Chef Franco Sampogna

Canvas by French painter Toma-L

After a superb dinner at Frevo, a wonderfully chic speak-easy restaurant tucked away behind an art gallery on Eighth Street, I was elated for three reasons. The first is that Brazilian born chef Franco Sampogna’s contemporary French cooking is so luminous and logical but sensual and succulent. Then there’s the easygoing stylishness of this intimate low-lit counter-style open-kitchen restaurant with eighteen seats at the stone-topped bar and a six-seat chef’s table and the terrific serving team, who hail from France, Portugal, Brazil, and even Connecticut, like me. This charming and talented staff exultantly showcases the fact that even in these tumultuous times, the U.S. remains a magnet for ambitious and talented people, in the best traditions of the country’s history. Finally, this restaurant proved to me that some thirty-three years after I’d folded the wretched sofa bed of my studio at 189 Waverly Place closed for the last time and moved  to Europe, Greenwich Village retains a vital wick of creativity despite the fact that it’s gentrified so much I probably could never live in the fabled neighborhood I’d once so loved ever again.

So Frevo is a votive candle of a restaurant that defends both New York City’s gastronomic credentials and its ability to incubate creativity through its defining DNA of curiosity, tolerance, and ambition. To understand the reasons why such an address is so especially uplifting in New York today, consider that two of the city’s great defining institutions Dean & DeLuca and Barneys are damaged and diminished for a variety of reasons explained in this excellent article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/nyregion/dean-deluca-barneys-bankruptcy.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage

Foie gras with dried fruit, pistachio and Nori ribbons

Acting on a heads up from a Parisian colleague who now lives in New York City–“This restaurant is really really good, Alec,” she told me, Bruno and I braved our jet-lag and headed downtown for dinner at  Frevo the night we arrived in the U.S. in early August. In the Fifth Avenue bus, I quietly hoped the prix-fixe tasting menu wouldn’t overwhelm us, since we were hungry but decidedly not in the mood for one of those twenty-course tasting menus that have become the bane of modern gastronomy in many European countries.

When I asked my Parisian colleague for more details, she explained that chef Franco Sampogna had had a brilliant career in France and most recently worked as a chef on Long Island and on private yachts. Sampogna moved to France when he was 17, went to hotel school in Nice, and then worked for a constellation of great French chefs, including  Fabrice Vulin at La Chèvre d’or, Guy Savoy at his namesake restaurant, and Alain Ducasse at the Hotel Plaza Athénée.

Arriving, the restaurant was hidden behind a vest-pocket art gallery displaying the works of French painter Toma-L, who takes his inspiration, the nice young woman in the gallery explained, from Joan Miró and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Then she opened a secret door behind one of Toma-L’s paintings and ushered us into the back-room.

Green peas with coconut foam and pistachios

Seated, the French sommelier started us off with a welcome pour of Chartogne-Taillet Saint Anne Champagne. These bubbles paired perfectly with a tangy amuse-bouche of crunchy quinoa salad, a nod at one of the signatures of Sampogna’s cooking, which is healthy eating. Then the meal debuted with a delightful composition of crabmeat, curry, and broccoli topped with Kaluga caviar. Legible, luxurious and bashfully elegant, this dish previewed the themes of the excellent five-course meal that followed.

It wasn’t just the food that made me happy here, though. Even if they came from all over the world, the crowd sitting belly up to the counter was a Greenwich Village crowd par excellence–friendly, unpretentious, nonchalantly stylish, witty, and hungry for life, whether with a five-dollar bill or a Platinum card packed in their pockets.

Chatting with Margot, a single middle-aged lady from Montreal on my right, she told me that she’d been feeling a bit blue after a divorce and had decided she needed “a dose of New York, because New York always works for me–I just love this city so much, always have, always will, ever since I arrived for the first time by bus after a horrendously long journey from the crap town I grew up in Quebec. That said, the Village has changed a lot, because of real-estate, yes, but also since it seems to me that people much younger than me don’t know how to have fun–they’ve lost all of their recklessness.”  I loved this observation, so I told her about the head-resting-on-a-roll-of-toilet-paper naps I’d take at lunchtime in a bathroom stall when I was an editorial assistant at Harper & Row and had come to work after a 45 minute nap and a shower following a night at Studio 54, and also one of my favorite summer nights in the Village. I was stumbling home from a bar around 3am on a night when it was probably 100 degrees F. A large crowd was gathered on the sidewalk in front of a building just before the fire house on Christopher Street and Greenwich Avenue. Curious, I joined them and asked someone what was going on. “Sshhhh!” she said.

So then I heard the wild moans of a woman and grunts of a man making love in an apartment with their windows wide open on a summer night back in the days when a lot of people, like me, could neither afford to buy an air-conditioner or operate one. The sensual panting and screaming rose and rose, and when the woman finally climaxed, the crowd below applauded and laughed. “What a lucky lady,” said the woman who’d hushed me when I arrived. The Montrealer loved this story and replied with one of her own about having sex on the steps of the Salvation Army building on 14th Street with the Pakistani man who’d just sold her a pack of cigarettes in an all-night shop. “My best idea Probably not, but such amazing sex for both of us.” So I love Greenwich Village as one of the world’s greatest urban neighborhoods and always will, just like Margot from Montreal.

