Ever since I’ve had teeth, few foods have more reliably made me happy than pizza, and this is why the pizza at pizzaïoulo Giuseppe Cutraro new Peppe Pizzeria in the 20th Arrondissement not far from the Père Lachaise Cemetery made me ecstatic last weekend. With my appetite honed by the recent weeks of being locked up in my Paris flat, I was yearning for some really really really good pizza, because most of what was available through Paris food-delivery apps was pretty mediocre. And the inexplicable international popularity of several huge American pizza chains notwithstanding, there are few things sadder than mediocre pizza.

When I think about it, I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like pizza, because not liking pizza would be as life-threatening and pleasure-killing as saying you didn’t like flowers or kisses. But as a native of southwestern Connecticut, the original home of great pizza in the United States (I expect some cat calls and blow back for this assertion, but it’s true), I’m grew up as a pizza connoisseur, and that was long before I finally made it to Naples and had a first head-spinning experience of the real McCoy, the sultry and stunningly delicious Margherita–just dough topped with crushed tomatoes, mozzarella di buffalo, and a fresh basil leaf of two before a turn in the blister-inducing inferno of a Napolitan beehive pizza oven.

I’d been reading about this place in just before le confinement (quarantine) shut down almost every restaurant in Paris, and I’d decided I’d be willing to travel halfway across Paris to taste the pizza that had won Giuseppe Cutraro, aka Peppe, the “World Champion of Contemporary Napolitan Pizza 2019-2020.” (“The Art of the Napolitan Pizzaïoulo” has figured on UNESCO’s World Heritage list since 2017). To be perfectly honest, it sounded, well, strange. To wit, this pie was sauced with yellow Sicilian tomatoes, topped with mozarella di buffala and provolone, Tuscan ham aged for 36 months, almond slivers and fig jam. But before you conclude that I’m a hidebound purist, I’d quickly tell you that one of my all-time pizzas was and is the one served at Frank Pepe Pizzeria in New Haven, Connecticut, which is topped with little-neck clams from Rhode Island and is just stunningly good.

So “Hawaian  pizza” topped with ham and pineapple and pizzas topped with salad, any kind of salad–absolutely not, but if you respect the pizza as a sort of brilliant blank canvas awaiting the humble new gustatory brush strokes of a real artist, sometimes pizza innovation works out spectacularly well. Like Frank Pepe’s clam pizzas or Giuseppe Cutraro astonishing delicious ‘World Champion Pizza.” The reason this pizza is so good is the same reason that any dish anywhere in the world succeeds, which is that it offers such an exquisitely subtle but still legible compilation of tastes that unite in perfect harmony. The almonds Texture. The yellow tomato sauce Low-acidity to balance the sweetness of the sparingly applied fig jam. The two cheeses Different textures and salinities. Try it, you’ll like it is all I can say.

The other thing that makes Peppe Pizzeria’s pizzas so good is that they allow the dough, which is made from flour imported from Naples, to ferment before kneading it and slapping it around, so that the rolled crust is filled with air pockets and the base is exceptionally light and thin.

Peppe did a stint at Keste on Bleecker Street in New York City’s West Village and also worked in Switzerland before he came to Paris to work as a pizza-maker for the Big Mamma Group in Paris, which has seven Italian restaurants in the capital, one each in Lille and Lyon, and two in London. Peppe wanted his own place, though, so he opened at the end of January, and the restaurant had been packed at lunch and dinner until the lockdown came in mid-March.

Fortunately, however, it was easy to continue working on a takeout basis, so the place has thrived even during the challenging last few months. When we arrived to collect our two pizzas, an order of carpaccio with arugula and a tiramisu the other night there was a huge line of people waiting to collect their pizzas. So we bought two deliciously yeasty Napolitan beers and enjoyed the fresh air of a mild May evening until our order came up and we bolted back across Paris to tuck into our pizzas.

Ever since I ate the lone remaining slice of our Margherita for breakfast the following morning, I have been permanently craving this pizza and ruing the fact that Peppe Pizzeria doesn’t deliver. One way or another, I’ll be back again soon, and maybe next time I’ll try the truffle pizza, which is topped with “truffle cream” (hmmm….), sautéed mushrooms, fresh stracciatella from Puglia, crushed hazelnuts and freshly shaved Italian truffle. The ‘Piccante”–tomatoes from Puglia, mozzarella di buffalo di Campania, Calabrian spianata (spicy salami), pickled onion and shavings of Pecorino Romano DOP speaks to me, too. And a friend who lived nearby says that the gnocchi alla Sorrentina are outstanding, too.

I look forward to the day that we can dine in Peppe Pizzeria’s spacious dining room, too, but in the meantime, the friendly crew behind the tiled open kitchen should get used to seeing my pizza-loving face.

Peppe Pizzeria, 2 Place Saint-Blaise, 20th Arrondissement, Tel. 01-45-35-59-13. Metro: Gambetta or Porte de Bagnolet. Open Tues-Sun for lunch and dinner. Closed Monday. Average 30 Euros. www.peppepizzeria.fr

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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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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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Swordfish carpaccio with zucchini, raspberries and dill

Almost no adjective in a restaurant review makes me warier than the word ‘fun,’ because overtly ‘good-times’ type places often don’t take their food very seriously and attempt to hide this culinary weakness with loud music, low lighting and amped up cocktail menus. That said, I’ll cock a snook at myself and come right out with it: Daroco is probably more fun than any other new restaurant in Paris this summer. Why?

