Le Petit Lutétia, Paris | A Nice Old Neighborhood Place Gets Gentrified, B-/C+

When friends recently suggested meeting for Sunday dinner at Le Petit Lutetia, I looked forward to going as much for their company and a good dose of nostalgia as anything else. For the eleven years I spent living in two different Left Bank apartments–one in the rue Monsieur, the second in the rue du Bac, I lived within walking distance of this nice old neighborhood brasserie in the rue de Sevres.

I didn’t go very often, though, because the food was, as the French would say, correcte, or acceptable, but rarely better than that. They did have an oyster stand out front for a longtime, though, and the confit de canard (duck preserved in its own fat and then grilled golden and crispy) was a good meal on a cold night, especially when it came with duck-fat sautéed Sardalais potatoes with a generously sprinkling of chopped garlic and parsley.

The prices were affordable, and it was nice to know that it was there for those nights when I got home late from work and had an empty fridge, or I just wanted a quick bite with a friend without leaving the neighborhood. The waiters in long white aprons were polite, and the art-nouveau dining room itself had handsome stencilled tile floors. Upfront and just inside the door, the bar was separated from the rest of the space by beveled glass partions, the lighting was low and amber, and murky but pretty oil paintings framed in dark molding on the walls gave the place some character. To wit, Le Petit Lutetia was a useful if unremarkable neighborhood place that just ticked along uneventfully from one year to the next.

And like all neighborhood restaurants, this was one with which I had a long skein of memories, some happy–a first date that became a second one very quickly, a tete a tete with a new friend after a movie on a rainy night, and others sad–a break-up dinner that didn’t last until dessert and a final excruciating meal with a visiting relative who shall remain unnamed after we’d just spent four days together in Istanbul that had left my nerves completely macramed.

As we approached the restaurant the other night, however, I was surprised to see a framed notice on a stanchion indicating that they now had a voiturier, or car-parking service. This struck me as odd, because most of the people who dined here came by foot.

Inside, the nice older man with gray hair and steel-rimmed glasses who ran the dining room for many years was no long there, but this came as no surprise. My guess was that he’d retired, and I hope he’d was off somewhere in the Pyrenees fishing for trout or in his home wood-working shop in the Limousin, or something like that. Aside from the absence of the oyster stand out front, however, nothing else seemed to have changed, although I did notice that the waiters were much younger than they’d once been and also that the dining room was busier than I’d expected it might be on a rainy night.

As I slid in on the banquette, it was just as broken-bottomed as it was when I last been here, oh what, maybe twelve years ago. But then I noticed patissier Pierre Herme sitting at a table a few down from us, and further along, a well-known decorator having a dinner with a friend. So even before I opened the menu, I knew something had changed here, since Le Petit Lutetia was most definitely not a place to attract those who assiduously cultivate the public eye back in the days when I was an occasional customer.

And indeed something had changed: the menu, which was considerably more expensive and also rather more interesting than it had once been, with modish to boring dishes like smoked salmon with blinis and creme fraiche, red tuna tartare; a 28 Euros salad of lettuce, avocado and King Crab (the menu specifies, ‘beaucoup de crabe,’ mais quand-meme!), and, perhaps as a sop to the well-bred and habitually parsimonious grandmothers who invite their grandchildren here for dinner, a simple vegetable soup for 8 Euros.

Oh, well, what the hell, even it was absurdly expensive, I feel like some smoked salmon tonight, I thought to myself, and after that, I’ll have the confit de canard for old times’ sake. Bruno went all fish with the tuna tartare and grilled salmon, Carole sank for the soup and then smoked salmon (diet), and Laurent the tuna tartare and then the veal chop with mushrooms, a head-splitting 40 something Euros. Deputised to order the wine, I was fiddling with the list when our bearded waiter arrived, and then it struck me. In a flash, I was certain this place had been taken over by one or more of the Costes brothers. So I asked, and he seemed oddly reluctant to answer my question.
“Very little has changed here since the new owner took over,” he said, somewhat evasively.
So I persisted. Was Le Petit Lutetia now owned by one or more of the Costes brothers?
“Why do you need to know?” he said with a stiff smile.
“I’m a very curious kind of guy, that’s all, Sir,” I replied.
“M’oui, Jean-Louis Costes,” he said and scurried away without taking our wine order.