Foam hating has become a trope of modern American food writing, but foam can actually be a perfect vector with which to convey flavor without resorting to a sauce. This is what passed through my mind as we tucked into an angelic dish of green peas from the Union Square market topped with tufts of coconut-milk foam–a shy nod by Sampagno at the cooking of his native Brazil, and pistachios. The peas were so fresh and sweet that even butter would have been superfluous, but intriguingly, the taste of coconut teased their herbaceousness and underlined their natural sugar.

Next, an impeccable Hudson River Valley foie gras made with dried figs, apricots and pistachios, and then the dish that put Sampogna’s haute cuisine credentials on full display–halibut with braised fennel in a fennel jus. The fish was perfectly cooked just past opalescent and had a pleasantly crispy skin, and the jus was a silken umami-rich stole that luxuriously flattered the fish without overwhelming its natural flavors. This was one of the most deeply satisfying dishes I’ve eaten in a longtime, because it was such a brilliant example of the camouflaged simplicity that is defining characteristic of the very best French haute cuisine cooking.

Colorado lamb was perfectly cooked and served with a lamb caillette, or patty of ground lamb, cracked wheat, roasted tomato and yogurt foam, and the meal concluded with a refreshing composition of lemon, lime and almond.

It wasn’t until we stepped back through the ‘secret’ door into the art gallery and then out on to Eighth Street that I fully realized just how far away this meal had transported us, since for three very happy hours we’d been inside a cosseting cocoon of chic with a cast of charming people who poured us spectacular wines and cooked us a sublime meal. Frevo is a delightful restaurant, and Samogna’s decision to try his luck in New York is very much France’s loss and America’s gain, since this very talented young chef has a brilliant future in front of him.

Frevo, 48 W 8th St, New York, NY 10011, USA, Tel: (001) 646-455-0804, Email: reservations@frevonyc.com, www.frevonyc.com  Open Tuesday to Saturday, 6-10pm; Tasting menu: $124 per person

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Pickles

On a warm summer night, Le Rigmarole turned out to be a perfect choice for dinner, because Franco-American chef Robert Compagnon’s small plates menu of yakitori, pastas, and tempura was light, bright, fresh and full of flavor. I’d been wanting to get to this place ever since it opened in October 2017, but frequent travel and the long hideouts needed to work on my latest book meant that this took some time. Well, the long wait was more than worth it.

I hugely enjoyed every single one of the nine dishes Bruno and I shared the other night, especially given the fact that our appetites were heat-wilted and balky. In fact, it was almost as though Compagnon had designed a menu that was especially intended to tantalise languid taste buds, since what’s on offer here is comfort food of the highest and most inventive order, and this is why I’ll be eagerly looking forward to eating here again very soon after a much needed summer vacation.

Robert Compagnon became obsessed by cooking with Japanese Bichotan charcoal while working at the famous Yakitori Tori Shin in New York City and decided to return to Paris and open a Yakitori bar of his own. What makes Le Rigmarole very different from the Japanese places that inspired it is that he cooks with superb French produce and is also serious pasta-lover. Also, co-owner Jessica Yang is a very talented pastry chef who formerly worked for Guy Savoy in Paris and at Rebelle and Per Se in New York City, and the delightful Crislaine Medina who runs the front of the house, has helped the owners put together a really excellent wine list, including the lush biodynamic Buteo Gruner Veltliner from Austria that we chose to accompany our meal.

And a quick note here for anyone who might be unfamiliar with Bichotan charcoal. It’s an exceptionally high quality charcoal made from oak and chefs prize it because it burns at a lower temperature than ordinary charcoal for a longer period of time and it doesn’t release any odors, which means that the char on foods cooked over it is strictly the natural flavor of that particular food. This creates a much cleaner finer taste than traditional charcoal.

The menu at Le Rigmarole runs to some twenty small plate dishes meant for sharing, including fish, poultry, meat, vegetables and pastas. You can also order a chef’s tasting menu, but since I’ve become very weary of this gastronomic trope, which is a fixture of young Paris Master Chef type chefs and la bistronomie, or the modern bistro movement, we decided to order a la carte. After all, I know what I feel like eating of a given meal and choice is one of the pleasures of going to a restaurant.

So we chose nine different dishes, and our meal began with a pleasant assortment of pickles–radishes, carrots and turnips, and then a baby red-onion tempura that was one of the best things I’ve eaten all year. I’ll come right out with it–even after over thirty years in Paris, I still have an atavistic love of certain low-brow American comfort foods, like onion rings, for example. I love onion rings, and well, these were onion-ring nirvana–such light tempura batter on quarters of tender sweet baby onions with a sprinkling of salt and red pepper brought on bliss. Next, a perfect chunk of salmon yakitori in a dipping sauce of herbed yogurt with a dribble of olive oil, another excellent dish, because the dominant flavor here was that of the firm and very fresh fish.