It occupies a beautiful space with a locally legendary fashion pedigree, i.e., the former Jean-Paul Gaultier boutique in the rue Vivienne. It also has an eye-catching off-beat vaguely tongue-in-cheek Miami-moves-to-Soho decor of high-backed royal blue velvet booths, white terrazzo floors (someday, somewhere, I’d love to live in a place with terrazzo floors, partly because it’s pretty and feels so good barefoot and partly so that I can channel the weekend invitation I foolishly turned down to Gore Vidal’s villa on the Amalfi coast a good twenty-five years ago when people were still trying to get me out of my Fruit of the Looms), and exposed brick walls. The most important part of the decor, however, are the good looking clearly carefully cast servers in striped Saint James sailor’s pullovers, a Gaultier signature, and the crowd itself, because this place has so quickly become the nexus the Parisian tribes that work in businesses which are mostly visual–photographers, fashion designers, web designers, advertising and PR types, plus a few lumbering folks from the ever diminished world of words and a gaggle of retailers, buyers and other professional trend spotters.

This restaurant is the latest creation of savvy restauranteurs Alexandre Giesbert and Julien Ross (Roco, Roca and Rococo), and it scores a bull’s eye in terms of what Parisians want to eat this summer, which is uncomplicated good quality Italian cooking. Think a short produce-driven menu that debuts with simple well-sourced, crowd-pleasing Instagram ready starters like swordfish carpaccio with zucchini, raspberries and dill or bosomy lactic burrata topped with toasted pine nuts and dribbled with pesto oil. The only starter that disappoints is their rendition of vitello tonnato, overcooked slices of veal with a nearly tasteless tuna cream sauce under a thatch of arugula with no capers.

In terms of main courses, there’s a veal chop and sea bream, three pastas–rigatoni alla Norma (tomato, ricotta and aubergine sauce), spaghetti with clams and shavings of rather extraneous bottarga, and a spaghetti carbonara, and then a long list of nicely made pizzas that are baked in a wood-burning oven. The classic Margharita is good, because of its tangy tomato sauce and the way that the heat of the oven melts the good quality mozzarella without causing it to lose all of its milkiness, but my favorite is the one topped with mozzarella, marinated broccoli rabe, and crumbled sausage; I could, in fact, eat one of these for lunch everyday.

Dining here with a wonderfully ravenous fashion PR friend from New York City, we shared the best starters and a pizza–hey, this woman really is my kind of a gal, before we both had a pasta. While sipping our excellent Sardinian white (the only one on the excellent wine list), we chatted, and Brett nailed the other thing that makes this restaurant so likeable. “Last night I had dinner at the Hotel Costes, and even though I still love the look of the dining room, the service is so up itself that it almost ruined the evening,” she said. “What’s fun here is that the waiters and waiters are really hot but friendly and attitude-free. Don’t you think that service with attitude, which has always been part of the boilerplate in the Costes restaurants, is just so nineties, so over#8221; Yup, I do, and I’d noticed exactly the same thing at Daroco. The staff is nice and alert without ever being in your face, and even when two older American men came through door wearing the kind of pastel stripped polo shirts and ventilated caps more appropriate to a Florida golf course (I suspect the came via a hotel concierge), the hostess was warm, welcoming and didn’t give into any possible temptation to raise an eyebrow or shoot a bemused and perhaps fleetingly snide look at a passing waiter.

My spaghetti carbonara was impressively well made, although the guanciale lacked the depth of potent bristly porcine flavor I crave when I eat it at Roscioli in Rome. Brett’s spaghetti was good, too, but suffered a bit from a surfeit of gummy shavings of bottarga. What works better with this produce is grating it, like they often do in Sardinia and Sicily, since the resulting powder distributes it more evenly and also allows a more judicious dosage of the pleasantly briny pressed and dried mullet eggs.

Eschewing the brief dessert selection, we had sublime espressos from Coutume Cafe, and then opted for a night cap of brilliantly mixed cocktails at Danico, the sexy bar in the very back of the restaurant instead.

Walking home after dinner, I found myself musing on one of the other satisfying things about the meal I’d just had a Daroco, which is that proves the vital good health of the Paris dining scene, and my theory that what makes it so uniquely wonderful is that rings of new gastronomic possibilities are being added to the city’s much love core offer of bistros, brasseries, white-table-cloth restaurants and haute-cuisine tables at a rate not seen in a very longtime. This means that in Paris, like London, L.A., Sydney and New York, you can now eat great Thai for lunch and then tuck into an excellent pizza for dinner. Where Paris continues to hold the ace, however, is that it still offers the world’s best and deepest offer of French cooking, both new and old, in all of its glory.

The English-speaking world’s insatiable appetite for traditional French cooking, or dishes like boeuf bourguignon, exasperates some younger food writers, who construe it as some kind of obfuscating culinary nostalgia, but the reality is that in Paris, I love the fact I can eat David Rathgeber’s (L’Assiette) cassoulet one night and Tatiana Levha’s (Le Servan) cockles in fish sauce the next.

6 Rue Vivienne, 2nd Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-42-21-93-71, Metro:  Open daily noon-midnight. Average 35 Euros. www.daroco.com

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Restaurant Passerini, which occupies a spare but handsomely renovated former cafe in the 12th Arrondissement of Paris near the Marche d’Aligre, one of my very favorite Paris markets, is not only the best new Italian restaurant in Paris but Europe. Now that’s a tall statement, Alec, you might think, but I know it’s true. Giovanni Passerini, the Rome born former chef of Rino, the delightful little bistro in the rue Trousseau where he first won his name and which is now closed, is so solidly talented that he would be a rising star in Italy if he still lived there. And though it’s not my subject here, Paris is on the brink of becoming a city that ranks on par with Rome and Milan as an ultimate destination for outstanding Italian cooking.

