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

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Tasting Plate @Romain Villot

Just in time for spring, Tavline, a new Israeli restaurant, brings cooking with an invigorating herbaceousness to the Marais, the 4th Arrondissement in Paris. In doing so, it resets the culinary offer of an historically Jewish neighborhood in the French capital for the 21st century, too, since Israeli cooking, as popularised by London based chef Yotam Ottolenghi, bespeaks the earthy, vegetable-loving, umami-rich allure of this exceptionally appealing modern kitchen, an immigrant mash of dishes from Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Arab countries, plus ancient dishes that issue from the Sephardic diaspora, or the Spanish and Portuguese Jewry expelled all over the world in 1492.

Tavline, which means ‘herb’ in Hebrew, is the brainchild of a delightful and very talented young couple, Keren Benichou and her husband chef Kobi Villot Malka. Both of them have Moroccan-Israeli origins, but Villlot Malka worked for Alain Ducasse for five years after studying at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, which explains the suaveness of his cooking. What he proposes at Tavline is Israeli comfort food, but with a certain finesse in terms of its flavors, technique and plating.

Karen Benichou and Kobi Villot Malka @Romain Villot

Stepping into this casual dining room on the rue du Roi de Sicile, you leave Paris behind for Haifa or Tel Aviv, since the atmosphere here recalls the casual restaurants and cafes that have made both of these cities seriously good food destinations. The Israeli background of the owners notwithstanding, the crowd on a recent rainy night was decidedly cosmopolitan when Bruno and I arrived for dinner. To my right, four ladies from Denmark, to our left, a French Jewish and Palestinian couple, and at least five languages other than French could be heard in the room. This diversity was immediately bracing in a world that’s so fraught today over issues of identity, religion and ethnicity, too. To wit, we were all happy to share the same space and enjoy some delicious food in a place that is radiant with warm hospitality, a love of good cooking, and a respectful and very deep appreciation of human variety. As Tavline rather guilelessly shows, restaurants can have a big impact on a neighborhood or a city in terms of affirming those humanist values that invariably govern any happy well-run kitchen.

As a longtime Parisian and someone who loves the Marais for its history, architecture and magnificent mixture of different cultures–if the neighborhood’s essential DNA is Jewish, it’s also long been Paris’s gay neighborhood and a place of refuge for those who are unconventional, off-beat, or just plain different, it gladdens the heart to see a new restaurant opening here instead of another cold anonymous luxury boutique. For anyone who’s not in the know, after colonizing and damaging such storied Paris neighborhoods as Saint-Germain-des-Pres, global luxury retailers are now making big eyes at the Marais, a part of the city with the kind of affluent, style-conscious foot traffic they crave. Their arrival has been predictably disruptive, since rents are climbing, which threatens the brilliantly eclectic variety of small businesses in this ancient, loved and very settled part of the city.

Tavline dining room @Romain Villot

This particular night, we were both really hungry, since we’ve often been deprived of our cuisine during a period of exile from home created by a nightmare of leaking water pipes, so we sat down and eyed the menu eagerly.

So I immediately wanted everything on this menu, which is why Keren Benichou brightly suggested we share the ‘assiette degustation’ (tasting plate) of starters, which included roasted beets with labnah, roasted cauliflower with a tangy pistou sauce and a vinaigrette of tomato pulp, charred eggplant with a coulis of tomates and pimentos, and roasted sweet potatoes with tahina. Every dish was vivid with flavors and textures that invoked an oriental sensuality that was a long way from Paris on a rainy night, and my only regret is that the sardines marinated with spices and served with orange salad, fennel and grilled peppers had sold out before we arrived.

Shaksouka, or eggs coddled in a ruddy puree of tomatoes and peppers, must be one of the most delicious and consoling dishes ever invented, and they offered a lot of comfort to my bruted nerves, although I could easily have eaten a portion twice or even thrice the size of the one served here as a main course. Bruno, whose been the point man with the feckless plumbers, chose the memoulaim, or onions stuffed with lamb on a bed of barley in a ruddy sauce of roasted lamb juice brightened, I think, by sumac and maybe some pomegranate molasses, and I had trouble getting a fork into this dish, which was intriguingly pastoral and unexpectedly delicate.

On a next visit–and there will be one, I want to try the ksisot, or grilled fish balls sauced with yogurt on a bed of lentil and preserved lemon. Oh, and the sardines.

For dessert, we shared a delicious lemon cream with a crumble crust, and it was wonderfully tart and satisfying at the end of a meal of food that was so clearly cooked from the heart. Tavline is terrific little restaurant.

Tavline, 25 rue du Roi de Sicile, 4th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 09-86-55-65-65, Metro: Hotel de Ville or Saint Paul. https://www.facebook.com/TAVLINE/ Closed Sunday and Monday. Open Tuesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner. Average 30 Euros.

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Silver and gold: ‘It’s lovely, but where should we go for lunch#8217;

In the rather unlikely event you haven’t noticed, Alain Ducasse is a very shrewd man. With the opening of Ore, the new cafe-restaurant he conceived and staffed at the chateau de Versailles, he’s not only equipped the opulent chateau with a French restaurant that’s worthy of such a prestigious setting, but offered an intriguing solution to what has previously been a mystifying French failure. To wit, given their spectacular Gallic gift for gastronomy, it’s unfathomable the French have most recently been so unsuccessful at creating restaurant concepts that enable large numbers of people to eat good French food at reasonable prices.

What makes me say this Well, examine the gastronomic offer at any French airport, train station or highway rest stop, and you’ll most often come away crestfallen by having found nothing but a gauntlet of international fast-food outlets and franchise restaurants run by big industrial restaurant groups. We’re talking the usual culprits, Burger King and Pizza Hut, etc. If there’s lately been a sort of half-hearted feint at offering healthier options with the appearance here and there of the EKKI chain, or even the proliferation of PAUL, which peddles an industrial but just acceptable French take on the quick eats sold by bakeries—sandwiches, quiches, salads, there’s basically no proper place for a real meal at any airport and very few at train stations save an historical oddity like Le Train Bleu at the Gare de Lyon in Paris (N.B. This particular restaurant is recommended primarily for its spectacular Belle Epoque décor, with the kitchen running a very distant second, so order simply). It’s even more puzzling, too, when you remember that the brasserie, that sexy restaurant idiom that incarnates urban glamour and also traditionally assured a prompt feed at a fair price, was originally a French invention.