It was sort of interesting to try and decipher the logic with which the dishes we’d ordered came out, because there definitely was one, and ultimately it shaded from quieter flavors to more assertive ones and then sometimes back again, like a nice little melody After the frank taste of the salmon, for example, the homemade spaghetti with cockles and sea urchin sauce that followed with luscious and umami rich to make it one of the best pastas I’ve ever eaten in Paris.

Next, a pause–skewers of chicken breast with basil leaves and chopped pickled lemon, a brilliant cameo of a dish where every element retained its gustative integrity but played in a charming little skit of different tastes that winsomely flattered each other–the barnyard succulence of the chicken was gently awakened by the heat dimmed basil and flattered by the lemon. This was a brilliant little miniature.

Roasted round zucchini with charred skin and a half a lobster with spingoli pasta followed, and then curls of pork breast cooked on bamboo skewers yakitori style. All three dishes were excellent, especially the lobster, where the flesh of crustacean from Chausey in the English Channel was just pearled, or cooked enough so that it wasn’t raw but was still incredibly succulent and almost crunchy. Our last dish–pork polpette (meatballs) had great base notes that came from the pig’s liver and was politely feral.

Blissfully well fed, we couldn’t manage dessert this time round, but I’m eager to discover Yang’s talent the next time I come here.

An just FYI, Le Rigmarole is open until August 12, and the closes for the summer holiday from Augsut 13-September 11, during which time the team will travel to Taiwan and Tuscany in search of new inspiration.

10 Rue du Grand Prieuré, 11th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-71-24-58-44, www.lerigmarole.com Open for dinner only from Wednesday to Sunday. Average a la carte 50 Euros, chef’s tasting menu 49 Euros.

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Chef Tomy Gousett @Pierre Lucet Penato

Savoury pancake with guanciale, Peconio, arugula @ Alexander Lobrano

Chef Tomy Gousset’s friendly new restaurant Hugo & Co is exactly the the type of place the Latin Quarter in Paris has been wanting for a longtime, because it’s such a delicious reflection of the neighborhood itself. To wit, this lively little place serves up a cosmopolitan menu of affordably priced small-plates comfort food that are made for sharing, service is young and good-natured, and there’s a great wine list. So it was no surprise then that it was packed with a mixture of academics, creative professionals, students and travelers when I went for dinner the other night. “We already have lots of clients who come several times a week,” our smart and outgoing waiter told us once we’d settled in at one of the tables that faces the caramel-colored leather banquette which lines one wall of the room and ordered a glass of wine.

It had been a while since I’d come to this part of town, the 5th Arrondissement, for a meal, too, since as the neighborhood has gentrified, it’s become too expensive for most students. Today, the 11th and 10th Arrondissements have become the youngest and liveliest districts of the city. The reason for this is their more affordable rents, both for apartments and commercial spaces, which explains why these arrondissements are also now where most young chefs going out on their own set up shop.

My first apartment in Paris was on the rue de la Sorbonne in the 5th Arrondissement, and back in those days several decades ago, the neighborhood brimmed with great inexpensive foreign tables like Au Coin des Gourmets, a reliable Vietnamese place in the rue Dante; a couple of good bistros– the late lamented Moissonier and Au Moulin a Vent, for example; and, for meals with visiting friends from out of town, the Brasserie Balzar, which had decent food, great people watching and a charming atmosphere created by its natty tweedy professorial clientele, long-serving waiters, cantilevered mirrors that encouraged flirting, and the wonderfully ugly art-nouveau vase of flowers on the bar (N.B. I stopped going to the Balzar ages ago, since the food has declined and the atmosphere had been dented during a period of corporate, penny-pinching ownership; now, though, it has a new owner, so I’m hoping for a renaissance at this long-running Left Bank address, a place for which I once had so much affection).

Crostini with avocado, red radish and Parmesan @ Pierre Lucet Penato

With the exception of the Balzar, though, which inexplicably became popular with fashion people in the eighties and early nineties, the 5th Arrondissement was, with the exception of La Tour d’Argent, never a destination arrondissement for seriously gastronomic eating.

Looking at the menu at Hugo & Co, however, my first thought was that this might change, since what’s on offer is so alluring while avoiding the dulling cliches of la bistronomie, or modern French cooking. We decided to share three starters–a savoury pancake with guanciale, Pecorino and arugula; marinated salmon with passionfruit sauce, hashed beets and toasted rice; and some strachiatella with ramps, gomasio, and black olives. If all of them were excellent, the pancake was the real stand out, since it was exactly the kind of dish you known you’ll end up permanently craving, a nicely crusted pancake topped with crispy curls of guanciale, grated Pecorino and a scattering of arugula leaves. The strachiatella was delicious scooped up with the good bread served here, and though quieter and less original, the salmon was pleasant, too. What we really liked in all three of these dishes was the way they skated across a variety of different cultures and palates to create something original that had a flawlessly appetising logic.