Why Well, briefly, Parisians love Italy perhaps more than other European country with the possible exception of Spain, and the current mode among young chefs in Paris for highest quality produce simply prepared to express its essential goodness is every bit as Italian as it is French. In fact, this is approach to cooking is probably even more Italian than it is French, because depending on the region of Italy, the Italians exalt a gastronomic simplicity that’s typified by dishes like a really good insalata Caprese (you know, of course–tomatoes, mozzarella, olive oil, basil, salt), an excellent pizza, or a great risotto.

Well, this is how Paris wants to eat right now–simply, with the alluring sideways twist that Italian cooking is also usually as full of flavor as it is low-fat. For me, this explains everything about the new gastronomic Italianophilia in Paris right now. And even though I rarely recommend foreign restaurants in Paris, because I believe most travelers come to the city bent on eating as much French food as possible, Restaurant Passerini is such a good restaurant that it completely warrants a meal on the carefully plotted dining schedule of even the most discerning Paris bound diner.

Chef Giovanni Passerini

“It’s a lot of pressure for me to represent Italian cooking in Paris,” Passerini said when we crossed paths when I went to his new digs for dinner the other night. But on the basis of the meal I shared with an asutely gastronomic friend  from LA who also lives in Paris, he has nothing to worry about. His food is superb, and the restaurant itself, which channels Gio Ponti and Olivetti, or the great days of Italian design in the Sixties, is a very pleasant space in which to have a meal, especially with its gray terrazzo floors. The only thing that could use some fine tuning is the service, which was regrettably impatient shading to aggressive and even impolite to us, people whose credentials for politeness are beyond all doubt. I worked in restaurants at another time in my life and my scales always bang down hard on the side of the one who’s standing not the one who’s seated, because I know how hard this work is. So was it really too much to expect that our bottle of wine be served before our first courses reached the table?

Happily, a more amenable waiter came to the rescue, and when an order of suppli–breaded deep-fried rice beignets stuffed with roast pork, cheese and tomato sauce arrived at the table, all was suddenly hugely right in the world, especially since we also loved our excellent natural wine from the Alto-Adige region. I’d never seen this ur Roman snack in Paris before, and it was not only thrilling to find it on home turf, but in a version that would be spectacularly good even by Roman standards.

Since our approach to a menu that induced a slightly frantic fit of gastronomic greediness–there were just so many things we wanted to try, we shared most dishes, including a plate of live baby langoustines sautéed in olive oil, garlic and red pepper with a little bit of tomato and some black olives. Here, the sauce was lovely, but the langoustines were either overcooked or past prime, since most of them were disappointingly pasty.

Since I knew Passerini had opened a fresh pasta shop near the Marche d’Aligre several months ago, I certainly wasn’t going to let the pasta course slip by, and the freshly tagliolini with red shrimp from Sicily, dried peppers from Crusco and sumac was easily the best pasta dish I’ve ever had in Paris. The texture of the pasta was springy and al dente, the Sicilian shrimp were sweet and succulent in a way no imported long-distance crustacean from Asia, Africa or Central America could ever be, and the addition of sumac–ever so slightly chewy, pungent, and fragrant with a perfume that mixes dried black cherries and tobacco with pine needles and roasted red peppers, was sublime.

After the hors d’oeuvres, starters, pastas and main courses, there is a large section the menu devoted to dishes to be shared among four or more, including brill with lemon sauce; turbot with lemon sauce; roasted pigeon; lobster; and whole ducks and guinea hens. Since all of these dishes would have been too much for us as a deuce, I doubled back to a starter for my main course–veal sweetbreads with spring vegetables that included lava beans and peas in a suavely acidulated sauce of cooking juices and citrus (lede photo in this post). Madame chose the exquisitely roasted Challans duckling with baby onions and olives. Both of these dishes again explained the heightened magnificence of Passerini’s Italian cooking in Paris, to wit, he uses the very best French produce with Italian culinary logic, and it produces some spectacular food.

We concluded with a cheese plate that would have been better had it included more of the great Italian cheeses that are still woefully under-represented in Paris, and the only dessert that night was a baba au rhum with unpasteurized ivory-colored cream and fresh strawberries.

If the service at this restaurant will doubtless benefit from some inevitable and necessary fine-tuning–almost every restaurant is a little ragged when it’s just out the gate, this table is a real gift to Paris and a poignant expression of how the French capital continues to attract, groom, discipline, teach and cherish the world’s most ambitious young chefs. We’re lucky that Giovanni Passerini is one of them.

Restaurant Passerini, 65 rue Traversière, 12th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-43-42-27-56, Metro: Ledru-Rollin, http://passerini.paris/  Open for lunch Wednesday to Saturday, dinner from Tuesday to Friday. Saturday night, the restaurant becomes an Enoteca, or wine bar, with no reservations and a small-plates menu. Average 45 Euros.

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In Paris, the new Salsamenteria di Parma is a very reasonably priced trattoria specialising in the delicious foods of Parma and the famously gastronomic Italian province of Emilia-Romagna. It’s an exceptionally clever and surprisingly good “fast casual” restaurant, too. I say surprisingly good, because for such honest well-cooked food made from expensive pedigreed mostly Emiglia-Romagnan produce the rapport-qualite prix (value for money) is especially impressive.

