Julia Sedefdjian

In Nicoise dialect, a ‘baieta’ is a little kiss. In Paris, Baieta is brilliant young chef Julia Sedefdjian’s new restaurant in the Latin Quarter and a place where any meal has the poignancy of receiving a succession of little kisses. This is because Sedefdjian’s personal riff on the cooking of Nice, her hometown, and Provence is so sincere, succulent, sunny, shyly sensual and stunning in its technical perfection. And all this is from a chef who is only 23 years old and who won her first Michelin star while cooking at Les Fables de la Fontaine when she was 21 (she started at the restaurant when she was 17 and became its chef at 20).

Sedefdjian created her restaurant with Sébastien Jean-Joseph and Grégory Anelka, two colleagues she met while working at Les Fables de la Fontaine. Jean-Joseph is her sous-chef, while the charming and very friendly Anelka runs the dining room. She calls them “my brothers,” and the three of them are depicted in a drawing by their favorite tattoo artist on the dining room wall.

While you read the menu at Baieta, several little hors d’oeuvres are served to pique your appetite. Sedefdjian’s take on pissaladiere, the sautéed onion, black olive and anchovy tart of Nice–something I love, was excellent on a focaccia like base.

The menu was very tempting, too, especially for someone like me, who loves the food of Nice and southern France, all those wonderful dishes that are found in one of my favorite cookbooks, La Cuisiniere Provencale by J.B. Reboul.

When he came to take our order, Grégory Anelka told us that the two signature dishes here are the “Jaune d’oeuf croustillante,” a starter, and the “Bouillabaieta,” Sedefdjian’s version of bouillabaisse. We decided we’d try them both, and also the caramelised pork belly with celery rave puree, peanuts and an herby green sauce and cod with cockles on a bed of Sardinian fregola pasta with artichokes and olives under a cloud of preserved garlic. The one dish that I’d been hoping to find on the menu, Sedefdjian’s superb version of a classic aioli–cod with vegetables and potatoes with garlic mayonnaise, wasn’t an option, but I’m hoping it will appear on a future menu, since I’ve never forgotten how good it was since I had it at La Table de la Fontaine when she was cooking there.

While we waited over a glass of white wine, both of us noticed something else very special about this restaurant, which is that it has a noticeably happy, relaxed ambience. This is a welcome new trend in Paris, where serious food is increasingly being freed of a conventional corset of formality and stilted pleasure-wilting self-importance.

The egg yolk in a crunchy sphere showed off just the fact that Sedefdjian is an inventive, hard-working and very talented chef with a huge future. When it arrived at the table, my first reaction was to admire it, but I wondered if it would all come together on the palate. It did. Served on a bed of smoked and raw haddock, the yolk spilled out on to the fish, poached leeks and seaweed vinaigrette when the sphere was pierced and bound this homey and deeply satisfying dish together.

The caramelised pork belly was a beautiful plate of food, too, with tender chunks of pork glossed in a beautiful jus, celery rave prepared three ways–as chips, in seared cubes and as a puree, and the green puree of ramps (l’ail des ours, garlic of the bears) was a perfect foil for the wonderfully fatty meat.

“Both of these dishes could be served in a haute-cuisine restaurant,” Bruno observed, and he was absolutely right. Happily, however, they’re available at a charming place without the stratospheric prices associated with that most exalted and so rarely experienced level of French cooking.

Our main courses were stunning. The ‘Bouillabaieta” was an especially good dish, since Sedefjdian had recomposed it, cooking the fish and shellfish separately and then combining it with a potato-puree thickened fish stock that was accented by little toasts with rouille served on the side. What made this so excellent is that the fish didn’t lose their natural flavors to the single ruddy stew, as is usually the case, but remained firm and bright with flavor.

The cod was outstanding, too–a thick perfectly cooked slice of impeccably fresh fish on a bed of al dente fregola with steamed cockles and razor-shell clams, artichokes and slivered olives under a veil of garlic. Here the flavors complimented each other rather than melding together, another example of Sedefjdian’s respect for the produce she works with.

What also impressed about this meal was the excellence of its rhythm. On a very busy night–many tables turned twice, the timing–both in terms of cooking and serving, was flawless. In fact, the only thing about this meal that I found unimportantly wanting was the wine list–to wit, I’d have loved to eat this food with a nice bottle of Bellet, the wine from Nice, but none was to be found on the list.

