Prunier is back, and it’s better than ever. Most recently owned by the late Pierre Bergé, founder of the Yves Saint Laurent fashion house with the late designer of the same name, one of the most glamorous restaurants in the world has just reopened under new owners, the Swiss investment group Olma Luxury Holdings, with a new menu by Michelin three-star chef Yannick Alleno.

Laurie Ochoa, Ruth Reichl, Nancy Silverton and me

So when Laurie Ochoa, food editor of the LA Times; writer and editor Ruth Reichl (my old boss at the still lamented GOURMET), baking genius and restauranteur Nancy Silverton and I had one meal alone during the trip we led in Paris and Champagne in October (more on that here https://dinnerwithfriendsabroad.com/), I booked at Prunier, because I knew it would be a festive occasion and wanted to try Alleno’s new menu.

This supremely elegant seafood house and caviar counter just behind the Arc de Triomphe opened in 1924. As I told Laurie, Ruth and Nancy over glasses of Champagne as we began our meal, it was some sixty-three years later that I walked through its doors to meet Yves Saint Laurent, of all people, for lunch.

The reason for this painstakingly negotiated and carefully choreographed occasion with a charming public-relations woman in attendance was an interview I was doing of the designer for a London newspaper after I’d left my job as an editor in the office of Fairchild Publications, the fashion publisher that was once the unforgiving arbiter not only of hemlines and good taste in its garment-industry newspaper Women’s Wear Daily, but the cruel judge of the beau monde’s social cachet in the pages of its slick magazine W.

My English editor wanted something “a little racy and a bit naughty,” but I was wary of delivering these goods, since few people in the world were better protected legally in those days than the late designer. Still, it was an important story for me, and so I was anxious when I showed up for the appointment at the curiously early hour of 11am (“It’s so that Yves won’t be high or drunk yet,” speculated my shrewd friend, the late Christa Worthington).

When I arrived I was stunned by the beauty of the art-deco decor of this place and then dumbstruck and horrified to be ushered to a table a large silver bowl filled with crushed ice and a metal tin nestled in this icy mis en scene. It’s contents were glossy and black, so that even though I’d never eaten caviar before, I knew what it was, and I also knew that it was an extravagance to be personally presented with such a huge serving of this storied delicacy.

Yannick Alleno

Unlike Yannick Alleno, who could probably have finished the entire tin pictured above on his own, I’d never had caviar before and was squeamish about the idea of eating fish eggs.

“Really, Alec!!?#8221; Ruth said.

Yup, really. If I’ve always loved to eat, I arrived in Paris with a pathetically pinched and provincial palate par excellence. Most seafood was off limits, and game was too wild for me.  Thirty-six years later, however, I’ve become an avid omnivore, and so I couldn’t wait to tuck into some of the world’s best seafood at Prunier.

And the interview with Yves Saint Laurent While I busy tasting my first caviar, something I immediately fell head-over-heels in love with, the designer left the table to—I don’t know what, and never returned. So I sat there with the stricken PR woman for another 45 minutes eating caviar, oysters and smoked salmon, and then I went home to call London and explain that the interview had been aborted.

Coming out of the Metro, I stopped at the Felix Potin, a convenience store, in the rue de Babylone, to buy some milk, and going into the shop, I immediately recognized the man at the cash register who was buying a huge amount of cheap candy.

The cashier rang it all up, and spoke the total aloud. The designer stood there blushing and sort of dazed.

I guessed that he had no money on him, and told the cashier I’d pay for the candy. Then Saint Laurent looked at me and smiled sheepishly. “Merci, vous etes gentil,” he said. And then he looked at me again. “I’m very sorry. I’m very sorry,” he said, recognizing me. “I don’t feel well today. I’m very sad and I had nothing to say. My life is very difficult right now.”

A man in a dark suit came into the shop, glanced at the cash register receipt, handed me 200 Francs, and led the designer, who lived just across the street, away.

“I hope you at least enjoyed the caviar,” he said over his shoulder. I did indeed.

