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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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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A room with a view

Reinventing a restaurant as famous as La Tour d’Argent was always going to be fraught with problems. Why Well, if some clients might welcome the changes, perhaps even muttering under their breath, ‘Thank goodness, it’s about time!,’ others would denounce even the most reverent tinkering with the experience of a meal here as heresy. “They’ve absolutely ruined the place!” these sanctimonious self-appointed guardians of tradition would fume.

Unfortunately, in Paris, in 2016, the culture of the city is generally more in sympathy with a static status quo than innovation. In almost every realm, the past is reflexively judged to be more perfect than the present, which leads to the city’s bizarre officially sanctioned cantankerous determination to become a sort of genteel open-air museum. It also explains the existence of certain restaurants that are fussy, fretful gastronomic mausoleums that commemorate culinary traditions and a stuffy service style few people enjoy anymore, if they ever did.

But change had to come at La Tour d’Argent, which has been rather rudderless for a longtime. Since the death in 2006 of Claude Terrail, the natty gravely voiced boulevardier whose charm was the axis on which this perched table turned for over sixty years, this restaurant has been on an earnest but occasionally fumbling quest to renew its raison d’etre. The old formula of gallantly pandering to a self-satisfied international beau-monde that kept its reservation book full just wasn’t working anymore. In fact, the framed photos and autographs of the socialites, royals, and other celebrities who adored this place in its post-war hay day from 1950 to 1975 are decidedly momento mori now, and in any event, the general public is less impressed by such pedigrees in the age of the selfie and—woe is me– the Kardashians.

Langouste, soupe froide, cucumber

So leaving the visual possibility of an alarming overly ambitious facelift happily to one side, the kitchen had to be the place for any serious relaunch of this legend, and happily, that’s exactly where it’s happened. But first, for anyone who prefers a short-take, here it is: Now run by Andre Terrail, son of Claude, the Tour d’Argent has a brilliant new chef who has made the restaurant a serious gastronomic contender in Paris again.

With the arrival of the superbly talented Philippe Labbé, it looks like this grande dame of Gallic gastronomy has finally been granted a deeply delicious new lease on life. This means it’s a place you not only can go to again but one you should prioritize if you want an impeccably cooked meal of exquisite classical French cooking in a romantic setting with magnificent views.

I knew nothing about this, of course, when I somewhat ruefully headed here for lunch the other day, having received an invitation from Penelope, aka “Penny,” a second cousin from Philadelphia whom I hadn’t seen in at least a good twenty, maybe twenty-five, years. This is why my first response to her note—the invitation came on a heavy cream-colored monogrammed notecard, was a phone call to try to delicately suggest that maybe we might eat at another classic Parisian table of her choice, one where the food was likely to be better. But she stuck to her guns, saying she wanted to see the view again after so many years, and that she was sure the food would be “just fine.”

Arriving a little early, I lingered on the banks of the Seine across the street from the restaurant, and peering down at the dark moss green waters of the river, I hoped she’d be right and recalled the first time I ever ate there, which was also a good twenty years ago when I was writing a restaurant column in English for the pages that Time Out, the London arts-and-listings magazine, then published in the back of Pariscope. It was an incompatible marriage because the Paris weekly never quite achieved the quality level of the ten-page supplement the British publication edited. To wit, Time Out prided itself on a certain critical acuity and occasionally biting wit, while Pariscope never dared bite any hand that might feed it.

In any event, I had suggested to the editor of Time Out Paris that we might do an eating guide to Paris that reprised my weekly columns and add other new material, and so we did, with the help of many other talented local English-speaking reviewers, including the lovely Rosa Jackson, who eventually became editor of the guide and who now runs a superb cooking school, Les Petits Farcis, in Nice.

In the context of the severely straightened circumstances of editorial budgets in 2016, it now seems astonishing, but Time Out actually paid for every meal that was reviewed in its pages. They were good for a median priced meal for two, plus the cheapest bottle of wine on the menu, with any other extras being at the charge of the reviewer. Since La Tour d’Argent was a big fish, I asked Lemisse, one of the other editors on the guide, if she wanted to join me, and so we met in a café nearby for a Dutch courage glass of wine before we rather improbably cast ourselves into a tableau of la vie en rose that neither of us could have otherwise afforded short of escort work, winning the lottery or an inheritance.

Stepping through the doors, we found we’d unwittingly entered a steeplechase of courtesies that brought us to our table exhausted by the exertions of graciously acknowledging a good dozen or more ‘Bonsoirs’ of varying degrees of warmth and sincerity. Miraculously, though, we had a window table. To be sure it was at the far end of the dog’s leg dining room, and so with a partial view, but it was a window table nonetheless.

When our solemn waiter arrived with menus, he paused first and slowly eyeballed us. His verdict expressed by raised eyebrows and his nose wrinkled into a clenched pink knot like a rabbit was so gloriously theatrical that we had trouble not immediately dissolving into gales of laughter. Because this was exactly what we’d expected. To wit, we’d signed up for that most bizarre of gastronomic coinages, the gourmet meal that was meant to be politely and humbly endured rather than enjoyed.

Chef Philippe Labbé

So we were studying the menu with no small degree of financial trepidation, when someone delivered a testosterone riddled boom of a tableside greeting, “Bonsoir, Madame, Bonsoir, Monsieur!”

We looked up. A handsome older man with steel gray hair was half bowed tableside, and neither of us had a clue as to who he was or what response was expected from us. “Bonsoir,” I finally mumbled back.

“Is this the first time you’ve dined at La Tour d’Argent?” the man inquired. We nodded. “Is it a honeymoon?” We vigorously shook our heads. “I see…” He stroked his chin. “May I advise you then?”

“If you’d like,” I said noncommittally, since I was seeking to head off a serious wound to my wallet with my rent due just three days later. And then, when I noticed the bachelor’s button in  his lapel, I realized with a blood-chilled chagrin that I’d been speaking to none other than Claude Terrail himself.

We ended up with starters of scallops with truffle shavings and artichoke stuffed with crabmeat—nice food, if not memorable, and then we tucked into the Canard de l’An 2000 (Duck of the year 2000), which entitled us to the numbered postcards that are the great souvenir of a meal here—every duck served is numbered, but otherwise disappointed. Instead of tableside service, we were served two juicy ducks breasts in red wine sauce and duck thighs with a vinegary salad on the side. All told, a pleasant if unremarkable meal with a sad and particularly penurious half-bottle of Chinon.

Treating ourselves to a needed night-cap after dinner, Lemisse and I agreed that neither of us would ever need to repeat that particularly experience again, and so this is where I’d left off with La Tour d’Argent. Occasionally, friends visiting Paris did go, however, and their post-prandial comments were generally middling to wilted, with the view usually being mentioned as the highlight of the experience.