Over dinner, I told Bruno about my first apartment, a one-bedroom that had padded coral-fabric covered walls, a ratty little kitchen with a double hot plate, and a bathroom with bubble-gum pink fixtures. Suffice it to say that it was the best I could come up with during a one-day hunt with a lupine real-estate agent. I rented it furnished, and it only became just slightly habitable after I’d put all of the lady dermatologist owner’s china figurines and dusty plastic flowers in a coat closet and hung a couple of paper globe lamps that I bought for a few francs from a Chinese notions store nearby. But it was right across the street from La Sorbonne, and it used to fascinate me to peer into the class rooms across the street and see the professors lecturing to orderly rows of students sitting upright at their desks. And even in a bower afflicted by such dubious taste, it was thrilling to slowly but surely hatch a new life for myself in Paris. Little did I know at the time that the roots of this fledgling attachment to my new city would grow so deep that I would end up living here for over half of my life. I’m very lucky.

Next, I tucked into a Tonkatsu style breaded pork cutlet topped with a fried egg in a pool of hoisin sauce with a garnish of pickled red cabbage and black rice, and Bruno enjoyed braised beef cheeks with grilled asparagus and panisses (fried chickpea-flour bars). While we were eating, chef Tomy Gousset did a round in the dining room, stopping to chat amiably at almost every table.

I’ve known the Cambodian born Gousset’s superb cooking every since he returned to France after a stint cooking at Daniel Boulud’s restaurant Restaurant Daniel in New York City and took over the kitchen at Pirouette in Les Halles. I’ve also admired his food at his eponymous table Tomy, which he opened in the 7th Arrondissement when he left Pirouette, but I didn’t know that he’d gone to the Ecole Ferrandi and then cooked with Alain Solivérès at Taillevent and Yannick Alleno at the Hotel Meurice.

“New York was so important for me. I really loved it, the kitchens of so many different countries intersecting, the whole idea of the laid-back no-limits urban bistro. I learned so much there,” Gousset told us, adding, “Hugo & Co is all about having a good time.” That’s a pretty perfect way of summing this place up, too.

We finished off our excellent bottle of white Dao while sharing an order of warm madeleines with lemon zest and a light lemon custard dipping sauce, a charming dessert, and stepped out into a rainy Spring night knowing we’d come back here again soon, too.

48 Rue Monge, 5th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 09-53-92-62-77, Metro: Cardinal Le Moine or Place Monge. Open Monday-Friday for lunch and dinner. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Average 35 Euros. www.tomygousset.com

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In taking over the kitchen at Racines, a charming bistrots a vins ( a bistro that specializes in wines) in the Passage des Panoramas, talented chef Simone Tondo returns to his roots in more ways than one. Just after arriving in Paris, Tondo worked alongside chef Sven Chartier when the latter ran the kitchen here, so this new chapter in his career is a homecoming of sorts. And then there’s the chalkboard menu, which offers a brilliant market-driven selection of mostly Italian dishes, including several from Tondo’s native Sardinia (many of the wines are Italian, too).

Happily, these dishes display the same earnest, endearing, elegantly earthy style of suave comfort-food cooking that is Tondo at his best. In fact at lunch there the other day, I found his food to be more confident and more assured than ever, which makes for a change from the last time I sampled his cuisine. To wit, Tondo recently had an eponymous restaurant in the 12th Arrondissement where I found his bistronomique (modern French bistro cooking) cuisine too complicated and lacking the imprint of his personality to be really convincing. To be sure, the food he cooked there was good, because he’s an excellent cook, but I missed the sheer charm and amiability of the dishes I ate the first time I discovered his cooking some six years ago.

Grilled langoustines @ Alexander Lobrano

After working in a variety of kitchens, including Cracco in Milan, Mirazur in Menton and with Giovanni Passerini at Rino in Paris, Tondo first really came on the Paris dining scene in 2012 when he launched an excellent restaurant, Roseval, deep in the 20th Arrondissement with British chef Michael Greenwold (today it’s called Dilia). Dining there with friends on an early summer night, we were dazzled by the excellent produce, imaginative culinary constellations of taste and texture, and the stunningly precise cooking times this pair managed to achieve in a tiny  galley kitchen. The dish that stopped the conversation that evening was one I still crave–a gossamer puree of smoked potatoes with sautéed onions, baby clams and a crunchy veil of buttered bread crumbs. The crustaceans’ juices spiked the potato and the crumbs added some provocative texture to a dish that was apparently angelic, but stealthily quite sensual. Sliced sirloin with anchovy cream and riced and pureed cauliflower and a scattering of fresh tarragon leaves strewn across the plate was outstanding, too, as was pork with smoked eggplant, pomelo, fingerling potatoes and dill.

I ate often at Roseval until the pair of chefs went their own ways and sold up, with Tondo eventually opening his own place in the space formerly occupied by Gazetta, the contemporary bistro of chef Peter Nilsson in the 12th. And now following that adventure, it was a pleasure to find Tondo in this charming new setting with the delightful Stephanie Rockford running the dining room.

