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.

The post Maison Aribert, Uriage | My Last Restaurant of 2020, A-/B+ appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

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

The post Le Vivier, Le Grau-du-Roi | A Great Fish House in the South of France, B+/A- appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

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.

The post A L’Epi d’Or, Paris | An Heirloom Bistro’s Brilliant Revival, B+ appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

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

The post Le P’tit Canon, Paris | A Charming Neighborhood Bistro, B appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

Victor and Charly, founders of the Brasserie Bellanger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Brasserie Bellanger, Paris | Good Cheap Gallic Grub, B appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

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.

The post Jòia, Paris | Hélène Darroze’s Terrific Comfort-Food Bistro, B+ appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

Chef Tomy Gousett @Pierre Lucet Penato

Savoury pancake with guanciale, Peconio, arugula @ Alexander Lobrano

Chef Tomy Gousset’s friendly new restaurant Hugo & Co is exactly the the type of place the Latin Quarter in Paris has been wanting for a longtime, because it’s such a delicious reflection of the neighborhood itself. To wit, this lively little place serves up a cosmopolitan menu of affordably priced small-plates comfort food that are made for sharing, service is young and good-natured, and there’s a great wine list. So it was no surprise then that it was packed with a mixture of academics, creative professionals, students and travelers when I went for dinner the other night. “We already have lots of clients who come several times a week,” our smart and outgoing waiter told us once we’d settled in at one of the tables that faces the caramel-colored leather banquette which lines one wall of the room and ordered a glass of wine.

It had been a while since I’d come to this part of town, the 5th Arrondissement, for a meal, too, since as the neighborhood has gentrified, it’s become too expensive for most students. Today, the 11th and 10th Arrondissements have become the youngest and liveliest districts of the city. The reason for this is their more affordable rents, both for apartments and commercial spaces, which explains why these arrondissements are also now where most young chefs going out on their own set up shop.

My first apartment in Paris was on the rue de la Sorbonne in the 5th Arrondissement, and back in those days several decades ago, the neighborhood brimmed with great inexpensive foreign tables like Au Coin des Gourmets, a reliable Vietnamese place in the rue Dante; a couple of good bistros– the late lamented Moissonier and Au Moulin a Vent, for example; and, for meals with visiting friends from out of town, the Brasserie Balzar, which had decent food, great people watching and a charming atmosphere created by its natty tweedy professorial clientele, long-serving waiters, cantilevered mirrors that encouraged flirting, and the wonderfully ugly art-nouveau vase of flowers on the bar (N.B. I stopped going to the Balzar ages ago, since the food has declined and the atmosphere had been dented during a period of corporate, penny-pinching ownership; now, though, it has a new owner, so I’m hoping for a renaissance at this long-running Left Bank address, a place for which I once had so much affection).

Crostini with avocado, red radish and Parmesan @ Pierre Lucet Penato

With the exception of the Balzar, though, which inexplicably became popular with fashion people in the eighties and early nineties, the 5th Arrondissement was, with the exception of La Tour d’Argent, never a destination arrondissement for seriously gastronomic eating.

Looking at the menu at Hugo & Co, however, my first thought was that this might change, since what’s on offer is so alluring while avoiding the dulling cliches of la bistronomie, or modern French cooking. We decided to share three starters–a savoury pancake with guanciale, Pecorino and arugula; marinated salmon with passionfruit sauce, hashed beets and toasted rice; and some strachiatella with ramps, gomasio, and black olives. If all of them were excellent, the pancake was the real stand out, since it was exactly the kind of dish you known you’ll end up permanently craving, a nicely crusted pancake topped with crispy curls of guanciale, grated Pecorino and a scattering of arugula leaves. The strachiatella was delicious scooped up with the good bread served here, and though quieter and less original, the salmon was pleasant, too. What we really liked in all three of these dishes was the way they skated across a variety of different cultures and palates to create something original that had a flawlessly appetising logic.