Beyond the quality of the food, I find this restaurant fascinating from a commercial and marketing point of view, too, because it so astutely satisfies the big demand for good, healthy, promptly served food in a large city like Paris with some welcome originality. The previously existing lunchtime offer in this 9th arrondissement neighborhood with many offices in the heart of Paris not far from the big department stores and the Opera Garnier ran to a dulling culinary refrain of gussied up burger joints trying and failing to sling a ‘Brooklyn’ attitude;  overpriced salad joints hiding their mediocrity behind jaunty graphics and insistent claims of healthy eating; sad Chinese traiteurs where the food sits in big aluminium trays inside of neon-lit glass cases, something that’s always made me wonder if there might not be a single huge factory somewhere in the suburbs of Paris cranking out these dishes in industrial quantities; and a couple of cafes still serving steak-frites type menus to that diminishing number of Gauls who still like a little glass or two of red wine with lunch and perhaps a Gauloise with their post-prandial coffee.

In contrast, the shopfront premises of Salsamenteria di Parma are decorated with big wheels of Parmesan over the bar and whole Parma hams hanging from hooks on the walls, and there’s a mixture of opera and sixties Italian pop on the soundtrack. The wooden tables are covered with the mustard-colored paper mats you often find in Italy and set with scodella (white china bowls) from which to drink your wine–most of the wines served here are Lambruscos and other rustic and rather raspy Emilia-Romagnan ones. The menu is structured to make it as easy to have a quick bite as it is to enjoy a larger fuller meal, including tempting offers of those foods urbanites around the world seem to love the most these days–garnished flatbreads, garnished salads, and pasta, and also features many dishes that are perfect for sharing, especially the charcuterie and cheese assortments.

To be honest, I doubt I’d have been tempted by this place if it hadn’t been chosen by a visiting friend from Milan who already knew and loved these restaurants for the simple reason of having been so very often disappointed by the Italian food in Paris (the latest letdown was La Comedia in the 5th Arrondissement, where the waiter tried to bully me into buying a 68 Euro bottle of Amazon with the promise of a ‘special gift’ and became sullen, even borderline rude when I declined this laughable suggestion; otherwise, the food here is served in buffoon-ishly massive portions to compensate for its mediocrity and lack of taste).  “This is real Italian, Alec,” insisted Anna. “The company is based in Parma, which I’m sure you know is the headquarters town of the Barilla group, and I think they’ve learned the good lessons of Barilla and avoided the bad ones.”

She’d also chosen this restaurant as the venue for a quick lunch during a one day visit to Paris, and because we hadn’t seen each other in a longtime, I went. Aside from the wine, it was very good. In the Italian tradition of the coperto (coverage charge), we paid one Euro for bread and salsina, a dipping sauce of pureed pepper. We also ponied up another Euro per portion the artichoke and red-onion-and-balsamic sauces. They were all good, as were the Caprese di Parma, freshly sliced Parma ham with mozzarella on a bed of arugula with red peppers in oil and the Poker di Culatello, a tasting plate of culatello ham and other charcuterie.

Anna works in fashion and she talked a blue streak about how much trouble the Italian industry is having competing with illegal copy-cat producers in Asia and hand-work in places like Morocco or Sri Lanka that costs a fraction of what it does in Italy. Finally, she sighed and said: “Well, the one thing they can’t copy is our food. Or maybe they can, but it won’t taste as good as it does when it’s real Italian.” She also told me a strange but revealing little anecdote about how her uncle, an eyewear designer, had lost his job working for a huge well-known Italian eyewear manufacturer, been out of work for four months, and was then contacted by the Chinese company that has been causing his former employer so many problems to work for them as a designer from his home in Ancona. “Un mondo cosi strani!” said Anna; ‘Such a strange world.’

Next we shared some pumpkin-filled tortelli with butter and grated Parmesan and a Maialata, a tasting plate of roasted culatello ham and two types of sausage with nicely made potato puree.

Served within the space of 75 minutes, the meal concluded with some chocolate ‘salami’–a loaf of chocolate, meringue, and hazelnuts, and two good coffees.

Walking home past the local salad bars, Chinese traiteurs, etc. I found myself wondering why no clever young Frenchman or French woman hasn’t conceptualised some branch of French cooking to appeal to the ‘fast-casual’ segment of the market. There are such rich possibilities to decline for such a concept from the regional kitchens of France, and since most of the 33 million tourists who make Paris the world’s most visited city would like to eat French food most of the time while they’re in town, it would seem that the market for such a product is huge.

It also occurred to me that the Italian concept as it now exists would also be a really big hit in the U.S., U.K., and most other European countries and would also work really well in airports and train stations, etc., so it has huge potential. So until the day that a French version of Salsamenteria di Parma comes into existence, I’ll happily return to this cheap and cheerful little restaurant when I have a request for a quick but satisfying lunch instead of a more leisurely traditional restaurant meal.

Aside from the fact that I’ll never be a fan of Lambrusco, or any other Emiglia-Romagnan wine for that matter, and the music was just a little too loud, I enjoyed this place and tip my hat to the clever team who invented this mini-chain of restaurants, since in Italy where the first one opened in Parma, there are now two branches in Milan, one in Cannes and this latest one in Paris, with more coming soon.

40 rue Saint-Georges, 9th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-48-24-58-94. Metro: Trinite d’Estienne d’Orvre, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette or Le Peletier. Average 20 Euros.  www.salsamenteriadiparma.com  Also in Cannes: 86 rue Meynadier, Cannes, Tel. (33) 04-93-99-66-67.

