If reviving any classic restaurant runs the risk of cliché and pastiche, the challenge was magnified when it came to Lyon’s La Mere Brazier, one of the most famous restaurants in France. “I knew it was going to be a challenge,” says Lyonnais Matthieu Viannay, 42, the restaurant’s new chef-owner. “Lots of people wanted the restaurant to remain exactly the way that it had always been, and so they weren’t going to like even small changes, while younger people who’d never known the original could find the menu too old-fashioned. What I had to do was find a personal balance between the classical French cooking that La Mere Brazier originally served and my own style.”

   When Viannay, one of the most accomplished of Lyon’s new generation of chefs, decided to revive La Mere Brazier, closed since 2004, he first immersed himself in the history of the restaurant, which was founded by one of Lyon’s famous “Meres” (female chefs) in 1921, and then sought the consul of a cook who’d been an apprentice to Eugenie Brazier in 1945—Paul Bocuse. 

Continue reading…

The sweetest secret in Paris recently came to end with the opening of La Chocolaterie, a striking new boutique in the trendy northern Marais. Before the only way to sample the deliciously confidential wares of chocolatier and patissier Jacques Genin was at Alain Ducasse, Joel Robuchon, Pierre Gagnaire, Yves Camdeborde’s Le Comptoir du Relais or one of the other select restaurants and hotels in Paris that carry his handmade chocolates and pastries or by prizing the his address out of someone and knocking on the door of his tiny atelier deep in the 15^th arrondissement and asking if he’d sell you some directly (a nice guy, he usually did).

  Now, as word spreads about Genin creations, among them his caramel éclair, cassis (black currant) and mimosa pate de fruits and Szechuan pepper ganache, an ever growing throng of intensely curious chocolate and pastry-loving Parisians are flocking to Genin’s bright, airy 200 square meter boutique in a 17^th building at 133 rue de Turenne. What they all want to know is who is Jacques Genin, and how did he manage to stay under the radar of the French capital’s thousands of avid chocolate lovers for so long.

Continue reading…

Despairing of ever finding really good Italian food, this tiny little restaurant in a passage off the busy rue du Faubourg Saint Antoine hit me like a thunderbolt. The Caffe dei Cioppi is a tiny space with maybe five table, plus two seats at the counter that allow you to watch the chef at work. In its layout, its sort of like an American diner, but amber lighting gives the space a cosy feel compared to the fluorescent common to that Yankee genre. We went as five and after sharing an excellent bottle of white Sardinian Vermentino as an aperitif, we got busy with the short and very gently priced menu. Everything appealed, though I loved the idea of a frittata (Italian omelette) seasoned with fresh mint and peas, I can never resist freshly made mozzarella, which here came with an almost invisible drizzle of sublime Sardinian olive oil and perfect grilled vegetables–aubergine, baby onions, zucchini and a sun-dried tomato. A superb plate of food, and the only one of us who didn’t have the mozarella crowed over his plate of freshly sliced Italian prosciutto and salami. Next, I chose thepolpette (flattened meat balls) with over roasted potatoes seasoned with rosemary and sea salt. Made with bread soaked in milk, grated Parmesan and onion, they were still soft inside, which set up a wonderful contrast with the crunchy potatoes. All of the other dishes I tasted–homemade ravioli filled with ricotta, linguine with a sauce of sea bass and tomatoes, and penne in broccoli sauce, were superb, too. Though desserts are never the high point of an Italian meal, the melted chocolate cake and apple tart here were terrific. My only regret as we went off into the night after a truly fine feed was that this place isn’t in my neighborhood. If it was, I would very happily eat there once a day.

“Alec, it couldn’t possibly be any good. It’s just down the street from the Cafe de Flore in heart of tourist Paris,” said my friend from London when we arrived at Le Petit Saint Benoit. She and her husband were in town doing a story for an Australian magazine and had asked me to chose a inexpensive restaurant within walking distance of their hotel. Also a place where they serve on an outdoor terrace if possible, since Pete would walk a mile for a Camel.

