Chef Tom Meyer

Stepping through the front door of talented young chef Tom Meyer’s restaurant Granite in Paris unleashed a rush of memories and also inspired hope during a profoundly testing time. Though the COVID epidemic is still very much with us, as of this writing (December 16, 2021), restaurants in France remain open, with assiduous verification of your vaccination status before you’re allowed inside, and the Gallic gastronomic scene has recovered smartly this year with the opening of many outstanding new restaurants.

Deprived of restaurants for much of 2020, the French have a deeper, fresher and more urgent understanding of how important they are to their well-being today than probably at any time since 1945. This is of course because they love good food so much, but it goes way beyond simple–or complex, gastronomic pleasure. What we all missed terribly last year was the easy conviviality, piquant social voyeurism, and random sociability of dining out, since no other idiom more powerfully feeds and frames the finely grained drama of daily life than a restaurant meal.

So while it was exciting for me to be trying this new restaurant for the first time, it was also a poignant occasion. Because it takes a lot of courage to open a restaurant right now when we’re still pretty much flying in thick fog. The fact that people chose to do so, however, seeds hope, because it implies that this too shall pass, and reminds us that we’ve often been delivered by human ingenuity. Cooking is a act of supreme ingenuity, because it creates pleasure from the essential act of daily nourishment.

And of course I knew this space intimately from its previous iteration as chef Daniel Rose’s restaurant Spring. It’s been completely remodeled and redecorated since Rose cooked here, though, with a sort of Scandinavian modern look of cut-out wooden paneling on the walls and bare wood tables surrounded by cosseting topaz-upholstered pedestal chairs. The open kitchen that was a defining feature of Spring survives, however, as Meyer’s compact and densely populated work space.

Chef Tom Meyer, 30, previously worked as sous-chef to Anne-Sophie Pic at her Michelin three-star restaurant in Valence and was the runner-up finalist in the Bocuse d’Or cooking competition in Lyon in 2019. Meyer was tapped for Granite by restauranteur Stephane Manigold, who has become one of the most astute judges of emerging gastronomic talent in Paris and one of the city’s most innovative taste makers. Aside from Granite, Manigold’s other Paris restaurants include the superb Substance, Contraste, Liquide, Maison Rostang and Bistrot Flaubert.

Knowing and loving the lyrical beauty of Anne-Sophie Pic’s cooking both in Valence and at her Michelin two star restaurant at the Beau Rivage Hotel in Lausanne, it was as fascinating to discern her influence on Meyer as it was to thrillingly discover his own precise, muscular, full-bodied style. I especially appreciated his ability to be elegant without ever becoming fussy or over-complicated.

Meeting a friend for lunch here, we reminisced about the days this address housed Spring and chatted about how much the gastronomic landscape in Paris has changed during the almost twenty years that have passed since it opened. To wit, menus are shrunken and contemporary French cooking spins harder on an axis of local, seasonal produce than ever before. And if Parisians, including me, often go to restaurants for an experience they’re incapable of creating for themselves at home, there is now a prevailing impatience shading to disdain for the excesses of molecular cooking and also what I describe as the difficult Outward Bound dishes in some high profile restaurants in the Nordic countries, which bully people into sort of a cowed submission.

Our first course was a grilled cepe mushroom with a sabayon flavored with meadowsweet, a wild herb, and a sauce of deeply reduced mushroom jus and white miso. A study in chic comfort food, it was a succulent, earthy and sort of moody dish on an early winter day,  Next, sardines with haricots verts, Matcha seasoned pistachio oil and a salad of seaweed, an apparently naive but actually studiously complex constellation of tastes and flavors with a Japanese personality that bewildered at first but ultimately delivered a bracing gust of the sea.

A giant gnocci filled with steamed shellfish and garnished with cockles in a lemony sauce, fennel sprigs and Vietnamese coriander had a homey charm, but was the single disappointment of this meal, because the texture of the pasta was unpleasantly pasty. Sea bream with kale in apple juice with a gelee of lovage was a ravishingly flirtatious and very original dish, and then Meyer pirouetted to towards fiercer funker tastes and textures with a juicy roast pigeon in a sauce of deeply reduced pigeon jus with green cardamom and kombawa (Japanese citrus) garnished with puffed millet and cocoa nibs.

The little filets of the bird were impeccably cooked, and the Asian accents added some brilliant percussion to the sauce.

Desserts were outstanding. The first one was a delicate rice roll enclosing several spoonfuls of rice pudding, with a garnish of a Mirabelle plums stewed with vin jaune, a pleasantly resinous nod at the chef’s home region, the Jura in eastern France. Next, a plush cold mousse of Belizean chocolate, with glasswort, a sea vegetable, and a hot chocolate sauce infused with lemon and orange leaves was bluntly erotic after the muzzling grandmotherly hug of the rice pudding. What Meyer was offering here was comfort and sensuality in equal measure, and these traits seemed frankly perfect in view of the times we’re living in.

Meyer is an extremely gifted chef who will undoubtedly become one of the most influential talents of his generation.

Granite, 6 rue Bailleul, 1st Arrondissement, Paris, Metro: Louvre-Rivoli or Les Halles. Open Monday-Friday for lunch and dinner. Closed Saturday and Sunday.
Tél (33) 01-40-13-64-06, Prix-fixe menus 58 Euros (lunch), 75 Euros (five courses), 95 Euros (seven courses). www.granite.paris

P.S. I’d like to suggest a perfect last-minute gift for everyone who loves Paris, France, French food, restaurants, cooking, travel and a well told tale, which is my new book MY PLACE AT THE TABLE: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris. This is a sort of gastronomic coming-of-age story about how a shy kid from the suburbs of Connecticut–me, pursued his passions to become a famous food writer in Paris. New Yorker food writer Bill Buford says of my book that “it’s a flat-out wonderful read, filled with stories and secrets.”

If you’d like to offer a signed book, please send me a message through this site, and I’ll mail you a signed book plate with any specified inscription or dedication you might require.

In Paris, the book is for sale at the Red Wheelbarrow. You can also order a copy from your favorite independent bookseller, or from Amazon

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Chef Matthias Marc

Trout tartare with raspberries, fresh horseradish and beetroot coulis

 

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A L’Epi d’Or, a solid old neighbourhood bistro that opened on the edge of Les Halles in 1880, has mercifully been spared the ignominious fate of too many traditional Paris bistros in an ever gentrifying city: becoming a clothing store. Sepia-tinted by decades of Gauloises and Gitanes, this sturdy old place with a cracked tile floor, a big zinc bar, and globe lamps overhead has instead become the object of the wisely gentle, puckishly reverent and shrewdly restrained culinary intentions of chef Jean-François Piège.

“I didn’t want to reinvent A L’Epi d’Or, I just wanted to make it better,” says Piège, who lives nearby and has a deep affection for this kind of historic and profoundly Parisian address. “I want the tastes of honest old-fashioned French cooking to survive as everyday food, not as part of some expensive nostalgic special-occasion meal,” adds the chef, who has two Michelin stars at his Le Grand Restaurant, and also owns and runs three other restaurants, Clover Grill, Clover Green, and La Poule au Pot.

This remark struck a real chord with me, because in some Paris neighbourhoods today, it’s easier to find a bowl of ramen or an Italian meal than it is French bistro cooking. For a variety of reasons, this kitchen, the bedrock level of Gallic gastronomy, is struggling, and I’m not talking about bistronomie, a.k.a. modern bistro cooking, but workaday traditional bistro cooking like the dishes you find on the menu at A L’Epi d’Or. To wit, dining out in Paris has changed, and changed a lot, since thirty years ago, when eating anything other than French food in Paris was very much the exception to the rule. Sure, we’d go for the occasional Chinese, Vietnamese or North African meal, but our daily food bread and everything else that came to the table with it was French in those days.

Now if you consider the modern urban gastronomic cannon, or those same popular dishes that are served in major cities all over the world–sushi, ramen, cheeseburgers, tacos, burritos, pizza, pasta, tapas, ceviche, etc., almost none of them are French with the possible exception of quiche. Traditional French cooking based on braising and the slow, careful construction and concentration of flavours has become an outlier, because it’s time consuming behind the kitchen door and also because it has wrongly acquired a reputation for being heavy, even ‘unhealthy.’ The reality is that it’s nowhere near as time consuming as a global recipe culture driven by semi-hysterical promises of fast and easy cooking might lead you to believe, and it’s also not only deeply nourishing but profoundly satisfying.

