@Yann Deret

Tinkering with a neighborhood institution is always risky, but the new version of Vins des Pyrénées is a solid success. Why Truth be told, this wonderful old hole-in-the-wall that’s been open in one guise another since 1906 is actually more appealing now than it’s ever been, with much better food than it served in the past, a great-looking new decor that respects its past rather than overwhelming it, friendly service, and a terrific cocktail menu. Best of all, it’s still one of those rare places–for the time being, where you can decide to go at the last minute without having made a reservation (reservations are preferable, bien sur, but sometimes a date just happens, and this place privileges such spontaneity rather than imposing the tyrannical straight-jacket of a reservation on a spur-of-the-moment good time).

  This is a rare good news story, too, at a time when income-inequality driven gentrification continues to ravage the sociological ecosystems of the world’s most desirable cities. Even though Paris is subject to the same forces have sadly dulled and pasteurised so many of the most wonderful parts of New York and London, and the French capital has been less disrupted than those latter two, the Marais continues to go relentlessly upmarket. But at Vins des Pyrénées, owner actor Florian Cadiou has shrewdly respected the enduringly democratic DNA of the quartier enough to draw up a menu that lets you pop in for a single course–maybe their excellent Croque Monsieur made with truffled Gouda, and a glass of wine for twenty euros, which is what goes a bargain these days in Paris.

To be sure, some of the old timers, like the vociferously cranky middle-aged British music critic in a vintage black leather Perfecto jacket and his equally grumpy companion who sat next to us at dinner the other night, won’t be pleased. But hey, the days when Jim Morrison liked to hang out here aren’t coming back. That said, this place still manages to be cool without calling a tedious amount of attention to its hipster cred, and that’s something to be grateful for in an age of wiltingly over-hyped and over-conceptualised restaurants. After all, who doesn’t love an address where you could actually become a regular without having to spend a small fortune or reserve in advance?

@Yann Deret

@Yann Deret

At the end of a busy day, a cocktail seemed like a good idea, and it was, because young bartender Adele Fardeau, ex- Mandarin Oriental Hotel, makes a very fine drink indeed.

Chef Jimmy Ferret @ Yann Deret

@Yann Deret

From the brief modern French comfort food menu by chef Jimmy Reffet, who most recently cooked at Saturne and Terroirs d’Avenir, among other places, we went for the foie gras and the roast lamb croquettes, both of which were excellent. Other tempting starters included marinated leeks with crushed hazelnuts in a sauce ravigote, jambon Basque from the Maison Ospital, and terrine de campagne with homemade pickles.

Main courses of steak tartare and squid stuffed with piquillo peppers, chorizo and fennel were nicely made, too. And in the end, the menu reminded me of the French equivalent of those pleasant if unremarkable neighborhood restaurants with names like the Peacock Feather or the Drink Well and ‘bills of fare’ that ran to cheese burgers and chef salads that you used to find in the West Village in New York City. This genre of now extinct Manhattan table was where the locals went on the way home from work, alone or with a friend, for a cocktail or two and a good simple meal in a place that was friendly and familiar, because the fridge was empty, their bed was empty and/or they wanted some company. Vins des Pyrenees operates on exactly the same wave-length, although the bar upstairs has already become a place where the wild things are, especially the pretty little conservatory cum fumoir.

Le fumoir at Vins des Pyrenees @ Yann Deret

We shared a lemon meringue tart for dessert, and agreed that the only slightly disappointing thing about this place is the wine list, which, given the name of the place, could and should be a lot more interesting. What I’d love to see is a full range of French wines running from the Basque Country to the Languedob-Roussillon and some Spanish wines, too, since the Pyrénées are after all shared by France and Spain.

Vins des Pyrénées isn’t a place you come in search of gastronomic exaltation, but it’s very likeable for so usefully offering a good feed and great drinks seven days a week in one of the most appealing neighbourhoods in Paris.

25 rue Beautrellis, 4th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-42-72-64-94, Metro: Saint Paul, Open daily 7AM–2AM,  Lunch menus 17 and 22 Euros, average a la carte 35 Euros. http://www.vinsdespyrenees.com

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Tucked away in a courtyard in the Marais, and occupying the same space as The Studio, a long-running but not regretted Tex-Mex restaurant that claims a flickering wick of memory only by reminding me of how much I miss authentic Mexican cooking in Paris, Grand Coeur is a delightful new brasserie that serves a very good contemporary French menu. It also has one of the city’s loveliest terraces for out door summer dining, which is a Parisian passion. Grand Coeur (The Big Heart) comes with a seriously impressive pedigree, too, since it’s the creation of seasoned Marais restaurateur Julien Fouin (Jaja and Glou, neither of which I much like) and Argentine born chef Mauro Colagreco, whose restaurant Mirazur in Menton is one of my favorite tables in France and who is widely considered to be one the country’s five or six best chefs. Talented acting chef, Brazilian born Rafael Gomes, has cooked everywhere from Eleven Madison in New York City to an Alaskan fishing trawler, and he brings a lot of nonchalantly cosmopolitan finesse and creativity to this restaurant, too.

I hadn’t been to this address in many years, so coming for dinner the other night unexpectedly brought-on a little avalanche of fuzzy flashbacks when I stepped into the courtyard. Rather surprisingly–given how much the Marais has gentrified, the dance studio at the head of the courtyard is still in business after all of these years, which explains the constant stream of impressively lean and lithe dancers trailing across the big flat cobblestones. I also couldn’t help but being impressed by the architectural beauty of this 18th century setting, which once housed the Aigle d’Or (The Golden Eagle), a coaching inn that eventually became the premises of The Studio.

Though happily seated outside on a mild summer night, a twinge or two still reminded me The Studio was a place that had always made me restless and melancholy for the simple reason I’ve never considered myself to be an expatriate. Though I may have lived in Paris for several decades, electing to become an expat is a knowing social and psychological positioning relative to an individual’s native and assumed cultures that’s never attracted me. In the traditional version of this pose, the adopted country is viewed through a permanent veil of oddity and exoticism, while the original homeland morphs into a place of sentimentalized perfection like a Normal Rockwell painting.

