In Hebrew, the word ‘Tekés’ means ceremony, with the implication of a celebration. In Paris, the word now has two meanings–the original Hebrew one, and a second one as the name of Tekés, a very popular new restaurant, which is also a cause for rejoicing, because it has brought modern Israeli vegetarian cooking to a city that’s long been lamentably well-known for its indifference to vegetables.

The long running exception to this generalization has been chef Alain Passard’s shudderingly expensive Michelin three-star restaurant Arpege, but now people who love good food and eat plant-based diets are finally getting a lot more choice in Paris. And many of these new places, including Tekés, are so good that even people who aren’t vegetarian will enjoy eating at them.

Tekés is tucked away in the Sentier, or Paris’s old garment district, which has now become a popular nightlife zone for younger Parisians with lots of bars, cafes and restaurants (Paris-lovers will note that this zone has replaced the superannuated rue de Soif in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, as this once delightful neighborhood has been drained of life by an infestation of identikit luxury brand-name boutiques and expensive pied-a-terre apartments). I liked this warm lively place immediately when I went there to meet a friend there for dinner. It’s run by the same Israeli team led by talented chef Assaf Granit that launched the hugely popular Shabour and Balagan, along with the just-opened Jerusalem street-food restaurant Shosh.

Led by chefs Cécile Levy, who formerly cooked at the Norman Hotel in Tel Aviv, and Dan Yosha, Tekés’s busy open kitchen privileges cooking over charcoal and embers, and it puts on a great show while producing stunningly delicious dishes like grilled zucchini with cinnamon labneh and flambéed eggplant.

The menu leads off with some outstanding breads, including a beautifully fluffy crown-shaped challah for sharing and a buttery sage-leaf garnished galette to tear apart and dip in labneh, and then runs to a suite of Vegan and vegetarian dishes, which are also meant to be shared. These are followed by a regularly evolving roster of Israeli comfort food dishes from different Jewish culinary traditions, which are also meant to be shared, another reason that a meal here ends up being such a good time.

I loved my beet-root chachlik, which came with feta cream and watercress and was every bit as satisfying in terms of taste and texture as any version made with meat, and my friend was delighted by her “The Silk Road,” a dish composed of celeriac, clementine, ginger and shushka. We were also intrigued by the vegetarian chicken liver, which is a composition of mixed mushrooms served with a soft-boiled egg, dates and pine nuts. All of these ingredients arrive table side and are then blended with a mezzaluna before being served. The unguent umami-rich hash actually does have distant echoes of chopped chicken liver, but it’s lighter and fresher than any version made with the fowl. Gnocchi (below) were absolutely delicious, too.

Desserts are intriguing, too, including a brilliant airy mushroom mousse with chocolate granola, a perfect grand finale to the healthy joyous cooking of this very good restaurant.

And walking home after dinner, I couldn’t help but feeling quietly ecstatic that a growing number of talented young chefs are finding ways to create dishes that are not only healthy and environmentally friendly but offer a full flush of gastronomic pleasure as well.

N.B. Tekés has one of the best and most interesting wine lists in Paris, with an especially strong selection of outstanding wines from Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Tekés, 4bis rue Saint Saveur, 2nd Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 07 81 42 54 74, Metro: Open for dinner only Monday-Saturday. Closed Sunday. Average dinner 45 Euros. http://www.tekesrestaurant.com

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Tucked away in a mercifully still ungentrified street in the northern Marais, Parcelles is a very near perfect Parisian bistrot a vins, or bistro with a special focus on wine. It’s immediate charm, which comes from the wake of the addresses that proceeded it at the same address, notably Le Taxi Jaune, is joyously authentic and profoundly Parisian, from the big copper-clad bar to suspended factory lamps and a retro cracked tile floor.

This isn’t some fly-in-amber address, however. Instead, you instantly sense the suave professionalism and seriousness of the staff from the moment you’re seated at a table with a crisp white table cloth. Then there’s the delightful welcome from owner Sarah Michielsen, who’s one of the best young restauranteurs working in Paris today. This is because of her reflexive hospitality but also comes from her extensive experience of running Parisian dining rooms, including, mostly recently, that of Itinéraires, the now closed restaurant of her ex-husband, chef Sylvain Sendra.

Sommelier Bastien Fidelin is similarly cordial and attentive when he comes to the table with his rather fascinating wine list, which features organic and natural wines from all over France and beyond. The importance of his work is reflected by the name of this restaurant, too. In the French terminology of wine-making, a parcelle is a small plot of land with distinctive geographical and geological characteristics that impact the quality and character of the grapes cultivated.

Chef Julien Chevalier’s menu is regularly revised according to what’s seasonal and best in the markets, and his style is wonderfully produce centric. To wit, he aims to enhance the natural flavors of the produce he cooks rather than temper them into other tastes. In this cautiously and hopefully post pandemic moment, this simplicity and authenticity is exactly the way we want to eat right now.

So Parcelles is a sophisticated but relaxed modern bistrot a vins that aspires to and often achieves a wonderfully low-key excellence.