While we were settling in over very good glasses of Chenin Blanc, Tondo sent us a pair of grilled langoustines to nibble on, and they were superb–napped with excellent olive oil, perfectly cooked, delicately perfumed with rosemary. And so we ended up sampling all of the first courses on the menu that day, including a gorgeous Mozzarella, treviso with speck and a superb plate of Italian charcuterie, including some of finocchiona, or fennel-seed seasoned salami, that’s reason alone to buy a plane ticket to Italy. Not pictured: the best polpette (meatballs) I’ve ever eaten.

While we were enjoying these starters, it occurred to me that Tondo has picked up exactly where Pierre Jancou, the trend-setting founder of Racines, left off when he sold the place. To wit, the kitchen here is based on excellent seasonal produce prepared in such a way as to enhance its natural tastes. The brute goodness of nature was the axis of Jancou’s cooking here, and Tondo has revived this gastronomic orientation, with the additional skill of having a native’s knowledge of the Italian produce he serves and prepares.

And it was while tucking into Tondo homemade pasta with a stunningly good tomato-sausage sauce that I found myself thinking that we’re hungry for real food again. Not chef’s food, not swirls and pearls and powders and fronds, but the type of food that’s cooked with love in family kitchens. That’s what Tondo is offering here, and it’s quite wonderful. My more calorically cautious pal enjoyed her seared scallops with mesclun, too.

Lavishly well fed by the end of his meal, because Tondo is such a reflexively generous cook and host, we decided to share a single dessert. And because my friend probably knows more about dessert than anyone else I’ve ever met, I let her chose one for us.

Truth be told, I wasn’t that excited when she went for the tiramisu, probably because I’ve had so many mediocre ones along the way. But she hit real bull’s eye with this one, because she said, “This is really exceptional. It’s so light, and it shows that a dessert which has become a stereotype can be wonderful again if it’s made with great produce and care.” The great produce in this case is a special marscapone that Tondo imports from Italy himself, and he whipped it into such an airy lactic cloud that it might have blown right off the plate if a stiff breeze had come along. Dusted with good cocoa, it was delicious.

With a terrific list of natural and organic wines, and Stephanie Crockford’s lovely service style and great sense of humor, Racines is just the kind of place where it would be easy to become a regular. So bravo to Simone Tondo, who is cooking better than ever.

8 Passage des Panoramas, 2nd Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-40-13-06-41. Metro: Bourse or Richelieu-Drouot . Open for lunch and dinner from Monday to Friday. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Average meal 35 Euros. www.racinesparis.com

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@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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Inspite of its dopey name, Kult, the stylish but easygoing restaurant in the just-opened hotel Le Saint, is a welcome new option for good casual dining in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Surprisingly, the restaurant offer in this storied Left Bank neighborhood, the most loved district of Paris for upmarket visitors to the city, is relatively meager. To wit, if you want a good French meal within a five-to-ten-minute walk of the Cafe Deux Magots or the Cafe de Flore, your best choices are pretty much Fish La Boissonnerie, Semilla, Le 21 and, a little bit further afield, the excellent Cafe Trama on the rue du Cherche Midi.

The good-looking new hotel Le Saint was created from a legendary local hotel, the Hotel Lenox, a place I loved, because I lived there for three months in a beautiful duplex suite at the expense of the publishing company I was working for when I first moved to Paris. Day in and day out, the Lenox offered me, a gangly unknowing neophyte, lessons in the ways of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the neighborhood which remains the boiler-room of a certain eternal style of that distinctively Parisian off-center bourgeois chic the world just can’t get enough of.

So what did I learn there in those early days Oh, well, lots of things, but among them, the fact that true beauty is always flawed, personal and a tiny bit eccentric. That charm comes from a dared but never excessively scrutinized mixture of social confidence, verbal wit, graciousness and self-deprecation. And that even if it isn’t always easy, it’s better to listen for a long time rather than to speak too quickly. Oh, and also that opposites are always style friends, as in cheap and expensive, new and old, and bold and conservative. H & M and Hermes, Marks & Spencer and Comme des Garcons, mais pourquoi pas?

My gastronomic lessons in the neighborhood were of less importance, since even in 1986, Saint-Germain-des-Prés wasn’t exactly heaving with good bistros aside from the long gone but still much missed La Cafetière in the rue Mazarine. That said, my take away from Saint-Germain-des-Prés was an infinitely valuable lesson about great French food, which is that the true axis of this country’s exalted cuisine is a triumph of exceptionally good seasonal produce cooked simply.

So after I was seated on a stripped velvet banquette at the end of the bar and watching the bar tenders slowly, slowly, slowly mixing drinks, I wondered, would Kult ‘get’ the food ways of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, or would it be a silly gimmicky place like the Costes brothers glamorous but mediocre La Société?

Even before I glanced at the menu, my expectations were hopeful, however, since I’ve always liked the clean, lucid, well-focused cooking of chef Guillaume Monnet, who cooks at L’Affable, a pleasant nearby modern bistro. He drew up the menu at Kult and put its staff and suppliers in place.

