For me, one of the great pleasures of summer is having more time to cook, and the first thing I do when I’m a weekend guest at someone else’s country house or I take up residence in a vacation rental is attack the cookbook shelf. Last summer, I spent ten days on the Greek island of Paros, and the magnificent house in which we stayed came with not only an amazingly well-equipped kitchen–the full battery of All-Clad cookware and Kitchen-Aid blender and mixer made me almost as wildly happy as the sweeping views view over the Mediterranean, but several shelves of Greek cookbooks, all of which I read cover to cover. My favorites were Modern Greek by Andy Harris, Real Greek by Theodore Kyriakou and Charles Campion, and The Food and Wine of Greece by Diane Kochilas, and the recipe for Greek wedding pasta (with chickpeas, spinach and feta) that I found in Real Greek has become a firm favorite.

This summer, my favorite cookbook is Sunday Soup, a beautifully illustrated volume with some sixty soup recipes by syndicated cooking columnist and frequent Bon Appetit contributor Betty Rosbottom. During her long career–she ran a cooking school in Columbus, Ohio, and now consults for another one in Western Massachusetts, where she currently lives, Rosbottom has developed a wonderfully companionable but flawlessly professional writing style, and she’s a superb easygoing but very talented cook, too.

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Meeting friends for lunch, I was looking forward to a good meal at La Gauloise, a long-running bistro in the 15th arrondissement where I’ve had some wonderful meals in the past. On a very warm day, they were sensibly tucked away in a shady corner of the large outdoor terrace in front of the restaurant when I arrived, and our first order of business was to order a bottle of Bandol rose, which is great summer drinking because it has a lot more character than most other modish roses.

Studying the 28 Euro lunch menu, I dipped a soggy cucumber stick in a little pot of herbed creme fraiche, and quietly noted that it had no taste at all, a warning signal as it turned out, since the meal that followed was dishearteningly mediocre at best. I started with a dish that could have been wonderful–pot au feu vegetables with a coddled egg and a sharp mustard sauce, while the others went with gaspacho they judged disappointing, and marinated herring, which I found well cooked but underseasoned. Meanwhile, if the accompanying egg was perfectly cooked runny, my vegetables had almost no taste whatsoever. Next up, steamed salmon (bland), chicken (dry), and, for two of us, boeuf bourguignon, a dish I crave whatever the weather.

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One of the conundrums of writing about food in Paris is that I rarely have the opportunity to return to a restaurant I’ve already reviewed as often as I’d like.* Why? The insistent churn of the new and the fact that I won’t do more than five dinners out during any given week–weekends I not only love to stay home and cook but also give my alarming girth a respite, mean that it’s hard to get back to places I’ve already been with much regularity, so I was delighted when a friend who lives in the 15th arrondissement suggested dinner at Le Cristal de Sel the other night. *(the recent exception has been La Regalade Saint Honore, where I’ve now been almost a dozen times and thoroughly enjoyed every meal)

I liked it when it opened two years ago, ate there several times, and then it sort of slipped by me. My friend told me that they’d just reopened after a fire, though, so this seemed a good occasion to see how talented chef Karil Lopez’s cooking had evolved in the meantime. Lopez trained with Eric Frechon at the Bristol hotel before he went out on his own, and my abiding memory of his food was that it was unusually sincere, delicate and almost maternal, or quite unusual for a male chef.

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Quite understandably, given their vertiginous prices, one of the questions that I’m asked most often is which Michelin three-stars are worth the wound to the wallet. It’s a tough one to answer, too, since I don’t go to any of them as often as I’d like, and they do have their ups and downs. So I was delighted the other day when a pal who’s as food mad as I am invited me to lunch at Guy Savoy.

I hadn’t been to this exalted table for a longtime and was honestly curious as to what I’d find, too. As my memory served me, Guy Savoy has always offered superb service and reliably very fine food, but was rarely a place where any single dish stopped me in mid-sentence. Instead of the sort of intense, sensual, almost shocking haute cuisine I love–the cooking of Pierre Gagnaire and Pascal Barbot at L’Astrance, for example, I’ve often found that Guy Savoy delivers the type of impeccably prepared, reliably delicious and rather polite dishes that suit his clientele of well-heeled local business people (at noon) and frankly rich international types (at dinner) to a T.

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I hadn’t been to Prunier, the elegant art-deco jewel of a restaurant on the Avenue Victor Hugo for a very longtime for the simple reasons that it’s very expensive and I rarely find myself drawn to the silk-stocking precincts of the 16th arrondissement.

A rather grand friend from Geneva invited me the other night, however, and as we studied the menu over flutes of Champagne, I noticed a copper casserole arrive from the kitchen brimming with shrimp, cockles, mussels, squid rings and fish filets on a bed of pale golden orzo, a clever idea that riffs on the Catalan recipe which uses short stubby vermicelli noodles in place of rice in a paella-like fideua.

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If I lunched there several times a few weeks ago, and generally found the food to be much better than expected (with the exception of the worst frites I’ve ever eaten in France), it took a trip to New York to really put Ralph’s, the new restaurant in Ralph Lauren’s new Saint-Germain-des-Pres boutique, into perspective. To wit, I think it’s sort of too bad the powers that be didn’t decide to do a modern American bistro in the idiom of the very pleasant Cookshop in New York City’s Chelsea district instead of a pricey slice of up-market Betty Crocker vintage Americana.

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