Our desserts were excellent, too. I loved my delicate fennel spiked sable topped with dots of lemon cream and meringue, while Bruno tucked into a cheeky poached pear with a tuile that stuck its tongue out at him and was garnished with a pool of chestnut ice and chestnut coulis.

Sedefdjian is one of the best young chefs in a new generation who are revisiting the regional roots of French cooking to renew the luster of Paris as the Old World’s pre-eminent dining destination, and I am certain that she will become a chef on par with predecessors like Paul Bocuse and Joel Robuchon–she’s just that good. So go now to catch a rising star and have a really lovely meal without a wound to your wallet.

The view from the loo

5 rue de Pontoise, 5th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-42-02-59-19. Metro: Maubert-Mutualite. Open for lunch and dinner Tuesday to Saturday. Closed Sunday and Monday. Average 45 Euros. www.restaurant-baieta-paris.fr

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Many years ago during a visit to Paris, my brother and I decided to visit the Château de Vincennes, one of the lesser known but still rather fascinating sights of Paris and easily reached from the Château de Vincennes Metro station. It was a beautiful Indian summer day, and after we’d explored the château, we wandered into a restaurant nearby for lunch. We knew nothing about this long-gone place, it just looked good, as did the menu posted by the door. So we ordered shirred eggs with finely chopped black truffles to start, and then the roast chicken, which came with a side of delicious crunchy frites and nosegays of peppery watercress. We finished up with an excellent chocolate mousse, and with a bottle of Beaujolais Villages, this wonderful meal cost less than 200 Francs. Beyond the warmth of the service and the excellent of the food, what made this meal memorable was that it happened off-the-cuff. We hadn’t looked at any guides, and blogs didn’t exist in those days, so we just got lucky, but then twenty-five years ago, it wasn’t all that exceptional to find such solidly good casual dining in Paris on the spur of the moment.

Unfortunately, the odds of coming across such a good meal today are less than they once were, but one of the happiest and more low-key developments in Paris this Fall is that a growing numbers of really good casual-dining tables have recently opened. What I mean here are restaurants where you can show up without a reservation and eat really well. On the Left Bank, a fine example of this genre is the Cafe Trama, which I recently wrote about on this blog (N.B. reservations are advisable at this place, however) and on the Right Bank, chef Christian Etchebest’s new La Cantine de la Cigale, where I went for dinner the other night, similarly hits the spot. This is Etchebest’s third Cantine, too–they’re two other ones on the Left Bank–La Cantine du Troquet in the 14th arrondissement and La Cantine du Troquet Dupleix in the 15th.

Since I had an ungodly early flight to New York the following morning, Bruno and I didn’t feel like cooking on that rainy night, so we hoofed it up the road to Pigalle and liked this friendly place with very good service from the moment we stepped through the door. We settled into a table in a cozy niche in this high-ceilinged dining room, and immediately ordered a bottle of Domaine Brana irouléguy, a terrific Basque red I knew would go well with the southwestern French food served here. Meanwhile, the delightful waitress patiently explained the entire menu to a quartet of tourists from Hong Kong at the table next to us, and even though I don’t like television screens of any kind in restaurants, the wall-mounted one here–intended primarily to broadcast the rugby matches that Etchebest likes, was set to an inoffensively low level.

As I have come to expect from Etchebest, an excellent cook specializing in the hearty cooking of southwestern France, the menu here was very reasonably priced and quite tempting. It also made me happy to be in a restaurant with a specific French regional kitchen, since places that specialize in the great traditional dishes of Burgundy, Alsace, Provence and other regions have become regrettably rarer through the years.

I love Basque food, so I started off with Etchebest’s clever contemporary riff on piperade, a comfort-food dish par excellence. In this version, the stewed green peppers, onions and tomatoes spiked with Espelette pepper came in a glass under a cap of creamed eggs, and were garnished with a crisp slice of toasted country bread and shavings of excellent Basque country ham. Generously served and full of flavor, it was a very satisfying starter, and Bruno was delighted with his Ospital pate de tete (head cheese terrine from Eric Ospital, the charcutier who produces some of the best chacuterie in France in the Basque town of Hasparren), which came with a garnish of chopped red peppers and black olives, a side salad of arugula and pickled green peppers.