So Monnet knows and understands the eating habits of the locals, or that ur Parisian mix of fashion people, politicians, antique dealers, book editors, expats, and famous faces (Catherine Deneuve, Bernard Henri Levi, etc.) but is also savvy enough to factor the cravings of worldly, wealthy tourists into the mix when he draws up a menu, too. What these people have in common is that they know they should eat healthy but also like to spoil themselves a bit and also love sophisticated but unpretentious comfort food.

So I’d already decided that at the end of a serious bear of a stress-ridden day, I’d throw calories to the winds with foie gras and grilled onions, a superb combination, and then go with a primally pleasing steak tartare with homemade frites when Bruno finally galloped through the door and walked right past me, because he’s getting used to new pair of glasses. He needed a cocktail, we needed a cocktail, and so we did. And they were good, even if the craft aspect of bar-tending always means they take too long to arrive.

Soothed by his Manhattan, Bruno chose the tuna tataki with beets and horseradish cream and the ginger spiked duck breast with carrots and an unexpectedly successful sweet-and-sour sauce. Both of our starters were excellent, since the charred onion gently tempered the barnyard richness of my foie gras and picked onions teased the earthiness of Bruno’s beets and back-stopped the fleshy iodine-rich tuna.

My steak tartare was excellent, or just that carnivore thing you want to eat when you need iron and minerals and don’t have the attention to offer to the elegance of sauce or the flirtatiousness of an unexpected spice or herb. What made it original, though, was the chopped dried fig that had been folded into the meat, an interesting idea that would have been even more effective if it had been a little more subtle, i.e, the fig was too present, since I didn’t really want anything to blunt the taste of my beef.

On the same wave-length of urgent appetite but with a little more wit was Bruno’s duck breast, which came with a lightly crispy skin that had basted the meat with its earthy, flavor-rich fat but was still cooked juicy. Our garnishes were perfect, too–a few salad leaves and double-cooked fries for me, ginger boosted carrot puree for Bruno. I finished up with an unremarkable cheese plate–a shame when you have cheese shops like Quatrehommes and Barthelemy so nearby, but Bruno was pleased with his poached pear with speculoos crumbs (these Belgian spice cookies are the Old World equivalent of graham crackers)  and vanilla ice cream.

Surrounded by an intriguingly Saint-Germain-des-Pres crowd, including a well-known politician with his ambitiously busty transgender girl friend, and an antiques dealer who surprised me by coming to dinner with a wife I didn’t know he had–his boyfriend, however, I’ve known for years–this casual table delivered exactly the kind of uncomplicated good-quality contemporary French meal we’d come here hoping to find. I expect that it will become very popular very quickly, too.

Kult, Hotel Le Saint, 3 rue du Pré aux Clercs, 7th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-42-61-01-51, Metro: Rue du Bac or Saint-Germain-des-Pres. www.lesainthotelparis.com Lunch menu 28 Euros, Dinner menu 38 Euros. Open Tuesday to Saturday for Lunch and Dinner; closed Sunday and Monday.

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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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Maigre (croaker fish) in nasturtium sauce with shaved radishes

Clover, Jean-François Piège‘s new table in  Saint-Germain-des-Prés, is the bistro this storied Left Bank neighborhood has been wanting for a longtime. Think of this intimate forty-square meter place as sort of a post-modern Brasserie Lipp, or a place that offers a deep experience of the moods and mores of this chic and still intellectually vibrant part of Paris. Happily, however, they part ways entirely when it comes to their menus, since Piège’s witty, delicious and intriguingly wholesome contemporary French cooking couldn’t possibly be more different from the generally tired and over-priced brasserie standards served at Lipp, a handsome but faded local institution that’s stood still as such fashion-alert places like the Emporio Armani Caffé and Ralph’s have succeeded in luring away its clientele of editors and style mavens. What they have in common, though, is the way they present a cameo version of the neighborhood–sepia-toned and contemporary, respectively, and distill its allure into a restaurant experience.

Piège’s take on Saint-Germain-des-Prés is worldly, stylish, convivial and decidedly gourmand. It’s also very personal. When he told me about the project last summer, he said he wanted to create a place that was “homey, warm and a little bit like a club, a place where people who love good food might make new friends.” This was very much my experience when I went to dinner here with Bruno a few days after it opened the week before Christmas. Piège’s delightful wife Elodie greeted us with a warm smile when we entered this very intimate place with an intriguing decor of walls covered half in white tile, half with diamond-shaped wooden marquetry. The produce the kitchen was using that evening was handsomely displayed as a set of still lives inside of two glass-fronted stainless steel cabinets, and beyond the long row of tables lining the wall, a crew of cooks was busily at work in the kitchen, which is completely open and takes up most of the back of this long narrow space.

No sooner than we were seated, our neighbors to my left, a very friendly couple from Montpellier, struck up a conversation, explaining that they’d come to Paris specifically to eat at the restaurant, because it was Madame’s birthday and Madame has always loved Piège’s cooking. Anyone who knows Paris well knows that this is not a common occurrence in a Paris restaurant, and so I was even more surprised when the young couple on the other side of us engaged us in conversation just as the first course in a menu of seven arrived, puffed roasted quinoa wafers and black-sesame-and-eggplant puree, which were pleasant nibbling with a glass of Champagne. They’d read about the restaurant in Le Figaro, and also fans of Piège’s, they’d booked right away as well.