And so finally I crossed the street and met my second cousin in the reception area of the restaurant. She was wearing a dress of pistachio-colored linen, a cameo and Victorian style red coral jewelry that I’m sure her mother had bought on a trip to Sorrento around 1880. The retired headmistress of a prestigious girl’s school on the Main Line, she still had an imposing aura about her despite the girlishness evoked by the coral- colored velvet Alice band that held her oat-colored hair back.

The waiters seemed to understand that this was a woman not to be trifled with either, and we were promptly escorted to a table with a spectacular full-on view over Paris that took my breath away. On an intermittently overcast day, the city was heart-breakingly beautiful in its summer-stunned majesty, with the gardens behind Notre Dame sticking into the Seine like a green trident and sea gulls mixing with pigeons against a backdrop of pewter gray roofs punctuated by notable domes and spires.

When the great surprise of Philippe Labbé’s arrival was unveiled while we were having a glass of Champagne, the day suddenly became infinitely festive. Oh, I knew my second cousin, a classicist, would bring up the fact that I had been a terrible Latin student in high school and also ask me why I wasn’t married, but I wasn’t going to let these arrows dim my pleasure in a good meal. And with the passage of time, it occurred to me that however well-aimed her remarks might be, their effect was now more likely to be briefly startling, like pricking your finger on a needle, than wounding, since I no longer sought after or much cared about her ‘good’ opinion of me.

“Isn’t this lovely,” she said when she started reading the menu. “Please throw all cares to the winds, Alec. It’s my treat, of course, and another old relative popped off recently and left me some loot, so let’s spend some of it, shall we?” Emboldened, I ordered the Breton langouste (145 Euros) as my starter, and the beautiful copper-and-calico-colored crustacean was brought to the table live for my inspection before reappearing in an enthereal puddle of cool pink bisque seasoned with lemon verbena. The langouste (rock lobster) had been shelled, and its tender meat road small buoys of cucumber, a beautiful contrast of textures between the crunchy vegetable and the sweet flesh of the lobster.

Quenelles de brochet

I was so engrossed in the elegance of this dish, so lost in my own selfish trance of pleasure, that I was surprised to hear someone speaking to me, my cousin. “Would you like to taste this?” she asked, and of course, I did, since she’d ordered a “Quenelle du 21eme Siècle” as part of her lunch menu. Looking as my second cousin’s leonine profile as she sipped her Chassagne Montrachet, it fleetingly occurred to me that she could be a lesbian, but then again, she had been married to the late Oliver, a nice soft-spoken book editor at a now equally defunct Philadelphia publishing house (all of publishing is now extinct in Philadelphia, to my knowledge, and this is a shame, since these small houses often took chances on books that were judged too unlikely to be financially successful by the New York editors).

The pillowy quenelle, a pike-perch dumpling native to Lyon and environs and one of my favorite classical French dishes, was simply brilliant in an impeccably deconstructed sauce Nantua (crayfish sauce) that was a richly flavored as it was astonishing light. Ornamented by a little ring of tiny girolles mushrooms, baby peas, and fragile leaves of salad burnet and woodruff, the quenelle was very beautiful, too. I guessed that it was these vegetal garnishes, and perhaps a tiny dose of vanilla added to the sauce Nantua, that made the dish 21^st century, since it was otherwise a flawless homage to Escoffier. And yet it was also very subtlely modern, since Labbé has an extraordinary talent for calibrating infinitesimal tweaks to a dish that move it almost imperceptibly off-center and make it his own.

As we ate there was family chatter between us, including a reminiscence by Penny about a Thanksgiving dinner at my paternal grandmother’s during which another cousin suddenly decided to breast feed her baby at the table. I was just on the verge of adolescence at the time, but it struck me as a perfectly normal thing to do and also sort of fascinated me to see the baby going at the distended nipple so greedily. For almost everyone else, though, it was a high distasteful lapse of good manners. And then there was another cousin who came with his Bolivian girl friend—he’d been in the Peace Corps there, who had long thick black braids and wore a black bowler hat to lunch and cracked and sucked on the bone of her drumstick.

We laughed over these memories, but I couldn’t quite place Penny’s sympathies during their recitation.

What I left unsaid, however, was that my main interest in going to that particular meal was the thrill of blowing on the embers of the hopeless crush I had on another second cousin, the smolderingly handsome Bart, who had unwittingly won my ten year old heart the summer before when he looked after me and my brother at a Long Island beach club.

My honey-roasted Challans duckling breast was served in a sauce of vinegar-spiked pan juices with candied peaches, fresh almonds and a side of Szechuan pepper laced muesli. Now, this was one very sexy dish, and a sly one, too, since Labbé had had his own way with the restaurant’s traditional fowl. Juicy, flavorful, and a perfectly toothsome balance between chewy and tender, this bird struck me as Labbe’s own edible version of La Marianne, that kitschy female incarnation of France that appears in bust forms in government buildings.

Meanwhile, across the table, Penny was apparently very happy with her John Dory filet in an acidulated sauce seasoned with lemongrass and ginger with garnishes of girolles, radishes, and tomatillos, the first I’ve ever seen in France. We exchanged a smile or two while were ate, but were otherwise quiet like some companionable long-married couple. Or so I thought.

When our plates were removed, she cleared her throat. “Alec, you know I’ve always been rather jealous of you.” I think she enjoyed my look of surprise. “I mean the reckless, selfish throw all cares to the winds way that you moved to New York City after college, studiously avoided all of the ‘nice’ young people your Aunt wanted you to befriend, and threw yourself into, as I’ve been made to understand, a whirlwind of nightlife and sex and illicit substances.”

I said nothing.

“Well, I just wish I’d had the courage to do the same thing. I wish I’d gone to Studio 54 and dated famous dancers and, well, all of that. I mean, it must have been so much fun.”

“It was. But then so is this lunch. Life changes, and new pleasures come along to replace the old ones,” I said.

“Yes, but I’m sorry I didn’t know any of those old ones,” Penny replied.

When waiter interrupted us to take our dessert order, I caught the gaze of the heavily rouged, kohl-eyed older woman with a necklace of apricot-sized amber beads and a silver-headed cane at the table next to ours, and she winked. Ah, so we had an audience, and suddenly the previously matronly looking dining room with its royal blue carpet with a bronze flourish patter, mirrored ceiling, and royal blue velvet covered Louis XVI or something chairs revealed a side of itself as a setting that might have tantalized the late photographer Helmut Newton. I ordered caramelized white peaches with lime sorbet and lemon-verbena yogurt. Penny chose strawberries marinated in wine with black olive puree and sugared scrambled eggs with pistachios, a fascinating entremet.

We smiled at each other when our desserts were served, but after a single strawberry, Penny put her spoon down.

“Did you know that I did a junior year abroad in England?”

“I didn’t.”

“Yes, in London, where I studied ancient languages and Victorian literature.” She looked out the window, and I respected her long pause.

