As the months roll by during the second national lockdown of France’s restaurants, I often find myself thinking of chef Mory Sacko and his intriguing restaurant MoSuke. The reason why is that I desperately hope this exceptionally talented young chef’s intriguing restaurant will survive the financial vicissitudes of the greatest crisis to face French gastronomy since World War II, the successive closures imposed by the French government as a way of tamping down the Covid pandemic in France.

This almost all-white dining room with bamboo laminate topped tables, a few bold splashes of color and accessories of colorful African fabric opened in Montparnasse last September, and Sacko was winning rave reviews for his delicate, elegant, and very personal cooking, a fascinating and unique cuisine that reflects his French nationality, the African origins of his immigrant parents and his deep affinity for Japan and Japanese cooking, when he suddenly had to close MoSuke.

“It was very very hard,” he says. “For me, but also for my team, and it’s harder still that we still don’t know when we’ll be able to reopen again,” he told me by phone recently.

To be sure, the very tall (six feet, five inches), lithe and almost preternaturally gracious and poised 28 year old chef, who grew up in the eastern suburbs of Paris with  his eight siblings eating West African dishes like chicken yassa (with lemon and onions), thieboudienne (fried stuffed fish in a tomato-and-vegetable sauce served with rice), and mafé (beef stew in peanut sauce), has hardly been idle in the meantime. Aside from tending to his nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram, he also won a Michelin star in the 2021 guide to France and is the host of a delightful and popular new television show on France 3, Cuisine Ouverte (Open Kitchen) {N.B. This show is in French and you’ll have to create a free account on the France 3 website to watch Sacko live), which debuted on February 28.

The guiding idea of the wryly but accurately named television show is for Sacko to explore the products of the diverse terroirs (specific geographical regions where specific foods are produced according to specific government regulations) of France. The first show was set in Megeve, the tony Alpine resort in the Savoy, and Sacko was a striking screen presence against a backdrop of snowbound mountains. During this show, he met a producer of reblochon, a typically Savoyard cow’s milk cheese, and then a local chef, Emmanuel Renaut, who has three Michelin stars at a the outstanding Les Flocons de Sel. Both chefs then used the cheese to prepare dishes that reflect their style, with Renaut making the hugely lucky Sacko the most sumptuous looking grilled cheese sandwich I’ve ever seen, aka une croûte de montagne. Think sautéed onions, two types of cheese, including Reblochon, and white wine on country bread.

Manioc lacquered with soy sauce, spinach, ginger, coconut

Sacko’s retort was an intricate dish that elegantly expressed the trinity of his gastronomic identity as a Frenchman of African origins who is besotted with Japan. After smoking the reblochon in hay, he liquefied it with sautéed potatoes and onions, added a dab of wasabi, and  siphoned into deep-fried spheres of toasted bread crumbs, which were then perched on sunny yellow pools of beaten egg yolk seasoned with Japanese plum vinegar. Renaut found the dish surprising, but appealing, observing “I was afraid the wasabi would overwhelm the cheese, but it wakes it up.”

This same leitmotif of lyrical but well-reasoned gastronomic invention and iconoclasm was what I found so thrilling when I had dinner at MoSuke with a gastronomically incisive friend last September.

Both of us loved the roasted lobster with facto-fermented peppers, miso and tomato, a sauve and very pretty dish where the miso’s umami teased the sweetness of the lobster and backdropped the gently soured peppers perfectly. This dish was, in fact, a beautiful cameo of where contemporary French cooking is right now–unfailingly elegant in its aesthetics and flawless in terms of its technical skills, but teasingly racy with unexpected flavours and textures and a sort of complicit one-night-stand sexiness.

If I found Sacko’s version of chicken Yassa–chicken with lemon and onions, a signature dish of West Africa, a bit too refined for my tastes, I loved my friend’s sole cooked in a banana leaf with shichimi tōgarashi (a Japanese mix of seven spices) succulent and delicious, as was its accompanying garnish of attiéké, a dish of fermented cassavas pulp popular in the Ivory Coast, garnished with lovage.

And finally, a truly charming dish of marinated pineapple with bissap (hibiscus) sorbet and a candied shiso leaf. This was food unlike anything I’d ever eaten in Paris before, and so I was very curious to chat with the chef at the end of our meal.

When I asked him about his culinary background, he said, “My Mom’s Malian, but she’s also lived in the Ivory Coast and Senegal, so she knows a lot about West African cooking. She’s a great cook, too” he added proudly. After attending hotel school at fifteen, it was while working in the kitchen of chef Hans Zahner at the Royal Monceau hotel in Paris that he first became interested in cooking.

“It was all new for me, because I didn’t have a French grandmother who made boeuf bourguignon every Sunday,” he said with a grin. “We ate African at home and when I went out with friends, it was for fast food. So I learned French cooking through my work, and I have an outsider’s relationship with it. This let’s me be a little irreverent with tradition at the same time that I really respect it,” he added.

When Sacko became sous-chef to Thierry Marx, an ardent Japanophile, at the Michelin two-star restaurant Sur Mesure at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Paris, he discovered the produce and cooking techniques of the Land of the Rising Sun.
“I fell in love with the aesthetics of Japanese cooking, its precision and perfectionism, its cult of the best produce, and its flavors—African and Japanese cooking both prize umami,” Sacko told me. MoSuke, the name of his new restaurant, reflects this passion, too, since it’s an amalgam of his own first name with that of Yasuke, the first and only African samurai, an emancipated Mozambican slave who lived in 16th century Kyoto.

“There’s a big gastronomic romance between France and Japan, because the two countries recognize themselves in each other. I’m sort of the joker in this story, because I approach both of these kitchens as an outsider, and with my knowledge of African cooking and ingredients, I can shake things up and frame their flavours differently,” says Sacko.

Suffice it to say that I am very much looking forward to dining at MoSuke again and that it should be on your go-to list as well for your next trip to Paris, which will hopefully be very very soon.

11 rue Raymond Losserand, 14th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01 43 20 21 39, Metro: Montparnasse-Vaugirard or Gaite. Open Wednesday-Sunday for lunch and dinner. Closed Monday and Tuesday. Average 60 Euros. www.mosuke-restaurant.com

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Chef Ollie Clarke

Smoked lamb carpaccio at Origins 14 – La Regalade

British chef Ollie Clarke has bought the legendary La Régalade in the 14^th Arrondissement and is transitioning it towards a new name, Origins 14 – La Régalade. In all likelihood, this will be shortened to Origins 14 once Clarke has settled in, but for the time being, the moniker La Régalade is being retained as a sort of placeholder, because so many people know where this restaurant is located and also that it was the birthplace of la bistronomie, or modern French bistro movement, when chef Yves Camdeborde first opened it in 1992.

Since modern French bistro cooking has become the dominant culinary idiom among ambitious young chefs going out on their own, it’s almost hard to imagine that this cooking style barely existed twenty-five years ago. That was when a band of young chefs who’d worked with chef Christian Constant when he was head chef at the sadly now vanished Les Ambassadeurs at the Hotel de Crillon began going out on their own and applying the haute-cusiine lessons they’d learned from Constant to bistro cooking.

This included the idea of using luxury foods liked foie gras and truffles as garnishes on bistro dishes, shorter cooking times, a lavish use of fresh herbs, and a preference for jus (deeply reduced meat or seafood stock) and vinaigrettes in place of traditional French sauces made by deglazing cooking juices with wine and then elaborating them with rich dairy products like butter and cream. Vegetables suddenly achieved a new importance in the context of this cooking style, too, and homelier cuts of meat, including a lot of organ meats, and less expensive fishes (mackerel, herring, red mullet, etc.) took pride of place on the menus at this new breed of bistro, which also dismissed the canon of traditional bistro cooking, including such grand Gallic dishes as blanquette de veau and boeuf bourguignon, as too rich and too heavy.