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Up in Menilmontant, the over-night success of the oddly named Dilia, a new bistro serving stiffly priced prix-fixe menus of contemporary Italian cooking, offers proof that a strong whiff of La Vie Boheme remains irresistible to the world’s style setters. Occupying the same simple little neighborhood tavern that formerly housed Michael Greenwold and Simone Tondo’s Roseval, Dilia has become every bit as much of a modish address as its predecessor since it opened a few weeks ago.

The nervy contemporary Italian cooking of chef Michele Farnesi, who previously cooked at Pierre Jancou’s restaurant Heimat, a place that’s never really caught on, is very good, too. But during a recent dinner here with Bruno and another Parisian couple, it was apparent that most of the people in this small and rather cramped dining room with plank floors, bare white walls and zero décor beyond the light fixtures, weren’t in the room because of the food, but because they’d heard or read somewhere that it was the place to be.

Such is the immediacy of the world’s gastronomic media these days, in fact, that the gas has rarely been turned on more than once or twice at any half-decent new Paris restaurant before it becomes fodder for the insatiable maw of media, more multifaceted than ever in this world of blogs and user-driver or crowd-sourced restaurant sites than ever before. This rabid appetite for the new is wonderful in many ways, because it demonstrates just how deeply engaged by good food a huge swathe of the general public in every country in the world has become, but on the other hand, its king or queen-making powers are frequently deleterious to fragile, newly born restaurants.

Consider our meal at Dilia, for example. We arrived pretty much on time, and because several of us had to get up early the following morning, we chose the four-course 44 Euro tasting menu and ordered an unexpectedly excellent bottle of biodynamic white wine from Emiglia-Romagna, a part of Italy I generally associate with Sangiovese. A sort of fiddly forgettable amuse bouche came to the table, and then a bottle of wine later, or forty-five minutes on a Friday night when we were all unwinding, the first course arrived at the table, fluffy beet-juice-tinted gnocci garnished with chopped oysters and horseradish. It was good product rendered into pleasant, well-made and puckishly creative food—the taste spectrum of this dish might best be described as sort of a Mediterranean riff on borscht, but it wasn’t quite enough to completely dispel the gathering mists of exasperation that had installed themselves at our table, and this despite the fact that we very much enjoy each others company and hadn’t seen each other for several months.

And so it went, successive overly long unacknowledged lapses of time passing between each course, which meant too much wine and more exasperation. Sensing the kitchen was clearly overwhelmed, but instinctively protective of any chef, because I know how grueling their work really is, I attempted to mollify the bridling nerves of the other three with only partial success. Mono-tonal in a rather Japanese sort of a way, our next course was seared rascasse (scorpion fish) with white bean puree and sautéed kale, bien sur. Again, nice cooking, but lacking the gastronomic wiring that a little dab of wasabi or green pepper would have provided if the same dish had been served by a Kyoto chef.

With the main course yet to arrive, it was clear this place just wasn’t baking right as a restaurant experience, which was a shame, since Farnesi’s food is so good and the service is amiable and well-intended but unhappily lacking in the prevailing professionalism needed to deliver the experience of a meal that’s both pleasant and relaxed.

The best dish of the evening, a beautifully pan-roasted pigeon with ceps and a lushly herbaceous green coulis, was, however, more than enough to make me willing to return to Dilia for another meal in the future. And if Bruno might be up for second experience of this table, I don’t expect that our friends would be, since a certain impatience had long since shaded into irreparable aggrievement by the time this succulent dish arrived. Dessert was a dully foamy thing, and we were finishing our wine and waiting for the bill when the chef came out, knelt down tableside and asked one of my friends, one of the world’s best-known food bloggers, how it was that he’d happened to come here. I cringed for both Farnesi and my friend, but there was nothing I could do for either of them at this point.

In any event, he’s a solidly talented cook with some great ideas, and his team is lovely, and once they find someone to make all the pieces fit together, Dilia just may become a restaurant that solidly lives up to all of the early hype. (Full disclosure: I included Dilia in a round-up of new restaurants in the New York Times that ran long after I had eaten here; so I can’t really claim much authorship in terms of the manic buzz that surrounded this place the night I went to dinner).

Dilia. 1 rue d’Eupatoria, 20th Arrondissement, Paris, Tél. (33) 09-53-56-24-14. Open Tuesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner. Closed Sunday and Monday. Métro: Ménilmontant, Lunch menus 16 Euros, 19.50 Euros; dinner menus 44 Euros, 60 Euros. www.dilia.fr

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So I’m having a cautious flirtation with Faggio, the ur hip new pizzeria in ur hip Pigalle in Paris. I’m not sure if it will last for lots of different reasons, but for the time being I’ve found a pizzeria that makes me really happy. The thing is, though, when it comes to pizza in Paris, I’ve fallen in and out of love dozens of times. The reason is that I come from the best pizza belt in the United States, or the long urbanized band of the American East Coast that runs from Boston to Baltimore and which luckily received millions of Italian immigrants a century ago. This is why every major city in this zone-Providence, Rhode Island; New Haven, Connecticut; Trenton, New Jersey, etc.-has at least two or three seriously good pizzerias. And this is why I’ve never found a pizzeria in Paris that measures up to my American baseline, the late and hugely lamented Apizza Center in Fairfield, CT, which predictably bit the dust after an ill-fated attempt to make it modern. much less those I’ve so rapturously eaten in Naples.