This is what I thought when I tucked into my first course of legumes pot au feu, or leeks, carrots, turnips, celeriac, parsnip and potato that had been cooked in beef bouillon as part of a pot au feu. The succulent vegetables had a light gloss of bovine richness that didn’t mask their natural tastes or textures, and the pool of sauce they came in–bouillon with a few drops of olive oil, some chopped parsley and a superbly redolent gently fruity red wine vinegar was a supremely Gallic garnish. What made this dish work so well, though, was the resonance of the vinegar, which had a percussive freshness that was fascinating. When I chatted with Piège later in the meal, he explained that the red-wine vinegar was homemade, with a mother of vinegar that was constantly fed with leftover red wine. “It’s the youth of the vinegar that makes it mellow and so good with cooked vegetables,” he explained.

To be sure, my first memory of A L’Epi d’Or had nothing to do with what I ate here. Just a couple of months after I’d arrived in Paris to work as an editor in the offices of fashion publisher Fairchild Publications, I was invited for lunch on a rainy winter day by a famous Paris fashion designer. I’d never met him before, but when I stepped through the door of this restaurant, I was certain it couldn’t possible be the man with butterscotch coloured hair and a black leather bomber jacket over a black muscle T shirt who was the only other customer in the dining room. He nodded at me, and I nodded back and then I spoke to the older woman behind the bar, giving her the name of the designer. With a pursed smile, she nodded towards the man in the bomber jacket.

He was drinking Champagne when I sat down with him, and we chatted briefly–he’d just returned from Tokyo that morning, which is why less than a minute later he almost fell asleep while reading the menu. Then he told me he’d was going to the men’s room, so I pulled back the table to let him out, and glancing at him walking to the back of the room, I was astonished to see that the back of his black leather pants was cut out to display his bare ass. Seeing me see him, the woman behind the bar barked with laughter.

“Et dis donc, Monsieur!” (Say there, Mister!), she said and guffawed. “Il n’est pas tres subtile celui!” (He’s not very subtle, that one), she cackled again, and then he returned.

“I just needed a little powder to perk myself up,” he said when he sat down. I nodded vaguely. “Would you like some#8221; he asked, offering me some cocaine.

“No, thanks, I’m happy with my marinated leeks,” I replied, and he rolled his eyes. “And you go to church every Sunday, too#8221; he snorted.

“No,” I said. “I’m Protestant,” as if that explained anything.

“Oh, God, you’re a Protestant, too. They have no imagination, which makes them terrible sex. Most Catholics are a little kinky, even if they don’t know it.” And so it went. But I liked the unpretentious bistro food, the room, and the crowd.

The motley crowd of traveling salesman, market workers, night-club goers and the occasional pair of convivial and immaculately made up streetwalkers was always one of the best things about A L’Epi d’Or, and on this first experience of its resurrection, it was too soon to guess at the eventual sociological composition of the restaurant’s new clientele except to say that the sex business has moved online in Paris and traditional bistro cooking seems to be developing an eager new following among the Bobo (bohemian bourgeois) couples who have colonized the ancient side streets of Les Halles.

I guess Bruno and I will just have to fit into the evolving mix here as a middle-aged married gay couple, too, since nothing is likely to keep us away from one of the best pâté en croûte in Paris, which was my lucky spouse’s starter. It’s worth noting that this dish is always available, too, as one of “Les Incontournables,” or those dishes that form the short permanent menu. This list also includes the excellent looking steak tartare with a beautiful dimple filled with mayonnaise of the woman sitting next to us, foie gras terrine, Croque Madame, slow-roasted lamb, breaded fish filet, rice pudding, orange-flower ice cream, and a cheese plate. Otherwise, a different starter, main and dessert are served daily, almost boarding house style.

Bruno had the lamb so tender it could be eaten with a spoon (as described on the menu), and it was slow-braised, wonderfully crusted and came with fennel, carrots and potato puree in another simple sauce of cooking juices gently sharpened into a vinaigrette. My roast veal with potato puree was the kind of proud humble Gallic comfort food that will always be my gastronomic true north, because this dish, and Bruno’s, were things I could very happily eat every  week.

And even after all of this food, we still had dessert, because we wanted it, this heavy glass bowl of fluffy chocolate mousse that we shared, and wanting it was reason enough. Next time, though, I’ll try and get here on a Tuesday, because I love beet salad with haddock, hachis Parmentier–French shepherd’s pie, and nougat glace, one of my all-time favourite desserts and another once common dish that has become a rarely seen retro treat.

If there’s any way of saving the surviving everyday bistros of Paris, chef Jean-François Piège has found it at A L’Epi d’Or, which is now a better restaurant than it’s ever been.

A L’Epi d’Or, 25 rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1st Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-42-36-38-12, Metro: Louvre-Rivoli or Palais-Royal-Musee du Louvre. www.alepidorparis.com Closed Saturday and Sunday, open Monday-Friday for lunch and dinner. Prix-fixe menus: 36 Euros for three courses, 27 Euros for two courses.

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Tucked away in one of the ancient and atmospheric side streets that survived the massacre of Les Halles*, the great central food market that was once ‘the Belly of Paris,’ La Poule au Pot is a long-running address that once attracted a bon-vivant crowd of celebrities and night owls with a comforting version of the dish from which it takes it name. Now, happily, it’s been saved from becoming yet another clothing boutique or sandwich shop–the most common fate of any commercial space that changes hands here today, by talented chef Jean-Francois Piège. Piège, 47, has three other excellent restaurants in Paris–Restaurant Jean-Francois Piège, his gastronomic table; Clover Grill, a steakhouse that’s also near Les Halles; and Clover Green in Saint-Germain-des-Pres. This fourth restaurant, however, is the one that feels like the most personal expression of the chef and the traditional French cooking he loves.

I’ve been smitten by Piège’s cooking ever since I first discovered it back in the days when he was head chef at Les Ambassadeurs, the now-defunct restaurant of the Hotel de Crillon. If I loved the wit of his deconstructed spaghetti carbonara–a chunk of crispy pork belly accompanied by a fragile parmesan cartridge that contained the pasta, just napped with cooking water, butter and black pepper, and love what he does at eponymous his Michelin two star restaurant, La Poule au Pot is the table that most deliciously reveals this amiable chef.

Chatting with the chef when I went for dinner with Bruno the other night, he told me, “My idea was to serve the food that I grew up eating in Valence. I love this cuisine bourgeoise French food, and this is a profoundly French restaurant.” To that end, he freshened up the old restaurant without jarring the wonderful 1950s ambience created by mirror-tile covered pillars, floral wall paper, a work-a-day tile floor, wooden chairs, or the big wooden-boxed table radio on the copper bar where little brass plaques bear the names of famous patrons of yore, many of them show-business people most English-speakers won’t know. Adding an amusingly populaire aural note to this mis-en-scene, the restaurant’s soundtrack is the seventies and eighties Pop music Piège grew up on, a detail I like, because it basically tells you, Don’t take this place too seriously–you’re here to have a good time. And we did, a very good time.

We were happily eating some oeufs mimosa–here stuffed eggs topped with riced egg yolk, chives, and finely chopped crackling, an excellent idea, with a flute of Champagne when all of a sudden a guest at the large table of ten on the wall across from us stood up and started singing opera. He had a beautiful voice, and he sang for a good five minutes, which stopped the restaurant in its tracks as patrons and waiters listened appreciatively. Who was he and why was he singing I have no idea, but I did see a couple of excellent bottles of red Burgundy on the table where he was sitting. Beyond that, La Poule au Pot in its new version remains the same bastion of complicit conviviality that it’s always been, or a far cry from the kind of modern Paris bistro where the waiter feels that it’s incumbent upon him to explain the chef’s ‘concept.’

Looking at the menu, it was tough for us to decide what we would eat, since we pretty much wanted everything. But finally Bruno chose the split and roasted marrow bones and me the galantine de canard, a vieille France marvel that’s much too rarely seen on Paris menus these days. Bruno went into a sort of Cro-Magnon trance eating his bones, while I drifted off into a reverie of gastronomic content induced by the beautifully made and perfectly seasoned galantine, a coarse pistachio-studded fowl forcemeat surrounding a lobe of foie gras and garnished with radishes and a gorgeous amber gelee of deeply flavored duck stock.