French food writer Sebastien Desmorand coined a name for the new movement, La Bistronomie, and a raft of new guides and publications, including Nova (no longer publishing) and Le Fooding (now partially owned by Michelin and so part of the establishment it once took such iconoclastic delight in ridiculing and rejecting) championed it. So it thrived, and to such a degree, in fact, that it’s now much easier to find a bistronomie style meal in Paris than it is a traditional bistro feed.

On my way to the restaurant on a cool autumn night, I remember the spectacular first meal I had at the original La Régalade. First we gorged ourselves on the superb loaf of terrine de campagne that arrived at the table with excellent bread compliments of the house, and then I had ravioli stuffed with foie gras under a thatch of truffle shavings and a sublime dish of grilled rougets with cep mushrooms and roasted chestnuts. This meal was so good that thinking about still makes me ravenous many years later. So I was very curious about how Clarke would reset the pendulum of this very famous place en route to meet Bruno there for dinner.

Arriving, the look of the dining room hadn’t changed in any perceptible way, which allowed me the pleasure of some umami-rich gnawing on old bones nostalgia for all of the excellent meals I’d eaten here through the years, with different people and on different occasions, over a glass of excellent Cotes du Roussillon Domaine Modat while I waited for Bruno. The crowd seemed little different from the last time I’d been here, perhaps five years, ago, as well, since it remained a mixture of locals, guidebook-following foreigners, French out-of-towners staying in inexpensive hotels around the Porte d’Orleans and solidly fed Parisian regulars of different stripes who’d probably arrived by Uber. There was, however, a sprinkling of younger types, who probably knew Clarke’s cooking from the days he was chef at Fish La Boissonnerie, a popular expat table in Saint-Germain-des-Pres.

So I found myself musing like some kind of an uncle on the idea of having known this restaurant for its entire lifetime and also wondering why I hadn’t been here in such a longtime. In the end, the reasons this address fell off my list had to do with the fact that bistronomie became so ubiquitous it no longer required a journey to an out-of-the-way corner of the 14th Arrondissement to enjoy or not enjoy it and also because as good as the cooking of chef Bruno Doucet may be–Doucet took this place over when Camdeborde moved to Saint-Germain-des-Pres to profitably play to his international reputation in a front-row setting where he could command higher prices, it lacked the sinewy originality and occasional thrillingly primal bluntness of Camdeborde’s style. All of this probably explains why Doucet decided to sell the restaurant to Clarke and concentrate on the two other Paris restaurants that bear the La Regalade name, La Régalade Saint-Honoré and La Regalade Conservatoire at the Hotel de Nell. Odds are good that he probably wants to make some money off of a good globally known brand name on his own count, too–and who can blame him, without having to worry about maintaining the allure of the original location.

When Bruno showed up we ordered right away, since he was hungry at the end of a long day. After the waiter left our table, I found myself earnestly hoping about what would happen next, and then it did. The help-yourself terrine de campagne brought to the table as a complimentary hors d’oeuvre arrived with a thump, and then there was second thump an earthenware jug of cornichons was set down on the table, along with a basket of excellent bread. And we shamelessly savaged the terrine, which was superb. Oh, and by the way–don’t even think about scolding the fat edging this terrine, since it was as delicious, maybe even more delicious, as good butter. Just for the record, maybe it’s Instagram fatigue or something, but I’ve also gone completely off super-styled food photography and am now besotted with photographs that tell the truth.

Since the kitchen was clearly struggling a bit to keep up with a full dining room just a couple of weeks after the takeover, we were also treated to a superb slice of one of the best rabbit terrines I’ve ever eaten. Clarke, 28, whose food I loved at Fish La Boissonnerie, has clearly mastered his basic Mrs. Beeton’s cooking skills, because these beautifully made terrines could as easily have been served in a Cotswold farmhouse as a restaurant in Paris. And in the interval between the terrines and the arrival of our first courses, I couldn’t help but think about what a hugely challenging thing a reset of La Régalade would actually be, since it’s such a monument of recent Parisian gastronomy. And yet…. And yet the thought does occur that bistronomie has become pretty rote after twenty-five years, so perhaps we’re eager for a delicious and well-reasoned change?

No sooner than I’d started mulling over this idea–what exactly might we be wanting when we sit down in a Paris bistro today#8211;then our starters came to the table. My carpaccio of smoked lamb with spinach leaves, pine nuts and Kalamata olives was excellent, as was Bruno’s marinated bonite with Granny Smith apples and roasted chestnuts. And then it struck me–maybe what we want is food that’s less chef-y and more about good eating What made me think this is that these starters were intelligently conceived, well-sourced, frank and not intended to show off, or bear a showy chef’s signature, although they did–Ollie Clarke’s.

For all of his experience in Paris, I have a sneaking feeling that it’s not the French chefs he worked for who had the biggest impact on Ollie Clarke, but British seafood maestro Rick Stein, since Stein is a cook who glories in great produce and is fascinated by preparing traditional recipes with the subtlest of tweaks. What this means is food that’s delicious and modern but humble. Or food like Ollie Clarke’s.

Even if they both had a flaw or two, our main courses confirmed this perception of Clarke’s cooking as feet-on-the-ground, with the good bones of serious technique, plus a sensibly shy shot of imagination and a profound love of produce. My pork belly was described as croustillant, or crispy, on the menu, but wasn’t. Still, the taste was gently smoky and pleasantly porcine, and the garnishes of cabbage and carrots with a puree of boudin noir (blood pudding) were logical–the vegetables, and clever–the sauce. Bruno liked his veal breast with honey-glazed parsley root, too. When I return, however–and I will, I’ll order fish, because I’d be curious to see just how Rick Stein may still be Clarke’s compass in the kitchen, since Clarke began his career at Stein’s The Seafood Restaurant in Padstow, a pretty seaside town in Cornwall.

Clarke also had the good sense to maintain another much loved tradition at La Régalade, the individual Grand Marnier souffle, which was impeccably made and as much of a failsafe Gallic happy ending as can be imagined. Ditto a stunningly good baba au rhum, or sponge cake gorged with rum-spiked sugar syrup, a big quilt of vanilla-flecked whipped cream and the charming garnish of candied lemon verbena leaves.

This was a very very good meal, and the Paris table it made most think of wasn’t any of the bistronomie places in Paris today, but rather the restaurant Bones when Australian James Henry was the chef there. Clarke and Henry share a love of the art and hard work of good honest cooking made with excellent produce, and neither of them need to insert themselves into the story with fiddly garnishes or fussy plating like many other bistronomie chefs. So Ollie Clarke is off to a a terrific start, and La Régalade looks good to go for a new cycle of quiet culinary renown with him in the kitchen.

Origins 14 – La Regalade, 49 avenue Jean Moulin, 14th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-45-45-68-58. Metro: Porte d’Orleans. Prix-fixe menu 37 Euros. www.origins14.com Open Tuesday to Friday for lunch and dinner, Monday dinner only, closed Saturday and Sunday.

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L’Assiette @ Stephane Riss

Chef David Rathgeber’s restaurant L’Assiette is not only the best bistro in Montparnasse, but one of the best bistros in Paris. Why I’ll let the chef himself explain why it’s so good. “I don’t like la cuisine d’assemblage (the modern mode for plates of food that are layered compositions of flavors). I like melded flavors that wouldn’t exist without real cooking, and this is what I do at L’Assiette. Some of my dishes are traditional, like cassoulet, and others are my inventions, like pork belly with octopus, but follow the same logic of building new flavors by tempering and intensifying the natural tastes of produce you’re actually working with,” says the chef, 44, an amiable Auvergnat from Clermont-Ferrand. So Rathgeber is a disciple of Escoffier and his cooking adheres to the the great dictums of Curnonsky, the famed 19th century French food critic: “In cooking, as in all the arts, simplicity is the sign of perfection;” “Make food simple and let things taste of what they are;” and “Sauces comprise the honour and glory of French cookery.”