Those were the pizzas we ate as a family on Sunday nights, and I loved going with my father to pick them up, since I was as fascinated by the inferno-like coal-burning pizza oven as I was by the teenagers on dates, greaser boys with tattoos and girls with teased hair and dark eyeliner. I loved sitting in the second front seat of my father’s Saab, too, with the three cardboard boxes piled on my knees, and the smell of hot cardboard mixing with those of melted mozzarella, yeasty dough, and the sharp tomato sauce that came out of big cans with Italian writing on them was my favorite perfume of desire before puberty. Ultimately, it was that tomato sauce that made these pizzas so good, since it was sharp, almost acidic, and a perfect foil for the mozzarella and occasional garnishes of crumbled Italian sausage with fennel seeds or mushrooms, real mushrooms, not canned, that had been hand sliced and sauteed.

In Paris, I liked the pizzas at Chez Bartolo in Saint-Germain-des-Pres until they became absurdly expensive and the service so aggressively unfriendly that this little place became infrequentable, and Da Mimmo, which I stopped going to for the same reasons. Il Brigante in Montmartre is still pretty good (the pizza-maker at Faggio used to work there), as is La Briciola, but I find the quality at Al Taglio isn’t what it was. And I won’t pay the eye-watering prices they charge at the dreadfully named Pizza Chic either.

Recently, though, Paris has been in the midst of a wonderful little pizza revolution, as a variety of excellent new pizza places open to rival the sad-sack addresses found all over the city–you know, the places that use frozen dough, pre-shredded mozzarella, cheap tomato sauce and pizza-makers without work permits. Several months ago, I liked the pizza at East Mamma but what I’ve really been wanting is a great pizza place that’s within a ten-minute walk of my front door in the 9th Arrondissement, or a perfect bolt-hole pizza place for a Sunday night.

I’d been hearing good things about Faggio in the neighborhood, so last night we ankled over there for dinner. Arriving, I had SoPi (South of Pigalle, as this almost comically trendy neighborhood has become known) on my mind, and so I was amused when we were lucky enough to find a table in the white-tiled back dining room with its Edison bulb fixtures, and Bruno guilessly remarked: “This place makes me think of New York.” And of course it did, because the room was full of men with Rutherford B. Hayes beards, including owner Fabien Lombardi, ex-bartender and co-founder of l’Entrée des Artistes, and young women with jeans with artfully ripped knees.

What augured better for dinner were the bags of excellent quality Italian Caputo flour stacked on the floor adjacent to the tiny kitchen with its tiled wood-burning pizza oven. Ignoring the three starters, we ordered a Regina topped with Prince de Paris ham, mozzarella and mushrooms for me, and a Montanara, with Parma ham and delicious smoked stracciatella for Bruno, and amused ourselves by watching the local fauna in the exposed brick-walled room during the long wait before the pizzas arrived.

When they finally did show up thirty-five minutes later, they were very good, but we’d drunk deep into our bottle of biodynamic white from the Veneto, which is exactly what happened the other night during dinner with friends at Dilia, a new Italian bistro in Menilmontant. To wit, hipster tables seem to assume an amiably blithe indifference to the apparently dispensable niceties of good service. At Faggio, it wasn’t that anyone was unfriendly, but rather that no one was going to acknowledge that you’d had a long wait before being fed. And of course the wine list was really top-heavy in terms of pricing, since the only way to make the rent if you’re running a pizzeria in Paris is to sell a good amount of pricey wine. So our bill for two pizzas and a bottle of wine was 58 Euros, and the very good white I chose was one of the least expensive.

After dinner, I wasn’t sure if I’d go back, but today I know that I would, since it’s lunchtime and I want nothing more than a pizza Montanara to magically appear on my door step. Next time round, though, I’d probably do take away, and I might also tell the owner that his probably knowing jeu de mot of the restaurant’s name isn’t very funny. In Italian, the official meaning of faggio, is beech, as in a beech tree, but it has another slang meaning as well. Per ‘The Urban Dictionary:’ “Faggio: Scooter from the GTA video game series. It is a derogatory, effeminate play on the name of the Italian scooter brand Piaggio, as scooters (sometimes referred to as vespas) are generally perceived to be only a slightly less emasculating mode of transportation than the segway, the pink tricycle, or an electric barbie car. Secondarily, It can be interpreted as a clear insult directed at the effeminate owners of such modes of transportation (see artfag). Examples: “This beige cream faggio certainly is a slow and gay mode of transportation,” or “That faggio owner certainly looks gay slathered in beige cream.”

72, rue de Rochechouart, 9th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-40-37-44-02. Metro: Anvers or Poissoniere. Open Monday and Thursday-Sunday for lunch and dinner. Closed Tuesday and Wednesday. Average 20 Euros (without wine) 

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“Before, there were just a few really good Italian tables in Paris, but they were also really expensive, or the usual neighborhood Italian places, which were generally pretty mediocre,” says Tigrane Seydoux, co-owner with business partner Victor Lugger of the hugely successful new East Mamma restaurant just across the street from the Square Trousseau in the 11th Arrondissement. “So our idea was to open a ‘casual-dining’ sort of restaurant inspired by the trattorias of Italy that offered good food made with really great Italian produce, which we import ourselves, at reasonable prices,” says Seydoux, who adds that his love of Italian food came from growing up in Monaco, “where you probably eat Italian more often than you do French.”

@Renaud Cambuzat

“Everything chef Ciro Cristiano works with is imported directly from Italy, including our prosciutto, which comes from Bagatto in the San Daniele region, and the wood-burning pizza oven, which was built by Salvatore Acunto in Naples,” says Seydoux proudly. Not surprisingly, this handsome restaurant designed by London interior architect Martin Brudnizki, who’s Jamie Oliver’s preferred designer, has been packed ever since it opened a few weeks ago, with the no-reservations policy leading to a big hungry crowd waiting on the sidewalk outside.