Over dinner, I told Bruno about my first apartment, a one-bedroom that had padded coral-fabric covered walls, a ratty little kitchen with a double hot plate, and a bathroom with bubble-gum pink fixtures. Suffice it to say that it was the best I could come up with during a one-day hunt with a lupine real-estate agent. I rented it furnished, and it only became just slightly habitable after I’d put all of the lady dermatologist owner’s china figurines and dusty plastic flowers in a coat closet and hung a couple of paper globe lamps that I bought for a few francs from a Chinese notions store nearby. But it was right across the street from La Sorbonne, and it used to fascinate me to peer into the class rooms across the street and see the professors lecturing to orderly rows of students sitting upright at their desks. And even in a bower afflicted by such dubious taste, it was thrilling to slowly but surely hatch a new life for myself in Paris. Little did I know at the time that the roots of this fledgling attachment to my new city would grow so deep that I would end up living here for over half of my life. I’m very lucky.

Next, I tucked into a Tonkatsu style breaded pork cutlet topped with a fried egg in a pool of hoisin sauce with a garnish of pickled red cabbage and black rice, and Bruno enjoyed braised beef cheeks with grilled asparagus and panisses (fried chickpea-flour bars). While we were eating, chef Tomy Gousset did a round in the dining room, stopping to chat amiably at almost every table.

I’ve known the Cambodian born Gousset’s superb cooking every since he returned to France after a stint cooking at Daniel Boulud’s restaurant Restaurant Daniel in New York City and took over the kitchen at Pirouette in Les Halles. I’ve also admired his food at his eponymous table Tomy, which he opened in the 7th Arrondissement when he left Pirouette, but I didn’t know that he’d gone to the Ecole Ferrandi and then cooked with Alain Solivérès at Taillevent and Yannick Alleno at the Hotel Meurice.

“New York was so important for me. I really loved it, the kitchens of so many different countries intersecting, the whole idea of the laid-back no-limits urban bistro. I learned so much there,” Gousset told us, adding, “Hugo & Co is all about having a good time.” That’s a pretty perfect way of summing this place up, too.

We finished off our excellent bottle of white Dao while sharing an order of warm madeleines with lemon zest and a light lemon custard dipping sauce, a charming dessert, and stepped out into a rainy Spring night knowing we’d come back here again soon, too.

48 Rue Monge, 5th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 09-53-92-62-77, Metro: Cardinal Le Moine or Place Monge. Open Monday-Friday for lunch and dinner. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Average 35 Euros. www.tomygousset.com

The post Hugo & Co, Paris | A Terrific Little Place in the Latin Quarter, B+ appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

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.

Laetitia and chef Romain Brechignac @Lisa Klein Michel

A really excellent recent meal at Le Flaubert, which was originally called Le Bistrot d’a Cote when two-star Michelin chef Michel Rostang first opened it thirty years ago, got me to thinking about the impact of the internet on restaurant writing. To wit, the only reason I had this fine feed at a restaurant I’d once loved but hadn’t been to in over ten years is that some visiting friends from South Africa had been advised to eat there by a good hotel concierge. Otherwise, I am usually so caught up in the cycle of the new, new, new–Hello, SEO (search engine optimisation) that I very rarely find the time to go back to places I’ve enjoyed to see how they might be evolving, holding up, changing.

What this does, in effect, is penalize the careers of established chefs and well-run restaurants, since after the initial blaze of publicity when they open, how do they remain sought-after, talked about, and most of all profitable when the whole dining-out gig is so gamed towards the new To be sure, a great chef can win a solid following of regulars who fill his or her dining room day in and day out, but the ferocity of the new remains hard to overcome, since it’s become a given that novelty is the best driver of cyber clicks, because–it is hoped–they will translate into on-line advertising, assumed to be the last bandage of ever more seriously ailing print publishing.