L’Assiette @ Stephane Riss

To be sure, Rathgeber worked for Alain Ducasse at the Louis XV in Monaco and then the Plaza Athénée in Paris for fourteen years, but today his style is purely his own, although a certain love of and respect for vegetables continues to echo Ducasse’s kitchens. Rathgeber also worked at Aux Lyonnais and Benoit, two Ducasse bistros, and he won a Michelin star while working at the former, which is  where I first discovered his cooking. Then, after opening branches of Benoit in New York City and Tokyo, he returned to Paris in 2008 and decided to take over this legendary beau-monde bistro, where everyone from the late French president Francois Mitterand to Yves Saint Laurent president Pierre Bergé once dined regularly, from the beret-wearing, wise-cracking Lucette Rousseau (aka Lulu), when she decided to retire.

“This was a perfect move for me, because the food Lulu was serving was so close to the way that I like to cook and eat, and she’d built up a solid clientele of people who love solidly traditional French food,” says the chef. “Of course cooking is not static, it evolves and changes, which is why I love tinkering with old recipes to reinterpret them without causing them to lose their essential character.”

Suffice it to say that there’s absolutely no danger of that happening in Rathgeber’s kitchen, since his cooking is exquisitely ground in Gallic gastronomic history at the same time that it’s fresh, unexpectedly light and sometimes surprisingly bold.

On yet another recent woefully rainy night, we were hungry when we arrived in these beautiful dining rooms with painted glass ceilings, a marble counter, lacquered bistro tables and creaking parquet floors, and the little saucer of ham that was served with our glasses of white wine was the perfectly tuned signal that we’d arrived in a place that cared deeply about good food and which would take good care of us at the end of our long days. Potently porcine, this hand-sliced highest quality Burgundian ham was a repudiating reminder that industrial charcuterie should be avoided both for reasons of health and its tragic lack of flavor and texture.

Rathgeber’s menu offered so many things that both of us wanted to try that it took us some time to come to reciprocally acceptable choices. Since a real ballotine de volaille fermiere is something you rarely see on Paris anymore, because this luscious dish rolled breast of chicken stuffed with a forcemeat of its legs and thighs mixed with spinach, herbs and vegetables takes too much time to make, I wasn’t going to miss it, and Rathgeber’s version delivered brilliantly, since it was earthy and richly flavored and sauced with a chicken jus that merged deliciously with the Xeres brightened vinaigrette of the mesclun salad upon which it was served. Recognising that not everyone is as fiercely fanatic about old-fashioned barnyard cooking as I am, Rathgeber also proposed the unexpectedly toothsome tartare of New Caledonian blue shrimp that caught Bruno’s eye. Garnished with salad leaves, beet slices and a scribble of preserved lemon vinaigrette, the crunchy shrimp were seasoned with chopped pignoli nuts, lime zest, and remote traces of lemongrass and ginger to create a dish that was brilliantly vivid and original.

On a raw night, the maitre d’hotel counselled cassoulet as one of the house specialties, which was an entirely unnecessary suggestion, since I had already made this decision while studying the menu online during a fit of procrastination in the middle of the afternoon. It was magnificent, too, since the crust was a crispy skein of savoury lace, the white beans were al dente, the Toulouse sausage was succulent, and the sauce was irresistibly redolent of duck fat rendered by the confit de canard (duck preserved in its own fat) the sturdy ceramic casserole also contained.  This, too, is a dish rarely seen on Paris restaurant menus anymore, which why there was something celebratory and triumphant when it was lowered in front of me, bubbling and pipping hot.

Though we’re often of one mind on most important things, Bruno and I part ways when it comes to issues of gastronomic pleasure vs. healthy eating. I fall squarely for the former, while he is most likely defending the latter. But in this instance, he was truly victorious, since his pork belly and roasted octopus with baby clams, fava beans and roasted tomatoes in a sauce of cooking juices deglazed with aged vinegar offered a sumptuous possibly Lusitanian inspired tapestry of tastes and textures that were lusciously light, bright and clean.

Abetted by the superb red Saint Joseph the shrewd, friendly female sommelier suggested, a quilt-like sense of well-being overcame us, and before long we were chatting with the good-looking couple from Philadelphia across the way who were on their second honeymoons and who were also wallowing in the cassoulet. “Why is cassoulet so delicious#8221; the woman with the beautiful aquarmarine eyes wondered aloud, and I suggested that it was not only the ultimate Gallic expression of umami, but also a perfect reflection of those dishes Rathgeber loves best and does best, dishes with melded flavors, the duck, the fat back, the beans, some tomato, and so forth. “I think it just has to be one of the best things to eat in the entire world,” she sighed, and the two of us and her husband nodded vigorously.

Then, just when a fledgling but fleeting conversation about Donald Trump briefly threatened our sense of sated gastronomic comity, the creme caramel with caramel sauce we were sharing out of delirious gourmandise and floating island they’d ordered for the same reason, arrived and propitiously puffed out the politics.

Through eight years of hard work, the talented David Rathgeber has created one of the very best bistros in Paris, and a place I am never able to return to often enough. So until that occasion, I’ll dreaming about the rabbit stuffed with boned pig’s feet that would have been my choice if I hadn’t had the cassoulet.

181 rue du Chateau, 14th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-43-22-64-86, Metro: Mouton-Duvernet, Gaite, Alesia, or Pernety. Open Tuesday-Sunday for lunch and dinner. Closed Monday and Tuesday. www.restaurant-lassiette.paris, Lunch menu 23 Euros, average a la carte 50 Euros.

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After I stepped into the vestibule at Le Duc, a long-running seafood house in Montparnasse, a delightfully nostalgia-freighted evening pushed out from the dock the moment I was seated at a corner table in the wood-paneled dining room. With its jaunty nautical decor–the late great French restaurant designer Slavik was surely inspired by one of Gianni Agnelli’s Riva speed boats when he set to work here–and conditionally lordly service, this place is rather like the catch-of-the-day oriented little sister of Le Voltaire, another vintage beau-monde monument of a restaurant on the Left Bank. And like Le Voltaire, it’s a place that not everyone will “get” or like, because it could be accused of being clubby, expensive and old-fashioned.

Indeed it’s all of those things, but l still liked it enormously, and after a superb meal here, I’d rank it right up there with Rech and Dessirier as one of the best seafood restaurants in Paris. But first, back to Slavik and the question of restaurant decor. Before a knock-off version of Jacques Garcia’s Napoleon III bordello style dining room for the Hotel Costes became the new boilerplate for Paris restaurant decors, it was Slavik who ruled the roost of Paris restaurant design, especially in the seventies when he did Chez Georges near the Porte Maillot and L’Européen across the street from the Gare de Lyon. If there was always something a little corny and larger-than-life about Slavik decors, many of them have aged to real charm. Unfortunately, this is also often the very same moment that restaurant owners who dread being called ‘old-fashioned’ dream of gutting their Slavik decor and replacing it with yet another bad version of Garcia’s now also dating look for the Hotel Costes.

Hopefully Le Duc will be spared, because it has a bona-fide retro glamour, and the same might also be said of its clientele, a veritable gratin de Paris that included Alain Minc, Philippe Labro and the Contessa Brandolini the night I was somewhat improbably cast into their midst by the generous dinner invitation of a friend. Recognizing a few famous faces–a political advisor, a writer, and an Italian aristocrat, respectively, momentarily propelled me back to the days when I’d just arrived in Paris and was working as an editor for the American fashion-publishing company that pioneered the modern-day people press. Part of our job while attending fashion shows and other events was to cull as many famous names as possible for later use as seasoning for our reviews. I hated intruding on total strangers to beg a quote, and I hated the fact that these mumblings were awarded so much importance, but against the backdrop of today’s high-velocity celebrity-driven marketing, all of this looks rather quaint in retrospect. The people we stalked in those days had beauty, talent or breeding, or all of the above.