All of us started off with l’Oeuf Christian Dior, which is a signature dish on the new Prunier menu. It was a sleight of gastronomic elegance more than worthy of the late designer, too, since it came to the table as a perfectly coddled egg with a generous spoonful of caviar on its crown and a buttoniere of chive in a pool of caviar-speckled cream. Beautiful to behold, it was even better to eat, since following the waiter’s instructions that we dig down to the bottom of the bowl with each spoonful of egg, we discovered the feral genius of this dish, which was a  hidden aspic made with essence of jambon blanc (white ham). In effect, a whole ham had been gently sweated for hours on end and the juices it released had been captured and used to season the aspic. This contrast between the lush iodine-rich caviar and meaty aspic created a perfect and very luscious harmony when napped by the yolk of the egg.

Subsequent starters were superb as well, including the salmon-and-seaweed hand roll Nancy ordered, the langoustine carpaccio with caviar cream that seduced me, Laurie and Ruth.

I knew the minute I opened the menu and saw it that I’d have sole meunière, because it’s one of my favorite of all French dishes, and Laurie had it too, because she feels the same way. Here it was impeccably fresh, perfectly cooked, and beautifully garnished with melted butter, capers, a piece of lemon and a side of ethereal potato puree. Nancy had scallops with seaweed butter and a saffron sauce and Ruth ordered line-caught sea bass with a celery gelee and caviar. All of us were extremely happy with our meals.

None of us had been planning to have dessert until the pastry tray arrived. Assured that the figs were from the south of France and the raspberries from Alsace, we succumbed to these beautifully made tarts, and threw caution to the winds by accepting the suggestion of a glass of Champagne with dessert.

“I think Prunier just be the most beautiful restaurant in the world,” said Ruth And I think she just may be right. One way or another, it’s an excellent choice for that special meal you were planning to treat yourself to in Paris, and it’s also very romantic without making any effort to be so whatsoever.

Yes, it’s very expensive, too, but it’s worth every centime.

And if I may, I’d like to suggest that my gastronomic coming-of-age story MY PLACE AT THE TABLE: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris would be a wonderful holiday gift for food-lovers, Francophiles, and anyone who loves a good read.

16 Avenue Victor Hugo, 16th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-44-17-35-85, Open for lunch and dinner Tuesday-Saturday. Closed Sunday and Monday. Lunch menu 68 Euros, prix-fixe menus 125 Euros, 190 Euros; average a la carte 150 Euros. www.prunier.com

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A L’Epi d’Or, a solid old neighbourhood bistro that opened on the edge of Les Halles in 1880, has mercifully been spared the ignominious fate of too many traditional Paris bistros in an ever gentrifying city: becoming a clothing store. Sepia-tinted by decades of Gauloises and Gitanes, this sturdy old place with a cracked tile floor, a big zinc bar, and globe lamps overhead has instead become the object of the wisely gentle, puckishly reverent and shrewdly restrained culinary intentions of chef Jean-François Piège.

“I didn’t want to reinvent A L’Epi d’Or, I just wanted to make it better,” says Piège, who lives nearby and has a deep affection for this kind of historic and profoundly Parisian address. “I want the tastes of honest old-fashioned French cooking to survive as everyday food, not as part of some expensive nostalgic special-occasion meal,” adds the chef, who has two Michelin stars at his Le Grand Restaurant, and also owns and runs three other restaurants, Clover Grill, Clover Green, and La Poule au Pot.

This remark struck a real chord with me, because in some Paris neighbourhoods today, it’s easier to find a bowl of ramen or an Italian meal than it is French bistro cooking. For a variety of reasons, this kitchen, the bedrock level of Gallic gastronomy, is struggling, and I’m not talking about bistronomie, a.k.a. modern bistro cooking, but workaday traditional bistro cooking like the dishes you find on the menu at A L’Epi d’Or. To wit, dining out in Paris has changed, and changed a lot, since thirty years ago, when eating anything other than French food in Paris was very much the exception to the rule. Sure, we’d go for the occasional Chinese, Vietnamese or North African meal, but our daily food bread and everything else that came to the table with it was French in those days.

Now if you consider the modern urban gastronomic cannon, or those same popular dishes that are served in major cities all over the world–sushi, ramen, cheeseburgers, tacos, burritos, pizza, pasta, tapas, ceviche, etc., almost none of them are French with the possible exception of quiche. Traditional French cooking based on braising and the slow, careful construction and concentration of flavours has become an outlier, because it’s time consuming behind the kitchen door and also because it has wrongly acquired a reputation for being heavy, even ‘unhealthy.’ The reality is that it’s nowhere near as time consuming as a global recipe culture driven by semi-hysterical promises of fast and easy cooking might lead you to believe, and it’s also not only deeply nourishing but profoundly satisfying.