Knowing I had a long dreary travel day ahead of me, I opted for the saucisses confit with white beans and a pleasant foamy lashing of Ossau-Iraty cheese, a brilliantly hearty dish that was so generously served a starter wasn’t really necessary. Headed to an office chair rather than an airplane seat in the morning, Bruno preferred something lighter, and chose the chicken Caesar salad, a dish he finds irresistible. I like them perfectly well, too, as sort of a best-available option when traveling in the U.S., but would never have passed up the Basque dishes in favor of same, but this one was large, beautifully made and toothsomely garnished with roasted chicken, hard-boiled eggs, and, in a Basque feint, peppers. We couldn’t figure out which dish they were meant to accompany, but the bowl of frites that came with our mains were some of the best I’ve eaten in Paris for a long time–cooked in duck fat so that they were crunchy and golden, and garnished with cracked black pepper and coarse sea salt. Needless to say, we didn’t leave a single one behind us.

We finished up with a shared slice of very good mirabelle tart, and went back out into the rainy night in high spirits. I’ve always loved Christian Etchebest’s cooking and his warm, alert style of hospitality, so it’s great to know that there’s now an outpost of his kitchen just up the road from me and that it’s open seven days a week and also serves late. It’s not only places like this that make Paris Paris, but it’s a terrific option for anyone who’s planning a night on the town in Pigalle–I’d much rather eat here than at any of the recent trendy spots like Le Depanneur, yet another American cantine with pricey burgers, or who wants a good solid French feed after exploring Montmartre.

La Cantine de La Cigale, 124 boulevard de Rochechouart, 18th, Tel. 01-55-79-10-10. Metro: Anvers, Pigalle or Abbesses. No reservations. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Average 35 Euros.

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Ever since I first sampled her cooking many years ago when she first opened Les Olivades in the 7th after working for Alain Passard, I’ve been a fan of Florence Mikula, a really nice woman whose cuisine is as generous and straight-to-the-point as the lady herself. Back then in the mid-eighties, provencale cooking was enjoying a new vogue in Paris that was a reflection of the fact the Parisian media elite had thrown in the towel on the Riviera as being overbuilt and too flashy and was moving north to Provence, and specifically into the Luberon, in search of some peace and quiet and the thing they destroy the moment they find it: authenticity. The TGV had made the Luberon a viable weekend destination, too, and so la cuisine du soleil, or provencale cooking, suddenly started turning up in the food pages of French women’s magazines, where it was always rightly noted that it was as healthy–olive oil instead of butter, lots of fruit and veg, as it was delicious.

Mikula, a native of Avignon, not only knew how to cook provencale, but she cooked it really well, which immediately made Les Olivades a huge hit. Eventually, Mikula, who had to fight like a dog to be accepted into hotel school and then to get her first few jobs because of her sex, sold Les Olivades and moved across the Seine to open a very personal bijou table–Les Saveurs de Flora, on the Avenue George V. Though she made some great dishes there–I loved her bortsch with scallops sauteed with foie gras, grilled John Dory with artichokes barigoule, preserved lemon and gnocci, veal sweetbreads with morels and asparagus, and sublime apple millefeuille with salted-butter caramel, I never really took to this restaurant, which catered to a business crowd at noon and a rather anonymous hotel-guest clientele in the evening. In fact it always struck me as odd that someone a vivacious and fun-loving as Mikula would ever have chosen such a decidedly gray-flannel location.

So I was really curious when I heard that the restless Flora had moved on again, this time alighting in an eponymous auberge–Auberge Flora, which she’d created on the northeastern edge of the Marais not far from the Bastille. This location sounded rather promising, and on the way to dinner with my pal Devreaux the other night, I found myself hoping that this time Flora might finally have found a long-running nest of her own. Arriving, the meal got off to a good start, too, since we were offered olives and three different aperitif sables (olive, cheese, chorizo) with our glasses of very good Pinot Blanc. The young waitress couldn’t possibly have been friendlier or more helpful either, and we studied the menu with interest.

What Mikula’s getting up to here is a small-plates menu at a table d’hotes setting on one side of the bar, or a 42 Euro prix-fixe menu seated at individual tables in the other half of the arrowhead shaped dining room. Since we were seated outside at a sidewalk table on a warm night, we decided to start out with several small-plate nibbles and then sample the main courses from the prix-fixe menu, which can also be ordered a la carte.

