Chefs Pierre Toitou and Cyril Pham

The new Drum Cafe at the LUMA Foundation in Arles is an excellent example of how good a museum restaurant can actually be when someone cares about serving good food instead of the usual bland industrial food-service catering too often found at museums. The food at the Drum Cafe is so delectable that it’s very much coming here for a meal even if you’re not planning to the visit this new contemporary arts complex, which was recently created from a decommissioned rail yard and train-carriage maintenance workshops.

My curiosity about this place was first aroused very early in the morning a few weeks ago on a train from Nimes to the airport in Marseilles when I looked up from my book just long enough to catch a sudden thrilling glimpse of the new Frank Gehry designed metal-clad tower that has become the emblem of the LUMA Foundation. It came and went so unexpectedly that my reaction was all instinct–backdropped by the morning sky, the tower was intriguingly strange and oddly beautiful.

I’ve been reading about LUMA ever since its creation was announced  by Maja Hoffmann, the philanthropist heiress to the Hoffmann Laroche pharmaceutical fortune, but hadn’t yet found the time to go during a year made so busy by the publication of my new book MY PLACE AT THE TABLE: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris (Mariner Books). Then I learned that Pierre Toitou, whose cooking I’d loved when he was at Vivant and Deviant in Paris, had been cast with Cyril Pham as the first chefs for the museum’s new restaurant, the Drum Cafe.

So on a beautiful Indian summer Saturday in Provence, Bruno and I headed south for lunch and a visit to the museum.

The restaurant is located on the ground floor (rez-de-chaussée) of the Frank Gehry tower on the grounds of the LUMA Foundation. Coming through the door, there’s a bar and a few tables in a dark foyer, while the main dining room has a single large horse-shoe shaped table at the bottom of an atrium lined with book shelves and decorated by polychrome pipes overhead that reminded me of the Centre Pompidou; all of these years later, this architectural feint is still fresh and fun, too.

Seated, we immediately ordered two glasses of a delicious organic white wine made in the Camargue from Viognier grapes and a plate of panisses with cured anchovies and fried sage leaves to nibble on while we studied the menu. Ever since I first ate a panisse (a chickpea flour bar) in Nice as a backpacking student a very longtime ago, I’ve never been able to get enough of them, and the ones served here were very good.

The menu was fascinating, too, since Toitou is such a gastronomic vagabond. As I over-heard him explaining to a neighboring quartet, “My father (Jean Toitou, founder of the Paris fashion label A.P.C.) is a Tunisian Jew and my mother is Russian and Norman. Growing up we ate a lot of Japanese food at home, because my parents love it and traveled to Japan often, but we never had French dishes like boeuf bourguignon, because no one knew how to cook them.” Toitou has cooked everywhere from the Hotel Plaza Athenee (Alain Ducasse) in Paris to London (Sketch by Pierre Gagnaire) to Uruguay. He’s also previously done a Pop-up in Arles with Arrmand Arnal of La Chassagnette and is an avid traveler.

All of this comes through in a brief but intriguing menu of mostly Mediterranean dishes that are brilliantly jolted by techniques and ingredients from other cultures. These small-plate dishes that are meant to be shared are sort of exactly what many people want to eat right now as we tentatively emerge from the COVID pandemic. To wit, this food is fresh, seasonal, health, straight forward and booming with umami, or just the cure for people who’ve become bored by the limits of their own skills in the kitchen after cooking non-stop for months.

Finally, we settled on an oxtail terrine (presse de boeuf) with black olive mayonnaise and a salad of fresh herbs and mushrooms in Satay sauce with chili oil and lime leaves. If the rich and brilliantly succulent terrine was profoundly French in the best traditions of rock of ages bistro cooking, the mushrooms registered like some sort of ecstatically good street-food dish you might come across in Bali. One way or another, both plates were beautifully made, generously served and deeply satisfying.

It was pretty obvious that word-of-mouth was working, too, since many of the other people having lunch around us were curious and gastronomically adventurous locals, or the sort of people who support inventive and creative chefs in smaller towns and rural settings all over France.