So Le Duc is a bastion of the Parisian old guard, which is sort of ironic given the fact that the original owners, the Minchelli brothers, completely upended traditional French seafood cooking when they hung our their shingle over thirty years ago (the restaurant has since changed owners). The Minchellis were the ones who set French fish cooking on a Zen path, liberating the Parisian catch-of-day from smothering baths in hot cream or too much butter; and when Paul Minchelli wanted to go even further on this path, he went his own way, and first opened a wonderful eponymous restaurant in the 7th Arrondissement before finally ending up with the charming and very good Le 21 in Saint-Germain-des-Prés today.

So now you’ve stepped through the door, and had a cordial but slightly distant welcome at Le Duc, which you find exasperating, and then you’re seated and notice that other tables are receiving better service. This makes you mad, even a tiny bit crazy, because you believe that the restaurant experience should be democratic–to wit, anyone who’s succeeded in making a reservation and who arrives with a valid credit card should receive exactly the same service as anyone else in the room. But the truth is that it doesn’t work this way, and not just at Le Duc, but dozens of other restaurants in not only Paris but New York, London and other cities. And if New Yorkers  have more experience of this conundrum than people from the middle of America, who tend to really take it on the chin, that doesn’t mean they like it either. So here’s the tripwire in this review. If the idea of going to a restaurant that doesn’t mete out exactly the same formulaic service to one and all like an Olive Garden makes you nuts, you might not be happy at Le Duc. This isn’t to say that the service at Le Duc  isn’t good–it is–but rather that it plays quiet favorites with its regulars, because this restaurant spins on the axis of its regulars.

Truth be told, I picked up on all of this while watching the room from a back-to-the-wall seat in a corner table, and it was beginning to rankle a bit, too, but then the food started coming out.

We shared an order of sea-bass carpaccio served with garlic bread toasts and an order of plump Scottish langoustines with mayonnaise, and both were superb. And so they should have been at these prices, but on the other hand, best quality wild (as opposed to the pervasively farm-raised) seafood has become a real luxury. There’s not a lot of it around, there will be even less of it around tomorrow, and it’s complicated to catch and get to market. So it’s expensive. Period, the end. The four langoustines went for 60 Euros ($74), which is very serious money in my book. Worth it Yes, if you have that kind of dough or someone else is buying or even if you’ve saved up your hard earned centimes for a kick-out-the-walls luxury feast that hasn’t been anointed by the Michelin Guide (Isn’t it amazing that the Michelin Guide still serves as the ultimate reference for all things gastronomic in France with so little discussion, even in the increasingly high-dudgeon and sharp-elbowed world of blogging?). These langoustine tails were succulent, redolent of the sea, and perfectly cooked, just begging for a slather of the just-made Piment d’Espelette spiked mayonnaise in a little pot that I’d have wrapped up and taken home had I come to table with some Saran wrap.

Since I’m weary of tasting menus–Hey, chefs, please, oh please let me chose what I want to eat and how I want to eat it without imposing an “experience” or a “concept”–I deeply enjoyed my roasted sea bass with baby clams and an exquisite thyme-flecked beurre blanc. My host’s sole grilled on a salamandre was gently charred marine bliss, too, and I loved our garnishes, too–riz venere (black rice) for me and a silky potato puree for my benefactor.

Both because I live in dread of my sneakily expanding girth and most seafood places don’t do dessert very well, I was thinking of giving the sweet end of the meal a miss. Then a surging feeling of well-being suddenly drove me off the course of prudence. Oh what the hell, I want a baba au rhum, and if it’s not good, I won’t finish it.

But it was, and I did, and I also helped my friend with his millefeuille, which was fait maison (homemade) and excellent. Ultimately, Le Duc is throw back to the days before so many chefs decided that they were more important than their customers–their message, their vision, etc.–and that’s one of many reasons that I enjoyed this place so much. Bien sur, there’s more than a whiff of snobbery in the room, but the only reason you’ll be a dartboard here would be because your indignant behaviour painted a target on your back. So would I go back on my own nickel and without the social shield of accompanying a regular Well, yes, I would, not often, but when wanting a seriously good seafood meal with a bit of pomp, as in pompous, and circumstance, plus a fine show in the room, this would be a perfect choice. It’s so profoundly Parisian, too, that I hope it never changes.

243 Boulevard Raspail, 14th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-43-20-96-30. Metro: Raspail. Open Tuesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner. Closed Sunday and Monday. Lunch menu 55 Euros. Average a la carte 100 Euros. 

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On my way to meet Bruno and some friends for dinner the other night, I was in sort of a bad mood. An old college friend had called for a chat just before I went out, and it had been terrific to catch up with him until the talk turned to our work. He’s a very successful lawyer in Washington, D.C., and I, well, I’m a food and travel writer who lives in Paris, bien sur. He mentioned having seen something that I’d written in the Wall Street Journal and said that he’d liked it. I’m so glad, I told him, and then there was an ominous pause. “Alec, one thing I’ve always wondered–I’ve always enjoyed your writing, but why did you decide to write about food when you could be writing about so many other things#8221; Oh, dear. Where to start Some day, I’ll answer this question in much greater length and detail, but my brief reply was that my love of food was born as an expedient way for a shy boy to indulge his curiosity about the world and access a dimly perceived sensuality that was, I instinctively knew at the time, inappropriate for someone of my age. Also, there just isn’t a faster way, of course, to know where you are or learn something personal about someone than there is by eating that country or that person’s food. And besides, I’ve always loved to eat, and as the years have gone by, I’ve learned to eat almost anything, or at least once. So my love of food, and writing about, is just as essential to my seeing the world clearly as putting on my glasses every morning after the alarm clock goes off.

What I found wilting, however, was the implication that food writing is somehow unimportant or accessory, when I know with great certainty that it’s not. How could I ever have begun to understand Transylvania during a trip to one of the most beautiful places in Europe if I hadn’t visited the shepherds who were tending their flocks of sheep above the little village where I’d rented a house for a week and tasted their freshly made cheese It was warm and tangy and dripping with whey, and it was startlingly funky and just delicious. Their gift made me shy, but I laughed when I ate it, and the shepherds laughed with me. Though I could sort of make my way in Romania, because I speak Italian and Romanian is, of course, a Latin language, our shared tongue on that hot afternoon, which smelled of freshly cut hay, sheep and the shepherd’s sweat, was cheese. And similarly, how could I have ever begun to make sense of Paris when I arrived here twenty-seven years ago with a knowledge of the language that was a confused and self-conscious linguistic school-boy pottage if I hadn’t started assiduously going to the city’s restaurants Everyone one of them taught me something about the city and about France, and even though I now speak French, this is as true today as it was then. I love restaurants, all restaurants, because they’re like little theaters, where there’s always a show going on and a spectrum of lessons to be observed and learned.

So this was what was going on in my head on my way to Aux Enfants Gâtés, a place I’d read about in Le Figaro. It also happened to be a very pretty Spring night, however, and the terraces were full along the rue Daguerre, the spine of a nice little neighborhood where I’ve often thought it might be good to live, because it’s one of those avowedly gastronomic precincts that make eating in Paris such a pleasure. I was also hungry at the end of a busy day, and looking forward to seeing my friends (it goes without saying that I’m always looking forward to seeing Bruno).

I liked this little restaurant as soon as I came through the door, too. Nadine and Bruno were already at the table having a glass of Petit Chablis, and the small space had a warm witty decor that included attractive geometric wallpaper that stopped just short of being a tongue-in-cheek reference to French design in the Seventies, suspension lamps, and oak tables. A pleasant and welcoming blonde lady–Caroline, the wife of chef Frédéric Bidault–ex Grande Cascade and Lasserre with Jean-Louis Nomicos, as it turned out, was running the busy room with efficiency  and good-humor, and from the relaxed happy atmosphere in the space, I suspected we’d eat well, and we did, in fact, very well indeed.

