Astair is the newest address of a trio of the French capital’s most innovative restaurateurs–Jean Valfort, Charles Drouhaut and Jean-François Monfort. This team has real gift for delivering restaurants that hit a bull’s eye in terms of what Parisians want to eat right now (Canard et Champagne and Farago are theirs, too), but their signature talent is the sincere and polished hospitality they unfailingly deliver.

Settling in at this good looking dining room with a natty decor by interior designer Tristan Auer that includes terrazzo floors, ox-blood banquettes and bentwood chairs and an art-moderne style cocktail bar in the middle of the room, we immediately liked the lively and very Parisian atmosphere. Then our waiter, a Frenchman who’d lived and worked in Washington, D.C. for many years, was charming and very knowledgeable about the menu. This was a big help, too, since my mind was racing as I tried to decide what to order. Almost everything on the menu sounded appealing, but the real reason for my slightly frantic indecision was that it’s signed by one of my favorite French chefs, Gilles Goujon, who has three Michelin stars at his superb restaurant  L’Auberge du Vieux Puits in Fontjoncouse in the Aude.

Goujon is that increasingly rare chef in the higher echelons of French gastronomy today, or a cook whose pleasure and purpose is to work in his own kitchen day in and day out rather than build a franchised international empire. He’s as talented as he is modest and friendly, too, which I learned many years ago when I first went to his restaurant for lunch. I was writing something about the best restaurants in the Languedoc just after he’d won his third star in 2010.

Somehow or another, I completely miscalculated how long it would take for me to get to Fontjoncouse from Montpellier, and then I got lost on top of everything else. When I was already forty-five minutes late, I called to apologize and let them know that I was on my way. “No problem at all!” said the man who answered the phone. “Drive carefully, and we’ll see you soon.” It was 1.45pm when I arrived at the restaurant, where the serving hours are normally noon to 1.30pm.

“Welcome!” said Goujon when he came to the table himself with the menu.

Flustered and still flapping, I apologized profusely and suggested that maybe I should just have a single dish, since I’d arrived so late.

“Stop! Please, stop! You are welcome here, and it will be my pleasure to cook for you! No one’s in a hurry today. So take off your watch and put it in your pocket, or you’ll ruin your lunch!” He had no idea that I was a journalist either, in case you’re wondering.

Matted against such kindness, the meal that followed was superb. A coddled egg came with fine slices of black truffle and a thrillingly feral puree of the tuber, plus a warm brioche to mop it all up with. Next, a nacreous rouget filet sat on top of a potato filled with brande de morue surrounded with steamed shellfish and a lashing of saffron rouille; this was one of the best fish dishes I’ve ever eaten, and I’m still yearning to return to Fontjoncouse and eat it again eight years later. That, and a rack of roasted cochon noir pork with a potato puree with boudin and a jus that include the fleshy green Lucques olives from the Languedoc.

When I finally left around 4.30pm, I got sort of teary with gratitude as I unwittingly headed for an entirely different experience, which was an evening alone in a hotel room with a water bed and mirrored walls and ceiling in Gruissan Plage. Needless to say, I wasn’t the one who chose this hotel.

So we settled on two starters signed by Goujon, linguine with squid’s ink and a ragout of squid cooked with cardamom for me and a coddled egg with wild mushrooms and brioche for Bruno.

If both of these dishes were excellent, the subtle flavor of the cardamom in the creamy squid ragout and the way it married with the the perfectly al dente pasta made this one spectacular. Other available starters were resolutely French, including oysters, escargots and frog’s legs.

Though the lamb shank with eggplant, pickled lemons, tomatoes and North African spices is usually served for two, they kindly made an exception for me, and I loved the way the differing tones of acidity in the lemon and tomato cut the richness of the fork-tender meat, while the aubergine soaked up its luscious cooking juices.

Bruno opted for the Bulinade de la Côte Vermeille, another Goujon dish and a ruddy fish soup of filled with mussels, cuttlefish, monkfish cockles and sliced potatoes. “What makes it different from a bouillabaisse is that it tastes like there’s some lard (bacon) in the sauce, and it has stronger flavors of pepper, probably Piment d’Espelette, and garlic than a bouillabaisse does. It’s delicious, but I wish it came with some croutons to mop up the soup a little bit more,” he said.

Rather embarrassingly, I guess I’d stared so hard at our neighbor’s roasted quail with grapes and figs that she asked me if I’d like to try some, and for the first time in as long as I can remember, I allowed pure desire to override the ancient curse of my self-deprecating good manners. “Yes, please, if you don’t mind, just a little piece,” I said. It was a good call on my part, too, since the bird was juicy and gently gamey and the resinous flavors in the hot fruit flattered it perfectly.

Though portions here are hefty, sheer gluttony had us finishing up with a very good fruit-garnished baba au rhum for me and an excellent fig tart for Bruno that vanished before I’d even thought to photograph it.

