Terroirs d’Avenir boutique

While we were enjoying a good, casual, off-the-cuff lunch at Frenchie to Go, chef Gregory Marchand’s breakfast-and-lunch eat-in or takeaway place next to his home table, Frenchie, I thought of the note a friend in New York who follows my Instagram feed sent me recently. “Don’t you ever just want to stay home and eat a big messy Reuben sandwich#8221; she asked, teasing me about the often beautiful and elaborate dishes that I share from the restaurants I go to of a given week in Paris as a food writer. Well, um, yes, in fact, I love a good Reuben sandwich. And sometimes I also like a good Saturday morning lie-in so much that we end up missing our two favorite Saturday morning markets–the organic one in Les Batignolles, which is officially known as the Marché Biologique des Batignolles and is located on the boulevard des Batignolles, and the lavish one on the Avenue du Président Wilson, which is held on Wednesday and Saturday mornings.

There are few things that make me happier than going to either of these markets, especially because I try to avoid going to restaurants on the weekends in favor of cooking at home, which both Bruno and I love. There are times, however, when Morpheus just pulls you back into bed, and when this happens, we’ll make a run to Terroir d’Avenir, a terrific pair of boutiques in the rue du Nil where you can get your hands on the same superb fruit, vegetables, herbs, cheese, fish, and meat this small select company supplies to many of the best young chefs in Paris. And so on a recent Saturday morning, we decided to make a run to this shop, because it’s tomato season, and I trusted they’d have good heirloom tomatoes (they did, too).

After we bought some of the best white peaches I’ve ever eaten, several kinds of tomatoes, herbs, yellow squash, eggplant, fennel, and enough other vegetables to stuff the drawers in both of our small fridges at home, we were hungry. So Bruno suggested we go next door to Frenchie to Go. It’s been open for a couple of years now, but never finding myself in this neighborhood in the middle of the day, I’d never been for lunch, just breakfast, and so this was the perfect occasion. Right from the start, I’ve loved the fact that this place serves non-stop, so that if you tumble out of the Louvre starved at 2.43pm, you can hoof it over here and get a bacon sandwich with egg and cheddar, the best lobster roll in Paris,  a hot dog (homemade, mind you, in a roll from star baker Gontran Cherrier), a pastrami sandwich, fish-and-chips, a Reuben or a pulled pork sandwich.

We went with the latter two, plus a large order of fries, and homemade ginger beer. Now the Reuben was a beauty, or just the kind of over-stuffed New York deli style sandwich I sometimes get misty eyed for. The pulled pork sandwich was a good savory munch, too, but would have been better with more pork and less pickled cabbage. Alas, my fries were cold and rather dried out, so I thought of returning them, but than decided to eat some of Bruno’s much fresher ones instead.

What’s great about this place is that it hits a near bull’s eye in terms of catering to a certain atavistic roster of Anglo-American comfort food dishes created by someone who profoundly understands how they’re built in terms of layering tastes and respecting texture that aren’t easy to find in Paris (For anyone who doesn’t know, Gregory Marchand worked for Jamie Oliver in London and then Danny Meyer in New York before he returned home to found his wonderful little empire–Frenchie, Frenchie Wine Bar, and Frenchie to Go, in a then quiet shabby street on the edges of the Sentier, Paris’s old garment district).

Frenchie also serves breakfast, and you can eat on stools at a couple of shared tables, or takeaway and look for a quiet corner. Given the fact that breakfast can be a boring and/or expensive letdown in Paris hotels, I often tell friends to head over here if they want a sturdy breakfast (my favorite is that bacon sandwich with egg and cheddar, and a bacon scone with maple syrup). And it’s also a good place to pull together a picnic before a train or a plane, especially with some fruit and cheese from Terroir d’Avenir.

Don’t miss the wonderful tromp l’oeil wallpaper in the WC either (it’s based on a photograph of a stamped-tin ceiling, like you might find in London or New York), bien sur.