Ore, Dining room @ Pierre Monetta

Surely there had to be some modern way of conjugating French cooking that would be successful in both commercial and culinary terms. Well, as Ducasse has freshly proven at Ore, it turns out there is, and it’s pretty wonderful. To wit, this restaurant on the first floor of the Pavilion Dufour just inside the gates of Versailles serves very good freshly cooked high-quality relatively affordable Gallic grub. It’s also open non-stop from 8am to 6.30pm, so that you have breakfast before you tackle the chateau, reward yourself with a really good lunch after many fascinating but foot-sore hours ogling the opulence, duck in for tea with sandwiches or stop by for a pastry or a Croque Monsieur later in the afternoon.

The menu has also been designed to cater as broadly as possible to all comers, so they’re good options for vegetarians, children, and people coming from culinary cultures very different from those of France. But the lede idea, of course, is to showcase a certain idea of French gastronomy that references both its glorious history and its thriving and innovative present, and Ore does this very well.

Discovering this table during a recent Saturday lunch with Bruno a few days after it opened in September, I was immediately surprised by the monastic minimalism of the décor by interior architect Dominique Perrault and impressed by how warm, welcoming and well-briefed the dining room staff are. What makes this especially important here is that many people emerging from the elevator exhibited a certain wary shyness, because perhaps they’d heard that Alain Ducasse is a famous chef with an international empire of restaurants, but had never been to any of them and didn’t know what to expect restaurants.

Their two big fears That they’d be patronized, and it would be too expensive. Instead, everyone is warmly welcomed.

Over a glass of Champagne served in broad shallow hollow-stemmed antique flutes the waiter told us Ducasse himself had scored at a flea-market left nameless (where does he find the time?!), we warmed to the austere elegance of the space as well. The solid oak floors, bare oak tables and brass wainscoting were doubtless deliberately chosen not to compete with the palace next door. Instead, these dining rooms offer an oasis of visual serenity after a good dose of head-spinning grandeur.

We fenced back and forth about who’d have what, but finally reached a perfect peace as we always do at the table. So we began with three starters, each of which represented a different declension of gastronomic temptation. Ducasse likes to pull people’s legs with an occasional nod at the eternal pleasures of certain childhood favorites, and so it was easy to succumb to the elbow macaroni with cubes of Prince de Paris ham, grated black truffles and soft savory rivers of melted Compte cheese. I mean, it’s just impossible to believe that a dish like this wouldn’t make anyone weak in the knees. Then an indulgent but pleasantly light salad of shelled lobster and heirloom tomatoes with an appropriately gentle vinaigrette that quietly back dropped the succulent natural tastes of these two products, and an impeccably made pate en croute with pickled vegetables.

Next, choosing from the list of dishes that are only served from 11.30am to 2.30pm, I decided to test the tantalizing extravagance promised by the steamed turbot with truffled Hollandaise sauce. This generous cut of fish arrived in a pale yellow robe of airy and very gently acidulated Hollandaise sauce that was speckled with fine black blazes of truffle and escorted by wonderfully waxy baby potatoes and wilted spinach. Despite the luxuriousness of the sauce, there was something earnestly healthy and tonifying about this dish, which made it an intellectual pleasure as well as a gustatory one.

Meanwhile, across the table, Bruno was tucking into a classic tournedo Rossini, or a beef filet with seared duck foie gras on a canapé and a magnificent mahogany sauce redolent of truffles and wine. A wedge of buttery pommes Anna (finely sliced potatoes baked with lashings of butter) gilded the lily of this go for broke indulgence, and again the cooking was flawless.

These two dishes actually brought to mind a conversation I’d recently had with Alain Ducasse during he reminisced about how a now long vanished moment in the gastronomic geography of the Ile de France, the region that contains and surrounds Paris, when there was a branch of Maxim’s at Orly airport. As he recalled, the food was actually very good there, and it was a particular pleasure to enjoy some foie gras and a steak there with a glass or two of good Bordeaux before boarding your plane. “I think we need to revive the availability of really good food in such settings,” the chef observed. While we were waiting for our desserts at the end of an excellent lunch, I couldn’t help but thinking that the menu at Ore could serve as a sort of sublime boilerplate for what could be possible once again at train stations, airports, and why not even onboard trains, in France. And knowing Monsieur Ducasse, I won’t be surprised if this is already in the works.

Desserts were, well, fit for a king or a queen. In fact I was really impressed by the quality of the pastry here, since the choux pastry of my La Religieuse was immaculate, the pastry cream was light but delivered a fine taste of freshly caramelised sugar, and the little caramel cape draped on the bottom orb was regally rich. Bruno’s gateau au fromage blanc, agrumes confits was a decidedly elegant French rendition of the idiom of desserts made with fresh cheese and was further brightened and lightened by lime zest, tiny chunks of candied orange peel, and a collar of citrus puree with cubes of candied grapefruit.

Ore is a very good restaurant, and also one that I fervently hope will serve as the new model for dining in institutional settings in France. Oh, and just in case you’re a big spender, Ore can be reserved for private dinners that feed anywhere from 2 to 120 guests.

