a festive occasion and wanted to try Alleno’s new menu.

This supremely elegant seafood house and caviar counter just behind the Arc de Triomphe opened in 1924. As I told Laurie, Ruth and Nancy over glasses of Champagne as we began our meal, it was some sixty-three years later that I walked through its doors to meet Yves Saint Laurent, of all people, for lunch.

The reason for this painstakingly negotiated and carefully choreographed occasion with a charming public-relations woman in attendance was an interview I was doing of the designer for a London newspaper after I’d left my job as an editor in the office of Fairchild Publications, the fashion publisher that was once the unforgiving arbiter not only of hemlines and good taste in its garment-industry newspaper Women’s Wear Daily, but the cruel judge of the beau monde’s social cachet in the pages of its slick magazine W.

My English editor wanted something “a little racy and a bit naughty,” but I was wary of delivering these goods, since few people in the world were better protected legally in those days than the late designer. Still, it was an important story for me, and so I was anxious when I showed up for the appointment at the curiously early hour of 11am (“It’s so that Yves won’t be high or drunk yet,” speculated my shrewd friend, the late Christa Worthington).

When I arrived I was stunned by the beauty of the art-deco decor of this place and then dumbstruck and horrified to be ushered to a table a large silver bowl filled with crushed ice and a metal tin nestled in this icy mis en scene. It’s contents were glossy and black, so that even though I’d never eaten caviar before, I knew what it was, and I also knew that it was an extravagance to be personally presented with such a huge serving of this storied delicacy.

Yannick Alleno

Unlike Yannick Alleno, who could probably have finished the entire tin pictured above on his own, I’d never had caviar before and was squeamish about the idea of eating fish eggs.

“Really, Alec!!?#8221; Ruth said.

Yup, really. If I’ve always loved to eat, I arrived in Paris with a pathetically pinched and provincial palate par excellence. Most seafood was off limits, and game was too wild for me.  Thirty-six years later, however, I’ve become an avid omnivore, and so I couldn’t wait to tuck into some of the world’s best seafood at Prunier.

And the interview with Yves Saint Laurent While I busy tasting my first caviar, something I immediately fell head-over-heels in love with, the designer left the table to—I don’t know what, and never returned. So I sat there with the stricken PR woman for another 45 minutes eating caviar, oysters and smoked salmon, and then I went home to call London and explain that the interview had been aborted.

Coming out of the Metro, I stopped at the Felix Potin, a convenience store, in the rue de Babylone, to buy some milk, and going into the shop, I immediately recognized the man at the cash register who was buying a huge amount of cheap candy.

The cashier rang it all up, and spoke the total aloud. The designer stood there blushing and sort of dazed.

I guessed that he had no money on him, and told the cashier I’d pay for the candy. Then Saint Laurent looked at me and smiled sheepishly. “Merci, vous etes gentil,” he said. And then he looked at me again. “I’m very sorry. I’m very sorry,” he said, recognizing me. “I don’t feel well today. I’m very sad and I had nothing to say. My life is very difficult right now.”

A man in a dark suit came into the shop, glanced at the cash register receipt, handed me 200 Francs, and led the designer, who lived just across the street, away.

“I hope you at least enjoyed the caviar,” he said over his shoulder. I did indeed.

All of us started off with l’Oeuf Christian Dior, which is a signature dish on the new Prunier menu. It was a sleight of gastronomic elegance more than worthy of the late designer, too, since it came to the table as a perfectly coddled egg with a generous spoonful of caviar on its crown and a buttoniere of chive in a pool of caviar-speckled cream. Beautiful to behold, it was even better to eat, since following the waiter’s instructions that we dig down to the bottom of the bowl with each spoonful of egg, we discovered the feral genius of this dish, which was a  hidden aspic made with essence of jambon blanc (white ham). In effect, a whole ham had been gently sweated for hours on end and the juices it released had been captured and used to season the aspic. This contrast between the lush iodine-rich caviar and meaty aspic created a perfect and very luscious harmony when napped by the yolk of the egg.

Subsequent starters were superb as well, including the salmon-and-seaweed hand roll Nancy ordered, the langoustine carpaccio with caviar cream that seduced me, Laurie and Ruth.

