Quality seafood is expensive, and this is why Fichon, a charming restaurant on the back of La Butte, or northern slope of the Montmartre hill crowned by the Sacre Coeur, has become such a hit. It offers an inventive, super-fresh mostly fish-and-shellfish menu for very reasonable prices.

Occupying the former premises of a triangular-shaped hardware store, Fichon is also a perfect example of an accelerating trend that explains why we’re eating better in Paris today than ever before—the renewal of the neighborhood restaurant. To be sure, most Parisian quartiers have a good handful of restaurants, but what’s been changing recently is that these local spots are becoming so much better in terms of quality and also proposing much more interesting and adventurous menus than the bistros of yore. This means that whatever part of the city they live in, most Parisians now have great casual dining at affordable prices right on their doorsteps these days.

At Fichon, for example, the starters we chose to begin our meal were some superb wild oysters from Normandy and a portion of succulent pink shrimp with homemade mayonnaise, an uncomplicated but delicious debut to our meal. Matthieu, the proprietor, was formerly in the wine trade, which explains why this place has such an interesting list. I was surprised to see a Croatian white among the seven foreign vintages proposed and asked about it. “It’s a terrific wine for seafood, fresh, just the right amount of acidity, a little iodine in the nose, because the vineyards are near the sea, and pleasant notes of green apple and drying hay,” he explained, quietly accurately, since this 25 Euro bottle of 2013 Krauthaker – Grasevina – Korija was delightful with the shellfish.

There were many other good-value bottles on this interesting list, too, including a 2013 Cour-Cheverny from Domaine des Huards (24 Euros) and a pleasant 2015 Kritt Pinot Blanc, Marc Kreydenweiss (24 Euros). The most original splurge bottle among the whites, though, was the lush biodynamic 2014 Coteaux d’Aix-en-Provence from Domaine La Coste, the spectacular wine estate with a world-class collection of contemporary art and a just opened new hotel, which I think is one of the best new places to stay to have come along in France for a longtime, just north of Aix-en-Provence.

After doing all of the renovations necessary to create this handsome restaurant with exposed stone walls, a blue fish-scale tiled bar and retro chrome wire seats with peach and turquoise cushions, the team had a set back when the co-op board of the building in which they’re located refused to allow them to install the exhaust fans necessary for using a grill. This explains why most of the seafood on the menu is raw, steamed or just briefly seared, but in the end the constraint hardly crimped their style, since what’s on offer from the recently arrived new chef, young Japanese chef Katsuhiko Sato, who formerly worked for Yannick Alleno, is light, inventive and appealing.

My chunky tuna tartare came with garnishes of Granny Smith apple cut into matchsticks, steamed cockles and squid’s ink mayonnaise that was one of the best uses of this product I’ve ever found. Spared the usual heat, the ink retained a potent oceanic lushness that made me wonder why more chefs don’t use it in cold dishes. Bruno’s sea bream carpaccio was a similarly attractive and generously served presentation of impeccably fresh fish with beets, radishes, and grated poutargue.

On a future visit, I’d happily try the steamed skate wing with Chorizo, Brussels sprouts and a Xeres spiked ricotta cream, while Bruno says he’d angle for the sea bass ceviche with red onion, lime juice, green Tabasco, coriander and passionfruit. And just on the off chance your dining companion is not a fan of shells and fins, truffled burrata, beef carpaccio with trout eggs and pine nuts, and a changes-daily vegetarian plate are also available.

Adding to the pleasure of this meal was the busy happy atmosphere in this understandably popular place and the alert and notably friendly service. We finished up with an excellent cheese plate for me and a clever riff on cheese cake that came with an Oreo crust and beet coulis.

Aside from tucking this address aside for a return visit for myself, I’ll definitely be recommending as a great lunchtime option for anyone who’s planning to explore Montmartre, one of Paris’s most charming and emblematic neighborhoods.

Fichon, 98 rue Marcadet, 18th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 09-70-94-52-14. Metro: Jules Joffrin. http://www.fichon.fr Open Tuesday-Saturday for lunch and dinner. Closed Sunday and Monday. Average three-course meal 30 Euros.

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It’s some of the best news of la rentrée (the Fall/Autumn season) in Paris this year: With the opening of Le Bistrot de la Galette, there’s finally a charming restaurant in Montmartre that actually serves good reasonably priced French food. This beautiful bistro looks like it’s been there forever, but it’s actually the very recent creation of the very talented pastry chef Gilles Marchal, who has worked at the Hotel de Crillon, the Hotel Bristol and many other places, and who has also just opened biscuiterie (cookie shop) not far from his excellent patisserie in the nearby rue Ravignan, both in Montmartre.

So just steps from the sorry tourist-trap tables of the Place du Terte, where wide-eyed people come from round the world to track down the long vanished traces of the bohemian community that made Montmartre one of the world’s greatest artist colonies between 1880 and 1914, at long last there’s a pleasant, uncomplicated, fairly priced and profoundly French place to have a meal.

Walking up the rue Lepic to meet Bruno here for dinner on an Indian summer night, I arrived feeling gently melancholic and a little wistful, since I once had a very close friend who lived on the rue Lepic, and I still don’t understand how that friendship just sort of went missing after a very large distance separated us. Though I’m now happily married (who’d have ever believed that I could pen that sentence! Not me, but what huge happiness it’s brought to a loving couple that’s nearly twenty years old), friendship will always be for me the ballast of a life well-lived and an honestly sacred troth. In fact I think of my friendships like gardens, or rich fertile places that need to be loved, respected and regularly cared for to thrive. This doesn’t mean, of course, that one has to hover over a friendship, or be too exigent about what defines it, since one of my very dearest friends in the world is a man who lives in Sydney and whom I see only a couple of times a decade, if we’re lucky, as we were this past summer, when we met up by the seaside in Spain.

But I couldn’t help but sort of idly musing on what social media has done to my admittedly very old-fashioned idea of friendship as a miraculously created web of intimacy spun on a frame of respect and nourished by humour, honesty and a joyous conscientiousness. The little blue ‘like’ button on Facebook has become a sort of unfathomable shorthand for some form of intimacy born of affinity, which can of course be wonderful, but on the other hand, I have hundreds of ‘friends’ I’ve never met, and whom I’m usually connected to out of possibly reciprocally self-interested need or desire to show the world that we’re ‘friends.’ Ultimately, however, real friends are those people who will forgive your occasional bouts of madness or seriously bad behavior, because they know and love you and so understand from whence this ugliness issues and also that it will pass. Such people are very rare and very precious.