As depicted above, our main courses might look a bit ferocious but both dishes were outstanding. Homemade cuttlefish ink cavatelli with a cuttlefish ragu was brightened by a pepperoncini fired red blaze of melted ‘Nduja, the soft sausage from Calabria that’s one of my favorite kitchen helpers. (Why When I don’t have time to cook a sauce as rich and ruddy as the succulent cuttlefish ragout, ‘Ndjua adds a lot of flavor to pasta just tossed with olive oil, capers and a sprinkling of smoked salt.) Frankly, I also liked the way that this dish cocked a snook at the usual conventions of food styling in the age of Instagram, too. What Toitou seemed to be reminding us is that taste should always trump fiddly prettiness and that food should be allowed to look like, well, food.

The plating of the grilled marinated octopus tentacle posed on top of a beautifully made potato cake also seemed intended to titillate with a first impression of gruesomeness. One way or another, it was excellent, since the octopus has been marinated to give its meat a creamy tenderness and the char added wonderful flavor to the dish, as did an Indian condiment, raita, which is yogurt with chopped cucumber, pepper and herbs. The potato cake was a highly engineered version of pomme Anna, minus the large amount of butter usually found in this dish. Instead, the potatoes had been finely sliced, neatly formed into a loaf and baked, to create a garnish I could happily eat everyday.

Since we were planning to visit the galleries in the LUMA tower after lunch, we decided to share a dessert, a slice of tarta de Santiago. It presented as a sort of delicious spiced cake made with ground almonds and was garnished with prunes in spiced syrup.

Curious about its origins, I poked around we got home and discovered that it’s a recipe from Galicia in Spain that dates back to the Middle Ages. Translated into English, its name means ‘the cake of Saint James,’ a reference to the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route that passes through Galicia to culminate at the city of Santiago de Compostella. The top of the cake is often decorated with powdered sugar and an imprint of the Cross of Saint James, but the version served at the Drum Cafe was naked, ecumenical and delicious. Interestingly, the European. Union granted the Tarta de Santiago a PGI (Protected Geographical Indication) in 2010; this means that any qualifying tarta must be made in Galicia and contain at least 33% almonds.

Pierre Toitou is in residence at the Drum Cafe until January 2022, when a new chef(s) will arrive, because the idea of the Drum Cafe is to host a regularly changing roster of different chefs in its kitchen, an increasingly popular restaurant concept everywhere.

N.B. The Drum Cafe is open only for breakfast and lunch.

Drum Cafe, LUMA Arles, Parc des Ateliers, 45 Chemin des Minimes – 33 Avenue Victor Hugo, Arles.Tel. (33) 04 65 88 10 00, Average 45 Euros. Open Wednesday to Monday 10am – 6pm, Closed Tuesday. Lunch menu served from noon to 3pm. Reservations strongly suggested via website: https://www.luma.org/en/arles/visit-us/eating-and-drinking-on-the-parc-des-ateliers/drum-cafe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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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When a rooster crows, the French transcribe the sound it makes as cocorico. Even after living in France for over thirty years, I’ve never quite been able to retool my SONY Walkman ruined Connecticut-born ears to hear that. Mais peu importe, (But that’s of no importance, or, in more current terms, whatever).  Cocorico or cockle doodle do, the crowing bird that’s making Parisians very happy right now is Rooster, chef Frédéric Duca’s charming new bistro in a quiet corner of the 17th Arrondissement.

Duca’s just returned to Paris after a very successful four-year stint as chef at Racines New York, the Lower Manhattan branch of the Parisian bistrot a vins originally founded by Pierre Jancou. Before that he won a Michelin star in 2013 as chef at L’Instant d’Or, a now gone restaurant on the Avenue George V in Paris, began his career cooking with Gérald Passédat at Le Petit Nice in Marseille and then worked as sous-chef at Le Taillevent in Paris under the late Michel de Burgo.

“New York City was fantastic,” said the chef when we chatted before dinner at his good-looking new restaurant, think a sort of a hybrid hipster-inflected Brooklyn-meets-Provence chic. To wit, an antique metal pharmacy cabinet displaying handmade ceramics from Aix-en-Provence and Brooklyn separates the bar from the main dining room.  Fifties retro wall lamps and Scandinavian modern chairs and tables give the space a funky flea-market edge, and the chef himself laid the handsome cream-colored Moroccan tile herringbone pattern floor (“It almost killed me,” says Duca).

“I loved the free-style approach to modern cooking in New York, where chefs draw inspiration from around the world, and this is what I brought back to Paris,” says Duca. “New Yorkers also like primal flavors, a taste they share with people from the south of France,” the Marseille born chef mused. “For better and worse, Paris is more refined. So at Rooster, I’m doing a personal mash on the three cities I’ve cooked in,” he explained.

