This year in Paris, a late, damp and often overcast Spring has been pushing and pulling my appetite in all different directions. To be sure, I’ve eating as much French grown asparagus–both green and white, as I can get my hands on, but the gray skies and cool temperatures have left me yearning for sturdier comfort food than I’m accustomed to craving at this time of the year. Then I went to dinner the other night at Les Climats, a very pleasant new restaurant in one of my favorite restaurant venues in Paris, the elegant Belle Epoque dining room of a handsome old dormitory building that once housed young single ladies who worked for the P.T.T. (Poste Telegramme, Telephone), and found my seasonal groove again.

In the early nineties when this place first became an open-to-the-public restaurant, it was called Le Telegraphe, and it enjoyed a two or three year run as one of the most fashionable restaurants on the Left Bank, despite the fact that the food was never better than a little better-than-average. Tipped off by a friend who lives nearby that it had recently re-opened yet again–it’s been through several middlingly successful incarnations since it was Le Telegraphe, Bruno and I decided to treat ourselves to what we hoped would be a good dinner on yet another drizzly cool Friday evening. I knew nothing about the chef, but my friend did tell me that it had a ‘lush’ decor and that the wine list was all Burgundies, right down to a Cremant du Bourgogne instead of Champagne, and since I find Burgundies, especially white ones, absolutely perfect drinking for Spring, I thought we might be able to will the season into existence over a good glass of Burgundy or two.

Arriving, we had a choice to two different settings, the dining room up front with lots of scarlet wing chairs with leopard print trim and some very beautiful Secessionist style art-nouveau reproduction chandeliers, or a pretty terrazzo-floored terrace with white wicker chairs and a greenhouse walls overlooking the lush courtyard back garden where meals are served at noon only in deference to the neighbors. Since the dining room was one of those spaces that look too designed to be comfortable, we opted for the terrace, with its mix of British colonial and art-nouveau references.

Over a glass of very good Cremant de Bourgogne–I long ago learned that these sparkling wines not only offer exceptional value for the money but are often excellent, we studied the menu, which had clearly been been constructed to flatter the restaurant’s remarkable wine list. Willing summer to begin, Bruno ordered the sea bream carpaccio on a bed of razor-fine cucumber scales garnished with ambered colored gelee flavored with Xerex vinegar, a brilliant idea, and I had an impeccably well made Opera de foie gras on a bed of spice-bread sponge with Gewurtztraminer gelee. The steely artistry present in both of these dishes made me curious about the chef, and whom our very nice waiter informed me is Phan Chi Tam, a young Frenchman of Vietnamese origin who had most recently been working for Thierry Marx at Sur Mesure, his restaurant at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Paris.

The smart counter-casting of the eager young serving staff, most of whom commute to this plush corner of the Left Bank from far afield suburbs, leavened the atmosphere of the restaurant in a useful way as well. To wit, even the stuffiest B.C.B.G. poseurs were guilessly brought to heel by the sincerity of this trying-so-very-hard-to-please young crew.

Our main courses were excellent as well. Bruno loved his steamed turbot with baby clams and a rich foamy dashi broth and was delighted to get his hands on a glass of the same sublime Puligny Montrachet I’d had with my foie gras (in addition to the spectacular wine list, they also offer a terrific variety of pours by the glass). My veal tartare, a fine foil for good wine, was coarsely chopped excellent quality meat that was garnished with a puree of fava beans and baby peas and very timidly seasoned with a little bit of citrus zest. Even though it was lovely with a glass of Hautes Cotes de Beaune, a little pinch of piment d’Espelette and a light sprinkle of coarse sea salt with sea weed would have given this fine product more personality.

Desserts were excellent, too, including the Pierre Herme inspired litchi and fresh raspberry macaron I enjoyed and a lime-flavored ‘boule de neige’ (frozen dairy confection) with ginger-and-passionfruit coulis that Bruno chose. Though it’s rather expensive at dinner–you could easily spend 130 Euros a head with a glass of wine or two, I suspect this sophisticated, worldly and well-conceived place will be hugely popular this summer at noon, when they serve two reasonably priced prix-fixe lunch menus (36 Euros and 45 Euros) in their secret garden. And after all of the years during which this type of restaurant–serious tables with seriously good French cooking for a well-heeled and well-dressed clientele, have been dying out, it’s nice that even during this balkish Spring, a welcome trend to their renewal continues not only with the charming Les Climats, but Goust and places like Les Tablettes de Jean-Louis Nomicos, this latter restaurant being a real forerunner of this gastronomic redux.