Oh well, maybe the friendship gone oddly asunder lacked the rudder I always believed it had, but one way or another, this particular sweep of Parisian cobblestones will always have tender resonances, and between doing this very personal psychological fine-stitching  and the steep slope I climbed, I reached the table honestly hungry for something as delicious as the oeufs Mimosa (a superior French version of deviled eggs) pictured above.

Bruno was waiting for me, and while we sipping a nice glass of Chablis, the charming woman who runs the restaurant arrived table side to explain it to us a little better. She began with a pleasant dose of history, reminding us that that the original hilltop village of Montmartre had once been the site of many windmills where farmers brought their grain to be milled into flour. At the end of the nineteenth century, a woman from one of the well-established millers’ families, a certain Madame Debray, had the idea of opening an estaminet, or a little cafe, where she served the farmers freshly made galettes and glass of milk. Appreciated for the quality of its simple cooking and excellent baking, Madame Debray’s place thrived, but then when windmills were made obsolete by the arrival of electricity, Madame Debray transformed her cafe into a dance hall that became popular with painters, writers and bon vivants.

“Pour faire une bonne galette, il faut la plus belle des farines,” (To make a good galette (savory crepe), you need the very best flour), Madame Debray once said, and en homage to her, Gilles Marchal decided to base his menu on  pâte feuilletée, or flakey pastry.

What this means is that most of the dishes on the menu use pâte feuilletée as a base or a garnish. To be honest, this news made me fear the cooking here would be a one-trick pony, but the roasted tomato tarts drizzled with pesto that began our meal were excellent for being so light but full of flavor, because Marchal works with organic flour by miller Gilles Matignon and excellent quality milk and butter. The oeufs mimosa were a treat, too, since most adults crave stuffed eggs with the same unexamined avidity that children do candy.

For our main courses, I had the galette Parisienne–with roast pork, sautéed pink mushrooms, raw fresh cream and Comte cheese, and Bruno chose one that was filled with shredded roast lamb and baked Provencal vegetables. Both of them were delicious, but since mine was prettier, it gets the two beauty shots above. There were also several regular bistro dishes–sea bream with a sauce Dugléré (fish fumet, butter, tomatoes, shallots, white wine) and a financière of creamed veal sweetbreads, plus omelettes and scrambled eggs with smoked salmon or bacon, potatoes and fresh herbs. This was the September opening menu, and more hearty traditional bistro dishes will be featured in the months to come.

Every time the attractive good-humored hostess stopped by to pour some more of our always luscious Cote du Py Morgon, we learned more about Marchal’s career and his new restaurant. For example, the handsome bar in the main dining room–we were sitting outside on an Indian summer night, came from an old tavern in Charleroi, Belgium and almost everything else in the dining room had been lovingly purchased at flea markets and antique dealers. “More than anything else, Gilles really wanted to create a neighborhood restaurant, a place where people who live in the area will come often and feel welcome. And of course places with a local clientele often have the type of warm, authentic that visitors appreciate as well,” she added. What she couldn’t say, and I will, is that such restaurants also always need someone in charge with the charm, experience, intelligence and reflexive hospitality skills she so unselfconsciously wields.

Given Marchal’s pedigree as one of the greatest patissiers in Paris, we were both keenly looking forward to dessert. And just as I quietly guessed he would, Bruno chose the puits d’amour, a puff pastry topped with a silken vanilla-flavored pastry cream beneath an amber crackle of caramel, and me, well, my hands usually have to be tied behind my back to keep me away from a good baba au rhum, the sponge biscuit served with a little simple syrup, a splash of good plantation rum from Martinique and a generous tuft of whipped cream with two cults of candied lemon peel. Both desserts exhibited an haute-cuisine excellence, which made eating them at a wobbly table and chairs outside even more of a pleasure.

“That was really good, and isn’t it nice to leave the table feeling well-fed but not heavy,” said Bruno as we walked down the hill. He paused, as I knew he would, to look up at the windows of the friend who moved away so many years ago, and looked momentarily puzzled as he briefly wondered about why this once very special friendship had gone missing out of some kind of non-reciprocated benign neglect. “She’d have really liked Le Bistrot de la Galette, too,” he said, “And I look forward to coming back and trying the cold weather menu, because their cooking is so good and the service is so charming.” All of that, and it’s also very good value for the money.

102 ter rue Lepic, 18th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-46-06-19-65. Metro: Lamarck-Caulaincourt or Abbesses. Open Tuesday to Sunday for lunch and dinner. Closed Monday. Average 35 Euros. www.bistrotdelagalette.fr

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Many years ago during a visit to Paris, my brother and I decided to visit the Château de Vincennes, one of the lesser known but still rather fascinating sights of Paris and easily reached from the Château de Vincennes Metro station. It was a beautiful Indian summer day, and after we’d explored the château, we wandered into a restaurant nearby for lunch. We knew nothing about this long-gone place, it just looked good, as did the menu posted by the door. So we ordered shirred eggs with finely chopped black truffles to start, and then the roast chicken, which came with a side of delicious crunchy frites and nosegays of peppery watercress. We finished up with an excellent chocolate mousse, and with a bottle of Beaujolais Villages, this wonderful meal cost less than 200 Francs. Beyond the warmth of the service and the excellent of the food, what made this meal memorable was that it happened off-the-cuff. We hadn’t looked at any guides, and blogs didn’t exist in those days, so we just got lucky, but then twenty-five years ago, it wasn’t all that exceptional to find such solidly good casual dining in Paris on the spur of the moment.

Unfortunately, the odds of coming across such a good meal today are less than they once were, but one of the happiest and more low-key developments in Paris this Fall is that a growing numbers of really good casual-dining tables have recently opened. What I mean here are restaurants where you can show up without a reservation and eat really well. On the Left Bank, a fine example of this genre is the Cafe Trama, which I recently wrote about on this blog (N.B. reservations are advisable at this place, however) and on the Right Bank, chef Christian Etchebest’s new La Cantine de la Cigale, where I went for dinner the other night, similarly hits the spot. This is Etchebest’s third Cantine, too–they’re two other ones on the Left Bank–La Cantine du Troquet in the 14th arrondissement and La Cantine du Troquet Dupleix in the 15th.

Since I had an ungodly early flight to New York the following morning, Bruno and I didn’t feel like cooking on that rainy night, so we hoofed it up the road to Pigalle and liked this friendly place with very good service from the moment we stepped through the door. We settled into a table in a cozy niche in this high-ceilinged dining room, and immediately ordered a bottle of Domaine Brana irouléguy, a terrific Basque red I knew would go well with the southwestern French food served here. Meanwhile, the delightful waitress patiently explained the entire menu to a quartet of tourists from Hong Kong at the table next to us, and even though I don’t like television screens of any kind in restaurants, the wall-mounted one here–intended primarily to broadcast the rugby matches that Etchebest likes, was set to an inoffensively low level.