Ore, Château de Versailles, Place d’Armes, Pavillon Dufour – 1st floor, Versailles, Tel. (33) 01-30-84-12-96, Open Tuesday to Sunday from 8am to 6.30pm. Closed Monday. Average lunch 35 Euros. www.ducasse-chateauversailles.com 

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@Stephane Adam

Canard & Champagne, a new restaurant in the Passage des Panoramas in Paris, has a very clever concept. Occupying the magnificent landmarked former premises of an 18^th century stationery shop with black-and-white marble floors and a magnificent carved wooden shop in the moody Passage des Panoramas, this casual convivial place specializes in two of the most quintessentially French products imaginable, duck and Champagne. It’s the brainchild of shrewd young restauranteurs Jean Valfort, who previously launched Blend, Paris’s first gourmet burger chain, and Pierre Dutaret, who comes from a famous foie-gras producing family in southwestern France.

Bar at Canard & Champagne @ Stephane Adam

“Our concept is unabashedly cocorico (this is how the French hear the crowing of the cock that is their national symbol, and the word is also slang for patriotism),” says the amiable Valfort. “We also wanted to promote Champagne as a table wine, or a wine that pairs well with food. Too many people think of it only in terms of being a party drink or a special-occasion quaff, but it goes so well with a variety of different foods, including duck and foie gras, the staples of our menu,” he added.

Indeed, it’s easy to order here since you have a choice of two starters—excellent foie gras that comes with an intriguing chutney of fruit and nuts or a green salad, three main courses—magret de canard (grilled duck breast), confit de canard (duck preserved in its own fat) or a steak. Desserts come from the Boulangerie BO in eastern Paris, and they’re superb, especially the Madagascar vanilla and chocolate tarts. And to add to the fun of a meal here, the sommelier is happy to suggest a different Champagne for each course.

What I was not expecting when I went to dinner here with Bruno was an abrupt and very powerful experience of time travel triggered by taste memory.

In fact it was the appropriately goose-bump inducing mineral-rich succulence of the juicy magret de canard (duck breast) that sent me musing in some very murky layers of memory. The stunning deliciousness of this ur French fowl, which was served with potatoes and a flute of delicately fruity Champagne that flattered the bird perfectly, unexpectedly equipped me with a sort of impromptu sextant which made it possible to measure a large stretch of lapsed time with amazing accuracy and flinchingly tender perceptivity.

If one sharp point of the instrument was stuck in the flesh of the duck the other night, the other was more randomly pinned rather precariously to a summer night on Quogue, Long Island in the late 1960s. Here, in a great gray hen of a wood-shingled Victorian summerhouse, I ate my first duck.

The bird in question had been purchased from the big duck-shaped cement shop—a masterpiece of American roadside kitsch that all of us loved, in the back country behind Quogue back in the days when the hot summer air on Long Island still smelled pungently, almost sulfurously of potato fields and there were enough duck farms around so that ‘Long Island duck’ was a designation on New York City menus.

My parents had been dispatched on a five-week Mediterranean cruise by my grandmothers to mend a marriage that would remain rudderless, and we—me, my two brothers and my sister—went to stay with our adored Grandmother Jean in this huge but wonderfully shabby place with lots of clam-shell ash trays, board games missing cards and other bits and pieces, paperbacks swollen from humidity in lop-sided bookcases and wobbly wicker furniture with hard kapock pillows covered in faded floral patterns. During the week, my heart-stoppingly handsome second cousin Bart—his beauty came largely from his Argentine mother rather than any blood line we shared—took me and my brother John to the beach club, where we spent the whole day in the sea like seals while he chatted up and conquered one pretty blonde au pair girl after another. Meanwhile, my younger brother and sister splashed the minnows and each other in an inlet at the bottom of the lawn where my grandmother could keep an eye on them.

If the weeks were peaceful, the weekends were agitated, because my aunt, a then unmarried book editor who lived in New York City, would come for the weekend with one friend or another and often a pair of boys to boot. While we were content with the cleaning woman’s wonderful fried chicken and potato salad, or hot dogs and hamburgers, this wouldn’t do for the Manhattanites, which is how I found myself sitting at the dining room table starting into a plate a piece of duck, the hairs on its skin still visible and its gray meat napped by the orange sauce someone had attempted to improvise with orange marmalade, Dijon mustard and some Port.

All of the adults came to the table with the remains of their cocktails, watered down by ice cubes that had melted to the size of aspirins. It was a sweltering night, and the sad little fan someone had put on a side chair near the table only really served to remind all of us of just how hot and uncomfortable we really were.

I thought the duck was loathsome—it was too gamey for my pre-adolescent palate, the meat was stringy, and the sauce was at once too sweet and too tart. I noticed that Bart, the apple of my eye, wasn’t eating his bird either, and that my grandmother had laid her silver over her duck to unconvincingly disguise the fact that she’d barely touched it, and to make sure no one thought she was going back to it, she’d already lit a Parliament.

“Alec, you’re always so curious at the table—why haven’t you eaten your duck?” asked my aunt.

“It tastes awful,” I said, and the conversation stopped. All of the adults at the table except my grandmother insisted I be punished for my rudeness.

“Oh, well, my lambs, it’s such a warm night, and maybe duck isn’t something that children are necessarily going to enjoy,” my grandmother started equivocating. But the little mob was not to be stopped, which is why I was sent to bed early without dessert.

I was in my room sitting on the window sill next to the screen window listening to the crickets in the night and hoping I might catch another tantalizing glimpse of Bart taking a shower in the chauffeur’s apartment over the garage where he was staying before he went out, as he did every night, when the door opened. I knew it was my grandmother from the orange point of her lit cigarette as she advanced through the dark. “Here you are, darling.” She’d come up the back stairs to bring me a bowl of vanilla ice cream with butterscotch sauce. We sat next to each other on my bed while I ate my ice cream and she smoked, her ashes falling somewhere in the dark.

“Mother! Mother?! Where are you We’re waiting to start the game,” my aunt called from down the hall. “Alright, sweet dreams, darling, and I’ll see you in the morning,” she said, kissing me on both cheeks. She started away, and then she turned back, “Oh, and one more thing,” she whispered. “Don’t write off duck entirely based on the one we had tonight. It can be delicious when it’s cooked properly the way they do it France. You’ll see one day, I’m sure you will.”