“I went away for a weekend once with one of my professors, to Brighton we went, me and Charlotte, and we had a lovely time. I often wonder how different my life might be today if I’d stayed. I was in love, but, well, I just couldn’t see how it could work out. Or rather, perhaps I just didn’t have the courage to make it work, so I went home and married Oliver.”

I put my hand on top of hers on the table. So this was why she’d wanted, or rather needed, to see me so badly.

“Mais Cherie! Vous etes toujours tres belle! C’est jamais trop tard!” called our neighbor, and Penny started laughing so hard she had to blot up tears with her napkin. Then the lady excused herself with a chuckle and a little wave and slowly made her way across the dining room.

A minute later the waiter reappeared and poured us some very good Champagne, explaining that it was a gift from ‘Madame.”

Like Philippe Labbé’s superb cooking at La Tour d’Argent, perhaps a life well-lived then is all about the appreciating the seasons, celebrating subtlety and getting the details right in the end. I hope I don’t have to wait another twenty years before I return to this wonderful restaurant.

15 Quai de la Tournelle, 5^th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-43-54-23-31, Metro: Maubert-Mutualite or Sully-Morland. Open Tuesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.tourdargent.com Average a la carte 250 Euros, prix-fixe menus 210 Euros, 220 Euros, 350 Euros; Lunch menu 105 Euros.

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I’ve been in love with Brittany for nearly thirty years, which isn’t surprising, because I grew up in New England. From my very first visit, this friendly delightfully shaggy and craggy green Celtic province of western France that’s lapped on its back and belly by the Atlantic Ocean has always struck me as an even better version of my own much loved home turf. Why Well, the food, among other things.

If I’ve always loved the tourist Brittany of crepes, oysters, langoustines and homard (lobster) a l’amoricaine, over the course of the decades I’ve lived in France, Brittany has become one of France’s foremost gastronomic regions. Today it rivals, maybe even trumps, parts of Gaul with more established and deeply rooted gastronomic cultures, places like Burgundy and Provence, for example.

These were the thoughts that were bobbing around in my head as we greedily scarfed down a half dozen wild oysters on the edge of the port of Cancale before heading to a superb Sunday lunch at La Table de Breizh Café on a beautiful recent summer day. Since I first dined here a year and a half a go, Japanese chef Raphaël-Fumio Kudaka’s restaurant has become one of my favorite tables, and I was looking forward to having a meal here with Bruno, who loves Breton produce and Japanese cooking as much as I do.

Arriving, we were the first customers of that Sunday lunch service, so we eschewed the Japanese style tables, and opted to sit at the counter where we could watch Kudaka and his team at work and also enjoy the sweeping views and salty breezes of the aquamarine-colored Bay of Mont Saint Michel , which was dotted with exposed oyster parks at low tide.

Since there are only two tasting menus available here on Saturday and Sunday, 75 Euros or 135 Euros, it was easy enough to make a choice. With a train ride back to Paris before us after lunch, and having lavishly well eaten during the previous days, we went with the former, to which we added a tempura course at a supplement. That taken care of, I was able to explain the genesis of this restaurant to Bruno.

After hotel school in Dinard, Breton Bertrand Larcher worked in Switzerland and then moved to Tokyo, where he opened that city’s first Breton crêperie in 1996. Eventually he returned to France and opened crêperies in Cancale, Saint-Malo and Paris that rebooted a genre made stale by tourist induced mediocrity by using seriously good quality produce, much of it organic, and making his crêperies into little showcases for the superb foods of his home province. When Larcher met Raphaël-Fumio Kudaka, who had previously worked with Olivier Roellinger in Cancale, they decided to open a restaurant where Kudaka would cook his own very personal Breton-Japanese cuisine.

The opening course of the meal was a spectacular composition of grilled chicken and shelled lobster with toasted buckwheat grains and a thatch of cucumber, snow peas, kohlrabi, coriander, ginger and parsley in a miso-spiked vinaigrette anointed this perfect coupling of products from the Armor, the Breton word for “land near the sea,” the Argoat, “land of the forest.” This is the recurring yin and yang of a meal at La Table de Breizh Café–creating perfect balance in dishes that include both Brittany’s superb fish and shellfish and its extraordinary meat, vegetables, fruit and dairy produce, and it’s also the defining signature of contemporary Breton cooking across the province.

“I couldn’t imagine what Breton and Japanese food might have in common,” said Bruno, “But now it seems quite logical,” as he said as he tucked into a deep-fried scallop roll on a cushion of dried tofu in a deeply reduced lip-smackingly gelatinous sauce of shellfish bouillon. Both kitchens are informed by a great humility, venerate the produce they work with, prize subtlety, layer textures and are aesthetically alert without ever becoming twee.

The tempura plate included a slice of creamy Japanese eggplant (aubergine), a jalapeño pepper, a cube of tofu, a slice of shrimp mousse bound in a ribbon of leek, and, best of all, a crispy bon-bon of veal sweetbread wrapped in a shiso leaf; this was a brilliant dish, because the gently mentholated taste of the shiso tempered the rich animal custard without overwhelming its delicate earthiness.

The last dish was the most Breton of the meal and also demonstrated Kudaka’s ability to sublimate the region’s best produce through his deep knowledge of both French cooking and the Japanese kitchen. The impeccably cooked rack of Breton pork came with a blaze of red miso on its crown of crunchy golden crackling and was garnished with Paimpol beans, romanesco, seaweed, purslane and a slice of excellent head cheese topped with a wasabi-spiked sauce gribiche. What made this composition so deeply satisfying was that it had nothing to do with ‘fusion’ cooking but reflected an almost painterly understanding of taste, since the umami-rich miso and racing wasabi were such distinctive and quietly exhilarating signatures.

Though the Japanese have an admirable capacity to master the technical skills necessary to become great pastry chefs, the seductive drama that’s at the heart of creating great pastry does not figure into their gastronomic geometry as the grand finale of a meal. Instead, Japanese desserts are intended to be as sincere, consoling and innocent as a kiss from your grandmother. And this was exactly the winsome pleasure delivered by a composition of cheesecake like tofu flan, peach and red miso ice cream, and poached white peaches.

Adding to the experience of Kudaka’s spectacularly good cooking, service at this restaurant is very Breton, which is to say professional, friendly and good-humored, and there’s an excellent wine list–we drank a beautiful 2013 Gauby Vieilles Vignes Blanc with our meal–and a superb selection of sakes.

La Table de Breizh Café, 7 quai Thomas, First floor, Cancale; Closed Tuesday and Wednesday. Lunch menu 38 Euros (Monday to Friday only), Prix-fixe menus 75 Euros, 135 Euros. Tél. (33) 02-99-89-56-46. www.breizhcafe.com 

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On my way to dinner at Le Frank, chef Jean-Louis Nomicos’s very good new restaurant at La Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, I found myself musing on museum dining.