And because Piège is a reflexively generous man, a quality very much reflected by his cooking, he also sent out an order of frog’s legs en persillade (garlic, parsley, butter) for us to share. These succulent little morsels came from frogs raised in his native Drome, and they were tender and had the subtly mossy taste of a clean country pond.

On the way to dinner, I had every intention of having the poule au pot, or chicken poached in bouillon with vegetables, but since Piège has sensibly decided to serve it only during the cooler months, I had a perfect excuse to zero in on the blanquette de veau–veal in a creamy sauce with baby vegetables and mushrooms, here served with steamed rice, although I was sorely tempted by the turbot with hollandaise sauce. This gentle beautifully made stew was as happy and consoling as a grandmother’s hug, too.

Meanwhile, after dithering between the veal sweetbreads with girolles and the merlan (whiting) frit, Bruno chose the latter, which came to the table with fried parsley and tartare sauce and was good eating on a warm summer night.

Dessert seemed a long shot for us after being so lavishly well-fed, but we decided to share the sampler of three tarts. This turned out to be a wise decision, too, since the apple tart was one of the best I’ve ever eaten, I loved the big juicy blackberries on another, and the chocolate tart had a gently bracing bitterness and was perfectly made.

“This was the food that made me move to France,” I told Piège at the end of our meal. “It’s the French food I like best, too,” he replied, bashfully but obviously happy to have created so much pleasure. Walking home on a summer night with a moon in the sky, I also wondered at how fresh this cooking seemed. But this just goes to show that if you live in Paris for over thirty years like I have, what’s old invariably and quite wonderfully becomes new again. On the fulcrum of great Gallic cooking, it’s the city’s old-school cooking that not only balances the new, but makes the new both possible and interesting until it stops being new, and you start craving the edible varities of tradition again.

*The original market, a handsome cluster of glass-and-cast-iron Baltard pavilions, was destroyed after Paris’s wholesale food businesses were moved to suburban Rungis in 1969 and a notably ugly ill-conceived urban renewal project built–a modern mostly subterranean retail mall and transport hub, on the site. It’s recently been renovated with an undulating yellow-lollipop glass roof, an arguable improvement, but the gardens that surround the mall are still a torn up mess, perhaps awaiting a final redesign when tycoon Francois Pinault’s new museum of modern art opens in the former Bourse du Commerce.

9 rue Vauvilliers, 1st Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-42-36-32-96. Metro: Les Halles or Louvre-Rivoli. Open daily. Prix-fixe menu 48 Euros. Average a la carte 75 Euros. www.jeanfrancoispiege.com

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As Jean-Francois Piège has proven once again at the Clover Grill, his casually chic and wonderfully convivial new grill restaurant in an ancient side street in Les Halles, he’s not only a superb chef but a brilliant restauranteur. If this convergence of talents might seem logical, even natural, the truth is that many gifted chefs are actually pretty hopeless when it comes to doing the social, aesthetic and financial engineering necessary to create a successful restaurant.

Piège created the Clover Grill, a handsome space with a jet-engine strength ventilation system, which means you’re spared the curse of most Paris grill and meat restaurants–your coat smells like the meal you just ate for a week afterwards, with his wife Elodie, and the décor here is an expression of their assured and winningly witty good taste. The Pièges play with some tongue-in-check retro references to the decors once commonly found in French bistros and hotels with cabbage-rose wallpaper (Everyone old enough to have done a Eurail trip around Europe with a backpack or, in my case, ghastly tweed-sided American Tourister suitcase, will doubtless feel the twinge of a long dormant visual memory stirring when they spot this murky floral wall covering in the cozy second dining room here; for me, it’s an instant ticket to a triangular shaped Lyon hotel room next to the train tracks with those hateful hard round pillows called a traversin rolled up in the top of the bottom sheet and a sink but no toilet in the corner), honeycomb tile floors, wainscoting, globe lamps and other Gallic memes, but have the gift of making it all seem fresh and modern, too. This comes from the excellent lighting, beautifully made modern chairs and tables, and puckish fun of including a once shunned object like a Napoleon III faience plant stand in a decidedly hip décor.

The look of the place is important, too, because it tells you why you’re here, which is to have a good time. This is, in fact, the Piège’s welcome new take on the type of fashionable night-on-the-town Paris restaurant that hasn’t really been seriously updated since the Costes Brothers unleashed their formula of louche decors, snippy service and commissary style disco food on the French capital in the 1980s.

At the Clover Grill, however, not only do the room and the crowd look great, the service is charming and they serve the kind of good honest uncomplicated food you look for in a grill restaurant. That said, the bonus here is Piège’s consistent and admirably restless culinary creativity, which shows up most legibly in the starters.

Arriving for dinner the other night, we were offered a choice between the two dining rooms—the low-lit one with a Sputnik style ceiling-mounted lighting fixture and that memory-stoking wallpaper, or the bar room. We chose the latter, since it offered good sight-lines of the long great looking marble bar where you can also sit for a meal and a bartender from the Experimental Cocktail Club group mixes up some seriously good drinks, including the pimenton sprinkled Pisco sour I had to take the edge off of a long day, and the open kitchen where meat and fish are grilled over charcoal or cooked on a rotisserie in the back of the room. The cocktail was served with a nice complimentary hors d’oeuvre of spelt wafers, radicchio fronds and citrus crème, which pleasant provoked the appetite without exhausting it.

Hungry and unable to make up our minds, we settled on three starters, celeriac cooked like a baked potato in the cinders of the grill and then served with a black-truffle-and-Parmesan butter, mackerel marinated in white wine and served on canapés of grilled Koshihikari rice with horseradish, and “Comme une Pizza,” a brittle sphere of pizza dough—an idea Piege perfected when he was chef at the Brasserie Thoumieux, with sliced scallops, onions, truffles and bacon.

Though grilled fish and lobster are offered, as well as rotisserie-cooked duck, Bresse chicken and roast lamb for two, beef is the meat of the matter here, and though I love a good cote de boeuf, I was eager to try the two meats that Piege himself recommended to us when we chatted with him—the Noire de la Baltique beef and the Black Market beef from Australia, so I went with a contre-filet of the former and Bruno an entrecote of the latter, which we ordered rare.

As I’ve learned from finding myself in the middle of the road between a European preference for beef of texture and character and an American adulation of tenderness, tastes in beef are ferociously national and personal. Last year I wrote a piece on the great steaks of Europe for the Wall Street Journal, and it elicited some serious braying from North American readers who rejected the idea character could count for as much as tenderness. Here the story goes that a lot of the beef in Europe is unpleasantly tough, as opposed to the great feed-lot- fattened cuts-like-butter beef produced in the U.S. The point of my piece, which so many missed, is that for me the best beef exhibits an equilibrium between North American and European preferences, or is flavorful and textured but not tough.

Enjoyed with a glass of the very good Muscadet suggested by the savvy female sommelier here, our starters were excellent, and so they should have been for the hefty tariffs they carry. With just a single 69 Euros prix-fixe menu being the only alternative to a la carte, this new place is definitely going to be the province of the well-heeled. Then our steaks arrived with baby potatoes roasted in goose fat, and they were huge.

A first taste of my Noire de la Baltique contre filet (sirloin) made me head spin because it was so sapid. It’s flavor was potently mineral rich and ever so slightly fermented, even faintly winey and gamey, with a subtle nose of the beech-wood shavings on the floor of the room in which it had aged for two months in Hamburg and also notes of iodine, which led me to guess (correctly) that the aging atelier was somewhere in that city’s port district. There was a little bit of a mystery here, however. When we inspected the beef on display in the glass-fronted display cabinet in the back of the bar room, it had a label that said “Born, raised and slaughtered in Germany.” The only other restaurant I’ve been to that serves this beef, Beef in Geneva, which is supplied like Piège by the Metzger brothers butcher shop in Paris, identifies it as being Polish.

Whatever its provenance or biography may be, however, the Noire de la Baltique is some spectacularly good meat, and we both liked it better than the Australian Black Market beef, which had the somewhat overwhelming fatty richness of certain Japanese breeds. But again, beef preferences are personal in the most ornery of ways.