When we finally resumed our own conversation with the arrival of a second course, a ‘foie gras without the gras,’ or a rich liver pate served on a wooden cutting board with fine slices of homemade cured pork belly, toast, and decorative sprigs of spruce, Bruno spoke to me in English: “Quite a friendly place, isn’t it#8221; I knew he feared we might be over engaged by our neighbors throughout the meal, but the two couples had astute psychic antennas enough to leave us in piece when we began eating this interesting composition of tastes and textures.

A little silence also allowed me to muse even this early in the meal that Piège had devised an entirely different cooking style for this restaurant from those at his two other tables, Thoumieux, a stylish modern brasserie, and the superb Restaurant Jean-Francois Piège, both in the 7th Arrondissement on the rue Saint Dominique. Demonstrating a keen understanding of the gastronomic preoccupations that make Germano-Pratins (as residents of Saint-Germain-des-Prés are known) tick, this bold modern kitchen is clearly seeking to reinvent the Rabelaisian pleasures of traditional French bistro food for a new era that’s increasingly attuned to environmentalism and good health; this means, of course, a diet that includes much less meat, or perhaps banishes it altogether, and more organic vegetables, whole grains and seafood from sustainable fisheries.

This is not an easy thing to do, of course, since much of the consoling richness of great old-fashioned bistro cooking comes from the French genuis for rendering the juices, collagen and fat of meat into sauces. As I’ve experienced at other Paris restaurants where chefs are grappling with the same challenge, the most present danger in this new cuisine of admirably good intentions is that it can often look or taste austere. This is not the case at Clover, which may be the most successful restaurant in Paris today in terms of the doubly virtuous diet (it’s good for you and for the earth). Piège’s cooking is provocative, since it often ventures away from anything familiar, but deeply considered and as reverent of Gallic culinary tradition as it is attuned to the new realities that are changing, and which will continue to change, the way we eat now and in the future.

So with all of this in mind, I was surprised by how delicious the food became after a quiet and somewhat ascetic debut. Meaty little mussels anointed with horseradish cream–a brilliant idea, since it flattered their sweetness by providing it with a foil–came on a plate-sized shoreline decorated with slices of the big green globe radish that’s at the top of vegetable style charts in Paris this winter, and then a French take on shabu-shabu cooking–a big hot block of pink granite on a stainless steel platter–arrived crowned by a pair of shucked scallops on a bed of red-beet jam. Next, a small steamed filet of maigre (croaker fish) garnished with shaved radishes in a vivid yellow chive-flecked pool of gently astringent nasturtium jus.

Up to this point, our meal had been more or less fat-free, so it was a small thrill to spend some of this gastronomic virtue on an exquisitely made wild duck tourte, which came to the table with a small salad of frisee and received a sexy shower of black truffle shaved table side before we tucked in. The buttery pastry dome elongated the pleasure of the duck meat, gizzard, and foie gras filling, which was gently earthy and perfectly textured.

And the trope of gastronomy that’s good for you made a triumphant but delicious closing statement with dessert, which was a baked jumbo sweet banana squash from Joël Thiébault that had been drizzled with rum and vanilla before being oven-roasted and which came to the table with freshly made custard ice cream and caramelized crumbs and toasted pumpkin seeds.

Piège says that he’ll be constantly revising the menu at Clover, a name he chose because he’s a collector of four-leaf clover objects, and that he finds it “challenging but exciting” to be inventing a new healthy and distinctly French style of bistro cooking. “I think it will be possible to retain and enhance all of the things Parisians have always loved about bistros and bistro cooking, but adapt them to a new century,” says the chef, and we’re the ones who’ll be lucky enough to find out how he’ll continue to do this as this excellent little restaurant grows.

Restaurant Clover, 5 rue Perronet, 7th Arrondissement, Tel. 01-75-50-00-05. Metro: Saint-Germain des Prés, Mabillon or Rue du Bac. Closed Sunday and Monday. Lunch menus 28€ and 42€; Dinner menus 58€ and 73€ www.jeanfrancoispiege.com 

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Though Gare au Gorille is both a bad pun** and the title of a 1952 song by French musician Georges Brassens, what you really need to know is that it’s also the name of a charming and very good new bistro in the Batignolles district of the 17th Arrondissement in Paris. And that this engaging address comes with an impressive pedigree  which really delivers, since chef Marc Cordonnier was formerly Bertrand Grébaut’s sous-chef at Septime, where his business partner and good-natured maitre d’hotel Louis Langevin was sommelier and picked up the relaxed but gracious serving style created at that restaurant by Théo Pourriat. Finally, if you have any interest in dining here any time soon, it might be a good idea to take a pause and pick up the phone, since it’s very quickly become almost as popular was Septime itself. Be forewarned that they don’t answer during serving hours, which can make it even more of a vexing challenge to snag a table here, too..