It’s not that the New hasn’t always driven media, but rather how fierce this has become as we read more and more online, with the websites’ infinite need for fresh content, than we do in print.

As someone who ardently loves good food, my goal here isn’t to open the back of the cyber business models that drive the internet, but to simply observe that they are changing the way we eat in ways which often reward good public relations more than they do good cooking. When it comes to Le Flaubert, I still remember the flutter this place caused when it first opened, because it was so surprising in 1987 that a Michelin two-star chef would turn his hand to affordable everyday dining. But insofar as this idiom is concerned, Michel Rostang is every bit as much a father of “La Bistronomie,” or modern French bistro cooking, as chef Christian Constant and the band of young chefs he trained, notably Yves Camdeborde, Eric Frechon and Thierry Breton.

After the meal I had here the other night, I can also say that this table is not only better than ever but has become one of the finest bistros in Paris. So what lucky happenstance it was that delivered me to its door, and my thanks to my Capetonian friends for getting me back here. As soon as we stepped through the door, the atmosphere was terrific–the dining room had that wonderful winter fug generated by people who are eating and drinking well, and the hostess here, Laetitia, was delightful from the moment she brought us our menus with that sort of saucy, bemusedly wry social posturing that’s bistro service at its best. We ordered glasses of Condrieu, because who wouldn’t, and after they came to the table Laetitia followed with a slice of excellent homemade jambon persille (a Burgundian terrine of chunks of ham in parsley-brightened aspic).

The South Africans were as excited as baby seals to be in Paris again after a very longtime, and since neither of them speak French, I sherpa-ed them through the menu, which left them squirming in their seats with anticipation. And since even after many years as a Parisian, I could never become blasé about the city myself, we were an eager audience when our starters arrived.

Caroline’s mackerel poached in white wine was beautifully plated with pickled vegetables and poached spring onions with an iodine rich seaweed vinaigrette, while Hunter slipped into sort of a monastic meditative bliss as he ate his duck and foie gras pate en croute, which was encased first in buttery pastry and then in a shimmering garter of dark amber aspic–I forked in here, and it was in a mouthful everything that has always defined this restaurant, or a sort of exalted rusticity produced by applying steely haute-cuisine technique to bistro dishes. Much as I adore these friends, it was a struggle against a surge of animal avarice to allow my friends to taste my airy gnocchi a la Parisienne with roasted ceps and sweetbreads, since this was not only one of the best dishes I’ve eaten all year, it was ecstatically consoling on a cold, damp winter night. That said, I hate to think of how I might of reacted if either of them had asked for a second taste.

Our food was so soothing that it allowed us to unload our respective burdens–them, the corruption of the Zuma government, me–well, just guess, without denting our pleasure and move on to happier subjects of conversation, like the beach house that Hunter had designed for them on a pristine stretch of the Indian ocean in Mozambique, one of the most beautiful countries I’ve ever visited, or the intriguing way that Cape Town is slowly but surely recovering its essential DNA as a city once known as “The Tavern of the Seas.” To wit, they said that there’s more racial comity than ever there, and that it’s less and less self-conscious. Caroline asked me about “the handsome Macron” and all of us confessed that we didn’t have a clue as to what Bitcoin might be and couldn’t care less one way or another. We also chatted about the impact of the internet on our lives, the ways we love it, the ways we don’t, with Hunter expressing exasperation that anyone could become famous just for knowing how to grab our increasingly shattered attention spans in cyber space, as opposed to having some real talent.

For mains, Caroline ordered the roasted octopus with artichoke and onions, because, as she later admitted, she’d never eaten octopus before (“it’s odd, but delicious,” was here take on this tentacled treat), and I couldn’t resist the olive-oil poached cod on a bed of Paimpol beans and ceps. Both dishes were made with superb produce, impeccably cooked and deeply satisfying, which put them at a notable difference from a lot of the wearisomely chef ‘bistronomique’ I’ve been eating too often lately.