Aside from the two breeds we tried, the Clover Grill also proposes Bavarian beef (Simmenthal), Black Angus from Kansas, and Genisse de Boeuf (from heifers that have not yet calved) from the Limousin, Auvergne (Salers) and Charolais. A choice of four different sauces are also offered to garnish your meat: black Sarawak pepper, Bearnaise, Bercy (red wine with bone marrow and shallots), and a stunning reduction of macerated black currants and blackberries that’s the single most exciting steak sauce I’ve ever tried anywhere. This is because the jam-like depth of the red fruits meet the winey taste of the meat perfectly but without muddling it with red-wine tannins. When I asked Piège about this sublime sauce, he said his mother and grandmother used to make it in the Drome, the region in the Midi where the chef grew up in Valence, as another way of fully using the seasonal harvest of these berries.

Among the four desserts proposed, the stand-out is the rotisserie-roasted pineapple, which would seem to be painted with butter and sugar, so that it caramelizes while it roasts to end up with a taste that reminded me of my mother’s pineapple-upside-down cake, with it’s winking red maraschino cherry ‘eyes’ inside of each pineapple ring embedded in the delicious gooey caramel topping. To cut its sweetness, it comes to the table with a scoop of freshly made lemongrass ice cream, which is delicious. Otherwise, the smoked chocolate tart with a sable crust and hay-flavored ice cream was pleasant, but I can’t see myself ordering either the churros or the grilled banana ‘facon split’ the next time I come here. There will be a next time, too, since I’m curious to see what the 20 Euro burger is like, and I’m already craving another taste of that uniquely luscious Noire de la Baltique beef.

Clover Grill, 6 rue Bailleul, 1^st Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-40-41-59-59, Metro: Louvre-Rivoli, Open Monday to Saturday for dinner. Closed Sunday. Lunch from Monday to Saturday from January 1, 2017. Average 70 Euros, www.clover-grill.com

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Chez la Vieille has reopened, and this is very good news for anyone who loves the earthy voluptuousness of authentic old-fashioned French bistro cooking as much as I do. We have Chicago born chef Daniel Rose to thank for this welcome and very artful revival, too. Rose is the one who loved this place enough to give it a new life (it’s been closed since 2012), so he staffed it up with talent from his restaurant Spring, just around the corner, including chef Oleg Olexin and Remi Segura, who’s signed the great wine list and runs the two dining rooms.

This has been quite a year for Daniel Rose, too. Hot on the heels of his huge critical and commercial success with Le Coucou, the new French restaurant that I think is the best one in New York City, it looks like he’ll also succeed where so many others have failed by successfully resurrecting one of the most legendary bistros in Paris, Chez la Vieille. Since the original ‘vieille’ (old woman), the famously ornery Adrienne Biasin, hung up her apron and retired over twenty-five years ago, many have tried to keep the fires burning at this snug place once beloved of politicians and show-biz types on a street corner just a couple of blocks the old Les Halles market, which was destroyed in a mad act of municipal vandalism in 1969 when it was transferred to a complex of new buildings tragically out of sight and out of mind of the famously food-loving city in suburban Rungis.

But after Marie-Josee Cervoni, the woman who took over from Biasin when she retired, sold up, everyone who followed in the foot steps of these two ladies failed, including the mercurial chef Michel del Burgo, a flash-in-the-pan eighties wonder boy, and several Japanese chefs, probably because the duplex space is not an easy one to make work, but perhaps most of all because to no one’s surprise without la vieille there was no Chez la Vieille. Several people tried to carry on proposing the lavish hors d’oeuvres course for which this restaurant was famous—herring in cream, celeri remoulade, terrine de campagne, marinated anchovies, grated carrots, potato salad with chunks of cervelas sausage and chopped cornichons, and more, but rather than reading as an offering of maternal abundance as it had in the past, it came off as too much food. It also required too much fussing and fiddling from waiters exasperated by the challenge of circulating these bowls and platters to tables both downstairs and up.

But most of all, the demise of Chez la Vieille signaled that even in Paris life had moved on from the days that anyone could get away with pilfering the whole afternoon necessary to eat and enjoy a meal here. Because when Adrienne Biasin, a.k.a. “la vieille,” was in the kitchen, lunch was a lavish high-cholesterol pageant that ended with the grand finale of a big snifter of Armagnac to celebrate the deliciously anarchic decision to throw all professional responsibilities and personal cares to the winds in favor of a thumpingly good feed that was often followed by a good long nap or maybe some furtive fumbling with someone you weren’t married to in a chilly just-rented hotel room

For my part, I had no idea what I was getting into when a visiting London newspaper editor I occasionally free-lanced for invited me to lunch and asked me to find us a place that served “old-school Cro-Magnon bistro food” and also had a decent wine list. In November 1986, I’d only lived in a Paris for six weeks, so I did some research and finally settled on Chez la Vieille, calling three days ahead of time to book for lunch. I’d never been and was keen to try it.

A gruff-sounding woman answered the phone. I explained that I wanted to book a table for two at 1pm three days forward.

“Mais vous etes qui?” (Who are you?), she asked.

I was dumbfounded. Maybe I’d dialed the wrong number?

“Why should I give you a table I don’t think I know you….”

“I hope you’ll give me table, Chere Madame, because I’ve been told your cooking is so good, and I’d be grateful for the opportunity to discover it.”

“Are you a politician You speak like you’re a politician, a lot of shit coming out of your mouth.”

“No, I’m not a politician, I work as an editor in the Paris offices of an American publishing company, and I’ve just moved here from London.”

“Putain qu’on mange mal a Londres!” she said, and I laughed (Oh Fuck do you eat badly in London!). “You’re not English are you?”

“No, “ I told her.

“Okay then, you can come. What’s your name?”

“Alexandre.”

“Okay, see you Friday. Don’t be late, though, or I’ll give your table to someone else,” she said and hung up.

So on a chilly day when I saw Paris nude for the first time—the city’s trees had finally lost all of their leaves, I stepped through the door of this restaurant into warm invisible veils of melted butter and simmering beef, and ran right into a woman with small sharp brown eyes and a prominent nose in a well-worn apron that slouched on her bosom.

She eyeballed me and went for my sartorial jugular, or the much loathed camel’s hair polo coat from B. Altman department store in New York City that my mother had insisted on buying me when I went off to Amherst College in western Massachusetts as a freshman. A more inappropriate garment for that occasion is still hard to imagine, and in fact, the real challenge even today is to divine a situation in which this insanely foppish piece of clothing might have ever been appropriate to the life of a seventeen-year-old boy. It was, however, the only outwear I owned at the time aside from a suede jacket that reeked of sex and cigarettes.

“Alors, c’est quoi ca,” she said, flipping her dish cloth at my coat. “Vous etes un notaire, vous J’espere que non, car ils baisent mal, tous, ils baisent mal.” (Are you a notary I hope not, because they’re bad lovers, all of them), she said and chuckled. Oh was she having a good time with me, surely among the most impossibly naïve and wide-eyed creatures who’d ever graced her door. And in retrospect, I can’t say I blamed her, because even though I didn’t realize it immediately, repeated exposure to her painfully accurate teasing made me usefully aware of the tapestry of public vulnerabilities I was displaying in broad daylight following to my recent move to France. To wit, I was self-conscious, often lonely, and wrong-footed by a recurring lack of self confidence. Or in other words, I was rather lost.

Shaking her head, she took my coat, and then she led me by the hand–her grip was firm–into the dining room.

“Who are you having lunch with?” I explained the British editor.

“You’re not having sex with him, are you?”

I blushed and guffawed. “God, no!” She joined in with a cackle and clapped me on the back.

She poured me a glass of wine and came back with a saucer of sliced sausage. She gazed at me for a minute, and then she said, “Why are you so sad when you’re so pretty?” I was spared the torture of finding an answer to that question–I didn’t think of myself as sad, and I certainly didn’t see myself as pretty, when the leonine English editor fumbled his way through the heavy curtains at the door into the dining room. And we ate. And ate. And ate.