A few days later, an old friend came to town and expected me to pull a rabbit out of a hat. She’d read about Septime, which is probably at the top of the list of almost every visiting foreign food-lover this Spring, and wanted to go for dinner. Needless to say, Septime had been full for dinner that night for many weeks, but as it happened, I’d read that chef Bertrand Grebaut had designed a menu that’s being served at Wanderlust until June 21, and never having been to this table at the curious-looking lime-green Cite de la Mode et Design perched on the banks of the Seine near the Gare d’Austerlitz, I booked us a table.

Arriving, I could see that Laurie hadn’t changed a bit from the days that we worked the night shift at a bakery on the Upper West Side of New York. Her blonde rasta plaits were bundled up in a sort of scarlet do-rag and she still sported the same surgical steel ring in one nostril that she had all those years ago. As serious but slightly crazy kids who liked to have a good time, we spent many lost nights together at Paradise Garage, a big thumping night club on the Hudson, before she moved off to the woods of Pennsylvania with a Puerto Rican lady mechanic. These days, though, she lives in Austin with her cow-girl partner, whom I’ve never met, and we hadn’t seen each other in well over twenty years. “Well, aren’t you looking all Euro guy these days, Babe,” she said and gave me a hug. I noticed that she’d put on a fair amount of weight, inevitable, it seemed, for a professional baker, but certainly wouldn’t have said a word about it to her. “Hey, you’ve, um, filled out a bit, huh! You used to be skinny as a reed, but your face still looks good.” Small mercies, or something.

Both of us liked the restaurant, any airy open space with an outdoor terrace, too cold for that night, overlooking the Seine and a staff of good-looking hipsters who also happened to be incredibly professional about their work. After we’d muddled the passage of time a bit with Bourbon cocktails–a sort of a riff on a Julep, we ordered, and if the food lacked a little bit of the finesse of Grebaut himself, it was still delicious and more generously served than what you get a Septime.

I loved the buttered bread crumb garnish on veal tartare (I’m single-handedly denuding the pastures of France this Spring) on potato puree with tassels of fresh tarragon, since it was sensual study in textures within a shy band of flavors, and Laurie, who says she misses really good fresh fish in Austin, was delighted by her sea bream tartare.

Our main courses were very good, too. A perfectly cooked cod steak with a mussel-garnished vinaigrette and grilled baby fennel for me, and baby chicken with faiselle and new potatoes for Laurie. “I love this food. It’s generous and hearty, but delicate and original, too,” said Laurie.

When I asked her if she wanted dessert, she shook her head and said no, “I need a smoke, and I have a little surprise for you.” So I invited her to dinner and paid the bill, and then we found a bench on the quai next to the Seine and she got out a tin of the oatmeal cookies she’d carried all the way from Austin and a little bottle of Southern Comfort. “You’ve probably gotten too fancy for Southern Comfort, but I’m here to remind you that you used to love a Southern Comfort and Coke when we’d go clubbing.”

I don’t like Southern Comfort anymore, as it turns out, but Laurie’s cookies were delicious. She’s still a wonderful friend, too, and Wanderlust is a great idea for anyone who wants to eat Bertrand Grebaut but can’t land a reservation at Septime. Oh, and as their guest-chef menu rolls on into the summer, the next up will be Christophe Pellet, who used to cook at La Bigarrade in the 17th arrondissement.

Les Climats, 41 rue de Lille, 7th, Tel. 01-58-62-10-08. Metro: Solferino. Open daily. Lunch menus 36 Euros, 45 Euros. Average a la carte dinner 120 Euros. www.lesclimats.fr 

Wanderlust, 32 Quai d’Austerlitz, 13th, Tel. 01-70-74-41-74. Metro: Gare d’Austerlitz. Open daily: Lunch noon-3pm, dinner 8pm-midnight, Sunday brunch noon-4pm. Lunch menu 20 Euros, 25 Euros; dinner menus 35 Euros, 40 Euros. www.wanderlustparis.com

The post LES CLIMATS–Suave Contemporary French Cooking, Brilliant Burgundies, B+; WANDERLUST–Good Eats Where the Wild Things Are, B appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

Before I extol Les Delices de Shandong in the 13th arrondissement, it’s obvious that I should offer a glimpse of my credentials as a critic of Chinese cooking, in this case, the superb regional kitchen of Shan Dong. Alas, as much as I feel qualified to write authoritatively on the American, British, French, Italian, Spanish and other Western kitchens, it’s best to admit that my knowledge of Chinese cooking is rather infantile, or to wit, it’s based very much on a personal primal reaction to what tastes good. Oh, to be sure, I grew up eating, and loving, ‘Chinese’ food of a sort, since Sunday night take-out meals from the excellent ‘West Lake’ in downtown Westport, Connecticut next to the public library, and the also good ‘Golden Door’ restaurant in a shopping center on U.S. 1, were a treat I craved as a suburban child with an insatiable hunger for new tastes and flavors, textures and ingredients.

