I’m delighted to announce that the new updated edition of Hungry for Paris was released by Random House at the end of September.

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Jeanne A, the new epicerie-a-manger in the 11th arrondissement  Since Frederic Hubig-Schall is one of the most ambitious and talented young restauranteurs in Paris, I was expecting a lot from his latest address, Jeanne A, an epicerie a manger (grocery store where you can also eat) in the 11th arrondissement next door to his very popular restaurant L’Astier, and I certainly wasn’t in any way disappointed. This is a swell spot and a terrific addition to the ever more stylish Menilmontant quarter. “What I wanted to do with Jeanne A, which is named for Jeanne Astier, is to create a neighborhood place where you just stop in to have something good to eat with a good glass of wine,” says Hubig-Schall. “This place is about relaxing and having a good time.”

It’s a terrific idea, too, since every table was full last night when I went for dinner, and there’s a big and very pretty raw oak table in a back alcove that’s terrific for anyone looking for a venue for a group of ten to have a good meal and a great night out. Hubig-Schall loves his wine, and we drank terrific wines last night, including a fabulous Saint Chinian from Borie La Vitarele. The wine list here proposes only magnums, but also serves the same wines by carafe.

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It was at least twenty-five years ago that I attended a dinner at the James Beard Foundation in New York City as part of the research that I was doing for an article on this organization for a British food magazine. I was living in London in those days and had flown back to New York to work on this story and several others, and I was spending long hours in the New York Public Library in a race to get all of the material I needed before returning home to England. The Beard people very graciously invited me to dinner as a way of seeing their work in action and walking to this townhouse in Greenwich Village on a brisk autumn night I was overcome with a bout of the same shyness that had made me such an incorrigible book worn as a little boy. I skulked on the sidewalk out front for a while, then finally summoned the nerve to march into a party where I knew no one. I hovered with a glass of white wine in hand in a corner for a while, and then it was time to go in and sit for dinner.

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After dinner last week with two sweet and seriously tatooed guys from LA, and David and Romain, an adorable Franco-American couple who live in Paris, in one of the oldest and best-known bistros in Paris, Chez Denise, an old-timer in Les Halles, I had a bee in my bonnet as I walked home. If we ate well, the real pleasure of being at this place was the high-testosterone sepia-toned Parisian atmosphere. But since the Los Angelinos really know and love great food, I felt as though we’d let them down a bit–they were waiting to be clobbered by a knock-out good bistro meal, which, unfortunately, was what I had the following night at the Restaurant du Marche in a remote corner of the 15th arrondissement. Point blank, this was one of the best meals that I’d eaten in Paris for a longtime, and if the service hadn’t been a bit unfriendly–polite but poker-faced throughout the meal, I’d have rated this table a flat-out A.

It took Bruno and I a longtime to find it–it’s way out on the very edges of Paris between the Porte de Versailles and the Porte de Vanves, but the moment we arrived, I knew we were in the right place. I hadn’t even hung my jacket over the back of my bentwood chair when a saucer of finely sliced sausage arrived at the table, and it was delicious with a modestly priced glass of white Cotes du Gascogne. I’ve had this place on a Post-It note stuck to my computer for ages, but what finally propelled me to go was a rave review by Francois Simon, the estimable food critic of Le Figaro, one of the major French dailies. I’ve worked with Francois several times–I suggested that he write the endpaper for a GOURMET special edition of Paris–it seemed too colonial for us to do an entire edition with only American writers and not a single French voice, and then translated it into English as gently as I could, since he has a wonderfully idiosyncratic style, and we’ve also collaborated as editors on Zagat’s Paris Guide. Through this work, and having read him for years, I know that we share not only almost identical food but restaurant tastes, and so his enthusiasm goaded me on to this remote bistro.

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Even though the advent of email has blessedly reduced the frequency of one of my most-dreaded-of-all weekly errands–a visit to the Post Office, I still seem to be in and out of that miserable place every other day for one reason or another, which means I’ve probably walked past La Clairiere, a sleepy looking bistrot a vins just across the street from La Poste at the corner of the rue Taitbout and the rue Saint Lazare several hundred times during the last few years. What with the churn of the new and the fact that I try to avoid going out to lunch–not because I don’t enjoy it, but it chews up the whole day, I’d never set foot in the door until last week. My delightful friend Andrew called and suggested a much needed heart-to-heart, and since La Clairiere is mid-way between us, I told him I’d meet him there and hoped it would be good.

Stepping inside, I was reminded of the odd-ball bistros where we used to go for lunch when I worked as an editor in the rue Cambon–cheap, cheerful, friendly, funky places that looked like a setting for a Simenon mystery novel.

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For anyone who loves good food, this rentree, or Fall season, in Paris has some momentous new restaurants in the wings, including the opening of talented chef Jean-Francois Piege’s bijoux gastro table over Thoumieux, his stylish brasserie in the 7th, in late September and the arrival of a new chef at Restaurant Alain Ducasse–Christophe Saintagne takes over from Christophe Moret, who’s moving to Lasserre, on Monday, September 6, 2010, with a new menu to be unveiled by the chef on September 30. Saintagne formerly ran Ducasse’s Parisian bistros and Japanese restaurants.

In the meantime, I was happy to join a friend for dinner at the newest branch of Madame and Monsieur Ly’s little empire of Asian restaurants on a lovely Indian summer night when I was dumb with jet lag from having just returned from New York. I’ve eaten at Chez Ly in the Avenue Niel in the 17th arrondissement several times, and not only is the food excellent, if pricey, but Madame Ly is one of the most charming hostesses in Paris. This remarkably hard-working Asian couple–he’s a Vietnamese from Hong Kong and she’s Cambodian, have between them now created four very good Asian restaurants that stand out in the crowd for the fact they use first-rate French produce, eschew the usual dragon-in-the-temple decors of so many Asian eateries in Paris, have excellent service and very good wine lists.

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