First the hors d’oeuvres, then the boeuf aux carottes Adrienne insisted on serving me, and paupiettes for the Anglo editor.  I didn’t want beef braised with carrots, because I’m not a big fan of carrots, and I had my eye on the roasted veal, but served with wide-cut homemade noodles, this beef—cheeks and breast, braised in beef bouillon with white wine, carrots, onions, garlic, and a smear of tomato paste was so deeply comforting, it made me teary eyed. Though she loved to preen as a crotchety, even difficult, old lady, this wiry woman cooked with love, and once she’d made up her mind about you, she was fiercely protective and deeply loyal. This was what dawned on me as I ate the beef, which was so tender it cut with a fork, in a sauce that had a tantalizing equilibrium between the sweetness of the onions and carrots and the acidity of the tomato and wine. The editor loved his paupiettes—veal cutlets stuffed with forcemeat and tied into lard-barded bundles with fine string—in Port sauce with baby vegetables, too. Adrienne’s crème caramel was the best I’ve ever eaten until very recently at La Bourse et La Vie, which is also owned by Daniel Rose, and bien sur the meal ended with Armagnac, and, rather horrifyingly, some tears.

The London editor had recently founded out that his wife was having an affair with the builder hired to do some work on their house in Hampstead. And when he’d challenged her about it, she’d told him she was leaving him for the new man who was handy with a hammer. Awkwardly, I tried to console him, and was only delivered when he glanced at his watch and realized he had to rush out the door to get his train at the Gare du Nord. So he flung two five-hundred-franc notes on the table and was gone.

Adrienne told me that she didn’t have the right notes to give me change for bill, which was somewhere around 675 francs. So I told her to keep the money on account as a credit for my next meal there, an idea that pleased us both a lot. I went back a week later and spent the remaining 325 francs and more. And this became a happy Friday habit.

So I wondered what to expect on my way to Chez la Vieille the other night. How retro would Rose go in resurrecting this restaurant And actually, how retro did I want him to go?

On the one hand, memory has anointed Adrienne Biasin’s cooking with gold leaf, but walking down the avenue de l’Opera on a cool night, I couldn’t help but daring myself to admit that sometimes her cooking could be a little bit, well, a little bit bland. And as much as I loved her, I never loved the dining rooms—the big bar downstairs took up too much room, upstairs felt like right field, and the lighting was terrible in both rooms.

Well, first things first. Interior architect Elliott Barnes new look for the restaurant is pretty brilliant.

Barnes has retained with the white-gray-and-black tiles of the downstairs dining room, but cleared out the tables downstairs in favor of a handsome new bar made from tin and light wood with a rank of bar stools where you can sit for a drink or a meal. Upstairs, reached as always via the stairwell of this 16^th century house, the high ceilinged dining room with only eighteen covers has been painted tea blue and kitted out with banquette seating along one wall, modern sconces designed by Barnes, and a chain-mail chandelier overhead that struck me as incongruous in this setting.

Helmed by chef Oleg Olexin, the menu is intelligently concise but very appealing. Dismissing options like the Utah Beach oysters from Normandy, the sardine rillettes with seaweed butter, and the bibb lettuce salad with chicken gizzards, we ordered starters that seemed more likely to honor the late Madame Biasin and also show off the kitchen’s talent.

And indeed the unctuous duck terrine ‘Adrienne’ shot me back through time in the most ruthless of ways, since this soft but firm slab of minced duck meat, organs and fat has the kind of low-ball barnyard funk that Madame Biasin always made her signature. Here the terrine comes with a racy beet-juice red grated horseradish condiment and onion jam; both are excellent. Bruno’s Puy lentils with two soft slabs of foie gras were a sexy upstairs-downstairs pair, too—two perfect products that flattered each other in a horny rural coupling.

When it came to ordering mains, we side-stepped the highly recommended coquelet a la diable, knowing that we’ll eat here again soon, in favor of two dishes I perceived as urgently expressing both Rose and Biasin—bouillon with spaetzle, grilled bacon and a poached egg and blanquette de veau, which in English rather insipidly translates as veal in cream sauce but is in reality just so much more than that. Done well, which is a real art, this dish of tender meat with baby onions, the occasional carrot, and miniscule button mushrooms is just about as comforting as being swaddled in white flannel sheets, put in a cradle and rocked in front of a wood fire by your grandmother on a rainy night. Rose is also rightly obsessed by the restorative qualities and pleasures of an honest long-simmered bouillon, and the one served here stands out as the single best comfort food to be found anywhere in Paris this winter.

What makes it even more interesting is that it’s a dish that Adrienne Biasin would probably never have served, since for her it would have felt unfinished. She would have wanted to whip the egg into the sauce rather than leave it whole, for example, and might have been puzzled by the grilled bacon as well, not knowing, of course, that bacon and eggs is one of the most essential and primal comfort-food pairings in the entire English-speaking world. But this deeply restorative dish, a preparation as restaurant (the old French word  for ‘restorative,’ and yes, the genesis of the modern word for a public place to eat, since the original ones in Paris served variously garnished bouillons) as any hundred patented modern medicines, displays Rose’s profound knowledge of French cooking and its history, and also the nimble outsider’s irreverence that allows him to tinker with a cuisine he has succeeded at making his own.

Remi Segura’s off-list Domaine Ganevat Chamois du Paradis Cotes du Jura was a superb suggestion for this meal, and his service was all easygoing charm throughout a meal which I’d criticize in only two places. The garnish of Basmatic rice with toasted almonds and snipped apricot to be eaten with the blanquette de veau came in a tiny dish and was awkward to eat from. When I mentioned this, I was told that I should have dumped the rice into the cast-iron Staub casserole the blanquette de veau came in and eaten out that directly. This would have been complicated in a variety of different ways, since it would take forever for the whole dish to cool off enough to eat, it would be complicated to try and cut chunks of meat in sauce in a high-sided casserole, and the deliciously crunchy almond chips would lose their role if soaked in sauce. So better in my opinion to serve the rice in a larger side dish so that the pleasure of the blanquette can be parsed out.

Given the generous portions here and the heartiness of the cooking, we decided to split a portion of rice pudding with crushed praline rose (almonds in a pink-colored hard candy sugar shell, a popular comestible in Lyon) at the end of the meal. For me it was too sweet and too mushy, and I’d have liked a little bit of crunch from freshly crushed pralines to contrast with the soft, creamy rice. These are quibbles, however, since Chez la Vieille is not only an excellent restaurant but quite possibly a better one than it was under the aegis of the late Adrienne Biasin, who would doubtless also be glad to know that I gave my much loathed camel’s hair coat to a clothing bank a good twenty-five years ago and that I’ve never ever had sex with a notary.

1 Rue Bailleul, 1st Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-42-60-15-78. Metro: Louvre. Open Tuesday through Saturday for lunch and dinner. Closed Sunday and Monday. Average 45 Euros.

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Champeaux is gastronaut Alain Ducasse’s new brasserie in the revamped Forum des Halles in Paris. I’ve been several times, and I rather like it. It is, of course, still a work in progress, but it’s also an attempt to make good food available to all comers again–even if the prices are a little too high, witness all of the kids sitting on  the stone stairs that lead into the exorbitantly renovated shopping center and transit hub (they spent $1 billion here but it sure doesn’t show) eating fast food from grease-strained white paper bags. Observing how people will adapt any venue to their own needs and uses despite the head-strong high-faluting intentions of the architect, the fledgling renovation of Les Halles is also an invitation to muse on how gentrified good eating has become in most major Western cities. And in the heart of the neighborhood that was the site of the main food market in Paris eight centuries before it was so brutally relocated to suburban Rungis in 1969, this takes on a particular poignancy.

To wit, when I first moved to New York City and took a punitively underpaid job in book publishing, there were dozens of places I could find a good meal within my paltry means both in midtown where I worked and on the Upper West Side where I lived. For a couple of dollars, I could get a slice of smoked fish on a bagel, a big combo plate of Cuban-Chinese food, a couple of slices of good pizza, a big juicy burger, and, if I was willing to hoof a dozen blocks further north, a big spicy plate of goulash with fried potatoes. The incredibly delicious variety of food available to me on my modest means was one of the major reasons I fell in love with New York City, and after I spent almost ten years sating, sort of, an insatiably compulsive and intertwined hunger for new night clubs and sex with strangers I hoped I’d never see again, this gift of food was the passion that survived as the pithe of my love for NYC after I moved first to London and then to Paris.