Meeting my friend Tina, another American journalist in Paris with a French spouse,  for lunch we got through a good hunk of media gossip over a glass of excellent Champagne (Elise Deschannes – Essentielle), and decided to order different things to give the menu a broader sampling. My steamed clams in a marine broth with fresh herbs were succulent and remarkably fresh, while Tina’s pumpkin fritters with herbed Fromage blanc were perfectly cooked in a feathery tempura-like batter.

My choice of a main course may have made Tina shudder, but I can’t resist ris de veau (veal sweetbreads), because I love their resonantly carnal taste and texture. Here, they were impeccably cooked, with some light crusting and garnish of fried sage leaves, and served on a bed of buttery potato puree with a beautifully made silken sauce of veal stock and pan drippings. Tina’s guinea hen was a succulent piece of bird with garnishes of spelt risotto, a thick asparagus spear, and some tapenade. Both plates were generously served and the cooking was. light, precise and full of flavor.

The wine I somewhat begrudgingly allowed sommelier Bastien Fidelin to chose–I’d been leaning towards something from the Cotes du Rhone or Languedoc, was outstanding with this meal, too: Saint Veran – 2019 – Les Pommards by Jessica Litaud, an exceptionally talented young winemaker.

We concluded by sharing a truly perfect creme caramel and the fuzz of well-being that follows a delicious and beautifully served meal (N.B. Don’t miss the lemon cream crumble if it’s on offer).

Since I’m still savoring every meal out with a quiet sense of grateful wonderment after the misery of the two restaurant shutdowns in France, I couldn’t help but thinking that it’s restaurants like Parcelles, not the over-hyped tables of the latest winners of the competitive cooking shows on French television, that form the ballast of Paris’s enduring reputation for gastronomic excellence.

Creativity has its place in the kitchen and can be rather fascinating, but Gallic gastronomic classicism delivers a purring pleasure that is truly timeless in its elegance and sensuality.

13 rue Chapon, 3rd Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01 43 37 91 64, Métro : Arts et Metiers. Open Mon-Sat. for lunch and dinner. Closed Sunday. www.parcelles-paris.fr Average a la carte 50 Euros.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Chef Franco Sampogna

Canvas by French painter Toma-L

After a superb dinner at Frevo, a wonderfully chic speak-easy restaurant tucked away behind an art gallery on Eighth Street, I was elated for three reasons. The first is that Brazilian born chef Franco Sampogna’s contemporary French cooking is so luminous and logical but sensual and succulent. Then there’s the easygoing stylishness of this intimate low-lit counter-style open-kitchen restaurant with eighteen seats at the stone-topped bar and a six-seat chef’s table and the terrific serving team, who hail from France, Portugal, Brazil, and even Connecticut, like me. This charming and talented staff exultantly showcases the fact that even in these tumultuous times, the U.S. remains a magnet for ambitious and talented people, in the best traditions of the country’s history. Finally, this restaurant proved to me that some thirty-three years after I’d folded the wretched sofa bed of my studio at 189 Waverly Place closed for the last time and moved  to Europe, Greenwich Village retains a vital wick of creativity despite the fact that it’s gentrified so much I probably could never live in the fabled neighborhood I’d once so loved ever again.

So Frevo is a votive candle of a restaurant that defends both New York City’s gastronomic credentials and its ability to incubate creativity through its defining DNA of curiosity, tolerance, and ambition. To understand the reasons why such an address is so especially uplifting in New York today, consider that two of the city’s great defining institutions Dean & DeLuca and Barneys are damaged and diminished for a variety of reasons explained in this excellent article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/nyregion/dean-deluca-barneys-bankruptcy.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage

Foie gras with dried fruit, pistachio and Nori ribbons

Acting on a heads up from a Parisian colleague who now lives in New York City–“This restaurant is really really good, Alec,” she told me, Bruno and I braved our jet-lag and headed downtown for dinner at  Frevo the night we arrived in the U.S. in early August. In the Fifth Avenue bus, I quietly hoped the prix-fixe tasting menu wouldn’t overwhelm us, since we were hungry but decidedly not in the mood for one of those twenty-course tasting menus that have become the bane of modern gastronomy in many European countries.

When I asked my Parisian colleague for more details, she explained that chef Franco Sampogna had had a brilliant career in France and most recently worked as a chef on Long Island and on private yachts. Sampogna moved to France when he was 17, went to hotel school in Nice, and then worked for a constellation of great French chefs, including  Fabrice Vulin at La Chèvre d’or, Guy Savoy at his namesake restaurant, and Alain Ducasse at the Hotel Plaza Athénée.

Arriving, the restaurant was hidden behind a vest-pocket art gallery displaying the works of French painter Toma-L, who takes his inspiration, the nice young woman in the gallery explained, from Joan Miró and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Then she opened a secret door behind one of Toma-L’s paintings and ushered us into the back-room.

Green peas with coconut foam and pistachios

Seated, the French sommelier started us off with a welcome pour of Chartogne-Taillet Saint Anne Champagne. These bubbles paired perfectly with a tangy amuse-bouche of crunchy quinoa salad, a nod at one of the signatures of Sampogna’s cooking, which is healthy eating. Then the meal debuted with a delightful composition of crabmeat, curry, and broccoli topped with Kaluga caviar. Legible, luxurious and bashfully elegant, this dish previewed the themes of the excellent five-course meal that followed.

