Tucked away in a mercifully still ungentrified street in the northern Marais, Parcelles is a very near perfect Parisian bistrot a vins, or bistro with a special focus on wine. It’s immediate charm, which comes from the wake of the addresses that proceeded it at the same address, notably Le Taxi Jaune, is joyously authentic and profoundly Parisian, from the big copper-clad bar to suspended factory lamps and a retro cracked tile floor.

This isn’t some fly-in-amber address, however. Instead, you instantly sense the suave professionalism and seriousness of the staff from the moment you’re seated at a table with a crisp white table cloth. Then there’s the delightful welcome from owner Sarah Michielsen, who’s one of the best young restauranteurs working in Paris today. This is because of her reflexive hospitality but also comes from her extensive experience of running Parisian dining rooms, including, mostly recently, that of Itinéraires, the now closed restaurant of her ex-husband, chef Sylvain Sendra.

Sommelier Bastien Fidelin is similarly cordial and attentive when he comes to the table with his rather fascinating wine list, which features organic and natural wines from all over France and beyond. The importance of his work is reflected by the name of this restaurant, too. In the French terminology of wine-making, a parcelle is a small plot of land with distinctive geographical and geological characteristics that impact the quality and character of the grapes cultivated.

Chef Julien Chevalier’s menu is regularly revised according to what’s seasonal and best in the markets, and his style is wonderfully produce centric. To wit, he aims to enhance the natural flavors of the produce he cooks rather than temper them into other tastes. In this cautiously and hopefully post pandemic moment, this simplicity and authenticity is exactly the way we want to eat right now.

So Parcelles is a sophisticated but relaxed modern bistrot a vins that aspires to and often achieves a wonderfully low-key excellence.

Meeting my friend Tina, another American journalist in Paris with a French spouse,  for lunch we got through a good hunk of media gossip over a glass of excellent Champagne (Elise Deschannes – Essentielle), and decided to order different things to give the menu a broader sampling. My steamed clams in a marine broth with fresh herbs were succulent and remarkably fresh, while Tina’s pumpkin fritters with herbed Fromage blanc were perfectly cooked in a feathery tempura-like batter.

My choice of a main course may have made Tina shudder, but I can’t resist ris de veau (veal sweetbreads), because I love their resonantly carnal taste and texture. Here, they were impeccably cooked, with some light crusting and garnish of fried sage leaves, and served on a bed of buttery potato puree with a beautifully made silken sauce of veal stock and pan drippings. Tina’s guinea hen was a succulent piece of bird with garnishes of spelt risotto, a thick asparagus spear, and some tapenade. Both plates were generously served and the cooking was. light, precise and full of flavor.

The wine I somewhat begrudgingly allowed sommelier Bastien Fidelin to chose–I’d been leaning towards something from the Cotes du Rhone or Languedoc, was outstanding with this meal, too: Saint Veran – 2019 – Les Pommards by Jessica Litaud, an exceptionally talented young winemaker.

We concluded by sharing a truly perfect creme caramel and the fuzz of well-being that follows a delicious and beautifully served meal (N.B. Don’t miss the lemon cream crumble if it’s on offer).

Since I’m still savoring every meal out with a quiet sense of grateful wonderment after the misery of the two restaurant shutdowns in France, I couldn’t help but thinking that it’s restaurants like Parcelles, not the over-hyped tables of the latest winners of the competitive cooking shows on French television, that form the ballast of Paris’s enduring reputation for gastronomic excellence.

Creativity has its place in the kitchen and can be rather fascinating, but Gallic gastronomic classicism delivers a purring pleasure that is truly timeless in its elegance and sensuality.

13 rue Chapon, 3rd Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01 43 37 91 64, Métro : Arts et Metiers. Open Mon-Sat. for lunch and dinner. Closed Sunday. www.parcelles-paris.fr Average a la carte 50 Euros.

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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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Chefs Pierre Toitou and Cyril Pham

The new Drum Cafe at the LUMA Foundation in Arles is an excellent example of how good a museum restaurant can actually be when someone cares about serving good food instead of the usual bland industrial food-service catering too often found at museums. The food at the Drum Cafe is so delectable that it’s very much coming here for a meal even if you’re not planning to the visit this new contemporary arts complex, which was recently created from a decommissioned rail yard and train-carriage maintenance workshops.

My curiosity about this place was first aroused very early in the morning a few weeks ago on a train from Nimes to the airport in Marseilles when I looked up from my book just long enough to catch a sudden thrilling glimpse of the new Frank Gehry designed metal-clad tower that has become the emblem of the LUMA Foundation. It came and went so unexpectedly that my reaction was all instinct–backdropped by the morning sky, the tower was intriguingly strange and oddly beautiful.

I’ve been reading about LUMA ever since its creation was announced  by Maja Hoffmann, the philanthropist heiress to the Hoffmann Laroche pharmaceutical fortune, but hadn’t yet found the time to go during a year made so busy by the publication of my new book MY PLACE AT THE TABLE: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris (Mariner Books). Then I learned that Pierre Toitou, whose cooking I’d loved when he was at Vivant and Deviant in Paris, had been cast with Cyril Pham as the first chefs for the museum’s new restaurant, the Drum Cafe.

So on a beautiful Indian summer Saturday in Provence, Bruno and I headed south for lunch and a visit to the museum.