And so I did.

Nothing preserves memory better than scent, food and music.

57 Passage des Panoramas, 2^nd Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 9-81-83-95-69, Metro: Richelieu-Drouot, Grands Boulevards, or Bourse. Open Tuesday to Sunday, noon-12am. Closed Monday. Lunch menus 17.50 Euros, 20.50 Euros; prix-fixe menu 26 Euros; desserts 8 Euros. www.canardetchampagne.com

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Inspite of its dopey name, Kult, the stylish but easygoing restaurant in the just-opened hotel Le Saint, is a welcome new option for good casual dining in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Surprisingly, the restaurant offer in this storied Left Bank neighborhood, the most loved district of Paris for upmarket visitors to the city, is relatively meager. To wit, if you want a good French meal within a five-to-ten-minute walk of the Cafe Deux Magots or the Cafe de Flore, your best choices are pretty much Fish La Boissonnerie, Semilla, Le 21 and, a little bit further afield, the excellent Cafe Trama on the rue du Cherche Midi.

The good-looking new hotel Le Saint was created from a legendary local hotel, the Hotel Lenox, a place I loved, because I lived there for three months in a beautiful duplex suite at the expense of the publishing company I was working for when I first moved to Paris. Day in and day out, the Lenox offered me, a gangly unknowing neophyte, lessons in the ways of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the neighborhood which remains the boiler-room of a certain eternal style of that distinctively Parisian off-center bourgeois chic the world just can’t get enough of.

So what did I learn there in those early days Oh, well, lots of things, but among them, the fact that true beauty is always flawed, personal and a tiny bit eccentric. That charm comes from a dared but never excessively scrutinized mixture of social confidence, verbal wit, graciousness and self-deprecation. And that even if it isn’t always easy, it’s better to listen for a long time rather than to speak too quickly. Oh, and also that opposites are always style friends, as in cheap and expensive, new and old, and bold and conservative. H & M and Hermes, Marks & Spencer and Comme des Garcons, mais pourquoi pas?

My gastronomic lessons in the neighborhood were of less importance, since even in 1986, Saint-Germain-des-Prés wasn’t exactly heaving with good bistros aside from the long gone but still much missed La Cafetière in the rue Mazarine. That said, my take away from Saint-Germain-des-Prés was an infinitely valuable lesson about great French food, which is that the true axis of this country’s exalted cuisine is a triumph of exceptionally good seasonal produce cooked simply.

So after I was seated on a stripped velvet banquette at the end of the bar and watching the bar tenders slowly, slowly, slowly mixing drinks, I wondered, would Kult ‘get’ the food ways of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, or would it be a silly gimmicky place like the Costes brothers glamorous but mediocre La Société?

Even before I glanced at the menu, my expectations were hopeful, however, since I’ve always liked the clean, lucid, well-focused cooking of chef Guillaume Monnet, who cooks at L’Affable, a pleasant nearby modern bistro. He drew up the menu at Kult and put its staff and suppliers in place.

So Monnet knows and understands the eating habits of the locals, or that ur Parisian mix of fashion people, politicians, antique dealers, book editors, expats, and famous faces (Catherine Deneuve, Bernard Henri Levi, etc.) but is also savvy enough to factor the cravings of worldly, wealthy tourists into the mix when he draws up a menu, too. What these people have in common is that they know they should eat healthy but also like to spoil themselves a bit and also love sophisticated but unpretentious comfort food.

So I’d already decided that at the end of a serious bear of a stress-ridden day, I’d throw calories to the winds with foie gras and grilled onions, a superb combination, and then go with a primally pleasing steak tartare with homemade frites when Bruno finally galloped through the door and walked right past me, because he’s getting used to new pair of glasses. He needed a cocktail, we needed a cocktail, and so we did. And they were good, even if the craft aspect of bar-tending always means they take too long to arrive.

Soothed by his Manhattan, Bruno chose the tuna tataki with beets and horseradish cream and the ginger spiked duck breast with carrots and an unexpectedly successful sweet-and-sour sauce. Both of our starters were excellent, since the charred onion gently tempered the barnyard richness of my foie gras and picked onions teased the earthiness of Bruno’s beets and back-stopped the fleshy iodine-rich tuna.

My steak tartare was excellent, or just that carnivore thing you want to eat when you need iron and minerals and don’t have the attention to offer to the elegance of sauce or the flirtatiousness of an unexpected spice or herb. What made it original, though, was the chopped dried fig that had been folded into the meat, an interesting idea that would have been even more effective if it had been a little more subtle, i.e, the fig was too present, since I didn’t really want anything to blunt the taste of my beef.

On the same wave-length of urgent appetite but with a little more wit was Bruno’s duck breast, which came with a lightly crispy skin that had basted the meat with its earthy, flavor-rich fat but was still cooked juicy. Our garnishes were perfect, too–a few salad leaves and double-cooked fries for me, ginger boosted carrot puree for Bruno. I finished up with an unremarkable cheese plate–a shame when you have cheese shops like Quatrehommes and Barthelemy so nearby, but Bruno was pleased with his poached pear with speculoos crumbs (these Belgian spice cookies are the Old World equivalent of graham crackers)  and vanilla ice cream.

Surrounded by an intriguingly Saint-Germain-des-Pres crowd, including a well-known politician with his ambitiously busty transgender girl friend, and an antiques dealer who surprised me by coming to dinner with a wife I didn’t know he had–his boyfriend, however, I’ve known for years–this casual table delivered exactly the kind of uncomplicated good-quality contemporary French meal we’d come here hoping to find. I expect that it will become very popular very quickly, too.

Kult, Hotel Le Saint, 3 rue du Pré aux Clercs, 7th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-42-61-01-51, Metro: Rue du Bac or Saint-Germain-des-Pres. www.lesainthotelparis.com Lunch menu 28 Euros, Dinner menu 38 Euros. Open Tuesday to Saturday for Lunch and Dinner; closed Sunday and Monday.