I knew the minute I opened the menu and saw it that I’d have sole meunière, because it’s one of my favorite of all French dishes, and Laurie had it too, because she feels the same way. Here it was impeccably fresh, perfectly cooked, and beautifully garnished with melted butter, capers, a piece of lemon and a side of ethereal potato puree. Nancy had scallops with seaweed butter and a saffron sauce and Ruth ordered line-caught sea bass with a celery gelee and caviar. All of us were extremely happy with our meals.

None of us had been planning to have dessert until the pastry tray arrived. Assured that the figs were from the south of France and the raspberries from Alsace, we succumbed to these beautifully made tarts, and threw caution to the winds by accepting the suggestion of a glass of Champagne with dessert.

“I think Prunier just be the most beautiful restaurant in the world,” said Ruth And I think she just may be right. One way or another, it’s an excellent choice for that special meal you were planning to treat yourself to in Paris, and it’s also very romantic without making any effort to be so whatsoever.

Yes, it’s very expensive, too, but it’s worth every centime.

And if I may, I’d like to suggest that my gastronomic coming-of-age story MY PLACE AT THE TABLE: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris would be a wonderful holiday gift for food-lovers, Francophiles, and anyone who loves a good read.

16 Avenue Victor Hugo, 16th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-44-17-35-85, Open for lunch and dinner Tuesday-Saturday. Closed Sunday and Monday. Lunch menu 68 Euros, prix-fixe menus 125 Euros, 190 Euros; average a la carte 150 Euros. www.prunier.com

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Chef Tom Meyer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This year, the meals I’ve enjoyed most in France have been at Le Vivier, a charming, relaxed, reasonably priced and very good seafood restaurant in Le Grau-du-Roi, a busy beach resort that’s also France’s second-largest Mediterranean fishing port on the short shoreline of Le Gard. This French departement is west of the Rhone and bound on the south by the Mediterranean and the North by the Cevennes mountains, and it’s to this beautiful quiet green peaceful place that Bruno and I moved as soon as the arduous lockdown in Paris was lifted.

Heading south from Paris to our house in a little village a few miles west of Uzes, the highway was empty, and we exulted in the enormity of the toast-colored wheat fields, vineyard-covered hillsides and sweeping forests, which came as both a relief and a shock after having lived in 140 square meters (1500 square feet) for ten weeks. During le confinement, as it was called in France, I only left the apartment two or three times to do those errands that required my actual physical presence. Bruno would duck out to buy bread, but otherwise we bought almost all of our food and wine online, and our apartment became our tiny continent, with every room becoming a different country with a different mood and personality, and the kitchen, as always, being the heart of our home and the place we met twice a day for lunch and dinner and to do a huge amount of cooking.

At the beach in Le Gra-du-Roi in Le Gard

We cooked boeuf bourguignon, we cooked pot au feu, we roasted chickens, we made Marcella Hazan’s ragu for pasta and lasagna, we indulged ourselves in chef Jacques Maximin’s sea bass recipe, which is in my book HUNGRY FOR FRANCE, with a fish delivered directly to us by a fisherman in Brittany using Chronopost Fresh, France’s brilliant cold-chain-guaranteed overnight shipping service. We made mapo tofu, we made red bean curry. My main recreation was online food shopping and recipe hunting during the longest time that’s ever passed since I moved to Paris in 1986 when I didn’t go to a single restaurant. Every day, I worked as hard on our meals as I did on any of the articles I was writing, because the pleasure of good food had never been more important to me. With our worlds turned upside down, we needed nourishment, comfort and pleasure.

Blauzac

First day in the new kitchen

On the way south, we ate a picnic we’d bought at Marks & Spencer–BLTs, shrimp-and-mayonnaise sandwiches, salads, and chips, in a highway rest stop and watched a farmer fitting a huge block of salt into a stand for the brown-and-white cows who were eagerly watching him through a scrim of trees. And finally we reached our house in Blauzac, which had been in renovation for the past eight months at the end of an eight-hour drive, cleaned up the beautiful new kitchen and made some pasta, put some sheets on the bed and fell asleep with all the windows wide open so that we could enjoy the sweet smells of the earth and the fig tree in the garden breathing during the night.