The short menu was impressively seasonal, and three of us immediately decided on the vegetables in aspic as our first course. I can’t speak for Nadine or Judy, but my decision was propelled by both an atavistic affection for aspic–memories of the wobbly tomato aspic Mom used to serve when she had a ladies luncheon during the summer came to mind–and a vernal desire for greenery, and what came to the table after an amuse bouche of foamy potato soup was just the little still-life I had in mind. Carrots and leeks suspended in a layer of vegetable bouillon aspic topped a bed of duxelles, or hashed mushrooms, and this deceptively simple–it was obviously a laborious thing  for any chef working on his own in a restaurant to have made–and sort of poignantly sincere, since you just wouldn’t have gone to the trouble to cook something like this if you weren’t motivated by a real desire to give other people pleasure. Garnished with lava beans, asparagus, red peppers and roasted tomato, it was also one of those wonderful dishes that was as healthy as it was gastronomic. The scattering of freshly chopped chives brought an image of the chef’s strong hand on a knife on a chopping board in the kitchen to mind, and also communicated the real pride and pleasure he takes in his craft.

Bruno’s pâté de tête (head cheese) was homemade, too, and made him very happy. I forked my way across the table, and loved the mix of tender meat, perfect seasoning and great garnish of freshly made celeri remoulade.

Our main courses continued the welcome theme of precise modern bistro cooking with beautifully sourced and vividly fresh produce, too. Judy and Nadine had the lieu jaune (yellow pollack), which came on a bed of wilted baby spinach in a light sauce of pan drippings, good butter and citrus, and was garnished with shaved radishes. “Just lovely,” said the ladies.

Bruno’s saddle of lamb was stuffed with herbs and was a gorgeous piece of meat cooked rare the way it should be, and my roasted veal was garnished with morels and homemade gnocchi that had been griddled to give them a nice crust. The simple sauces of cooking juices on both of these dishes were expertly made and welcomely light. This was clearly food that had been made by someone with a deep love and knowledge of cooking, in a style that was pleasantly homey but decidedly professional. I rather doubt that the Clos Siguier Cahors–a bargain in terms of restaurant pricing at 23 Euros a bottle–we chose was an ideal choice for the fish, but it was good drinking with the lamb and the veal.

A perfect wedge of Fourme d’Ambert, one of my favorite cheeses, came garnished with trident of dressed romaine, and the others concluded this very happy meal with a streudel like tourte de pommes with caramel ice cream. All said, this meal was a perfect retort to the ongoing kerfuffle about whether French food is still good anymore or needs to be saved or some such. If the menace of industrialized cooking is a global plague for anyone who loves to eat as much as I do, Paris remains blessedly truffled with outstanding little neighborhood restaurants like this one, where I couldn’t help by being moved by the deep desire to please and nourish that so clearly motivates the admirably proud, hard-working and hospitable Bidaults.

4 rue Danville, 14th, Tel. 01-40-47-56-81. Metro: Denfert-Rochereau or Gaîté. Closed Sunday and Monday. Lunch menu 25 Euros, three-course prix-fixe 34 Euros. www.auxenfantsgates.fr

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Some strange and generally wonderful things have happened to me because of Facebook. A few days ago, I had a message from a woman I’ll call Amanda, a friend I hadn’t seen since high-school graduation. She wrote from Tampa, Florida, where she is living as a recently divorced real-estate agent and said that she’d decided to treat herself to a trip to Paris, a city she hadn’t visited since a college trip many years ago. “I made out with a boy who followed me for twenty minutes in the Tuileries gardens. It was the craziest thing I’d done up to that point in my life–many more since then!–and he was so incredibly handsome I still think of him sometimes. Who knows Maybe I need a good dose of Paris, and it would be great to see you again if you’re around.”

I loved the idea that Amanda, who’d been so pretty and prim and smart, had done something as reckless as kissing a stranger in a public park, and her confession made me wonder how well I’d ever really known her. Oh, to be sure, we were friends, as, it would seem, two of the rare kids in the fast-track college program who were even a tiny bit wild, even in those days. What this meant was smoking joints and going to all-night diners in the down-at-the-heels industrial town next to our wiltingly pretty New England suburb in the orbit of New York City, harmless stuff really, but when she went on to study classics at a very respectable women’s college near Boston, I assumed that those rare errant nights in the diner were behind her.

So I said ‘Yes’ to dinner, and she wrote back right away and told me to meet her for a drink first at Le Select, the cafe in Montparnasse, and then we’d go to dinner. “Oh I know you’re a connoisseur, Alec, but let me chose where we go to dinner.” How very sweet–if slightly strange–that our reunion was so natural. The person I found was a strong, handsome woman with a charmingly self-effacing self of humor, a quick wit, and an omnivorous interest in the world. She was physically very little changed, too–lean, tan, blonde as always, and well-seasoned by the many years gone by. So we drank white wine and laughed at ourselves and the past and started catching up. Still, me being me, I wondered where we were going to dinner, and when she saw me glance at my watch, she said, “Oh, you! We’re just going across the street, and I don’t want to hear a word about what you think of the place. I’ve never been, and I’ve always wanted to go.”

So I went to dinner at La Coupole for the first time in many years, and in the interest of a happy night with an old friend, I didn’t get my back up over her assumption that just because I write about food, I’m fussy or fancy or something. In any event, everyone assumes this, and everyone’s wrong. And recently I’d also been thinking about something that’s wrong with this blog, and most other food publications in any format, which is that we’re all so preoccupied with the new that we never go back and see what the old places are like. The fact that Amanda wanted to eat at La Coupole on her first night in Paris more than thirty years sort of underlined this for me, too.

Amanda had thoughtfully booked dinner online and gave her name to the bored man at the reservations lectern when we came in. Wordlessly, he escorted us to a rather distant quadrant of this vast room, and I said nothing, because this was her evening, and I sensed anything I might have said wouldn’t have mattered, since as far as he was concerned we were just another pair of American tourists, those lemmings he contends with by the dozens everyday. Happy though I was in the present, I couldn’t help but hear the rustling of many shed skins as we sat and read the menu, since at another point in my Paris life of almost thirty years, I ate here rather often. To be sure, it was never for reasons gastronomic, but rather because La Coupole was once one of the anointed restaurants of the fashion tribe in the days when I was an editor for a glamorous fashion publishing company, an incarnation that today strikes me as a rather mystifying bit of bad casting and acting.

“I imagine you know this place quite well,” said Amanda. Indeed I do, or did, I told her, yarning about my days on the style circuit and also reminiscing about the Sunday night dinners I used to have here with a bunch of single friends, none of whom live in Paris anymore. I explained that we once shared a collective brasserie reflex, since Sundays could be melancholic, and so we’d often round ourselves up for a dinner round robin style, which was also the unstated occasion to take a shower and get dressed after a day spent in pyjamas. Brasseries were lively and fun in those days, and so a perfect antidote to the morbid flutterings on the wall of a winter’s evening.

When Amanda flipped her hair back, I was surprised to see a tiny tattoo of a bird on the side of her neck, and she laughed when she saw me see it. “It was a birthday present from a Cuban guy I used to go out with, and when my Mom was still alive, I rather meanly loved to pin my hair up when I’d go to see her in Connecticut, because for her it was a pure horror. Remember, girls with pierced ears were fast, and all of that snotty garbage we were fed as kids. Well, I sort of like my tattoo these days, or most of the time anyway.” We ordered, and I said nothing about the restaurant, but found it embarrassingly deflated, or devoid of any glamour whatsoever. It was almost like running into a friend who’d once been an ace athlete before she put on a lot of weight or realising that the handsome guy who’d been a star on the high school football team had had some “work” done. The passing of time makes some things vintage and others sad. Still, our older waiter was charming in a wry sort of way, and I was fascinated by the beautiful black woman in the back of the room.