So even though I could have fathered most of the kids sitting on those steps leading down into the transit center bowels of the Forum des Halles that connect it to distant suburbs most Parisians alternately don’t know or fear, I still couldn’t help but being moved by their palpable glow of excitement, or the adrenalin-boosted elation tinged with fear that any kid feels when he or she steps off the train in the heart of the big city. I mean, hey, when I was an adolescent with a shoulder-length parted-in-the-middle Prince Lancelot haircut who lived in suburban Connecticut, there was nothing I liked more than a Saturday of hanging out in the Child’s or Howard Johnson’s restaurants in Times Square smoking cigarettes (Newports), drinking too much coffee and hoping against hope that I might be accosted in this funky, rough, sex-riddled neighborhood (Never happened, alas, probably because it’s no fun to shoot pigeons sitting on a phone wire, or to come on to a kid who is so patently  eager to be disabused of his hopeless naivete when it’s badge of privilege visible to everyone but the wearer).

Sea bream carpaccio with citrus @Pierre Monetta

So when we went to Champeaux the first time, I liked the fact that there were some interesting looking kids from the burbs in the room who’d decided to dare Ducasse. I mean, these kids probably knew about him from various shows about the reboot of Les Halles on television rather than anything particularly gastronomic, and most of them probably hadn’t had the experience of any restaurant that would end up in the egregiously elitist Michelin guide. They also likely wouldn’t know a bistronomie restaurant if they stepped on one. Why?

Though it’s been blessedly gentler than what’s gone on in New York or London during the last couple of decades, the sociological parsing out of central Paris means that these kids and their families have since been threshed out of the mix, which is why, shock horror, the Paris press was so befuddled by the huge success of the first Burger King to return to France after a long absence when it opened in the Gare Saint Lazare, another major venue for suburbanites arriving in the city. The socialists may run City Hall, but what’s left of the middle class in Paris is hanging on by a thread, to say nothing of working class Paris, which is basically gone, along with the frequently smoke-filled cafes where they could get lunch for 30-40 francs. Rising rents also explain the explosion of franchise places, often of American origin, along the city’s main avenues, here a Subway, there a Pizza Hut and across the street a KFC.

Pate en croute @Pierre Monetta

New York City, God love it, keeps the cheap hot meal within reach of almost everyone with its astonishing culture of food carts. Nothing similar exists in Paris, and to my knowledge, very little thought has been given to the way that gentrification has completely changed the city’s restaurant landscape. With the redesign of the Forum des Halles, however, there was no way of ignoring the fact that the busy rail station deep below spills thousands of suburbanites of modest to middling means into the heart of the city everyday. Champeaux at least makes a fluttering attempt to be accessible to these people, since you can get a cheese soufflé for 14 Euros and the plat du jour is 22 Euros.

The diversity in the dining room the other night was refreshingly different from most Paris restaurants, too. The room itself is huge and has been criticised for feeling like its in an airport or train station, but first of all, it is is part of a train station, and second of all, I like its post industrial look and vaguely tongue-in-cheek references to recently gone ‘retro’ 1970s French design in public spaces. The lighting in a difficult space is good, too, and the terrazzo table tops are both practical and good looking. The single shoulder strap on the aprons the waiters wear is the only design detail I’d hasten to correct, because it’s dippy looking and impractical.

The menu is modern and modish, with only the plat du jours and a peculiar post-modern riff on the onion soup that was one of the neighbourhood’s great dishes for centuries playing the card of tradition. I prefer the version a few doors down at Au Pied de Cochon, where a crouton floats a cap of melted cheese.

Salad of raw and cooked vegetables @ Pierre Monetta

Otherwise, there’s a sextet of beautifully made souffles–three savoury, three sweet, which are the signature dish here, and a couple of nods at healthy eating with dishes like a starter of cooked and raw vegetables with herb pesto and croaker with toasted quinoa and a lemon-olive condiment. If you go for the hand-chopped steak tartare, ask for it without the exasperating shower of Jerusalem artichoke chips that adds nothing to the taste of the good quality well-seasoned meat.

My best meal here so far was a slice of excellent pâté en croûte, followed by the quenelles de brochet, Friday’s plat du jour, in a beautifully made sauce Nantua, and finally a pistachio souffle that hid a pool of salted caramel sauce and was accompanied by caramel ice cream. For these three dishes, I would definitely return, and all things be equal, it’s heartening that the brasserie revival pioneered by chef Eric Frechon when he opened Le Mini-Palais and Lazare, is continuing to gain momentum, with chef Thierry Marx’s new brasserie at the Gare du Nord in the wings for this year’s rentrée. On these terms, Chapeaux is a useful new address for the same reason any brasserie is, to wit they remain walk-in restaurants where you can usually get a table at the last minute and have a decent feed while enjoying some good people watching.

And after all, the real measure of any really great food city is how well it feeds everyone who lives there.

La Canopée, Forum des Halles, 1st Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-53-45-84-50. Metro: Les Halles, Chatelet , Louvre-Rivoli, Etienne Marcel. Open daily. Average 30-35 Euros. www.restaurant-champeaux.com

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When summer blooms, the urge to dine outdoors sweeps through many major western cities, but perhaps nowhere is the choice of an al fresco dining venue more fraught than it is in Paris. Why Landing a choice fresh-air table is a great Parisian seasonal game. If anyone can decide to sit down on one of the city’s hundreds of cafe terraces and order one of the worlds best summer meals–a glass of rose, an omelette and a green salad (more often mediocre than not, alas, in the French capital these days, since cafes generally contend with a clientele that’s even more centime-sensitive than any fast-food restaurant. To wit, break an invisible mental price barrier–most recently fifteen Euros, now twenty—and your clientele starts melting; what this means, of course, is constant cost-cutting in the kitchen), not everyone has the well-filled purse and social wiliness required to bag a table at a place like Le Restaurant du Palais-Royal, which occupies a corner of the Palais Royal and possesses a small seasonal terrace which overlooks not only the magnificent arcades and facades of this former royal residence in the heart of Paris, but its the stunningly beautiful gardens as well.

So fiercely in demand are these tables of a given summer day when the weather is good, that Parisians have long ignored this restaurant’s formerly uneven cooking and eye-watering prices. Now, though, with the arrival of a new chef, Philip Chronopoulos, 28, ex L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon, Le Restaurant du Palais-Royal not only offers an ethereally charming setting for a meal but some superb contemporary French cooking as well.

Artichokes poivrade at Le Restaurant du Palais-Royal

Just for the back story, Paris’s love of fresh-air dining in beautiful bucolic venues was born of the romantic movement in the 18th century and flowered during the 19th century, when many of the city’s then newly built parks included a restaurant or two. Then as an ancient Gallic fear of draughts–courants d’air, which were thought to be cause colds or that vast category of diseases once known as ‘fevers’ faded with access to better medicine, improved urban hygiene and new ideas about health which held that fresh air and sunshine was good for you, picnicking became a popular past-time and guinguettes, or open-air pleasure barges, came to line stretches of the Seine and the Marne. Cafe terraces long the broad avenues and boulevards that Haussmann drove through the city became a fixture of Parisian life, too.

Unfortunately, it’s not easy to find a great open-air setting and good food in Paris–traffic noise and pollution render many open-air settings unpleasant and the beautiful-terrace-with-good food is almost as elusive as the beautiful-view-restaurant-with-good-food, which makes the recent opening of the Grand Coeur in the Marais so noteworthy and the renaissance of Le Restaurant du Palais-Royal so welcome (note, too, that the cooking at both restaurants is so good and their venues so charming, that they’re well worth a meal even when you can’t sit outside).

What I personally love about the terrace at Le Restaurant du Palais-Royal is that it’s one of those very rare and precious places in Paris where the city loosens its psychological corsets during the summer and relaxes without imperiling its elegance. This incremental relaxing of a perpetual pose of restraint and discipline is deliciously provocative, and as much as the magical setting, this is what makes a summer meal here so romantic.

Eager to discover a favorite table in a new incarnation, I invited another longtime American-in-Paris, my friend Judy, to join me for dinner on a night when there was just enough of a trembling breeze to make it appealing to be outdoors after ten days of Saharan heat. I’d heard that the restaurant had a new chef, but the reason for coming was the setting, so I hoped for the best when we opened our menus to build our meals over a glass of supremely refreshing Chablis. “There are some lovely sounding things here,” said Judy, hopefully, and there were. In fact, the short menu comprised an intriguing offer of dishes that were wholly original but decidedly summery.

Out of curiosity, we shared a superb tartare of sea bream and fromage frais in a pool of fresh cherry juice with basil leaves. The acidity of the fruit tempered by the lactic edge of the dairy was a perfect foil for the fish.