I didn’t move to Paris because I don’t like the U.S., however. I moved to Paris out a profound fascination with and attraction to France, which makes me an American who has chosen to create a life in France, not an American who has scorned his birth country only to indulge in occasional bouts of wistfully missing it. More than anything having to do with Tex-Mex cooking, it was this public psycho-emotional positioning, at once self-satisfied and self-flagellating, that Le Studio catered to, although it also functioned as a low-key Anglophone singles bar and was an occasionally handy place to get completely trashed on mediocre Margaritas.

These days, though, I much prefer a good glass of Condrieu, which is what we sipped while studying the appealing menu and the crowd, an attractive and promisingly combustible mix of Parisians and foreigners. Grand Coeur describes itself as a brasserie, but it’s an innovative modern one, since on the current seasonal menu, the only rock-of-ages brasserie standard was a steak tartare. So I think that the use of the word brasserie is as much about aspiring to the jaunty metropolitan attitude that words implies as it is a particular menu or cooking style.

Knowing that the asparagus season is quickly sputtering out, I couldn’t resist ordering a main course of grilled white asparagus on a bed of barley risotto as my starter, and it was a well-conceived and quietly satisfying dish which might only have been improved if the grain had been simmered in a more richly flavored stock. Otherwise, it also indicates the fact that vegetarians are finally being accorded a little serious respect in Paris (this is why I’ve just added a vegetarian-friendly tag to the index on this site), and the crushed grilled hazelnuts in a tiny trail across the enticingly scored ivory colored spears was a wonderful idea, because the toasted nuts emphasized the quiet sweetness of the vegetable. Meanwhile on the other side of the table, Bruno was enjoying a little low-tide feast as he scarfed down a generous serving of grilled razor-shell clams in a light herbal bouillon.

The gastronomic axis of Grand Coeur is well-sourced and precisely executed contemporary French comfort food, and this makes it an especially welcome restaurant in the Marais, the 4th Arrondissement, which has always suffered from an odd paucity of such amiable, good quality tables. I indulged my hankering for a steak tartare, and this one easily ranked up their among the best in Paris, since it came to the table as impeccably well-seasoned hand-chopped Aubrac beef accompanied with a small salad and some of the best frites I’ve ever eaten in Paris–here they’re fried twice in baths of two different oils and then sprinkled with piment d’Esplette. Bruno’s poularde was fine fowl, too, and came with a generous sauté of herb-strewn baby potatoes

We concluded with a shared Pélardon, a goat’s milk cheese from the Cévennes that’s one of my favorites, and a shared order of the white chocolate, yogurt and passionfruit ice cream dessert, which was pleasantly refreshing. Since we’d been lucky enough to enjoy a meal on the planter-lined terrace, I wanted to take a quick look inside before we went off into the night. Here, the artfully lit interior by designers Julie Deglesne and Brune de La Guérande, who also did Coretta, sets up a quietly chic contrast between the rusticity of this space as created by beams and exposed stone walls and marble-topped tables, bentwood chairs and globe lamps.

It’s a great looking space, so along with Gomes cooking and a menu that will follow the seasons, Grand Coeur had the potential to become the sort of restaurant Le Balzar in the Latin Quarter once was, or a reflexive go-to table with a non-chalant chic that always puts on a good show. For my part, I’m eager to come back and try the ragout of baby peas, clams, and Menton lemon zest, the fish soup, and the roasted lobster in lemon verbena bouillon.

Grand Cœur,  41 rue du Temple, 4th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-58-28-18-90. Metro: Hôtel de Ville or Rambuteau, www.grandcoeur.paris, Open Tuesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner, light menu served during the afternoon. Prix-fixe menus €23-30 and €18 (kids), average a la carte carte €50. Afternoon menu: Dishes €8-16

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@ Pierre Monetta

Paris without Benoit, a wonderful old bistro on the edge of the Marais that’s been in business since 1912, would be almost as unimaginable to me as Paris without the Eiffel Tower. Why Though I’ve occasionally had a bone or two to pick with Benoit through the years, it remains an august monument to the eternal goodness of Parisian bistro cooking. And that’s why today I’m grateful to Alain Ducasse for taking it over in 2005. I was a bit skeptical at the time–after all, what could Ducasse bring to a bistro register as brilliant as the one perpetuated by the Petit family for 93 years Not much, as it turned out, but in his quiet role as a restaurant curator and collector, he saved this place.

Without Ducasse, Benoit might have suffered the same ignominious fate as Le Grizzli, a once charming old-fashioned Auvergnat bistro across the street where I used to love the fricot de veau (veal stew with wild mushrooms) that’s now become an insipid could-be-just-about-anywhere  type of table–I mean, does anyone really come to Paris to eat skewered chicken with sate sauce?

@ C. Sarramon

My most recent meal at Benoit was born of a heart-felt desire to lift the spirits of a much-loved friend, a longtime American resident of Paris like me, who’s going through a very hard time. Aside from daily phone calls, I was trying to think of what I could do to cheer her up, to distract her, and then it occurred to me that a really good meal with some great wines would be perfect. So I invited her to join me at Benoit.

On the way to dinner, it was a soft Paris night in May when the air was scented by chestnut flowers, a distinct but soft and fleetingly floral moment in the city’s annual calendar that never lasts more than a few days, and I thought of the first time I went to dinner at Benoit, with Ken, a handsome guy from the corn-belt in Ohio who used to work for the same company I did. He liked to eat as much as I do, and we drank a what-the-hell expensive bottle of Cote Rotie with our meal, which wasn’t a long-planned event, but rather an off-the-cuff let’s-go-out-to-dinner feast before obligatory reservations strangled such spontaneous pleasures. Yes, there really was a time in Paris where you could walk in the door of a very good restaurant in Paris and get a table. What a shame it is that meal planning has become as strategic, intricate and carefully plotted as D-Day.