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Terroirs d’Avenir boutique

While we were enjoying a good, casual, off-the-cuff lunch at Frenchie to Go, chef Gregory Marchand’s breakfast-and-lunch eat-in or takeaway place next to his home table, Frenchie, I thought of the note a friend in New York who follows my Instagram feed sent me recently. “Don’t you ever just want to stay home and eat a big messy Reuben sandwich#8221; she asked, teasing me about the often beautiful and elaborate dishes that I share from the restaurants I go to of a given week in Paris as a food writer. Well, um, yes, in fact, I love a good Reuben sandwich. And sometimes I also like a good Saturday morning lie-in so much that we end up missing our two favorite Saturday morning markets–the organic one in Les Batignolles, which is officially known as the Marché Biologique des Batignolles and is located on the boulevard des Batignolles, and the lavish one on the Avenue du Président Wilson, which is held on Wednesday and Saturday mornings.

There are few things that make me happier than going to either of these markets, especially because I try to avoid going to restaurants on the weekends in favor of cooking at home, which both Bruno and I love. There are times, however, when Morpheus just pulls you back into bed, and when this happens, we’ll make a run to Terroir d’Avenir, a terrific pair of boutiques in the rue du Nil where you can get your hands on the same superb fruit, vegetables, herbs, cheese, fish, and meat this small select company supplies to many of the best young chefs in Paris. And so on a recent Saturday morning, we decided to make a run to this shop, because it’s tomato season, and I trusted they’d have good heirloom tomatoes (they did, too).

After we bought some of the best white peaches I’ve ever eaten, several kinds of tomatoes, herbs, yellow squash, eggplant, fennel, and enough other vegetables to stuff the drawers in both of our small fridges at home, we were hungry. So Bruno suggested we go next door to Frenchie to Go. It’s been open for a couple of years now, but never finding myself in this neighborhood in the middle of the day, I’d never been for lunch, just breakfast, and so this was the perfect occasion. Right from the start, I’ve loved the fact that this place serves non-stop, so that if you tumble out of the Louvre starved at 2.43pm, you can hoof it over here and get a bacon sandwich with egg and cheddar, the best lobster roll in Paris,  a hot dog (homemade, mind you, in a roll from star baker Gontran Cherrier), a pastrami sandwich, fish-and-chips, a Reuben or a pulled pork sandwich.

We went with the latter two, plus a large order of fries, and homemade ginger beer. Now the Reuben was a beauty, or just the kind of over-stuffed New York deli style sandwich I sometimes get misty eyed for. The pulled pork sandwich was a good savory munch, too, but would have been better with more pork and less pickled cabbage. Alas, my fries were cold and rather dried out, so I thought of returning them, but than decided to eat some of Bruno’s much fresher ones instead.

What’s great about this place is that it hits a near bull’s eye in terms of catering to a certain atavistic roster of Anglo-American comfort food dishes created by someone who profoundly understands how they’re built in terms of layering tastes and respecting texture that aren’t easy to find in Paris (For anyone who doesn’t know, Gregory Marchand worked for Jamie Oliver in London and then Danny Meyer in New York before he returned home to found his wonderful little empire–Frenchie, Frenchie Wine Bar, and Frenchie to Go, in a then quiet shabby street on the edges of the Sentier, Paris’s old garment district).

Frenchie also serves breakfast, and you can eat on stools at a couple of shared tables, or takeaway and look for a quiet corner. Given the fact that breakfast can be a boring and/or expensive letdown in Paris hotels, I often tell friends to head over here if they want a sturdy breakfast (my favorite is that bacon sandwich with egg and cheddar, and a bacon scone with maple syrup). And it’s also a good place to pull together a picnic before a train or a plane, especially with some fruit and cheese from Terroir d’Avenir.

Don’t miss the wonderful tromp l’oeil wallpaper in the WC either (it’s based on a photograph of a stamped-tin ceiling, like you might find in London or New York), bien sur.

9 rue du Nil, 2nd Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-40-26-23-43, Metro: Sentier or Réaumur Sébastopol. www.FrenchietoGo.com Average meal 14 Euros. Open Monday-Friday 8.30am-4.30am, Saturday-Sunday 9.30am-5.30pm. Closed for the summer holidays from August 10 to August 16.

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With the opening of Restaurant 52 Faubourg Saint Denis, a studiously hip bistro with non-stop service, shrewd restauranteur Charles Compagnon continues to define the emerging culinary style of Paris’s rapidly gentrifying 10th Arrondissement.

This new place, which occupies a former butcher shop on the Faubourg Saint Denis neighborhood’s busiest shopping street, expands on the style he originally launched when he took over L’Office, the still very good modern French bistro that brought an initial gust of hip into a quiet faded residential corner of the quarter then dominated by Kosher bakeries and butchers. Next Compagnon opened Le Richer, a sort of a Parisian version of a New York coffee shop cum London gastro pub a few blocks away, and now with 52 Faubourg Saint Denis he’s built out his popular formula even more concisely.

In much the same way that New York based restauranteur Danny Meyer’s Union Square Cafe in New York City defined the gastronomic personality of the Union Square neighborhood when it was in the earliest stages of its now fulsomely achieved gentrification, Compagnon is framing a distinctive restaurant idiom for the 10th Arrondissement.

It’s a real winner, too. This place has the same in-the-raw industrial chic as the other two addresses, with a polished cement floor, walls that are still attractively scared by the now exposed grout of the demolished tile work of the butcher shop which formerly occupied the premises, and a an eye-catching bar where you linger over a drink or have a proper meal. Compagnon lived in New York–where he worked at the James Beard Foundation–for several years, and he has proved to be a good student of the myriad styles of casual eating venues that make that city so interesting.