9 rue du Nil, 2nd Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-40-26-23-43, Metro: Sentier or Réaumur Sébastopol. www.FrenchietoGo.com Average meal 14 Euros. Open Monday-Friday 8.30am-4.30am, Saturday-Sunday 9.30am-5.30pm. Closed for the summer holidays from August 10 to August 16.

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photo @ paul brissman

I’m not sure exactly why it happened, but somehow or another, the whole business of making a simple restaurant reservation has turned into an irritating, multi-step time-consuming chore in most of the world’s major cities. And the way in which restaurants cavalierly treat those of us who are willing to put up with this steeplechase completely ignores the two obvious realities–no restaurant would stay open without customers, and a restaurant reservation is a sincere and serious expression of desire and curiosity on the part of a customer with regard to a chef’s cooking and hospitality style and a commitment to experience it.

Recently, though, this introductory transaction between restaurant and customer seems to have gone very wrong. In Paris, some of the most popular tables are so over-solicited that they just don’t even bother to answer the phone anymore, with the result that people in New York, LA, Sydney and Hong Kong dial away for hours without even the courtesy of an answering machine. London and New York are better in terms of being able to book online (Open Table, etc.), but if the chefs have long complained that customers are rude and careless in not calling to cancel a reservation they no longer need, I’d say that the sort of airline style full-load factor double booking that’s become common place in London and New York restaurants is a disgrace. What this is all about is making you show up for a table at a time that’s rarely of your chosing–“You can come at 7pm or 10pm,” and then making you cool your heels in the bar for a really longtime until your table finally comes up. Mind you, you have to check in with the hostess on the dot of 8.30pm for an 8.30pm reservation, or else there’s no guarantee you’ll get your table, which I frankly find outrageous.

During a brief recent stopover in New York, I was meeting a good friend, a major food writer from London, for dinner, which I was looking forward to, since we don’t see each other enough in Europe and I love Mexican food, and I thought it’d be interesting to hear his take on the foodscape of New York City after a week of eating there. When we realized we’d both be in New York for a single cross-hatched night, he was in Cape Town and I was in Saigon, but he told me he really wanted to try Alex Stupak’s new East Village restaurant Empellon Cocina, so I got on Open Table and found out that I couldn’t book for March in February, and so had a Post-It note on my computer for a few days. Then I duly made the reservation, which asked for a cellphone–I have a crummy little pay-as-you-go phone that I use in the US, and didn’t give it another thought until we showed up on a rainy Friday night for dinner about ten minutes late. “Oh, yeah, well, like, we just gave away your table cuz you were like late, so whatever.” Well, how long would we have to wait for another table. “Oh, like forever, so sorry, but it’s just not going to happen.” I thought my English friend would have a coronary on the spot, so I ushered him outside as soon as possible. “That was the rudest experience I’ve ever had in a restaurant on any continent, and I’ll tell you something, Alec, with that attitude, I don’t care if the food’s wonderful. I wouldn’t set foot in that place at gun point. I honestly think the world’s gone mad–have chefs completely forgotten that a restaurant is an optional experience and that customer service is vital part of the experience they’re peddling#8221; Er, well, um, apparently, at least at Empellon Cocina. But not only at Empellon Cocina, since it’s become such an ordeal to book a popular new restaurant in almost any major city anywhere that the pleasure of the experience often becomes a wound badly salted even before you show up.

Chef Marcus Samuelsson; photo @ paul brissman   On the flip side of the coin, however, they’re buzzy new places in New York City that actually more than warrant the major nuisance of scoring a table, a perfect example being brilliant Swedish-Ethiopian-American chef Marcus Samuelsson’s Red Rooster in Harlem. Good grief is it hard to get a table at a place that made it on to esteemed colleague Nicholas Lander’s Favorite Tables of 2011 in the Financial Times but when I settled in at the bar for a ‘Brownstoner,” a sublime bourbon cocktail on a Sunday night with my Moldavian friend Nanettina, all was immediately well with the world, even though I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to some anxiety about having dinner in Harlem.