We ordered eighteen Utah Beach oysters, and they were plump, meaty, and wonderfully briny, so the fact that the rye bread they came with was stale didn’t really matter, and if the finger bowls which once might have come with these crustaceans have long since gone missing, they were always a little fiddly anyway, and the plastic-wrapped towelette that replaced them was of no real use either. So we talked, and both of us occasionally ran aground on the sudden incomprehension of the unexpected shoals in our pasts. I mean, how did it happen that I once worked at Cosmopolitan magazine in New York City and regularly used to see Helen Gurley Brown in the hall in a bathrobe with a towel on her head What prevented me from becoming sad, though, was Amanda’s company, the good oysters, the fact that I like the life I have, and I had a huge admiration for the way our waiter was soldiering on despite the fact that there was an incipient going-out-of-business atmosphere in the room. The brasseries of Paris, you see, have become too expensive and too just shy of mediocre for them to trudge along much longer as they are right now.

Amanda ate smoked salmon as a main course, and it was the only time during the evening that her brightness faltered. “This is pretty ordinary,” she said, adding, “And I don’t know Paris like you do, but this place is all about tourists and people from the provinces, isn’t it#8221; Pretty much, I told her, wishing the tourists and the people from the provinces well. I ordered La Couple’s ‘famous’  lamb curry, an odd sounding choice, perhaps, for a brasserie, but I remembered having liked it, probably because it tasted like the curry my mother used to make back in the days when none of us knew a thing about Indian food.

My heart went out to the friendly dignified man who showed up in a children’s birthday party Maharajah’s costume to serve the curry, and I couldn’t help but asking him where he was from. “Sri Lanka, Sir,” he replied with just a tinge of knowing bemusement. To my surprise, the lamb curry was good, or at least in the terms of what I once knew about curry when the little tin of Durkee curry powder in the spice cabinet was my own Joseph Cornell like world of the exotic.

We didn’t bother with dessert, because there wasn’t any point in it, and we needed to digest both our meal and our meeting. Even though Amanda was tired, I had a hunch about what her next step would be. “I think I’m going to sit on a cafe terrace and have a Cognac and bum a cigarette off of someone now, Alec,” she said, reading my mind. So we crossed the road and had a hug before I went into the Metro. “Isn’t it nice that we still like each other after all of these years?!” Amanda said in parting, seizing my line again, and aside from recovering an old friendship, I also appreciated the evening for the unexpected archaeology of returning to La Coupole, a place I’d never have gone without her. The meal wasn’t awful, but it certainly wasn’t worth the money we spent, and since guidebook publishing is generally in such dire straits that few writers ever visit the restaurants they write about anymore and just mostly spade over existing listings, I’m glad to be able to tell you that you don’t need to put this place on your Paris Go-To list anymore. Okay, maybe for some late night oysters on a Sunday, but otherwise you might want to take my word when I tell you that it used to be very glamorous.

La Coupole, 102 Boulevard du Montparnasse, 14th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. 01-43-20-14-20. Metro: Montparnasse-Bienvenue. Open Daily. Average 50 Euros. www.lacoupole-paris.com/en/ 

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“Mais attendez, Monsieur–you brought steaks back to France with you from the United States Vous etes completement fou ou quoi#8221; (Are you completely crazy or what?) Well, I’m not going to touch that interesting question from a French custom’s inspector with a barge pole, so I’ll just get it over with and fess up–yes, I often buy a half-dozen organic New York strip steaks at a favorite New York City butcher just before I’m off to the airport. I pack them in layer after layer of shopping bags and put them in my checked luggage, since the air temperature at high altitudes means they’re just fine after a seven or eight hour flight back to Europe.

We eat one the day I get home and freeze the others as a special treat to be meted out, if you will, during the months before I can get back to the butcher again. Yes, of course there’s wonderful, wonderful beef in France, but you just don’t get the same sublime trifecta of taste, texture and tenderness in any other beef in the world that you do with the very best American. With one very notable exception, a particular cut of French meat I found myself thinking about quite often during a trip to Buenos Aires, from which I came away disappointed by the city’s parillas.

Not long before my trip to South America, the beef loving Bruno and me broke our usual rule that steaks are best eaten at home and decided to splurge on Le Severo, which I think is the best steakhouse in Paris. This was hardly a spontaneous decision, of course, since you have to call several weeks ahead of time to snag a table in former butcher William Bernet’s always jammed-to-the-rafters dining room deep in the 14th arrondissement behind the tourist belt of the boulevard Montparnasse. Aside from that, I don’t go often, because it’s expensive, very crowded, very noisy and very popular with American lawyers whose voices could bore through metal. Not all American lawyers have voices like that–my best American friend in San Francisco and my brother are certainly exceptions, but the ones who come here seem to have clocked this place as some sort of Parisian version of the Palm steakhouse (it’s not), and so crow with pleasure at being in the know.

Ah, but when I give in to this place, the pleasure is intense. Though there’s usually a feint or two at the vegetable kingdom among the starters, I know it’s half-hearted, and so am never tempted the way that I might be by a garlicky iceberg lettuce salad with crumbled bacon and chunks of ‘blue’ cheese in an American steakhouse (writing that description, I’d give a finger for one of those salads right now) or the grilled provolone in an Argentine one. Instead, in an act of unblushing madness, we ordered plates of Bernet’s sublime Auvergnat ham and the best chorizo I’ve ever eaten in my whole life. And the fact that it’s served with thick pats of yellow butter reminds me–as if that’s necessary, of why I love France so much. I mean, talk about gilding the lily.

So the charcuterie is one great reason to come here, and the sharp knives and good bread, two others. The fact that Bernet has one of the most wonderful real-people, i.e. great bottles of wine at prices normal people can pay as a splurge, wine lists in Paris is another enticement, and the people watching is fascinating. But I’m not going to beat around the bush, I come here to eat a pavé de rumsteak from nearby butcher Hugo Desnoyer grilled on a salamandre, a piece of equipment I don’t have at home, with a tiny magic mountain of some of the best frites in the whole world.

Bruno made the mistake of ordering a filet the other night, and while it was delicious–Desnoyer’s meat is just plain sublime, it wasn’t half as good as my pavé de rumsteak, which offered the perfect Gallic knock-out punch to my perhaps vestigially patriotic attachment to great American beef.

They’re several desserts on the menu, including a creme caramel, but I’ve never seen anyone order one for the simple reason that this place is all about going to a bona-fide Cro-Magnon orgy. To wit, dessert would just be too damned dainty after a feed like this. After he’d finished his meat, Bruno excused himself to wait for me outside–he can’t handle the noise past a certain point, and despite the fact that this was meant to hurry me, I finished every shred of the meat, crumb of potato and drop of magnificent Crozes Hermitage at what I deemed to be a correct rhythm, pointedly ignoring his pacing on the pavement outside. The reason, you see, was summed up by the rumpled and rather tipsy businessman who stumbled out the door after me after I’d paid the bill for a cigarette. “Putain!” (F–k!) he exclaimed, after sucking on his Marlboro. “Was that meat good or what!#8221;

Le Severo, 8 rue des Plantes, 14th, Tel. 01-45-40-40-91. Metro: Mouton Duvernet. Closed Saturday and Sunday Average 55 Euros.

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On the way to meet a friend for dinner at L’Atelier d’Antan the other night, I found myself musing on a subject that’s been preoccupying me for the last week or so. To wit, has culinary media pushed too hard in terms of insisting that chefs be relentlessly creative Mea culpa This thought first occurred to me during a recent trip to central Europe. Arriving hungry at a country inn after a long drive, I spotted grilled white polenta with wild asparagus, cured pork belly and ‘mountain cheese’ (fresh mild curd cheese) on the menu and couldn’t wait for this starter to come to the table. And then it did, and these beautiful ingredients had been subjected to some pretty terrible gastronomic vandalism–a squirt-bottle zig-zag of wasabi cream was scribbled over the dish, which was also incomprehensibly garnished with fresh pineapple and mango, so that what otherwise would have been a really nice plate of food was nearly inedible. The chef wasn’t a young Turk, as I expected, either, but rather a very experienced middle-aged woman with a great local reputation.