What was racketing around in my head on the way to dinner was my recurring exasperation with several of the most exhausted cliches of contemporary food writing, to wit, women love salad and fish, while men want meat and more meat, and younger people don’t want traditional French bistro food like older ones do but would rather have pizza, sushi and cheeseburgers. None of these ideas are true, actually, but their persistent existence throws any discussion about good food in Paris way off course. Many of the women I know and love are even more enthusiastic eaters of offal and big bloody steaks than I am, and a good number of my youngest friends crave blanquette de veau and coq au vin even more than I do.  So do you care to guess which one of us ordered the asparagus with a truffled mousseline sauce?

Well, we both did, but that was after we’d shared an order of Langue de Lucullus, a speciality of Valenciennes in northern France comprised of fine layers of smoked tongue interleaved with pork-liver pate; it’s a dish I never eat without thinking of Bruno’s lovely mother, who now insists I call her “Maman,” because I’m her ‘American son,’ since she was the one who introduced it to me. It’s sturdy old-fashioned French food, and as much as I love it it always induces an apprehension that I might soon be a worthy model for Rodin, the sculptor of large solid people, if he were still alive.

There were ever so many tempting things on the menu at Benoit the other night, but what caught my eye, oddly, was Boeuf Wellington, that ur American suburban dinner-party show-off recipe from the Seventies, which consists of a filet of beef anointed with a sauce Perigueux (foie gras and truffles) wrapped in pastry. I hadn’t eaten Beef Wellington in beyond the nets of recent memory, but since it’s served here for two (until the end of May 2015, as part of a tiny collection of wonderfully retro recipes) I had to be sure my friend was onboard as well.

She was, so we did, and it was wonderful, because the beef wasn’t the insipid filet most often found in the same preparation in North America, where tenderness is the ultimate and rather sorry measure of good meat, but juicy mineral-rich French beef with a pleasantly chewy grain. And as I ate it, I thought of the long butterfly-print culotte halter dress that my mother wore with tangerine sandals when she wanted to buck back against a world of make-up-free suburban women in wrap skirts with the same bob haircuts they’d had since they were twelve. Mind you, my mother was all scorn (and still is) when it comes to anything that might be construed as feminine wiles, but she still occasionally felt the need or desire for a little bit of glamour, a timeout from the spaded femininity of American suburbs in the Northeast in the sixties and seventies, and it’s true I’ve never ever known a man who looked at a metal duck-head belt buckle, one of the embarrassing emblems of female preppy privilege, and gone wild with desire

poule au pot @ pierre moneetta

So certain dishes become repositories of memory in all cities, all countries and all cultures. And this was why it was so poignant to eat Beef Wellington at Benoit–it fused France and America in a gentle subconscious soup of happy memory for two gastronomically exigent American expatriates (and I’d still insist that I’m not an expatriate, but rather an American whose curiosity led him to chose a life abroad). Mind you, the impulse could have gone very wrong if the dish hadn’t been so beautifully prepared–and this is Benoit’s glory, it’s Vieille France glorified by exquisite modern cooking methods and the exalted sourcing of the best Gallic produce.

Mind you, it’s expensive, and the service is still organised according to an unspoken and not always accurate table plan of snobbery that these days is probably snubbing some of the most interesting people in the room. To wit, people who still dress up get seats in the prized corral in the heart of the restaurant, those who are deemed runners up sit up front in the area adjacent to the bar, and everyone else is sent to the backroom, a dull dining room that was one of my bones to pick with Ducasse when he took this place over. The decision was all business, and it blunted the restaurant’s charm.

Benoit is still the kind of place, though, where you might have a gracious and unexpected surprise during dinner. The beautiful woman from Manila sitting next to us with her American husband insisted we try some of her luscious poule au pot, because she couldn’t finish it but must have been sporadically listening to our frenetic chatter about good French food, and when asked, the waiter didn’t blanche. After barely being able to finish the beef Wellington, it was stretch to eat anything more, but this bird was beautiful and the pool of bouillon it rested in was rich, restorative and earthy.

And then we finished up with an exquisitely made strawberry Charlotte, and a flirtatious little plate of chocolate-sauced napped profiteroles, which came to the table because the waiter liked us and wanted to please and provoke in equal measure. Our whole meal tasted of the food which made us decide to live our lives in Paris a longtime ago, but it was also fresher and more vivid than any of those remembered dishes of yore. This is where Ducasse, and chef Fabienne Eymard, have so admirably succeed, since there’s a very good possibility that the bistro cooking served here is even better today than it was when the Petits owned it. Memory is slippery by definition, but taste very rarely lies, because it’s so primal: Benoit is still a very good bistro.

20 rue Saint Martin, 4th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-58-00-22-05. Metro: Chatelet or Hotel de Ville. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Lunch menu 39 Euros, Average a la carte dinner 85 Euros. www.benoit-paris.com

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Before I say anything else, let me state that Les Enfants Rouge, a new bistro in the Marais, is a good little restaurant and that Japanese chef Daï Shinozuka, who most recently cooked with Yves Camdeborde at Le Comptoir du Relais, is a solidly talented chef. This established, the two main things that I took away from a meal here with a friend the other night is that “la Bistronomie,” or modern French bistro cooking as pioneered by Yves Camdeborde when he opened La Regalade in 1992, is no longer cutting edge or even particularly directional in Paris, and that the noise level in Paris restaurants is rising so relentlessly as to put them in the same deafening category as most new places in New York or London.

For anyone who doesn’t know the back story, “bistronomie’ is a contraction between “bistrot” and “gastronomie” that was coined in the 1990s by the French food writer Sebastien Desmorand, and it was arguably first championed by Camdeborde when he left the kitchens of the Hotel de Crillon, where he’d trained with chef Christian Constant, often referred to as the father of this movement, because he trained so many of the chefs who practice this style of cooking in Paris today, in 1992. The core idea was to lighten and enhance traditional bistro cooking by applying the exigencies of haute cuisine cooking to the bistro idiom. The idea was to revisit the traditional ‘cuisine du terroir’ with a certain creativity and to juxapose modest ingredients like offal or inexpensive fish like mackerel with luxurious garnishes, fresh herbs, lighter sauces, and tweaks of unexpected seasoning.