Continue reading…

For me, one of the most endearing qualities of the French is their willingness to be contrarian. This same trait has infuriated successive American governments, and is often used by crack-pot Stateside radio commentators to whip up anti-French feeling, but I think it’s very useful. France is often the only country that doesn’t bleatingly go along with American wishes, and this tendency to ride the brake is useful, because it allows for some reflection. Further, the only way to be sure that you’re right is to listen carefully and seriously to an opposing point of view.

Sometimes this contrarian pose is just cantankerousness for pleasure of being contrary, however, which is what I’ve witnessed in Paris during the last week or so as several usually very reliable French food critics have not only rallied to the defense of the new Costes brothers restaurant La Societe in Saint Germain des Pres, but claim they actually like it. Maybe they do, but from the perch of someone who not only passionately loves good food but also has a huge respect for the back-breaking work of running a small independent restaurant, I’d only say that it couldn’t be for the food. Let’s be clear. The Costes brothers run a chain of some two dozen fashion driven restaurants with identikit menus that have made it acceptable to go to a restaurant for reasons that have nothing to do with eating good food. Instead you go to Costes restaurants because Paris nightlife is so wilted and because you like to eat in pretty surroundings served by pretty people. You also go to Costes restaurants as an act of conspicuous consumption, because they’re expensive relative to the quality and effort involved in creating what they serve. You go to Costes restaurants because you’re more interested in “fashion” than you are in food. But you don’t go to to them to have a good or interesting meal.

Continue reading…

Allow me to get La Societe out of the way so that I can get on to two new places that are really worth your reading time. As anyone who has read HUNGRY FOR PARIS will know, I take a very dim view of the impact that the two dozen or so restaurants of the Freres Costes have had on the Paris dining landscape. To wit, they serve an almost identical menu of easily assembled dishes that require very little actual cooking, and unfortunately they’ve succeeded in seducing a big tranche of affluent young and older Parisians (who regret that they’re no longer young by aping the tastes and habits of youth) who care more about decor and seeing and being scene than they do good food. To each their own, you might say, except that the success of the Costes has spawned a wilting number of imitators, and this mass of restaurants where you don’t really go to eat competes with restaurants where the chef cooks his or her heart out everyday.

I went to La Societe, the new Costes place on the Place Saint Germain, out of a certain morbid curiosity, but also because I admire the talent of interior designer Christian Liagre, who created a wonderfully louche Asia-in-the-thirties look for this place, and, rather wistfully, because I was quietly attending yet another memorial service for the Left Bank as I once knew it. Suffice to say that with the exception of the Eglise de Saint Germain des Pres and the Cafe Bonaparte, this whole vital crossroads of what was once one of the world’s great brain trusts has now been given over to conspicuous consumption. Armani got the ball rolling when he bought out Le Drugstore, a giant Ralph Lauren boutique is looming, and now with La Societe, food as conspicuous consumption arrives on the scene. I personally don’t see any reason to pay 14 Euros for an avocado vinaigrette, but perhaps you do?

Continue reading…

I’ve been watching an alarming trend gain momentum in Paris for some years now: there’s less and less real cooking going on in Paris restaurants. Too many of them do what I call “cuisine d’assemblage,” or dishes that are a question of a little slicing (charcuterie) and washing (salad), than real cooking. If was of course the Costes brothers who pioneered this technique–same menu in two dozen restaurants, with things like a glass of carrot-ginger juice as an appetizer, salade d’haricots verts, etc. It’s easy to see the appeal of this approach–it keeps costs down, but what it amounts to is a hollowing out of the real and wonderful work of actually cooking.

A more recent take on this phenomenon are a raft of a new restaurants that serve pedigreed produce–Gillardeau oysters, Basque and Spanish charcuterie, etc., most of which is either organic and/or comes from sustainable sources. A good example is the much lauded new Glou, a good looking storefront space in the northern Marais just across the street from the Musee Picasso. It was opened a few months ago by Julien Fouin, the founding editor of the  French food magazine Regal. Fouin, a nice guy, is at the epicenter of the young French food world, so his place has been the object of his praise in a variety of different Paris magazines and papers. What most of them have been focusing on, however, isn’t the food, but an Italian machine that allows them to pour great wine by the glass while preserving the rest of the bottle.

Continue reading…