Beyond the dishes by Gilles Goujon, the menu also offers sole meunière, calf’s liver deglazed with vinegar, grilled sole and cote de boeuf–either Charolais or Salers, for two. What’s interesting here, too, is the way that menu shows off how the gastronomic boundaries of the brasserie are being revised for the 21st century–now many brasseries are offering simmered dishes that were once more often found in bistros alongside such brasserie standards as grilled fish and meat. “Young Parisians have fallen in love with the urban glamour of the brasserie–their liveliness and brisk service, but they don’t necessarily want to eat choucroute garni like their parents did. This is why we asked Gilles Goujon to work with us at Astair–we wanted to create an offer that’s more gourmand,” explained Jean Valfort.

They certainly succeeded, which is why Astair is one of the very best of the new brasseries that are so successfully rebooting this much loved Metropolitan idiom.

Astair, 19 Passage des Panoramas, 2nd Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33)09.81.29.50.95. Metro: Richelieu-Drouot. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Lunch menus 15 Euros, 20 Euros, 25 Euros, Average a la carte 65 Euros. www.astair.paris

The post Astair, Paris | A Suave 21st Century Take on the Paris Brasserie, 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.

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/

The post Le Vaudeville, Paris | The Welcome Revival of a Great Parisian Brasserie, B- appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

@Yann Deret

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

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

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

@Yann Deret

@Yann Deret

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

Chef Jimmy Ferret @ Yann Deret

@Yann Deret

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

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

Le fumoir at Vins des Pyrenees @ Yann Deret

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

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

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

The post Vins des Pyrénées, Paris | A Marais Bolthole Gets a Clever Reboot, B appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

With a striking redesign by British designer Tom Dixon and a tempting new menu by three-star chef Eric Frechon, the legendary Le Drugstore at the top of the Champs-Élysées once again offers a good reason to stroll up the most famous avenue in Paris.

This is good news, too, since with one or two exceptions, the Champs-Élysées has long been a gastronomic wasteland from one end to the other. A case in point: the Pizza Pino restaurant where I ate my first meal in Paris in 1972 is still there, and still serving the same sad pizzas, including those with sunny-side up eggs that made us laugh out loud when we saw them. These were what we we ate on the hot August night my father overruled the reservation my mother had made at La Tour d’Argent.

My two brothers and I had been traveling on our own for over six wonderful weeks (Rome, Pompeii, Perugia, Florence, Sienna, Venice, Vienna, Switzerland, a cruise on the Rhine) when we met my father and sister, who’d just flown in from New York, at a hotel in the rue Marignan. The reunion was fraught in a variety of ways, which is why we ended up at Pizza Pino instead of La Tour d’Argent (my father thought it would be a waste of money to take children to such an expensive restaurant; my mother, who had decided to spend an unexpected inheritance in an uncharacteristic act of well-moderated extravagance, wanted us to enjoy the views of Notre Dame by night and have an experience of real French haute cuisine). The saving grace of Pizza Pino, however, were those egg garnishes, which brought the relief of mirth to a table of people who hailed from one of the world’s great pizza belts, coastal Connecticut from Norwalk to New Haven. I mean, who in their right mind would put an egg on a pizza?!?! Clams, mushrooms, sausage, bacon (oh, bacon!), meatballs, yes, but an egg?

Le Drugstore originally opened in 1958 when French advertising maestro Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, founder of the Publicis agency, returned to Paris after a stint working on Madison Avenue in its “Mad Men” heyday as the center of the advertising industry in the United States. Impressed by the 24/7 life of New York City, Bleustein-Blanchet decided to create a multi-faceted address that would cater to a full-spectrum of consumer self-indulgence on what was then one of the world’s most storied boulevards, the Champs-Élysées. So Le Drugstore became a pulse-point where you get everything from a bottle of Champagne to the latest records, along with a well-made Martini and a then decidedly exotic bite to eat like a cheeseburger, since the restaurant’s D.N.A. was always avowedly American, a reflection of an era when post-war America exemplified modernity and technological innovation.

The concept was a huge hit, and there were once two other Drugstores in Paris, one in Saint-Germain-des-Prés across the street from the Cafe des Deux Magots on the boulevard Saint Germain, and the other at the Rond Point des Champs-Élysées. They thrived during the sixties, seventies and into the early eighties, when Paris nightlife guttered out, never to really recover again. To the horror of local residents, the Saint-Germain-des-Prés Le Drugstore became an Emporio Armani some twenty years ago, and then the one at the Rond Point des Champs-Élysées went belly up, too.

Le Drugstore @ Yann Deret

If the Champs Élysées Le Drugstore survived, it was mainly due to tourist traffic, because Parisians themselves became disaffected with the avenue a longtime ago. Recently, there have been several attempts made to revive Le Drugstore, including an unfortunate Frank Gehry like renovation of the building by Michele Saee in 2004, which happened at the same time that Alain Ducasse was brought in to reboot the restaurant. Neither Saee’s redesign, nor the Ducasse concept went over very well, so fast forward to the new makeover.