So we zeroed in on a trio of nibbles and ordered a bottle of Bourgeuil, quite reasonably priced at 22 Euros. The samosas filled with shredded duck were crispy and oil-free, and though they lacked any discernible seasoning, they were a perfectly pleasant hors d’oeuvre. Eggplant caviar was good, too, but exhibited no trace of the pistou oil the waitress explained as the reason for its being described as “a la Jordanienne” on the menu (I’ve never been to Jordan, so I can’t say, but this menu poetry doesn’t make a lot of sense to me–parsley oil, maybe, but not pistou), and the shotglass serving was niggling for 6 Euros. And finally, grilled vegetables with melted burrata on a sable was a nice idea, but the sable was cement-like and the cheese garnish stingy. And we had to ask for salt, too.

Despite the miscellaneous culinary imprecisions in our starters, I could still detect Mikula’s sunny style in every dish, and this was even truer of our main courses. Though it came to the table lukewarm, my rack of suckling pig was beautifully roasted with a nice brittle golden crackling, a generous amount of juicy meat, and a superb garnish of fava beans, mushrooms and black olives in a pork jus. Aside from a hotter temperature, the only thing that might have made this dish better would have been a side of rice, noodles or potato puree to help mop up the delicious sauce. Devreaux’s John Dory came as a carefully cooked filet–firm but moist, with a hauntingly seasoned broth filled with wilted fennel and high notes of saffron, fennel and star anise. A well conceived dish, its flaws were that it reached the table less than lukewarm and that someone had run amok with the salt in the kitchen, which made the delicate broth, which called out for a side of steamed rice, an almost shocking brine. As sorry as I was for Devreaux, however, I really, really enjoyed my pork, which instantly reminded me why I’ve always been so keen on Mikula’s cooking.

Since portions are generous, we concluded with a marinated demi Picodon, one of my favorite cheeses, and two tots of Close des Fees, one of the Languedoc’s best reds and a joy to find poured by the glass. Several desserts appealed, but the lavender tart which has always been my favorite Mikula finale wasn’t on the menu, and in the back of my mind, I decided to hold off, because I know that this is a restaurant I’ll very happily be visiting again. Yes, the kitchen isn’t up to speed yet, but the menu’s fascinating, they work with great produce, the service is charming, and the prices are reasonable. Oh, and they’re open seven days a week, and the multi-formated setting makes it a great place for anyone dining alone.

44 boulevard Richard Lenoir, 11th, Tel. 01-47-00-52-77. Metro: Chemin Vert or Breguet-Sabin. Open daily from 6.30am to midnight, Lunch noon-3pm, dinner 7pm-11pm. Light eats available off hours. Average lunch 30 Euros; Prix-fixe dinner menu 42 Euros; average four course small-plates menu 30 Euros.

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Twenty five years ago, gulp, my brother and I found ourselves moping around the Gare du Nord with two hours before our train back to London on a rainy Sunday. If this scenario was already far from ideal, it was seriously worsened by the fact that we’d had about three hours sleep and had put an alarming dent into a bottle of rot-gut duty-free Prince Hubert cognac when we’d returned to our Left Bank hotel after some bar hopping.

I wasn’t very hungry, and I know my brother wasn’t either, but it was a cold, wet day and with a long journey ahead of us–these were the pre-Eurostar days when you still crossed the Channel on a Hovercraft that left you half-deaf for hours, I decided it would probably be a good idea to eat something, so we drifted across the street to a brasserie, the Terminus Nord. We must have looked pretty awful, because the sturdy older waiter in a black vest and long white apron chuckled as he sized us up. “C’etait la guerre hier soir#8221; he said, but I was much too wooly headed to understand that this was a joke. We weren’t making much headway with the menu either with our ratty school-boy French, and then things turned from bad to worse when my brother registered that the noisy old woman on the banquette next to him was eating a pig’s foot and turned green.