This means a short menu that features three or four suggestions for entrees, mains and desserts as a way of showcasing Duca’s love of fresh produce and earthy tastes. A perfect example The veal and razor-shell clam tartare garnished with bergamot and grated smoked ricotta that Bruno had as a starter. There’s also a dish for two to share, a roasted shoulder lamb with its kidneys and artichokes on a bed of spelt in a cocotte.

Like so many of the dishes on Duca’s menu that night, my starter was subtly different in this chef’s execution and so a pleasure for anyone weary of the wan and expensive gastronomic mannerism that has come to characterize late-stage bistronomie (modern French bistro cooking) in Paris. In this very clever riff on a classic pissaladière, or southern French tart topped with sautéed onions, black olives and anchovies, Duca replaced bread dough with tart brise (shortcrust pastry) and garnished it with a perfectly cooked rouget (red mullet) filet and some mustard cress. These adds transformed a market snack into a dish that was brawny in a very Mediterranean way, but also surprising delicate and refined.

Probably because he’d been able to read my mind, Duca added a pasta to our meal, too–homemade agnolotti with a vivid stuffing of parsley, sage and button mushrooms, which was served al dente in a gentle but perfectly sharp Parmesan cream. What really made this dish special, though, were nearly transparent ribbons of Lardo di colonnata, which added the perfect amount of salt and texture.

Duca’s a terrific seafood cook and saucier, skills that were deliciously displayed by our mains. Seared scallops topped with a hazelnut viennoise (crushed hazelnuts and a bit of bread crumbs) was a brilliant idea, since the earthy sweetness of the nut flattered the iodine-tinged sweetness of the bivalves, which were framed by roasted Jerusalem artichokes–another tonal echo of the scallop, salsify chips and an umami-rich jus de viande. A beautifully cooked piece of yellow pollack–the fish’s fleshy was pearly even though the skin had been appealingly crisped, offered another riff on the terre-et-mer (earth-and-sea) yin and yang dishes Duca composes with such skill.

I’m sure the beef dish on the menu that night–filet with parsnips, carrots, pickled citrus and a jus de daube would have been excellent–I mean, how could anything with a jus de daube be bad?, but like the true Marseillais he is, Duca exhibits a profound love of fish and seafood.

Desserts were pleasant, too, including Menton lemon cream with meringue, anise-seed sables and olive oil sorbet and bay-leaf panna cotta with cider gelee and Granny Smith apple sorbet.

If this restaurant was in South Park Slope, it would be packed at both lunch and dinner, but because this Paris location straddles the bobo Batignolles and the more bourgeois eastern precincts of the 17th, the sociological shape of the clientele here is still a work in progress.

My hope for Duca is that word of mouth spreads among all of the lawyers and legal types who have left the Palais de Justice on the Ile de la Cite for Renzo Piano’s stunning new building in Les Batignolles and that his restaurant becomes one of their canteens. One way or another, the cocorico-scored-by-Spike-Lee cooking of a chef who still misses his daily bicycle commute over the Brooklyn Bridge will definitely find me in the crowd again soon.

137 rue Cardinet, 17th Arrondissement, Tel. 01-45-79-91-48, Bus 31, 66, 528 – Stop: Parc Martin Luther King. Open Monday to Friday for lunch and dinner. www.rooster-restaurant.com Lunch menus 26 Euros and 32 Euros. Average a la carte 60 Euros.

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In the dialect of the Bearn region of southwestern France, Jòia means “joyous.” But ever since chef Hélène Darroze’s new restaurant by the same name opened in Paris, it also means great eating and good times.

“I found this space when I was looking for a new address for my gastronomic restaurant on the Left Bank,” Darroze told me and Bruno when we chatted with her across the counter that separates the counter seating in the dining room from the busy open kitchen where half the staff are women at dinner the other night. “It wasn’t right for my gastronomic table, because I’d been thinking I wanted to be somewhere in the 8th Arrondissement, but I fell in love with the space and decided to do a new restaurant-bar that would serve the kind of southwestern French comfort-food I make when friends come over for dinner. So this restaurant is about relaxing, sharing, and having a good time,” said the chef, who’s spending most of her time in Paris again, with just a few trips monthly back to London to oversee her Michelin two-star table there at the Connaught hotel. (N.B. Darroze’s gastronomic restaurant in the rue d’Assas is currently closed for renovations and is scheduled to reopen in Spring 2019).

