As Jean-Francois Piège has proven once again at the Clover Grill, his casually chic and wonderfully convivial new grill restaurant in an ancient side street in Les Halles, he’s not only a superb chef but a brilliant restauranteur. If this convergence of talents might seem logical, even natural, the truth is that many gifted chefs are actually pretty hopeless when it comes to doing the social, aesthetic and financial engineering necessary to create a successful restaurant.

Piège created the Clover Grill, a handsome space with a jet-engine strength ventilation system, which means you’re spared the curse of most Paris grill and meat restaurants–your coat smells like the meal you just ate for a week afterwards, with his wife Elodie, and the décor here is an expression of their assured and winningly witty good taste. The Pièges play with some tongue-in-check retro references to the decors once commonly found in French bistros and hotels with cabbage-rose wallpaper (Everyone old enough to have done a Eurail trip around Europe with a backpack or, in my case, ghastly tweed-sided American Tourister suitcase, will doubtless feel the twinge of a long dormant visual memory stirring when they spot this murky floral wall covering in the cozy second dining room here; for me, it’s an instant ticket to a triangular shaped Lyon hotel room next to the train tracks with those hateful hard round pillows called a traversin rolled up in the top of the bottom sheet and a sink but no toilet in the corner), honeycomb tile floors, wainscoting, globe lamps and other Gallic memes, but have the gift of making it all seem fresh and modern, too. This comes from the excellent lighting, beautifully made modern chairs and tables, and puckish fun of including a once shunned object like a Napoleon III faience plant stand in a decidedly hip décor.

The look of the place is important, too, because it tells you why you’re here, which is to have a good time. This is, in fact, the Piège’s welcome new take on the type of fashionable night-on-the-town Paris restaurant that hasn’t really been seriously updated since the Costes Brothers unleashed their formula of louche decors, snippy service and commissary style disco food on the French capital in the 1980s.

At the Clover Grill, however, not only do the room and the crowd look great, the service is charming and they serve the kind of good honest uncomplicated food you look for in a grill restaurant. That said, the bonus here is Piège’s consistent and admirably restless culinary creativity, which shows up most legibly in the starters.

Arriving for dinner the other night, we were offered a choice between the two dining rooms—the low-lit one with a Sputnik style ceiling-mounted lighting fixture and that memory-stoking wallpaper, or the bar room. We chose the latter, since it offered good sight-lines of the long great looking marble bar where you can also sit for a meal and a bartender from the Experimental Cocktail Club group mixes up some seriously good drinks, including the pimenton sprinkled Pisco sour I had to take the edge off of a long day, and the open kitchen where meat and fish are grilled over charcoal or cooked on a rotisserie in the back of the room. The cocktail was served with a nice complimentary hors d’oeuvre of spelt wafers, radicchio fronds and citrus crème, which pleasant provoked the appetite without exhausting it.

Hungry and unable to make up our minds, we settled on three starters, celeriac cooked like a baked potato in the cinders of the grill and then served with a black-truffle-and-Parmesan butter, mackerel marinated in white wine and served on canapés of grilled Koshihikari rice with horseradish, and “Comme une Pizza,” a brittle sphere of pizza dough—an idea Piege perfected when he was chef at the Brasserie Thoumieux, with sliced scallops, onions, truffles and bacon.

Though grilled fish and lobster are offered, as well as rotisserie-cooked duck, Bresse chicken and roast lamb for two, beef is the meat of the matter here, and though I love a good cote de boeuf, I was eager to try the two meats that Piege himself recommended to us when we chatted with him—the Noire de la Baltique beef and the Black Market beef from Australia, so I went with a contre-filet of the former and Bruno an entrecote of the latter, which we ordered rare.

As I’ve learned from finding myself in the middle of the road between a European preference for beef of texture and character and an American adulation of tenderness, tastes in beef are ferociously national and personal. Last year I wrote a piece on the great steaks of Europe for the Wall Street Journal, and it elicited some serious braying from North American readers who rejected the idea character could count for as much as tenderness. Here the story goes that a lot of the beef in Europe is unpleasantly tough, as opposed to the great feed-lot- fattened cuts-like-butter beef produced in the U.S. The point of my piece, which so many missed, is that for me the best beef exhibits an equilibrium between North American and European preferences, or is flavorful and textured but not tough.