The restaurant is located on the ground floor (rez-de-chaussée) of the Frank Gehry tower on the grounds of the LUMA Foundation. Coming through the door, there’s a bar and a few tables in a dark foyer, while the main dining room has a single large horse-shoe shaped table at the bottom of an atrium lined with book shelves and decorated by polychrome pipes overhead that reminded me of the Centre Pompidou; all of these years later, this architectural feint is still fresh and fun, too.

Seated, we immediately ordered two glasses of a delicious organic white wine made in the Camargue from Viognier grapes and a plate of panisses with cured anchovies and fried sage leaves to nibble on while we studied the menu. Ever since I first ate a panisse (a chickpea flour bar) in Nice as a backpacking student a very longtime ago, I’ve never been able to get enough of them, and the ones served here were very good.

The menu was fascinating, too, since Toitou is such a gastronomic vagabond. As I over-heard him explaining to a neighboring quartet, “My father (Jean Toitou, founder of the Paris fashion label A.P.C.) is a Tunisian Jew and my mother is Russian and Norman. Growing up we ate a lot of Japanese food at home, because my parents love it and traveled to Japan often, but we never had French dishes like boeuf bourguignon, because no one knew how to cook them.” Toitou has cooked everywhere from the Hotel Plaza Athenee (Alain Ducasse) in Paris to London (Sketch by Pierre Gagnaire) to Uruguay. He’s also previously done a Pop-up in Arles with Arrmand Arnal of La Chassagnette and is an avid traveler.

All of this comes through in a brief but intriguing menu of mostly Mediterranean dishes that are brilliantly jolted by techniques and ingredients from other cultures. These small-plate dishes that are meant to be shared are sort of exactly what many people want to eat right now as we tentatively emerge from the COVID pandemic. To wit, this food is fresh, seasonal, health, straight forward and booming with umami, or just the cure for people who’ve become bored by the limits of their own skills in the kitchen after cooking non-stop for months.

Finally, we settled on an oxtail terrine (presse de boeuf) with black olive mayonnaise and a salad of fresh herbs and mushrooms in Satay sauce with chili oil and lime leaves. If the rich and brilliantly succulent terrine was profoundly French in the best traditions of rock of ages bistro cooking, the mushrooms registered like some sort of ecstatically good street-food dish you might come across in Bali. One way or another, both plates were beautifully made, generously served and deeply satisfying.

It was pretty obvious that word-of-mouth was working, too, since many of the other people having lunch around us were curious and gastronomically adventurous locals, or the sort of people who support inventive and creative chefs in smaller towns and rural settings all over France.

As depicted above, our main courses might look a bit ferocious but both dishes were outstanding. Homemade cuttlefish ink cavatelli with a cuttlefish ragu was brightened by a pepperoncini fired red blaze of melted ‘Nduja, the soft sausage from Calabria that’s one of my favorite kitchen helpers. (Why When I don’t have time to cook a sauce as rich and ruddy as the succulent cuttlefish ragout, ‘Ndjua adds a lot of flavor to pasta just tossed with olive oil, capers and a sprinkling of smoked salt.) Frankly, I also liked the way that this dish cocked a snook at the usual conventions of food styling in the age of Instagram, too. What Toitou seemed to be reminding us is that taste should always trump fiddly prettiness and that food should be allowed to look like, well, food.

The plating of the grilled marinated octopus tentacle posed on top of a beautifully made potato cake also seemed intended to titillate with a first impression of gruesomeness. One way or another, it was excellent, since the octopus has been marinated to give its meat a creamy tenderness and the char added wonderful flavor to the dish, as did an Indian condiment, raita, which is yogurt with chopped cucumber, pepper and herbs. The potato cake was a highly engineered version of pomme Anna, minus the large amount of butter usually found in this dish. Instead, the potatoes had been finely sliced, neatly formed into a loaf and baked, to create a garnish I could happily eat everyday.

Since we were planning to visit the galleries in the LUMA tower after lunch, we decided to share a dessert, a slice of tarta de Santiago. It presented as a sort of delicious spiced cake made with ground almonds and was garnished with prunes in spiced syrup.

Curious about its origins, I poked around we got home and discovered that it’s a recipe from Galicia in Spain that dates back to the Middle Ages. Translated into English, its name means ‘the cake of Saint James,’ a reference to the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route that passes through Galicia to culminate at the city of Santiago de Compostella. The top of the cake is often decorated with powdered sugar and an imprint of the Cross of Saint James, but the version served at the Drum Cafe was naked, ecumenical and delicious. Interestingly, the European. Union granted the Tarta de Santiago a PGI (Protected Geographical Indication) in 2010; this means that any qualifying tarta must be made in Galicia and contain at least 33% almonds.

Pierre Toitou is in residence at the Drum Cafe until January 2022, when a new chef(s) will arrive, because the idea of the Drum Cafe is to host a regularly changing roster of different chefs in its kitchen, an increasingly popular restaurant concept everywhere.

N.B. The Drum Cafe is open only for breakfast and lunch.