Over hors d’oeuvres of velvety jambon noire de Bigorre and mash-and-season-it yourself guacamole–a clever idea both for the resulting guacamole but also the restaurant theater, I explained to Bruno why I admire Darroze. To wit, after business school in Bordeaux, she ended up working in the offices of Alain Ducasse’s Louis XV restaurant in Monaco until the day when he came in and told her she had more business being in the kitchen than in front of a computer. This was doubtless because she comes from one of the most distinguished gastronomic dynasties in southwestern France, a family which ran an eponymous restaurant in Villeneuve-de-Marsan for more than a century.

So after a stint cooking in Monaco, Darroze took over the kitchens of her family’s restaurant and became the fourth generation to run them. She won a Michelin star for her food at the family table, but left to move to Paris and open her own restaurant in 1999 (the Darroze’s original restaurant in Villeneuve-de-Marsan is now closed).

“She must have felt sort of intimidated when she started cooking,” Bruno said in response to my timeline.

“Perhaps, but I don’t think she probably had any other choice,” I replied, musing vaguely on a question that a young journalist writing about the New Yorker during the days that my grandfather was fiction editor there had posed to me during a telephone interview recently.

What he asked was: “Was it difficult for you to find your own voice and style when you had such a famous grandfather and also an aunt who worked at the New Yorker#8221; I didn’t hesitate. “No, not really, because my voice is mine, and the vector through which I’ve chosen thus far to express it has been food in the broadest sense of the word.”

Insofar as Ms. Darroze is concerned, her love of the foods and cooking of southwestern France is evident at all of her restaurants, but her style is quite different from the food I ate several times at her family’s restaurant before she took over the kitchen. To wit, it’s fresher and lighter, with more legible seasonings and shorter cooking times.

Delicious examples of Ms. Darroze’s style arrived with our first courses, a sublime creamy garlic soup made with l’ail rose de Lautrec (yes, that Lautrec, since the painter Toulouse Lautrec came from the same town), which is my favorite French garlic for being gentle but umami rich both cooked and raw, and my sauté of wild mushroom with foie gras and an egg yolk confit. This blissfully autumnal dish is one I could eat every other day for the rest of my life, because it’s such a perfect symphony of earthy tastes and textures.

Both starters paired beautifully with the wine our charming Italian waiter suggested, too–a Fontanasanta Manzoni Bianco from Italy’s Alto Adige region by winemaker Elisabetta Foradori. Interestingly, the entire wine list here is devoted uniquely to wines that are made by women, in France, of course, but also in Australia, Italy,  Spain, and the U.S.

Among the main courses here, most are for two people, and since they were out of the beef short rib with a ‘ranchero’ condiment, we went with the poulet jaune from the Landes, which was roasted with a stuffing of brioche and foie gras tucked under its skin and served with several heads of baked Lautrec garlic as a garnish. With sides of ewe’s milk cheese enriched polenta and crunchy roasted potatoes, this was a Pantagruelian feast that left us both elated and deeply sated.

Dessert seemed highly unlikely under the circumstances, but the Italian waiter insisted we’d be making grave mistake if we we didn’t try the millefeuille of crepes with Matcha and yuzu cream, and since I’d been eye-balling it from afar all night, he didn’t have to work very hard to persuade me. It was hefty but wonderfully delicate at the same time.

The next time I dine here, I’ll try the herb-filled ravioli, or maybe the roast hake with chimichurri sauce, the stuffed lamb’s neck, or the rouget stuffed with squid and mushrooms in a jus de bouillabaisse. But I know I’ll be back, because this is a very happy restaurant created by someone who not only knows and loves good food but who’s biggest pleasure in life is in sharing it.

Jòia 39 rue des Jeuneurs, 2nd Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-40-20-06-06. Metro: Grands Boulevards or Bourse. Average 60 Euros. Open Monday to Saturday for lunch and dinner, closed Sunday.

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Though the TripAdvisor reviews may not yet reflect it, Le Vaudeville, one of the most legendary brasseries in Paris, is back. Following a sensitive renovation by new owners the Groupe Bertrand, it’s much better than it’s been for a longtime. To be sure, it’s not a place one heads to in search of gastronomic revelation, but rather for a good simple French meal when everything else is closed, it’s late, or you just want a meal in a pretty lively room without making a lot of fuss about the food. That’s what brasseries have always been about in Paris, a straightforward and expeditious feed with a good dose of Metropolitan glamour to boot.