It wasn’t just the food that made me happy here, though. Even if they came from all over the world, the crowd sitting belly up to the counter was a Greenwich Village crowd par excellence–friendly, unpretentious, nonchalantly stylish, witty, and hungry for life, whether with a five-dollar bill or a Platinum card packed in their pockets.

Chatting with Margot, a single middle-aged lady from Montreal on my right, she told me that she’d been feeling a bit blue after a divorce and had decided she needed “a dose of New York, because New York always works for me–I just love this city so much, always have, always will, ever since I arrived for the first time by bus after a horrendously long journey from the crap town I grew up in Quebec. That said, the Village has changed a lot, because of real-estate, yes, but also since it seems to me that people much younger than me don’t know how to have fun–they’ve lost all of their recklessness.”  I loved this observation, so I told her about the head-resting-on-a-roll-of-toilet-paper naps I’d take at lunchtime in a bathroom stall when I was an editorial assistant at Harper & Row and had come to work after a 45 minute nap and a shower following a night at Studio 54, and also one of my favorite summer nights in the Village. I was stumbling home from a bar around 3am on a night when it was probably 100 degrees F. A large crowd was gathered on the sidewalk in front of a building just before the fire house on Christopher Street and Greenwich Avenue. Curious, I joined them and asked someone what was going on. “Sshhhh!” she said.

So then I heard the wild moans of a woman and grunts of a man making love in an apartment with their windows wide open on a summer night back in the days when a lot of people, like me, could neither afford to buy an air-conditioner or operate one. The sensual panting and screaming rose and rose, and when the woman finally climaxed, the crowd below applauded and laughed. “What a lucky lady,” said the woman who’d hushed me when I arrived. The Montrealer loved this story and replied with one of her own about having sex on the steps of the Salvation Army building on 14th Street with the Pakistani man who’d just sold her a pack of cigarettes in an all-night shop. “My best idea Probably not, but such amazing sex for both of us.” So I love Greenwich Village as one of the world’s greatest urban neighborhoods and always will, just like Margot from Montreal.

Foam hating has become a trope of modern American food writing, but foam can actually be a perfect vector with which to convey flavor without resorting to a sauce. This is what passed through my mind as we tucked into an angelic dish of green peas from the Union Square market topped with tufts of coconut-milk foam–a shy nod by Sampagno at the cooking of his native Brazil, and pistachios. The peas were so fresh and sweet that even butter would have been superfluous, but intriguingly, the taste of coconut teased their herbaceousness and underlined their natural sugar.

Next, an impeccable Hudson River Valley foie gras made with dried figs, apricots and pistachios, and then the dish that put Sampogna’s haute cuisine credentials on full display–halibut with braised fennel in a fennel jus. The fish was perfectly cooked just past opalescent and had a pleasantly crispy skin, and the jus was a silken umami-rich stole that luxuriously flattered the fish without overwhelming its natural flavors. This was one of the most deeply satisfying dishes I’ve eaten in a longtime, because it was such a brilliant example of the camouflaged simplicity that is defining characteristic of the very best French haute cuisine cooking.

Colorado lamb was perfectly cooked and served with a lamb caillette, or patty of ground lamb, cracked wheat, roasted tomato and yogurt foam, and the meal concluded with a refreshing composition of lemon, lime and almond.

It wasn’t until we stepped back through the ‘secret’ door into the art gallery and then out on to Eighth Street that I fully realized just how far away this meal had transported us, since for three very happy hours we’d been inside a cosseting cocoon of chic with a cast of charming people who poured us spectacular wines and cooked us a sublime meal. Frevo is a delightful restaurant, and Samogna’s decision to try his luck in New York is very much France’s loss and America’s gain, since this very talented young chef has a brilliant future in front of him.

Frevo, 48 W 8th St, New York, NY 10011, USA, Tel: (001) 646-455-0804, Email: reservations@frevonyc.com, www.frevonyc.com  Open Tuesday to Saturday, 6-10pm; Tasting menu: $124 per person

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Substance is such a good restaurant that it’s well worth traveling to a quiet corner of the 16th Arrondissement to discover the sinewy talent of young chef Matthias Marc, 25, a native of the Jura in eastern France. Marc signs many of his dishes with a witty wink at this eastern French region of mountains and forests best-known gastronomically for producing Comte cheese and charcuterie like morteau sausage, but his his sensibility is decidedly cosmopolitan on a solid Gallic base. His cooking is also stunningly precise and intriguingly imaginative. I predict that he’s going to become one of the best chefs in his generation, too.

Marc honed his cooking style when he was working at the very popular Racines des Prés just off the rue du Bac in the 7th Arrondissement, but eager to have his own kitchen, he teamed up with Anthony Pedrosa, who ran the dining at this same restaurant, and Stéphane Manigold, a businessman with a passionate interest in gastronomy to create this excellent new table.

Taking a leaf from Racines, they commissioned interior designer Michel Amarettos to create an intimate modern bistro with a low-key contemporary chic conveyed by an open kitchen that overlooks the dining room, bare tables with white and teal fabric covered Sixties style arm chairs and basket-weave ceramic panels on the walls. Not surprisingly, Substance has been hugely popular ever since it opened a few months ago, and it seems that the 16th Arrondissement, a part of  Paris that’s not usually on my beat, since most of the city’s best young chefs are to be found in double digit arrondissements of eastern Paris like the 11th and 20th these days, is rousing from a certain culinary turpitude with this opening and that of other excellent restaurants like Comice.