Drum Cafe, LUMA Arles, Parc des Ateliers, 45 Chemin des Minimes – 33 Avenue Victor Hugo, Arles.Tel. (33) 04 65 88 10 00, Average 45 Euros. Open Wednesday to Monday 10am – 6pm, Closed Tuesday. Lunch menu served from noon to 3pm. Reservations strongly suggested via website: https://www.luma.org/en/arles/visit-us/eating-and-drinking-on-the-parc-des-ateliers/drum-cafe

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The Paris restaurant scene has deliciously come back to life after the challenges of two recent lockdowns, and a talented new generation of chefs are serving intriguing contemporary French cooking that leaps beyond the cliches of la bistronomie (modern French bistro cooking) with an emphasis on simplicity and sustainability. Though one or more of the restaurants below are currently closed for their August holidays, this is the cheat sheet you’ll want to tuck away for your next trip to Paris

L’Arrière-Cuisine. Chef David Rathgeber’s Montparnasse table L’Assiette is one of my favorite Paris bistros. Now he’s opened what the French call a cave a manger, or a little grocery store where you can also get a simple meal and eat it at the table d’hotes, or communal table in the middle of the room surrounded by stools. What’s on offer here is Rathbeber’s excellent take on street food and quick eats, often inspired by the comfort food classics of Nice and the south of France, which he learned when he worked in the kitchen of Alain Ducasse’s three-star Louis XIV in Monaco. It varies from one day to the next, but might include homemade kefta with homemade pita bread, pissaladière, socca, and what’s probably the best pan bagnat in Paris, a beautiful handheld feast filled with radishes, shaved fennel, lettuce, tuna, anchovies, tomatoes, fava vean, quail’s eggs, pureed black olive, garlic and olive oil. This sandwich is so good that the last time I had a train at the Gare Montparnasse, I left the house early to buy one for lunch on the rails on the way to Brittany.181 rue du Château, 14th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01- 43-22-64-86. Open Mon-Sat 11.30am-8.30pm. Métro: Mouton-Duvernet.

Cena. The two most innovative restaurateurs in Paris today are probably Stephane Manigold (the just opened Liquide, Contraste, Substance, Bistrot Flaubert, Maison Rostang) and David Lahner (La Crèmerie, Le Bon Saint Pourçain, Anima, Racines, Caffè Stern, Vivant). Cena is David Lahner’s latest and it fills a void in a part of Paris top heavy with Michelin starred restaurants but offering rather little in the way of the kind of healthy and inventive contemporary bistro cookoing that has become the signature of Paris dining. Dishes like Roman style deep-fried artichokes, arugula, guanciale and socca (chickpea-flour crepe) curry; yellow pollack with roasted asparagus; and chocolate mousse with smoked black cardamom reflect the impressive resume of young chef Alban Chartron, who worked at La Villa Florentine in Lyon, le Louis XV in Monaco, Anne-Sophie Pic in Valence, and at Épicure at the Hotel Bristol in Paris before taking over the kitchen here. 23 Rue Treilhard, 8th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-40- 74-20-80, Metro: Miromesnil. Open Mon-Fri for lunch and dinner. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Average 60 Euros.

Restaurant La Halles aux Graines. Located in the handsome neo-classical building on the western edge of Les Halles that was once the market for trading wheat in France, the new restaurant of Sebastien and Michel Bras is inspired by various different types of grains and pulses, along with the minimalist revision of the space by Japanese architect Tadao Ando. The official table of the new museum housing the art collection of French luxury-goods mogul François Pinault, it’s located on the third floor of this landmarked building and so has superb views of the church of Saint-Eustache, la Canopée des Halles, and the Tour Saint-Jacques, among other mythic parts of the Paris skyline. Highlights of a recent dinner here included two starters—button mushrooms stuffed with mushrooms and a veil of candied oats and black pepper and red tuna with celery and anchovy vingaigrette, a delicious terrine of summer vegetables for two as a main course, and a superb millefeuille with caramelized pumpkin seeds for dessert. Charming service and an excellent wine list. 2 rue de Viarmes, 1st Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-82-71-71-60. Métro : Louvre-Rivoli. Open Monday to Saturday for lunch from noon-3pm, tea and light meals from 3pm to 7pm, dinner from 7.30pm-midnight (last orders at 10.30pm), www.halleauxgrains.bras.fr

Jugaad. I love the diverse kitchens of India, which I first discovered many years ago when I was a student in London. Though there have always been a few Indian restaurants in Paris that I would describe as “correcte” (decent), the French capital has never had a really good Indian restaurant, until now at Jugaad. Talented and highly experienced chef Manoj Sharma’s cooking is a brilliant modern match-up of witty contemporary Indian cooking inspired by India’s many regional recipes and the best French produce.
Standouts among the starters include lamb tartare with crunchy vegetables and mixed spices and mozzarella croquettes with peas, mint and fresh red pepper sauce, which are best ordered with Naan (puffy flatbread) freshly baked on the premises. Among my favorite mains are pork ribs marinated in Goan spices with pickled vegetables; malai salmon, which is marinated in maple syrup and served with a glasswort (a briney seaplant) pesto with curried yogurt and cardamon cream and crunchy buratta with caramelized tomato sauce and mint-and-pistachio pesto.16 rue Favart, 2nd Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 05-54-96- 63-48, Metro: Richelieu-Drouot, Open Tuesday-Saturday for lunch and dinner. Closed Sun-Mon. Average 60 Euros.
www.jugaad.paris

Liquide. Please read my full review here: www.alexanderlobrano.com/restaurant-reviews/liquide-paris-chef-matthias-marcs-great-new-bistro-in-les-halles-b/