Perhaps the most ardent advocate of “la bistronomie” has been the French website and guide Le Fooding, which was founded to shake up the totemic conventions of restaurant reviewing and food writing in France in the same way “la bistronomie” was rebooting the much loved culinary traditions of the Paris bistro. What I realized during dinner at Les Enfants Rouge, however, is that this movement is now almost twenty-two years old and has become the new normal in Paris, and as the idiom has become mainstream, it’s no longer surprising. Depending on the restaurant, it’s often very satisfying, even superb, but today it lacks the originality it once had for the very fact of its omnipresence. In fact, it’s now easier to find a ‘bistronomique’ meal in Paris than it is to find a traditional bistro feed. And in similar terms, Le Fooding has become a trend-arbiting institution alongside many of the other established French food guides. Don’t get me wrong–I like Le Fooding, but its unconventional, anti-establishment edge has dulled as its business model has grown. Like almost every magazine in the world, they’ve bowed to the sirens of celebrity marketing and now have a dreary column of celebrities’ favorite restaurants, and it also still surprises me that they don’t invite readers to comment on their reviews when when even the venerable Michelin guide has opened itself up to feedback from the gastronomic peanut gallery. So ultimately, I find myself wondering, What’s next?

Still, for anyone who wants to discover a textbook perfect example of bistronomique cooking, Les Enfants Rouge is a very good address, and it also goes some way to redressing the fact that the Marais still doesn’t have as many good restaurants as the popularity of this Paris neighborhood would warrant. Arriving at this small attractive room off of the trendy rue de Bretagne, the space came off as sort of a small art gallery with contemporary paintings spot-lit on the white walls and a mixture of tables dressed with white table cloths–a break from the normal convention of bistronomique addresses, and a few, including ours, that were bare and looked like old linoleum topped school desks.

Service was attentive and charming, and after my friend Lady K from Washington and I had ordered, we were served little cups of foamy soup as an amuse bouche. It was so delicately flavored that we had trouble identifying its ingredients, but there was a vague but pleasant smokiness to the soup that suggest bacon. Next, Lady K was served a saute of mushrooms topped with an egg in a little enameled casserole dish perhaps that emphasized the stylized rusticity of the cooking here, and I ended up with a tureen of delicious chicken bouillon garnished with chopped mint, cubes of celery root and carrot, and, in very direct reference to Shinozuka’s previous kitchen (Le Comptoir du Relais) tapioca, which sounds much better in French as “perles du Japon” (Japanese pearls). Both dishes were earnest and well-executed, if more polite than intriguing.

My roasted filet of cod with baby clams was impeccable, however–a perfectly cooked piece of fish with the gently briny baby clams adding both texture and gastronomic punctuation to the quiet flavors of the cod. Lady K’s veal breast was beautifully cooked, too–browned so that it was crusted and caramelized and then slow-braised so that she could eat it without a knife. Her garnish of slivered griddled baby potatoes and chopped bacon in a light foamy cream sauce was excellent, too, for its bosomy autumnal earthiness. in fact the only problem mid-way through our meal was that the room had become so noisy that we had to shout at each other across the table to be heard. I think this was partially due to the full house in a small, low-ceilinged room with no sound-absorbing fabric in the windows, but also to the fact that the ambient noise level in Paris restaurants has risen dramatically during the last few years. I don’t regret the whispery staidness that once prevailed in many Paris restaurants, but it’s obvious that a certain aural restraint is falling by the wayside in Paris as its done long ago in London and New York. In New York, I’d note that many of the most amped up diners seem to be young Wall Street yahoos with absolutely no awareness whatsoever of those around them, while in Paris, it seems that an old Gallic taboo on being loud in public spaces has been discarded by a younger crowd out to have a good time.

I finished up with a generously served and well-selected cheeseboard, while Lady K had a nicely made Baba au Rhum, correctly soaked tableside from a good bottle of rum from the island of La Reunion. Because the room was so noisy, we decided to have coffee down the street at a cafe instead of lingering, and once we were in a calmer setting, Lady K said, “So what did you think#8221; “It was a good meal,” I replied, “But it lacked any distinctive signature.” Or in other words, it was like so many other ‘bistronomique’ meals I’ve had in Paris during the last twenty years, but I don’t fault chef Shinozuka for this. Instead, I think he’s a talented chef and a very diligent student of the idiom in which he was trained. But for the first time in years, I do find myself wondering, So what comes next in Paris?

Les Enfants Rouges, 9 rue de Beauce, 3rd, Tel. 01-48-87-80-61. Metro: Arts et Métiers, Filles du Calvaire or Saint-Sébastien-Froissart. Open Wednesday through Monday for lunch and dinner. Average 35 Euros.

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Unfortunately, despite its popularity, the Ile Saint Louis has not had a really good restaurant since the original Hiramatsu moved away. Yes, there’s Mon Vieil Ami, but the service there is problematic, it’s become too expensive and there are just too many foreigners, so the one place I ever recommend is the perfectly respectable Brasserie de l’Isle Saint Louis, with its charming interior, anthology of decent old-fashioned French dishes and pleasantly teasing and jocular waiters. Still, such a special place has always seemed to warrant an equally special restaurant, so I was intrigued when I read that the hoary old La Taverne du Sergent Recruteur, a tourist table par excellence, had been reborn as Le Segent Recruteur, an elegant contemporary French restaurant.

Since this new restaurant was on the expensive side, I plied the long-suffering and increasingly resistant Bruno–he’d almost always rather stay home and cook, since, according to him, “We rarely eat as well in restaurants as we do at home,” by making him my guest for dinner. Arriving, the place had a handsome new decor with good lighting and contemporary ceramics in vitrines by Spanish decorator Jaime Hayon, and it was packed with an international quorum of well-dressed couples, most of whom had clearly been sent here by nearby hotels. The open kitchen in the back of the room was a busy hive, but the dining room had a relaxed atmosphere, so we decided to throw caution to the wind and start the evening with a glass of rather dull mono-cepage Champagne (I later discovered that these were priced at a ridiculous 20 Euros a pour, so you’ve been warned).