This address is also much appreciated by people staying at hotels in western Paris like the Peninsula, the George V, the Prince de Galles, the Shangri-La and other properties within an easy walk of this address.

Sitting just across from the open kitchen, it was fascinating to watch the ballet of chefs at work in a compact space, and also interact regularly with Anthony Pedrosa, this restaurant’s excellent sommelier, as he regularly visited the restaurant’s wine tower, adjacent to our table. Substance has an exceptionally good wine list, including over 180 different Champagnes. The Champagne selection was drawn up by Anselme Selosse, the cult Champagne producer whose signature wine is called “Substance,” hence the restaurant’s name, and Stéphane  Manigold, and it highlights a variety of ‘grower’ Champagnes, or Champagnes from small producers like Laherte Frères, a small producer based on the Montagne de Reims just outside of Reims. This makes Substance one of the best addresses in Paris for Champagne lovers.

Our meal began with a simple but elegant amuse bouche of smoked cream with salmon eggs and dried pine-needle powder, a garnish that curiously flattered the glossy orange fish pearls with a subtle resinous flavor and also announced chef Marc’s attachment to his native Jura.

The surrounding clientele offered an amusing demographic snap shot of this affluent part of Paris, too. To my left, a table of four forty-something men in jeans and blazers guffawed about their girl friends and a recent weekend in Saint Tropez, several middle-aged couples sat stonily with their heads cocked in different directions as a possible prelude to a divorce, and three well-dressed older ladies with the same meringue-colored hair and expensive pocket books appeared intrigued by the adventure of being in a trendy restaurant. There were several tables of girl friends dining out after work, and here and there, a younger couple that called out the fact that this bourgeois neighborhood has now become a relatively good-value neighborhood on the Monopoly board of Paris real estate.

Still, the aura of entitlement that hovered over most of the tables here brought me back to musing on a subject I’d last visited during an excellent meal at Batard, a “modern European” restaurant in New York City, in February. This is how the clientele of a restaurant can impact on the way you perceive of its cooking and also your experience of being there.

That cold night in New York City, I was dining with a much-loved old friend, and we we were paying our own bill, which was in contrast to the mostly loud, smug expense-account wielding clients in this very pretty dining room. For most of them, it was just another night out on the corporate purse, while for us it was a special occasion, and several times during that meal, I had to actively discipline myself to screen out the officious and reflexively privileged behavior at some of the surrounding tables. You can’t, of course, control who else you’ll be dining with in a public setting, but it certainly can have a very big impact on how much you enjoy your meal, and I also couldn’t help but feel frequently exasperated by the inattention given to some really superb cooking by people who were there not because they wanted to eat well, but because they had the money to pay for it.

This is due to the deep reverence I have for the culinary professions, stemming not only for the hours I’ve spent in kitchens all over the world as a food writer, but also going back to the days when I was variously a prep cook, bus boy and waiter in New England seaside hotels during college summers and also to a stint as a 11pm-5am baker in a New York City kitchen that had me standing warily on the subway platform at West 72nd Street at 5.15am with flour in my hair, an aching back and an adrenaline woke wariness of riding the subway in the dead of night in New York in the 1980s. The short take on all of this Most people have absolutely no clue how hard a kitchen works with the goal of delivering gastronomic pleasure, because if they did, they’d be much much more grateful.

Our starters at Substance were superb. I loved my fluffy squid’s ink gnocchi with a smoked egg-yolk condiment, pickled watercress sauce and a jus de morteau, because it was an earthy and deeply satisfying dish that flashed with culinary wit and invention.

Bruno’s perfectly cooked green asparagus came prepared two different ways–their tips with a tangy ramp cream and their steams chopped and served with trout rillettes with a funky floral hay-infused vinaigrette. This composition was a steely equilibrium of the rustic and the urbane that was a perfect example of Matthias Marc’s cooking, too.

Our main courses were spectacular, too. My rolled John Dory came on a bed of quinoa with fresh celery root pickles, fried capers and a luscious gently cardamom-flavored sabayon. The fish was succulent, and its accompanying condiments added texture and suavely percussive gastronomic punctuation to a brilliantly conceived and executed dish.

Bruno’s roast baby lamb with Comte cheese foam, seared baby onions and more dried pine needle powder was gorgeous springtime eating, too, and a great example of the discreet but wiry sensuality that is a signature of Matthias Marc’s excellent contemporary French cooking at Substance.

There was no way were going to miss the Sao Tome chocolate souffle with bitter cocoa crumble and pine-flavored ice cream for two for dessert either, and it had a funky fruity tropical fruitiness that lofted us us out of Paris to the tiny island in the bight of Western Africa where the cocoa beans were grown.

Substance is an excellent restaurant, and an excellent venue in which to uncork a really good bottle of Champagne.