I have a long history with this restaurant, since it was the site of my first-ever meal with newly made friends when I moved to Paris over thirty years ago. I still remember the Friday afternoon in the rue Cambon offices of Fairchild Publications where I was working as an editor when I sidled over to the one person who’d been friendly to me during my first month in town and asked if she’d like to have dinner that weekend. “Sure,” she said–a vast relief to me, “And I’ll bring my husband, Peter.”

So we met there on a rainy Saturday night, and ate a mountain of oysters, followed by steaks for the gents and the  grilled cod with mashed potatoes that’s still on the menu for Anne. Aided by a flood of white wine, it was a hilarious evening during which we discovered we had a lot in common in terms of everything from food likes to our politics and senses of humour. And so an enduring friendship was born.

As a newcomer to Paris, I also loved the louche buzz in the room, and its beautiful art-deco decor, which dates to its rebuilding by Solvet Père et Fils, the same architects who designed another famous Parisian brasserie, La Coupole, after the original cafe on this site across the street from La Bourse, the old French stockmarket, had been destroyed by a German air-raid during World War I.

And so through the years I ended up here rather often. For a big tray of oysters with a new lover, for a small tray of oysters when a lover left me, with friends after a movie, with my mother when I hoped that the animated room might arm me against her exasperating remarks, and with almost every Parisian friend I’ve ever had when we decided to have dinner at the last minute and hadn’t made a reservation anywhere else. The food was, as the French would say, “correcte,” or reliably adequate, until this restaurant followed all of the other ones that were once part of the now defunct Brasserie Flo chain, and became mediocre at best and expensive for what it was.

The charm of a meal here well and truly dented, I stopped going, except for the occasional oyster feast with Bruno, but even then, we preferred to take our oysters home with us from the shellfish stand out front rather than be seated in the dining room.

Now, happily, this place has had a corporate reset. Respecting the restaurant’s DNA, the Groupe Bertrand has given it a needed freshening up, which has included a terrific new terrace and an excellent new bar program that features light eats with a glass of wine or a cocktail.

You may be wondering how I ended up here again. Well, suffice to say that I try very hard not to be a food tyrant, which means being a bully when it comes to where we eat. Yes, as a Paris food writer I often have a list of new places I want to try that’s as long as my arm, but I find it keeps the peace in my couple, and is also actually rather useful, when I let someone else decide where we’ll have dinner.

So when I returned home from a recent trip to Spain on a Sunday night, Bruno mentioned that he’d walked by Le Vaudeville and that it was looking wonderful after a freshening up. “Maybe it’s good again,” he said, hopefully. Stealthily, I did a little research on the internet, which is how I learned it had new owners. “Sure, let’s give it a try,” I told him, and off we went.

A charming young maitre d’ greeted us when we arrived, but I still recognised several of the hard-working long-serving waiters from days of yore and hoped they were being well-treated by the new management. Hungry, we settled in on the terrace and shared a flight of excellent hors d’oeuvres, including charcuterie, onion rings, and accras (salt-cod fritters), with a flute of Champagne, because, well, because.

Next, we tucked into a tower of impeccably fresh langoustines–when they’re fresh, their tails remain in a rigid curl rather than being flacid, and, because I am a child of suburban American steakhouses and was surprised to see it on the menu, an avocado-and-prawn cocktail in a sauce Marie Rose (mayonnaise with ketchup or tomato paste). Though it hardly rivalled my favorite version of this dish, which is served at chef Michael Lomonaco’s Porter House in New York City, it was perfectly pleasant. Other possible starters included onion soups, escargots, sea bream tartare, and fried smelt with tartare sauce.

Though tempted by the butter-roasted lobster at a reasonable 29.50 Euros, I had a filet of beef with Béarnaise sauce for my main–a nice piece of meat, perfectly cooked and with a very respectable Béarnaise that was also good for dipping frites into, and Bruno chose grilled sole with haricots vert. Among other options, it was nice to see a choucroute garni on the menu here, and salmon tartare as a main course would be a good choice for summer dining or light eating.

In the past, I never ordered dessert at Le Vaudeville, because they were eminently forgettable and never very good. But the ‘Angelina’ pedigree of the millefeuille tempted me, while the sagely more calorie-conservative Bruno went with a dainty, airy toasted-almond topped ile flottante napped in light caramel and a sauce Anglaise. Both were good, and walking home after dinner, I was happy that a restaurant which is such a repository of happy memories is once again a place where I might be happy going for an off-the-cuff meal with no hesitation.