As I have come to expect from Etchebest, an excellent cook specializing in the hearty cooking of southwestern France, the menu here was very reasonably priced and quite tempting. It also made me happy to be in a restaurant with a specific French regional kitchen, since places that specialize in the great traditional dishes of Burgundy, Alsace, Provence and other regions have become regrettably rarer through the years.

I love Basque food, so I started off with Etchebest’s clever contemporary riff on piperade, a comfort-food dish par excellence. In this version, the stewed green peppers, onions and tomatoes spiked with Espelette pepper came in a glass under a cap of creamed eggs, and were garnished with a crisp slice of toasted country bread and shavings of excellent Basque country ham. Generously served and full of flavor, it was a very satisfying starter, and Bruno was delighted with his Ospital pate de tete (head cheese terrine from Eric Ospital, the charcutier who produces some of the best chacuterie in France in the Basque town of Hasparren), which came with a garnish of chopped red peppers and black olives, a side salad of arugula and pickled green peppers.

Knowing I had a long dreary travel day ahead of me, I opted for the saucisses confit with white beans and a pleasant foamy lashing of Ossau-Iraty cheese, a brilliantly hearty dish that was so generously served a starter wasn’t really necessary. Headed to an office chair rather than an airplane seat in the morning, Bruno preferred something lighter, and chose the chicken Caesar salad, a dish he finds irresistible. I like them perfectly well, too, as sort of a best-available option when traveling in the U.S., but would never have passed up the Basque dishes in favor of same, but this one was large, beautifully made and toothsomely garnished with roasted chicken, hard-boiled eggs, and, in a Basque feint, peppers. We couldn’t figure out which dish they were meant to accompany, but the bowl of frites that came with our mains were some of the best I’ve eaten in Paris for a long time–cooked in duck fat so that they were crunchy and golden, and garnished with cracked black pepper and coarse sea salt. Needless to say, we didn’t leave a single one behind us.

We finished up with a shared slice of very good mirabelle tart, and went back out into the rainy night in high spirits. I’ve always loved Christian Etchebest’s cooking and his warm, alert style of hospitality, so it’s great to know that there’s now an outpost of his kitchen just up the road from me and that it’s open seven days a week and also serves late. It’s not only places like this that make Paris Paris, but it’s a terrific option for anyone who’s planning a night on the town in Pigalle–I’d much rather eat here than at any of the recent trendy spots like Le Depanneur, yet another American cantine with pricey burgers, or who wants a good solid French feed after exploring Montmartre.

La Cantine de La Cigale, 124 boulevard de Rochechouart, 18th, Tel. 01-55-79-10-10. Metro: Anvers, Pigalle or Abbesses. No reservations. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Average 35 Euros.

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Perched on a hillside overlooking Paris, Montmartre, once a country village and later a bohemian neighborhood known for its lively cabarets and popular with artists like Toulouse Laurtrec and Utrillo, is one of the most visited districts of the city. The basilique du Sacre Coeur and the Place du Terte, where the artists once congregated, are its main attractions, but to enjoy the handsome church and the fine views over the city from its steps, I send out-of-town friends up there early in the morning and also advise them to skip the tourist-heavy Place du Terte in favor of a long walk with no itinerary through the streets of

the neighborhood to enjoy its particular atmosphere and interesting architecture.

If they think they’ll want lunch during their idle perambulations, I book a table for them at this excellent little restaurant on a side street near the Mairie (town hall) of the 18th arrondissement, a lively area with lots of cafes and interesting boutiques. Chef Gregory Maillard worked with Eric Frechon at L’Epicure, the three-star table at the Hotel Le Bristol, before going out on his own with this intimate and casually chic storefront dining room. The precision and flawless quality of his sophisticated market-driven contemporary French comfort food shows off why Paris still deserves its vaunted gastronomic reputation, too, since you still eat remarkably well in small neighborhood restaurants like this one. The haute-cuisine background Maillard brings to the modern- bistro register is his signature, too.

Plotting a post-summer vacation reunion dinner recently with pretty Franco-American Claire and handsome Breton Denis, a delightful couple we met when we were staying in the same bed-and-breakfast in Stonington, Connecticut almost ten years ago, I knew this place would be ideal, since they’re as avidly gourmand as Bruno and me but dislike food that’s fussy or too cerebral. So two of us began with the terrine of duck foie gras topped with a fine quince gelee, and two settled on the langoustine tails wrapped in crisply fried pastry parcels and garnished in a successful feint at the Asian palate with squid’s ink wafers, cucumber slices, sesame seeds and fresh coriander.

The main courses we chose on a cool night were  thick pork chops in a lush sauce of pan drippings with a garnish of elbow-macaroni lashed with more of the same deeply rich sauce and chopped ceps and truffles for the gents, and a juicy rack of lamb with vegetables for Claire.

An exceptionally good cheese plate gave the boys an excuse to order a final glass of wine, while Claire tucked into an elegant lemon tartelette with a fine pane of caramel and a crumbly buttery crust.

The only drawbacks to this fine restaurant are the expensive wine list, service that’s a little more formal than it needs to be, and the fact that reservations have to be made well ahead of time. But these constraints don’t stop it from being my favorite restaurant in Montmartre, and Claire and Denis loved it, too.

18 rue Eugène Sue, 18th, Tel. 01-42-55-61-64. Metro: Jules Joffrin or Marcadet-Poissonniers. Open for lunch and dinner Tuesday to Saturday. Closed Sunday and Monday. Lunch menus 29 Euros, 35 Euros. Average a la carte 60 Euros.

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Poulet de Bresse for 2-4: 95 Euros

On the way up to the  unfortunately named Le Coq Rico, chef Thierry Lébé’s new Antoine Westermann backed rotisserie in Montmartre, last night, I couldn’t help but wondering why no one had ever thought of doing a roast-chicken themed restaurant in Paris before. To be sure, there are lots of places that are rightly or mostly wrongly well-known for their roast chicken in Paris–L’Ami Louis, La Rotisserie d’en Face, La Rotisserie du Beaujolais, Le Pere Claude and Chez Maitre Albert among them (they all get a C+ from me), but even the good ones rarely do it better than my favorite roast chicken purveyors, almost all of which are to be found at open-air Parisian markets.