What Dixon instinctively understood was that architect Pierre Dufau’s original design should be the compass for his renovation, since its mid-century mannerisms have become stylish all over again. To this end, Dixon used rich materials like marble and brass and sensual ones like glove leather to channel the once giddy glamour of the original design, albeit seen with the bemused but respectful critical distance of sixty years.

Le Drugstore – the bar @Yann Deret

Staying true to Le Drugstore’s original vocation of spontaneity, there are a variety of settings in which to eat and drink here, from a sidewalk terrace, to a glamorous bar, leather banquettes, wing chairs at tables, and more conventional sit-up-straight tables with chairs. You can also sit on stool at a white-marble counter and watch the action in the open kitchen.

Le Drugstore – Finger Food @Nathalie Carnet

Chef Eric Frechon’s job was to create a menu would read as sophisticated modern comfort food to both Parisians and the international foot traffic the Champs-Elysées attracts most heavily from April to October. This meant offering an array of foods that would also respect a detailed variety of dietary restrictions, both religious and medical, and proposing dishes that instantly read as pleasure to several dozen different nationalities.  Oh, and the owners also wanted a wink or two at Le Drugstore’s original ground-breaking American influenced menu. Faced with a tall order, Frechon pulled it off rather brilliantly.

Le Drugstore – Beef tartare @Nathalie Carnet

Stopping by for dinner recently, I knew we’d be in for some fun when I first eyeballed Dixon’s striking dining room, spotted a whole section on Frechon’s menu entitled ‘finger food,’ and surveyed the dining room. Here, a pair of Russian blondes with the animation brought on by Andean snow were flirting with the good-looking Lebanese brothers at the table next to them, there three Japanese women were intently examining one another’s brand new Louis Vuitton handbags, and everywhere else, dozens of interesting, poignant and often amusing cameo performances were taking place with a similarly international cast.

To accompany well-mixed cocktails, we started with some corn tempura with tandoori salt and accras (deep-fried) beignets of salt cod and tiny gray prawns served with aioli sauce. The nibbles were delicious, and it immediately struck me that the food here was now good enough and interesting enough again to tempt Parisians back to a place most hadn’t set foot in for years.

Roasted cauliflower meuniere with curry oil @Nathalie Carnet

Next, we skated by the section of dishes that are available all day, including cheeseburgers, croque Monsieurs, and Cesar salads, to the main menu, which is divided between sections entitled “Le Cru” (The Raw) and Le Cuit (The Cooked). This may sound gimmicky but isn’t, since raw means modishly popular tartares, carpaccios and salads, while cooked ranges from roasted cauliflower with curry oil to grilled red tuna marinated with citrus and ginger. Again, the short take here is seriously well-made international comfort food.

I started with a beautifully composed salad of fresh blue crab, avocado, pink grapefruit, green apple, tomato and butter lettuce in a honey vinaigrette, and Bruno chose the beef carpaccio, which came garnished with a tangle of finely grated daikon, spring onions, coriander and a soy vinaigrette. Both dishes were well-sourced, attractively plated contemporary cosmopolitan classics.

If my main course–a shrimp burger with green onions, coriander and ginger, was rather underwhelming–the ‘burger’ was too small, the ratio between shrimp and bread crumb was off, and the bun it road too sweet, Bruno was very happy with his cod. Steamed and then lightly seared, it was sprinkled with plankton powder, the super food du jour in Paris right now, and briny samphire seaweed, a crunchy iodine-rich sea vegetable that’s a natural pairing with Atlantic fish. A scattering of shell-like gnocchi surrounded the fish and were accented with a gentle garlic foam.

Notable among other choices here is the Japanese Wagyu beef, a sirloin for two that goes for a spritely 195 Euros.

Pineapple carpaccio @Nathalie Carnet

Desserts are excellent at Le Drugstore, and so they should be, since they’re an important part of the culinary bait here. To wit, the whole point of this place is to walk through the door off the cuff and decide to eat and drink something that spoils you. This might mean a pineapple carpaccio flamed with aged rum or a nice raspberry financier with passionfruit sorbet.

So Le Drugstore is what I would call a successful situational restaurant, or a place that’s very handy should you find yourself in this part of Paris and wanting a meal outside normal meal times, or a comfortable place to dine on your own, or an address that’s open on Saturday, Sunday and every other day of the year but which is worth going to for reasons beyond that convenience.

Framed another way, Le Drugstore is a good new incarnation of the emerging new-style 21st century Parisian brasserie and a lot of fun to boot.

133 avenue des Champs-Elysées, 8th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-44-43-79-00.
Métro: Charles de Gaulle-Etoile or George V. Open daily: Monday – Friday 8am-2am; Saturday, Sunday and holidays, 10am-2am. Average 45 Euros. https://restaurantledrugstore.com/en/ledrugstore

The post Le Drugstore, Paris | Stylish Sustenance on the Champs Élysées, B appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

@Romain Laprade

The Divellec is one of the most beautiful new restaurants to open in Paris for a very longtime. As wonderfully louche as Studio K.O.’s Miami-meets-1940s Casablanca-in-Paris decor may be, however, what always matters most to me at a restaurant is the food, which is superb. Still, even though the seafood cooking at this venerable old-school  fish house overlooking the Esplanade des Invalides on the Left Bank has been brilliantly rebooted by young chef Matthieu Pacaud, the son of Bernard Pacaud of the three star L’Ambroise on the Place des Vosges, this reopening has gone oddly under-remarked in a city as food-loving and mad for fish as Paris.