This is what I thought when I tucked into my first course of legumes pot au feu, or leeks, carrots, turnips, celeriac, parsnip and potato that had been cooked in beef bouillon as part of a pot au feu. The succulent vegetables had a light gloss of bovine richness that didn’t mask their natural tastes or textures, and the pool of sauce they came in–bouillon with a few drops of olive oil, some chopped parsley and a superbly redolent gently fruity red wine vinegar was a supremely Gallic garnish. What made this dish work so well, though, was the resonance of the vinegar, which had a percussive freshness that was fascinating. When I chatted with Piège later in the meal, he explained that the red-wine vinegar was homemade, with a mother of vinegar that was constantly fed with leftover red wine. “It’s the youth of the vinegar that makes it mellow and so good with cooked vegetables,” he explained.

To be sure, my first memory of A L’Epi d’Or had nothing to do with what I ate here. Just a couple of months after I’d arrived in Paris to work as an editor in the offices of fashion publisher Fairchild Publications, I was invited for lunch on a rainy winter day by a famous Paris fashion designer. I’d never met him before, but when I stepped through the door of this restaurant, I was certain it couldn’t possible be the man with butterscotch coloured hair and a black leather bomber jacket over a black muscle T shirt who was the only other customer in the dining room. He nodded at me, and I nodded back and then I spoke to the older woman behind the bar, giving her the name of the designer. With a pursed smile, she nodded towards the man in the bomber jacket.

He was drinking Champagne when I sat down with him, and we chatted briefly–he’d just returned from Tokyo that morning, which is why less than a minute later he almost fell asleep while reading the menu. Then he told me he’d was going to the men’s room, so I pulled back the table to let him out, and glancing at him walking to the back of the room, I was astonished to see that the back of his black leather pants was cut out to display his bare ass. Seeing me see him, the woman behind the bar barked with laughter.

“Et dis donc, Monsieur!” (Say there, Mister!), she said and guffawed. “Il n’est pas tres subtile celui!” (He’s not very subtle, that one), she cackled again, and then he returned.

“I just needed a little powder to perk myself up,” he said when he sat down. I nodded vaguely. “Would you like some#8221; he asked, offering me some cocaine.

“No, thanks, I’m happy with my marinated leeks,” I replied, and he rolled his eyes. “And you go to church every Sunday, too#8221; he snorted.

“No,” I said. “I’m Protestant,” as if that explained anything.

“Oh, God, you’re a Protestant, too. They have no imagination, which makes them terrible sex. Most Catholics are a little kinky, even if they don’t know it.” And so it went. But I liked the unpretentious bistro food, the room, and the crowd.

The motley crowd of traveling salesman, market workers, night-club goers and the occasional pair of convivial and immaculately made up streetwalkers was always one of the best things about A L’Epi d’Or, and on this first experience of its resurrection, it was too soon to guess at the eventual sociological composition of the restaurant’s new clientele except to say that the sex business has moved online in Paris and traditional bistro cooking seems to be developing an eager new following among the Bobo (bohemian bourgeois) couples who have colonized the ancient side streets of Les Halles.

I guess Bruno and I will just have to fit into the evolving mix here as a middle-aged married gay couple, too, since nothing is likely to keep us away from one of the best pâté en croûte in Paris, which was my lucky spouse’s starter. It’s worth noting that this dish is always available, too, as one of “Les Incontournables,” or those dishes that form the short permanent menu. This list also includes the excellent looking steak tartare with a beautiful dimple filled with mayonnaise of the woman sitting next to us, foie gras terrine, Croque Madame, slow-roasted lamb, breaded fish filet, rice pudding, orange-flower ice cream, and a cheese plate. Otherwise, a different starter, main and dessert are served daily, almost boarding house style.

Bruno had the lamb so tender it could be eaten with a spoon (as described on the menu), and it was slow-braised, wonderfully crusted and came with fennel, carrots and potato puree in another simple sauce of cooking juices gently sharpened into a vinaigrette. My roast veal with potato puree was the kind of proud humble Gallic comfort food that will always be my gastronomic true north, because this dish, and Bruno’s, were things I could very happily eat every  week.