My heart sank, because I just don’t do Costes restaurants. For me, their style of restaurant keeping has done serious damage to Paris by privileging atmosphere and casting–both in terms of dining-room personnel and clientele, i.e. only the rich, famous and/or beautiful need apply, over good food. And the snideness of the service at many of the restaurants they run–Georges on the top of the Centre Pompidou, La Societe in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, L’Avenue on the Avenue Montaigne, and Le Cafe Marly at the Louvre, among other addresses, led me to swear them off many years ago.

Now I understood the sprinkling of recognisable faces in the dining room, the stratospheric prices, and the menu of food for people who are more interested in going to restaurants for social reasons than gastronomic ones. Oh, well, all I could do was hope for the best, which aside from a previous wound to the wallet, was more or less exactly what happened.

My starter of smoked salmon was so generously served it could easily have been a main course–and so it should have been for the price, and its quality was excellent. Bruno and Laurent loved their tuna tartare–nice plump chunks of good quality fish on a bed of mashed avocado with a little cilantro and a bit of chopped scallion, and despite its rather sad pale army-green split-pea color, Carole was content with her soup.

And then our main courses arrived. Was this food excellent or memorable? No, but it was correct at a higher level of correctness than the old Le Petit Lutetia once was, and in terms of what this patch of the Left Bank has become today, this seems to suffice for most of its clients, many of whom appeared to be regulars.

But as I tucked into my confit de canard, I couldn’t help but feeling wistful for the inhabitants of the old stables building at the head of the courtyard at 134 rue du Bac, my last Left Bank address. In this odd-bod building, there was a middle-aged lady who was a sales woman at a luxury boutique in Paris and the mistress of a married minister in the French cabinet, a rather deranged American poetess who was no shyer about populating her bed with eager and likely candidates night after night than I was, the widow of a French ambassador to an African country who lived among the collection of arts and objects this life had yielded, a mean old drunk who worked for a bank on the ground floor, a delightful and incredibly talented French-Argentine couple–he, an architect, she, an amazingly talented painter, who lived across the hall from me, and who cheated on each other in such epic ways that they finally flew apart, and, well, me. You see, this curious laundry bag of people was what once made the Left Bank so wonderful. And it’s now pretty much gone, since the same urban story has played out here that has played out in other wonderful funky urban neighbourhoods I once inhabited, Earl’s Court in London and Greenwich Village in New York City. Why? None of the inhabitants of the flats in the old stables could afford to live there today, and the complexion of the neighbourhood has changed so thoroughly, that many of the well-heeled newcomers who’ve replaced them would surely look down their noses at neighbours who don’t have the money they do.

So as obvious as it may seem to say so, a ‘neighborhood’ restaurant will always be a reflection of who lives there, and as the great threshing out of the Western world’s major cities continues and even accelerates, places like the Le Petit Lutetia I once knew, or a flock of ordinary West Village restaurants with straggly spider plants in their windows and better than decent cheeseburgers and meatloaf to accompany really well-made Martinis have vanished for ever. Alas. But Bruno’s marinated salmon (soy sauce, mirin, etc.) was very good, as was Laurent’s cote de veau. And I liked my confit de canard, which was just fine, but pleased me more than anything else because it’s a dish you so rarely see on a restaurant menus in Paris anymore. That said, the potato garnish was heat-lamp dried out and not only lacking the duck fat that would have given them flavor but the coarse hash of raw garlic and parsley that has always titillated me, a garlic fiend from birth.

Carole finished up with an Ile Fottante, but the gents abstained from dessert, because we were well fed and quietly wary of the bill. As we sipped our post-prandial coffees, I found myself wondering, would I come back here again. Well, not as a destination restaurant, but forewarned that it would be thumpingly expensive and eager to show some visiting jet-lagged friends what Paris is all about, yes, I’d come back. But with these conditions occurring rather rarely, and so many of my visiting friends obviously arriving on a quest for seriously good and interesting food, I rather doubt that my face will grace this door again for another ten years or so.

Before heading home, I headed for the men’s room, where the glazed ceramic plaque of a little hobo made me think that the last time I’d been here was yesterday.

107 rue de Sèvres, 6th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-45-48-33-53. Metro: Vaneau or Duroc, Average 60-90 € Open daily from noon to midnight.