The market in Uzes

The next morning, we went to shop in the market in Uzes, and it was while browsing the stalls here that  I realized  how much my corona virus quarantine had changed my tastes in food. Not going to restaurants for almost three months, I emerged wanting food that was simpler, more produce-centered and less complicated. “The greatest dishes are very simple,” said the great French chef Auguste Escoffier, and cut off from restaurant cooking in Paris, I was reminded that this is so true.

When I started going to restaurants again, I discovered even more just how much my tastes had changed. The meals that I enjoyed the most were the ones that sublimated good seasonal produce with an artful simplicity. This is what I found the first time I went to dinner at Le Vivier in Le Grau-du-Roi, which wears twin caps as a beach resort and fishing port. The charming owner suggested some oysters from the Camargue, which she served with a condiment I’d never heard of before, oyster pepper. To be honest, I was skeptical, but a tiny pinch of this blend of different peppers made the brute briny flavors of the firm fleshy oysters incredibly suave.

My main course was excellent, too. Freshly landed squid cooked on a plancha until they were just tender and garnished with summer vegetables, including radishes, broad beans, corn, carrots, zucchini and potatoes composed this succulent and beautifully cooked feast, a meal I enjoyed enormously.

So a few weeks later when our plan to drive down to a little beach town in Catalonia was very sadly scrubbed due to a recurrence of corona virus there, we canceled our trip and drove down to the sea coast an hour from our house in Blauzac for a few days in a very simple hotel. If every summer, I yearn to dunk myself in the sea, this year I craved this primal tonic even more than ever. I’d told Bruno about Le Vivier after I’d eaten there alone on my first visit, so we went back for dinner together.

After scarfing down some oysters, I had lieu jaune (yellow pollack) in a perfectly prepared shallot-rich beurre blanc, and Bruno tried the rouille Graulenne, a local specialty made with fresh octopus, potatoes and aioli. Both dishes were fresh, flavorful, seasonal and made with the poignant precision of a chef who is proud of their work and eager to please. Should you find yourself in this part of France this summer or in the future, this is a very good restaurant. It’s also very popular, so reservations are imperative.

After dinner, we went for a walk along the canal that connects the fishing port to the Mediterranean to see the historic lighthouse at its entrance, and somehow the pennant of light sweeping over the sea in the darkness made me feel hopeful. With kindness and common sense and science, we’ll get through this epidemic. Good wholesome simple food will help us, too, and we all have to support the chefs and restaurants wherever we live in any way we possibly can right now.

Living in France, I’m aware that many people reading this post may be in places where restaurants are still closed for public-health reasons. I send them my deepest sympathies and wish them to stay safe and well. The pandemic is not over yet in France either, but the French government has done a generally excellent job of responding to it, and people are generally compliant with the government order to wear a mask in enclosed public places. It’s such a very small and easy gesture to make, both to keep yourself safe and respect the health of other people, too.

The view from Blauzac

I’ll end this post with what I hope you’ll consider to be some very good news, too. Shacked up in the south of France, I finally finished my next book, MY PLACE AT THE TABLE: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris, which will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Spring 2021. It’s a coming of age story about how a kid from the suburbs of Connecticut ends up becoming a food writer in Paris. It’s also a tale of luck, love, dreams, hard work, perseverance, good and bad judgment, occasional bouts of insanity and the fact that I’ve loved the language of food as much as I love words on a page as far back as I can possibly remember. I hope you’ll enjoy it, and I want to thank my wonderful editor Rux Martin and the indescribably wonderful and patient Bruno for the safe passage of my story.