And even after all of this food, we still had dessert, because we wanted it, this heavy glass bowl of fluffy chocolate mousse that we shared, and wanting it was reason enough. Next time, though, I’ll try and get here on a Tuesday, because I love beet salad with haddock, hachis Parmentier–French shepherd’s pie, and nougat glace, one of my all-time favourite desserts and another once common dish that has become a rarely seen retro treat.

If there’s any way of saving the surviving everyday bistros of Paris, chef Jean-François Piège has found it at A L’Epi d’Or, which is now a better restaurant than it’s ever been.

A L’Epi d’Or, 25 rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1st Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-42-36-38-12, Metro: Louvre-Rivoli or Palais-Royal-Musee du Louvre. www.alepidorparis.com Closed Saturday and Sunday, open Monday-Friday for lunch and dinner. Prix-fixe menus: 36 Euros for three courses, 27 Euros for two courses.

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

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

Grilled langoustines @ Alexander Lobrano

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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@Romain Laprade

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

Sea bass carpaccio with citrus zest@Jacques Gavard

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

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

@Yann Deret

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

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

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

@Romain Laprade

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

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

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

Scallop carpaccio with caviar @ Jacques Gavard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fresh juice

Hot drink

Selection of bread and pastries

Butter and organic jam

Botarga bruschetta

Perfect egg Florentine

Bass ceviche, lemon juice and pink berries

Scallop burger, fresh herbs

Thin apple pie with toffee ice cream

or

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

49 €

with a glass of Champagne Thienot 65€

So what do you think Meet me there?

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

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

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.

The post La Tour d’Argent, Paris | A Delicious Evolution, A-/B+ appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

Like most Paris brasseries, La Rotonde was founded long before people started going to restaurants for revelations. No, in those days, people went to restaurants to eat, and they pretty much knew what the menu would look like even before they stepped through the door.

When it opened on the boulevard Montparnasse in 1911, the Left Bank neighborhood was just beginning to attract artists like Picasso and Chagall and it was a busy commercial thoroughfare leading to a one of the city’s main train stations. So people went to La Rotonde to eat, to people watch, to while away an hour or two over a coffee or a glass of wine with the distraction of a book or a sketchpad. But most of all, they went to eat, because that’s why you went to brasseries, the brilliant Parisian invention that made dining out a nonchalant metropolitan pleasure by putting it within reach of almost every pocket and every pocketbook. You went because you were hungry and could get something to eat in a brasserie pretty much all day long and often well into the night.

When I first moved to Paris from London a longtime ago, I couldn’t have explained to you what made a brasserie different from a bistro, but I instinctively liked them, especially since I often worked very irregular hours and me and most of my friends were single. So brasseries were our default choice for a meal, the place to go to snuff out a case of Sunday night blues with friends, or unknot my nerves after work with some oysters and a bottle of Muscadet. They were our one-size-fits-all restaurant, and they reliably offered a good time and a decent enough feed for an acceptable price. (Oh, and the difference between a bistro and a brasserie Very simply, bistros specialize in simmered dishes and sauces, brasseries are about fast cooking, like grilling or frying, with a shellfish stand out front and perhaps a choucroute garni on the menu that refers to their original roots as brewhouse restaurants in Alsace).

And then it all went wrong during the 1990s when most of the great brasseries of Paris were swallowed up by chains, which increasingly resorted to commissary-supplied kitchens and gastronomic shortcuts to make these places as lucrative as possible. The thing is, of course, is that this didn’t go unnoticed, and like thousands of other Parisians, I sadly gave up on brasseries as their quality tumbled and their prices soared.

A brasserie revival has been in the making for a longtime, with chef Eric Frechon getting things off to a solid start several years ago when he opened Lazare and the Minipalais. Last year, chef Mauro Colagreco of Miramar opened the excellent Grand Coeur brasserie in the Marais. Now Alain Ducasse has a new-style brasserie slated for  Les Halles, which will open this spring, and chef Thierry Marx has another one in the works, Le Train Blanc, for the Gare du Nord later this year.

In the meantime, however, the only possible brasserie I could pull out of my hat when I had to find a place for a “cheerful and lively meal”  at the request of a friend who was inviting me and Bruno out to dinner as a Christmas present on a Sunday night the weekend before New Year’s was, rather guardedly, La Rotonde. I say guardedly because if it’s a popular table with an intriguing tapestry of Parisians and out-of-towners woven from   politicians, show-biz types, captains of industry, a complete alphabet of the French bourgeoisie, plus the happy shot of Lurex supplied by well-bred wide-eyed tourists who are more welcome in town than ever, the service can be luck of the draw, sometimes charming, sometimes bored and brusque, sometimes a mixture of all three.