To wit, Compagnon has gambled that young Parisians will like the idea of a relaxed friendly no-reservations-required restaurant with healthy, affordable, interesting contemporary cooking as much as New Yorkers or Londoners do. And they do. But this address is also a really appealing address for visitors to Paris, since it’s open daily from 8am to midnight–they serve light eats outside of the main lunch and dinner serving hours, the prices are relatively reasonable, and it offers a keyhole view of one of Paris’s most interesting neighborhoods right now.

The menu is short–four starters, four mains, four desserts–but the prevailing gastro gestalt is modern French comfort food, and this the kitchen does very well indeed.

Stopping by for a Sunday supper with Bruno on a rainy autumn night when we were just way too lazy to cook, I couldn’t stay away from the raviol0 (giant ravioli) with an egg yolk and soft cheese tucked inside and garnishes of croutons, cooked and raw mushrooms, and cubes of ham in a buttery, foamy sauce made with good bouillon.

Bruno was happy with his oddly named ‘maki’ (open sandwich) of cucumber, radishes, and horseradish cream, but I found it rather too cerebral and lacking in flavor. A smear of pureed seaweed was probably intended to add some balance to this dish, but as delicious as the condiment was, this one undershot the mark for me.

My slow-braised pork belly had a nice crust from a turn on the grill, though, and came to the table with refreshing garnishes of salad with a lively vinaigrette and a lush herbal persillade.

Bruno loved his beautifully cooked duckling breast–crispy skin, juicy bird–with torn kale, turnips, a scattering of corn kernels, a few pickled grapes and a light sauce of pan juices, and it was probably more revealing of the kitchen’s style than anything else we ate during this pleasant meal. The menus in all of Compagnon’s restaurants spin on an axis of good product and the logical compositions of taste and texture that inform well-reasoned home cooking as opposed to restaurant food.

What makes the difference Some subtle stripe of sincerity and an endearing lack of polish that pleasantly errs on the side of food you might very conceivably have cooked yourself if you were a really good cook. And as far as I’m concerned, this is a real sweet spot, too, since the ubiquity of restaurant going in most large Western cities is today as much a reflection of being time short as it is an expression of bourgeois leisure. If you’re an overworked professional in a big city today, you go to restaurants often, maybe even too often, and so it’s really nice to come across food that is more about making you happy than it is about expressing the chef’s ‘vision’ or ‘personality.’

This is, in fact, where I think much of the best cooking in Paris is coming from right now–that place where a professional culinary education intersects with an earnest desire to leave people feeling well-fed in the broadest sense of a restaurant meal. Examples Le Servan, Restaurant Pages, and all of Charles Compagnon’s tables.

Restaurant 52 Faubourg Saint-Denis, 52 rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, 10th Arrondissement, Paris, No phone. Metro:  Strasbourg-Saint-Denis. Open daily from 8am to midnight. Lunch service from noon to 2.30pm, dinner service from 7pm-11pm. Average meal 35 Euros.

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Yes, I love truffles, both black and white, but what really makes go weak in the knees is mandoo (Korean dumplings). Let me explain. I’ve been answering a lot of questions about my favorite foods and my work during the last two weeks, since I just had two books come out within a week of each other, Hungry for France: Adventures for the Cook and Food Lover and the second edition of Hungry for Paris. I’m having a lot fun being on the other side of the question answering for a change–I’m usually the one with the queries–and while I’ve been impressed by the work of my colleagues, I’ve been consistently running into one regular misconception about my work as a food writer that I really need to set straight.

So as I’ve explained to others, No, this man does not live on a diet of foie gras, lobster and truffles alone, much as he loves all three. Instead, I’m a natural-born omnivore who happily feeds at all levels of the food chain, but who has  a particular weakness for Paris bistros of all stripes, i.e. traditional and modern, a deep love of comfort food and home cooking wherever I go, plus a passionate attraction to street food. This doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy rare visits to the highest altitudes of gastronomy, as much indicated by a chef’s effort and imagination as by price or stars or numerical ratings. I do. But rather like you, perhaps, this food rarely coincides with either my more primal desires or my wallet.

What made me think about this the other day was the brief, relatively inexpensive and hugely satisfying meal I had at Mandoo, a tiny (12 covers) counter-service only Korean restaurant in the august but melancholic Quartier de l’Europe, a swathe of Paris on both the 8th and 9th arrondissement sides of the train tracks running to the Gare Saint Lazare station where the streets are rather provocatively named after European cities, including Liege, Budapest, Constantinople, and Bucharest, the idea once having been to evoke the exoticism of long-haul travel by rail.

This was my third attempt to eat at this little restaurant since it opened a couple of weeks ago. The first two times, I accelerated the slow and rather odd rhythms of my usual day to deliver myself to the door of this place at noon, only to find the counter already filled. The last time this happened, Kim Kwangloc, the nice Korean chef, advised me I had to book, even for one, even for lunch. So I asked to make a reservation for two for dinner the following night. Full. The night after Full. And on it went, until two weeks later, when I finally stepped through the door of this little storefront, a place that would be Edward Hopper bleak–and that’s sort of a good thing–were it not for Kwangloc’s charm and delicious food.

But wait–why was I so persistent Well, that’s the easiest question I’ve had in a longtime. To wit, I’ve never met a small stuffed edible that I don’t like a lot. I love tortellini, ravioli, gyoza, all and any dumpling from Asia, Maultauschen (ravioli from Swabia in Germany), Khinkali (Georgian dumplings), empanadas, and any other small stuffed food you might think of (please feel free to add to my cursory list, since I’ve surely overlooked dozens). I crave all of those foods at all times, but among them, well, I have a real soft spot for mandoo, which have been the basis for several really wonderful friendships, including my newly minted one with Hany Oh and Teri Ham of the terrific Nalda blog in Korea. Until the Mandoobar opened, the only way to sate this wanton desire was during trips to New York, where the Mandoo Bar on West 30th Street is a place I never miss.