“I hope you won’t think that I’m an alcoholic,” my bro said, recovering himself, “But I really need a Bloody Mary.” I had my doubts about French Bloody Marys, but the waiter, much amused by our shared cardboard pallor, assured us that this was possible, and then he suggested that we order choucroute garni. He was met with two blank stares. “It iz rotten cabbage with peeg,” he kindly told us in English. This sounded like a real horror story, but he insisted. “Ze Bloodys, some Riesling, choucroute with peeg, you sleep in train, feel much better. Yes#8221;

Well, the nice guy turned out to be absolutely right, and brother and I loved the choucroute, which arrived as a stainless-steel tray full of delicately pickled sauerkraut, sausages–Francfort, Montbeliard, bacon, a pig’s knuckle, and brined pork with neatly turned boiled potatoes. The sharp mustard stung me back to life right off the bat, and this glorious Alsatian farmer’s feed became something I crave every Fall when the temperature drops.

As I went on to discover during many years of living in Paris and traveling in Alsace, it’s never as good in the capital as it is on its home turf, but it’s one of those dishes I seasonally crave, so the other day, before heading off to Reims and Troyes for the weekend, it occurred to me that I might finally check out La Strasbourgeoise, a brasserie in front of the Gare de l’Est, for lunch before my train. I’d read glowing reports of this place from various French food critics, and when I looked their website, I saw they had a “formule express”–choucroute and a glass of Riesling or a beer, for 18.50 Euros and flapped out the door.

On the way over there, I was hopeful, reasoning that if this place was right across the street from the Gare de l’Est, the Paris train station that serves Eastern France, including Alsace, the choucroute would have to be pretty good, since they’re serving connoisseurs of this dish day in and day out. It was sort of a playing-hooky treat to be going out to lunch alone, so I was in a good mood when I arrived, and the welcome was very polite and the fly-in-amber dining rooms of this decidedly old-fashioned place were pleasantly sedate and quiet.

Glancing at the choucroute my neighbor was eating, I slightly recalibrated my expectations. It definitely wouldn’t be as good as this dish once had been at a great little Alsatian restaurant, L’Alsaco, which no longer exists and where the owner taught me that choucroute/sauerkraut/fermented cabbage preserved in a light brine had been invented by the Chinese and brought to Europe by the Tartars and the Mongols, or at Chez Jenny, the big Alsatian brasserie on the Place de la Republique, or Le Bec Rouge in Montparnasse, my two current favorite places for choucroute in Paris. But hopefully it would be decent. One way or another, the service was charming–when the man next to me fumbled for an excuse to order a third beer after his choucroute and before his coffee, the waiter said “Ah, but Monsieur, it makes me happy to see someone who’s taking their time.” Kind and suave, in one fell swoop.

When my choucroute arrived, I finally tasted the Riesling I’d been promptly served in a glass with a ribbed green stem, and it was surprisingly good. The black juniper berries in the hot mound of choucroute, aka sauerkraut, were a good sign, too–less reputable places skimp on or skip them. The various cuts of pork and sausage clearly weren’t Slow Food caliber, but still I hoped for the best, or, as it turned out, second or maybe third best. Though there was nothing flagrantly wrong with the dish aside from a deflating mealy steam-table potato, the sauerkraut was very timid and the charcuterie was charitably commercial, more critically, industrial. Oh well, the service here was cordial and it was a pleasant to be in a restaurant where the staff so clearly take pride in their work, but what this meal really accomplished was to remind me that I had to get to Chez Jenny for one of their honey-basted rotisserie-roasted jarret de porc on a bed of choucroute as soon as I possibly can. That, or plan a weekend in Alsace sometime soon.

Le Bec Rouge, 46bis Boulevard du Montparnasse, 15th, Tel. 01-42-22-45-54. Metro: Falguière or Montparnasse. Open daily. Average 35 Euros.

Chez Jenny, 39 Boulevard du Temple, 3rd, Tel. 01-44-54-39-00, Metro: République. Open daily. Average 35 Euros.

La Strasbourgeoise, 5 rue du 8 Mai 1945, 10th, Tel. 01-42-05-20-02. Metro: Gare de l’Est. Open daily. Average 35 Euros.

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Last supper in Spain

Et helas, all good things must come to an end, including a wonderful holiday in Spain, but I love Paris during la rentree, when the city has an engaging if sllghtly smug and rather self-satisfied energy to it that peters out by Christmas.

A Parisienne celebrating La Rentree No, a Serbian farm girl spotted in Belgrade airport  And after a long drive home–and recent regime of fideos, paella, jamon and gaspacho, I was hungry for Paris when we got home the other day. I was also curious to try the new Basque restaurant Pottoka, which opened in the 7th arrondissement several weeks ago, because it’s so rare these days that anyone launches a new regional table in Paris, and so I met a friend for dinner the night after we got home.