18 rue de Chaillot, 16th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-47-20-08-90. Metro: Alma-Marceau.         Open for lunch and dinner from Monday to Friday. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Lunch menus 35 Euros, 36 Euros; carte blanche menu 79 Euros; average a la carte 75 Euros. www.substance.paris 

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Pickles

On a warm summer night, Le Rigmarole turned out to be a perfect choice for dinner, because Franco-American chef Robert Compagnon’s small plates menu of yakitori, pastas, and tempura was light, bright, fresh and full of flavor. I’d been wanting to get to this place ever since it opened in October 2017, but frequent travel and the long hideouts needed to work on my latest book meant that this took some time. Well, the long wait was more than worth it.

I hugely enjoyed every single one of the nine dishes Bruno and I shared the other night, especially given the fact that our appetites were heat-wilted and balky. In fact, it was almost as though Compagnon had designed a menu that was especially intended to tantalise languid taste buds, since what’s on offer here is comfort food of the highest and most inventive order, and this is why I’ll be eagerly looking forward to eating here again very soon after a much needed summer vacation.

Robert Compagnon became obsessed by cooking with Japanese Bichotan charcoal while working at the famous Yakitori Tori Shin in New York City and decided to return to Paris and open a Yakitori bar of his own. What makes Le Rigmarole very different from the Japanese places that inspired it is that he cooks with superb French produce and is also serious pasta-lover. Also, co-owner Jessica Yang is a very talented pastry chef who formerly worked for Guy Savoy in Paris and at Rebelle and Per Se in New York City, and the delightful Crislaine Medina who runs the front of the house, has helped the owners put together a really excellent wine list, including the lush biodynamic Buteo Gruner Veltliner from Austria that we chose to accompany our meal.

And a quick note here for anyone who might be unfamiliar with Bichotan charcoal. It’s an exceptionally high quality charcoal made from oak and chefs prize it because it burns at a lower temperature than ordinary charcoal for a longer period of time and it doesn’t release any odors, which means that the char on foods cooked over it is strictly the natural flavor of that particular food. This creates a much cleaner finer taste than traditional charcoal.

The menu at Le Rigmarole runs to some twenty small plate dishes meant for sharing, including fish, poultry, meat, vegetables and pastas. You can also order a chef’s tasting menu, but since I’ve become very weary of this gastronomic trope, which is a fixture of young Paris Master Chef type chefs and la bistronomie, or the modern bistro movement, we decided to order a la carte. After all, I know what I feel like eating of a given meal and choice is one of the pleasures of going to a restaurant.

So we chose nine different dishes, and our meal began with a pleasant assortment of pickles–radishes, carrots and turnips, and then a baby red-onion tempura that was one of the best things I’ve eaten all year. I’ll come right out with it–even after over thirty years in Paris, I still have an atavistic love of certain low-brow American comfort foods, like onion rings, for example. I love onion rings, and well, these were onion-ring nirvana–such light tempura batter on quarters of tender sweet baby onions with a sprinkling of salt and red pepper brought on bliss. Next, a perfect chunk of salmon yakitori in a dipping sauce of herbed yogurt with a dribble of olive oil, another excellent dish, because the dominant flavor here was that of the firm and very fresh fish.

It was sort of interesting to try and decipher the logic with which the dishes we’d ordered came out, because there definitely was one, and ultimately it shaded from quieter flavors to more assertive ones and then sometimes back again, like a nice little melody After the frank taste of the salmon, for example, the homemade spaghetti with cockles and sea urchin sauce that followed with luscious and umami rich to make it one of the best pastas I’ve ever eaten in Paris.

Next, a pause–skewers of chicken breast with basil leaves and chopped pickled lemon, a brilliant cameo of a dish where every element retained its gustative integrity but played in a charming little skit of different tastes that winsomely flattered each other–the barnyard succulence of the chicken was gently awakened by the heat dimmed basil and flattered by the lemon. This was a brilliant little miniature.

Roasted round zucchini with charred skin and a half a lobster with spingoli pasta followed, and then curls of pork breast cooked on bamboo skewers yakitori style. All three dishes were excellent, especially the lobster, where the flesh of crustacean from Chausey in the English Channel was just pearled, or cooked enough so that it wasn’t raw but was still incredibly succulent and almost crunchy. Our last dish–pork polpette (meatballs) had great base notes that came from the pig’s liver and was politely feral.

Blissfully well fed, we couldn’t manage dessert this time round, but I’m eager to discover Yang’s talent the next time I come here.

An just FYI, Le Rigmarole is open until August 12, and the closes for the summer holiday from Augsut 13-September 11, during which time the team will travel to Taiwan and Tuscany in search of new inspiration.

10 Rue du Grand Prieuré, 11th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-71-24-58-44, www.lerigmarole.com Open for dinner only from Wednesday to Sunday. Average a la carte 50 Euros, chef’s tasting menu 49 Euros.

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In taking over the kitchen at Racines, a charming bistrots a vins ( a bistro that specializes in wines) in the Passage des Panoramas, talented chef Simone Tondo returns to his roots in more ways than one. Just after arriving in Paris, Tondo worked alongside chef Sven Chartier when the latter ran the kitchen here, so this new chapter in his career is a homecoming of sorts. And then there’s the chalkboard menu, which offers a brilliant market-driven selection of mostly Italian dishes, including several from Tondo’s native Sardinia (many of the wines are Italian, too).