Le Vivier, 7 Rue du Commandant Marceau, Le Grau-du-Roi, Tel. (33) 04-66-53-23-36. Open Wed-Sun for lunch and dinner, Closed on Mondays, Tuesday dinner only, Prix-fixe 24 Euros, Average a la carte 45 Euros, www.levivier-restaurant.fr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A L’Epi d’Or, a solid old neighbourhood bistro that opened on the edge of Les Halles in 1880, has mercifully been spared the ignominious fate of too many traditional Paris bistros in an ever gentrifying city: becoming a clothing store. Sepia-tinted by decades of Gauloises and Gitanes, this sturdy old place with a cracked tile floor, a big zinc bar, and globe lamps overhead has instead become the object of the wisely gentle, puckishly reverent and shrewdly restrained culinary intentions of chef Jean-François Piège.

“I didn’t want to reinvent A L’Epi d’Or, I just wanted to make it better,” says Piège, who lives nearby and has a deep affection for this kind of historic and profoundly Parisian address. “I want the tastes of honest old-fashioned French cooking to survive as everyday food, not as part of some expensive nostalgic special-occasion meal,” adds the chef, who has two Michelin stars at his Le Grand Restaurant, and also owns and runs three other restaurants, Clover Grill, Clover Green, and La Poule au Pot.

This remark struck a real chord with me, because in some Paris neighbourhoods today, it’s easier to find a bowl of ramen or an Italian meal than it is French bistro cooking. For a variety of reasons, this kitchen, the bedrock level of Gallic gastronomy, is struggling, and I’m not talking about bistronomie, a.k.a. modern bistro cooking, but workaday traditional bistro cooking like the dishes you find on the menu at A L’Epi d’Or. To wit, dining out in Paris has changed, and changed a lot, since thirty years ago, when eating anything other than French food in Paris was very much the exception to the rule. Sure, we’d go for the occasional Chinese, Vietnamese or North African meal, but our daily food bread and everything else that came to the table with it was French in those days.

Now if you consider the modern urban gastronomic cannon, or those same popular dishes that are served in major cities all over the world–sushi, ramen, cheeseburgers, tacos, burritos, pizza, pasta, tapas, ceviche, etc., almost none of them are French with the possible exception of quiche. Traditional French cooking based on braising and the slow, careful construction and concentration of flavours has become an outlier, because it’s time consuming behind the kitchen door and also because it has wrongly acquired a reputation for being heavy, even ‘unhealthy.’ The reality is that it’s nowhere near as time consuming as a global recipe culture driven by semi-hysterical promises of fast and easy cooking might lead you to believe, and it’s also not only deeply nourishing but profoundly satisfying.

This is what I thought when I tucked into my first course of legumes pot au feu, or leeks, carrots, turnips, celeriac, parsnip and potato that had been cooked in beef bouillon as part of a pot au feu. The succulent vegetables had a light gloss of bovine richness that didn’t mask their natural tastes or textures, and the pool of sauce they came in–bouillon with a few drops of olive oil, some chopped parsley and a superbly redolent gently fruity red wine vinegar was a supremely Gallic garnish. What made this dish work so well, though, was the resonance of the vinegar, which had a percussive freshness that was fascinating. When I chatted with Piège later in the meal, he explained that the red-wine vinegar was homemade, with a mother of vinegar that was constantly fed with leftover red wine. “It’s the youth of the vinegar that makes it mellow and so good with cooked vegetables,” he explained.

To be sure, my first memory of A L’Epi d’Or had nothing to do with what I ate here. Just a couple of months after I’d arrived in Paris to work as an editor in the offices of fashion publisher Fairchild Publications, I was invited for lunch on a rainy winter day by a famous Paris fashion designer. I’d never met him before, but when I stepped through the door of this restaurant, I was certain it couldn’t possible be the man with butterscotch coloured hair and a black leather bomber jacket over a black muscle T shirt who was the only other customer in the dining room. He nodded at me, and I nodded back and then I spoke to the older woman behind the bar, giving her the name of the designer. With a pursed smile, she nodded towards the man in the bomber jacket.

He was drinking Champagne when I sat down with him, and we chatted briefly–he’d just returned from Tokyo that morning, which is why less than a minute later he almost fell asleep while reading the menu. Then he told me he’d was going to the men’s room, so I pulled back the table to let him out, and glancing at him walking to the back of the room, I was astonished to see that the back of his black leather pants was cut out to display his bare ass. Seeing me see him, the woman behind the bar barked with laughter.