Enjoyed with a glass of the very good Muscadet suggested by the savvy female sommelier here, our starters were excellent, and so they should have been for the hefty tariffs they carry. With just a single 69 Euros prix-fixe menu being the only alternative to a la carte, this new place is definitely going to be the province of the well-heeled. Then our steaks arrived with baby potatoes roasted in goose fat, and they were huge.

A first taste of my Noire de la Baltique contre filet (sirloin) made me head spin because it was so sapid. It’s flavor was potently mineral rich and ever so slightly fermented, even faintly winey and gamey, with a subtle nose of the beech-wood shavings on the floor of the room in which it had aged for two months in Hamburg and also notes of iodine, which led me to guess (correctly) that the aging atelier was somewhere in that city’s port district. There was a little bit of a mystery here, however. When we inspected the beef on display in the glass-fronted display cabinet in the back of the bar room, it had a label that said “Born, raised and slaughtered in Germany.” The only other restaurant I’ve been to that serves this beef, Beef in Geneva, which is supplied like Piège by the Metzger brothers butcher shop in Paris, identifies it as being Polish.

Whatever its provenance or biography may be, however, the Noire de la Baltique is some spectacularly good meat, and we both liked it better than the Australian Black Market beef, which had the somewhat overwhelming fatty richness of certain Japanese breeds. But again, beef preferences are personal in the most ornery of ways.

Aside from the two breeds we tried, the Clover Grill also proposes Bavarian beef (Simmenthal), Black Angus from Kansas, and Genisse de Boeuf (from heifers that have not yet calved) from the Limousin, Auvergne (Salers) and Charolais. A choice of four different sauces are also offered to garnish your meat: black Sarawak pepper, Bearnaise, Bercy (red wine with bone marrow and shallots), and a stunning reduction of macerated black currants and blackberries that’s the single most exciting steak sauce I’ve ever tried anywhere. This is because the jam-like depth of the red fruits meet the winey taste of the meat perfectly but without muddling it with red-wine tannins. When I asked Piège about this sublime sauce, he said his mother and grandmother used to make it in the Drome, the region in the Midi where the chef grew up in Valence, as another way of fully using the seasonal harvest of these berries.

Among the four desserts proposed, the stand-out is the rotisserie-roasted pineapple, which would seem to be painted with butter and sugar, so that it caramelizes while it roasts to end up with a taste that reminded me of my mother’s pineapple-upside-down cake, with it’s winking red maraschino cherry ‘eyes’ inside of each pineapple ring embedded in the delicious gooey caramel topping. To cut its sweetness, it comes to the table with a scoop of freshly made lemongrass ice cream, which is delicious. Otherwise, the smoked chocolate tart with a sable crust and hay-flavored ice cream was pleasant, but I can’t see myself ordering either the churros or the grilled banana ‘facon split’ the next time I come here. There will be a next time, too, since I’m curious to see what the 20 Euro burger is like, and I’m already craving another taste of that uniquely luscious Noire de la Baltique beef.

Clover Grill, 6 rue Bailleul, 1^st Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-40-41-59-59, Metro: Louvre-Rivoli, Open Monday to Saturday for dinner. Closed Sunday. Lunch from Monday to Saturday from January 1, 2017. Average 70 Euros, www.clover-grill.com

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I went to dinner at the Bien Élevé restaurant in Paris the other night, and I was very well fed by both the kitchen’s very good cooking and also the charm of a motivated staff who animate what was once an old café in a gallopingly gentrifying part of the 9^th Arrondissement near the Folies Bergère. Sometimes all I really want is a good simple hospitable meal, and that’s exactly what I found here.

If I’ve thought back on this meal with satisfaction several times since, it’s the calm, sincere nature of the experience itself almost as much as the food that has made me muse. What I’ve been mulling over is that we probably want too much from two things which are very much a part of our daily lives—adjectives and restaurants. The former are, of course, the verbal tools we use to express the superlative, and the latter are public places where we can choose to go to be fed. And on both counts, we seem to want and need too much from both of them.

Consider the case of ‘delicious,’ the most common adjective used to describe a powerfully pleasant experience of eating something. It’s a word that’s become so banalized that I systematically avoid using it in my writing. Then there’s the conundrum of contemporary restaurant reviewing culture and conventions. I read a lot of restaurant reviews of a given week across the media of a half-dozen different countries, and I find many of them so arcane and often arch that a restaurant which quietly accomplishes the task of serving a good meal with polite service in pleasant surroundings is often pushed to the sidelines in favor of places that are either very very good or very very bad (as a word, very still seems to have some permanent credibility but according to the prevailing trends in current usage the word should never be used in pairs, because this is very very bad).