We were hungry that night, so after twenty minutes went by without a menu, I asked one of the numerous wait staff if we could see one and order. He returned with a puckish grin and handed us two triple-folded sheets of paper that had been sealed with sealing wax. This didn’t bode well, but I opened mine, and experienced an instant blaze or irritation. Here’s what I found:

Partir de Rien: 95 Euros

S’Inspirer: 145 Euros

Bruno shot me a beady eye, and I asked the server if he might explain the menu a bit further. “It’s better if it’s all a surprise,” he said coyly. I said that we’d really rather know what the sequence of dishes in each menu might be so that we could order a single bottle of wine for the meal. “You’re better off having a specially chosen glass with each course,” I was told. While remaining cordial, I told him that we didn’t like shifting from one wine to another during a meal, and that we’d rather start with some white, if that was appropriate, and then add a glass of red somewhere if that was warranted, etc.

“As you wish,” he replied, followed by a quick sing-song recitation of the bill of fare, a tone that implied we were being sticks in the mud. For two fleeting seconds, I thought of paying up for the Champagne and moving on, since we’d clearly blundered into one of those noisome places where we were expected to bow down in astonishment at the chef’s prowess. Or in other words, a restaurant that’s not particularly eager to make its clients happy, but which prefers instead to impose its culinary will upon them.

So we settled for six-course “Partir de Rien” (Indeed), and another twenty minutes went by before we were served two foamy hors d’oeuvres, pumpkin and herbs. They were just fine, but we still hadn’t seen the sommelier when the second hors d’oeuvres came out–an egg shell with a slow-poached yolk and angelica foam, harmless enough but rather deja vu as a concept. After a fair amount of prodding our white Saint Joseph was finally served, much too cold, just as a thoroughly uninteresting carpaccio of beets reached the table with, at long last, some bread and some very good freshly made butter.

Things improved considerably, however, with the following dish, a beautiful compostion of succulent mackerel garnished with cucumber shavings, lazer-fine slices of black radish and wild fennel leaves. This was clearly a signature dish, since the chef himself emerged from the kitchen to flurry our fish with a fine snow of frozen horseradish and yogurt. This very appealing dish reminded me a lot of similar preparations I’ve recently eaten in Stockholm, so a propos of nothing, I mentioned to the chef that it looked “tres Scandinave,” which earned me a glare before he wordlessly withdrew from the table. Bruno thought I’d unwittingly cast some aspersions on his originality with my comment, but this wasn’t my intention–the dish was tres Scandinave, and it was also the best conceived and most satisfying dish of the evening.

By now, however, we’d been at the table for over two hours, which I wouldn’t normally have even noticed, since I love being at the table and could talk to Bruno until the cows come home, but the only way for such an involuntary tasting menu to work is for the rhythm of the dishes to remain relatively well-syncopated. When there are long delays between courses, exasperation sets in, which is what I overhead at the table to my left, where the two husbands staged a rebellion and abbreviated their plodding steeple-chase of a meal by a dessert. This format also requires a lofty level of talent to come off, too, since the diner responds to the heightened expection of it all by focusing intently on every dish. All of which is to say that our next two courses–turbot with grilled artichokes in an acidulated sauce and wonderful suckling pig with caramelized crackling, were good but came no where near the level of David Toutain of Agape Substance, the current Parisian maestro of such tasting menus.

Going on three hours now, we decided to cut things short, too, and concluded with an excellent fresh fig tart with vanilla ice cream. The bill for this meal ran over 300 Euros, which was rather heart-breaking, since it inevitably invited comparison to all of the other places we might have gone instead for a better and more enjoyable meal. Aside from the excruciatingly slow and disorganized service, the problem with this place you see is that the chef is more interested in showing off his culinary prowess, such as it is–and he does have talent, than he is in creating a sincerely memorable evening for his clientele.

41 rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile, 4th, Tel. 01-43-54-75-42. Metro: Maubert – Mutualité, Pont Marie or Sully – Morland. Closed Sunday and Monday. Prix-fixe menus 95 Euros, 145 Euros.

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I have to admit that my immediate reaction when I first laid eyes on Le Temps des Cerises in the rue de la Cerisaie in the Marais was wariness. There was just no way any restaurant with a setting as winsomely pretty and well-preserved as this little 18th century house with geraniums in its second-story windboxes and a picture-perfect mosaic facade could possibly be anything but an egregious tourist trap. Except that it isn’t. Indeed, my opinion changed from the moment I stepped inside and charming young owner Grégory Detouy welcomed us and promptly brought us an excellent carafe of Rhone valley Viognier, along with some crunchy radishes and a shotglass of salt to dip them in, always a good sign.

  My doubts revived, however, when we studied the menu, because the prices were so reasonable. Again, if this place existed in the sad mad mode of a prima-donna tourist hell-hole like Chartier, it struck me as extremely unlikely that the food could be very good. I kept all of this to myself, though–Bruno had been wanting to try this place, and decided there was some very real consolation in the beauty of the snug old-fashioned dining room with a zinc topped bar just inside the front door, tawny walls, bare wood tables with bent-wood chairs, and a beautiful art-nouveau framed chalkboard on the wall. The appealingly diverse crowd was also almost entirely Parisian, too, and the small packed room radiated an atmosphere of bona-fide bonheur.

Detouy returned again to see if we had any questions about the menu. I asked about the specialities of the restaurant and he cited the escargots, boudin noir facon Parmentier (shepherd’s pie made with blood pudding) and steak Paname, an entrecote garnished with a vinaigrette of shallots, garlic and fresh herbs. He also told us that he was a chef by training but had fall in love with the idea of running a real old-fashioned bistro while working at Chez Janou, and had decided to take the leap and become an owner when this place became available two years ago. Our curiosity encouraged by several glasses of the good white wine, we continued asking questions and learned that the small charming house was originally built during the Middle Ages, had once been an annex to a Celestine convent and first became a bistro in 1830. To his credit, he also never once let on that he might be impatient or alarmed by these two garulous and slightly bibulous men, Bruno and me.