Sea bass carpaccio with citrus zest@Jacques Gavard

There are several reasons for this. First, the public relations firm charged with the relaunch emphasized the revived restaurant’s decor over its kitchen. This is doubtless because the chic Paris based Studio K.O. firm, which did the interiors of madly popular Chiltern Firehouse hotel and restaurant in London, also signed the new look for Divellec, too. But unless you’re enough of an interior-design nut to know who Studio K.O. is, it’s hard to see why any restaurant would emphasise its decor–gorgeous though it may be, over its food.

Then the restaurant had also been closed for three years after founder Jacques Le Divellec retired in 2013, so it fell off of a lot of people’s radars, and then those who remembered it, probably had an idea of a place that was slightly stuffy, somnolent and very expensive. Finally, Divellec is located in a very quiet, wealthy, well-guarded, older part of Paris, so it was unlikely to immediately gain much traction with the city’s best young food writers, those types who’d rather go belly to the bar at Clamato.

@Yann Deret

So with all of this in mind on a cold misty Sunday night as Bruno and I walked to dinner here for the first time since the reboot in a companionable silence, my expectations were vague. The truth, you see, is that I’d never actually had a meal at the former Le Divellec, a fusty bastion of politicians and captains of industry at noon, and the same in the evening with their mistresses, that I’d actually enjoyed. To be sure, I had once eaten a sublime grilled lobster a l’Amoricaine here with a stunning bottle of Mersault as the guest of an Irish banker whose freckled cherubic face existed as the perfect foil to his psycho-sexual perversion. But my last meal here, oh at least a good ten years before the lights went out in 2013, was my most memorable, since I had been invited to lunch by one of the most powerful and un-repentently honest food critics in France.

What I remember was the soft stale fishy smell of the dining room, the witheringly haughty service, and an awful lot of bland white sauce lashed all over everything. “How would you describe this meal, Alec#8221; the esteemed critic asked me. “Hotel du Lac,” I replied. He looked blank. “That’s the title of the British novelist Anita Brookner’s novel about a lonely middle-aged single woman who goes on holiday to a sad, sedate, anonymous, expensive hotel on a Swiss lake. She takes all of her meals in the hotel, and even though few of them are described, I imagine that they’d have been like this, soulless under-seasoned over-cooked luxury cooking,” I explained.

No one recognised the critic until after our very disappointing main courses were being cleared away. Then a silent thunder bolt shoot through the room, and a frantic Commedia dell’Arte like performance began when we were served an insanely generous portion of Beluga caviar with shocking speed.

@Romain Laprade

“Oh Mon Dieu,” the critic sighed when the glistening black fish eggs were brought to the table with blinis. “Please….,” he said, waving his hands. “We’ve finished our meal already.” The face of the older waiter who’d just served us was a rigid mask of fear. “I think this might be the best dessert ever invented,” he said, a great line delivered with a poignantly plaintive smile–he was, after all, the solider on the front lines. The half beat of silence encouraged him. “It would be a shame to waste it now,” he said, his body locked in a half-bow. Silence. More silence. A short negative head shake. Several hundred Euros of caviar departed to an uncertain fate, and the scene stirred a ripple in the dining room, a place I always thought of as a theater of unwanted kisses, since the people who paid the bills here were usually avaricious, physically or psychologically, with their guests. You know, the lupine old man with his mistress, the curmudgeonly grandmother making menacing remarks to her grandchildren about the uncertainty of their inheritances, the broken middle-aged couples on the edge of a divorce caused by an infidelity they didn’t have the spleen left to discuss.

This is how restaurants get a reputation in our collective consciousness, with some being tagged as warm and happy, others cold and melancholy. So even if Le Divellec of yore was a storied table that once had a Michelin star, maybe two, and served reliably fresh classically prepared seafood, I think I’d be hard put to find very many Parisians who remember actually having had a good time here. So as we reached the front door, I found myself hoping this curse might have been lifted.

Fair’s fair. Sunday night is not an optimum time to judge any restaurant more ambitious than a brasserie, so as we were seated in a pretty grass-cloth upholstered room with low lighting and lots of plants, I thought, well, what I’m hoping for is just a good meal, not a revelation.

Scallop carpaccio with caviar @ Jacques Gavard

You see the old Le Divellec kind of missed the boat when it came to a sea change in fish cookery that was launched in Paris at the beginning of the 1980s by Gerard Allemandou at La Cagouille and the Minchelli brothers at Le Duc, both in Montparnasse. What they espoused was a bracing just-plucked-out-of-the-sea minimalism that was more Japanese in approach and theory than French.