I was also glad that the beautiful etched glass art-deco door to the men’s room downstairs had survived the renovation.

Le Vaudeville, 29 rue Vivienne, 2nd Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-40-20-04-62. Metro: Bourse. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Average 40 Euros. http://www.vaudevilleparis.com/en/

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After reading several positive reviews of Jacopo, the new moderately priced bistro by Thibault Sombardier, a media-loving young chef who has a Michelin star at the seafood restaurant Antoine and who was also a contestant on Top Chef, the French dueling chefs television show, I met a friend for dinner with high expectations. The address in the rue Vernet in the 8^th arrondissement seemed to auger well, too, since this street had once been the location of one of my favorite Paris restaurants, Les Elysees du Vernet at the Hotel Vernet when several superb chefs—notably Bruno Cirino of L’Hostellerie Jerome in La Turbie, successively made it a dark-horse favorite with a beautiful setting under a verriere (glass ceiling) design by Gustave Eiffel (this restaurant still exists and is today known as Le V, but I have no opinion on it today, since I haven’t dined here in at least ten years).

On the way to dinner I also found myself thinking that a decent bistro in this business-and-tourist district of the 8^th Arrondissement along the Champs Elysees might spare some other hapless debutant visitor to Paris the ordeal that befell me on my first night in the French capital (mind you, I’m still eternally grateful to this day that my parents considered this trip to Europe to be an essential part of the education of their four children). On that steamy August night, however, a reunion meal was on the horizon, since my mother, two brothers and me were meeting my father and sister at a hotel just off the Champs Elysees after having traveled on our own for two months.

During those two months when Mom ran the show, we’d eaten exceptionally well, too, including a superb meal at Cipriani in Venice and another one at the Hotel Sacher in Vienna. For the occasion of her children’s first night in Paris, my mother, who had decided to throw caution to winds and spend a good chunk of an inheritance on this trip, had booked us at La Tour d’Argent. She wanted us to have an experience of French haute cuisine, the view of Notre Dame and the Seine by night, and the dozens of intricately stitched lessons in gastronomy, worldliness and gallantry such a meal would surely offer.

Steak at Jacopo

Lemon tart at Jacopo

Suffice it to say, my late father quickly reasserted himself as the family’s final arbiter of all things financial and told my mother to cancel the reservation, because it was, in his view, an absurdly extravagant and foolish place to take adolescent children. “Why don’t you children wait for us in the lobby downstairs,” my mother suggested.

So we sat in a strange row of four armchairs upholstered in some prickly fabric, and eventually they emerged from the elevator, my mother with tear-streaked cheeks first. We ended up walking down the street our hotel was located on and having a meal at the very same Pizza Pino that still exists at the corner of the Champs Elysees and the rue Marignan today (for the uninitiated, Pizza Pino, is a French pizza chain that’s not even on par with such sorry options as Pizza Hut or Sbarro). For ferocious pizza-lovers from the American state that has the best pizza in North America—that would be Connecticut, thank you, this meal was so mind-bendingly bad that it brought on a bout of collective hilarity that disguised, if not completely healed, the conjugal tug of war that had just taken place. To this day, I remained convinced that any cook who puts canned pineapple rings on a pizza is in need of a urgent psychiatric treatment, however.

Who knows, I thought as I arrived at the door of Jacopo, maybe if half-decent reasonably priced French food had been easy for us to find all of those years ago, my Parisian learning curve would have had a different point of departure. As is my habit, I read the menu before going inside to meet my friend, and it looked promising—there were lots of things I’d happily eat—and it was indeed quite reasonably priced, too. The long narrow dining room was rather odd-looking, however. With exposed cement walls and ceiling, bright modern lighting fixtures, dark stained parquet floors and Navy blue Fiberglas chairs at small metal edged tables, it looked more like a sports bar in a Sunbelt city than a bistro.