Protective of my friend’s purse and pride–she’d never ever have let us snatch up the bill at the end of the meal as would be our wont, I knew the three-course 44 Euro prix-fixe menu offered a reliably good feed for the money and also that there are several pleasant reasonably priced bottles on the wine list, too: Mâcon AOC Domaine du Gros Mont, La Roche Vineuse 2014, 28 Euros and an organic Languedoc AOC Hecht & Bannier 2014, for example. So we went.

Wild boar terrine by Gilles Verot

There was a nice buzzy in the room when we came in on a rainy Sunday night, too, and it was the occupants of the booths around us provided an intriguing array of vignettes to decipher as a backdrop to our conversation as we perused the menu, which was encouragingly dotted with dishes that deserved organic shout-outs for their ingredients or brand-name produce, like a veal chop supplied by butcher Hugo Desnoyer. Here a noticeably affectionate and very attractive middle-aged brother and sister on one side of the table and their scowling silent spouses who refused to look at each other on the other. And in that corner, the older man and cute younger boy, both with the telltale wet hair of a recent shower, and across from them, hmmm, a heart-warming example of a very rare Parisian genus, a middle-aged man-and-wife who were clearly still besotted by each other.

So everyone in the room was hungry, if for different reasons and different delicacies, but to start Judy chose the wild-boar terrine from the excellent nearby charcutier Gilles Vérot, and after a lot of silent hemming and hawing on my part–the odds were extremely good that I’d regret my choice, in much the same way I always regret ordering anything called ‘risotto’ in France–I rolled the dice and order the quenelle de brochet gratinée façon manta (fluffy pike-perch dumplings with crayfish sauce, a specialty of the Rhone-Alps region), because I love them and I wanted something light. Bruno shot me a dubious ‘Do you think that’s a good idea#8217; kind of glance but then he followed suit. Fifteen minutes later, all three of us briefly enjoyed a contented silence as we sampled our starters.

The squirt-bottle graffiti–Why I mean, really. Why#8211;of balsamic vinegar notwithstanding, Judy’s terrine was politely feral and had the thrillingly varied texture–by turns emollient and chunky–that displays the charcutier’s true art. Our quenelles had nothing to do with the air-plane catering style dish I feared, but were airy, gently fishy, and napped in a hot sauce Nantua (crayfish cream sauce pinkened by tomato paste) that was just as comforting as a flannel blanket in a tent on a cold night.

Our main courses were nicely executed vieille France comfort food, too, and this is exactly what we wanted on this particular evening. “Isn’t this nice#8221; said Judy after sampling her sea bass filet on a bed of white-and-wild rice in a sauce of preserved lemons. “It reminds me of the good old days when you could just enjoy your food without talking it or photographing it to death.” I nodded, and waited a few minutes before I started snapping away again.

In the same way that I was skeptical about the quality of my quenelles, I had my doubts about ordering an aioli, cod and boiled vegetables with garlic mayonnaise, a provencal dish that’s one of my favorites, in a restaurant where I suspected the uptight fear of bad breath might cause the kitchen to be too light-handed with the garlic. But no. The little sauceboat of mayonnaise packed just the garlicky punch I needed after several days of extravagant Christmas food, including foie gras, seared scallops in a sauce of bergamot and Cointreau that I invented, and lobster (for Bruno’s birthday dinner on December 25–yes, he’s a Christmas baby) all on the same day, and brought me back down to earth, which is where I like to eat best of all anyway.

I was fascinated by Bruno’s perfectly cooked Scottish salmon in a sauce Genevoise with nicely made potato puree, too, because I couldn’t remember ever having sampled this particular sauce, which was invented by Escoffier. When I asked the waiter about it, I was surprised by how accurate and in-depth his explanation was, to wit, “The sauce is made from sauce Espagnole [one of Escoffier’s five mother sauces, a deeply reduced brown sauce alternately made with veal stock or hambone stock], a fumet made from salmon heads, vegetables, white wine and lots of butter, bien sur.” It actually even tasted as though it had been largely made on the premises, too, although many restaurants buy in their fonds de sauces these days. Oh, and by the way, if you’re thinking, hmmm, that salmon’s a rather grand dish for brasserie grub, you’re right, but La Rotonde is very much of a black silk-stockings (and hidden garter belts) kind of a place.