The self-taught Minchelli, a native of Marseille who now runs Le 21, a confidential and very good little fish house in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, cast off the robes of Escoffier–his sauces, and served fish almost naked.  He invented this dead simple approach to seafood cookery while running his first restaurant, Le Duc, on the Ile de Re, which he later moved to Montparnasse. Long before anyone understood fish would soon become a luxury food, Minchelli was cooking it in such a way as to enhance its natural taste and texture, his reasoning being that it was so good as nature made it that it needed almost nothing more.

Some twenty-five years later, Minchelli’s approach, now adopted by most other Parisian chefs, exhibits its dazzling prescience more strongly than ever. But Pacaud picks up where Minchelli left off is with a new sense of gastronomic wit and puckish aesthetics that this now vintage school of seafood minimalism had been wanting. To wit, yes, we know we should be eating species of fish that are not threatened with extinction, mackerel instead of cod, for example. Yes, we know we should eat lighter, cleaner and less. But on the other hand, even if these lessons have rightly become so integrated into the culinary behavior of modern Paris, it’s still an occasional pleasure to veer off course, or to chose pleasure as a direction over any other point on the compass. So the challenge is to create contemporary fish dishes that don’t mask the natural flavor of the fish but are also inventive, festive, attractive and even a little bit amusing.

This is what I thought while an array of very pleasant hors d’oeuvres began our meal–an oyster napped with peppery watercress sauce and dabbed with herring eggs, a single butter-roasted scallop with a coin of fragrant black truffle and a wood-sorrel corsage. This succession of little dishes did exactly what good hors d’oeuvres always do, which is to offer teasing glimpses of the kitchen’s gastronomic garter belt to excite expectations for the meal to come.

The menu was totally tantalizing, too, especially since I’d decided to play the old what-the-hell card, too. By this I mean, that in today’s world everyone I know is so desperately over-worked to such a degree they rarely take the time to spontaneously enjoy themselves. You know, to just say, ‘Okay, screw it. I’m turning off my phone and my computer until Monday, and I’m just going to have a good time without planning it in advance. We work like dogs, we’re not machines, and if we don’t anoint ourselves with the occasional extravagance, what’s the point of the whole thing, i.e., a career#8221; Bruno looked a bit wan when I suggested we just go ahead and enjoy ourselves, because aside from some reasonably priced prix-fixe menus, the a la carte tarifs are pretty stiff.

I was extremely tempted by the tuna-and-dried-fruit pastilla with a coriander and ‘virgin’ celery reduction to start, but finally settled on ecrevisses, meaty little crayfish from Alpine lakes that are rarely seen on Paris menus, with a passionfruit vinaigrette and a cauliflower ‘zephir’ (sort of a soft custard of the same vegetable) at 65 Euros, while Bruno couldn’t resist the sea bass carpaccio with green apple gelee, crushed mixed peppercorns and citrus zest (38 Euros).

If the sea bass carpaccio was exquisite, my crayfish were too timidly seasoned and the cauliflower cream reminded me more of the old Le Divillec than the new one (and in case you were wondering, yes, it lost its article, ‘Le’ in the reboot and is now known just as Divellec) and was also a bit stodgy eighties vintage Robuchon in logic. Maybe the dish would have worked better if the passionfruit vinaigrette was more vivid, since it was nearly undetectable. That said, the crayfish were succulent, sweet and perfectly cooked.

The wine the natty sommelier suggested, a Romorantin from the upper Loire, was as perfect with his meal as his nimble commentary on the bottle. Without being showy, he mentioned that it had been one of the French king Charles V’s favorite wines and that the region was one of the extremely rare ones in France that had not been devastated by phylloxera in the 19th century, so the ancient root stock of the vines that produced the grapes from the wine was made is as powerful an expression of an intriguing and little known French terroir as one could hope for. Formal though he was, he was a very nice man who allowed as how he’d worked in California for many years and had recently returned to France, too.

The Sunday night tables around us were obviously having a good time, too. The stunningly good-looking just out of bed couple where the gent was clearly terrified of racking up too large a bill, the middle-aged couple who discussed almost every forkful of what they ate with the delightful young maitre d’hotel in a ritual that rippled back to paper road maps and the Michelin red guide on the dashboard, and an Italian mother and daughter from Milano who were insane for the decor and loved the food, too.

Following my crayfish, sole with grilled walnut butter and braised salsify with black truffle was magnificent. The distant sweetness of the nut loved the pearly flesh of the fish and the salsify provided textural contrast with the sole and softly punched its iodine with an earthy gust of truffle. Bruno’s John Dory with steamed shellfish–cockles, mussels, tiny shrimp, in sorrel cream was equally elegant.

Though I wouldn’t have wanted it, a cheese trolley should be proposed at a restaurant du plaisir like this one instead of just an assortment of four already plated cheeses from the admittedly excellent Quatrehommes cheese shop in the rue de Sevres where I whiled away many happy half hours back in the blessedly long-gone days when I used a laundromat just around the corner. So since we were well fed and happy, we decidedly to split a freshly baked individual apple tart with caramel ice cream, and it was lovely.