Mosuke. Please read my full review here: www.alexanderlobrano.com/restaurant-reviews/mosuke-paris-mory-sackos-exquisite-franco-afro-japanese-cuisine-a-b/

Petrelle. Since female chef Lucie Boursier-Mougenot and sommelier Luca Danti took over this charming restaurants, it’s even better than it was before and has become one of my favorite restaurants in Paris. What I love is that it’s so supremely Parisians—small, chic, charming and serving impeccably prepared and very witty contemporary French dishes that are unfailingly succulent and sensual. The menu changes regularly but I loved my last meal—roasted girolles with an egg yolk confit, brioche and guanciale; roast pigeon with a ragout of chickpeas and salsa verde; and whip-cream filled profiteroles. 34 Rue Petrelle, 9th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-42-82-11-02, Metro: Anvers and Poissoniere. Open Wed-Sun for dinner, Saturday and Sunday for lunch, closed Monday and Tuesday. Prix-fixe lunch 28 Euros, prix-fixe dinner 52 Euros.
www.petrelle.fr

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Chef Matthias Marc

Trout tartare with raspberries, fresh horseradish and beetroot coulis

 

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

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

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

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

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

Manioc lacquered with soy sauce, spinach, ginger, coconut

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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During the year without restaurants, it turns out the last one I would go to in 2020 was the Maison Aribert, a Michelin two-star table in the operetta-set-like little spa town of Uriage-les-Bains, which is a few miles outside of Grenoble in the Vercors.

In retrospect, I wonder if we weren’t guided by some sort of subliminal prescience, since the weekend after our trip away, France entered its second lockdown of 2020 on October 30. Once again, all of Gaul’s restaurants and bars were required to shutdown; as of this date, they are expected to remain closed until at least mid-January 2021. One way or another, we were itching for a change of scene after having spent most of the year in our house in a village outside of Uzes in the Midi after the first lockdown ended in late May.

I’d read a lot about chef Christophe Aribert, too, and having previously had an only dimly remembered experience of his cooking from the short stint he did as chef at L’Opéra Restaurant, the hapless restaurant now known as Coco at the Opéra Garnier in Paris, I was curious to discover his food. So we left home on a beautiful sunny day when the vineyards surrounding our village had turned into a sweeping bronze-colored carpet rolling off in every direction, including to the distant violet-colored Cevennes mountains on the horizon, and drove north to Valence. The idea was that we’d dine at Maison Aribert and spend the night there, and then visit the Musée de la Grande Chartreuse in Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse and then Chartreuse liqueur aging cellars in Voiron and Chocolats Bonnat, one of France’s best chocolate-makers, in the same town.

As is my predilection, the French countryside read en route as a succession of delicious foods and wines and remembered meals. The Rhone Valley resonated with the names of many of my favorite wines—Chateauneuf du Pape, bien sur, but also Cairanne, Gigondas, Vinsombres, and Beaumes-de-Venise, among others. A sign indicating the route to Sisteron brought back the best lamb I’ve ever eaten, a succulent slow-roasted shoulder of spring lamb from that town at La Bonne Étape, while the exit to Romans, made me want its tiny cheese-filled ravioli, and a sign for Saint Marcellin brought on a desperate craving for one of my favorite cheeses. More discretely, the road leading from Valence to Grenoble was lined with plantations of walnut trees, which produce the best of these nuts to be found anywhere in the world (F.Y.I., French walnut producers in the Dauphine have had a hard time of it in the face of competition from California and China, but their more expensive product, which has an Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée, has an infinitely better flavor and texture).

I also found myself eagerly looking forward to eating a meal I hadn’t cooked, since as much as I love to cook, I’ve never cooked more intensely in my life than I have this year. And recently I’ve been missing restaurants, and not just for their food, but as the most vital social fixture in my life and places that have fascinated and delighted me ever since I was a child.

Before puberty lit the fuse of sexuality, food was the vector for sating whatever awkwardly self-conscious sensuality I may have had, and restaurants offered stages for cameo performances that brought self-affirmation and the hope of a larger and more glamorous existence than those of the adults who surrounded me. To be sure, there actually were some rather glamorous people in our town, but most of them had sort of accidently washed up there after the drama of storms and battles elsewhere made them grateful for its silence and primness, a quality they were also wryly amused by.

So I’ve always loved restaurants, beginning with the homely ones that were only occasionally available to me growing up in southwestern Connecticut. I loved Howard Johnson’s—one of America’s original quality- casual restaurant chains, for its terrazzo floors, fries, burgers and peppermint-stick ice cream drowned with hot fudge sauce; the Apizza Center, which produced some of the best ‘pies’ in the pizza belt of pizza-loving Connecticut; and West Lake, a Cantonese restaurant with exquisitely good food we most often ate spooned out of white-paper takeout containers with little wire handles. Even today, thinking about West Lake’s egg foo yung, shrimp toast, egg drop soup, egg rolls, and shrimp in lobster sauce makes my mouth water.

American restaurant culture really blossomed at the same time that I became more and more interested in food, too. If I discovered my passion for restaurants during a first teenaged trip to Europe in 1972, they became a regular part of my life when I went to college. There were modish places like Fitzwilly’s, the first puckishly hip restaurant in Northampton, Massachusetts with its exposed brick walls, spider plants hanging in macrame holders, cheeseburgers in baskets lined with sheets of waxed paper and then elegant restaurants like the expensive Café Budapest in Boston. Moving to New York City after college, I discovered myself and the great metropolis through its restaurants, including places like
Ruskay’s, the supremely bohemian chic restaurant on the Upper West Side with candles that guttered over glass-topped tables and live musicians in a mezzanine, holes in the wall like the Latino-Chinese Flor de Mayo (www.flordemayo.com) and magnificent but wiltingly expensive French cooking at restaurants like Lutèce.