I ordered the creamy rice with shellfish and broccoli more out of curiosity than desire, and was pleasantly surprised by an airy dish of cockles and chopped razor-shell clam in a lightly acidulated marinade under a foam of baked rice foam garnished with a sprig and crumbs of baby broccoli. This brilliantly changed the equilibrium of our evening, too, since I hadn’t really intended for this to be a gastronomically interesting or adventurous meal and now it had suddenly become one. Judy’s baby artichokes poivrade, that lovely classic where the vegetable is poached in white wine, olive oil, lemon and herbs, came with a fascinating garnish of grilled Treviso, too.

@GdeLaubier

Roasted Breton lobster had a louche elegance that came from the fact that the fine flesh of the crustacean was dressed up but not overwhelmed by a lush garnet-colored sauce that incorporated a magnificent court bouillon made with its crushed shell, and wilted turnip greens and firm white asparagus tips brought a pleasantly gentle notes of  bitter punctuation to the almost custard-y richness of impeccably cooked veal sweetbreads. The sauce of deglazed cooking juices and fond de veau demonstrated that Chronopoulos is a seriously talented saucier, too, and also that sauces needn’t be banished from summer cooking if they’re light enough and deftly seasoned to be refreshing.

We concluded this unexpectedly delightful meal with two lovely summer desserts, Mara strawberries in a hibiscus jus with bitter almond ice cream and meringue cartridges with white peaches in a lush rum sauce. My only reservation about this meal was that the service was neither as assured or as gracious as a restaurant with cooking of this caliber warrants, but I expect his will evolve with time.

Le Restaurant du Palais-Royal is expensive, but it’s a superb choice for a special occasion meal in Paris, whether that occasion is a momentous one like a 50th wedding anniversary or a more daily one, like the decision to get a new haircut.

110 galerie de Valois (via the gardens of the Palais Royal) or 41 rue de Valois (if arriving by taxi or car), 1st Arrondisement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-40-20-00-27. Open Tuesday-Saturday for lunch and dinner. Closed Sunday and Monday. Average 120 Euros. www.restaurantdupalaisroyal.com    

The post Le Restaurant du Palais-Royal, Paris | A Perennially Romantic Restaurant Gets a Great New Chef, B+ appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

@ Serge Detalle

As the holidays approach, Paris grows busier like most cities, but even as the shopping-bag-carrying throngs thicken, the French capital retains a refreshing insouciance at odds with the atmosphere of amped-up consumer frenzy in so many other western cities. It’s not that the French don’t enjoy the holidays–they do–but rather that they’re admirably resistant to all and any calendar-generated hype. Blessedly, there’s nothing in France that approximates “Black Friday,” the first day of super-discounted Christmas shopping in the United States after Thanksgiving. You don’t find Santa Claus lurking in Parisian department stores, and the canned Christmas music in public spaces–garages, restrooms, malls, elevators–so common in English-speaking countiries would rightly drive the French to indignation shading to rage.

The commercial trimmings of Christmas aren’t completely absent from France, of course–most major French magazines include Best Gifts Guides in the shrink-wrapped subcribers’ editions and sprinkle some bird seed in front of luxury watch producers and Champagne houses with stultifying ‘special’ supplements on Champagne and luxury watches. Visually, the city veers from elegance–the beautiful lighting on the Avenue Montaigne–to the bizarre retro-disco horror of ‘ornamenting’ the trees along the Champs Elysees with ugly hula-hoop style lighting in garrish colors.

Myself, I’ve long since escaped from conventional Christmas shopping by gifting books, theater tickets, or–best of all–meals to my friends and family, and the first holiday gift meal of the year that I offered was to one of my very oldest friends in the world, who just happened to be in Paris before I went away on much-needed holiday in Vietnam. Thing is, when you gift a meal, it’s all about the person who’s receiving the gift, but this time round, I had an ace up my sleeve with the Bistrot Bellet, one of my favorite new restaurants. My pal–a New York lawyer, was in town for twenty-four hours on a fraught call to a major French corporate client, so I knew he’d be exhausted and frazzled when we met for dinner, which ruled out most of the more innovative modern bistros in Paris for the simple reason that he wouldn’t have understood or liked them, and the meals most of them serve would have taken too long. So I treated him to some blanquette de veau and a good bottle of wine, and he went off into the night purring with pleasure.

The other day, though, I was walking home from meeting someone for a drink in a cafe and my messenger bag was full of the tubs of red and yellow miso paste and kimchi I’d bought along the rue Sainte Anne (A much needed January diet is already planned). Bruno had been scooped up for a business meal, so I was on my own, and for the first time in a long time, I hadn’t made plans with other friends or even given much thought to dinner, an extremely rare event in my food-centered life. I was hungry, however, but didn’t feel like cooking, and so it suddenly dawned on me to take myself out for a nice but simple meal somewhere. Though I often dine alone when traveling for work reasons, and enjoy it thoroughly–having learned to eat solitary in public settings is one of the life lessons I prize most of the years I’ve lived in France, I rarely do so in Paris.

So I was vaguely thinking of ducking over to a favorite Vietnamese restaurant in the rue du Mont Thabor Indochine, the right-bank branch of Au Coin des Courmets), or even seeing what the rock of ages bistro Lescure is like these days, when I found myself peering through the window of a new restaurant just off the Place de Marche Saint-Honore in the heart of Paris. The Cafe des Abattoirs, which I’d read about, looked very appealing, so I went in and lucked out with a seat at the counter. I immediately liked the looks of this place, which had a long taupe leather mural of farm animals on one wall and a beautiful black-and-gold antique mirror that said ‘Cafe des Abattoirs’ at the head of the small, cozy dining room.

The nice guy in chef’s whites behind the bar set me up with a glass of white wine and some slices of delicious country ham served on a piece of white butcher’s paper, and suddenly all was well in the world. Caroline Rostang, who runs the restaurant with her sister Sophie–both being the daughters of estimable chef Michel Rostang, he of the eponymous Michelin two star restaurant in the 17th arrondissement, commented the three prix-fixe menus–32 Euros, 38 Euros and 45 Euros–offered here with some of her family’s signature charm, and I decided on the 38 Euro menu, which opens like all of them with a suite of hors d’oeuvres, followed by a Josper grilled bavette (skirt steak), and a choice of desserts.

@ Serge Detalle

Enjoying a great glass of Bourgeuil with oeufs mayonnaise, some charcuterie, and a tiny cup of deliciously earthy cream of mushroom soup, I eve’s dropped while Rostang told the couple sitting next to me that the mirror in the dining room had belong to her great-grandmother and once ornamented a hotel the family had owned and that this new address is the sixth Rostang table of the sixth generation of Rostangs to work in the restaurant business. There was a festive atmosphere in the dining room, which was populated by a mix of foreigners and well-heeled young executive types from the surrounding neighborhood, and the setting and mood reminded me of the kind of good neighborhood meat restaurant you often find in American cities.

@ Serge Detalle   Since I was uncharacteristically without a camera that night and my iPhone ran out of juice after I snapped the deviled egg, I’m not able to depict the superb Scottish Black Angus skirt steak I tucked into, but it was a beautifully cooked piece of meat and came to the table with both fries and Lyonnaise potatoes and a chrome condiments caddy that contained homemade ketchup, barbecue sauce, mustard and a tomato-horseradish relish that was so good I’d happily have bought a bottle or two if it’d had been on sale.

I finished up with a perfectly ripened quarter camembert, and in the space of an hour and a half was homebound again with that warm feeling of well-being that follows a good well-served meal. Thinking about this guileless off-the-cuff feast the next day, the obvious occurred to me–this is a very good restaurant and a useful one two, since it’s open seven days a week, so I called Caroline Rostang and scrounged some photos so that I could write about it here. She sent me some nice meatcake shots, too, including the Gascon cote du porc (above) and kefta style lamb kebabs (below).

This is a friendly well-conceived restaurant in a very convenient location, so if you’re looking for a good timeout feed during your holiday shopping or want to treat a friend to a meal as a gift, the Cafe des Abattoirs is a terrific choice.

Cafe des Abattoirs, 10 rue Gamboust, 1st, Tel. 01-76-21-77-60. Metro: Opera, Pyramides, or Tuileries. Open daily. www.cafedesabattoirs.com Prix-fixe menus 32 Euros, 38 Euros and 45 Euros.