Since I’ve spent so much of the summer traveling outside of France, I was aching for my first course, a grandly Gallic warm salad of Morteau sausage and potatoes, and it was superb–the smoky sausage from the Jura was obviously of good quality, it came with a nice little nosegay of fresh herbs and salad leaves and was very generously served. Bruno liked his seared sliced tuna on eggplant caviar, too, and the contrast between these two dishes well-expressed chef Pascal Brebant’s smart menu. Brebant, who trained with Marc Veyrat, offers a run of bistro classics side-by-side with modern dishes like lamb marinated in lime juice with spices and the salmon steak with sage and a Porto vinegar spiked cream sauce that Bruno enjoyed as his main course.

I decided to have the Steak Paname (Paname is French slang for Paris) when Detouy told me that it came with freshly cut and fried frites, which are regrettably rare in Paris these days. Thin and often rather leathery, entrecote is not one of my favorite French cuts of beef, especially since it’s inevitably overcooked. So it was a terrific surprise when this steak arrived rare and juicy as ordered, with a pile of frites so good I almost had to drive my knife into Bruno’s hand to keep him away from them. The shallot-garlic-and-herb vinaigrette that sauced the meat was excellent, too, and was also the detail that made me realize that this an absolutely perfect bistro to send foreigners to. Why?

During the 26 years I’ve lived in Paris, I’ve noticed that visitors are often letdown when I take them to a real bistro. This is because many people from big cities all over the world are accustomed to food that’s lighter and brighter (in terms of seasonings and garnishes) than what you usually find in an old-time French bistro. The modern palate likes herbs and vivid spices, favors fish and vegetables, and exhibits a preference for briefer cooking times. So Detouy, a shrewd restaurateur, and Brebant, an experienced and talented cook, have pulled off the nifty hat trick of creating their two strut menu and also preserving the warmth and conviviality of a traditional pre-war bistro without creating a pastiche. To be sure, the red-fruit sable we shared for dessert was dull and the bread here could be better, but this is a delightful little bistro, and a place that’s instantly won a place on my to-go list, especially since it’s open on Sunday nights and is so reasonably priced.

31 rue de la Cerisaie, 4th, Tel. 01-42-72-08-63. Métro: Saint Paul. Open daily 8am-2am. Lunch menu 13 Euros, Sunday brunch 22 Euros, Average dinner a la carte 30 Euros.

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Food is Petra’s beat, and passion, and if she loves Paris like I do, I spent months and months in Prague in the early nineties and have a deep affection for the city and the Czech Republic, so we seemed fated to get on. Usually on the other side of the pen and notebook, I also admired her confident manner and good questions. On my way to meet her, it occurred to me that she’d invariably ask me if Paris is still the world’s best food city. And if this is an obviously loaded question, it’s a much more complicated one to answer fairly and intelligibly than it may first seem.

Sure enough, no sooner than we’d introduced ourselves and ordered, then Petra shot her first arrow. I won’t attempt to recreate my response, except to say that I basically believe that today Paris remains first among many equals, because of the spectacular excellence of French culinary training, a public with a deep knowledge of and pride in the country’s gastronomy, and Europe’s nec plus ultra produce. I also added that as much as I rejoice in the remarkable talent of young French chefs like Betrand Grebaut at Septime, I despair at the ongoing erosion of traditional bistro cooking in Paris.  Every great food city needs a gastronomic ballast, and for me, in Paris that has always been really great bistro cooking. “So when was the last time you had an excellent traditional bistro meal at a place that you could recommend#8221; “That would be at Benoit a few weeks ago,” I said, with the precision that I had gone expressly to eat the special 100 Euro menu they’re offering to celebrate the restaurant’s 100th birthday. It was was nearly flawless.

   “One hundred Euros….” said Petra. “I know, no small change that,” I replied, “But when it’s becoming sadly easy to spend 70 Euros on a middling mid-range meal in Paris, I’d rather go out less often and spend more, if I must, to eat well. Today in Paris, it’s become very expensive to cook honest traditional bistro food, because it’s so time-consuming. To wit, the chef needs to be in the kitchen for long costly hours,” I added. “Otherwise, I’m very happy to enjoy some of the city’s outstanding and very good value contemporary French cooking.”

“Tell me about the meal at Benoit,” said Petra, with a faraway look in her eyes. I did, but first I explained that ithis table had been created by butcher Benoit Matray in 1912 and remained in the same family until chef Michel Petit, one of his grandsons, sold it to Alain Ducasse in 2005. Since the transfer, I’ve always found the food irreproachably sincere but uneven. Now, though, since former sous chef Eric Azoug became head chef, the food is often once again as excellent as it was in the Petit era.

“We ate exquisite rabbit rillettes with hot toast and glasses of Champagne, then Monsieur Bonneau, one of the best maitre d’hotels in Paris, slipped in some Langue de Veau Lucullus, because Bruno, my partner, had become all puppy-dog excited when he spotted this speciality of his hometown of Valenciennes in the north of France on the menu–it’s a sort of surprisingly light construction of fine layers of smoked veal tongue bound with a mousse de foie, followed by fat green Provencal asparagus in a truffled mousseline. Real Victor Hugo or Gustave Flaubert food!” “Was there more#8221; “Bien sur! We had turbans of sole on creamed spinach in a sauce Nantua, which is always made with crayfish, in this case from Lake Geneva, and then roast lamb with baby Spring vegetables.” “My God, Alec! Do you have pictures#8221;

Side by side we furtively scrolled through the snaps I took that night several weeks ago (the menu, by the way may have changed, should you decide to go, but they’ll be offering this centenary feed through the end of the year); these were Petra’s favorites.

Langue de Veau LucullusAsperges Vertes, Mousseline Truffee

Sole NantuaLamb with Spring VegetablesProfiteroles, or the Temptation of Bruno

“And do you have a reasonably priced new place that I might try tonight, Alec#8221; I asked Petra where she was staying, which was with a friend near the Canal Saint Martin, and Louloucam, a very sincere new bistro with an intriguing two-speed menu, or a mix of French classics and some clever modern dishes, by chef Jean Matthieu Frédéric, ex La Tour d’Argent, Le Meurice, and Chez Géraud, immediately came to mind. I’d eaten here with a couch-surfing pal in town from New Orleans on a Saturday night, and we’d loved our fun waitress, who’d lived Australlia for a while, the excellent terrine de foie gras, poached leeks cleverly spiked with lemongrass–now that’s one to copy, entrecote with pommes Maxim, and great desserts–poached pear in caramel sauce and cream-filled choux as part of a 31 Euro menu.