And then I did it again when I moved to London—discovered a city through its restaurants, and another time when I arrived in Paris in 1986. Now with dusk falling on an October day, I was ready to take on the best table in Uriage-les-Bains.

Set on a hillside, the Maison Aribert occupies a handsomely restored former 19th century curists’ hotel, which now offers very five comfortable rooms with Swedish made Hastens beds and lovely views over the surrounding park. Aribert’s restaurant is located at the foot of the hotel in a newly constructed pavilion that is strikingly covered with rough-sawn chestnut planks.

This project represents a triumphant homecoming for Aribert, who grew up here in the Isere as the son of parents who ran a hotel-restaurant and the grandson of a grandfather who was a vegetable farmer. Cooking was not the first ambition of this mountain man, but when a knee injury doomed his hopes of making a career as a skier, he eventually ended up in the kitchen. He worked at a variety of restaurants in Paris, including the kitchens of the Hotel de Crillon when Christian Constant, the father of the modern bistro movement, was there, and La Tour d’Argent before a desire to return to the mountains he loves so much propelled him to accept a job as sous-chef to Philippe Bouissou at the chic Napoleon III style Grand Hôtel d’Uriage-les-Bains in 1997. The pair of chefs won a Michelin star in 2000 and a second one two years later. Aribert took over after Bouissou retired and the restaurant retained its two stars.
Eventually, though, Aribert wanted his own restaurant, and so the Maison Aribert opened in 2019, and the chef kept the two Michelin stars he’d held in his previous post.

Hungry that night, we decided upon the eight-course 200 Euro Menu Degustation, even though I had a qualm or two. One of the many things I’ve learned most intently during a year that’s been nearly devoid of restaurants is that most tasting menus are much too long and over-wrought. This is because they’re the apotheosis of what I describe as show cooking, or a carefully plotted culinary performance that’s intended to make you marvel. In contrast, traditional cooking follows established recipes with the intention of feeding you something deeply satisfying and delicious. The best cooking, of course, manages to do both, to wit, leave you deeply admiring of the chef’s imagination, originality and technical skills at the same time that you’re swooning from some spectacularly good food.

Since the world has so tilted towards show cooking for the last thirty years, a development accelerated by the fairy-tale version of what it means to be a cook peddled with such success by food television, I somehow expected a Byronic flourish as our meal at Maison Aribert began that night. But I was wrong. Aribert’s first dish was as poignant as a naked angel. A small piece of locally raised trout had been cooked to the texture of a cloud, which was made earthbound only by the earthiness of a pleasantly puckering sorrel sauce, fine slices of turnip, blanched cabbage leaves and nasturtium flowers.

Next, a more assertive dish of beets teased by the gentle heat of horseradish and the sweet astringency of a black currant sauce. And the chef played on with a superb dish of brook trout dressed in a bright green sauce of parsley and haricots verts that registered on the palate some kind of vegetal version of mink.

The scales tipped back and forth between the earthy and the empyrean again with a coddled egg with wild mushrooms and herbs being followed by a buckwheat tartelette filled with the perch bellies on a bed of sauteed white onions under a fluffy duvet of celeriac foam. As exquisite as all of these dishes were, at this point in the meal I found myself thinking of something chef Yannick Alleno once said to me, which is that eventually during a tasting menu you have to reach a place where you feel you’ve arrived at the main course; otherwise the meal becomes completely ephemeral and more than a little effete.

Almost on cue, I was served a filet of poached roasted local free-range chicken with a lush dark- brown sauce made from the bird’s own jus seasoned with lemongrass and savory. This was the destination of the meal, and it was a potently lyrical expression of both Aribert’s superb technical skills and his deep love of the terroir of La Chartreuse.

Now with the chef off stage, the meal concluded with an expectedly brilliant cheese trolley—this little resort town is surrounded by some of the greatest cheese-producing towns of France, and then an oddly abstract three-part dessert, which included a chocolate composition and another one of
pleasantly tart apples.

The only blemish on our meal was the decidedly dyspeptic sommelier; otherwise it was a wonderful experience, which proved that Aribert is doubtless well on his way to winning a third Michelin star. N.B. Though hardly cheap, it’s also worth pointing out that this tasting menu at Maison Aribert was relatively good value for the money when compared to what a similar meal would cost in Paris or on the Cote d’Azur.

280 Allée du Jeune Bayard, Uriage-les-Bains, Tel. (33) 04 58 17 48 30, www.maisonaribert.com, Lunch menus 99 Euros and 125 Euros; dinner menus 150 Euros, 180 Euros, 200 Euros.

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The Loire as seen from the dining room at Assa in Blois.

On the overcast autumn day I went to lunch at Assa, I became so mesmerised by the mirrored view of the low gray sky on the skeining waters of the Loire river that my curiosity about the meal to come had sort of gently drifted downstream by the time the first complimentary hors d’oeuvres came to the table. I was here at this Michelin one-star table because I was hungry and hoped, of course, to eat well, but the spare serene Ryokan-like atmosphere and decor of the dining room had me pleasantly day-dreaming and enjoying the calm and new luxury of being in a quiet attractive place that felt safe during these tumultuous times.