For some reason, the spit-roasted fowl at Paris markets is almost always excellent, and even though it’s not cheap, it’s a lot cheaper than what you’ll be nicked for at most sit-down Paris restaurants. Since I’ve liked Mr. Westermann and enjoyed his sincere and artful cooking ever since I first sampled it–I was dispatched to Buerehiesel in Strasbourg by a New York magazine after he won three stars in 1993, I’m always eager to see what he’s up to. Unfortunately, I’ve found him to have gone rather consistently off course since he left his Strasbourg restaurant to his son Eric and started opening restaurants in Paris. Mon Vieil Ami on the Ile Saint Louis was quite good when it first opened–I loved the Alsatian inflected farm food, but the service never settled in correctly and its become too expensive, so I deleted it from the last edition of HUNGRY FOR PARIS and don’t go anymore. Drouant, Westermann’s other Paris table, is similarly mystifying to me–I’ve never enjoyed a meal there and don’t understand the kitchen’s odd, gimicky archly urban rustic cooking.

But Mr. Westermann is a delightful man and seriously gifted chef, so off we went to the highest peak in Paris on an arctic evening. Arriving, the presence of an amiable voiturier immediately told me what sort of clientele they were gunning for, or people not like me, which is to say high-rollers who show up in their four-wheel drive fume- spewers and don’t mind spending 10 Euros to get someone to take the ton of metal off their hands. And almost from the moment we stepped inside, I knew this place wasn’t going to work for me and held my tongue.

  Well-groomed robo-staff types went through the motions of a welcome like the vain and excited ushers at the Cannes film festival, and the white decor felt like a hollowed out sugar cube. To be sure, the working rotisserie off to one side was faced by a counter where you could eat alone, and a few people were dining there, but overall this “m’as tu vu” place felt as though it should be in Courchevel instead of Montmartre. Or in other words, it smelled like a money spinner from the get go.

And then we looked at the menu, which was frankly absurd. Two of us ordered the creme de volaille (creamed chicken) soup as a starter, and even though it was delicious, I was really bothered by the idea that they were charging 11 Euros for a ladle and a half of soup. This starter should have been served in a deep tureen at these prices, and before it came to the table, we should have been offered a help-yourself chicken-liver terrine to soothe us into the spririt of the place over our aperitifs. Instead, this restaurant felt as though the entire menu had been pushed through a very expensive computer-generated cost-analysis program at least five times before they unlocked the front doors for the first time.

Roast pigeon: 38 Euros

Since we were celebrating a friend’s birthday, I  kept my beak shut during our dinner, but when 75 minutes went by between our starters and our roasted birds– we’d ordered a pigeon for one and a poulet de Bresse that was caggily described as serving 2-4, I slipped away to see what was going on. What I found was a restaurant that desperately needed a real maitre d’hotel, or someone with a supervailing eye who could greet newcomers, time the kitchen and track the staff all at once. Instead, there was no one home at this place all through a very long and rather trying meal. When it finally arrived, all of the fowl was overcooked, and the airplane style portion-controlled side dishes were offensive. When someone has ordered a 95 Euro roast chicken, salad, frites and macaroni gratin should come to the table in abundance.

Oh to be sure, they brandish some major brand-name birds on the menu–Challans, Bresse, Coucou de Rennes, Géline de Touraine, etc., and their cooking is, as the French would say, “correcte,” but the harsh lighting and total absence of generosity at this restaurant were a heart ache, especially since it was my idea that we come here and my friend Laurent sent me a single-line email after we’d all parted company: “Alec, Pigeon a 38 Euros–Putain!”

Le Coq Rico, 98 rue Lepic, 18th, Tel. 01-42-59-82-89. Metro: Lamarck-Caulaincourt. Open daily. Average 50 Euros, with no drinks.

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For a variety of reasons, the French have been slow to come up with a good Gallic gastronomic retort to the creeping American concept of ‘fast casual-dining’ (Boy, do I hate that phrase, which resonates as a pretty unconvincing euphemism for fat-and-unhealthy). In fact, in many large American cities, it’s difficult to find anything but the chain gain, including Applebee’s, The Olive Garden, Chipotles’s, Hooters, The Cheesecake Factory, Red Lobster and their ilk. These formatted restaurants are rapidly going global, too, and inexplicably seem to be finding large numbers of receptive customers in Asia, as well as more traditional markets like Canada and the United Kingdom.

Though I’ve never set foot in a Hooters, I have been to several of the other chains, including an outrageously dismal meal at a Red Lobster several years ago, and what interested me about them was how with a bizarre mixture of cynicism and cleverness, they’ve created highly profitable gastronomic algorithms that would seem to make many people happy. With the exception of the dreadful Courte Paille (a short straw indeed), L’Arche, and Hippopotamus chains, Paris has been largely spared the blight of ‘fast-casual dining,’ with the exception of Les Grand Boulevards, the Champs Elysees and Les Halles. Most Parisians, I’d like to believe, still prefer small independent restaurants with ‘real’ cooking.

What brought all of this to mind was a very good dinner with Bruno the other night at talented chef Antoine Heerah’s newly redecorated and re-formatted Montmartre table Au Clocher de Montmartre, a very shrewd restaurant. What Mr. Heerah, who also runs Chamarre Montmartre and Le Moulin de la Galette, also in Montmartre, has done is coin a smart and appealing French idiom for, well, um, French casual dining. Or in other words, this is the kind of place where you can pop in for a snack–maybe some vegetable tempura or a plate of smoked salmon with a glass of wine, or a quick meal–soup and a salad, or an omelette and a dessert, and be on your way again in less than an hour. You can also decide on a more leisurely meal, and since this dining room is comfortable, well-lit and very good looking and the service is absolutely charming, this is a place where you might happily while away an afternoon over a good book and some ricotta and beet tart and a green salad with a nice glass of red wine, since the restaurant is open from noon to 10.30pm and serves non-stop. In short, this is an intensely customer-friendly restaurant that has been very shrewdly conceived to appeal to the time-short life and times of both tourists–this place is right behind the Sacre Coeur, and Parisians, since you can eat what you want, when you want and in any quantity or sequence that makes you happy.

Hungry on a rainy night, we nibbled some excellent Spanish charcuterie with Catalan style pan con tomate with a terrific glass of Vouvray to start, and then Bruno ordered an intriguingly named “Salade du Bout du Monde”, which arrived as a nice assortment of greens garnished with smoked eel, haddock, salmon eggs, mackerel rillettes, herring and other fish, and I decided on some “Beef noodles and ravioli” soup.