Mom would save the printed takeout menu from one order to the next in a drawer next to the wall-mounted phone in the kitchen, and around about 7pm on a Sunday, I’d poke my head around the corner every five minutes to see if she was sitting at the kitchen table filling out the menu before calling in the order. The only consolation for me if she wasn’t making fat gray Xs with a well gnawed yellow pencil was the possibility we’d be getting pizza instead–Mom understandably felt that she deserved a night off from shopping and cooking for a family of six, so Sunday was often takeout night, and the promise of favorite foreign foods blunted the terrible melancholy I always felt on the 7th day of the week.

We almost always had the same things, too: egg drop soup, egg rolls, shrimp toast, barbecued pork spare ribs, fried rice, Moo Goo Gai Pan (an Americanized version of a Cantonese dish that involved chicken with mushrooms, bamboo shoots, snow peas {mange toute}, and water chestnuts in a tame chicken-broth based sauce), egg foo yung, shrimp with cashew nuts, and broccoli, I think, which no one ever ate, with a grand finale of fortune cookies that no one actually ever ate either. These were great kitchen table meals with plastic packets of the hot Chinese mustard my father liked, sweet ‘duck’ sauce,’ soy sauce and the food packed in waterproof folded square white paper boxes with thin wire handles. LIttle did I know that most of what we were eating was heavily Americanized Cantonese cooking, and in fact, my education in Chinese gastronomy got muscled out of the way in the 70s and 80s by the arrival of lots of other foreign restaurants in Westport–a couple of terrible Mexican restaurants, a prissy French place called Bon Appetit that had–get this, sea salt on its tables, and a flock of salad-bar-anchored steakhouses with Olde Taverne style decors and big pepper grinders on the tables. Amazingly enough, Westport even had a Bulgarian restaurant, the Cafe Varna, where we had cub scout dinners that left a lot of little boys politely alarmed by stuffed grape leaves and other Balkan fare.

Aside from a few shocking forays to restaurants in Boston and New York’s Chinatowns as a college student–‘real’ Chinese food was almost alarming for being so much more vivid–I mean, the chicken tasted like chicken, it wasn’t until I moved to New York after college and was living on the Upper West Side that my Chinese culinary education advanced, and then it was in the blaze of hot peppers unleashed on Manhattan by the sudden popularity of Szechuan cooking, which made everyone rather embarrassedly aware that China had regional kitchens like, um, Italy, and that what we’d thought was Chinese food was tasty but timid stuff shrewdly edited to politely tantalize our wan palates. The Cuban Chinese food in the neighborhood was a fascinating red herring, though, and occasionally, I’d trek down to Chinatown with other broke young friends.

I don’t think I advanced much, however, until the brilliant and courtly editor for whom I was editorial assistant at Random House invited me out for lunch on a long ago birthday. It was a beautiful Fall day, but I labored in the space of a sudden ill-defined social occasion to create conversation that I thought would interest him as we walked up Third Avenue and then cut across to Shun Yee Palace, where I ate my first Peking duck, a dish so good that I stopped caring if my conversation with a man my father’s age seemed smart or interesting and just ate, greedily wrapping duck, crispy duck skin and finely chopped scallion (perhaps some cucumber, too?) in hot rice-flour pancakes smeared with plum sauce. This was one of the best things I’d ever eaten, and I just couldn’t stop. “The best companions at the table have real appetites,” the editor said eliptically as we were walking back to the office, and if i was momentarily alarmed that he might have found me dull, I also had the rest of our lunch in a brown paper bag to look forward for dinner that night, and instinctively knew I’d have plenty of time to puzzle over his bon mots in the years to come. Suffice it to say that I finally figured out that he loved really good food and was the father of four difficult sons, so the relaxed quietude of sharing a really good meal with someone else who was also immersed in their own pleasure was surely a rarity for him.