This railroad-car sized space is run by Sébastien Gravé, who chefs, and David Bottreau, who’s front of house, and this team met while they were both working at Christian Constant. They then went on to take over Constant’s excellent Les Fables de la Fontaine, and this is their first restaurant together. Arriving on a Tuesday night, the dining room had a large number of those men-in-dark-suits who seem to be so indigenous to this particular patch of the 7th arrondissement, and I guessed that they were bankers, accountants, fonctionnaires and marketing guys who get off on Basque and southwestern French cooking as a way of channeling their wilted inner rugbymen personnae.

With the lights turned down low, the decor here amounted to a few Basque words painted on one wall and a long banquette running the length of the one opposite, but since I’m only ever really interested in the food, this anonymousness didn’t bother me, especially since the service was so prompt and friendly.

The menu was appealing, too, and my pal decided to try the Ossau Iraty cheese flan topped with gaspacho and served with toast spread with sardine rillettes, while I went for the interesting sounding white beans and girolles with walnut dressing. If his dish was very tasty, especially the sardine rillettes, my dish was really outstanding–perfectly cooked white coco beans mixed with girolles, piquillo peppers, flat parsley and a few slices of smoked duck breast in an excellent vinaigrette. So the meal got off to a fine start, since the bread was good and we both liked our Pic Saint Loup at 28 Euros, too.

White beans, girollles, and smoked duck breast in walnut vinaigrette  Unfortunately, our main courses weren’t up to the excellence of our starters. I ordered the Axoa, a classic Basque stew of veal, and it came to the table under a pretty dome of golden pastry, a decidedly citified take on this rustic dish. Piercing the pastry, I was surprised by how dainty-to-stingy the portion of stew below actually was–there was a lot of air space in this preparation, and when the crust was mashed into the stew, the woeful effect was very much that of a Stouffer’s pot pie. To wit, too much pastry, not enough stew, and very little flavor. My friend’s palombe (wood pigeon), a daily special at a sturdy 25 Euros, was overcooked, too, although it came in a pleasantly ruddy sauce with a side of well-made potato puree. Though the gateau Basque looked delicious–there’s clearly a talented pastry chef in the kitchen, we finished up with some bleu de Brebis, which came with a small gritty salad and black cherry preserves.

All told, there’s talent in the kitchen here and they work with excellent produce, but as perhaps a reflection of this neighborhood, prices are stiff for rather ungenerous portions, the axoa needs a rethink, and cooking times need real attention. Still, I’d happily go back to try the cod fish and chorizo croquettes with a coulis of piperade and the Ospital sausages with potatoes and béarnaise, and it’s good news that Paris has a serious new showcase of Basque cooking.

Pottoka, 4 rue de l’Exposition, 7th, Tel. 01-45-51-88-38. Metro: Ecole Militaire or La-Tour-Maubourg.  Open Monday-Saturday for lunch and dinner. Closed Sunday. Lunch menus 17€ and 22€. Average a la carte 50€

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The highly dubious politics of the owner notwithstanding, I used to love L’Alsaco in the 10th, which served excellent Alsatian food, and Chez Maitre Paul in Saint-Germain-des-Pres for its delicious cooking from the Jura and Franche-Comte. There was a mode for provencale restaurants in the mid-eighties, a reflection of the sudden accessibility of the south of France as TGV (high-speed) train service started, but this tappered off too.

This is a real shame, since the regional kitchens of France are the brilliant gastronomic bedrock of what the world knows as ‘French’ cooking. There are, I think, many reasons for the current disinterest in French regional cooking in Paris, among them a preference for food that is both lighter and more cosmopolitan than Basque classics like Axoa, a succulent veal stew, or Pot’je Vleesch, a hearty northern French dish of boned rabbit, veal, pork and chicken. Then, too, the economics of running a restaurant in Paris these days do not favor regional cooking, since many of these wonderful old-fashioned dishes are time-consuming preparations that require someone in the kitchen to watch, skim, taste and adjust as the day goes by. Unfortunately, this has become an expensive proposition with the arrival of the 35 hour work week in France. Then, too, it’s not easy to find cooks who know how to prepare such food–younger chefs have been primed to want to express their creativity and have rarely been trained to make these dishes of yore.