Happily, these dishes display the same earnest, endearing, elegantly earthy style of suave comfort-food cooking that is Tondo at his best. In fact at lunch there the other day, I found his food to be more confident and more assured than ever, which makes for a change from the last time I sampled his cuisine. To wit, Tondo recently had an eponymous restaurant in the 12th Arrondissement where I found his bistronomique (modern French bistro cooking) cuisine too complicated and lacking the imprint of his personality to be really convincing. To be sure, the food he cooked there was good, because he’s an excellent cook, but I missed the sheer charm and amiability of the dishes I ate the first time I discovered his cooking some six years ago.

Grilled langoustines @ Alexander Lobrano

After working in a variety of kitchens, including Cracco in Milan, Mirazur in Menton and with Giovanni Passerini at Rino in Paris, Tondo first really came on the Paris dining scene in 2012 when he launched an excellent restaurant, Roseval, deep in the 20th Arrondissement with British chef Michael Greenwold (today it’s called Dilia). Dining there with friends on an early summer night, we were dazzled by the excellent produce, imaginative culinary constellations of taste and texture, and the stunningly precise cooking times this pair managed to achieve in a tiny  galley kitchen. The dish that stopped the conversation that evening was one I still crave–a gossamer puree of smoked potatoes with sautéed onions, baby clams and a crunchy veil of buttered bread crumbs. The crustaceans’ juices spiked the potato and the crumbs added some provocative texture to a dish that was apparently angelic, but stealthily quite sensual. Sliced sirloin with anchovy cream and riced and pureed cauliflower and a scattering of fresh tarragon leaves strewn across the plate was outstanding, too, as was pork with smoked eggplant, pomelo, fingerling potatoes and dill.

I ate often at Roseval until the pair of chefs went their own ways and sold up, with Tondo eventually opening his own place in the space formerly occupied by Gazetta, the contemporary bistro of chef Peter Nilsson in the 12th. And now following that adventure, it was a pleasure to find Tondo in this charming new setting with the delightful Stephanie Rockford running the dining room.

While we were settling in over very good glasses of Chenin Blanc, Tondo sent us a pair of grilled langoustines to nibble on, and they were superb–napped with excellent olive oil, perfectly cooked, delicately perfumed with rosemary. And so we ended up sampling all of the first courses on the menu that day, including a gorgeous Mozzarella, treviso with speck and a superb plate of Italian charcuterie, including some of finocchiona, or fennel-seed seasoned salami, that’s reason alone to buy a plane ticket to Italy. Not pictured: the best polpette (meatballs) I’ve ever eaten.

While we were enjoying these starters, it occurred to me that Tondo has picked up exactly where Pierre Jancou, the trend-setting founder of Racines, left off when he sold the place. To wit, the kitchen here is based on excellent seasonal produce prepared in such a way as to enhance its natural tastes. The brute goodness of nature was the axis of Jancou’s cooking here, and Tondo has revived this gastronomic orientation, with the additional skill of having a native’s knowledge of the Italian produce he serves and prepares.

And it was while tucking into Tondo homemade pasta with a stunningly good tomato-sausage sauce that I found myself thinking that we’re hungry for real food again. Not chef’s food, not swirls and pearls and powders and fronds, but the type of food that’s cooked with love in family kitchens. That’s what Tondo is offering here, and it’s quite wonderful. My more calorically cautious pal enjoyed her seared scallops with mesclun, too.

Lavishly well fed by the end of his meal, because Tondo is such a reflexively generous cook and host, we decided to share a single dessert. And because my friend probably knows more about dessert than anyone else I’ve ever met, I let her chose one for us.

Truth be told, I wasn’t that excited when she went for the tiramisu, probably because I’ve had so many mediocre ones along the way. But she hit real bull’s eye with this one, because she said, “This is really exceptional. It’s so light, and it shows that a dessert which has become a stereotype can be wonderful again if it’s made with great produce and care.” The great produce in this case is a special marscapone that Tondo imports from Italy himself, and he whipped it into such an airy lactic cloud that it might have blown right off the plate if a stiff breeze had come along. Dusted with good cocoa, it was delicious.

With a terrific list of natural and organic wines, and Stephanie Crockford’s lovely service style and great sense of humor, Racines is just the kind of place where it would be easy to become a regular. So bravo to Simone Tondo, who is cooking better than ever.

8 Passage des Panoramas, 2nd Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-40-13-06-41. Metro: Bourse or Richelieu-Drouot . Open for lunch and dinner from Monday to Friday. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Average meal 35 Euros. www.racinesparis.com

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With the opening of Comice, I’ve finally found a delicious reason to head for the 16th arrondissement, since this restaurant is the suave but relaxed address with outstanding contemporary French cooking this quiet bourgeois part of Paris has so sorely been missing. Traveling to meet a friend here for lunch just before Christmas, I found myself in the midst of a long meditation on my relationship with this part of the city as first I took the Metro many stops west from my home in the heart of the city, and then I walked many long blocks on pavements made pretty but slippery by random collages of the year’s most tenacious yellow leaves finally pelted off the trees by a hard cold early winter rain.