So here’s what I want next time round: line-fished sea bass cooked in a sea-salt crust and served with a citrus sabayon. But since this flops on the deck at 15 Euros for 100 grams of fish, what I can honestly look forward to the next time I visit Divellec is brunch, which may surprise all of the friends I have who know that I normally loathe this meal (Why The gustatory rewards of being dressed and in a restaurant during brunch serving hours on a weekend are almost unfailingly never worth it, and it’s the worst value for money meal in Paris most of the time, since plain old eggs get kicked upstairs by a factor of ten, sometimes twenty, on what they actually cost).

But if dinner was excellent, the brunch menu really speaks to me:

Fresh juice

Hot drink

Selection of bread and pastries

Butter and organic jam

Botarga bruschetta

Perfect egg Florentine

Bass ceviche, lemon juice and pink berries

Scallop burger, fresh herbs

Thin apple pie with toffee ice cream

or

Soufflé of chocolate grand cru, Bourbon vanilla ice cream (extra 10€)

49 €

with a glass of Champagne Thienot 65€

So what do you think Meet me there?

Divellec, 18 rue Fabert, 7th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-45-51-91-96, Metro: Invalides. Lunch menu 49 Euros, Initiation menu (four courses served at both lunch and dinner) 90 Euros, Tasting menu – eight courses, served at lunch and dinner. Brunch menu 49 Euros. Average a la carte meal 110 Euros. Open daily for lunch and dinner. N.B. You can make reservations via their website, too: www.divellec-paris.fr

The post Divellec, Paris | High Tide at Les Invalides, or a Brilliant New Fish House, A- appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

As Jean-Francois Piège has proven once again at the Clover Grill, his casually chic and wonderfully convivial new grill restaurant in an ancient side street in Les Halles, he’s not only a superb chef but a brilliant restauranteur. If this convergence of talents might seem logical, even natural, the truth is that many gifted chefs are actually pretty hopeless when it comes to doing the social, aesthetic and financial engineering necessary to create a successful restaurant.

Piège created the Clover Grill, a handsome space with a jet-engine strength ventilation system, which means you’re spared the curse of most Paris grill and meat restaurants–your coat smells like the meal you just ate for a week afterwards, with his wife Elodie, and the décor here is an expression of their assured and winningly witty good taste. The Pièges play with some tongue-in-check retro references to the decors once commonly found in French bistros and hotels with cabbage-rose wallpaper (Everyone old enough to have done a Eurail trip around Europe with a backpack or, in my case, ghastly tweed-sided American Tourister suitcase, will doubtless feel the twinge of a long dormant visual memory stirring when they spot this murky floral wall covering in the cozy second dining room here; for me, it’s an instant ticket to a triangular shaped Lyon hotel room next to the train tracks with those hateful hard round pillows called a traversin rolled up in the top of the bottom sheet and a sink but no toilet in the corner), honeycomb tile floors, wainscoting, globe lamps and other Gallic memes, but have the gift of making it all seem fresh and modern, too. This comes from the excellent lighting, beautifully made modern chairs and tables, and puckish fun of including a once shunned object like a Napoleon III faience plant stand in a decidedly hip décor.

The look of the place is important, too, because it tells you why you’re here, which is to have a good time. This is, in fact, the Piège’s welcome new take on the type of fashionable night-on-the-town Paris restaurant that hasn’t really been seriously updated since the Costes Brothers unleashed their formula of louche decors, snippy service and commissary style disco food on the French capital in the 1980s.

At the Clover Grill, however, not only do the room and the crowd look great, the service is charming and they serve the kind of good honest uncomplicated food you look for in a grill restaurant. That said, the bonus here is Piège’s consistent and admirably restless culinary creativity, which shows up most legibly in the starters.

Arriving for dinner the other night, we were offered a choice between the two dining rooms—the low-lit one with a Sputnik style ceiling-mounted lighting fixture and that memory-stoking wallpaper, or the bar room. We chose the latter, since it offered good sight-lines of the long great looking marble bar where you can also sit for a meal and a bartender from the Experimental Cocktail Club group mixes up some seriously good drinks, including the pimenton sprinkled Pisco sour I had to take the edge off of a long day, and the open kitchen where meat and fish are grilled over charcoal or cooked on a rotisserie in the back of the room. The cocktail was served with a nice complimentary hors d’oeuvre of spelt wafers, radicchio fronds and citrus crème, which pleasant provoked the appetite without exhausting it.

Hungry and unable to make up our minds, we settled on three starters, celeriac cooked like a baked potato in the cinders of the grill and then served with a black-truffle-and-Parmesan butter, mackerel marinated in white wine and served on canapés of grilled Koshihikari rice with horseradish, and “Comme une Pizza,” a brittle sphere of pizza dough—an idea Piege perfected when he was chef at the Brasserie Thoumieux, with sliced scallops, onions, truffles and bacon.