Only one of us could manage dessert (it wasn’t me), so we shared some profiteroles, filled with good vanilla ice cream and lashed with a sauce of Valrhona chocolate, and they were delicious. Served with charm and a deep professional knowledge of proper table service, this meal was the kind of feed upon which the good reputation of French cooking was originally constructed, because what this food says is that you can eat well even when you’re not interested in making a fuss about it or spending too much money.

La Rotonde, 105 boulevard Montparnasse, 6th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-43-26-48-26, Metro: Vavin. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Prix-fixe menu 44 Euros. Average a la carte 60 Euros. www.rotondemontparnasse.com

The post La Rotonde, Paris | The Pleasures of Simplicity, B+ appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

This past summer I wrote a happy piece for the Wall Street Journal about the quickening bistro revival in Paris. Since then the trend has gained even more momentum and also attracted the attention of other food writers, which is a wonderful thing, because it attests to the enduring popularity and improving prospects of the cooking that’s the ballast of the French kitchen, bistro food, bien sur. Now, with the opening of chef Daniel Rose’s new 29 seater table La Bourse et La Vie, it looks like another nearly extinct Paris restaurant idiom, the bistro de luxe, or an upmarket bistro specializing in la cuisine bourgeoise, is slated for a comeback.

If you’re wondering what the difference is between regular bistro cooking and cuisine bourgeoise bistro cooking, the latter is more refined, delicate and likely to make use of luxurious produce than its ruddier and more rustic gastronomic sibling. A perfect example of la cuisine bourgeoise is the riff on artichoke hearts and foie gras served by Rose’s wife, Marie-Aude Mery, who runs the tiny kitchen at the couple’s new restaurant, which is open for breakfast and lunch as well as dinner.

At a restaurant like Chez Pauline, a bistro de luxe in the rue Villedo, long gone but for years a standard-bearer of la cuisine bourgeoise, along with tables like Pierre au Palais Royal and Le Recamier in the days when it was run by Burgundian chef Martin Cantegrit, the firm fleshy artichoke bottoms would have been filled with foie-gras mousse. The base-note tastes of artichoke with its false sweetness and foie gras with its soft waxiness and barnyard funkiness have always paired beautifully, but what improves the dish at La Bouse et La Vie is that the foie gras is served in generous slabs. This rescues this dish from the somewhat elderly lack of texture from which it suffered in its classic version, and to flirtatiously temper the richness of this plush pairing, it’s accompanied by almost aspic-like shallot vinaigrette, a brilliant detail.

So it’s this type of exceptionally shrewd cooking that makes the new version of La Bourse et La Vie such an exciting addition to the Paris restaurant scene. It’s a sexy little restaurant, too, with a gun-metal gray interior by interior architect Elliott Barnes, former partner of the late Andrée Putman, that highlights its best feature, the original 1820s vintage moldings that surround the mirrors which visually amplify the diminutive space of the former stationer’s shop. A few other details wink in sort of a coy post-modern way at the decorative idioms of the traditional Paris bistro, including a heavy velvet draft-blocking curtain at the door, a zinc bar and the modern globe lamp lighting fixtures designed by Italian designer Gina Sarfati in 1965.

Stepping through the door with Bruno, we ran right into the indefatigably cheerful Daniel Rose, who brought us a giant gougère, or puffy cheese-blazed choux pastry, to nibble on with our glasses of Domaine de la Taille aux Loups sparkling wine, a favorite from the Loire.” And then a bit of banter. “This tastes like it was made with Dorie Greenspan’s recipe,” I said to Daniel. “Yup, I pinched her recipe!” True or false, it was delicious, as was the mackerel poached in white wine, a dainty version of a bistro classic, that Bruno ordered as his starter (I, of course, had the artichoke hearts with foie gras, which were superb).

Continuing to indulge my retro culinary curiosity, I had the filet de canette a l’orange, another gloriously rock-of-ages but recently little seen glory of Gaul, and it was an exquisite bird–tender, juicy, cooked perfectly rare with a light golden crust on its skin and a silken sauce of pan-drippings and stock very discretely flavored with orange (I suspect that finely chopped dried orange zest had been made into an infusion and then added to the sauce at the last minute, lest too much heat dull its quietly refreshing citrus brightness). As profoundly satisfying as the duckling may have been, however, what really raised my pulse rate was the superb accompanying side dish of sautéed ceps and figs, a brilliant garnish for the bird.