This year, for obvious reasons, I’ve been to many fewer restaurants than I’ve frequented in many years. After the lockdown ended in Paris, we migrated south to our house in a little village outside of the beautiful town of Uzes in Le Gard, and though they’re some wonderful restaurants there, we didn’t go out that often. Instead, we cooked. And cooked. And cooked. Since after the year-long renovation of our house, a trio of linked together 15th century stone houses in the heart of the village, we received a voluminous rotation of visitors, including Bruno’s sister who lives in Florence and her two sons, one of whom lives in Rome as a film student and the other who’d repatriated to Italy from Colombia on a humanitarian flight organised by the Italian government, his mother from the north of France, his sister from Paris with her partner, and friends from Paris, Switzerland and the nearby Luberon.

It was lovely to share our new nest with all of them, but it also meant an enormous amount of, well, cooking. So by the time I ended up on my own at the table at Assa, I was rather glad of my solitude and the fact that someone other than me would be wielding the pots and pans in the kitchen. In these tumultuous and trepidatious times, being in a restaurant also felt like a very sincere luxury, too, since I love the ritual of sharing a meal with strangers and discovering a new chef. Or in the case of Assa, two chefs, Anthony Maubert and his Japanese wife Fumiko, who run this old riverside auberge they’ve so artfully reinvented for a new century.

When the complimentary hors d’oeuvre that began  the four-course lunch menu I’d ordered arrived, it was so brilliant my attention was promptly summoned back to the table and intensely focused on the beautiful and surprising dish presented on a round slice of tree trunk. Two different types of Loire River freshwater fish were presented, one in a spoon as a little dumpling topped with a coriander leaf and the other in a bath of white miso with pickled turnips and puffed rice. The contrast between the garnishes and the firm gently flavoured white fish was fascinating, because it constituted sort of a compass to follow during the meal to come. Using seasonal Loire Valley produce as its anchor, the Mauberts’ cooking was a vivid set of dishes with elegant but occasionally playful melodies equally inspired by France and Japan. It was also consistently beautiful to behold and plated with a keen aesthetic that heightened the pleasure of the palate.

The first course of my meal was the most profoundly satisfying dish I’ve eaten so far this year. A seared slice of foie gras sat on a gelee of dashi and was topped with grilled shiitake mushrooms and raw button mushrooms, with a sprinkling of matcha adding color and a pleasant whispering astringency to this umami-rich dish, a perfect expression of autumn in the French countryside.

The very impressive resumes of the Maubert really showed through in a main course of whiting with roasted celeriac, roasted celeriac-and-buckwheat cream, tender cabbage leaves, citrus caviar, tempura celery leaves and broccolini, goji berries, toasted buckwheat and coins of daikon, too. Anthony Maubert previously worked at Lasserre, Le Manoir du Lys, La Vague d’or in Saint Tropez, Marc Veyrat and Michel Bras. Fumiko Maubert trained as a dietician in her native Japan and then followed her love of gastronomy to France, where she has worked at Lasserre, the Hotel de Crillon and Michel Bras.

If I recognised the poignant reverence Bras has for the vegetal world in the Mauberts’ cooking and enjoyed their visual exuberance, which recalls the baroque style of chef Arnaud Donckele at La Vague d’Or, their style is completely their own. They clearly love vegetables and herbs, too, but as vividly flavoured as the composition of ingredients surrounding the perfectly cooked whiting was, it was also a very legibly healthy dish, where a gustatory coherence was created by the contrasts of the natural flavors and textures of the ingredients in the dish instead of a butter-rich sauce. Fumiko Maubert has a deep interest in making contemporary French gastronomy as healthy as possible while still delivering gastronomic originality and pleasure at the table.

The cheese course continued the meal’s themes of discovery, beauty and originality guided by a rudder of good health. Shavings of aged Loire Valley goat cheese topped some freshly made tofu on tamarin to offer a study in the lactic differences and similarities between animal and vegetable milk. This dish came with a side garnish of crispy puffed rice grains and a bowl of warm fresh goat milk, and it was satisfying and rather fascinating in an alluringly monastic way. A dessert of matcha, azuki bean paste and lemon was so appealing that I promptly ate it without taking a photograph.

Loire Valley wines, including a superb Vouvray, one of my favorive wines, were served by the glass, and the male dining room staff dressed with the straw boaters the French call canotiers and sky-blue cotton trousers were prompt, efficient and warm. During a very challenging year, this was the best meal meal I’ve had so far and one that was deeply nourishing in a variety of ways.

Assa is very much of a destination restaurant, so if you’re looking for a revivifying break in the country in France this autumn, book here and stay at the charming new Les Sources de Cheverny hotel, which is only about a twenty minute drive from the restaurant in the forest.

189 quai Ulysse Besnard, Blois, Tel. (33) 02-54-78-09-01. Open Wednesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner, Sunday lunch only. Closed on Monday and Tuesday. Prix-fixe menus, 62 Euros, 74 Euros, 88 euros, 92 Euros, 114 Euros, Average a la carte 121 Euros.   www.assarestaurant.com 

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With the opening of Pavyllon, chef Yannick Alleno has created a convivial new casual restaurant that aims to make his cooking available to a broader public than the one that can afford his Michelin three-star table upstairs at the lovely Pavillon Ledoyen in the gardens of the Champs Elysees. “Pavyllon is sort of my laboratory,” says Alleno, who seems to inherently understand that French haute cuisine is searching for relevance in a new century. Pavyllon occupies a sunny pretty room overlooking the gardens at the same address.