I’ve always had a soft spot for museum restaurants, even if many of them have never previously been very good, because they were such a relief from the long studious hours I was required to spend gazing at saints with arrows sticking out of their sides or fleshy ladies being chased by a satyr or other paintings in the museums I was taken to in various East Coast cities as a boy by my well-meaning mother and grandmother. It’s not that I didn’t like looking at the paintings, but rather that we always stayed much too long, and that the real treat during any visit to the city–mostly New York, but sometimes Boston or Philadelphia–was going to a restaurant. On rainy or snowy days, of which there were many, the ladies in charge often opted for the museum restaurant, however.

So I have vivid memories of the mediocre fried chicken, meat loaf and other hot food served at the now long vanished cafeteria at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. If the food was as dull as the invariably wet-from-the-dishwasher fiberglass tray on which it was pushed down the rails, the restaurant itself was exquisitely glamorous. It was styled like a Roman villa around a central atrium with a big fountain ornamented with verdigris bronze figures, and it used to prick my imagination with yearning to live like an ancient Roman rather than as a boy in a colonial house in suburban Connecticut.

“I bet the Romans didn’t eat meat loaf,” I once said to my grandmother, and my assertion disguised, sort of, as a question elicited a puzzled look from her.

“Well–probably not. But if they did, I expect they’d have covered it with garum,” she said, and puffed her Parliament.

“What’s garum#8221;

“A fish sauce the Romans used to fancy. I expect it tasted a bit like a cross between A1 Sauce and Worcestershire sauce with a lot of anchovy paste.”

Be that as it may, even garum probably couldn’t have rendered the Met’s gray meat loaf palatable, and these feelings of general dubiousness towards museum food remained my a priori until very recently.

Then several years ago, I had a very good meal at the restaurant at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain when it was run by Basque chef Martin Berasategui (it no longer is). This was followed by an excellent lunch at Danny Meyer’s The Modern restaurant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and then a terrific feed at M. Wells Dinette at the MoMA P.S. 1 in Long Island City, New York. Recently I read that chef Michel Bras is running the restaurant at the new Musée Pierre Soulages in Rodez, too.

The museum restaurant, once the last resort dining choice for grandmothers with their grandsons on rainy days, is clearly on a roll.

On a pretty Fall night, the Fondation Louis Vuitton looked like a turfed glass cloud when I arrived, and the only discordant thing about architect Frank Genry’s beautiful building was the huge shiny LV emblem branding the building. Since the name of the museum is the Fondation Louis Vuitton is clearly legible over the front door, this commercial overstatement struck me as a very false note, but from the moment I met Bruno at the restaurant, the habitual elegance of Louis Vuitton came into play.

Beneath a school of softly illuminated Gehry designed school of suspended fishes that looked like a motif from Japanese porcelain, the understated dining room is tucked away behind a gorgeous walnut screen and is furnished with sumptuous gray leather banquettes and gray-leather-and-walnut chairs. Only open for a week that night, it was pulling a stylish Western Paris and suburbs crowd–the couple on one side of us was trying to decide between a winter vacation in the Seychelles or the Maldives, while the two immaculately coiffed and dressed ladies of a certain age on the other flank talked about their dog groomers.

Still, this museum restaurant was off to a much better start than any I’d been to in Paris for a very long time, and they would be Georges, with its appalling service and mediocre food on top of the Centre Pompidou; the equally snooty, over-priced and mediocre Cafe Marly at the Louvre; and the beautiful but underperforming restaurant at the Musée d’Orsay. For openers, Le Frank is beautiful, and with talented and winsomely sincere chef Jean-Louis Nomicos in charge, I knew we’d eat well, and we did, very well.

After an amuse bouche of pleasantly ruddy pumpkin soup with garnishes  of creme fraiche, croutons and baked chestnuts, Bruno tucked into the sea bream carpaccio with marinated carrots, “lemon caviar” (fine grains of lemon pulp), basil and piment d’Espelette, and I chose the egg cooked sous-vide and nestled in a bed of Jerusalem artichoke puree on top of a delicious soubise of onions. The egg came with match-sticks of black truffle and the dish was just as soothing and satisfying as climbing into a hot bath.

As I’ve come to expect from Nomicos, who also runs the very good Les Tablettes de Jean-Louis Nomicos, and whose cooking I’ve known at both La Grande Cascade and then Lasserre, both dishes were impeccably prepared and masterfully seasoned. I couldn’t help but also thinking, however, that this food was rather polite, in terms of being pretty and inoffensive in olfactory terms, and I guessed that the briefing the chef had received from the Fondation probably emphasized the importance of aesthetics and the need for olfactory discretion, too, since the dining room is just off the lobby of the museum. So there was little chance of finding bottles of fresh garum on the tables at Le Frank. Intead, I gather that Louis Vuitton wanted cooking in what it sees as its own image–beautiful, classic, discreetly stylish and carefully crafted. So hold the garlic, and don’t get crazy.

Nomicos, a gifted and deeply experienced chef, doesn’t have to tack too far from his natural style to satisfy what I’m guessing to be Vuitton’s marching orders either, since a certain visual and gustatory elegance has always been a major part of his signature. But what gives his cooking character is the earthy Mediterranean punctation of his cooking. It was the syncopated crown of black-olive powder that really lit up my steamed sea bass on a bed of finely sliced snow peas with a nicely made sauce vierge,which would have been even better if the tomatoes weren’t so wan. And in Bruno’s braised veal cheek with a ragout of ceps, it was the marigold, another vivid Mediterranean touch–Nomicos is from Marseille–in the sauce that brightened this composition and made it personal. Ultimately, Nomicos’s cooking, whether here or at his own restaurant, is often so choir-boy winsome that I’ve occasionally found myself wondering what he’d cook if he suddenly jumped the gastronomic rails. That’s not going to happen at Le Frank–this restaurant is all about shrewd gastronomic branding, a conceit that’s more Louis Vuitton’s than Nomicos’s–but someday I hope to find out. In the meantime, however, I’ll happily go to any address where Nomicos is cooking and enjoy his craft, because there’s no logical reason to complain about a cook as solidly talented as he is.

Desserts–a sort of post-modern riff on baba au rhum and a clever lemon tart with meringue drops–were beautifully made, too, and if the service still needs some fine tuning, Le Frank is a delightful restaurant and a great night out if you decide to dine here after visiting the museum on Friday, when the museum stays open until 11pm. Note that they serve a light lunch menu and tea-time menu at the restaurant outside of dinner hours, and that it’s simple but very appealing, too.

8 Avenue du Mahatma Gandhi, 16th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-58-44-25-70. Metro: Les Sablons. www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr , Open Wednesday to Sunday from noon to 7pm. Dinner by reservation only Wednesday to Saturday. Average lunch 35 Euros, Average dinner 70 Euros.