No, I wouldn’t rush across town to eat here, but the excellent quality of Frédéric’s produce–his meat comes from the Boucheries Nivernaises, his quick but perhaps appropriately cautious creativity, and the relaxed friendly setting make it both a great neighborhood bolt-hole and a fine coda to those who’d doom-say the French kitchen.

Benoit, 20 rue Saint Martin, 4th, Tel. 01-42-72-25-76, Metro: Hotel de Ville. Open daily. Lunch menu 36 Euros, 100th anniversary menu 100 Euros, average a la carte 100 Euros.

Louloucam, 264 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin, 10th, Tel. 01-40-34-76-87. Closed Saturday noon, Sunday and Monday. Metro: Jaurès, Louis Blanc or Stalingrad. Lunch menu 16-20 Euros, Dinner menu 31 Euros.

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Photo @ Peter Turnley

The tragic skid into an unappetizing senility that most Paris brasseries have experienced during the last twenty-five years is a subject I’ve often written about, and it remains a sad and sore topic with me, because I so loved the brasseries of Paris before they fell victim to poorly played business schemes to make them part of money-spinning chains. If I’ve always loved the food of Paris bistros more, nothing could beat the city’s brasseries for their irresistible atmospheres of desultory glamour. In my mind’s eye, in fact, the brasseries of Paris will always register as they do in the beautiful Peter Turnley photograph above.

With the recent and continuing cold snap in Paris, I found myself craving a good choucroute the other night, and having fallen into conversation about this deeply nourishing Alsatian dish of sauerkraut topped with charcuterie and various cuts of pork and a few potatoes with the elegant old woman in bus who had sweetly complimented the scarf I was wearing, I found myself cajoling Bruno into accompanying me on an unexpected mission the other night. I wanted choucroute, and I was willing to put the nice lady’s recommendation of La Brasserie de L’Isle Saint Louis, a place I hadn’t been in at least fifteen years, to the test.

Bruno balked for the same reasons many Parisians might. With the brasserie’s extraordinary location on the quai de Bourbon just over the foot bridge from the Ile de la Cite, logic would tell you that it’s a tourist trap. A tiny bit of Bruno’s exapseration abated when we were warmly welcomed here, and things further improved when we our excellent bottle of Pinot Gris was served. Staring at the wagon wheel chandeliers overhead and the hunting trophies on the wall, I churned through my memory trying to remember on what occasion I’d last been here and with whom, but I kept firing blanks, and then Bruno’s frisee and my tarte a l’oignon were served by our amiable, wry and wise-cracking waiter. Both were very good, too.

The people watching in this black-and-white dining room was wonderful, too. Aside from two German business men getting politely sozzled across the way, on this cold winter night, the Parisians all looked like people with interesting histories. “But my book was published just after I’d returned to Paris from living in Uruguay for five years,” was a snatch of conversation I overheard that made want to listen to the rest of the story.

Just before the choucroute arrived, we fell into conversation with Jerome Kappe, one of the two brothers who are the third generation of their family to run the brasserie, and he told me that they actually make their own choucroute everyday, which was quite a surprise. And then the dish arrived, and it wasn’t the choucroute that first convinced me that the old woman on the bus had been right, it was the potatoes. These were real peeled and boiled potatoes, and not the shrink-wrapped pre-skinned and cooked ones you find everywhere in Paris now. The choucroute was excellent, too, and so generously garnished that I regretted having had a first course. “This is really good, what a surprise,” mused Bruno, but I was too happy enjoying the sting of mustard in my nostrils and the smoke on my palate from a perfectly grilled piece of pig belly to answer right away.

Suffice it to say that I ate a lot more than I should have, but this was the best choucroute I’d had a in a longtime, and the quality of the cooking was such that I’m planning to go back soon as see if their other specialty, cassoulet, is as good as this one was. In the meantime, I’ve thought of that choucroute at least once a day with the deepest yearning, because it tastes so much like France, the eternal France.

55 quai de Bourbon, 4th, Tél. 01.43.54.02.59. Metro: Pont Marie. No reservations, non-stop service from noon-11pm. Closed Wednesday. Average 35 Euros.

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The Marais (traditionally the 4th arrondissement, and in the parlance of local real-estate agents, more and more of the 3rd arrondissement) is one of the most charming parts of Paris, but consistently under-performs other popular Paris neighborhoods in terms of the quality of its restaurants. Why It’s a major nightlife quarter, so many of the people who descend upon the neighborhood from elsewhere in the city are content to have a mediocre pizza or a quick and unmemorable Asian meal before they go bar-hopping.

A friend who lives in the neighborhood recently called me with a baited breathe report on a good new bistro, though, so the other night I met Bruno at Le Métropolitain for a late-ish dinner at the end of our respectively mad busy days. I liked this right off the bat, too, because the welcome was so warm, and I found the decor–it’s themed around the Paris Métro, or subway system, cute instead of cloying, right down to the bistro’s visiting card, which is the size of a Métro ticket. The walls are covered with white beveled-edge tiles, too, and they’re posters, maps and memorobilia connected to Paris’s crack mass transit system, too.

I was surprised that this place was so crowded, and then the waitress explained that their chef, Paul-Arthur Berlan, had been a finalist on the French television show “Top Chef,” which is sort of a competitive cook-off thing. It was odd to think that this could explain the crowd, but then I have to acknowledge a major component of my eccentricity in the fact that I don’t watch television aside from occasionally flipping on the boob tube in a hotel room to get some news. In fact, the television at our house isn’t even plugged in, and though it astonishes some friends, I find my television-free life both easy and pleasant. In any event, I’m also wary of the idea of ‘competitive’ cooking in the glare of television cameras. There’s a lot of pressure in a restaurant kitchen, of course, but trying to pitch gastronomy as a win or lose competitive sport strikes me as sport strikes me as pretty bogus and not at all in the spirit of great cooking.