Meanwhile, across the table, Bruno was quietly enjoying Rose’s clever contemporary revision of one of the all-time greatest bistro dishes, pot-au-feu. Rose didn’t say so, but his fresh and very inspired take on this cold-weather classic would seem to have been inspired by two other now rarely served but decidedly delicious cuisine bourgeoise dishes, boeuf a la ficelle, or beef poached in bouillon, and quasi de veau bourgeoise, the ‘quasi,’ or top of a leg of veal, simmered in broth with vegetables. In Rose’s dish, the quasi was served rare, with bone marrow, poached flank steak, cabbage, carrots, celery and a crispy galette of calf’s head topped with sauce gribiche, and the bouillon was delicately perfumed with chopped mint and lime zest. This exquisite dish was accompanied by some pommes boulangères–potatoes baked with butter and bouillon on a bed of sautéed onions, that I couldn’t keep my fork out of.

Beyond his talent in the kitchen, what Rose excels at is hospitality, and his desire to spoil and amuse his guests creates an atmosphere here that’s at once confidential, charming, and ur worldly in the most Parisian of ways, no mean feat for a guy who hails from the American Midwest. The charming sommelier and an excellent wine list abetted the pleasure of this feast as well..

When we arrived, Bruno spotted a pretty tarte au citron on the end of the zinc service bar and immediately asked that a portion be set to one side. So when it came to the table, he devoured it so quickly, I had no time to take a picture of it, much less taste it. I believe him when he said it was very good, although he did insist that his own is better, and I can attest to how excellent his lemon tarts always are. And me, in a happy way-we-were sort of haze brought on by the fact that this meal had conjured up memories of favorite meals and dishes I hadn’t though about in a very longtime, I tucked into what just might have been the best crème caramel creme I’ve ever had. It was rich, eggy, creamy and redolent of vanilla, and the only thing that could possibly have made it better was a stronger taste of burned sugar in the sauce, but that’s a personal preference. And in keeping with the don’t ask, don’t tell theme of enjoying the evening rather than trying to safe-crack every recipe, I didn’t ask Rose if this gorgeous custard hadn’t also received a big dollop of crème fraîche in addition to the usual cream and milk, but the fluffy pillowy texture made me think it had.

La Bourse et La Vie is a wonderful restaurant.

La Bourse et la Vie, 12 rue Vivienne, 2nd Arrondissement, Paris, tel. (33) 01-42-60-08-83, Metro: Bourse, Palais Royal-Musée du Louvre, Quatre Septembre. Open Monday-Friday for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Closed Saturday and Sunday, Average a la carte 45 Euros.

The post La Bourse et La Vie | Daniel Rose’s Excellent New Bourgeois Bistro, A-/B+ appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

When summer blooms, the urge to dine outdoors sweeps through many major western cities, but perhaps nowhere is the choice of an al fresco dining venue more fraught than it is in Paris. Why Landing a choice fresh-air table is a great Parisian seasonal game. If anyone can decide to sit down on one of the city’s hundreds of cafe terraces and order one of the worlds best summer meals–a glass of rose, an omelette and a green salad (more often mediocre than not, alas, in the French capital these days, since cafes generally contend with a clientele that’s even more centime-sensitive than any fast-food restaurant. To wit, break an invisible mental price barrier–most recently fifteen Euros, now twenty—and your clientele starts melting; what this means, of course, is constant cost-cutting in the kitchen), not everyone has the well-filled purse and social wiliness required to bag a table at a place like Le Restaurant du Palais-Royal, which occupies a corner of the Palais Royal and possesses a small seasonal terrace which overlooks not only the magnificent arcades and facades of this former royal residence in the heart of Paris, but its the stunningly beautiful gardens as well.

So fiercely in demand are these tables of a given summer day when the weather is good, that Parisians have long ignored this restaurant’s formerly uneven cooking and eye-watering prices. Now, though, with the arrival of a new chef, Philip Chronopoulos, 28, ex L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon, Le Restaurant du Palais-Royal not only offers an ethereally charming setting for a meal but some superb contemporary French cooking as well.