Okay, then, enough ambered reminiscence. So am I a reliable judge of Chinese cooking Well, yes, I’d like to think so, and this is why I’d say that if you were only going to go to a single Chinese restaurant in Paris, it should be Les Delices de Shandong, where I ate with Bruno, who lives in terror of red pepper, the other night. I’ve been reading opinions of this place by French colleagues who know a lot more about Chinese food than I do for a longtime, Sophie Brissaud on her P’tit Pois blog foremost among then, and so was really looking forward to this meal. It was superb.

I loved the animation of the brightly lit dining room, and accustomed to the usual get’um in get’em out brusqueness of Asian restaurants in the 13th arrondissement, I was surprised by the polite service. We stared at the menu and negotiated a meal for two very different appetites. I wanted to try the pork-and-cabbage filled dumplings, but agreed to an order of noodles in sesame sauce for Bruno in case the dumplings proved too fiery. Since I didn’t know much about Shan Dong cooking, I just couldn’t assure Bruno that they’d be something he could eat (To learn more about Shan Dong cooking, you might want to watch this YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs0bUhmcBoA). Well, the dumplings, which were filled with delicately tangy (black vinegar, I think) smoky chunky pork and cabbage were spectacular, and the sesame noodles, though much tamer, were good, too, but I wouldn’t feel obliged to order them again if I went back with someone else.

Main courses required similar calculation and negotiation. I had no interest in shrimp with cashews at all, but knew they’d be fine for Bruno if the saute of smoked pork with lots of red peppers, celery, Savoy cabbage, and a few fermented black beans was too potent. Well, it was brilliantly potent–one of the best Chinese dishes I’ve ever eaten, in fact, and with regular slugs of Tsingtao beer, Bruno enjoyed it, too, and we both liked the liserons (oddly called ‘blindweed’ in English, but resembling a sort of leaf-less watercress) in garlicky emerald-green tofu sauce. And the shrimp with stale cashews was desperately bland, almost as though the chef was offended that someone would order something so dull.

On the way home, Bruno, who works in a busy crowded office while I spend my eccentrically quiet and solitary days in flannel pajamas and sweat shirts to a busy rhythm of my own mad making, admitted that the food was very good, but had problems with the noise. It was noisy, but I barely noticed. Instead I was thinking about who I could draft to go back with me to try the soups, the kidneys, the intestines, the carp, and a dozen other dishes I noticed trailing by with avaricious envy. This is a terrific restaurant. And to think it all started out over egg rolls with duck sauce in Greens Farms, Connecticut.

Les Delices de Shandong, 88 boulevard de l’Hopital, 13th, Tel. 01-45-67-23-37. Metro: Campo-Formio. Closed Sunday. Average 25 Euros.

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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.

Paella de luxe at Prunier

It looked delicious, but it was hard for me to believe that such a traditional French luxury seafood house would be serving this wonderfully rustic Catalan dish. So I asked the waiter, and he confirmed that yes, indeed, it was paella and that Prunier would be serving it every Thursday night at a relatively reasonable 35 Euros a head during June and July. Since this stunningly beautiful restaurant also has a very pretty sidewalk terrace, this is a great opportunity for a summery treat for anyone who isn’t imminently heading to Catalan beaches, too.

To be sure, this paella is urbane, delicately seasoned and eminently more refined than anything you’ll find in Spain, but with a nice bottle of Provencal rose, it makes for a very good meal. For those in search of something less hearty, Prunier also offers a relatively good value prix-fixe menu “Simone” for 65 Euros, which includes shrimp sauteed with ginger, combava and baby artichokes, steamed sea bass with baby vegetables in a coulis of peppers and pistou, and strawberry and rhubarb garnished tiramisu, and even on a rainy night when they’re not serving inside it’s a pleasure to dine in a room that is one of the great art-deco masterpieces of Paris.

Prunier, 16 avenue Victor Hugo, 16th, Tel. 01-44-17-35 85. Metro: Charles-de-Gaulle-Etoile. Paella 35 Euros a person, a la carte 100 Euros.

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Ever since I first went to Le Petit Marguery, the old-fashioned bistro that’s one of the most famous addresses for game in Paris in season, many years ago, it’s been one of my favorite restaurants, so I was delighted when I learned that they’d recently opened Le Comptoir du Petit Marguery, a less expensive bistro annex (Through the years, the original Le Petit Marguery has become rather pricey).

Trying to think of a place to dine with a difficult friend, an elegant older woman from London whose primary pleasures are monologuing and complaining (I put up with this because she’s also brilliant and, when in better frame of mind, has a wonderful sense of humor, and we’re both obsessively interested in food and travel), I remembered that this new place is usefully open on Sunday night and booked. On a rainy night that I feared would feed my friend’s instinctively negative worldview, I was delighted to arrive at this cozy place with  factory lamps, exposed brick walls and wooden tables, and find a warm welcome and a very appealing and reasonably priced menu.