Why adjectives have become so damaged is a bit of a mystery to me, but I think some part of the blame results from the pervasiveness of non-stop advertising that strains to incite and excite new reasons to consume. Everything has to be bigger, brighter, better, sexier, and more exciting, with the result that almost nothing is. Then there’s also the fact that so many of the English adjectives used to describe food are generally so flat-footed when compared to those in Latin languages.

The reason our expectations of restaurant going may have reached the point that a successful meal is defined as a suite of gastronomic revelations leading to rapture is probably because most English-speaking countries are still building their food cultures. Americans, along with Brits, Canadians, and New Zealanders, only began to take food and cooking seriously somewhere in the late sixties and early seventies. In countries like France or Italy that have very ancient gastronomic cultures, there isn’t the same resistance to simplicity found in the U.S. Sometimes, you see, an oyster should just be an oyster, and the French know that.

For my part, having had the privilege of eating the magnificence of the best cooks in Gaul for thirty years, I now find that I’ve fallen more in love than ever with my inner peasant, or that place that posits true good taste in nature, and this is a blessing. What I enjoy more and more is good simple honest food cooked from great seasonal produce with humility, care, and even a little bit of love. These days, I’d rather tuck into a plate of great ham, maybe some Spanish Iberico, French Noir de Bigorre or Prsut from Croatia or Slovenia than anything  ‘creative.’ I crave everything grilled—fish, meat, vegetables, even fruit and cheese. A beautifully made loaf of bread can move me as much as any elaborate sauce, and cheeses—real ones made from raw milk, are the most reliable constellation of gastronomic pleasure I know.

So off I went to meet Bruno for dinner at the Bien Élevé, because our relationship is gastronomically democratic. To wit, I impose a lot of meals on him, so occasionally, when we’re not cooking at home, which we both love to do, and I’m not intending to review a restaurant, we’ll just plain go out like most people do, and on this particular night his express wish was for some really good meat.

This is what the Bien Élevé (the Well Bred) specializes in–really good meat. Charming newbie restaurateurs Arthur Lecomte and Dimitri Aboulker threw over the corporate world to open a restaurant, because they like good food so much. Wisely, they decided to keep their first foray simple by concentrating on sourcing some really good meat. The beef that is the star of the menu comes from a farm run by the Bouchez family in Châteauneuf in the Nord Pas de Calais, and it’s Black Angus. Otherwise, chef Thibaut Eurin’s menu also proposes succulent porc noir from the Bigorre and free-range Licques poultry, along with a regularly changing pasta or fish for those who aren’t carnivores.

Helpfully egged on by Lecomte, we decided to share a côte de boeuf , or a rib steak for two. Knowing it would be a hefty, we shared some Bigorre ham and a slice of excellent terrine de campagne as starters, and then the meat arrived.

This beef was exquisitely succulent with a gently chewy texture and a depth of primal mineral-rich bovine flavor that I’ve rarely ever tasted before. First it was presented whole, and then it came back to the table in generous slices with a trio of sauces we ignored (although the Béarnaise was clearly homemade and pinch hit as the perfect dipping sauce for some excellent frites), chunky fries, and a puree of parsnips garnished from fresh white beans from Paimpol in Brittany.  Good simple cooking from excellent produce all across the board.

As a last act, we shared the baba au Chartreuse, the latter being the potent green herbal elixir made by monks in eastern France. It came with a ruffle of whipped cream and some chopped pear. The fruit was pleasant enough, but didn’t seem necessary for any other reason than to make a feint at something healthy in the home stretch.

The walk home after dinner was a very happy one, since we left the table sated and also quietly elated by the good simple meal we’d just enjoyed. I didn’t see a vision of the Madonna on the way home, and as far as I know, Bruno didn’t either. Instead, we shared a quiet companionable silence kindled by deep affection and the well-being brought on by a very good meal.

47 rue Richer, 9^th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. 01-45-81-44-35. Metro: Le Peletier or Grands Boulevards. Open Tuesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner, closed Sunday and Monday. Lunch menu 19 Euros, average a la carte 40 Euros. www.bieneleve.fr

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No, the better way to see how well a city eats is to go into its neighborhoods and sample the places the locals go to all of the time, a place like Le Bon Georges, for example. No surprise in this strategy, bien sur.

