During the last few months, I’ve been traveling all over France for various stories I’m working on, and so I’ve had a very intense in-the-trenches experience of what it’s like to eat-on-the-go in France today. I’m not talking about leisure travelers who have the time to track down a great bistro off of the autoroute and make time for a good meal, but someone who is doing busy, time-short business travel in the country that has long claimed to have the world’s best food.

I actually think it still does, with the woefully glaring exception of eating-in-transit situations. French food in airports, on trains and in highway rest-stops is just plain awful, and rather than waste billions of Euros vainly promoting the French language around the globe annually through the Alliance Francaise (do that many people in Katmandu really want to learn French, or does it appeal to Caviar Gauche sensiblities to have an AF there), I’d like to suggest that France launch a NASA style initiative to reinvent mass catering, i.e. fast food. The fact that it was recently announced that McDonald’s is soon to pick up another cluster of franchises in French highway rest stops speaks volumes. That said, I agree with chef Thierry Marx, who recently told me, “You can’t kick McDonald’s–they are only answering a need.” Indeed, but let’s have a French response instead.

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Since I always enjoyed Chamarre when it was rather incongruously located in the 7th arrondissement–the warmth and sensuality of the cooking always seemed rather at odds with the uber bourgeois fastness of the Avenue Lowendahl, I was delighted when exceptionally talented chef Antoine Heerah reopened his restaurant in Montmartre in the premises formerly occupied by Beauvilliers. Heerah, a generous, jovial Mauritian of Indian descent, practices one of the most guileless, intelligent and original fusion cuisines currently available in Paris. What he’s basically done is deconstruct all of the disparate elements of the Mauritian kitchen–French, English, Portuguese, Chinese, African and most of all Indian, and then put them back together again using his considerable technical skills as a classically trained French chef.

Though it’s a favorite Indian Ocean getaway destination for the French, Mauritius is little-known to non-Europeans. Originally colonized by the Dutch, the fertile green island was traded back and forth between France and Britain several times before becoming a important coaling station for the British Empire. For much of its history, its most important crop was sugar cane, and the need for field hands explains the country’s ethnic diversity. When slavery was abolished, indentured Indians were brought in to harvest the cane on the large plantations owned by a small elite of mostly French ancestry. The Chinese arrived as shop keepers, enriching a population that was also spiced with a smattering of AWOL sailors from American whaling ships and British naval vessels and later, South Africans and Portuguese fleeing the civil wars of that country’s former African colonies. Tidy, literate and strikingly beautiful, Mauritius today is prosperous, pleasant, French-speaking place that lives off of tourism since the sugar plantations became economically no longer viable. (Should you go, by the way, don’t miss the spectacular Bauhaus tea-processing factory that was designed by a Berlin architect who was among a shipload of Jewish exiles that Mauritius accepted over British objections and housed and fed during World War II).

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Though the name, Frenchie, is cloying without being cute and also perpetuates some much loved but completely daft idea the French have that English speakers refer to them as Frenchies, this vest-pocket bistro in the Sentier, or old Paris garment district, is a delightful spot with really excellent food. Gregory Marchand, the Nantes born chef-owner, works in a tiny kitchen in the back of a exposed stone and red-brick dining room that could easily be found in Nolita (NYC) or Shoreditch (London), and the vibe is similarly Anglo-American, which makes sense, because Greg mostly recently did a stint at Danny Meyer’s sublime Gramercy Tavern and worked at Jamie Oliver’s 15 before that.

The short market menu offers two starters, two mains, a cheese plate and two desserts, and it changes often, which is a good thing, since this place has already acquired a dedicated crowd of young regulars. Waiting for Nadine to arrive, I drank a glass of very good Bossard Muscadet and studied the wine list, which is impressive, including Pic Saint Loup de Mas Foulaquier, a lovely Spanish Rueda, several outstanding cotes du Rhone.

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As an American in Paris for almost 23 years, I took a particular pleasure in reading David Lebovitz’s delightful new book LIVING THE SWEET LIFE IN PARIS. Lebovitz, one of America’s most renowned pastry chefs, a hugely successful cookbook author and blogger extraordinaire (www.davidlebovitz.com) recounts his decision to move to Paris and the sweet-and-sour baby steps of learning a new language and culture with wit, grace and trenchant honesty, which makes this book a far cry from the usual extremes of this genre.

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Almost nothing could be more telling of the impact of this year’s steep recession on the Paris restaurant scene than the instant notoriety of Yam’Tcha, a sweet little restaurant that recently opened in an ancient side street in Les Halles. To wit, this 20 seat place run by earnest, amiable young chef Adeline Grattard, former second to Pascal Barbot at L’Astrance, has passed through global gastro cyber space with the intensity and speed of a comet. Because Grattard actually is a serious, talented and original cook, I’d like to think her table, which she runs with her Hong Kong born husband Chiwah Chan, will withstand the blow-back of a culinary media world that’s so desperate for news that it exalts anything that’s even slightly different and half plausible.

So am I being hypocritical in writing about this fragile new flower on this website? No, not really–though I’m flattered that your eyes may be rolling over these words, I wouldn’t pretend to be such an oracle that famished throngs will be pressing their faces to Tam’Tcha’s window on Monday morning. I assume that those of you who find their way to this quiet little patch of the culinary cyber world are people who are very seriously interested not only in eating well, but in thinking about gastronomy in all of its facets, which brings me back to Yam’Tcha. Quite simply, I worry that the relative paucity of restaurant news out of Paris this year means that the city’s substantial core of food writers is going to pick this tasty morsel to the bone before its had a chance to find its groove.

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On my way to meet a friend, Martine from Cahors, for dinner tonight, I passed the ghastly sandwich counter of the Royal Trinite Cafe at the counter of the rue Havre de Caumartin and found myself wishing that France would create a new level of national security agents–food police, who would have the authority to instantly confiscate and destroy anything as nasty as these pallid baguette sandwiches filled with fake mozzarella, industrial chorizo, and wane pink ham garnished with brown-edged lettuce and slices of unripe tomatoes.

These hideous sandwiches offer a terrible confirmation of the international blog chatter that would insist that France’s best gastronomic days are behind it. And yet ten minutes later, I was seated in a quietly stylish bistro with perfect low lighting, pots of white orchids in the windows, and perfectly bleached ancient white beams overhead and staring at a truly superb menu. I’d been wanting to get to Pramil, in the ever trendier 3rd arrondissement, for a longtime, but it’s rare that I have a night when I don’t have to go somewhere that’s new, new, new.

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