“Et dis donc, Monsieur!” (Say there, Mister!), she said and guffawed. “Il n’est pas tres subtile celui!” (He’s not very subtle, that one), she cackled again, and then he returned.

“I just needed a little powder to perk myself up,” he said when he sat down. I nodded vaguely. “Would you like some#8221; he asked, offering me some cocaine.

“No, thanks, I’m happy with my marinated leeks,” I replied, and he rolled his eyes. “And you go to church every Sunday, too#8221; he snorted.

“No,” I said. “I’m Protestant,” as if that explained anything.

“Oh, God, you’re a Protestant, too. They have no imagination, which makes them terrible sex. Most Catholics are a little kinky, even if they don’t know it.” And so it went. But I liked the unpretentious bistro food, the room, and the crowd.

The motley crowd of traveling salesman, market workers, night-club goers and the occasional pair of convivial and immaculately made up streetwalkers was always one of the best things about A L’Epi d’Or, and on this first experience of its resurrection, it was too soon to guess at the eventual sociological composition of the restaurant’s new clientele except to say that the sex business has moved online in Paris and traditional bistro cooking seems to be developing an eager new following among the Bobo (bohemian bourgeois) couples who have colonized the ancient side streets of Les Halles.

I guess Bruno and I will just have to fit into the evolving mix here as a middle-aged married gay couple, too, since nothing is likely to keep us away from one of the best pâté en croûte in Paris, which was my lucky spouse’s starter. It’s worth noting that this dish is always available, too, as one of “Les Incontournables,” or those dishes that form the short permanent menu. This list also includes the excellent looking steak tartare with a beautiful dimple filled with mayonnaise of the woman sitting next to us, foie gras terrine, Croque Madame, slow-roasted lamb, breaded fish filet, rice pudding, orange-flower ice cream, and a cheese plate. Otherwise, a different starter, main and dessert are served daily, almost boarding house style.

Bruno had the lamb so tender it could be eaten with a spoon (as described on the menu), and it was slow-braised, wonderfully crusted and came with fennel, carrots and potato puree in another simple sauce of cooking juices gently sharpened into a vinaigrette. My roast veal with potato puree was the kind of proud humble Gallic comfort food that will always be my gastronomic true north, because this dish, and Bruno’s, were things I could very happily eat every  week.

And even after all of this food, we still had dessert, because we wanted it, this heavy glass bowl of fluffy chocolate mousse that we shared, and wanting it was reason enough. Next time, though, I’ll try and get here on a Tuesday, because I love beet salad with haddock, hachis Parmentier–French shepherd’s pie, and nougat glace, one of my all-time favourite desserts and another once common dish that has become a rarely seen retro treat.

If there’s any way of saving the surviving everyday bistros of Paris, chef Jean-François Piège has found it at A L’Epi d’Or, which is now a better restaurant than it’s ever been.

A L’Epi d’Or, 25 rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1st Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-42-36-38-12, Metro: Louvre-Rivoli or Palais-Royal-Musee du Louvre. www.alepidorparis.com Closed Saturday and Sunday, open Monday-Friday for lunch and dinner. Prix-fixe menus: 36 Euros for three courses, 27 Euros for two courses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mieux, which means ‘better’ in English, is a wonderful name for a restaurant, because it declares gastronomic ambition but with a certain appealing humility. This charmingly decorated and cleverly designed bistro just five minutes from my front door in the rue Saint Lazare delivers better than just better, though, since the contemporary French bistro cooking is delicious, and the service is charming. Restaurant Mieux also has a very good wine list.

The bistro, which opened last May, is the project Baptiste Bayle, Giulian Maiuri and Thomas Bonnel, three nice guys who did all of the work of renovating this space themselves, including pouring a cement bar, buffing the Fifties tiles they discovered when they pulled up the floorboards, combing flea-markets for the great-looking bric-a-brac and chairs from a French school that gives this place its homey atmosphere and renovating a secondhand Spaziale coffee machine, which is now used to make great java with Brûlerie de Belleville beans. Guilian, who formerly worked at the Maison Breguet and the Trianon Palace in Versailles, heads up the kitchen.