The joint was jumping, though, with a happy mixture of after-work office friends, tourists, and some French out-of-towners who’d must have heard about the place via word-of-mouth. Over a nice pour of Petit Chablis for 7 Euros a glass, a price that sort of par for the game in any central Paris neighborhood if you’re drinking better than plonk, my friend and me studied the menu and the crowd. We were fish out of water here, you see, because like most Parisians, we almost never find ourselves on the Champs Elysees for any reason that doesn’t have to do with some business-specific errand. Though the city of Paris has made a huge effort to enhance and renew the appeal of the avenue, it’s just not a place Parisians gravitate to, because they’ve long since written it off as tourist turf, or sort of a much better looking and considerably less illuminated Gallic version of Times Square in New York City.

I decided to order a meal that was as French at Vercingetorix, the great hero of the Gauls. To wit, onion soup and blanquette de veau, while my friend opted for the oeufs mayonnaise—hard-boiled eggs with mayonnaise, another dish as Gallic as Charles de Gaulle’s nose, and cod persille (parsley butter with tomatoes and bread crumbs). Then I glanced at the wine list, which was where I expected the restaurant would be making its margins, and they so they did. If there was one white at 25 Euros a bottle and a red at 24 Euros, it was an expensive roster, an off-page nod at the rents in this very expensive part of Paris and perhaps targeted at a business crowd at noon. Still, two people having a three-course meal and sharing a bottle of wine could get away for about 35 Euros a piece here, and cheaper still with just a glass of wine with their meal.

Salmon tartare

That’s when it occurred to me: We were having dinner in a French version of the Olive Garden (a popular chain of moderately priced fast-casual Italian restaurants in the United States), or a sort of fast casual pastiche of a real bistro designed to deliver familiar affordable indigenous comfort food at easy prices in a setting that forsook the touristy memes of white laces curtains and red-checked table cloths. And this is when the meal suddenly became really interesting, because even if the French supposedly consumed more hamburgers last year than they did jambon beurre, the famous sandwich made with baguette, ham and salted butter, the success of this no-reservations restaurant is a reflection of a deep yearning for the type of traditional French dishes that few middle-class people in France have the time to prepare anymore and which are now most often found in a handful of expensive tourist-oriented bistros in Paris. But would the food be good at Jacopo?

Our first courses were not promising, to say the least. My onion soup was unpleasantly sweet, which made me less unhappy that it had been served in such a stingy bowl, and was garnished with a large obviously pre-made crouton topped with dried out melted cheese. More puzzlingly, the oeufs mayonnaise were frankly terrible; the three egg halves (what happened to the fourth one?) were overcooked and topped with a thick flavorless foam that had no resemblance to mayonnaise whatsoever. “You can’t expect miracles for these prices,” my pal commented as she observed my optimism deflating. Except, that is, when you can.

My blanquette de veal was so good that I knew that if I found myself at lose ends for a meal in this part of town, I’d pop in to Jacopo again just to eat this delicate stew of tender meat, onions, mushrooms and carrots in a silken and light but flavorful cream sauce.

“This is really good,” I told my pal.

“No!”

“Yes! Have a taste,” I said, and she did.

“It is good, but my fish is overcooked and has no flavor.”

A shared and rather sad baba au rhum concluded this gastronomic foray, and I went off into the night undecided about the utility of this place, because on the one hand, it was better than the fast food places and chain restaurants on the Champs Elysees, and also relatively affordable, and on the other, the cooking was decidedly hit and miss.

Fast forward two weeks. On a rainy day around noon, I found myself in this neighborhood again when I went to collect a travel visa from an embassy located here, and as it started to pour, I found myself standing hungry near the doors of Jacopo just as it opened for lunch, and thought, Why not?

This time round, a steamed artichoke with a vinaigrette sauce as a starter, chicken breast in a nicely made sauce with baby lardons and mushrooms and surprisingly good frites brought on the same sort of pleasantly muddled satisfaction I used to feel many many years ago when I ate at…Howard Johnson’s, the sadly now defunct, solidly middle-class, middle-of-the-road Quincy, Massachusetts based restaurant chain that passed as a treat for their fried clam plates and peppermint-stick ice cream with hot fudge-sauce sundaes.

Everything wasn’t good at Howard Johnson’s—you had to know what to order, and the same thing is true of Jacopo, which is nobly catering to a similar demographic niche, too. To wit, if you know what you’re doing, you can have a perfectly pleasant meal here, especially for this part of Paris. My late father would have loved it.

5bis rue Vernet, 8^th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-42-89-20-22, Metro: George V. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Average 35 Euros. www.jacopo.fr

The post Jacopo, Paris | An Affordable French Take on Fast-Casual Dining, B-/C+ appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.