Though grilled fish and lobster are offered, as well as rotisserie-cooked duck, Bresse chicken and roast lamb for two, beef is the meat of the matter here, and though I love a good cote de boeuf, I was eager to try the two meats that Piege himself recommended to us when we chatted with him—the Noire de la Baltique beef and the Black Market beef from Australia, so I went with a contre-filet of the former and Bruno an entrecote of the latter, which we ordered rare.

As I’ve learned from finding myself in the middle of the road between a European preference for beef of texture and character and an American adulation of tenderness, tastes in beef are ferociously national and personal. Last year I wrote a piece on the great steaks of Europe for the Wall Street Journal, and it elicited some serious braying from North American readers who rejected the idea character could count for as much as tenderness. Here the story goes that a lot of the beef in Europe is unpleasantly tough, as opposed to the great feed-lot- fattened cuts-like-butter beef produced in the U.S. The point of my piece, which so many missed, is that for me the best beef exhibits an equilibrium between North American and European preferences, or is flavorful and textured but not tough.

Enjoyed with a glass of the very good Muscadet suggested by the savvy female sommelier here, our starters were excellent, and so they should have been for the hefty tariffs they carry. With just a single 69 Euros prix-fixe menu being the only alternative to a la carte, this new place is definitely going to be the province of the well-heeled. Then our steaks arrived with baby potatoes roasted in goose fat, and they were huge.

A first taste of my Noire de la Baltique contre filet (sirloin) made me head spin because it was so sapid. It’s flavor was potently mineral rich and ever so slightly fermented, even faintly winey and gamey, with a subtle nose of the beech-wood shavings on the floor of the room in which it had aged for two months in Hamburg and also notes of iodine, which led me to guess (correctly) that the aging atelier was somewhere in that city’s port district. There was a little bit of a mystery here, however. When we inspected the beef on display in the glass-fronted display cabinet in the back of the bar room, it had a label that said “Born, raised and slaughtered in Germany.” The only other restaurant I’ve been to that serves this beef, Beef in Geneva, which is supplied like Piège by the Metzger brothers butcher shop in Paris, identifies it as being Polish.

Whatever its provenance or biography may be, however, the Noire de la Baltique is some spectacularly good meat, and we both liked it better than the Australian Black Market beef, which had the somewhat overwhelming fatty richness of certain Japanese breeds. But again, beef preferences are personal in the most ornery of ways.

Aside from the two breeds we tried, the Clover Grill also proposes Bavarian beef (Simmenthal), Black Angus from Kansas, and Genisse de Boeuf (from heifers that have not yet calved) from the Limousin, Auvergne (Salers) and Charolais. A choice of four different sauces are also offered to garnish your meat: black Sarawak pepper, Bearnaise, Bercy (red wine with bone marrow and shallots), and a stunning reduction of macerated black currants and blackberries that’s the single most exciting steak sauce I’ve ever tried anywhere. This is because the jam-like depth of the red fruits meet the winey taste of the meat perfectly but without muddling it with red-wine tannins. When I asked Piège about this sublime sauce, he said his mother and grandmother used to make it in the Drome, the region in the Midi where the chef grew up in Valence, as another way of fully using the seasonal harvest of these berries.

Among the four desserts proposed, the stand-out is the rotisserie-roasted pineapple, which would seem to be painted with butter and sugar, so that it caramelizes while it roasts to end up with a taste that reminded me of my mother’s pineapple-upside-down cake, with it’s winking red maraschino cherry ‘eyes’ inside of each pineapple ring embedded in the delicious gooey caramel topping. To cut its sweetness, it comes to the table with a scoop of freshly made lemongrass ice cream, which is delicious. Otherwise, the smoked chocolate tart with a sable crust and hay-flavored ice cream was pleasant, but I can’t see myself ordering either the churros or the grilled banana ‘facon split’ the next time I come here. There will be a next time, too, since I’m curious to see what the 20 Euro burger is like, and I’m already craving another taste of that uniquely luscious Noire de la Baltique beef.

Clover Grill, 6 rue Bailleul, 1^st Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-40-41-59-59, Metro: Louvre-Rivoli, Open Monday to Saturday for dinner. Closed Sunday. Lunch from Monday to Saturday from January 1, 2017. Average 70 Euros, www.clover-grill.com

The post Clover Grill, Paris | Les Halles Gets a Great New Grill, B+ appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

Swordfish carpaccio with zucchini, raspberries and dill

Almost no adjective in a restaurant review makes me warier than the word ‘fun,’ because overtly ‘good-times’ type places often don’t take their food very seriously and attempt to hide this culinary weakness with loud music, low lighting and amped up cocktail menus. That said, I’ll cock a snook at myself and come right out with it: Daroco is probably more fun than any other new restaurant in Paris this summer. Why?