Its thick consistency–this soup had obviously been made from good old-fashioned soup bones (oxtail would be my guess, actually) was deeply comforting and their was so much dissolved protein in this concoction garnished with beef-stuffed ravioli, thick udon like noodles, bone marrow and tiny cubes of calf’s foot that it really was lip-sticking good. So good, in fact, that I wished they’d put an extra-large meal-sized version of this soup on the menu and also sell it to take out.

Though I loved the idea of a cepes omelette–one of the seven different egg preparations on the menu, a combination of my insatiable appetite and unslackable curiosity–two of my guiding stars, I’m happy to confess, led me to order the Roscoff onions stuffed with oxtail. I’ve never come across an onion I don’t like, but these firm, pink ones from the region around the Breton port of Roscoff, are exceptionally good onions and even have an Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC). Even though I see them in shops in London and even once came across them in a Trader Joe’s in Seattle, they never seem to find their way to Paris. Anyway, the onions were filled with tender juicy oxtail meat and garnished with strips of crisply grilled bacon.

I was very happy, and so was Bruno with his Angus steak, which came with excellent frites and a small salad of mesclun from Annie Bertin’s organic farm in Brittany. We shared a nicely made Paris-Brest–all of the pastries are on display, a good idea, near the service bar, before we went off into the night, and I came away with real admiration for Mr. Heerah, who demonstrates here that quality and affordability need be incompatible and also shows himself to be a very astute observer of Parisian life, since there’s not a neighborhood in the city that wouldn’t love this restaurant…a prototype, perhaps I’d like to think so, and am also looking forward to returning for the good-value 21 EUro prix-fixe brunch some Sunday.

Au Clocher de Montmartre, 10 rue Lamarck, 18th, Tel. 01-42-64-90-23. Metro: Lamarck-Caulaincourt or take the Funiculaire de Montmartre. Open daily noon-10.30pm, Sunday brunch served from 11am-3pm. Average 25 Euros.

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Okay, so I’m a little wary of crowd-sourced travel tips. The one and only time that I ever used TripAdvisor to find a hotel has become a standing joke between Bruno and me. We were traveling to Florida for a wedding with our friends Laurent and Carole, and since I’m the native English-speaker, I’d been deputized to book hotel rooms in Tampa, which is where we’d be first arriving from Paris before heading on to Sarasota. Like anyone before a trip, I had a million things to do the day before we left. Suddenly, it was midnight and I was zipping up my suitcase before a crack-of-dawn flight when Bruno asked me where we were staying in Tampa. Oh, God. I’d completely forgotten to book our rooms, so I galloped on to TripAdvisor and booked two rooms in the top-rated hotel in Tampa, which, the description noted, was very near the airport.

When we picked up our rental car at Tampa airport the next day–another fiasco that was my fault, since we ended up with a fire-engine red Dodge four-wheel drive thing that nearly required a step ladder to get into, consumed a half tank of gas just leaving the parking lot and had speeding tickets and drug dealer written all over it, I asked the guy at the desk how to get to the hotel, which was named something like La Vida Bonita. “Oh, it’s a snap. You see that mall over there#8221;–there was a large pink mall adjacent to the airport. Er, yes. “Well, that building sticking up out of the mall is La Vida Bonita.” La Vida was not bonita at the hotel at all either, since it had obligatory valet parking that cost $5 everytime you needed your car, and on arrival the pretty Swedish girl at the front desk blurted out a half-desperate tale of how she’d signed up to work here for a year as part of some hotel-school training program and was frantic to go home to Stockholm.

Anyway, suffice it to say that I was more than a little skeptical when friends from South Carolina who were visiting Paris called and invited me to join them for dinner at a restaurant they’d found on TripAdvisor. “Alec, you must get tired of always being asked where to eat, so we decided we’d sort things out,” they told me, and this was how I ended up at Marguerite.

I could have walked from where I lived in the 9th, but I was running late, so I took the Metro, and enjoyed walking through Barbes, one of the last honestly ungentrified neighborhoods in central Paris. With its very mixed population, it reminds me of what the Upper West Side of Manhattan was like when I lived there in the 1980s, except that it’s much safer than that neighborhood was in those days.

Still, I kind of wondered what my South Carolinians would make of this urban melting pot on the way to dinner. It turns out that they’d approached the restaurant by walking up from Pigalle, so they perceived of its location very differently than I did. They described the neighborhood as “Eastern Montmartre,” which it is in a way. One way or another, owner Stéphane Ducreux was very friendly when I got there, and his restaurant is a nice-looking place that reminded me of what restaurants in NYC’s Soho used to look like.

“Alec, I hope you don’t mind, but tonight we just wanted some plain old good food, and that’s what most of the folks said they served here on TripAdvisor,” said my friend Chaz, a college classmate who hasn’t changed a jot in all of these years except for a brush stroke of gray at each temple. “Now, I know you’ve turned into quite a gourmet, so I hope you won’t be letdown and one way or another, this is our treat,” Chaz continued, and I reassured him that I don’t live on langoustines and foie gras and like ‘plain old good food’ a lot, too, and reading the menu, this is exactly what it looked we’d be getting. In fact the menu read like the ‘bill of fare’ at Brock’s, the Irish steakhouse my mother used to like to go to in a Connecticut strip mall before it closed–soup and salads to start, lots of steaks served on wooden cutting boards, etc.

So we ordered, and after Stéphane had poured us all a glass of terrific white Macon, Sandi, Chaz’s wife made a toast to ‘old friends’ and forbade us to talk politics at dinner, which was sort of a shame, because Chaz and I can give each other a real workout. The Scandinavian ladies who were sitting nearby overheard Sandi and had a good chuckle, too.

When the food came, I was very surprised. Lee, Chaz’s eldest son, had been quiet, because he was “really bummed about Amy Winehouse,” but he brightened up a lot after tasting his foie gras, and my salad was fresh, huge, and topped with two plump crunchy grilled shrimp on a skewer; the “sauce César” was pretty timid–more garlic, Romano and some anchovies were needed, but it was ‘plain old good food,’ and it was just fine. My Southerners were happy as clams, too, which I completely understood–sometimes when you’re traveling it can be a real bear to eat in restaurants non-stop and you really do want something simple.

The real surprise of the evening, though, was the size and the quality of the steaks we were served. My rumsteak was fine quality meat, perfectly cooked, and came with salad and a side of well-made sauteeed potatoes with three little ramekins of dipping sauces–shallot, pepper and Roquefort. Mom back in Connecticut would have loved this feed, and my friends liked their ‘Burgerite,’ a clever French riff on a classic burger, since the patty was enclosed by two potato-onion-and-carrot galettes instead of a pointless cakey bun, and duck breast with a side of tagliatelle.