Despite the excellent word-of-mouth on this table, I still couldn’t help but being reflexively skeptical when I came for dinner the other night with Bruno. Why Though hope may spring eternal, my passion for great Italian food has been so consistently disappointed during the twenty-five years I’ve lived in Paris that I make it a point to avoid Italian restaurants here, since what I can cook at home is always so much better. I dislike the fussy, stuffy overpriced Italian places in the 8th and 16th Arrondissements as a general rule–the only exception being Penatti al Baretto, where the food is excellent even if the service is, well, let’s just say over-groomed, and know better than wasting a meal in any of the dozens of neighborhood joints where they sprinkle industrially made pizza dough with grated Emmental–yes, Emmental–on top of a swirl of pre-seasoned tomato sauce that’s bought in huge cans at Metro, the restaurant wholesale supply store that has a lot to answer for.

@renaut cambuzat

If Metro is a big part of the problem with the Italian food in Paris–you can effectively buy almost any Italian dish or sauce ready-made in its aisles, one of the other big stumbling blocks has long been the erroneous but entrenched ideas about Italian food that many Parisians have. To wit, for most, it’s a red-sauce story with pasta and pizza as they main players. That said, it’s doubtless the most popular foreign kitchen in Paris, and though it remains flagrantly overpriced in France, good quality Italian produce is more available today than ever before; I mean, when I first in arrived in Paris, mozarella was an exotic cheese that was hard to find, to say nothing of the now omnipresent burrata.

At East Mamma, the names of the Italian producers that supply that restaurant form an alluring banner at the top of the kraft-paper menus that also serve as placemats, and it’s an impressive list, too, since they’ve not only gone to the trouble of finding organic mortadella, that pistachio-and-fat speckled Emiglia-Romagnan forcemeat meat that became unhappily known as ‘Bologna’ after it crossed the Atlantic and morphed into a cheap lunch-meat staple in the sandwiches of children’ bag lunches, but also bring in the excellent Ortigia line of handmade soaps from Siracusa in Sicily for the restrooms. Touting brand-name produce is, of course, all the rage in Paris right now–is there anyone who dines out regularly left in this city who hasn’t heard of star vegetable growers Annie Bertin and Joël Thiébault, for example#8211;but alas good produce doesn’t necessarily translate to good cooking.

Studying the menu over a spritz–apple-basil for me, and the classic Aperol for Bruno–we decided we’d try the bresaola that the friendly waiter touted–“It’s nothing like regular bresaola, because it’s made with pork” (Oh. Okay. Traditional bresaola is made from air drying beef and comes from the Valtellina region)–and a burrata to start, and then share some pasta and a pizza. The porcine ‘bresaola’ arrived as a plate of appealingly succulent, savory fat-free pieces of cured pork loin, and the burrata pleased by gushing sharply lactic cream when cut into and being remarkably fresh. Other possibilities for the create-your-own antipasti first course included the tempting mortadella, several grades of Italian ham, smoked mozzarella, fresh mozzarella, and Parmesan aged for twenty-four months. Aside from constituting a pleasant bald appeal to anyone’s gluttony, this first course also made it possible to build out for a group, and there were many large groups having dinner here the other night.

All pasta at East Mamma is made freshly daily, and the Bruno’s linguine with San Marzano tomatoes, stratcciatella cheese, a fine grating of lemon rind and several sadly taste-free basil leaves had the reassuring ivory color that comes only when good flour is used, in this casa di Benedetta flour from Altamura.

My big puffy pizza with an alluringly black-blistered crust was excellent, too, although I was a bit puzzled by the decidedly non-Italian scattering of raw button mushroom slices on the pie. The Italians usually prefer their pizzas plain, but if mushrooms are used, they’re generally sott’olio, or preserved in oil. But this ‘White Regina’ made with tomato sauce, mozzarella, Tuscan ham and mushrooms was a perfect expression of the excellent produce used to make it, and was amply large enough not only for one but two. The Trediberri Sauvignon from Le Langhe that I wanted from the excellent list of Italian wines here was out the other night, so we drank a very pleasant San Antonio Scaia Bianca from the Veneto (incorrectly labeled as being Tuscan on the wine list; thanks, Nathalie) instead.

I cringed when I saw a pail of Nutella being brought to a neighboring table–one of the desserts here is an all-you-can-eat smear-it-yourself Nutella pizza, an idea the provenance of which strikes me as decidedly more inspired by The Cheesecake Factory than anything in Italy, but Bruno’s lemon tiramisu was pleasant, with a lemony taste that fell between lemon hard candies and limoncello (too sweet for me, but nicely made and surprisingly light).

Ultimately, East Mamma makes a commendable and generally successful effort to offer some respectably authentic and well-sourced trans-Alpine cooking to the French capital, but I’d never mistake it for a trattoria. It’s much too shrewdly high-concept for that, which is what places it squarely in the camp of the generally welcome new breed of–well, sorry, I hate the term, too–“casual dining” restaurants being brought to Paris by a growing tribe of clever gastronomically alert entrepreneurs with very good taste. So I think almost any Parisian who loves Italian food would be glad if they opened a branch in their neighborhood, and it’s a place I’d go back to again for another simple, pleasant, fairly priced meal.