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The best restaurant on the Cote d’Azur, the storied Mediterranean stalking ground of the world’s rich and famous that’s known as the Riviera in English, is Mirazur. It makes me happy to be this blunt, too, since the Riviera–I’ll opt for the English parlance, is encrusted with fussy over-priced restaurants where eager gastronomic novices flock every summer only to be fleeced and disappointed. Oh, to be sure, they’re many wonderful restaurants along the coast, but they’re usually the simple ones not the fancy places with waiters in tuxedos and food that’s served under silver-plated domes. I’m talking about great little bistros like L’Armoise in Antibes or Agua and L’Ecole de Nice in Nice. So the definitive superlative I’m awarding here is in the context of what the French call haute cuisine, or the very best cooking, and at this most ambitious and most expensive end of the food chain, very few of the restaurants exalted by famous guidebooks warrant the wound to your wallet.  Mirazur does.

I hadn’t been here since I came for lunch two years ago when I was researching HUNGRY FOR FRANCE, and as much as I enjoyed that meal, I wasn’t able to really lose myself in the beauty of chef Mauro Colagreco’s cooking, because I was with a photographer who was shooting every dish we’d ordered for the book. So this time was different. For one thing, I was alone, which was fine, since sometimes it’s a pleasure to embark on a long leisurely meal by yourself and especially with a stunningly beautiful view of the Mediterranean as company. So I sipped a flute of rose Champagne and looked forward to the tasting menu that was shortly to unfold. It began with a trio of delicate hors d’oeuvres, including a sampling of fresh tomatoes from the garden that Colagreco has on the hillside just across the street from his restaurant, a beignet of smoked eel, and a seaweed strewn clam on the half-shell with an intriguing garnish of leche de tigre, the Peruvian sauce that’s used to make ceviche and which is a liquefied mixture of fish, lemon, onion and ají.

The clam brought on a rush of pleasure with its simplicity and also because it awoke my memories of why I’ve always loved Colagreco’s cooking. The Argentine born chef, who trained with a variety of great French chefs, including the late Bernard Loiseau, Alain Passard, Alain Ducasse and Guy Martin, has a lyrical gastronomic signature all his own–his food is stunningly fresh and exudes a tenderness both in its execution and its aesthetics. This makes it a surprise to meet Colagreco, by the way, since he’d make a good rugby player, but then again, looks are often, or even usually, deceiving. And as if to confirm my musings, the first course of my meal arrived, a plump Gillardeau oyster with shallot cream, tapioca pearls, and a riff on the pear that include balls of the fruit and its juice. It would never have occurred to me that pears could make an oyster more eloquent, but the sweetness of the fruit teased the lactic flavors of the bivalve, with tiny sprigs of salicorne, or crunchy seaweed, serving as punctuation. This dish was a quiet elegant edible surprise, which is what the best haute cuisine is always about.

The salad of beans with fleshy almost black Napoleon cherries, pistachios and razored slices of zucchini was similarly delicate, completely unexpected and deeply refreshing. Eating it with some of the hot bread that was served at the same time with a little pool of olive oil and a brilliant poem about bread by Pablo Neruda, I resolved to attempt some version of it at home, but I rather doubt I’ll be able to find cherries as good as Colagreco’s in Paris. Freshness and a mastery of cooking times so precise they seem calibrated to the quarter second are the fundaments of Colagreco’s cooking.

His palate is restrained and very subtle, too–he wants you to taste his beautiful produce and would almost never do anything that would obscure its natural flavors. Sometimes he sublimates them, though, by matting them against a contrasting flavor, as was true of my next course,  sea snails, squid and zucchini in a gently tamarind seasoned broth, and the brilliant dish that followed, seared squid finely sliced into ribbons with a bagna caudal, the Piemontese sauce made with garlic, anchovies, olive oil and butter.

This meal may be starting to sound like a lot of food, but it wasn’t, because portions hit that sweet spot between fiddly tasting plates and a full serving, and the pacing of the meal was impeccable. It helped, too, that the general atmosphere in this restaurant is palpably happy and relaxed, or light years from what one might usually expect at a Michelin two star table. The dish that followed was my favorite, a filet of Chapon on a ragout of chickpeas, tiny zucchini, and cod tripe with fennel flowers. The various textures of the ragout flattered the fish and the gently contrasting tastes constituted one of the most magnificently subtle Mediterranean muddles I’ve ever tasted.

Roasted shoulder of lamb pirouetted away from the primal tastes of the Chapon with a vivid sauce of fresh plums and vanilla that served as an elegant prelude to dessert. On this warm afternoon, with dessert looming, I found myself hoping that they’d be small and refreshing.

So I was delighted when a rosewater granite with raspberries and blueberries came to the table. For me, this superb meal could have ended here, but Colagreco had a final surprise in store. Once I’d shattered the transparent pane of sugar on top of the bowl it came in, the saffron-flavored cream with a foam of new almonds and orange sorbet was just about the most perfect summer dessert I could imagine, since the saffron had the effect of gently tucking the palate in for a nap after the delicious ardors of a spectacular meal. Colagreco is a brilliant chef.

Mirazur, 30 avenue Aristide Briand, Menton, Tel. (33) 04-92-41-86-86. Email : reservation@mirazur.fr  www.mirazur.fr  Summer hours (mid July to the end of August): Open Thursday to Sunday for lunch, open daily for dinner; Winter hours (mid-February to early November): Open Wednesday to Sunday for lunch and dinner. Prix-fixe menus 47 Euros (not served on weekends), 70 Euros, 100 Euros, 140 Euros.

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On the waterfront: Sitges 

My discovery of Catalan cooking dates to an almost comically unsuccessful stint as an English teacher in Barcelona in the mid-eighties. I had a gap between two jobs in New York and a close friend’s brother, who was then living in Barcelona, told us a school there was looking for two native English speakers to run English conversation classes. My pal had a two-month hole in his schedule, too, so we applied and were hired despite the fact that neither of us had any teaching experience. The school specialized in teaching business English to executives, so reporting to work on our first morning on two hours of sleep and with nearly medical hangovers, we discovered that we were expected to wear jackets and ties at the school–a problem, since neither of us had brought either, and that there were two classes, one for men and one for women. It seemed a no-brainer to me that the women would be easier and more fun to teach than the men, and since my friend came to the same conclusion, we flipped a coin, and I lost.

There was an open communicating door between the two classrooms, so I could see and hear what my friend was up to, and I knew that things weren’t going very well when I heard him pose the following question to his ladies: “Do you like birds#8221; Silence was the appropriate response to this gambit, and silence was what he got. Meanwhile, my besuited men emitted a pleasant fugue of Puig Agua Lavanda and were shy and very polite. I explained, with major omissions, who I was and where I was from, and offered up that this was my first visit to Barcelona, a city I found very beautiful. Murmur of appreciation. Then I asked them what I should see in their city while I was there. A few murmured responses–Sagrada Familia, etc. Next I heard myself saying, “Do you like to barbecue in Catalunya#8221; My friend next door whopped with laughter at this one, but until you’ve tried you’d striking up a conversation with a room full of total strangers in dark suits old enough to be your father, I’d suggest you hold your fire. To my great surprise, someone raised his hand. “We do like to barbecue, and right now is the season of the calçots,” said a good-looking older man in the front row. Calçots “Special onions of the springtime.” Now someone else joined in. “We make them grilled and mother (sic) them with romesco.” Romesco (a delicious Catalan mortar-made sauce of almonds, peppers, garlic, olive oil and sometimes tomatoes) But how to mother them “You roll the onion in the sauce like a baby.” But of course you’d never smother a baby.