Why Haute cuisine dining, the traditional pinnacle of the French food chain, has not only become exorbitantly expensive but seems sidelined in a city where they’re so many brilliant young chefs serving spectacularly good and much more affordable food in relaxed and charming restaurants like Septime or the recently opened Maison pat Sota Atsumi.

To wit, I don’t go to Paris haute cuisine restaurants very often anymore, but having been to six or seven of them recently as part of a magazine assignment, I couldn’t help but thinking that I could have eaten just as well–if not better, at a variety of restaurants that would have cost a quarter of what any of these exalted meals did. There was a time when an haute cuisine meal was sort of like going up in a hot-air balloon, or a rare, extravagant and thrilling expedition that offered an enlightening Olympian view of the dining landscape below by dint of serving meals that were so much more head spinningly special, refined, sensual and original than anything you’d probably eaten anywhere else for a very longtime. With a few exceptions, I don’t find that to be true anymore, and I also think that the tight formal formatting of the haute cuisine meal is something that rarely delivers much joy anymore.

These three-star tables are under a huge amount of financial pressure not only because of their exorbitant labor costs, but also because the clientele that can afford Paris haute cuisine dining these days has changed so much. The old-school mix of French clients and foreigners from the U.S., the U.K. and other European countries has diminished at the same time that more and more haute cuisine diners are Asian, Russian, Middle Eastern and hailing from other places with booming economies and very different dining habits and palates. And many customers are also health conscious and environmentally aware in ways that are challenging a concept of luxury dining defined by such foods as foie gras, caviar, sea bass, and other haute cuisine standards.

Clearly, Alleno had all of this in mind when he opened Pavyllon, which serves dishes like beets with chocolate nibs, black olive pistou and ricotta for 21 Euros. He also decided on a counter-service only format, which isn’t new–Joel Robuchon got there first with his L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon, originally in Paris, and now in many other cities, including New York. Perched on a powder-blue velvet-upholstered stool at Pavyllon, you watch your meal being made in the open kitchen on the other side of a wide stone counter, and service is amiable and complicit, a sharp contrast to the drilled, cool and relentlessly calibrated service at many haute cuisine restaurants. “The idea of this place is for people to have a good time,” says Alleno, a remark that sort of underlines how this goal has become so muddled elsewhere.

This restiveness about the future of French haute cuisine is not new–the estimable food critic Francois Simon often complained that haute-cuisine meals were too long when he wrote for Le Figaro and Le Monde, and other chefs, like Pascal Barbot, have wondered about its rote rituals, but it’s become more general. Barbot, for example, serves fresh fruit at the end of a meal at his three-star restaurant L’Astrance, because as he once told me, all of the mignardises and chocolates are just too much. “And does anyone really want a pre-dessert#8221; he once asked me, referring to the appetiser dessert that proceeds the main one at many haute cuisine tables. “It’s all just too much,” he said.

As is true of any laboratory, some experiments are better than others. At a recent meal at Pavyllon, I loved the tart spinach soup with a tiny knob of scamorza and burned nutmeg and the oyster beignet with smoked pike perch eggs, but found the pike perch mousse lined with brioche crusts and celeriac extract a bit timid.

I’ve known Yannick Alleno’s cooking ever since he cooked at the Hotel Scribe many years ago and have always admired his talent, which continues to evolve in interesting ways. So it was interesting to see him riffing on his fascination with Asian cooking via a small plates format at Pavyllon. Some dishes are angelic to the point of being a little plain, like turbot with vegetable ‘pearls’ and salicorne with an herbal jus, while others are succulent and deeply satisfying, including a luscious stroganoff of Wagyu beef under a thatch of celeriac matchsticks and potato straws. The perfect pour with the stroganoff is a glass of the superb Saint Joseph that Alleno is now making with Michel Chapoutier.

Pithiviers of duck and foie gras by chef Sota Atsumi at Maison par Sota Atsumi

On another visit–and there will be one, I’d love to try the boudin noir (black pudding) with suckling pig chops and the Pithiviers of marinated hare with a jus royal, because these pastry tourtes, which are happily very fashionable in Paris this Fall, can be ecstatically good; the best one I’ve had recently was the magnificent duck, foie gras and spinach filled tourte served with quince puree at Maison par Sota Atsumi. I’d also be curious to sample Alleno’s pumpkin-stuffed tortellini and his gluten-free tagliatelle with corn extraction, caviar and crispy chicken skin.

Desserts are excellent, too, including caramel ice cream with Amarena cherries and candied hazelnuts. The wine list is outstanding, too, and they pour a great selection of wines by the glass. Service is eager and charming, too. Usefully, this restaurant is open daily for lunch and dinner, too, and you can book online, which makes it a great option for solo dining. As a laboratory for the future of French haute cuisine, Pavyllon is an interesting and appealing restaurant with some imaginative and technically impressive cooking.