Desserts, however–including cream brulee, a moelleux au chocolat à la pistache et sorbet (runny chocolate cake) and tiramisu, were acceptable but uninteresting. Since Stéphane Ducreux clearly knows how to source good product, I suspect cheese might have been a better choice, especially since there was still a good pour left in our excellent bottle of Chiroubles.

All told, it was a better meal than I’d been expecting, and if I had friends who wanted ‘plain good old food’ while in Paris, I might send them here, especially since Ducreux is such a pleasant host. When I checked Marguerite’s TripAdvisor ranking today, it was listed as the 28th most popular restaurant in Paris. La Billebaude, a place I’ve never heard of in the 7th was #1, followed by Frenchie at #2. In it’s own way, this list is fascinating, since it’s sort of like asking everyone at a game in Yankee stadium where they should eat during a visit to New York. When I got home, Bruno, who’d been working late and couldn’t join us, raced into the kitchen. “Et alors#8221; “We had a nice time, and the food was pretty good.” “Et La Vida Bonita#8221; That’s enough of that I told him, adding that in the same way I read six or seven newspapers everyday to get different slants on the news, TripAdvisor is out there in the cosmos of gastronomic opinion, too, and sometimes ‘plain good old food’ really is just fine.

Marguerite, 50 rue de Clignacourt, 18th, Tel. 01-42-51-66-18. Metro: Pigalle, Chateau Rouge or Marcadet- Poissoniers. Open Monday to Friday for lunch and dinner. Saturday dinner only. Average 35 Euros. The Marguerite will be closed from July 31 to August 16.

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One of the oddest features of Paris’s cityscape has long been the corridor of tawdry sex shows and shops that line the boulevards de Clichy and Rochechouart between the 18th and 9th arrondissements. Though this neighborhood originally thrived around the turn of the 19th century as a venue for cabarets, dance halls and theaters, it skidded into tour-bus-passenger porn during the 1950s and 60s, a decidedly unlovely commercial legacy of Paris’s now long-defunct reputation as the friskiest city in Europe.

Many of the buildings lining this corridor are actually quite beautiful, though, so I’ve long wondered when the migration of Eros to the internet would doom these sorry businesses. Now, with the recent renovation of the Place de Chichy having been accomplished and the renewal of the beautiful Egyptian style art-deco movie house Le Luxour at Barbes-Rochechouart well under way, it looks as though this once bleak turf is finally being rebooted for a more socially salubrious future in the 21st century.

New cafes and restaurants are also opening in the area, notably the delightful Le Petit Trianon, which occupies the ground floor of a magnificently restored theater of the same name. This ambitious project is the work of restauranter Julien Labrousse, who also relaunched the historic Hotel du Nord in the 10th arrondissement and Abel Nahmias, a cinema producer who is the son of restaurant critic Albert Nahmias and chef Olympe Versini of the excellent Casa Olympe.

Olympe actually consulted on the very appealing menu here, too, and Linda, the talented chef, formerly worked at Casa Olympe. What this crew has succeeded at creating is the type of great-looking, reasonably priced casual restaurant that is in much too short supply in Paris, too. This place serves all day long, starting with a good breakfast, which can be taken at a sidewalk table, and then moves on to lunch and dinner. The seriousness of the kitchen is clearly stated on the menu, where there’s a box that lists their various first-rate suppliers, notably among them Eric Ospital for his superb Basque charcuterie and Sicilian olive oil from Cederic Casanova, the Parisian oil man par excellence. Also noted is “Le Prince de Paris” ham, or real jambon de Paris, along with organic tamari sauce and Charroux mustard, which has been stone-ground since 1822.

Stopping by for dinner on a pretty summer night, Bruno and I immediately loved the sepia-toned atmosphere of the dining room and the friendly service, and the menu was ideal for a relaxed mid-week meal as well. Both of us love oeufs mayonnaise, so we decided to share an order, and they were excellent–organic eggs with real mayonnaise, and then I tucked into a generous plate of Eric Ospital charcuterie–I can never pass this up, and Bruno ordered “Le Prince of Paris” ham.

If Eric Ospital’s charcuterie is always irresistible, the real surprise was the real jambon de Paris, which was succulent, full of flavor and a real treat. For those those who don’t know, Paris has always been a major ham town, hence the term “jambon de Paris,” but in recent years, this nomenclature has been co-opted by industrial pork pushers, and so came to mean next to nothing. Cured with sel de Guérande, this is meat you really want to pig out on, and it brilliantly defines the real taste of cool-climate French ham (warmer regions of Gaul prefer dry-cure stuff).

Since were hungry that night, we also ordered a tartine of baby artichokes, sun-dried tomatoes and Parmesan as a nice nibble with the charcuterie, and it was excellent–grilled artichokes, excellent Parmesan and tasty tomatoes on a pleasantly sour piece of toasted country bread.

Our main courses were very good, too. Bruno went with grilled cod, which came with a pleasant “sauce d’ete,” or olive-oil garnish with tomatoes and black olives, and I had an excellent steak tartare with good home-made frites.

 Since it was such a nice night, we moved to the sidewalk terrace for dessert–a very good Valrohna chocolate mousse and a lovely open tart of red berries, including strawberries and raspberries. The foot traffic after dinner was great people-watching, too, since a concert had just gotten out, and this meant an engagingly odd-ball mix of hipsters with eye-brow jewelry, timorous older British couples in wind-breakers clutching their wallets and hand-bags, and a couple of packs of beefy, boozy German gents who were clearly trawling for a “Private Dancer” type good time.

As things worked out, I had to meet a colleague who was visiting Paris between flights for lunch a day later. Since this place wasn’t too far from the Gare du Nord–he’d sensibly come into town during his seven hour lay over, we went for a quick lunch of their served-all-day sandwiches, which is how I know that they also do a mean Croque Monsieur, which is served with green salad, and a nice smoked salmon sandwich with dill-spiked creme fraiche.

With good food at good prices and very pleasant service, Le Petit Trianon should serve as a template for anyone else who’s looking to revive a local cafe or create a place that suits the gastronomic tastes of Parisians out for an expedient but pleasant meal.

Le Petit Trianon, 80 boulevard de Rochechouart, 18th, Tél. 01 44 92 78 00. Metro: Anvers. Open daily from 8AM-2AM. Breakfast menu: 7.80 €. Average meal 25 €.

