It was a relief to see the fire-engine red painted facade of Les Petits Plats when I finally arrived for dinner the other night after a long Metro ride and then a bracing walk, and the welcome at this very happy restaurant couldn’t possibly have been warmer either. If I was late, the friend I was meeting for dinner was even later, and so we were both a bit rattled by the time we were seated as two at a bare wooden table for four, always a welcome development, since it offered not only the luxury of more elbow room but more psychic space into which we could relax. One of the terrific young servers promptly came by to pour us an excellent glass of Saint Veran and brought us a little plate of very good saucisson and we studied the appealing chalkboard menu, the work of a young chef who previously worked with Alain Reix when he was the head chef at the Jules Verne. Looking at the bill of fare, I immediately thought of Le Paul Bert, that usually very good cult bistro in the 11th, and in fact Les Petits Plats is clearly gunning to become a similar destination bistro with an excellent wine list and simple but appealing food that distinguishes itself as much by the quality of the produce used in the kitchen as any particular flight of culinary imagination. A singular originality here, though, is that you can order all of the main courses in half portions, a nod to weight-watchers and anyone who wasn’t born with the same trencherman’s appetite I have.

The restaurant, which is low-lit (but not too) in the evening is decorated with retro funky flea-market finds and was packed with an interesting cross-section of Parisians, including a lot of young media types, all of whom were having a really good time, and as is true of such places, this conviviality, which is generated by an exceptional cordial and good natured-staff, proved to be contagious.

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Located in an elegant 1904 vintage limestone mansion on the outskirts of Reims, Les Crayeres has long enjoyed a mythic status as a French destination hotel among foodlovers from all over the globe. Some part of this exaltation might be explained by the fact that visitors to this eastern French city are invariably here for the most mirthful of reasons–to joyously deepen their knowledge of Champagne, Reims being the Oz of this most famous of sparkling wines, and then there’s the fact that Les Crayeres has also been synonymous with the pinnacle of French gastronomy almost ever since it became a hotel.

My first gastronomic experience of this famously epicurean place occurred just a few months after I’d moved to France, when a friend and I decided to cast off the gloom of an endlessly rainy winter and treat ourselves to a day trip culminating in a really good lunch. And what a lunch it was! Chef Gerard Boyer, who had three stars at the time, engraved his name on the living pith of my memory with a (widely copied) artichoke cappuccino with black truffles, the best smoked salmon I’ve ever had, and a veal chop with a satiny citrus sabayon and a garnish of baby onions and wild mushrooms.

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Though it took forever to get to L’Agrume, which is an address that completely flummoxes anyone who’s as committed to traveling by mass transit as I am, the dinner I had there last night was, as they’ve been saying here in France for a very longtime, well worth the journey. Were it not for the fact that it’s located on a where-are-we? street on the edge of the 5th and the 13th arrondissements, this place has the easy groove of a neighborhood bolt-hole in Santa Monica, Cambridge, Mass., or Notting Hill, London with the obvious exception that everyone’s speaking French, bien sur, and the food exhibits all of the astonishing culinary discipline that makes me a doggedly perennial optimist when so many others are blowing hard that France’s best gastro days are behind it.

Meeting my friend David, who’s gastronomic perceptiveness functions at the speed of light and is almost unfailing accurate, for dinner, we sipped glasses of Picpoul, that cheap but under-rated Languedoc best-buy supermarket white, here poured at a very fair 3 Euros a glass, nibbled delicious pitted black olives, and tried to decide if we were up for the six-course tasting menu. As a rule, I loathe tasting menus, since it always seems pretty  improbable any chef will be able to play a symphony on my palette when we’ve never met, but since we were very curious, we decided to jump in, a pretty harmless gamble, too, for 35 Euros.