In a similar vein, I had a chat with a Spanish chef a few days later, and he told me that he was relieved that Ferran Adria had closed, because now “with any luck, food in Spain can become normal again.” During the reign of El Bulli, he said, “chefs all over the country were under terrible pressure to be creative rather than to just cook. All chefs are creative occasionally, but not regularly, which is why the Adria effect led to a lot of pretty awful food here.” “Now,” he continued, “it’s back to basics with carefully sourced produce and quieter innovation. I think people want food they can understand again.” I sort of think he’s right, too.

Anyway, the friend I was meeting, an infectious disease specialist who works for the U.N. in Africa, had booked at a bistro a colleague had told him about and was ravenous for some really good French food during a break in Paris before a round of meetings. I’d never heard of the place before, but was very happy to join him for dinner without second guessing this recommendation.

  Arriving, the snug little dining room was cute, simple and rather homey looking, and the charming hostess poured us a generous coupe de Champagne and let us study the menu.

There were lots of great looking things on the menu, and the prices were appealing, too. Before we could order from the nice maitresse de maison, the chef appeared at the table, and though I recognized him from somewhere by his memorable naughty choir-boy face, I couldn’t place him before he told me that he’d cooked at L’Oeillade, a restaurant in the rue de Saint Simon in the 7th arrondissement for many years. He recognized me as a customer from that restaurant–I used to go a lot when it first opened, and introduced himself as Pascal Molto.

“Ah hah! So you two know each other then,” the maitress de maison, the charming Sophie Delenne, teased, much to the amusement of my friend, who had a good chuckle. I was glad to see Pascal, a great cook and a very nice man, again, but a little flustered, because she’d succeeded in breaking down my innate reserve, a quality that sometimes drives my partner Bruno to despair, but which I find essential to the work that I do. To wit, my professional and private lives are still two separate animals, and I wouldn’t want it any other way, since I don’t know how I could possibly be publicly critical of a chef who was a good friend (She was a ghastly snob, but my Bostonian grandmother always dictated: “With strangers, be cordial but cool,” and I’ve come to see the wisdom of her ways, at least in a professional context). So even though I know and like many chefs, I’ve never felt that it would be appropriate for me to actually hang out with them, and this is a work style that was also very much ingrained in me by Ruth Reichl during the decade that I worked for her at the late but still much lamented Gourmet magazine.

Chris ordered the foie gras, and I went with the gambas (shrimp) in a Chinese inspired hot sauce as starters, but Pascal decided we’d eat both, so we each started with a thick and really delicious Armagnac spiked slab of homemade duck foie gras. “God is this good,” Chris sighed. “You don’t know how lucky you are, Alec, to eat such good food all the time.” Living in a dusty desert city in Africa, he eats mostly canned goods, and I couldn’t help but feeling chastened by the fact that I have the bounty of Paris outside my door every day when he does such important work and lives such a spartan life.

Before I could feel any guiltier, though, Sophie arrived to fill our glasses with really excellent white Sancerre, a wine I rarely drink anymore–it’s become too expensive, but have always enjoyed. Warm and funny, she explained that she’d met Pascal when she was working in a cafe that her parents used to own near L’Oeillade and that they’d become great friends, and it is, in fact, their complicity and wily friendship that informs the atmosphere at this small, generous and very happy restaurant.

Pascal’s prawns were absolutely delicious, too–not frozen, but sweet, fresh and tender, and their Asian sauce struck me as just the right dose of ‘creativity’ in a small neighborhood bistro in Paris. Oh, and what if I hadn’t liked them You’d know.

Next, I had a terrific osso buco–full of flavor, perfectly cooked, and garnished with a macedoine of Spring vegetables, several asparagus spears and a couple of girolles, while Chris tucked into some salmon with rice and ratatouille in a light, shallot-boosted cream sauce. He loved it–“I haven’t eaten any fish in six months, Alec!,” and when he dusted off his rusty French to emphasize his pleasure, saying “Que c’est bon!,” the table of six from Nimes nearby could no longer restrain their curiosity about us and we fell into a conversation that was stoked by Sophie’s generous and perpetual pouring.

By now, my habitual atavistic stuffed-shirt instincts had flown out the window, and dinner turned into sort of an impromptu party, which reminded me of how really rare it is to have so much fun in a Paris restaurant these days. When and why did food become that serious I don’t know, but dinner at this swell little spot reminded me that a restaurant can be a really good time time and also confirmed my hunch that the creativity bear that seems to be haunting chefs all over Europe these days really needs to be heeled. Media wants New! New! New!, but sometimes, even many times, old is much better as long as it’s seriously, sincerely good.

Pascal and Sophie fed us so well that I couldn’t imagine dessert–expanding middle-aged girth oblige, but Chris was keen–“Alec, the only sweet I ever get to eat is condensed milk.” Jeesh. So I agreed to split a dessert sampler with him, which was terrific: apple tart, chocolate mousse, sorbet and a terrific Ile Flottante.

After seeing Chris back to his hotel and recommending some cheese shops that would shrink wrap for export back to his base in Africa (Quatrehommes is good), I decided to walk home on a pretty summer night. It was a long hoof on a full stomach, but along the way I enjoyed a continuous playback of Pascal’s wonderful cooking and the very sweet friendship between him and Sophie that informs the atmosphere at the delightful L’Atelier d’Antan.

L’Atelier d’Antan, 9 rue Leopold Robert, 14th, Tel. 01-43-21-36-19. Metro: Vavin. Open Monday to Friday for lunch and dinner. Saturday dinner only. Closed Sunday. Lunch menu 15.50 Euros for three courses, 14.50 Euros for two; dinner menu: 30.50 Euros for three courses, 25.50 Euros for two.

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I like to think of myself as an honest man, but in Paris, there’s one instance in which I am regularly unfaithful whenever the occasion arises. Most of the time I buy my meat at the Boucherie Chaptal in the rue Blanche not far from where I live in the 9th, but whenever I can persuade Bruno to make an expedition to Hugo Desnoyer’s butcher shop in the deep 14th arrondissement, I throw over my local meat man in a heart beat.

Bruno hates going to Desnoyer because it’s hard to find a place to park–he’s the one in this couple with a car, I’ve never owned one in my entire life spent between a garland of huge cities like New York, London, and Paris, and even more so, because we always spend a small fortune there. So this morning I bartered a reluctant willingness to shop for new bathroom fixtures against a trip to Desnoyer, and we ran a muck. First, two faux filets of Limousin beef, then a shoulder of Lozere lamb, some veal to cook in a provencale saute, two pork chops, and a small mountain of ground beef, pork and veal to make tomorrow as part of my very favorite meat loaf recipe, James Beard’s Three-Meat Meat Loaf from James Beard’s American Cookery, one of my most used cook books. Oh, and at the last minute, a slice of veal terrine with pistachio, oxtail terrine, and a small tub of celeri remoulade and a small brick of Bordier butter with sel fumee (smoked salt).

Desnoyer’s meat is so beautiful and the service is so good at this place–I loved it every time the butcher hefted some of the meat we’d ordered on to the counter, and muttered, “Boy, is that good,” while he went about his work. Since we have a small French freezer and also try not to eat too much meat–at home, we eat a lot of fish, I’d had to restrain myself eventually. So finally our order was totted up, and Bruno gave the butcher a tip, and the whole brigade chorused a big “Merci!” together.

So then we went to buy wine, another favorite chore, did an hour and a half in the bathroom fixture shops, and raced home for lunch after buying a Moisan baguette to eat with all the terrines and the cheese I’d bought yesterday at Quatrehommes, which is conveniently located near my dentist. Bruno was a little cranky in the car, because we’d just spent a lot of money, but hey, Desnoyer supplies L’Arpege, Pierre Gagnaire, and L’Astrance, restaurants I love, but can’t afford to go to very often (he also supplies Les Fines Gueles and Le Verre Volee, two of my favorite bistrots a vins), so this pricey order could actually be spun a relative bargain.