Pavyllon, Carré des Champs-Elysées, avenue Dutuit Metro: Champs-Elysées-Clemenceau, Tel. (33) 01-53-05-10-10, www.yannick-alleno.com/fr/restaurants-reservation/pavyllon Open daily for lunch and dinner. Lunch menu 68 Euros, Prix-fixe menus 145 Euros, 235 Euros, Average a la carte 150 Euros.

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Mieux, which means ‘better’ in English, is a wonderful name for a restaurant, because it declares gastronomic ambition but with a certain appealing humility. This charmingly decorated and cleverly designed bistro just five minutes from my front door in the rue Saint Lazare delivers better than just better, though, since the contemporary French bistro cooking is delicious, and the service is charming. Restaurant Mieux also has a very good wine list.

The bistro, which opened last May, is the project Baptiste Bayle, Giulian Maiuri and Thomas Bonnel, three nice guys who did all of the work of renovating this space themselves, including pouring a cement bar, buffing the Fifties tiles they discovered when they pulled up the floorboards, combing flea-markets for the great-looking bric-a-brac and chairs from a French school that gives this place its homey atmosphere and renovating a secondhand Spaziale coffee machine, which is now used to make great java with Brûlerie de Belleville beans. Guilian, who formerly worked at the Maison Breguet and the Trianon Palace in Versailles, heads up the kitchen.

I first noticed Restaurant Mieux on the way home from doing some errands in the rue des Martyrs, and immediately liking its look and menu, I went in and booked for dinner for me and Bruno that same night. And I marveled at how gastronomic my own neighborhood has become, and in just the terms I like best—intelligently creative contemporary French bistro cooking that highlights carefully sourced seasonal produce and spins on an axis of sincerity and generosity.

Little did I know that the 9th Arrondissement would emerge as one of the best restaurant neighborhoods in Paris when we crossed the Seine from the tiny apartment where we once lived on the rue du Bac and bought our first, and then second, apartments in this arrondissement. But the 9th has turned into a sweet-spot location for restauranteurs, because the offices in this central Paris district assure a busy lunch crowd and then the food-loving locals and tourists from the growing numbers of hotels in this charming part of the city take over in the evening.

Arriving, the welcome was warm and the service immediately warm and alert but relaxed, which explained why the dining room was filled with such a cross-section of residents of the district once known as La Nouvelle Athenes, because so much of its architecture was originally inspired by ancient Greece when this part of the city was first developed from 1819 onwards. During the 19th century, this quartier was popular with artists, writers, musicians and actors, including George Sand, Eugène Delacroix, Alexandre Dumas, Frederic Chopin, Victor Hugo, Théodore Géricault, Pissarro, Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin. It was also known for being a neighborhood of kept women.

This arty liberal tradition lives on in the 9th, which is still home to many writers, photographers, artists, musicians and other creatives, and it’s that increasingly endangered but wonderful thing—a peaceful and unselfconscious historic neighborhood in the heart of a great western city. Gentrification is making it more affluent, but the social tone happily remains unchanged.

The menu here runs to three starters, three main courses and three desserts, sometimes more, which change regularly to reflect the kitchen’s desire to cook spontaneously. “The produce writes the menu here,” our waiter told us when he came to take our order.

On the first night of the year when there was an early autumnal chill in the air and after a summer of salads, I started with the homemade terrine of chicken livers and pork, with the livers adding an earthy unctuousness and the pork some carnal resonance and bite, which came with pickled onions and carrots. Bruno’s bonheur was the veal tartare made with marscapone and seasoned with crushed roasted cashews—an excellent idea, chervil and chives. And because we’d both been curious about the other starter that night, the waiter thoughtfully brought us a little tasting plate of the tomatoes with watermelon, cucumbers, feta, mint and Kalamata olives, a wonderfully refreshing dish that tasted like a happy souvenir of a summer vacation in the Greek Islands.

Our main courses were outstanding, too. Bruno’s free-range pork chop from the Auvergne was succulent and garnished with coarse ground polenta and roasted carrots from the Ile de France and a wonderful saute of wild mushrooms. I was tempted by the risotto with sage butter, zucchini and smoked ricotta, but  I’ve lived in Paris for too long to ever to order this dish in a restaurant I don’t know, because the rice is unfailingly overcooked. So I ordered with maigre (croaker fish) with potatoes, cabbage and clams in seaweed butter, and it was so skillfully cooked that I wouldn’t hesitate to trust the kitchen with rice the next time I come here. Portions were so generous that all we could manage at the end of the meal was a shared portion of stewed juicy ruby-red peche de vigne—the world’s best peaches, with lemon-verbena ice cream and hazelnut crumble. An excellent selection of cheeses was also available.

Restaurant Mieux is a place where you can easily become a regular, and it’s a table I’d happily go on my own, since they have a few spots at the bar for solo diners who’d rather sit on a stool than at a table. It also has several large tables that accommodate groups of six, eight or twelve, which makes it a great choice for an easygoing night out over a very good meal with a group of friends. It’s solidly good but unpretentious restaurants like Mieux which assure Paris’s enduringly superlative gastronomic credentials.

21 rue de Saint-Lazare, Paris, 9th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01- 71-32-46-73.
Métro: Trinite or Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. Open Monday noon-6pm, Tuesday-Friday noon to 1am, Saturday 6pm-1am. Sunday noon-6pm. Lunch menus 21€ and 26€, average a la carte for dinner 40€. www.mieux-restaurant.com

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