As surely as Mandoo Bar New York is a reflection of that city even though it’s in the heart of the small but wonderful Korean neighborhood near Penn Station–they serve cold sweetened ice tea in cans, there’s little atmosphere, it’s cheap, there’s a radio playing somewhere, and the staff are efficient but sort of disengaged, the Paris mandoo outpost is ur Parisian. To wit, even with counter seating, it’s formal, and if thence  chef chats with his customers, they almost never interact among themselves. This place also has a much better aesthetic than its cousin in New York, with Edison bulbs, a satin-finished oak counter, a blessed absence of a radio soundtrack, and a good-looking back wall of different woods put together like some sort of brainy puzzle. For an American, though, it’s a very odd thing for such a small group of people seated at a U shaped counter to so studiously avoid anything that might even remotely be construed as social, like talking to each other.

But that’s okay. We were here to eat, and we wolfed down two orders of mandoo–ten stuffed with meat (marinated beef and pork) spiked with ginger and ten with a pleasant but polite tofu-and-green-onion filling. Utterly indifferent to any accusation of gluttony, we ordered another ten of the delicate (the pasta-like envelope is made from a mixture of wheat and rice flour, which explains its pleasing pellucid appearance) meat-stuffed half moons immediately–they were superb–and sipped our Bek Se Ju, a sake like rice wine seasoned with twelve different herbs, but tasting mostly and gently of ginger and ginseng while they steamed. It was also fascinating to watch chef Kwangloc prepare the beef tartare that followed our mandoo binge. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a chef treat a piece of beef with more dexterity, respect, and even love as he did while transforming a nice chunk of beef from Boucherie Dubost up the street into fine garnet ribbons, which he seasoned with a little soy sauce, sesame oil and a pinch of pepper before serving. Tuna tartare is the only other main course served here, but it had already sold out that night.

The tartare, which we ate with sides of rice and Korean salad, was excellent. And there were only two things about this meal that left me unhappy when we walked home afterwards. No sooner than we’d stepped out on to the sidewalk, then my mandoo craving ferociously began to renew itself, and I also left without the comfort of having another reservation to look forward to, because I have some travel coming up. On the other hand, one of the places I’ll be going is New York, which means, you guessed it, a meal or two at the Mandoo Bar there, where I’ll stuff myself with the kimchi stuffed mandoo that I’d wager Kwangloc has deemed too potent to find favor with the French palate.

7 rue d’Edimbourg, 8th Arrondissement, Tel.01-55-06-08-53.Metro: Europe, Saint Lazare or Liege. Closed Saturday lunch and Sunday. Average 25 Euros.

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Sauteed squid and white beans at Cafe Trama

If all big cities change constantly, there’s one change that I’ve witnessed over the years in all of the cities I know and love best, including Paris, New York and London, that consistently saddens me, and that’s an ever decreasing diversity in their center-city streetscapes. What really brought this thought home was a recent Saturday morning in London when I was walking down Sloane Street and found it transformed in a souless alley of luxury boutiques guarded by security men with little curly black devices in their ears. Sloane Street has always been prime turf, of course, but when I last lived in London a longtime ago, there were still several pubs, a hairdresser and even a convenience grocer on that patch of pricey turf, and now they’re all gone. The same thing’s happened in many parts of Paris and New York, too–rising rents and increasing real-estate values thresh a neighborhood in favor of the same international luxury brand names you see in every city all over the world, and in this process what goes missing are the quirky little shops that give a place its character and also many of the homely ones that sell things you actually might need if you live locally.

Happily, they’re some streets that resist this process, and among them in Paris are the rue Vignon, which is right in the heart of the city behind the Madeleine, and on the Left Bank, the rue du Cherche Midi. Returning from a trip to the south of France on a recent Friday night, it was a real relief for me to see that so many of the shops I knew on the rue du Cherche Midi during the many years I lived on the rue du Bac are still there as I walked up the street in almost its entire length to meet Bruno for dinner at the charming Cafe Trama. The quincaillerie (hardware store) I always liked for its voyeur-at-a-keyhole glimpse of an orderly French domestic life that eluded me for years is still there just across the street from the ever popular cafe Le Nemrod and even the dreaded laundromat I used to use before fate smiled on me and freed me from that miserable chore–like all city-dwellers without washing machines, I always waited too long and then I always suffered the anxiety of wondering if one of the four dryers serving over a dozen washing machines might be available once my clothes were washed, survives. It sure did put a skip in step to walk by that place, though, and as I headed up the street it was also a pleasure to notice that a lot of new casual dining options have opened along this stretch, including the table that was my destination.

I decided on this new place, because a friend who works at a shop nearby had raved about it and also because it sounded easygoing and straightforward on a Friday night when we were both tired and had already cooked the fridge bare. I got there first and was warmly greeted by an attractive young woman whom I think was Marion Trama–of the celebrated culinary dynasty–and since it was warm, she nicely let me sit at the duece next to the open windows in the main dining room and promptly set me up with a very good glass of Chablis to while away the time over while I waited for Bruno. As the restaurant filled, the crowd was a pleasant mix of local jeunesse dorée, or affluent young locals; shopkeepers; antiquaires; and the sort of arty looking older Left Bank couples who’d be great subjects for a Sempe drawing.

I also liked the relaxed homey atmosphere, the good lighting and a decor that was a mix of tasteful flea-market finds and contemporary furniture, and the chalkboard menu looked appealing, too, for offering a mix of comfort-food classics and modish modern French dishes. As Marion Trama explained to us when she came to take our order after Bruno arrived, the menu was conceived so that you mix and match at will, having, for example, just a salad and some charcuterie, or a proper meal depending on your appetite.

Don’t tell my doctor, but I can never resist oeufs en meurette, or coddled eggs in red-wine-and-bacon sauce, a classic Burgundian dish, when I see them, so they got my dart for a first course, while Bruno had a delicious composition of sauteed squid with fresh white beans from Paimpol in Brittany in a shallow pool of savory slightly smoky bouillon. This was a simple but original and well-conceived dish, and the squid was perfectly cooked. I enjoyed my eggs as well, although the sauce was oddly sweet when I’d have preferred a ruddier range of flavors.