Soon we were well out of the gate, since I’d inadvertently found a subject that impassioned this room full of accountants, copy writers and lawyers. They told me where to go to eat calçots, which are indeed delicious, and they became my tutors in one of the Mediterranean’s great kitchens, since they’d come to our morning classes with restaurant recommendations written down on little scraps of paper and deliver oral recipes for their favorite dishes. Meanwhile, next door, I was still hearing things like, “Do you like cats or dogs?, which was almost the equivalent of a phrase from a German-English phrasebook my grandmother owned, which had became a family joke: “Excuse me, Madame, but there’s a cinder in your hat.”

Some years later, my fledgling knowledge of Catalan cooking got a big boost when I met Marimar Torres, the California winemaker from the distinguished Vilafranca de Penedes wine family, while I was doing a story on her family for a nice and now sadly defunct wine-country living magazine based in Napa, California. She cooked a superb lunch for me at her family’s house in Sitges and gave me a copy of her wonderful cookbook, Catalan Country Cooking, which I worked my way through in my kitchen in Paris over the course of the following year.

Despite my best efforts, however, many of the dishes in this book taste much better in situ, because the ingredients they require are not easy to find in Paris, so I always keenly look forward to my trips to Catalunya for the chance to eat its wonderful food.

Unsurprisingly, it’s not always easy to find really good and authentic cooking in the more tourist-oriented beach towns along the Catalan coast, and this is why I was so looking forward to dinner with friends at the restaurant Mare Nostrum in Sitges the other night. This table had come highly recommended by several of the delightful people at the terrific Pares Balta winery in Vilafranca de Penedes and had also been confided to me by the butcher where I shop when Bruno and I are on holiday by the seaside. The egg lady in the market had mentioned it, too, so when we decided to meet our South African pals for dinner, we booked here.

Arriving, it was a jaunty looking place with a taut white awning equipped with ceiling fans sheltering a terrace with well-spaced tables mostly occupied by handsomely groomed Catalan couples and families–the sartorial reflex to a certain relaxed formality in Spain is a wonderful visual tonic, and the welcome was warm. Sliced salami and good warm bread with a bottle of excellent olive oil arrived immediately, and I instantly had the sense of being in a very well-run restaurant with a sincere desire to please. Bruno and I try to eat our arroz (rice) dishes or fideus (short vermicelli) dishes at noon, but the South Africans had just arrived in Spain, so we agreed to throw the dice for rice, which was the only way to decide which one we’d eat, since everyone wanted something different, they’re served for a minimum of two, and they’re even better when made for four.

First, though, some nibbles, and they were wonderful–a mix of tender battered baby squid and flash-fried pimientos de padron, those delicious little green peppers from Galicia that you eat whole, and some delicate, perfectly fried and surprisingly airy salt-cod fritters. With a bottle of chilled 100% xarel lo (local cepage) from nearby Vilafranca de Penedes, the meal was off to an excellent start.

The rice dish was outstanding, too. Cooked in fish stock, the short grain rice from Valencia was still al dente and was an unctuous casserole generously garnished with tender baby artichoke hearts, squid, peas, and peppers, with two rather overcooked prawns on the edge of the plate for decoration. Unlike many Catalan rice dishes, this one came without aioli, but it was so richly flavored and even a little sweet from the artichokes that aioli would have been gilding the lily. Next week when I’m back in woefully rainy Paris, I know this dish will come to mind someday when I’m holding a dripping umbrella in a crowded Metro car, because for me, the best souvenirs you can take home from any holiday are always gastronomic.

After we’d finished slices of homemade fig tart, one of the charming owners of this restaurant served us complimentary shots of some local firewater that went down easily after such a hefty feed, and we learned that this restaurant opened in 1950 and is now run by the third generation of the Marti family, who have an exceptional gift for hospitality. This is the seaside restaurant you always hope you’ll find while you’re on holiday, so special thanks to Maxime Bazart for the wonderful recommendation.

Now if only I could break Bruno of his penchant for elaborate post-dinner cocktails…. But then again, he probably wanted to fling my snifter of very good brandy over the railing, too, and happily we were walking home.

Passeig de la Ribera 60, Sitges, Tel. (34) 93-894-3393, www.restaurantemarenostrum.com, Closed Wednesdays, Average a la carte 50 Euros.

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@ Adrien Durand

As a child of suburbia, I love cities with a passion that goes back to my earliest memories of trips into New York City from our safe and pretty but hopelessly dull nest in suburban Connecticut. I was hugely envious of cousins who were growing up in Manhattan, and once, on the way back to the woods from a Sunday visit to them in the big metropolis, I infuriated my father by suggesting that they were really the lucky ones to live in New York.

“New York is a terrible place to raise children,” he said as an edict, and I squirmed in the back seat and asked him why if this was true my aunt and uncle had decided to bring up my cousins there. “The city is dirty, crowded, unsafe and noisy, and it’s filled with all sorts of strange people,” he said, which suddenly crystalized all of the reasons I loved it so much. Then he added, “You’re too young to understand why it’s so awful anyway.” I don’t remember what I said next, but I really got his goat. “That’s enough of that, young man! The subject is closed. New York is filled with oddballs and perverts.” Well, that did it. I made up my eight-year-old mind on the spot to move there as soon as I possibly could, which I did immediately after graduating from college in even more woesomely bucolic and wholesome Amherst, Massachusetts. And through stints in New York, London, and Paris, with long spells in Prague, Rome, Boston and other cities, I’ve never looked back on my urban ardor.

Instead, I’ve become a permanent student of cities, observing them, trying to understand and decipher them, and delighting in their differences. It’s so innate to me that I rarely even notice it anymore, but the other night when I went to meet a friend for dinner at Monsieur Bleu, the stunningly beautiful new restaurant in the Palais de Tokyo, I found myself meditating on exactly why this restaurant is suddenly so exciting to Parisians this Spring while I waited for my friend to show up, and I didn’t have to think very long. As surely as they require supplies of clean water and electricity, along with police forces, street cleaners, and green spaces, all great cities need a regularly renewed wick of glamour to sustain their own myths. And during a difficult spring in Paris, what with the wretched weather, the limping economy, the strident public argument over gay marriage, and the woeful state of French politics, this restaurant comes along as a big votive candle placed on the altar of Parisian elegance, Parisian chic.