Happily, however, Berlan, a nice young guy with a lot of talent, ‘won’ the night we came to dinner. Bruno’s terrine of shredded beef cheeks, foie gras and beets was beautifully made, and I loved my rich, delicately smoky-tasting royale de lard (silky bacon-flavored flan) topped with a coddled egg and foamy mushroom puree. This was contemporary French comfort food at its best even if was served in one of those squat fiddly mason jars and the pre-coddled egg was cool, so obviously prepared in ahead of time. On the other hand, working in an absolutely miniscule kitchen, Berlan surely has to do as much prep work as possible in advance of every service, so my guess is that the royale was microwave warmed before being topped with the egg and mushrooms.

Bruno’s main course, a perfectly cooked filet of maigre (shade fish or drum fish, in English) on a bed of deliciously smoky eggplant puree with pretty little dots of red pepper puree that said “young chef” in a loud voice, was delicious. My pluma (succulent Spanish pork) was a bit overcooked and the puree of carrots and ginger that accompanied it wasn’t the ideal garnish for this gloriously fatty meat–I’d have preferred something a little acidulated to temper the cholesterol-be-damned richness of the pork, and the other garnish, a fresh carrot slaw with slivers of ginger, was just fine, but also very “young chef.”

To finish, I chose the pelardon marinated in olive oil, which was ideal with the rest of our very good bottle of Chinon–the brief wine list here is reasonably priced and well-chosen, and Bruno had a superb tarte Tatin made with pears. Our pleasure during this meal was enhanced by the warm, prompt and charming service of the young team here and the fact that everyone seemed to being enjoying their meals as much a we did. Aside from a couple of forgiveable imprecisions in the cooking, Le Métropolitain is exactly what a neighborhood bistro should be–a convivial, friendly place that serves good, intelligently imaginative food for reasonable prices.

Le Métropolitain, 8 rue de Jouy, 4th, Tel. 09-81-20-37-38. Metro: Saint-Paul. Open Monday-Friday for lunch and dinner. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Lunch menu 17 Euros, 32 Euros. Average a la carte 35 Euros.

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Meeting a friend for lunch at Jaja in the Marais on Bastille Day, I thought, maybe this time I’ll be lucky. Just a week earlier I’d had a decidedly mediocre and expensive meal at the embarrassingly named new Pamela Popo, and on the way home I found myself wondering why the restaurants in this otherwise delightful neighborhood are so often disappointing. To be sure, the Marais has a couple of my favorite tables, like the wonderful Cafe des Musees and Le Carre des Vosges, but this popular and charming precinct also supports of a bewildering number of sub-par eateries, including a lot of crummy see-and-be-seen fashion-driven restaurants. The reason, I think, is that a lot of young Parisians come to this ‘hood to hang out and then grab a cheap bite after a few drinks and before a few more, plus there’s a lot of tourist traffic.

Jaja is the latest address of French food personality Julien Fouin, who he once ran a good food magazine, is often on Gallic culinary television, and who opened the popular but not very good Glou in the nearby 3rd arrondissement two years ago. Fouin knows how to source good product, though, and also how to put together a really good wine list, and since ‘Jaja’ is French slang for ‘wine,’ I was pretty sure that at least we’d drink well.

Arriving, the courtyard space down a passage where Jaja serves during the summer is a lovely place for a meal, although I’d hate to eat in their vaulted stone cellar dining room, which smelled musty and felt claustrophobic when I went downstairs to wash my hands. My friend, another Paris based food writer, and I studied the menu, and she decided on both of the daily specials–an artichoke and arugula salad with Parmesan shavings and roasted tomatoes to start and then the grilled sea bream. Hungry after a not very good Vietnamese meal in the 5th the night before, I started with the ‘Chinese’ style noodles with grilled shrimp and then the pluma, a delicious cut of tender and flavorfully fatty Spanish pork, with sauteed potatoes and salad.

We were well into a discussion about the total madness of the current American budget negotiations when we both noticed that the white Saumur we’d ordered by the glass wasn’t very good, and then our starters arrived. Her salad was attractively presented, but canned artichokes were a let down, while I liked my nice little wooden skewer of firm grilled shrimp on a bed of ginger brightened ‘Chinese’ noodles. The crowd around us ran to a lot of well-heeled couples who’d clearly come to troll the neighborhood’s many good boutiques, a Swedish family with two notably well-behaved children, and several tables of buzz-cut boys with tatooed biceps, a source of envy to both of us, since you have to have pretty meaty biceps to make a tatoo work, and alas, this isn’t the case for either of us.

Deciding to ditch our Saumur, which my friend aptly described as a “head-achy’ wine, she ordered a glass of Coteaux d’Aix rose and I had a sublime pour of red Clos des Fées, which was a real discovery, since I love the whites from this Cotes du Roussillon producer. When I asked her about her main course, she said, “It’s fish. Period.” I fared better with my succulent pork, but some of the potatoes were mushy and everything lacked seasoning.

Intrepid, she tried the red fruit soup for dessert, while I had a pelardon (one of my favorite cheeses) that had too recently been in the refrigerator with a smear of fig jam and a few salad leaves. “Sorry about this,” my pal said over coffee, since it had been her idea to come here. No problem, I replied, since I enjoyed our chat, had been curious about this place, and forever on the look-out for good restaurants in the Marais. Unfortunately, this place not only didn’t fill the bill, but doesn’t hold a candle to such really good recent Paris wine bars as Frenchie’s Wine Bar or Vivant. Overall, aside from the good produce and the interesting wine list, we came away with the distinct impression that this is one of those restaurants where no one’s in charge and no one really cares one way or another if you’re happy with your food and the service. This is a shame, too, since the setting’s so pretty, this place is open daily, and the kitchen has the privilege of working with great produce. One way or another, neither of us felt that Jaja lived up to the little phrase printed on the business card that arrived with our bill: “Vins & Cuisine Sympathique.”

Jaja, 3, rue Sainte Croix de la Bretonnerie, 4th, Tel. 01-42-74-71-52. Metro: Hôtel de Ville, Rambuteau or Saint-Paul. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Average 40 Euros.

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