For lots of reasons, the most obvious being that I’m constantly sampling new places or checking up on tables I recommend in HUNGRY FOR PARIS, I’m not really a regular, as such, at any Paris restaurant. And yet in deference to the indefatigable Bruno, who dutifully accompanies me to remote corners of the city on tasting missions night after night when he’d much rather be eating at home, I’ve somewhat improbably become something of a regular at Le Bon Georges, a place I’ve now been over a dozen times since it opened this past winter. Understandably, he loves the idea of going someplace he knows and likes with good, solid, simple food. And so when I recently returned from a fascinating but challenging-in-the-last-act trip to Fez to report on a new restaurant there (the bus from Beauvais airport to Paris is a circle of hell that Dante missed, since it has some of the rudest and most inefficient service of any public transport I’ve ever used in my life), Bruno blessedly collected me from the Porte Maillot, and told me he’d booked at Le Bon Georges.

“You need some good meat and a nice bottle of wine,” he said, and his diagnosis was pretty accurate, since a heavy travel schedule had  been depriving me of both. The pretty dining room, which had previously been the venue of the clubby and over-rated trattoria Dell’Orto, was packed when we arrived, and we had a warm welcome from proprietor Benoit Duval-Arnould, a smart and charming restaurateur who’s done a better demographic analysis of the neighborhood he chose to set up shop in than anyone else I can think of in Paris in a longtime. To wit, Benoit aced its bobo appetite and gastronomic ticks, including a preference for pedigreed produce. Benoit, who trained as an agricultural engineer and who once worked for the Campbell’s Soup Company (Campbell’s owns the Leibig brand of soups in France), decided to bail on a successful corporate career, and it turns out he’s a natural in the restaurant business.

Benoit is extremely observant, reflexively generous, and good at casting, whether its his chef, Anton Guillon, who formerly cooked at Les Enfants Rouges, or his suppliers, who include the ever more omnipresent Joel Thiebault (the truck farmer from the Yvelines who supplies many young Paris chefs with locally produced seasonal produce, for those who don’t already know him), fish from Terroirs d’Avenir, and mostly importantly among many other good producers, beef from Alexandre Polmard, a farmer in the Meuse region of La Lorraine who raises Blonde d’Aquitaine cattle. Beef, you see, is the star product at Le Bon Georges, and the rich mineral taste of Polmard’s dense but intriguingly tender garnet-colored meat got my mouth to watering as soon as Bruno told me where we were going.

So we eye-balled the chalkboard menu, and Bruno lunged at the brioche with lobster, while I wanted a last feed of good white asparagus from Les Landes before the season ended. Bruno was happy with his brioche, which I’d have spread with something a little more emollient than just butter, and I liked my roasted asparagus with a well-made hollandaise sauce, but would have happily eaten more than the rather modest portion of four spears.

Tempted by a steak, I ended up with steak tartare–it’s just so good here, as are the home-made frites that accompany it, and Bruno did same. But Benoit decided to spoil us with baby carrots cooked in butter and a side of one of the best gratin dauphinois I’ve had in ages. Philippe and Natalie Gard’s Coume Del Mas – Schistes – Collioure 2013 went down a real treat, too, which is why we decided to end this very satisfying meal with some cheese, a perfectly ripened brie stuffed with walnuts for me and an ash-rolled chèvre for Bruno.

In Paris, we eat very well indeed.

45 rue Saint Georges, 9 Arrondissement, Tel. 01-48-78-40-30. Metro: Saint Georges or Pigalle. Open Monday to Friday for lunch and dinner. Sunday dinner only. Closed Saturday and Sunday lunch. Lunch menu 19 Euros. Average a la carte 65 Euros. http://www.lebongeorges.com 

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Often there’s no faster route to high spirits than a sudden surge of spontaneity and a good dose of extravagance (deeply considered penuriousness somehow just never seems to work). So on a gloomy Saturday morning, Bruno and I set out on a gastronomic expedition that I was certain would raise our weather-dampened spirits. We were heading to the new butcher shop that Hugo Desnoyer had opened in such a remote and very quiet corner of the remote and very quiet 16th arrondissement that it barely seemed like Paris when we got there.