Once we sat down to eat, though, all was well in the world. The veal terrine with pistachios is superb, and the earthy oxtail terrine with a couple of cornichons is bliss, too. In fact both products are so good that they’re worth tracking down as the perfect cold meal in a Paris holiday rental apartment or hotel room, or for a picnic or a train or plane meal. When I spoke with Mom in Connecticut last night, she knowingly asked me the most recurrently irritating question that she can fire my way–“When will you ever come home for good#8221; I told her I had no plans to leave Paris anytime soon, and she asked why. I shunned the question, but think she’d understand a lot better if she were able to sink her fangs into some of Hugo Desnoyer’s meat.

Hugo Desnoyer, 45 rue Boulard, 14th, Tel. 01-45-40-76-67. Metro: Denfert-Rochereau. Closed Sunday and Monday, www.regalez-vous.com.

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L’ECAILLEUR @ Bob Peterson

Occasionally I’d walk by one of these addresses, muse sentimentally over great meals and good times had there in the past, and wish that someone would set these places right, which is why it was with great interest that I read that they’d recently been taken over by Garry Dorr, the son of Willy Dorr, founder of the very successful Bistro & Compagnie chain of bistros, Bistro de Breteuil and Bistro des Deux Theatres among them, where you get a set-price menu of aperitif, half bottle of wine, starter, main, dessert and coffee for 39 Euros. Garry Dorr, 26, is a graduate of the celebrated Lausanne Hotel School, and on the basis of dinner at the Montparnasse branch of Le Bar a Huitres the other night, he’s not only a very smart guy but an aces restauranteur, too.

Arriving without a reservation, Bruno and I sipped a complimentary kir in the vestibule for less than five minutes and then were ushered to a table for four, a real treat for two, since nothing abets the appetite like some room to spread out and relax. Then we looked at the menu, and I was thrilled by the way that it had changed. The indifferent and rather anonymous assortment of oysters of yore had gone, to be replaced by a tempting selection of first-rate ones, including Prat ar Coum from ostreiculteur Yvon Madec in Brittany, Gillardeau’s, and even oysters from the Etang de Diana in Corsica (they’re some of the best I’ve ever eaten). Since the menu offers oysters par la piece, or individually, instead of forcing you to order a standard-issue seafood platter, we tather piggishly decided on a dozen Prat ar Coum, a dozen Gillardeau, and six Corsican oysters with an order of crevettes rose (cooked pink shrimp from Madgascar) to start.

Crevettes rose from Madagascar @ Bob Peterson  With a good bottle of white Menetou-Salon at 29 Euros, this was a superb feast, since the oysters were impeccably fresh and perfectly shucked. I was also impressed that the waiter suggested we eat them in terms of their gradated salinity, starting with the Gillardeau, continuing with the Prat ar Coum, and concluding with the Corsican oysters. Bread from Poujauran and Echire butter round out the pleasure here, and I was also surprised to notice that the table salt is pink salt from the Himalayas, the white pepper “hand-picked in the Malabar region,” and the olive oil from the Chateau d’Estoublon near Les Baux de Provence. In short, much to my surprise, Le Bar a Huitres has become a real stickler for quality, and so an absolutely terrific place for a spur-of-the-moment shellfish feed during the holidays.

Main courses were very good, too. I loved my nacreous filet of cod with aioli, and Bruno’s sole meuniere was beautifully cooked and prepared table-side. I finished up with a perfectly aged Saint Marcellin from the grouchy Mere Richard in Lyon, somewhat curiously served with black cherry preserves, while Bruno went for a second dose of gastro theater with crepes Grand Marnier. I had my doubts about the crepes, and so was very surprised to find that they honestly tasted as though they’d been recently made.

All told this was a very good meal for a very fair price–mind you, fish is expensive in Paris these days for reasons of depressing obviousness, to wit, there’s not a lot of wild fish left to catch. And if Le Bar a Huitres isn’t a destination restaurant per se, it’s terrific last-minute choice for anyone who hasn’t had the time to book ahead of time and wants a fine fish feed. Aside from their Montparnasse outpost, they also have branches near the Bastille, the Place des Ternes and in the Latin Quarter.

Le Bar a Huitres, 112 boulevard du Montparnasse, 14th, Tel. 01-43-20-71-01. Metro: Vavin. Open daily. Average 50 Euros.

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For some years now, there’s been a gastro duel between the 11th and 15th arrondissements as to which part of Parisian turf is the ultimate redoubt of the new Paris bistro, and with the recent opening of Le Casse-Noix, I’d say that the 15th has just nudged ahead a bit with the opening of Le Casse-Noix (The Nutcracker). Located on the border between the 7th and 15th arrondissements, chef Pierre-Olivier Lenormand has created an exceptionally pleasant restaurant in an old atelier space that he’s decorated with flea-market finds meant to evoke an eternal Gaul of thrift, wit, bonhommie and gastronomie.

Stopping by for dinner the other night with Bruno, Carole and Laurent, I instantly liked this warm pretty dining room and the friendly welcome we received, and also appreciate their really intelligent selection of wines by the glass, including the excellent white Menetou-Salon (a theme in my life this week) that I had as an aperitif. Unfortunately we arrived too late to get at the scallops that featured on the menu as both a starter and a main course, but the 32 Euro menu offered a lot of other excellent choices, including the delicious marinated salmon–big firm flavorful chunks of the fish prepared gravlax style and served with a nice salad of shaved fennel bulb and herbs, that we all pounced on as our first course.

Main courses were delicious, too. Joue de boeuf was prepared pot au feu style, and came as tender chunks of beef with a side casserole of delicious bouillon, poached winter vegetables, mustard and cornichons, a seasonal dish par excellence, while yellow pollack arrived as two generously served pieces of fish cooked in salted butter with a side of pleurottes mushrooms. A very good trio of cheeses with a side salad and an excellent ile flottante ended this fine feast at a restaurant that I’d recommend with no reservations.

56 rue de la Fédération, 15th, Tel. 01-45-66-09-01. Metro: Bir Hakeim. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Prix-fixe 32 Euros.

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Thoughts on Asian Eating in Paris

Freshly back in Paris after a trip that involved two stopovers in Singapore, I was stung by two truly miserable Asian meals this week. Dinner at Le Santal, a long-running Vietnamese place that wouldn’t be in business anymore were it not for the fact that it’s just across the street from the Opera Garnier, was flagrantly over-priced and dispiritingly mediocre, a case-book study in how with a few exceptions Asian food in Paris has remained stuck in a timid and dispiriting post-colonial time warp. The other big let-down was at Lao Tseu, a stylish Chinese hole-in-the-wall in Saint-Germain-des-Pres where I’ve been a regular customer for at least fifteen years (I used to live just a few blocks away in the rue du Bac). Both meals involved gummy flavorless starters–flabby Nem at the former, non-descript Shanghai style dumplings at the later, and main courses at both that ran to a slick of dreary vegetables with shrimp or chicken in corn-starch sauce with almost no flavor whatsoever.

Lacking in sincerity, pride and authenticity, these meals are unfortunately much too typical of the Asian offer in Paris, with the notable exception of some very good Japanese tables. Thinking back on the brilliant meal that I had at Billy Kwong, chef Kylie Kwong’s restaurant in the Surry Hills neighborhood of Sydney–I’m still dreaming about her “Homestyle Fried Biodynamic Eggs with Organic Tamari & Homemade XO” and homemade rice noodles with baby clams in chili-soy sauce, both terrific, as was everything else I ate there that night, I don’t understand why Paris has to settle for such mediocrity.

Why, I wonder, is the usual Asian offering in Paris so lackluster and dumbed down I think we have to be more demanding, and one of my hopes for 2011 is that a couple of clever local restauranteurs will re-boot Paris’s Asian offerings so that the city begins to approach the leagues of San Francisco, Sydney and London for anyone who seriously loves Asian cooking in all of its multifarious splendor.

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