Truth be told, for reasons variously financial, sociological and psychological, this isn’t a part of Paris with which I’ve ever had much kin. To be sure, they’re a few restaurants in this demure, well-tended zone of restrained privilege that I’ve always liked, including Les Tablets de Jean-Louis Nomicos, L’Astrance, Le Stella, Pages, and Monsieur Bleu (more for Joseph Dirand’s sublime decor than the food). But with the exception of the 9th Arrondissement where I live, my axis of good taste has been decidedly tipped towards eastern Paris, or the 3rd,  the 10th, the 11th, the 12th, and more recently, the 18th arrondissements for many years for the simple reason that these are the neighbourhoods of predilection for a whole generation of talented young Parisian chefs. Why That’s easy. These are the quarters where the rents for both flats and commercial spaces are still relatively affordable, which means that they’re also among the youngest parts of the city.

For my part, and as someone who will always be in life-long recovery from a childhood in a safe, well-groomed, and very polite suburb of New York City, I prefer neighbourhoods with more edge and human variety than I’ve ever found in the 16th, and when I was single, I liked living somewhere central that made it easy to walk home after a night out in the clubs. The 16th has also always failed my anonymity test, which is to say people observe one another day in and day out, because these zones are rarely troubled by unknown faces. Myself, I like unknown faces, thrive on diversity, and like my neighbours sparse and mostly kept at a friendly arm’s length.

The last time I’d spent any real time in this neighborhood, as in coming here once or twice a week, was over thirty years ago when I’d lingered in an emotionally inappropriate affair, as one does, because the sex was so good. Waiting to cross a street on the way to lunch, this furtive fumbling connection came back to me vividly, but now, instead of making me cringe as it had for so many years before, I finally laughed out loud at the absurdity of the time I’d spent with a handsome Belgian man who’d once been a monk but who had gone on to become an unhappily married insurance executive instead. Doubtless it was this lurid if good-humoured recollection that finally landed me at the door to this notably attractive dining room in high spirits and with a ravenously well-honed appetite, my revenge, perhaps, on the gimlet-eyed concierge in the Belgian’s building who always eyed me through an index finger’s pullback of ivory lace window veneer as Satan himself.

My lunch date from Los Angeles hadn’t arrived yet, so I chatted with the delightful Etheliya Hananova, who explained that she was originally was from Winnipeg but had arrived in Paris with her husband, chef Noam Gedalof, also Canadian, when he got the job as sous-chef to Antonin Bonnet at Le Sergeant Recruteur on the Ile Saint Louis. So I went back to the open kitchen to say hello to Gedalof, and learned that he’d also worked at Thomas’s Keller’s The French Laundry, an experience that he found ‘invaluable’ and had done a stint with chef Pascal Barbot at L’Astrance. “My cooking is all about produce, making it more eloquent while respecting its natural tastes and explained, adding that he enjoyed the challenge of sourcing as much of his produce from small producers he finds himself as possible. “There should be an element of surprise at every meal, and so I don’t want to use the same suppliers everyone else does,” Gedalof said with a smile. An example “The poularde (a chicken that’s more than 120 days old and which has been fed on a special diet) of farmer Simon Graf at La Ferme du Poc in Gascony. This bird is incredibly succulent and has the most amazing flavor.”

So I already knew what I wanted for lunch when the lady in black, chic as ever, finally darkened the doorway and raised my spirits.

“What a good-looking room, ” she said after settling down and inspecting her surroundings. “Who did it#8221; Well, that would be Parisian architect Nicolas Kelemen, with the beautiful flower arrangements coming from the exceptionally chic florist Debeaulieu in the rue Henri Monnier, and the handsome paintings of trees that are the focal point of the spacious dining room in tones of gray, petrol blue, almond and bittersweet by the Berlin based Canadian painter Peter Hoffer. “Chic but relaxed,” she said, adding, “And I’m hungry.”

So we looked at the menu, and decided she’d start with the scallop carpaccio, and I’d go with the foie gras mousse, that we wanted to try the roasted cauliflower, and that then she’d have the Corsican beef filet in Port sauce, and me that bird chef Gedalof had vaunted earlier.

When they arrived, our starters were beautiful. “Let’s hope they taste as good as they look,” said the Los Angelina, taking the words right out of my mouth. And they did. In fact, the purity, precision and humility of Gedalof’s cooking blew on the embers of one of my most cherished gastronomic memories, my first meal at the long gone restaurant Lutece in New York City, a meal that dazzled me with chef Andre Soltner’s discipline and exquisite ability to frame the natural flavors of food by enhancing them. This food was as elegant but quietly modern at Soltner’s cooking had been forty years ago, too, so much so, in fact, that Gedalof could be his students.

And to prove that he’s in a league with Soltner and a savvy student of Thomas Keller as well, a deliriously good next complimentary next course arrived, homemade tagliatelle with shaved truffles, because, as the charming Etheliya Hananova observed, “you can never eat enough pasta, and Noam loves making it.” We stared at the noodles in their mink stole and giggled with pleasure. “Now I know why I got up this morning,” my friend said.