Or at least the Paris I know, but then everyone inhabits the same city differently. Almost from the moment I arrived here in 1986, I developed an indifference shading to aversion to the 8th and 16th arrondissements, which have always struck me, with the exception of certain small neighborhoods, as epitomizing a certain bourgeois smugness. And since none of my friends live in this part of the city and most of them feel the same way that I do, I very rarely find myself in these western arrondissements. Still, there’s some handsome architecture deep in the 16th, and it’s also very green. And at this time of year, rain-filled lilacs are tumbling over wrought iron fences, and you catch a glimpse of an occasional bank of peonies on a private garden here or there. (Oh, how lovely it would be to have a private garden in the city! But failing that, I’m awfully glad to have the Jardins de Luxembourg).

In any event, Monsieur Desnoyer’s new butcher shop turned out to be neat as a pin, and the staff just as polite and helpful as they are at Tiffany’s—if you find other similarities between these two businesses, you’re not wrong either. But our destination was the solid butcher block table d’hotes on a raised platform in a corner of the this immaculate white space. What we’d decided, you see, was to take ourselves out for a carnivore’s feast, something Desnoyer only previously offered in a do-it-yourself version.

So we settled in at the table, and decided to share the faux-filet for two with a very good bottle of Haute Cotes de Beaune. No sooner than we’d ordered than the handsome and courtly Monsieur Desnoyer arrived with a complimentary plate of charcuterie, not because he knows me from a hole in the ground, but rather because with the opening of this new address, the butcher’s shop where he began his career as an apprentice many years ago and is now the boss, he’s celebrating his good fortune and hard work by sharing. Not only was it a generous and charming gesture, but it reminded me of why he’s my favorite Paris butcher. In the suddenly testosterone jumped up big bad ego world of star butchers in Paris, Desnoyer is the quiet man who gets on with his craft and who’s real pleasure is in selling people the very best meat he can possibly find.

There were three other people sitting at the table, and if we were reciprocally polite, no conversation with our neighbors occurred until a kindly and very familiar looking man and an Asian friend sat down at the table, and I racked my brains trying to figure out why I knew him. When our meat arrived and we grinned wolfishly, he wished us a “Bon appetit!,” and we fell into conversation. He told us he owned a a little restaurant on the Left Bank, a steakhouse, and I suddenly recognized William Bernet, the owner of the wonderful Le Severo in the rue des Plantes. Mais bien sur! He’d come along for lunch to support his star supplier, and because these two gents are really good friends beyond anything having to do with commerce. So then he ordered a really good bottle of Burgundy, and insisted we try it, and the table suddenly became very jolly as a previously shy crew recognized one another as lovers of la bonne chère (and chaire).

Just as our meat arrived–a sublime and perfectly cooked piece of Limousin beef so big we took half of it home and ate it for the next three days (here, parsimony is much advised as the basis for real delectation), the brilliant and voluptuous Valerie Solit arrived for lunch. Perched on six inch heels, wearing a turban and a sexy but demure A-line coat dress the likes of which I surely hadn’t seen since some long distant Easter Sunday, Solit, with her sapphire eyes, galvanized the shop. A charming lady, she’s a press attache, and among her clients are the Federation Francaise de Boucherie, so of course she was coming by Hugo Desnoyer’s new shop for Saturday lunch and to see how her chou-chou was getting on. I didn’t dare photograph her, by the way–I just don’t see myself brandishing my iPhone, which is all I had with me that day, at such a lovely lady, but there’s always Google for the curious.

William Bernet nicely offered us a bit more of his wine, which we refused (uniquely out of politeness, since it was superb), and an atmosphere of great conviviality blossomed during what had unexpectedly started to feel like some sort of primal tribal feast. I was delighted by the only element of our meal that wasn’t animal derived–a copy-this-idea medley of tiny new potatoes and radishes sauteed in salt butter, but by the time we’d eaten half of our steak, it didn’t even occur to me to wonder if there was a dessert option on the brief table d’hotes menu.