@Adrien Dirand 

With a truly brilliant design by architect Joseph Dirand, this is not only the most beautiful restaurant to have opened in Paris for a very longtime, but the first one in ages that appeals to all of the different tribes of style-setters who make Paris Paris. To wit, you’ll see beautifully groomed as almost only French women can be middle-aged press attaches having dinner with their luxury-brand manager husbands, bien sur, but you’ll also see scruffy social media czars who usually hang out in the 10th arrondissement, hen parties from Neuilly with an alphabet of head-spinningly expensive designer hand bags, film-makers, architects, well, a whole panoply of creative Parisians who are sort of surprised but mostly delighted to be finding themselves in the same room.

As someone who is still surprised that he was once regularly let in to Studio 54 in New York City (I mean, come on, I must been the only person on the dance floor in penny loafers–we’re talking dork with a big D), it’s amazing how often restaurant and club owners forget that the best way to light up the night is with go-for-broke off-the-wall social casting. To wit, there’s nothing duller than eating a meal in a room full of people who are just like you, so for the fashionable restaurant Monsieur Bleu aspires to become–it’s white-hot now, but will this last#8211;someone with a genuis-level understanding of Parisian sociology has to become the master mixologist.

For now at least, it’s that trendy new place in Paris people very often ask me to recommend. Or a restaurant which is every bit as much about design, atmosphere and people-watching as it about the food, which is just fine, if rather expensive. Young chef Benjamin Masson, a shrewd and solid Breton, came from Petrus, the luxury brasserie in the 17th, and so had ample experience in terms of cooking for a crowd like this one. The menu’s sort of fascinating, too, since it’s such a singular snap shot of what Parisians like to eat right now, in 2013, when they let their hair down.

They’re a few predictable surprises, like the box of modish American comfort foods–bacon cheeseburger, fried chicken sandwich, lobster roll (written in English), and a feint or four at the continuing popularity of westernized Asian dishes (turbot in a teriyaki jus) and Italian cooking in Paris. But what I liked best is the good Gallic grub–a Parmentier of Ospital boudin noir, steak tartare, frogs’ legs with garlic and parsley, and a sublime calf’s liver with a sauce of pan juices elongated with a bit of pomegranate juice (gotta get those anti-oxidants into the act somewhere).

Sorry, I didn’t do any photos of the food. My iPhone was almost out of juice that night, and beyond that, the lighting in this restaurant is so golden-glow perfect that my fumble-fingered attempts at photography probably wouldn’t have looked like much. Instead, I just enjoyed the charming company of my friend Karen and a simple if very pleasant meal. Oh, to be sure, I’d have liked a little more foie gras in my warm salad of baby new potatoes with a soft boiled eggg, and her dressed crab with coriander, beet roots and wasabi was timid. But my roast chicken with morels was a succulent French bird, and her calf’s liver came rare as ordered with silky potato puree. The caramel sundae with caramelized pecans hazelnuts propelled me back to being the exasperating boy I was when I irked my erroneously well-intentioned father by challenging his decision that we should live in the suburbs, and Karen kvelled over a slice of Rachel’s cheese cake.

Since I hadn’t intended to write about this meal, I had to call the press officer for pictures the next day. And when they came, I understood exactly why I’d love these rooms so much. Joseph Dirand has sure-footedly reprised the interrupted glamour of the late art deco, early art modern Palais de Toyko by making it modern, warmer and comfortable. And in doing so, he leapt over some seventy-five years or longer during which almost anything decorative in interior design or architecture was disparaged. With their Lalique (original) inserts, green marble, and brass ocean-liner lanterns, these dining rooms are a sight for sore eyes and a real balm for anyone who’s hoping that this still cutting-its-teeth new century might see a modern revival of the Gallic genuis for sensuality in interior design.

My priority when I go out after-hours is seriously good food, but this restaurant is so alluring that if the weather, or rather, when the weather changes this summer, I look forward to organizing a mid-summer’s night party with a bunch of friends on the terrace in front of the restaurant and enjoying one of the best views of the Eiffel Tower in Paris (next time round, I’ll go for the tuna tartare and sea bream with artichokes, too, come to think of).

@Adrien Durand

Monsieur Bleu, 20 Avenue du Président Wilson, 16th, Tel. 01-47-20-90-47. Metro: Alma-Marceau. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Average a la carte 65 Euros. www.monsieurbleu.com 

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An almost universally obeyed tenet of the canon of contemporary tourism unfailingly has tourists shopping for a really good view of any place they visit. I suspect this quaint habit dates back to the era of hot air balloons and improvements in the technology of fair ground rides, which made it possible for anyone with a couple of coins to thrillingly see way over the tree tops for the first time, but beyond that there’s probably always been something refreshingly if head-spinningly humbling about a really good view, since they have a way of putting us in our place. 

  In North American cities, meals with views of the dazzling tentacular metropolis below are a dime a dozen, which is why dining with a view strikes many people as hay-seed corny shading to tacky, but as far as I’m concerned I love a great view while dining. The real problem is that no one needs to be told that it’s usually impossible to find a great meal and a great view in the same place.

   Or do they In Paris, there’s Le Jules Verne in the Eiffel Tower, of course, where the food is good but the prices can induce oxygen deprivation, and of course the other problem here is that you don’t get to enjoy Paris’s most famous landmark, the Eiffel Tower, bien sur, as part of the view since you’re inside it. And this is why I went off to dinner at Ciel de Paris on 56^th floor of the Tour Montparnasse, the seventies vintage high rise opposite the Gare Montparnasse that’s perhaps the most relentlessly loathed building in Paris for dinner the other night, with great curiosity.

One of my oldest French friends, Christophe, a prosperous pharmacist from Bordeaux who’d once been a ballet dancer, was coming to town with his new second wife, and they’d booked for dinner here. “Alec, I know it’s terribly touristy but Stephanie hasn’t been to Paris since she was fifteen, so I thought it might be fun.” I assured him that no excuses were necessary and quietly resigned myself to the fun of meeting the new wife—my guess was that she’d be a busty blonde, as compensation for what I was certain would be a very ordinary meal at best.

  Well, suffice it to say that I was wrong, full stop. Arriving, the restaurant, where I’d once gone for an ill-fated drink many years ago, had been stylishly renovated (by French designer Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance) with a sort of appealingly campy seventies décor entire appropriate to the Tour Montparnasse—flying saucer cut-out lighting, etc., and Stephanie turned out to be chic brunette who owned a bookstore and who talked about her passion for novelist Jonathan Franzen for the first half-hour we were together.

  Over a good and surprisingly reasonably priced bottle of Champagne, the views of Paris were magnificent, too. When we got around to it, the menu read rather Business Class, but chef Christophe Marchais delivered a fine surprise with a starter of dressed crabmeat with a rich and ruddy gelee d’etrilles (crabs) for me, smoked salmon with an interesting millefeuille of celery root and Granny Smith apple for Stephanie and escargots with little beignets of boned pig’s feet for Christophe. 