Hunter went with the daily special, seared scallops with parsnip puree and pickled cauliflower. “It’s rare to find fresh scallops in South Africa, and if you do, they’re no where near as good as these–so firm and such a nice gentle sweet taste,” he said in praise of these succulent marine morsels from Normandy.

As part of a losing, but hopefully not futile, battle not to become a client of a chain of stores called the Big & Tall Men’s Store, a plus-sized place  where I once worked as a college student for a few weeks one summer–my father insisted I get a job before I went away to my ‘real’ summer job as a waiter on Nantucket, because he didn’t want me “loafing around,” I don’t normally eat dessert. Still the South Africans insisted, so I told them about the first day on the job at the Big & Tall Men’s Store, the only store in a suburban Connecticut strip mall without a front door–the clients parked in back and came in through the back door, presumably because they were too embarrassed to be seen going into such a place, and I was astonished to discover box shorts the size of small circus tents and suits that would fit a redwood.

During the dull hours when there were no customers, I’d sit on a stool by the cash register reading, and then when the door bell rang, signaling the arrival of a client, I never knew what shape of misery I’d find when I looked up, often way up, or wide, often very wide. These men were hurried, furtive shoppers, because they were miserable being in the store and just wanted to get it over with in a hurry. I’d mostly leave them alone, since I knew they wanted as little interaction as possible, but occasionally I’d try to help, especially during the summer, when I’d ask them if they needed a bathing suit, too. Nine out of ten of them were hugely relieved by the suggestion. “Do you sell them#8221; “Yes” “In my size#8221; “Of course,” I’d say, and steer them away from the tropical prints and stripes to the solid colors.

My memory shared as a protest got me no where, though. “Well, you have thickened up a bit since we last saw you (note to self: never be coy about your weight), but that’s no reason not to have dessert with two dear friends,” said Caroline. So I ordered some honey ice cream with roasted prunes and raisins, because it sounded more healthy than anything else. Hunter went with the petits pots de creme au chocolat a l’ancienne (the world’s best chocolate custard) and Caroline, the poached pear with whipped cream and walnuts. And so there was a sweet ending for all of us to a wonderful reunion and an excellent meal.

Le Flaubert – Bistrot d’a Cote, 10 rue Gustave Flaubert, 17th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01- 42-67-05-81, Metro: Pereire, Wagram or Ternes. Open Tuesday to Friday for lunch and dinner. Saturday dinner only. Closed Sunday and Monday. Prix-fixe menus 45 Euros, 36 Euros, 32 Euros, Average a la carte 50 Euros. www.bistrotflaubert.com

The post Le Flaubert, Paris | A Truly Excellent Bistro, A-/B+ appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

@ Jeanne Le Louam

Chef Adrien Ferrand

Named for his signature dish–a composition of smoked eel with reglisse  (liquorice root), apples and hazelnuts, Restaurants Eels is the best new table of La Rentree (the Fall season) in Paris. The solid allure of this place is foremost due to the superbly witty, inventive and assured cooking of chef Adrien Ferrand, but also to the beautiful renovation of an old couscous restaurant with a real attention to customer comfort in terms of lighting and noise by interior designer Pascale Perrier and the charming and professional service of the dining room staff.

Arriving for dinner with Bruno, we were immediately impressed by how well-run and professional this new restaurant is for a place that’s only three months old. Even before we’d looked at the menu, this aura of cheerful but steely confidence set table place apart from other young-chef-going-out-on-his-or-her openings. Here, every last detail has been thought through, what from the wood-panelled zinc-topped service bar where Ferrand composes his dishes before they’re served, to the clever black-steel glass racks strategically located around the dining room to save steps and the pretty vases of early autumn wild flowers that decorate the bar. Without coming off as a uniform, the staff wears one, and it’s almost invisible, since the ensemble has a sort of a graduate-student chic created by gray shirts, navy trousers and tobacco-colored leather Oxford shoes. Think sexy nerd.