I felt the same way when my poularde arrived. It was the best French fowl I’ve eaten, both in terms of product and cooking, since a tear-inducing poulet de Bresse at Paul Bocuse some five years ago. Impeccably cooked and napped by a velvety jus, it came with quince, buttery brioche toast, and tiny fragile sage-leaf beignets. Cynthia loved her beef with sweet-potato filled ravioli, too (no photo here, because she was too fast for me).

We also loved the bake whole cauliflower with a superb Grenobloise (capers, croutons, lemon) garnish, which we ordered as a side dish.

Gloriously well fed, and for me, perfectly wined, first with a glass of Domaine Ledogar Carignan Blanc and then a lush glass of Arianna Occhipinti SP68 Terre Siciliane from Hananova’s superb wine list, we doubted we could manage dessert, but finally, and very wisely, decided to share brilliant American pastry chef Catherine Takayama’s delicate “greek yogurt panna cotta with a citrus medley” and orange blossom ice cream, a supremely refreshing winter dessert. This was followed by mignardises that defied any attempt to resist temptation, and suddenly it dawned on me that I’d now be spending time in the 16th Arrondissement for reasons more sacred than profane, because Comice is a truly delightful restaurant.

31 avenue de Versailles, 16th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-42-15-55-70. Metro: Jasmin, Mirabeau or RER C Javel. Open for lunch Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Open for Dinner on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Closed on Sunday and Monday. Four course lunch menu 80 Euros, five course dinner menu 120 Euros. www.comice.paris

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No, the better way to see how well a city eats is to go into its neighborhoods and sample the places the locals go to all of the time, a place like Le Bon Georges, for example. No surprise in this strategy, bien sur.

For lots of reasons, the most obvious being that I’m constantly sampling new places or checking up on tables I recommend in HUNGRY FOR PARIS, I’m not really a regular, as such, at any Paris restaurant. And yet in deference to the indefatigable Bruno, who dutifully accompanies me to remote corners of the city on tasting missions night after night when he’d much rather be eating at home, I’ve somewhat improbably become something of a regular at Le Bon Georges, a place I’ve now been over a dozen times since it opened this past winter. Understandably, he loves the idea of going someplace he knows and likes with good, solid, simple food. And so when I recently returned from a fascinating but challenging-in-the-last-act trip to Fez to report on a new restaurant there (the bus from Beauvais airport to Paris is a circle of hell that Dante missed, since it has some of the rudest and most inefficient service of any public transport I’ve ever used in my life), Bruno blessedly collected me from the Porte Maillot, and told me he’d booked at Le Bon Georges.

“You need some good meat and a nice bottle of wine,” he said, and his diagnosis was pretty accurate, since a heavy travel schedule had  been depriving me of both. The pretty dining room, which had previously been the venue of the clubby and over-rated trattoria Dell’Orto, was packed when we arrived, and we had a warm welcome from proprietor Benoit Duval-Arnould, a smart and charming restaurateur who’s done a better demographic analysis of the neighborhood he chose to set up shop in than anyone else I can think of in Paris in a longtime. To wit, Benoit aced its bobo appetite and gastronomic ticks, including a preference for pedigreed produce. Benoit, who trained as an agricultural engineer and who once worked for the Campbell’s Soup Company (Campbell’s owns the Leibig brand of soups in France), decided to bail on a successful corporate career, and it turns out he’s a natural in the restaurant business.

Benoit is extremely observant, reflexively generous, and good at casting, whether its his chef, Anton Guillon, who formerly cooked at Les Enfants Rouges, or his suppliers, who include the ever more omnipresent Joel Thiebault (the truck farmer from the Yvelines who supplies many young Paris chefs with locally produced seasonal produce, for those who don’t already know him), fish from Terroirs d’Avenir, and mostly importantly among many other good producers, beef from Alexandre Polmard, a farmer in the Meuse region of La Lorraine who raises Blonde d’Aquitaine cattle. Beef, you see, is the star product at Le Bon Georges, and the rich mineral taste of Polmard’s dense but intriguingly tender garnet-colored meat got my mouth to watering as soon as Bruno told me where we were going.

So we eye-balled the chalkboard menu, and Bruno lunged at the brioche with lobster, while I wanted a last feed of good white asparagus from Les Landes before the season ended. Bruno was happy with his brioche, which I’d have spread with something a little more emollient than just butter, and I liked my roasted asparagus with a well-made hollandaise sauce, but would have happily eaten more than the rather modest portion of four spears.

Tempted by a steak, I ended up with steak tartare–it’s just so good here, as are the home-made frites that accompany it, and Bruno did same. But Benoit decided to spoil us with baby carrots cooked in butter and a side of one of the best gratin dauphinois I’ve had in ages. Philippe and Natalie Gard’s Coume Del Mas – Schistes – Collioure 2013 went down a real treat, too, which is why we decided to end this very satisfying meal with some cheese, a perfectly ripened brie stuffed with walnuts for me and an ash-rolled chèvre for Bruno.

In Paris, we eat very well indeed.

45 rue Saint Georges, 9 Arrondissement, Tel. 01-48-78-40-30. Metro: Saint Georges or Pigalle. Open Monday to Friday for lunch and dinner. Sunday dinner only. Closed Saturday and Sunday lunch. Lunch menu 19 Euros. Average a la carte 65 Euros. http://www.lebongeorges.com 

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