  Main courses were pleasant, too, including a perfectly cooked filet of beef in truffle sauce with a very clever ‘risotto’ of finely diced Charlotte potatoes for me, steamed turbot with baby spinach and a seaweed sabayon for Stephanie, and lobster with black rice and fava beans with an vanilla emulsion for Christophe. This was well-conceived and executed fun festive food that avoided the pitfalls of being frilly and silly, which is what too often happens in high-altitude settings.

  A well-served plate of cheeses came from Quatrehommes, and Stephanie’s chocolate dessert looked like a little model of a Le Corbusier’s villa—all planes and panes, but was delicious. Working in tandem with Christophe Marchais, chef pâtissier Baptiste Méthivier’s desserts are studiously art-directed but also delicious.

   So will I be rushing out the door to eat at Ciel de Paris again soon Probably not, but that’s because I live in Paris. On the other hand, I’d certainly send visiting view hunters here, since the food and service are good, and the prix-fixe menus make it relatively affordable for a meal with such gulpingly good views of the Eiffel Tower and all things beyond.

33 Avenue Maine, 15th, Tel. 01-40-64-77-64, Metro: Montparnasse. Open daily. Prix-fixe menus: 65 Euros, 114 Euros. Late night supper menu (after 11pm): 44 Euros, 50 Euros. Average a la carte 120 Euros.

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Her father once owned a chain of shoe stores in Brooklyn, and the first time I met him, I was wearing a pair of loafers with a hole under my big toe in one sole. As an editorial assistant in New York City, I lived meagerly from pay check to pay check, and I was waiting for my next check to take my one pair of good shoes to the cobbler. Anyway, I trekked out to Brooklyn on a snowy day for a fantastic dinner and a night of brilliant conversation with my pal and her book-and-opera loving parents. Mrs. Schindelheim made the best pot roast I’ve ever eaten, with a superb homemade chicken-and-vegetable soup to start.

A few days later, I got home from work and was vexed to find a note in my mailbox indicating that I had a package to pick up. My post office on the Upper West Side had a beautiful W.P.A. facade, but permanent lines and some of the crankiest clerks I’ve ever met, so I dreaded this errand and just hoped it wouldn’t be an invitation to a new discotheque sent in a long paper roller, a really bad idea that prevailed in New York in the early eighties. Instead, I was surprised by a neatly wrapped kraft paper carton with no return address. When I tored it open at home, I found a pair of fleece-lined bedroom slippers and a sturdy pair of ankle-high leather boots, with a card that said, “Dear Alexander, Please keep your feet dry this winter, and get your shoes fixed! Love, Mr. and Mrs. Schindelheim.”

So I would have racked my brains to find the right place for these lovely people, but as it turns out, I didn’t have to. Just a week earlier, I’d been to Antoine on the banks of the Seine not far from the Place de l’Alma and just across the river from the Eiffel Tower a week earlier on a Sunday night and had some terrific seafood. So I gave my pal the address and told her send her parents my best regards. An hour later, she called back and said that they’d be very disappointed if I didn’t join them for this meal.

Well of course I would. So I was sitting there enjoying a glass of white wine, thinking about how much better this restaurant is now than it was when it was a pretentious and very expensive place called Le Port de l’Alma, and watching the action in the busy kitchen through a large pane window giving on to the dining room when they arrived. Both of the Schindelheim parents were wearing hats like they always did, but I got a twinge when I saw that he was walking with a cane.

After a round of hugs, they settled in and cooed over the view of the Eiffel Tower across the river. “I hope the view doesn’t mean we’re paying extra,” Mr. Schindelheim wise-cracked, and I told him that if Antoine isn’t cheap, it’s worth it. “And in any event, good fish in Paris is a luxury,” I added, setting up Mr. Schindelheim, who patted his daughter, an eye surgeon with a German husband, on the hand, and said “Sorry, darling, but we’re going to spend if all before we go,” he chuckled. “See Alexander, the cane doesn’t mean a thing. I’m still sharp as a tack.”

So we drank Champagne–my treat, and as I knew she would, Mrs. Schindelheim remembered how her daughter and me had first met. Briefly, I was working as a temp for a secretary in the order department of the International Paper company who had been mugged when she went to the ladies room via a pantyhose sale at Lord & Taylor, and my friend, then a would-be painter with a fierce punk look, had been dispatched by the same agency to do some similarly mind-numbing job for a woman on maternity leave. “She told us that she’d met someone very nice at work when she came home for Sunday dinner,” Mrs. Schindelheim said, and her husband horned in, “She’s always been a bad judge of character.” I translated the menu for them, and all three of them remarked on how friendly and attentive the young servers were after we’d ordered.

“No wonder you’ve filled out so much, eating good food like this everyday,” Mr. Schindelheim said after he tasted his fish soup, which I’d had the week before–a rich, smooth, leaf-brown potion spiked with saffron and tasting deeply of rock fish. I liked my dainty beignets of langoustines and sole wrapped in feather-light golden leaves of pastry and served with an imaginative mango dipping sauce, and my friend loved her tartare of sea bream with lemon-verbena oil–“This fish is really, really fresh,” she said, surprised. “I was afraid that because it’s Sunday….” she trailed off.

Aside from the impeccable freshness of the fish, the great service, and the view, what I like most about this place is that the kitchen pratices an intelligent contemporary French seafood cookery that privileges the natural taste of their produce without overwhelming it, a perfect example being my thick and impeccably cooked chunk of sea bass from Saint Gilles Croix de Vie in the Vendee. It had been sealed inside of a glass casserole with pastry and organic baby vegetables with a little butter and a pinch of herbes de Provence and sea salt, and it was excellent. The obvious idea of this cooking method was the fish would create its own sauce, and it did.

“This is delicious,” Mrs. Schindelheim said of the sea bass grilled over sticks of wild fennel and served with an unctuous puree of ratte potatoes from Le Touquet that she shared with her husband. “I was afraid it would be all fancy and French, but it’s so light and subtle.” My friend liked her steamed sole with a sauce corail and squid’s ink gnocci, too. All of us finished up with excellent cheeses from Quartrehomme, and when Mr. Schindelheim told the waiter that the 36 month old Comte was one of the best things he’d ever eaten, he came back with another slice on a side dish. Mr. Schindelheim ate it, too, inspite of his wife’s raised eyebrows.

“So, an eye surgeon and a food writer–you kids ended up doing okay,” Mr. Schindelheim said while I walked them over to the Place de l’Alma to get a cab. “Of course, some grandchildren would have been nice, and I’m still waiting for Alexander to write a novel, but that was a very good dinner.”

Antoine, 10 Avenue de New York, 16th, Tel. 01-40-70-19-28. Metro: Alma Marceau. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Average 75 Euros.

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