133 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, 11th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. 01-43-41-32-15. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Average 30 Euros.www.bigmammagroup.com

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There’s something chimerical about contemporary Italian cooking, and a partial explanation for this was once provided to me by chef Giovanni Passerini of the excellent restaurant Rino in Paris. Passerini, a Roman, told me he’d moved to Paris, because “Romans only want to eat their own cooking. Parisians are much more receptive to invention and innovation.” In my own experience as someone who visits Italy regularly, the conundrum of modern Italian cooking definitely stems to some degree from the culinary conservatism that Passerini pointed out, but also seems to be attributed to the fact that La Nouvelle Cuisine had an even great impact on Italy than it did in France. To wit, so many of the restaurants that the major Italian guides rate most highly still practice a sort of mannerist modern cooking that espouses the worst of Nouvelle Cuisine fussiness without embracing the really important things it changed.

To be sure, there are several wonderful exceptions to this retro rut. Massimo Bottura’s Osteria Francescana in Modena is not only one of the best restaurants in the world, but one of the most consistently interesting and audacious, and I also really like Cristina Bowerman’s restaurant Glass in the Trastevere district of Rome. But during visits to Milan, Verona, the Italian Lakes and Venice last year, most feints at anything contemporary were disappointing, usually because they were more exercises in style than taste and often came off as sadly deracinated. So after several recent excellent Italian meals in New York, London and Paris, it occurs to me that the future of the Italian kitchen is as likely to be played out beyond the country’s borders than it is within them, since due to both the country’s poor economy and it’s prevailing preference for traditional cooking, many talented young Italian chefs go abroad to work.

Still, it was a real surprise the other night when Bruno and I went to Viola, a new restaurant in the Batignolles in Paris, and stumbled upon some good and rather interesting contemporary Italian food. Truth be told, I wasn’t especially keen on this adventure–the address had been recommended by a friend of Bruno’s from the gym, and I don’t really like going out much on Sunday nights–but in the interest of fairness, I said “Sure” when he bounced into my office and suggested it. “It’s always good to put a zig-zag in the routine, no#8221; said Bruno, and so a zig-zag it was. After all, I cringe a little when I think of the dozens–okay, hundreds–of times he’s uncomplainingly accompanied me of a given evening when I knew he’d have been much happier at home eating a salad. When we arrived, the place seemed vaguely familiar, and despite the fact that it’s been attractively remodeled with an appealing sort of loft-like neo-industrial decor, I recognized it as the former premises of Le Bistral, a contemporary French bistro that I always wanted to be better than it ever was.

The service was immediately friendly, and the very pleasant waitress proposed a variety of really good organic and ‘natural’ (un-sulfured) Italian wines by the glass, so things got off to a good start, since good Italian wine is still much too rare in Paris. Then the menu looked, well, interesting, and a decided, and welcome, departure from the usual miscellaneous pasta-and-pizza jumble typical of neighborhood Italian restaurants in Paris, a city that’s still waiting for a seriously good Italian restaurant, and this despite the fact that the most Parisians know and love Italy and its food. 

Since both of us wanted the shrimp tartare with grapefruit, Bronte pistachios (from the Sicilian village of the same name) and seaweed, we agreed to do what Bruno describes as a “Fifty-Fifth,” or to share our starters. So I ordered the scallops, which came corseted with ribbons of lardo di colonnata on a bed of lentils. Though the green apple fins flanking the tartare were an unnecessary Memphis style flourish, the tartare was excellent, with the pistachios and pureed seaweed amplifying the natural sweetness of the shrimp and the grapefruit adding a pleasantly tart foil to the richness of this composition. The scallops–nicely seared–were excellent, and the lardo was a great idea, since it brought them some salt and linked them to the earthiness of the lentils and the superfluous shavings of Burgundian truffle, which tasted like wet leaves.

Our main courses were pleasant but less vivid than our starters. My crab and eggplant stuffed paccheri were good but lacked an ingredient that might have brought their tastes into higher relief–maybe finely chopped preserved lemon or some capers. Bruno had the lamb two ways–an excellent lamb tartare and a beautifully cooked and very tender filet that had been rolled in crushed pistachios. Again, I didn’t see the point of the pistachios, but the garnish of Emiglia-Romagnan pumpkin puree with miniature finials of fresh treviso was an excellent idea.

As soon as I saw it on the menu, I knew Bruno would go for the homemade panettone with panettone ice cream as surely as he knew I’d conclude with some cheese. I’d have liked a more robust assortment of cheeses, including several different Peccorino–they were good but tasted rather alike, but the panettone and its accompanying ice cream were superb. I was impressed not only by the intelligent inventiveness of this cooking, but also the fact that the chef–Vicenzo Patruno–had gone to the trouble of sourcing so many signature Italian ingredients, including the Bronte pistachios, but also red onions from Tropea in Calabria.

Originally from Puglia, Patruno, 28, worked at the Hotel Monaco in Venice, the Armani Caffe restaurants in Milan and Paris, and then served as chef at Il Viccolo for seven years before being drafted as head chef for Paris’s first bistronomique (modern bistro) Italian table,. While I didn’t agree with the gastronomic logic of everything he did during this meal, he’s clearly a talented chef with a large future in front of him, and I’ll happily return to this pleasant little restaurant to experience his well-grounded imagination again.

80, rue Lemercier, 17th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. 01-42-63-59-61. Metro: Brochant or La Fouche. Open daily. Prix-fixe menus, lunch–18 Euros, 22 Euros; dinner, 29 Euros, 36 Euros. Average a la carte 40 Euros. www. restaurant-viola.com

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