I first noticed Restaurant Mieux on the way home from doing some errands in the rue des Martyrs, and immediately liking its look and menu, I went in and booked for dinner for me and Bruno that same night. And I marveled at how gastronomic my own neighborhood has become, and in just the terms I like best—intelligently creative contemporary French bistro cooking that highlights carefully sourced seasonal produce and spins on an axis of sincerity and generosity.

Little did I know that the 9th Arrondissement would emerge as one of the best restaurant neighborhoods in Paris when we crossed the Seine from the tiny apartment where we once lived on the rue du Bac and bought our first, and then second, apartments in this arrondissement. But the 9th has turned into a sweet-spot location for restauranteurs, because the offices in this central Paris district assure a busy lunch crowd and then the food-loving locals and tourists from the growing numbers of hotels in this charming part of the city take over in the evening.

Arriving, the welcome was warm and the service immediately warm and alert but relaxed, which explained why the dining room was filled with such a cross-section of residents of the district once known as La Nouvelle Athenes, because so much of its architecture was originally inspired by ancient Greece when this part of the city was first developed from 1819 onwards. During the 19th century, this quartier was popular with artists, writers, musicians and actors, including George Sand, Eugène Delacroix, Alexandre Dumas, Frederic Chopin, Victor Hugo, Théodore Géricault, Pissarro, Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin. It was also known for being a neighborhood of kept women.

This arty liberal tradition lives on in the 9th, which is still home to many writers, photographers, artists, musicians and other creatives, and it’s that increasingly endangered but wonderful thing—a peaceful and unselfconscious historic neighborhood in the heart of a great western city. Gentrification is making it more affluent, but the social tone happily remains unchanged.

The menu here runs to three starters, three main courses and three desserts, sometimes more, which change regularly to reflect the kitchen’s desire to cook spontaneously. “The produce writes the menu here,” our waiter told us when he came to take our order.

On the first night of the year when there was an early autumnal chill in the air and after a summer of salads, I started with the homemade terrine of chicken livers and pork, with the livers adding an earthy unctuousness and the pork some carnal resonance and bite, which came with pickled onions and carrots. Bruno’s bonheur was the veal tartare made with marscapone and seasoned with crushed roasted cashews—an excellent idea, chervil and chives. And because we’d both been curious about the other starter that night, the waiter thoughtfully brought us a little tasting plate of the tomatoes with watermelon, cucumbers, feta, mint and Kalamata olives, a wonderfully refreshing dish that tasted like a happy souvenir of a summer vacation in the Greek Islands.

Our main courses were outstanding, too. Bruno’s free-range pork chop from the Auvergne was succulent and garnished with coarse ground polenta and roasted carrots from the Ile de France and a wonderful saute of wild mushrooms. I was tempted by the risotto with sage butter, zucchini and smoked ricotta, but  I’ve lived in Paris for too long to ever to order this dish in a restaurant I don’t know, because the rice is unfailingly overcooked. So I ordered with maigre (croaker fish) with potatoes, cabbage and clams in seaweed butter, and it was so skillfully cooked that I wouldn’t hesitate to trust the kitchen with rice the next time I come here. Portions were so generous that all we could manage at the end of the meal was a shared portion of stewed juicy ruby-red peche de vigne—the world’s best peaches, with lemon-verbena ice cream and hazelnut crumble. An excellent selection of cheeses was also available.

Restaurant Mieux is a place where you can easily become a regular, and it’s a table I’d happily go on my own, since they have a few spots at the bar for solo diners who’d rather sit on a stool than at a table. It also has several large tables that accommodate groups of six, eight or twelve, which makes it a great choice for an easygoing night out over a very good meal with a group of friends. It’s solidly good but unpretentious restaurants like Mieux which assure Paris’s enduringly superlative gastronomic credentials.

21 rue de Saint-Lazare, Paris, 9th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01- 71-32-46-73.
Métro: Trinite or Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. Open Monday noon-6pm, Tuesday-Friday noon to 1am, Saturday 6pm-1am. Sunday noon-6pm. Lunch menus 21€ and 26€, average a la carte for dinner 40€. www.mieux-restaurant.com

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