Why I grew up in greater New York during a pair of decades when the city was collapsing into ever great social and criminal turmoil. Though I had a truly ancient memory of climbing down from the train platform on the Harlem River branch of what’s now called Metro North at 125th Steet with my thrifty grandmother from Chappaqua–the cab from this station to my aunt’s apartment at 91st Street and Park Avenue was cheaper than it would have been from Grand Central Station, this gesture stopped cold sometime in the early seventies, and for decades afterwards, I’d look out the scratched train windows at the burnt-out and abandoned brownstones of Harlem with sorrow and incomprehension.

So after living in Europe for over twenty-five years, I can’t pretend that I was exactly sure-footed when I took the subway uptown to Harlem. But the old danger-alert antennae that I developed in New York when the city was still a bit of a shooting gallery in the early 1980s and will forever possess, didn’t even flicker as I came upstairs on Lenox Avenue. And from the moment I stepped in the door at this uptown bird, I loved the place.

Not only was the service friendly, prompt and charming, but I haven’t seen such an interesting crowd in New York since the days that I was too naive to realize what a dork I was to be wearing penny loafers to Studio 54 and the restaurant Ruskay’s on Columbus Avenue was luring daring types north of Lincoln Center for sultry after (and often pre-) performance suppers–the Upper West Side was then very down at the heels. Like any happy American restaurant, Red Rooster was loud, but it stopped short of being deafening, and Nanettina and I read the menu with the fascination that this 21st century culinary Rosetta stone deserves.

photo @ paul brissman

If the Red Rooster takes its name from a famous Harlem speak-easy, and Samuelsson has lived in Harlem for the last six years, I’d never seen anything like this line up in my life. There were dishes that nodded at Spanish Harlem–the Latino neighborhood now rapidly wilting from gentrification, the Ethiopia of Samuelsson’s ancestors and the Sweden of his adoptive parents, and, perhaps most importantly, the great soul food eats of Harlem, or Afro-American comfort food I hadn’t eaten since I was a little boy and shared a house keeper’s supper (I was always happier with the warm interesting cooks in the various kitchens I haunted as a child then I was with the cool and collected ladies on the other side of the dining room door).

So boy did we eat, beginning with excellent cornbread that was served with a smokey, spicy tomato jam, and then a night owl’s breakfast of a starter for me–navy beans with grilled pork belly and a coddled egg, and crab cakes with spicy mayonnaise and pomegranate coulis for the more decorous Nanettina. We traded plates half way in, and both dishes were generously served, cooked from good produce, nicely seasoned and just plain delicious, as was the very good Austrian red that I spotted on the surprisingly good wine list (it would have been nice to have a few bottles from the North Fork of Long Island, though, since this restaurant attempts to fly a locavore flag, and those sturdy reds would go really well with the food here).

photo @ paul brissman

Next up fried yardbird (if you don’t know, yardbird is old American slang for a convict, so this is sort of a coy little joke), or dark-meat chicken (thighs and drum sticks) marinated in spicy buttermilk, fried, and served with heavenly white mace gravy, bread-and-butter pickles and mashed potatoes. To my surprise–chicken in France is vastly better than it is in the U.S., I hadn’t enjoyed a poultry feed as much in a really longtime. My Moldavian was very happy with “Helga’s” meatballs, a throwback to Samuelsson’s childhood and surely some ancestral rissoles of Nanettina’s forebearers as well. We also loved the sweet potato beignets and Red Rooster cheese cake–nicely made with a graham cracker crust, it came with citrus yogurt sorbet, lingonberries and passion-fruit sauce, a final study in the deeply appetizing multi-culturalism that informs the kitchen here.