On a Tuesday night, the dining room, which used to be couscous place and has since been renovated and given a great looking vaguely midcentury retro decor by interior designer Pascale Perrier, was full, with all 42 covers spoken for. In an old high-ceilinged corner shop front like this, this could mean punishing a punishing decibel level, but not here. The tables are widely spaced enough to dampen any din, and the charming maitre d’hotel with a full but neatly trimmed beard volunteered that they are still planning to install more noise-abatement insulation in the near future. The message was clear: This is a restaurant that care very much about its customers.

Smoked eel with apple and hazelnuts @ Pauline Gouablin

As he poured us each an excellent glass of Chardonnay from the Jura, he added that chef Adrien Ferrand’s signature dish is the smoked eel composition, and added that the fish of the day was hake. Without having given it a lot of thought, I had already sampled Ferrand’s cooking when he was cooking at KGB, chef William Ledeuil’s annex table to his excellent Ze Kitchen Galerie, in Saint-Germain-des-Pres. If the food I’d had at several meals there was excellent, Ferrand was still cooking within the gastronomic bookends of Ledeuil’s style.

Here, Ferrand, 25, not only comes into his own with a style that nods at Ledeuil’s fondness for herbs and Asian seasonings, but surprises with suave, deeply reasoned contemporary French dishes that display his own wiry creativity and delicious wit.  After perusing the appealing menu, I chose the carpaccio of red tuna from the Basque fishing port of Guéthary and Bruno decided on the roasted beets with goat cheese. Garnished with caper flowers, Thai basil, roasted cherry tomatoes and tomato marmalade, the unctuous tuna was generously served and had a delicious faint taste of the sesame seed oil, ginger and ponzu vinaigrette in which it had been briefly marinated. Nothing overwhelmed the essential mineral-rich oceanic flavor of this sublime fish, however, and this is why this dish was so outstanding. Bruno enjoyed his beets and goat cheese, but observed that as nicely made and presented as it was, even its fruity blackberry-balsamic vinaigrette couldn’t make it original.

In my experience, many young Paris chefs dazzle with their starters and then become more conventional with their main courses, which leads to a polite letdown. Ferrand is the exception. My Iberian pork came with roasted salsify roots and an intriguing autumn barnyard garnish of white beans, corn and girolles. A ruddy jus de viand dressed the meat and an umeboshi (Japanese salted plums) condiments was one of the best garnishes I’d ever eaten with pork, since its salt, umami and puckery sourness were the perfect foil for the rich meat. Bruno loved his lamb with smoked aubergine puree, wilted Pontoise cabbage and tamarind-spiked jus, too.

Since portions here are generous, we split a dessert–a winsomely autumnal dish of baked mirabelles, the tiny little plums from Lorraine, and quetsche (red plums) with hazelnuts, pistachio pound cake cubes, and clover-infused cream. It was delightful, and so was our meal here.

What makes Restaurant Eels such an excellent new table is that the young team behind it deliver a flawless and charming service experience around the outstanding cooking of Adrien Ferrand. And it was while we walking home after dinner that it occurred tome that this level of charm, good humor and precision is much too rare in young chef bistros in Paris. Regrettably often, the staff in such places are so in awe of the chef and his or her kitchen that their service posture is off-handed and haughty, just at the limits of being polite, the supposed justification being that you’re lucky (and barely worthy) to be eating in a place where the chef walks on water (several truly awful meals at Saturne come to mind, but they’re many other offenders).

There’s none of this nonsense at Restaurant Eels, where Adrien Ferrand’s superb cooking is beautifully framed by an exceptionally pleasant customer experience. So go now before it gets any more popular and the prices inevitably go up, since it really is wonderful.

The post Restaurant Eels, Paris | A Solidly Talented Table in the 10th Arrondissement, A-/B+ appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.