Having persisted, I bagged a table and found myself walking up the rue de Rome on a rainy night to meet Bruno for dinner. Despite its grand name, this street parallels the broad, deep, stone-lined train cut that leads into the Gare Saint Lazare, and several times I stopped to watch the wonderful urban spectacle created by an arriving or departing train. Since every lit window in every train car framed a miniature portrait on someone on a journey, there was something winsomely fascinating about these metropolitan film strips, which also brought Eadweard Muybridge to mind. Many people seem to find this scenery a bit drab, but not me. Instead, I found myself envying the people who occupied a high apartment with a large artist’s studio window overlooking the tracks, since the promise of travel, the fact of travel has been such a life long passion of mine. With no train ticket in my pocket that night, I was, however, looking forward to a good meal, but found myself vaguely wondering if this popular new spot would be one of those places where I’d encounter a display of bored and sort of slatternly hauteur from the young staff for being fifteen minutes late.

Happily, nothing could have been further from the case. As soon as I stepped in the door to this warm rail-carriage-like room with white walls, a stone floor accented with black slate spades, suspension lamps with Edison bulbs and a couple white tabled tiles up front by the service bar at the head of the dining room, the welcome was warm and service was cheerful, informative and prompt. In fact it was some of the best service I’ve had in Paris in a long time and made me think yet again that a new generation of restaurant owners and their staffs have coined a terrific new style of Gallic hospitality that’s warm without being familiar, alert without being intrusive, consistently well-informed and charmingly good-humored. So maybe we can put out to pasture the dog tired idea of Parisians as being ill-tempered and off-handed once and for all. Since they’re not. These days, they’re most often lovely.

The dinner menu is constructed as a generous list of small plates, and then two more substantial meat entrees to be shared by two, and possibly garnished with pommes darphin, grated sauteed potatoes rather like a Swiss rosti but finer, and a butter-glazed vegetable plate. So we chose three small plates, and our meal began with a succulent composition of beef carpaccio, sea urchin tongues, pickled red onion, shaved cauliflower and mustard greens that looked like some kind of edible Christmas decoration and woke up to become something satisfying with the addition of a tiny pinch of requested sea salt. Next, one of the the best duck terrines I’ve had during all my years in Paris with a lush garnish of quince and garlic puree decorated with carrot coins. Rich, emollient and distantly redolent of the barnyard like any great terrine, this one was a homely Gallic triumph so good that we briefly considered ordering another portion.The arrival of a dish of coques (cockles) sauced with their own pimeton (smoked paprika) spiked juices and strewn with tiny chunks of chorizo and sliced shallots saw off that idea, because the succulent crustaceans were generously served and their taste profile tacted away from fine French farm food. As delicious cameos of modernity, tradition and cosmopolitan, this appealing trio beautifully summed up the range of the kitchen here, however. Refreshingly, Cordonnier, who trained at Alain Passard’s Arpege, is an experienced and adroit young chef who steers clear of the provocative style of his Top Chef (a French culinary television show that aspires to a king-making influence) anointed colleagues. Instead, his compass in the kitchen is the pleasure of his clients. Fancy that!

The aged Norman steak for two was a fine mineral rich slab of beef garnished with grilled shallots, and it was generous enough to tip us into a doggy-bag request (the leftovers became an excellent steak sandwich with a smear of Gold’s horseradish cream the next day). While we were eating, Bruno asked me a question that’s come over the transom a few times recently: “How do you chose which restaurants to review on your blog and which ones to mention on your Facebook page (HungryforParis,HungryforFrance) #8221; I explained that with dozens of restaurants opening in Paris every week, I review the ones I deem to be most important in longer format here, and mention other good ones on my Facebook page, which is more of a news feed.

So why did I chose Gare au Gorille The chef ‘s background was promising, the Batignolles neighborhood is emerging as a great new food destination in Paris, and I know that the world has an insatiable appetite for seriously well-prepared and fairly priced contemporary French bistro food. Gare au Gorille doesn’t pretend to be blazing new local food trends or making a statement, thank goodness, but instead aspires to feeding people well in a pleasant setting with very amiable and professional service.

In the interests of research and in deference to Bruno’s sweet tooth, we shared a slice of lemon tart garnished with miniature meringues and pomelo segments, and though it won’t find it’s way on to the cover of a food magazine anytime soon, it was nicely made and very satisfying. With an excellent wine list–we drank a terrific Greek red, a 2011 Oenos – Xinomavro Naoussa, and a convivial atmosphere in the dining room, Gare au Gorille will doubtless become just as popular as Septime, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be willing to continue making the necessary effort to land a table here, because this is exactly the kind of restaurant that inspires an instant desire to become a regular.

**Be careful of the gorilla

68 rue des Dames, 17th Arrondissement, Tel. 01-42-94-24-02, Metro: Rome, Open Tuesday-Saturday for lunch and dinner, Closed Sunday and Monday. Average lunch: 25€
Average dinner: 50€ for two small plates and a shared main course, without wine. 

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