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Though most of my meals during any given week in Paris are in new restaurants, I make it a point to regularly revisit places I included in HUNGRY FOR PARIS and also to check in on other long-running and well-established local tables, Chez Maitre Paul in the rue Monsieur le Prince, for example. When I was choosing the restaurants to be included in Hungry for Paris, I ate at Chez Maitre Paul once a month for six months, hoping against hope on each new occasion that there’d be a change in both the kitchen and the dining room, because I used to love this place so much when it was owned by a warm, generous, charmingly shy couple from Besancon.

He cooked, and she mothered and spoiled a crowd of regulars who, twenty years ago, ran to professors and publishers–the talk here was always about books, ideas, politics. Madame loved explaining the cooking of the Jura and the Franche-Comte regions to those who didn’t know it, and all it took was a meal here to fall in love with this sturdy, delicious, rustic cooking. I always ate exactly the same meal, too–Montbeliard sausage with boiled potatoes in a puckery vinaigrette, chicken cooked in a vin jaune spiked cream sauce with morels mushrooms, and iced walnut cake, and it was here that I discovered  how good Arbois wines from vignerons like Trousseau can be. The dining room with its exposed stone walls and crisp white table cloths had a winsome grandmotherly feel, and I never ate here without coming away with a feeling of great well-being.

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Like you, everytime I have a trip scheduled, I immediately set out to make sure that I’ll eat as well as possible in whatever destination I’m visiting. So it was that I did a fair amount of research prior to a trip to Antwerp, a city I’ve known and liked for over twenty years. My first reflex was to visit a large number of travel websites in the hopes of finding a good new restaurant or two there, and when this didn’t turn up much of interest, I fell back on a basic Google search and ended up reading reviews on Trip Advisor. Several of them persuasively vaunted a newish Italian place, Il Sardo, just outside of the city’s main train station, which was where I’d be arriving. Though I’ve had indifferent to poor experiences with Trip Advisor in the past, I was taken in by the reader’s comments on this Italian place–these unknown folks insisted that it was an Italian head-and-shoulders above the other restaurants in this downmarket neck of the woods, and so I found myself at table in this place for lunch the other day. And had an amazingly mediocre meal. To be sure, I only ordered a salad and a pizza, but a salad and a pizza can be quite wonderful when they’re well made. Suffice it to say that I was terribly letdown by the advice of a bevy of anonymous correspondents, which set me to thinking about how treacherous the web can be when you’re looking for good restaurants. My salad was a dead ordinary business—unripe tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, fatty bits of sauteed bacon, grated carrots, bits and pieces of chopped green and red pepper, a dreary business indeed.

And this on the heels of one of the worst meals I’ve had in a longtime last weekend at the recently renovated La Mamounia hotel in Marrakech. The hotel had shopped two two-star European chefs for its “French” and “Italian” restaurants, Jean-Pierre Vigato and Alfonso Iaccarino (Don Alfonso) respectively. Since I live in Paris, the “French” restaurant was of no interest–nor was their “Moroccan” table, since I know where to get great Moroccan food in Marrakech, so I settled on the “Italian,” and it was a disaster.

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On a frosty January morning, I met Connecticut born Christian Holthausen, international communications director for Piper Heidsieck Champagnes, at the Gare de l’Est to hop an early train to Reims. Holthausen had invited me and another journalist to join him for a visit to the Piper Heidsieck mother ship, a stunningly sleek modern complex that’s light years away from the creaking-parquet settings and heavy-handed and not always accurate folkloric history peddled by other Champagne houses. “Even if you think you know a fair amount about Champagne, I hope you’ll find something to learn today,” said Holthausen, flattering my knowledge of the bubbly, since this turned out to be an an absolutely fascinating day on all levels.

As the train streaked through a frost-rimed landscape that brought Breughel to mind, Holthausen explained that he’d arranged a tasting of the “vins clairs,” or still wines from which Champagne is blended, with Myriam Faure Brac, one of the company’s top oenologists. Since so few people understand that Champagne is not a wine like “Chardonnay” or “Merlot,” but rather an exquisite work of eminently quaffable art created almost like music with notes, these being gustatory, I was keen for this experience.

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