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]]> /restaurant-reviews/la-bonne-franquette-the-miracle-of-finding-good-food-in-montmartre-b-chez-casimir-a-great-buy-bistro-near-the-gare-du-nord-b/ /restaurant-reviews/la-bonne-franquette-the-miracle-of-finding-good-food-in-montmartre-b-chez-casimir-a-great-buy-bistro-near-the-gare-du-nord-b/#comments Fri, 02 Apr 2010 21:56:35 +0000 /restaurant-reviews/la-bonne-franquette-the-miracle-of-finding-good-food-in-montmartre-b-chez-casimir-a-great-buy-bistro-near-the-gare-du-nord-b/ As much as I love wandering the steep stone-paved lanes of Montmartre very early in the morning, on a rainy day, in the dead of winter or maybe in August–all times when the tourist throngs are gone and you can feel the bawdy past of this perched hilltop village before it was engulfed by Paris […]

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As much as I love wandering the steep stone-paved lanes of Montmartre very early in the morning, on a rainy day, in the dead of winter or maybe in August–all times when the tourist throngs are gone and you can feel the bawdy past of this perched hilltop village before it was engulfed by Paris a century ago, the one thing I never expect to find anywhere near the Place du Terte is good food. Why Because the sheer volume of tourist foot traffic means that local rents are sky high, which drives most restaurateurs to use every trick in the book to make a profit–bought in salads, pre-prepared sauces, industrially baked desserts, all of these sad cheats are on lavish display in this micro neighborhood (they’re other parts of Montmartre with some terrific restaurants, the zone I’m referring to centers on the Place du Terte).

So it was with real dug-in reluctance that I went to meet a bunch of Australian friends for dinner at La Bonne Franquette the other night. To be sure, I’d tried to steer them away from a meal in this neighborhood, but they were quite adamant about lingering in what they referred to as “the artists’s quarter,” so I backed off, because hard though it is for me to believe, some people have priorities other than good food when they go to a restaurant, in this case, the ‘experience’ of haunting an artists’s haunt (Van Gogh painted his famous ‘La Guinguette,” today displayed in the Musee d’Orsay, in the garden of this auberge, a cozy old house that’s been in existence for several centuries and is located at the highest point in Paris).

Arriving, I met the gang in the charming little wine bar of this multi-settinged address and was surprised to see that they were having a Corsican wine promotion. I love Corsican wines, and since they were unknown to my Aussie pals, I chose a nice crisp white from Luri in the northernmost Cap Corse region of the island and we enjoyed a terrific apero (aperitif) together, which was made even better when we ordered a wooden tray of smoked ham from the Jura. During our sip, we feel into conversation with a charming couple at the table across the way, Patrick and Anne, both of whom spoke excellent English and who seemed to share my half-mad love of good food and wine.

Ushered into the main dining room for dinner, I noticed that there was a big function room in back filled with a happy, noisy crowd of tourists, and my heart sank. Oh well, I thought, at least the Corsican wine had been a treat. Opening the menu, however, I was heartened to see their excellent wine list and then surprised by two pages of acknowledgements of their suppliers (everything from anchovies from Collioure to confit de canard), all of whom are among the creme de la creme of French producers.

Frankly, these two pages of pedigrees left me a little baffled. If this was the type of restaurant that served tour bus lunches, what was the point in working with such good produce And then I realized that I’d been hoisted by my own petard. The point of serving good food is, of course, to serve good food, regardless of who may be eating it. Chagrined by having fallen into a mental fox hole of my own making, I studied the menu and decided on soupe a l’oignon and agreed to split a “poire de boeuf Charolais” (steak) for two with a friend who was hankering after a taste of Charolais, one of the greatest breeds of French cattle.

Others ordered spinach-and-goat cheese tart with mesclun and escargots to start, so we decided to team our first courses with a moderately priced Domaine de l’Ecu Muscadet by Guy Bossard, and it was fresh, slightly green and perfect drinking on a Spring night. My soup was delicious, too, as were the tart and the escargots, and I finally got over my wariness and decided that we might just end up having a good meal here. To be sure, the groups in back were a little noisy, but so what, they were having a good time.

Next, I tucked into one of the most delicious pieces of meat I’ve ever eaten in France, simply served with sauteed rattes potatoes and a mixed green salad. Succulent, flavorful, tender–it’s this meat alone that will send me back to La Bonne Franquette. My friends were in a similar swoon over their boudin noir with espelette pepper by Christian Parra, one of the great charcutiers of the Basque country, and a pig’s foot stuffed with foie gras. With the mains, we drank another wine the Aussies didn’t know–a Basque country red, a Domaine Arretxea Irouléguy by Thérèse & Michel Riouspeyrous, and its broad shoulders and earthy nose of wet roots were ideal with our food.

I finished up with a perfect slice of Brie de Meaux, while the others swooned over their Fontainbleau (a creamy fresh mild white cheese) served with a sublime chestnut cream with Provence. Over coffee, I confessed that I’d been highly dubious about the gang’s restaurant choice, and just at that moment, the nice guy we’d chatted with in the wine bar section of the restaurant, Patrick Fracheboud, showed up with complimentary glasses of a spectacularly good Cremant de Bourgogne (sparkling wine from Burgundy). It turns out he’s the owner, and a passionate lover of good food and wine who travels all over France in search of great bottles and is a member of the French chapter of Slow Food. Who knew?

Now persuaded of the quality of the kitchen at La Bonne Franquette, I can’t wait for the good weather, since they have a charming little garden out back and two spacious sidewalk terraces. I’ll definitely be back, and leaving, I thanked Fracheboud and told him that he was one of my new heroes. “Quoi#8221; (What?), he parried, and I explained that it struck me as a miracle to find good food in such a touristy neighborhood. “But what I do is perfectly normal. I’m a tourist sometimes myself, and when I am, I want to be well-received and well-fed, too. The pleasure of my work is sharing the great food and wine of France. I suppose you could say that I’m a man on a mission,” he said with a grin, and what a wonderful mission to be embarked upon.

WOULD I GO AGAIN With pleasure.

———————

On a rainy day with too much to do, I almost canceled a lunch date at Chez Casimir, but it had already been repeatedly rescheduled, and I knew that to do so would be to wound the fragile filament of a fledgling friendship, so off I went. I actually couldn’t even remember when I’d last eaten at the annex bistro to the excellent Chez Michel near the Gare du Nord, but arriving, nothing had changed.

The dimly lit room still read like the sixties vintage bistro is once was, with a bar off to one side, wooden tables and chairs, and an eminently forgettable decor. Jack and I studied the chalkboard menu, and I decided on the terrine de campagne with salad, and he the scallop rillettes to start, followed by yellow pollack with baby potatoes and black-olive tapenade for me and echine de porc (pork shoulder) braised with carrots for Jack.