When Madame arrived a few minutes later with a wind-damaged umbrella, I braced myself, but the nice young waiter headed her off with a glass of the same good Macon I was drinking and brought us radishes and a saucer of very good saucisson to nibble while we studied the menu, which offered a variety of very appealing choices among starters at 6 Euros and main courses at 14 Euros. Though my Breton artichoke salad on a bed of mesclun with a slice of foie gras was modest, it was also delicious, made with fresh artichokes in a very delicate dressing of walnut oil and Xeres vinegar and the small knob of homemade foie gras, such a treat as an amplifier of the taste of artichokes, was homemade and very good.  Madame was very happy with her starter of plump white Loire Valley asparagus en vinaigrette, which blessedly distracted her from a very long and dull story about a mutual friend in Buenos Aires whose married lover of many years had recently cheated her out of a lot money.

Main courses, with which we drank an excellent Irancy, were generously served, including my excellent gigot de sept heures (lamb baked in a slow oven for seven hours) and for Madame, a steamed sturgeon filet that was served on a bed of seasonal vegetables. While we finished up with Floating Island in an excellent sauce anglaise, I was treated to another long-winded tale about the perfidy of the eldest daughter of Madame’s boy friend, and quietly ressolved to return to this very good low-budget address soon with someone who had only eager stories to tell about a fascinating trip to Tibet or a new lover with whom he or she was besotted.

Le Comptoir du Petit Marguery, 9 boulevard de Port Royal, 13th, Tél. 01-42-17-43-43. Metro: Gobelins. A la carte 30 Euros.

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Suffice it to say that supermarkets, especially the really big ones, have choked the life out of hundreds of French villages, towns and cities by making it impossible for small merchants to compete, have ringed many of these same places with soul-strickeningly ugly collars of sprawl that are only accessible by automobile, and have privileged heavily processed industrial foods with high mark-ups over fresh healthy reasonably priced seasonal food people cook into good meals at home.

Confronted with this reality, I am swearing off supermarkets–places I almost never shop for anything but clearning products anyway–as much as I possibly can. Instead, I’ll continue to take the time necessary to buy my vegetables at the market or one of the very good green grocers in the rue des Martyrs, avidly frequent my very good butcher in the rue Blanche, etc., etc. The only way to free our food chain from the mad petroleum driven machine that profits huge oil companies, huge car companies, huge retailers, etc., is to just plain stop shopping in these places.

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Returning to Paris after a week spent in Normandy, I was hungry for Asian food, and so decided to act on a Post-It note that’s been stuck to my computer for some months. Knowing of my love for Vietnamese cooking, Kim Ta, the charming manager of Indochine, in the rue Mont Thabor, generously suggested that I might also try Suave in the 13th arrondissement.

Driving across Paris on a rainy night, Bruno and I reminisced about the first time we went to Vietnam and the astonishingly good dinner we ate at The Temple Club in Saigon–Vietnamese ravioli and then Bo Bun for both of us, so flavorful, delicious, and pretty to look at that we ate the same meal three other times while we were there. What fascinated me, too, was how vivid ‘real’ Vietnamese cooking tasted in comparison to most of what’s served in Paris. To be sure, it’s still tough to find certain fresh Asian herbs in Paris; French meat, fish and fowl are different; and they’re other alimentary constraints on producing authentic Vietnamese food in a European country. But this didn’t stop us from hoping that we might be headed towards a place that serves really terrific Viet cooking and which would become a new favorite.

Occupying an attractively decorated corner shopfront on the edge of the Butte des Cailles, or some remove from the antic high-rise action of Paris’s ‘real’ Asian village, Suave–its name oblige, immediately seemed to be setting itself up in opposition to the cheap, popular Asian places with steamy windows a few streets over. Instead, this place had a corner banquette with pillows, a beautifully worked framed embroidery of multi-colored birds on the wall, and gentle lighting.

It was very busy on a Friday night, too, which seemed auspicious, although Bruno rightly pointed out that “il n’y a pas beaucoup des sourires ici” (The service is unsmiling and almost military in its desire to spin as many diners as possible through the money-producing wicket). A starter salade de boeuf was excellent, though, with fine rings of lemon grass; rare and tender beef; and crunchy vegetables, while a mixed assortment appetizers–two spring rolls, two deep-fried shrimp beignet, two taro-root flower fritters stuffed with chopped shrimp, etc. was decent enough but brought Trader Vick’s to mind (Trader Vick’s was a chain of “polynesian” style restaurants, often in Hilton hotels, in the U.S. that reached its hey day in the late sixties, early seventies, and offered a Sears Roebuck take on ‘exotic’ eating).