If the food was very good, what I really loved about this place was that it’s become a lively, inclusive, progressive new institution in a rapidly evolving neighborhood (urban planners please note: a great restaurant or a lively market often provides the major momentum to a happy urban renewal story, with the wonderful green market in Union Square offering another great example) To wit, we talked to the beautifully dressed and very good looking young black couple next to us out on a first date–I hope our prattle was a relief from the taut tension of new desire rather than a hinderance, and then the two Swedish boys who took their place and quickly announced that they love New York, and a hip jazz musician, and a local real-estate agent, and a whole bunch of other friendly folks, and then headed downstairs to Ginny’s Supper Club for a night cap. Chatting with the jazz band between sets and listening to a really terrific singer, I remembered how much fun real night life used to be back before everybody got duped into working from 7am-9pm seven days a week and checking their email every five minutes. Here, on a rainy Sunday night in New York City, we just let go and had a great head-emptying good time.

310 Lenox Avenue, New York, NY 10027, Tel. 1-212-792-9001. Open daily. Average $50.

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Since I’m unapologetically obsessed by good food, it amost never happens that I leave the house without knowing where I’m going to eat. Most of the time, in fact, my destination has been carefully researched, and when possible, I love reading a menu online beforehand, partly to tease my appetite but also because this way I can construct my meal meditatively before being distracted by a waiter or a waitress or the good conversation of a friend. This advance planning isn’t only because I absolutely hate the idea of having a bad meal, but is also due to the fact that even in Paris the odds are so hopelessly stacked against spontaneity. These days, just winging it almost never works and reservations are almost always required.

Last night, though, I’d gone for drinks with my friend Christian, and both of us had been too busy to do any restaurant research beforehand. Since we were meeting near the Place des Victoires, I’d vaguely thought that it might be useful for research purposes to see what the food’s like at Le Grand Colbert these days, although I very much doubt it’s good (if you’ve been lately, please let me know if I’m right or wrong), and also knew that we could always go to Les Fines Gueles, a bistrot a vins that we both love.

Unfortunately, it got late on this rainy night, and Les Fines Gueles was packed when we swung by, so I was thinking that maybe Citronelle & Galanga, a good Vietnamese, would do the trick, and we were on our way over there when we noticed the brightly lit shopfront of a new business in the rue d’Argout and wandered over to see what it was: a new burger joint. But not just any burger joint–and they’re lots of those in Paris these days (see: http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/eurofile-the-new-american-tastemakers-in-paris/?ref=food). Instead, this was a small room with a very good looking and well-dressed crowd sitting on oak stools at oak tables tucking into big juicy burgers made with meat from Yves-Marie le Bourdonnec, one of city’s very best butchers. And it glowed with a certain irresistibly bluff urban chic.

The menu looked terrific, too, and we instantly decided to give it a try. The two young owners couldn’t have been more welcoming when we stepped inside either, so we stood and started drinking a fabulous bottle of Bordeaux while we waited for a table. Chatting with the French owners, we found out that one of them had lived in California, the other New York, and that they’d recruited the delightful Camille Malmquist, an American in Paris baker and blogger, to do their baking for them, including the best hamburger buns I’ve ever eaten, and, later, a superb miniature cranberry topped cheesecake.

I was all set for a “Cheesy”–a burger made from a specially composed mix of ground beef from Le Bourdonnec with English cheddar, bacon, homemade barbecue sauce, onion, pickles and iceberg lettuce–never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I’d actually want to eat iceberg lettuce, which is just about the only salad I knew as a child when Mom would cut a head into wedges she called ‘hearts of lettuce’ and we kids called hunk o’ let, slathered with either Stop & Shop Italian dressing or Marie’s blue-cheese dressing, but to our despair, they were sold out of everything but the “Sweet,” a monthly special veal burger with garnishes that were vaguely inspired by Vietnamese Bánh Mì sandwiches, to wit, carrots, pepper and mint, but also grilled Parmesan shavings, chorizo (which I never found) and arugula. Ditto the sweet potato fries–all they had left were regular fries, but they were homemade.