Served with excellent country bread and consumed with a juicy Cotes du Rhone, my terrine was wonderful–just the right unctuous balance between meat and flavorful fat, and Jack’s rillettes were terrific, too. My fish was slightly overcooked, but I loved the lemony broth spiked with tapenade, and the pork shoulder was spoon tender, too.

All told, an excellent lunch for 22 Euros (the dinner menu runs 29 Euros), and I’m planning on hitting their Sunday brunch sometime soon too. According to Jack, it’s “epic, with oysters, langoustines, crab, salmon, squid’s ink risotto, duck-gizzard omelettes on a serve-yourself buffet, and another one for desserts,” he enthused. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s the best reason I’ve ever found to get out of bed on a Sunday morning.”

WOULD I GO AGAIN Quite happily.

———-

La Bonne Franquette, 2 rue des Saules, 18th, Tel. 01-42-52-02-42. Metro: Abbesses. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Average 35 Euros.

Chez Casimir, 6, rue de Belzunce, 10th, Tél. 01 48-78-28-80. Metro: Gare du Nord. Open Monday-Friday for lunch and dinner, lunch menu 22 Euros, dinner menu 29 euros; brunch every Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 7pm, 25 Euros.

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]]> /restaurant-reviews/la-bonne-franquette-the-miracle-of-finding-good-food-in-montmartre-b-chez-casimir-a-great-buy-bistro-near-the-gare-du-nord-b/feed/ 5 /restaurant-reviews/chamarre-fabulous-fusion-in-montmartre-b/ /restaurant-reviews/chamarre-fabulous-fusion-in-montmartre-b/#comments Fri, 22 May 2009 17:28:19 +0000 /restaurant-reviews/chamarre-fabulous-fusion-in-montmartre-b/ Since I always enjoyed Chamarre when it was rather incongruously located in the 7th arrondissement–the warmth and sensuality of the cooking always seemed rather at odds with the uber bourgeois fastness of the Avenue Lowendahl, I was delighted when exceptionally talented chef Antoine Heerah reopened his restaurant in Montmartre in the premises formerly occupied by […]

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]]> Since I always enjoyed Chamarre when it was rather incongruously located in the 7th arrondissement–the warmth and sensuality of the cooking always seemed rather at odds with the uber bourgeois fastness of the Avenue Lowendahl, I was delighted when exceptionally talented chef Antoine Heerah reopened his restaurant in Montmartre in the premises formerly occupied by Beauvilliers. Heerah, a generous, jovial Mauritian of Indian descent, practices one of the most guileless, intelligent and original fusion cuisines currently available in Paris. What he’s basically done is deconstruct all of the disparate elements of the Mauritian kitchen–French, English, Portuguese, Chinese, African and most of all Indian, and then put them back together again using his considerable technical skills as a classically trained French chef.

Though it’s a favorite Indian Ocean getaway destination for the French, Mauritius is little-known to non-Europeans. Originally colonized by the Dutch, the fertile green island was traded back and forth between France and Britain several times before becoming a important coaling station for the British Empire. For much of its history, its most important crop was sugar cane, and the need for field hands explains the country’s ethnic diversity. When slavery was abolished, indentured Indians were brought in to harvest the cane on the large plantations owned by a small elite of mostly French ancestry. The Chinese arrived as shop keepers, enriching a population that was also spiced with a smattering of AWOL sailors from American whaling ships and British naval vessels and later, South Africans and Portuguese fleeing the civil wars of that country’s former African colonies. Tidy, literate and strikingly beautiful, Mauritius today is prosperous, pleasant, French-speaking place that lives off of tourism since the sugar plantations became economically no longer viable. (Should you go, by the way, don’t miss the spectacular Bauhaus tea-processing factory that was designed by a Berlin architect who was among a shipload of Jewish exiles that Mauritius accepted over British objections and housed and fed during World War II).

Even if you knew none of this background, you’d be able to parse it out from the menu at Chamarre. The Mauritian kitchen is based on seafood, especially octopus and deep-water ocean fish, but also plump fresh-water prawns known locally as camarons. The island’s pantry includes coconuts, mangoes, curry leaves, tumeric, ginger, cumin and a variety of Indian condiments, including pickled green mangos known as achards and chatnis (various local version of Chutney). China shows up in the island’s love of “mee,” the local word for noodles, and distant echoes of the high Victorian British empire come through in its love of old-fashioned steamed “puddings” and other Mrs. Beeton style desserts. Before tourism created a market for air-freighted produce from South Africa, the island lived off of its own relatively sparse produce supplemented by imported canned goods (corned beef, condensed milk, tomato sauce, baked beans) from Britain and other Commonwealth countries.

Heerah’s cuisine mirrors the Cinderella-like transformation of the remote island into a jet-set destination with an honest respect for its traditional culinary heritage and a stunningly modern layering of flavors and tastes. Going to dinner here the other night on what is surely one of the loveliest outdoor terraces in Paris, a lovely quiet flower-filled balcony adjacent to the restaurant, I was impressed all over again by the ingenuity of Heerah’s cooking, which he’s planed down a bit since a slightly bumpy opening. As she never stops telling me, my Breton friend Michele likes “good, simple food–nothing too fussy,” so I wondered how she’d react to Heerah’s spring menu–very well indeed as it turned. She started with a mixture of spring vegetables–peas, fava beans, baby onions, asparagus and salad leaves in a “Mauritian pesto” spiked with ginger and curry leaves, and absolutely loved it, while my shrimp prepared three ways–wrapped in pastry filaments with curry leaves, chopped in a bouillon made from their shells, and marinated with tangelolo were superb. Next maigre (a firm mild white fish) with a Romanesco sauce and tiny artichokes in deeply reduced chicken stock for Michele, and steamed yellow pollack with a “tatin” of Noirmoutier potatoes with limequats for me. Both dishes were light, vivid, fresh and wonderfully originally, as was the sublime Basmati rice milk ice cream that came with the savarin that we shared for dessert. The service was the only fly-in-the-ointment of an otherwise delightful meal–poorly trained waiters and a haughty hostess who suffered from what Michele correctly diagnosed as “syndrome du Palace,” or a psychological pose of exasperated superiority vis a vis those one has no choice but to serve. Though annoying, this was a minor blemish on an excellent meal, especially in such a wonderful setting, and I look forward to returning again soon. 52 rue Lamarck, 18th, Tel. 01.42.55.05.42. Metro: Lamarck-Caulaincourt. Open daily.

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