Bruno’s bo bun–deep-fried nems (spring rolls) and grilled beef on a bowl of noodles was okay, as was my bun cha, a Hanoi specialty of grilled pork on rice-flour vermicelli noodles with bean sprouts, sliced carrots, shredded lettuce, chopped cucumber. What was missing Generosity, for starters–these portions were modest, and also the, um, er, well, suave taste that both of these dishes have in Vietnam.

I’ve had worse versions of both in Paris, but if the basic quality of the food at Suave is respectable, it’s certainly not a place that’s worth crossing Paris for and real connoisseurs of Vietnamese cooking are likely to be a bit let down by this place.

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Like many people who’ve lived in Paris for a longtime, I inevitably find myself having a meal at Terminus Nord every couple of months for the simple reason that it has one of the most enviably strategic locations in the city just across the street from the bustling Gare du Nord. And with a similar inevitability, I come away from every meal at this place crestfallen by the stunning mediocrity of the food and the bored and distant service.

Aside from good company, the only consolations at a really poor lunch today were some excellent Norman oysters to start and the pleasure of whiling away several hours in this visually enchanting dining room, with its odd hybrid of art-deco and art-nouveau, floral-pattern mosaic floor, and wonderfully witty mural populated with caricatures of Belle Epoque Parisian types by turn-of-the-century Russian artist Nicholas Nifontoff. Otherwise, the meal was a train wreck.

I have a very strong suspicion that my ‘gratinee,’ or onion soup had been pre-prepared–right down to its melted cheese topped croutons–in a commissary somewhere, since it came to the table within minutes of being order and was lukewarm, or under-microwaved. A “tartare” of unripe avocado with shredded crab was watery and almost tasteless, and the blinis accompanying some unidentified smoked salmon–no provenance here whatsoever despite that fact that it cost 18 Euros, were cold, coarse and stale.

My two English friends were terribly letdown by the plat du jour–overcooked filets of sea bass, at once leathery and mushy, with an unseasoned puree of fennel, and my choucroute was lukewarm and served with the perfectly round golf-ball shaped potatoes that are alas but just one of the alarming products of industrial-scale catering in France and the charcuterie was flabby and tasteless. The only one who managed a half decent meal was Bruno, who had a decent steak that he wisely didn’t dress with the ramekin of sludgy looking industrial bearnaise sauce that came with it.

Dessert was out of the question after such a letdown, and over coffee my London pals wondered aloud at how it could be that the very simple standard-issue classics of traditional brasserie cooking could be so poorly done. I really hated to make matters worse, but I did tell them that the menus at most Parisian brasseries have been repeatedly pushed through the eye of a needle by teams of accountants to make them as profitable as possible and that they soldier on as money-spinners–adding injury to insult, Terminus Nord is not cheap–for people in a hurry and others besotted by the beauty of their Parisian decors. Guidebooks never delete them and most food writers indulgently turn a blind eye to their failings.

So where should you eat in the environs of the Gare du Nord Well, you can always just order some oysters and a glass of white wine at La Terminus Nord, but wanting a real meal, I’d suggest Chez Casimir, the annex of the excellent Chez Michel, which is open daily, or La Vigne Saint Laurent, a very pleasant bistro a vins about a ten-minute walk away.

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Chez Casimir, 6 rue de Belzunce, 10th, Tel.  01-48-78-28-80. Metro: Gare du Nord. Open daily noon-2.30pm, 7-10.30pm. Prix-fixe menu 29 Euros, Sunday brunch menu 25 Euros.

Terminus Nord, 23 rue de Dunkerque, 10th, Tel. 01-42-85-05-15. Metro: Gare du Nord. Open daily. Prix-fixe menu 29 Euros, average a la carte 40-45 Euros.

Suave, 20 rue de la Providence, 13th, Tel. 01-45-89-99-27. Metro: Corvisart. Open Monday to Saturday for lunch and dinner. Average 20 Euros.

La Vigne Saint-Laurent, 2 rue Saint Laurent, 10th, Tel. 01-42-05-98-20. Metro: Gare-de-l’Est or Gare du Nord. Open Monday-Friday. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Average 30 Euros.

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