It occupies a beautiful space with a locally legendary fashion pedigree, i.e., the former Jean-Paul Gaultier boutique in the rue Vivienne. It also has an eye-catching off-beat vaguely tongue-in-cheek Miami-moves-to-Soho decor of high-backed royal blue velvet booths, white terrazzo floors (someday, somewhere, I’d love to live in a place with terrazzo floors, partly because it’s pretty and feels so good barefoot and partly so that I can channel the weekend invitation I foolishly turned down to Gore Vidal’s villa on the Amalfi coast a good twenty-five years ago when people were still trying to get me out of my Fruit of the Looms), and exposed brick walls. The most important part of the decor, however, are the good looking clearly carefully cast servers in striped Saint James sailor’s pullovers, a Gaultier signature, and the crowd itself, because this place has so quickly become the nexus the Parisian tribes that work in businesses which are mostly visual–photographers, fashion designers, web designers, advertising and PR types, plus a few lumbering folks from the ever diminished world of words and a gaggle of retailers, buyers and other professional trend spotters.

This restaurant is the latest creation of savvy restauranteurs Alexandre Giesbert and Julien Ross (Roco, Roca and Rococo), and it scores a bull’s eye in terms of what Parisians want to eat this summer, which is uncomplicated good quality Italian cooking. Think a short produce-driven menu that debuts with simple well-sourced, crowd-pleasing Instagram ready starters like swordfish carpaccio with zucchini, raspberries and dill or bosomy lactic burrata topped with toasted pine nuts and dribbled with pesto oil. The only starter that disappoints is their rendition of vitello tonnato, overcooked slices of veal with a nearly tasteless tuna cream sauce under a thatch of arugula with no capers.

In terms of main courses, there’s a veal chop and sea bream, three pastas–rigatoni alla Norma (tomato, ricotta and aubergine sauce), spaghetti with clams and shavings of rather extraneous bottarga, and a spaghetti carbonara, and then a long list of nicely made pizzas that are baked in a wood-burning oven. The classic Margharita is good, because of its tangy tomato sauce and the way that the heat of the oven melts the good quality mozzarella without causing it to lose all of its milkiness, but my favorite is the one topped with mozzarella, marinated broccoli rabe, and crumbled sausage; I could, in fact, eat one of these for lunch everyday.

Dining here with a wonderfully ravenous fashion PR friend from New York City, we shared the best starters and a pizza–hey, this woman really is my kind of a gal, before we both had a pasta. While sipping our excellent Sardinian white (the only one on the excellent wine list), we chatted, and Brett nailed the other thing that makes this restaurant so likeable. “Last night I had dinner at the Hotel Costes, and even though I still love the look of the dining room, the service is so up itself that it almost ruined the evening,” she said. “What’s fun here is that the waiters and waiters are really hot but friendly and attitude-free. Don’t you think that service with attitude, which has always been part of the boilerplate in the Costes restaurants, is just so nineties, so over#8221; Yup, I do, and I’d noticed exactly the same thing at Daroco. The staff is nice and alert without ever being in your face, and even when two older American men came through door wearing the kind of pastel stripped polo shirts and ventilated caps more appropriate to a Florida golf course (I suspect the came via a hotel concierge), the hostess was warm, welcoming and didn’t give into any possible temptation to raise an eyebrow or shoot a bemused and perhaps fleetingly snide look at a passing waiter.

My spaghetti carbonara was impressively well made, although the guanciale lacked the depth of potent bristly porcine flavor I crave when I eat it at Roscioli in Rome. Brett’s spaghetti was good, too, but suffered a bit from a surfeit of gummy shavings of bottarga. What works better with this produce is grating it, like they often do in Sardinia and Sicily, since the resulting powder distributes it more evenly and also allows a more judicious dosage of the pleasantly briny pressed and dried mullet eggs.

Eschewing the brief dessert selection, we had sublime espressos from Coutume Cafe, and then opted for a night cap of brilliantly mixed cocktails at Danico, the sexy bar in the very back of the restaurant instead.

Walking home after dinner, I found myself musing on one of the other satisfying things about the meal I’d just had a Daroco, which is that proves the vital good health of the Paris dining scene, and my theory that what makes it so uniquely wonderful is that rings of new gastronomic possibilities are being added to the city’s much love core offer of bistros, brasseries, white-table-cloth restaurants and haute-cuisine tables at a rate not seen in a very longtime. This means that in Paris, like London, L.A., Sydney and New York, you can now eat great Thai for lunch and then tuck into an excellent pizza for dinner. Where Paris continues to hold the ace, however, is that it still offers the world’s best and deepest offer of French cooking, both new and old, in all of its glory.

The English-speaking world’s insatiable appetite for traditional French cooking, or dishes like boeuf bourguignon, exasperates some younger food writers, who construe it as some kind of obfuscating culinary nostalgia, but the reality is that in Paris, I love the fact I can eat David Rathgeber’s (L’Assiette) cassoulet one night and Tatiana Levha’s (Le Servan) cockles in fish sauce the next.

6 Rue Vivienne, 2nd Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-42-21-93-71, Metro:  Open daily noon-midnight. Average 35 Euros. www.daroco.com

The post Daroco, Paris | Honest Italian Cooking and a Good Time – B- appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.