So I showed up at Bourgogne Sud hoping that this new outpost of Burgundy between the Eglise de la Trinitee and the Place de Clichy would be good. Since we were six at the table, we were able to taste a variety of different dishes, too. Starting off with a good bottle of white Macon, we were offered cubes of head cheese to nibble on, but I was the only one who went for one, or in fact several, of these morsels–the Dutchman and two French men at the table wrinkled their noses, and the two other Americans were having none of it. It was delicious, too.

One thing everyone liked right off the bat were the prices, including a 23 Euro three-course menu, which is what half of the table ordered. So we began with generous slices of jambon persille (chunks of ham in parslied white-wine aspic), real Burgundian snails, a very nicely made pork terrine spiked with Marc de Bourgogne and green salad garnished with large croutons topped with country ham and goat cheese.

All told, this first round from the kitchen was nicely made food prepared with good quality produce, though several dishes, including the jambon persille, were under-seasoned and none of them were better than just plain good. Next, the calorie-conscious Bruno went with a steak tartare, which he said was good, while the rest of us sorted ourselves out between an excellent chicken with shallots in a vinegar-spiked terra-cotta colored cream sauce (I’d have liked for the vinegar to have been a bit more pronounced) with potato puree, quenelles de Brochet (pike-perch dumplings), and paleron de boeuf en Bouguignon, or beef braised in a pleasantly ruddy red wine sauce.

  Service was pleasant throughout the meal, and the atmosphere here feels more like Macon, the owner’s hometown, than Paris, with a mix of pennywise suburban theater-goers, neighborhood types, and solitary business travelers relieved to have found a decent feed near their mid-range accountant-selected hotels.

We also appreciated the wine list, which is heavy in southern Burgundian bottles and Beaujolais, and offers a nice selection of pours by the glass and differently sized carafes.

In a male-oriented restaurant–with its andouillettes, steaks and other meat dishes, this place seems more likely to appeal to Monsieur than Madame, unless she has a trencherman’s appetite, I didn’t expect much from dessert, but the compote of fresh apricots with vanilla ice cream was a grandmotherly pleasure, and they also served up a very nice strawberry tart and a fine selection of mostly goat cheese from the Maconnais and Charolais regions.

All told, even though the cooking lacks precision, it’s still solidly good, and this is a recommendable if rather plain address for anyone looking for a Burgundian feed in the heart of Paris. Hats off to the owner, too, for chosing to raise the flag of Burgundy instead of adding to Paris’s already wiltingly large stable of alarmingly bad sushi restaurants or pasta places.

Bourgogne Sud, 14 rue de Clichy, 9th, Tel. 01-48-74-51-27, MetroL Liege or Trinitee. Open for lunch from Monday to Friday and dinner from Tuesday through Saturday. Lunch menus 13.50, 15.50 Euros, prix-fixe menu 23 Euros, average a la carte 35 Euros.

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He cooked, and she mothered and spoiled a crowd of regulars who, twenty years ago, ran to professors and publishers–the talk here was always about books, ideas, politics. Madame loved explaining the cooking of the Jura and the Franche-Comte regions to those who didn’t know it, and all it took was a meal here to fall in love with this sturdy, delicious, rustic cooking. I always ate exactly the same meal, too–Montbeliard sausage with boiled potatoes in a puckery vinaigrette, chicken cooked in a vin jaune spiked cream sauce with morels mushrooms, and iced walnut cake, and it was here that I discovered  how good Arbois wines from vignerons like Trousseau can be. The dining room with its exposed stone walls and crisp white table cloths had a winsome grandmotherly feel, and I never ate here without coming away with a feeling of great well-being.

So on a snowy night this week after a book reading in the Latin Quarter, Bruno and I were starved and I suggest we stop by for a stick-to-your ribs winter meal. Walking down the rue Monsieur le Prince, now lined almost entirely with rather unappealing Japanese places, I sadly realized just how rare Chez Maitre Paul had become, too. Sushi and noodles are what academics seem to favor these days, and since so much of this neighborhood is now pied a terre territory, there’s very little local clientele left for a place like Chez Maitre Paul.