Artichokes poivrade at Le Restaurant du Palais-Royal

Just for the back story, Paris’s love of fresh-air dining in beautiful bucolic venues was born of the romantic movement in the 18th century and flowered during the 19th century, when many of the city’s then newly built parks included a restaurant or two. Then as an ancient Gallic fear of draughts–courants d’air, which were thought to be cause colds or that vast category of diseases once known as ‘fevers’ faded with access to better medicine, improved urban hygiene and new ideas about health which held that fresh air and sunshine was good for you, picnicking became a popular past-time and guinguettes, or open-air pleasure barges, came to line stretches of the Seine and the Marne. Cafe terraces long the broad avenues and boulevards that Haussmann drove through the city became a fixture of Parisian life, too.

Unfortunately, it’s not easy to find a great open-air setting and good food in Paris–traffic noise and pollution render many open-air settings unpleasant and the beautiful-terrace-with-good food is almost as elusive as the beautiful-view-restaurant-with-good-food, which makes the recent opening of the Grand Coeur in the Marais so noteworthy and the renaissance of Le Restaurant du Palais-Royal so welcome (note, too, that the cooking at both restaurants is so good and their venues so charming, that they’re well worth a meal even when you can’t sit outside).

What I personally love about the terrace at Le Restaurant du Palais-Royal is that it’s one of those very rare and precious places in Paris where the city loosens its psychological corsets during the summer and relaxes without imperiling its elegance. This incremental relaxing of a perpetual pose of restraint and discipline is deliciously provocative, and as much as the magical setting, this is what makes a summer meal here so romantic.

Eager to discover a favorite table in a new incarnation, I invited another longtime American-in-Paris, my friend Judy, to join me for dinner on a night when there was just enough of a trembling breeze to make it appealing to be outdoors after ten days of Saharan heat. I’d heard that the restaurant had a new chef, but the reason for coming was the setting, so I hoped for the best when we opened our menus to build our meals over a glass of supremely refreshing Chablis. “There are some lovely sounding things here,” said Judy, hopefully, and there were. In fact, the short menu comprised an intriguing offer of dishes that were wholly original but decidedly summery.

Out of curiosity, we shared a superb tartare of sea bream and fromage frais in a pool of fresh cherry juice with basil leaves. The acidity of the fruit tempered by the lactic edge of the dairy was a perfect foil for the fish.

I ordered the creamy rice with shellfish and broccoli more out of curiosity than desire, and was pleasantly surprised by an airy dish of cockles and chopped razor-shell clam in a lightly acidulated marinade under a foam of baked rice foam garnished with a sprig and crumbs of baby broccoli. This brilliantly changed the equilibrium of our evening, too, since I hadn’t really intended for this to be a gastronomically interesting or adventurous meal and now it had suddenly become one. Judy’s baby artichokes poivrade, that lovely classic where the vegetable is poached in white wine, olive oil, lemon and herbs, came with a fascinating garnish of grilled Treviso, too.

@GdeLaubier

Roasted Breton lobster had a louche elegance that came from the fact that the fine flesh of the crustacean was dressed up but not overwhelmed by a lush garnet-colored sauce that incorporated a magnificent court bouillon made with its crushed shell, and wilted turnip greens and firm white asparagus tips brought a pleasantly gentle notes of  bitter punctuation to the almost custard-y richness of impeccably cooked veal sweetbreads. The sauce of deglazed cooking juices and fond de veau demonstrated that Chronopoulos is a seriously talented saucier, too, and also that sauces needn’t be banished from summer cooking if they’re light enough and deftly seasoned to be refreshing.

We concluded this unexpectedly delightful meal with two lovely summer desserts, Mara strawberries in a hibiscus jus with bitter almond ice cream and meringue cartridges with white peaches in a lush rum sauce. My only reservation about this meal was that the service was neither as assured or as gracious as a restaurant with cooking of this caliber warrants, but I expect his will evolve with time.

Le Restaurant du Palais-Royal is expensive, but it’s a superb choice for a special occasion meal in Paris, whether that occasion is a momentous one like a 50th wedding anniversary or a more daily one, like the decision to get a new haircut.

110 galerie de Valois (via the gardens of the Palais Royal) or 41 rue de Valois (if arriving by taxi or car), 1st Arrondisement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-40-20-00-27. Open Tuesday-Saturday for lunch and dinner. Closed Sunday and Monday. Average 120 Euros. www.restaurantdupalaisroyal.com    

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