Among a nice run of main courses, including shrimp sauteed with lemongrass and ginger, we both had our hearts set on the steak tartare “à la thaïe,” which translated to coarsely chopped beef from butcher Hugo Desnoyer with a surprisingly successful seasoning of sesame oil, finely diced ginger and lemongrass. I feared that this Asian feint might overwhelm the primal goodness of the beef, but instead it set it into interesting mineral-rich relief, and the accompanying garnishes of mesclun and sauteed potatoes were ideal for their simplicity. With a good bottle of Morgon vieille vignes, this meal was one of those rare and deeply satisfying ones that was as much about being in the right place at the right time as it was the good food.

“I’d definitely come back here,” said Bruno as we shared a slice of pear and mirabelle tart. “The people are nice, the food’s good, the prices are fair, and it’s lively but relaxing.” I agreed, too, and made a mental note that this would be a great place for lunch for anyone touring the Left Bank and also ideal for the same kind of let-your-hairdown tete a tete we’d just enjoyed. It’s true that they’re some nights you just want a good simple meal without a lot of fuss about it, and if you find yourself feeling this way anytime soon, I suspect you’d enjoy the Café Trama as much as we did.

Café Trama, 83 rue du Cherche-Midi, 6th, Tel. 01-45-48-33-71. Metro: Rennes, Saint-Placide or Vaneau. Average 30 Euros.

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There are few things I love more than discovering a French town by visiting its market, and through many years of doing so, I’ve developed a short list of favorite French markets, many of which are in smaller cities and towns, including Rennes, Narbonne, Arles, Antibes, Saint Remy and most recently, Provins, a charming little town just an hour east of Paris (N.B. If you have a favorite market in a French provincial town, I’d love to hear about it). This past weekend, I also had a chance to shop at the market in front of the Musee des Beaux Arts in the small northern French city of Valenciennes, and I snared a very rare treat that I’ve been reading about for years, a tress of l’ail fume d’Arleux, or smoked garlic from the little French town of Arleux, which is famous for same. In fact, the thrill of finding the taste of smoke and garlic combined made it very hard to go out to dinner last night, since I was chomping at the bit to get to work with the odorific braid now dangling in my kitchen, but we hadn’t seen our friends Laurent and Carole since they returned from a two-week trip to Thailand, so we agreed to meet for dinner at Edgar, the restaurant of a new hotel by the same name in the Sentier, which is one of my favorite parts of Paris.

Having been a restaurant sabatical for two weeks while I was writing in a charming borrowed house in the country, I thought it would be good to break my fast with some place light and casual, and in these terms, Edgar, where chef Xavier Thiéry, ex-Le Petit Cheval de Manège is in the kitchen, turned out to be a pretty good choice. It was too cool to sit on the handsome terrace out front of this hotel, but if we have a proper Indian summer in Paris this year, this large terrace overlooking a quiet granite-paved square with very little traffic will continue to be a perfect casual-dining al fresco address.

As it was, we sat inside in the busy dining room at a rather awkward configuration of two tables for two pushed together so that two of us sat side-by-side. The lively dining room was filled with other groups of friends finding each other again after their respective vacations, and it had a great atmosphere with suspented reeditions of Sixties style Scandinavian lamps, retro frump lounge furniture and a young and unexpectedly friendly service team who confirmed my hunch that the days when eating anywhere stylish in Paris meant a nerve-frying encounter with arrogant semi-hostile servers in the style of the Costes establishments, is looking like it’s well and truly over. I sure hope so.

Inspecting the short menu here over the cheapest white wine on the drinks list, a decent white Cotes du Rhone, we decided to go the ‘small plates’ route. A heading entitled “A Partager” (to share) suggested that three dishes for two people as the right portion size so we decided on burrata with poutarge, roasted langoustines with seaweed butter, grilled octopus with cold tomato soup and watermelon, grilled organic shrimp with sesame salt, and two orders of grilled squid with harissa-spiked cucumber pickles. Three main courses were also available–steak, boudin and cod with peas and kumquat puree. I toyed with the idea of the cod, since I was sort of desperate for fish after two weeks in the country, the only local fish available being the rather unappealing selection at the huge Leclerc supermarket outside of Coulommiers, but we decided we’d hold off on mains until we’d had all of the small plates, which came up quickly and were accompanied by a bowl of good mesclun salad and another of delcious frites.

The burrata with poutargue (preserved fish eggs) was pleasant enough, but the langoustines (3) were sliced in half and their meaty was pasty instead of firm, a disappointment for 16 Euros.

Happily, the octopus was delicious–a perfectly grilled tentacle coiled in a pool of spicy yellow tomato soup with chunks of watermelon that made a feint at the taverna food that most of the crowd here that night had only so recently been eating on Paros, the Greek island of predeliction for trendy Parisians this past summer. The shrimp were plump and juicy and the sesame salt was an inspired garnish for these crustaceans, too. What I really loved, though, were the baby squid, just seared, so that they were still tender and milky with the piquant cucumber pickles offering an unexpectedly complementary garnish in terms of flavor and texture.

Six plates really did work out to be an adequate feed for four, and overall, this comfort-food flush was appealing and successful. We finished up with shared rice pudding with apricot compote and caramel sauce and a vanilla millefeuille from the Moulin de la Vierge chain of bakeries, the brown pastry layers of this later being thick for the convenience of restaurateuers–no one likes a soggy millefeuille, but oddly shirt-cardboard tasting.

Though far from being a head thrown back gastronomic experience, we had fun at the Edgar, which also serves breakfast and brunch on the weekends, and the alert and very pleasant young staff were a major reason that the evening went off so well.

Edgar, Hotel Edgar, 31 rue d’Alexandrie, 2nd, Tel. 01-40-41-05-19. Metro: Sentier, Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, or Réaumur-Sébastopol. Open Monday-Saturday for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Sunday brunch only. www.hoteledgar.com

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