Even though I’d have liked this magnificent mound of meat cooked much rarer, this little baby turned out to be a beauty of a burger, and the fries were terrific, too. The oak stools were sitting on were carved with a stylized version of a burger, the service was just charming, and if we weren’t already in the thrall of Bacchus, they had a great short list of beers we could have been sipping. Chatting further with the owners, they explained that they want Blend–the name is intended to refer to Le Bourdonnec’s ‘secret’ mix of meats, to be a showcase for the “friendly, fun, alert, involved” service they both enjoyed so much when they were living in America. Oh, and if this place is a success, which is more than likely to be, they bashfully admitted they’d open other branches of Blend in Paris, and then maybe beyond.

We finished up with Camille’s superb little cheesecake, and on the way home, I marveled at the fact that hamburgers have become so popular in Paris–when I moved here 25 years ago, they were still a poorly prepared novelty item at places like Joe Allen’s in Les Halles, and also that the city now has some really good burger places. So what happened Well, lower airfares have meant that a whole generation of younger Parisians have fallen madly in love with New York, and lacking the stern gastronomic codes of their parents, they eagerly embraced the city’s comfort foods, which seem so redolent of a certain personal liberty.

And what about me Was it heresy for anyone who’s lucky enough to live in Paris to chose a nice juicy burger over a perfectly roasted chicken or a cast-iron casserole of boeuf bouguigon Of course not, since the hunger before any meal is an evanescent expression of who and how you are at that moment. The most powerful cardinal points of any good appetite–novelty, adventure, nostalgia and biological cravings beyond my capacity for scientific analysis, gently pricked by such keening qualities as rarity and a desire for self-expression, should never be ignored, and last night, the proper prescription for me was a really good burger. Amazingly enough, in Paris now you can get one. And hats off to Camille Malmquist again for those amazingly good hamburger buns.

44 rue d’Argout, 2nd, Tel. 01-40-26-84-57. Metro: Bourse, Sentier or Les Halles. Open daily. Average 25 Euros.

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Ralph’s Restaurant in Saint Germain des Pres @ Nicolas Buisson

To be sure, Ralph’s is destined to be a big hit this summer, because the interior courtyard is an ideal urban bower for warm-weather dining, it has one of the best locations in Paris bang in the heart of Saint Germain des Pres and the food’s much better than I expected it would be (I’m not only not a big fan of in-shop dining, but perhaps unfairly doubted the designer would be able to pull off an “American” restaurant in Paris). All of this being said, it’s still too bad that such a highly visible showcase of red-white-and-blue gastronomy should be so static in creative terms.

Ralph’s Lauren’s style is often about a very subtlely off-center classicism, but this does not translate to the menu of Ralph’s, which is as traditional as anything you might have found in a country-club dining room on the Eastern seaboard in the 1950s. I started with a “Maryland style lump crab cake,” which was a nicely made and seasoned mound of crabmeat rolled in angel’s hair vermicelli, fried golden, and garnished with a pleasant yellow-pepper-and-citrus sauce, and my friend Alice ordered the lobster salad, which was well presented and generously served, and well it should have been for 35 Euros.

In fact all of the the prices at Ralph’s are similarly eye-popping, from 27 Euros for the very good cheeseburger I had as my main course, to 36 euros for the nicely grilled salmon on a bed of spring vegetables that Alice had for hers. Yes, 10 Euros for a side dish of wilted spinach may strike you as outrageous, but it also forces one to remember that Saint-Germain-des-Pres has now been thoroughly rebooted from blowsy bohemian hangout into a world-class luxury-shopping district. After all, why would Ralph Laurent have chosen to set up shop here?

So would I go again Definitely if you were picking up the tab and I had a hankering for a really good cheese burger, but even though the food’s pretty good, it’s not very likely otherwise–the prices are just too vertiginous for my thin wallet.

———–

A week later, I went to meet a dear old friend for dinner at Cookshop, a terrific looking bistro on Tenth Avenue in New York City, and sipping a surprisingly good glass of Finger Lakes Riesling (dim-witted of me perhaps, but I still associate Upstate New York wines with the scary jugged stuff I drank in college) at the bar before Tom showed up, I couldn’t help but thinking of Ralph’s and all the fun one might have had creating a market-driven menu that channels the best of contemporary American bistro cooking working with first-rate French produce in Paris.

