This week I’m blogging on Paris restaurants for the NY Times “T Style” section. My first post was on how I find mid-range dining to be vastly better in Paris than in New York. Dinner in Paris last night and tonight underlined, however, that the Paris scene is still pre- and post-recession. Let me explain.

Last night I went to dinner at Georges, the Costes brothers restaurant on top of the Centre Pompidou with a good friend. I hadn’t been in ages, since it’s not the type of Paris restaurant I enjoy. To wit, my priority is always good food, and charming service and a cosy setting help, too. Anyway, up the escalators to Georges we road, and while I was impressed all over again by the stunning view from the top of the museum, and also noted that the service was more attentive and friendlier than it had been in a longtime, I was stunned by the menu and the prices. Good grief! The menu had hardly changed a jot since the last time I was here, maybe four years ago, but the prices remain stratospheric. Decent though it was, my “Terrine luxe de confit de canard” wasn’t worth 20 Euros by a long stretch–the luxe being two tiny bits of foie gras in a middling portion of duck terrine. Judy’s Nems (deep-fried Vietnamese spring rolls) were decent enough, but again, not for 16 Euros! Next, I had a Costes classic, an “Aller-Retour,” chopped steak with a log-cabin of fries and a small salad of herbs. To be fair, it was good–perfectly cooked, delicious meat, excellent fries, but for 28 Euros?!? More egregious was Judy’s “Paillard de Poulet Dore Minute, Sauce Curry et Chutney”–a slender piece of chicken with two ink pots of sauce for a whopping 26 Euros. Much as we enjoyed the view, and a very good Saint Joseph, there’s absolutely no way either of us would set fooot in this place again unless we won the lottery.

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Not surprisingly, people often ask where I go for a good, quick, affordable last minute meal in my own neighborhood, which is the 9th arrondissement in the heart of Paris. I have many local favorites, but the one place that never lets me down is Chez Georgette, a brightly lit little bistro in the rue Saint Georges. Consider that during the last couple of months, I’ve probably eaten here a dozen times, and under quite different circumstances. Last night, I went as part of a band of six–Bruno, two friends visiting from New York and the French couple they’re staying with.

The gang gathered chez nous first for Champagne and nibbles (Auvergnat sausage, caperberries, and a Spanish mixture of deep fried corn kernels and lima beans combined with raisins, peanuts, almonds and hazelnuts). On a Friday night, the gang arrived late, derailing a reservation I’d made elsewhere, so I quickly plucked up the phone and booked us at Chez Georgette at 9.30pm.

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Though it’s been a good twenty-five years now, I am still recovering from the shock I experienced during the course of a meal at Pizza Pino on the Champs Elysees. Why, you’re surely wondering, would anyone eat pizza in Paris? Well it was a rainy Sunday night in August, and Mom and Dad, with the four of us in tow, decided to take the low road and head for the pizzeria just around the corner from our hotel in the rue Marignan. We’d eaten in bistros for the previous five nights, and with the rain and the effort of trying to find anything French open on a Sunday in August, the siren sound of the local pizzeria was heard and answered.

What ensued was an experience of communal familial hilarity that was never to be repeated. I mean after all, coming from Connecticut, we know our pizza, and so the menu at Pizza Pino was so utterly demented that we had trouble keeping a straight face when the waiter came to take our order. It was tough, in fact, to decide which was the weirdest pizza on this menu. Maybe the Pizza Hawaiian with PINEAPPLE slices!? Or the one with the fried eggs! Or a topping of salad!!! Clearly, we decided, the French didn’t get pizza at all.

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Le Meating certainly won’t work for everyone, but if you’ know Paris well and are enough of an intrepid gastro-sociologist to sacrifice a slamp-dunk good meal for one that’s oddly interesting, you might enjoy this very popular steakhouse in the 17th not far from La Porte Maillot. Since Americans have been doing their own riffs on various bandwidths of the French restaurant spectrum for years, it’s actually sort of fun to see what the French get up to when they decide to have a crack at one of our emblematic tables, the steakhouse.

Before diving in on an account of my recent dinner here, I’d pause to note that a broad spectrum of Parisians truly love this place. Show biz types, Mohammed Qaddafi’s daughter (seriously, she was sitting at the table next to us), pairs of yuppie ladies on a let’s-splurge night out, and the 17th arrondissement in all of its curious splendor–nouveau riche, ancienne regime riche, etc. packed out this place with a low-lit lounge-bar decor of patterned carpet and flower-motif appliques on the walls.

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A suite of disappointing meals during the last few weeks have had me wondering why Paris has such a hard time being modern. To be sure, they’re brilliant contemporary chefs in Paris, including Inaki Aizpitarte at Le Chateaubriand, Pascal Barbot at L’Astrance, William Ledeuil at Ze Kitchen Galerie, and Christophe Pele at La Bigarrade, but these are are restaurants d’artistes, or one-man shows that exhibit a specific (often brilliant) personal culinary sensibility.

What Paris sorely lacks, however, is someone like New York City’s Danny Meyer, a spectacularly gifted restaurant entrepreneur who has an almost Freudian aptitude for understanding what New Yorkers want to eat. From Blue Smoke (barbecue for city slickers) to the Burger Shack (terrific burgers in Madison Square Park) to the Gramercy Tavern and the always popular Union Square Cafe, Meyer always gets it right, and has coined a whole new service idiom of intelligent, informed, enthusiastic servers who function as the managers of your meal. I suppose the closest Paris comes to a serially successful restauranteur are the Costes Brothers, but I find their formula–dumbed down menus, attitude, decor uber cuisine–so wilting that I can’t really even consider them in the same breathe.

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As the economic storm clouds continue to gather all around the world, many restaurateurs are battening down the hatches for a very difficult year in 2009 by abbreviating their menus and serving hours and shifting to cheaper ingredients in places where they might be less noticed. Others, however, are rising to the challenge of a newly pecunious public with good-value prix-fixe all-included menus.

An excellent example of this accelerating trend is the 85 Euro menu (65 Euros without drinks) menu now being served at La Grande Cascade, the elegant Napoleon III pavilion in the Bois de Boulogne. Best-known for its lovely terrace during good weather, La Grande Cascade is also a delightful winter destination. Arriving for dinner the other night, a fire crackled on the hearth in the main dining room, an elegant salon with old-fashioned Brussels carpets, crystal chandeliers, and heavy silverware with a pretty Belle Epoque floral motif. Waiters in black waist coats conducted themselves like guests at a ball–formal but galant and charming, and chef Frederic Robert, ex-Lucas-Carton from the days when it was still Lucas Carton, cooks brilliant contemporary French dishes with a ballast of classical haute cuisine.

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