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@Bob Peterson for Hungry for Paris

“No, no, that’s not the right color. That’s cream, not almond,” an older man said to his colleague as they stared at a tiny piece of stone down on their knees on the mosaic floor they were creating. “The almond is too dark, the cream would be better. This is a corner of the room and the light in Paris is so often gray,” said his colleague.  They changed it back and forth several times, and finally settled on the cream. I’d never seen such a large and elaborate mosaic being created before, and I never enter this room without remembering their pride and their seriousness.

Roasted figs with creme fraiche

So a passionate attention to detail really does underlie the experience of a meal at one of the most legendary dining rooms in Paris, and this is why I was so curious to go to dinner the other night. Chef Yannick Alleno, who presided at Le Meurice for many years and won three stars there, moved on during the winter of 2013, and now the restaurant has joined the stable of tables run by Alain Ducasse, who placed Christophe Saintagne from Restaurant Alain Ducasse at the Hotel Plaza Athenee, a sister property to Le Meurice, since they’re both part of the Dorchester Group, in the kitchen now that this latter hotel is about to be renovated.

Waiting for Bruno in the street, I couldn’t help but wondering if the impending meal might feel like finding a different bird in the nest another one had built. Then Bruno showed up in his Mini convertible, and it was amusing to watch the top-hatted valet park this nice little car between a Bentley and a Lamborghini. When we went inside and were ushered through the discrete door behind a panel in the lobby, the dining room was not only every bit as magnificent as I remembered but also pleasantly more subdued. Several years ago, designer Philippe Starck had tinkered with the original post-renovation décor, and since I don’t want irony-inflected wit to move the sort of double-barreled grandeur I experience so rarely off-center, I’d never really taken to his tweaks.

Alain Ducasse is both extremely discreet and a real aesthete in the best sense of this word, so it was fascinating to register the subtle but powerful changes he’d made at the restaurant just a few weeks after it became one of his. The only ornament on our ecru linen dressed table was a plump ripe yellow tomato on a small smooth shake of timber (we later learned it came from one of the many trees felled in the forests of Versailles during a terrible storm several years ago), and it was a pregnant clue as to the visual and gastronomic sensibility of the meal that followed.

The first dish to arrive at the table was a small square sandwich of toasted country bread filled with fleshy pleasantly feral tasting cepes and a veil of smoked country ham. At the same time it appeared a waiter brought the salt and pepper in a series of gray porcelain cubes that briefly grabbed my attention with their stark beauty before I was distracted by the arrival of our first course, a black cast-iron casserole. When the lid was removed, we saw a small pretty still-life of vegetables that had been cooked on a bed of gray sea salt, and the waiter then supplied us with long thin forks to spear them with and dip into a tart green herbed dairy sauce. The vegetables—carrots, potatoes, onions, baby leeks—were homey and satisfying, and the gently astringent sauce cleansed the palate for everything to come. This communal dish also whispered that the pleasures of the table are often best shared. As much as this opener surprised us, we were both transfixed by the plate and the small fragile ramekin the sauce came in. “It must be him,” said Bruno, but we couldn’t gracefully upend anything to check until a few minutes later when we saw Belgian ceramicist Pieter Stockman’s named printed on their bottoms.

We’d first discovered Stockman’s exquisite ceramics in a boutique in Antwerp, and I’d later seen them at Restaurant Jean-Francois Piege in Paris. What transfixed me, though, was deciphering what these very carefully objects were saying. What I surmised is that in the 21st century, luxury should pure and delicate, or a series of simple evanescent pleasures that are humble and healthy rather than ostentatious and self-indulgent. Clearly Ducasse had decided to make Le Meurice his laboratory for reinventing French haute cuisine for the 21st century.

This extended to the deeply considered casting of the staff in this dining room, where I happily saw more women working than I ever had before in such an exalted restaurant. Among them, the charming and enviously polyglot Spanish woman who explained the haiku-like menu to us, and then the sommelier, Estelle Touzet, whose love and knowledge of wine and eloquent and thought-provoking way of describing it became one of the major threads of pleasure that animated our evening.

Bruno loved his sautéed autumn fruit and vegetables served with a deglazed sauce of cooking juices and cider vinegar—a varying palate of acidities and different shades of bitterness is another recurring element of this kitchen, while my pate chaud de pintade au chou came as an elegantly fragile cartridge of pastry filled with chunks of tender guinea hen and Savoy cabbage bound by a baked mousse of liver and gizzards.

The nearly nude way in which our fish courses were prepared further emphasized the angelic intentions of the kitchen. A magnificent lozenge of butter-basted turbot came on an identically sized piece of fine toast lightly spread with tapenade, all that was needed to emphasize its natural flavor with the foil of a little salt and texture. It reminded me of the innocent simplicity with which fish is often cooked in Scandinavia, while John Dory, also cooked on the bone, was presented on laser-fine slices of fig with coin-sized pieces of turnip and a salad of herbs. Here, the fine graininess of the fig seeds flattered the fish, while the gentle bitterness of the turnips punctuated its natural sweetness.

Main courses were even more plain-spoken in an almost Amish sort of way. Bruno’s colvert (wild duck) was cooked rare and garnished with halved black grapes, kernels of corn and a luscious salamis (the bird’s bones pounded to a smooth paste with red wine and stock), while my veal sweetbreads surprised me even after the detailed explanation of this preparation I’d been given at the beginning of the meal. A perfectly round slice of sweetbread was topped with a fine crust of toasted golden bread crumbs and came with a comma-shaped side dish of roasted heirloom tomatoes with a few melted shards of Parmesan. Restraint was the clear intention of this preparation, with the tomatoes intended to provide an acidic foil to the rich creamy flavor and texture of the sweetbreads. Since I love sweetbreads, this was the one moment in the meal when I yearned for a bit more, but in terms of the logic behind my menu, it was impeccable.

Ducasse is now producing superb chocolate at an atelier in Paris near the Bastille, and it supplied the raw materials for a stunningly good finale—chocolate ice cream decorated with fine broken panes of caramel on a bed of almonds and an accessorizing cocoa mousse and a pitcher of hot chocolate. Following the waiter’s instructions, I spooned up some of the mousse and ice cream with a nut or two and dribbled it with melted chocolate before experiencing an avalanche of pleasure that was propelled into even higher relief by the deceptively modest tone of the proceeding meal. The glass of ten-year-old Barbeito Bual Old Reserve Madeira, which sommelier Touzet explained she’d chosen for the faint flavor of the salt in the island’s soil expressed through the grapes behind the foreground tastes of caramel, leather and tobacco, added a deeper glow of sensuality to this shudderingly good concoction. Bruno enjoyed his roasted figs, which were served in a fragile bowl of mesmerizingly aromatic dried fig leaves with a granite of red wine atop a hazelnut cream, and we were more relieved than surprised when the traditional trolley of post-prandial sweetmeats was brought tableside and contained freshly made fruit compotes and sorbets instead of the usual mignardaises, candies and pastries. This gentle and planed down proposal was much more in keeping with the prevailing—and even invigorating—theme of restraint that had informed our meal than a selection of sugary little cakes would have been.

There was nothing ascetic or puritanical about the moderation that was the rudder of this meal, however. Instead it recognized that many people coming to a restaurant of this caliber today are there to be entertained as much as they are to be fed, and that almost anyone who can afford such an experience probably leads a life of habitual abundance.

Ultimately, this was a superb and very daring meal, because after making his reputation with an

exactingly disciplined take on the simple but naturally baroque character of European Mediterranean cooking, Ducasse has completely revised and reinvented his repertoire. What he instinctively understands, you see, is that as the conventional summit of the French culinary experience, haute cuisine has always been a mirror of our aspirations, pleasures, and even fears, and in his stunningly astute reading of these evolving codes in a still emerging new century, he’s come up with an intriguing new recipe for pleasure. Gallic gastronomic luxury should be simple and wholesome.

Restaurant Le Meurice – Alain Ducasse, Hotel Le Meurice, 228 rue de Rivoli, 1st, Tel. 01-44-58-10-55,

Metro: Concorde or Tuileries. Open Monday to Friday for lunch and dinner. Closed Saturday and Sunday.

Average a la carte 235 Euros, Five-course tasting menu 380 Euros. www.lemeurice.com/le-meurice-restaurant

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