Arriving, we had an autopilot welcome from a young waiter, who never bothered to ask if we’d like an aperitif, and the dining room was filled with tourists, including a large group of American men who wondered out loud why they couldn’t get boeuf bourguignon, and a sweet trio next to us–a Spanish student who was being treated to dinner by his very proud parents, both of whom were disappointed not to find escargots on the menu, especially Madame, who said she’d been thinking about snails swimming in garlic butter during their entire flight from Madrid. Their son explained that this particularly restaurant specialized in the cooking of the mountains of eastern France, which left Mom and Dad totally puzzled. Where, they clearly wondered, were not only the snails but the foie gras and other dishes they had their heart set on. Waiting for our first courses, we sipped an excellent red Arbois and I quietly routed for the student, who’d done something imaginative in bringing them here.

Then their main courses arrived, including a very overcooked looking steak for Mom, a visibly dry veal chop for the poor son, and a decent looking sole meuniere (not everything on the menu here is regional) for Dad, and the food extinguished their lively chatter. Eventually, Mom spoke up. “It’s not your fault,” she said kindly, “but maybe it’s true what I’ve been reading about France, maybe the food isn’t as good as it used to be. When I’d come with your grandmother, we’d nap after lunch just so that we’d have room for dinner, we couldn’t bare to miss a meal in those days,” she said.

The arrival of our Montbeliard sausages let me off the cringing hook I’d found myself on as an eve’s dropper, and they were very good–fat, firm pork sausages with a wonderful hint of the resinous pine smoke that makes them real Montbeliard. The potato salad was overcooked, sloppily plated and not very generously served, but the sausages were delicious, and I kept wanting to offer a slice to the nice woman from Madrid. Next, a very desiccated and tasteless veal chop with rosti potatoes and savoy cabbage for Bruno, and stringy, dried out chicken in a cream sauce that had almost fallen apart through overheating and which had almost no trace of vin jaune for me. I surmised that the chicken had quite oddly been pre-cooked and then plated with sauce, which is why is lacked the moistness and richness of this dish at its best, and the only real pleasure I found here was in scarfing down the morels, since mushrooms in cream sauce strike a cord of truly primal pleasure insofar as I’m concerned.

The much loved walnut cake of yore stood up to memory, however–a nice eggy cake studded with walnuts and covered with icing, but meanwhile the poor young Spaniard was promising his parents the compensation of an oyster feast at noon the following day. “It was cooking with no heart,” said Bruno has we went into the night, and I now know that if I ever decide to give Chez Maitre Paul another chance–and I will, I love the French regional tables in Paris and the city’s gastronomic landscape would be infinitely poorer if they all sputter out–I’ll be dining alone.

Chez Maitre Paul, 12 rue Monsieur-le-Prince, 6th, Tel. 01-43-54-74-59. Metro: Odeon. Open daily. Prix-fixe menu 28.50 Euros, a la carte 40 Euros.

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Alas, aside from the very pleasant service, our meal went asunder the moment our first courses arrived–horribly overcooked ravioles de Royans (wonderful little ravioli from the Dauphine region stuffed with tangy cheese) in a completely unseasoned cream sauce and a sad looking bowl of vegetable soup with no garnish whatsoever.

Next, dried out confit de canard with an avalanche of baby potatoes, instead of the to-be-preferred pommes sardalais (made with duck fat and garlic), a decent but dull onglet de veau, and for me a very sad blanquette de veau. Blanquette de veau, veal stewed in lemony cream sauce with mushrooms, is one of the my favorite dishes, and this take was light years from anything I’d ever call by the same name–dry, stringy chunks of veal in a decent but underseasoned brown sauce with mushrooms and, oddly, carrots.

Pain perdu (French toast, which the French eat as a dessert instead of a breakfast meal) came with a thin almost tasteless caramel sauce, and ultimately the only redeeming things about this meal were the restaurant’s stunning interior, the nice service, good company and a nice bottle of Quincy.

Chez la Vieille, 37 rue de l’Arbre Sec, 1st, Tel. 01-42-60-15-78. Metro: Louvre-Rivoli. Avg 70 Euros.

Pharamond, 24 rue de la Grande Truanderie, 1st, Tel. 01-40-28-45-18. Metro: Etienne Marcel or Les Halles. Prix-fixe menu 28 Euros, lunch menu (two courses) 18 Euros, a la carte 50 Euros.

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