Chef Marc Meyer has created a swell little neighborhood restaurant that was one of the NYC pioneers of the locavore eating trend, and on a warm May night, the dining room was filled with a wonderful mix of stylish and arty locals, including dating couples of all stripes, boys out on the town, girls out on the town, and a pleasant scattering of tourists who were probably staying at one of the glamorous new hotels–the Standard, the Soho House, the Hotel Gansevoort–that have opened nearby.

Good looking waiters in tight plaid shirts animated the room, and as soon as we were seated and I eye-balled the menu, I suspected were going to have a very good meal. And so we did. Tom loved his seared bluefish pate, and my Montauk squid with chick peas and a pleasantly spicy Moroccan sauce was perfectly cooked so that it was creamy and tender and absolutely delicious. Next, an epic New York strip steak for me and slow-braised porchetta for Tom. Both dishes were impeccably cooked and imaginatively garnished–my steak was brightened by a fine aioli and came with baby artichokes, fingerling potatoes and cured olives, while Tom’s stone-oven bake pork was beautifully accented by dried fruit and salsa verde and beans with applewood smoked bacon.

Desserts looked dauntingly sweet, so we finished up our excellent Burgenland red, a Kollwentz Zweigelt, with a portion of Crater Lake Blue, a raw cow’s milk cheese from Oregon. All told, an excellent modern American meal, and a cooking style I would dearly love to have available to me in Paris for those occasions when I want to show French or other foreign friends that the United States is quite far from being the gastronomic wasteland of their received ideas.

Ralph’s, 173 boulevard Saint Germain, 6th arrondissement, Tel. 01-44-77-76-00. Metro: Saint-Germain-des-Pres. Open daily. Average 65 Euros.

Cookshop, 156 10th Avenue, New York, NY 10011, Tel. 212-924-4440. Average dinner $70.

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So why the stodge fest in this great-looking little place with cobalt blue walls, industrial lighting, and the scuffed up wooden floors that are meant to recall, um, er, Soho I went for Saturday lunch with one of many French friends who claim to love American food. She wanted a Caesar salad, a dish I could never imagine ordering in a restaurant, and what came to the table was something that might have been created by a drunk at a motel salad bar–chopped iceberg lettuce, oddly uniform chunks of lukewarm chicken breast, and a hair-pomade consistency dressing that had no taste at all.

Since I’m defenseless when it comes to onion rings, I had to have some with my bacon cheeseburger. If the burger was respectable enough, the accompanying “fries” were greasy, unpeeled potato quarters, likely baked, and an increasingly common cheat in busy profit-conscious French kitchen where real fries demand too much time and effort. To be sure, the “bacon” had nothing to do with real American bacon either and the bun was too large and too dense. But the beef was good, and if this burger didn’t clock in at 13.50 Euros, or almost twenty bucks at current exchange rates, I might be tempted to return from time to time. Oh, and the onion rings Just plain awful, as in in deep-fried. oil-impregnated little O’s with the alarming consistency of a flabby arm. Or actually they reminded me of a deranged experiment a friend and I attempted a longtime ago with a box of Mrs. Paul’s Onion rings while on a Spring break trip to North Carolina. College students with empty pockets, we avoided restaurants and spent most of a week living on sandwiches. Then one hot afternoon on the way to the beach, we stopped at a convenience store to buy beer and the onion rings called to me from deep inside of a frozen food case. The problem, of course, was that we had no where to cook them…but wait! Maybe we could leave them on a piece of aluminum foil on the hood of the car while we were swimming and the sun would cook them! The soggy, greasy muck that we found when we returned three hours later immediately went into a litter bin, and I swore off a career as a physicist.

HAND, 39 rue de Richelieu, 1st, Tel. 01-40-15-03-27. Mo Pyramides or Palais Royale. Avg 20 Euros.

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