During lunch, we’d discussed what we’d agreed would be our v. reasonable butcher’s order. It was, we decided, time to stop being so open-handed everytime we went shopping together for food and wine, we really needed to start saving more money, and after such a good lunch, it would surely be easier to be more reasonable. So we joined the polite but wide-eyed line of customers waiting to be served. Staring into the cases at Desnoyer, one’s pulse really does quicken, too, which is why our very recent self-exortions promptly derailed the moment a polite young butcher in a pressed white jacket started serving us. So we’d have a veal chop, and some of that goreous jambon a l’os (ham on the bone), and a slice of the pistachio-studded veal terrine, which I just can’t resist, and some of the head cheese Bruno likes. Oh, and also that nice little rack of lamb, and the pork loins look good, too, and finally another faux filet to put in in the freezer.

Watching the butcher trim the meat that needed it (before he weighed it, thank you), and then wrap it–first in waxed white butcher’s paper, then in brown paper, before he tied it up with red string and wrote the name of the contents on the edge of the package in loopy black script, I was very happy, since the precision of these details communicated an ample but humble pride. And he also took the time to offer a warm, low-rolling set of suggestions as to how the morsels we were buying might best be cooked. So not only had I just eaten a wonderful lunch, and not only did I know I’d be eating very well again for a few weeks to come, but I so admired the art and grace with which these butchers practiced their craft. Of course we left after paying a big thumping bill, but that’s okay, because we actually don’t eat very much meat anymore, and besides that, the only logo sweat shirt I think I’d ever be comfortable wearing would probably say: Carpe Diem.

Boucherie Hugo Desnoyer Table d’Hotes, 28 rue du Docteur-Blanche, 16h, Tel. 01-46-47-83-00. Metro; Jasmin or Ranelagh. Average a la carte 50 Euros. Lunch only. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.hugodesnoyer.com Reservations essential.

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After dinner at the new The Beef Club the other night, however, I’m starting to have some serious doubts about what this trend means for Paris. If the food scene in every major city is in constant evolution, Paris isn’t every major city. It’s much smaller than London and New York, and without the same jumped-up financial sectors as those two cities, there’s less money to spin the wheels of the local restaurant industry, which is already struggling for a variety of distinctly local factors like the moronic 35 hour work week (whoever France’s next president may be, I hope they’ll renounce this daft Ruby Goldberg feint at economics once and for all).

What this means is that a big trend here has a lot more impact that it would in a larger city with a more lavish expense-account dining culture. A perfect–and rather sorry–example is the fact that almost everytime a neighborhood cafe or brasserie is remodeled these days, it turns up with a faux Costes brothers restaurant style decor. Though they’re definite signs Parisians are finally becoming bored by the Costes restaurants, the ripple effect of their success is still being copied everywhere. They were the ones who pioneered the local idea of well-sourced brand-name products instead of real cooking, and they also launched a whole sad battery of recipes that are more about assembling things on plates–salmon tartare, sliced tomatoes and mozzarella, etc., or just plain applying some heat here and there than are about the transformational art of cooking. And the new wave of Paris burger restaurants and steakhouses are basically just taking a leaf from the same playbook, since they’re all about prestige sourcing, too–meat from star butchers like Yves-Marie Le Bourdonnec or Hugo Desnoyer, plus a smattering of tantalizing culinary snobberies like moutarde de Meaux or Ogleshield cheese, and the smart art of grilling.

So the menu at The Beef Club offers a rather wilting and warning boilerplate of things that are likely to become ubiquitous in Paris, and what bothers me most about this is that they’re not French. I’m very far from being a gastronomic protectionist, but I honestly don’t understand why the beef served at The Beef Club comes from farmer Tim Wilson’s farm in Yorkshire (yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s grass-fed and the breeds are different from what you find in France, but so what–give me Bazas beef or Charolais or Blonde d’Aquitaine any day), but most of all I just don’t get this completely misbegotten and off-kilter version of a New York City steakhouse cross-bred with some wispy English version of same  and then lightly extruded through a French sensibility. Paris already has several superb steak restaurants, like Le Severo, so why do we need the Peter Luger modeled, super market-researched The Beef Club when what we’re really short of in the City of Light these days are good French bistros?

On the basis of the crowd there the other night–lots of younger affluent but fashionably bedraggled Parisians who checked their iPhones and Blackberries constantly through dinners with which they mostly drank Coca-Cola Light, I am light years away from being part of the target demographic. Still, I might have liked this place if the food had been better than average and the service half-decent. Since starters were expensive and neither original nor very appealing–Caesar salad, Scotch Egg with salad, and grilled rabbit livers, among others, we went directly to the main courses.

   I had a very sorry 23 Euro “Beef Burger” (as the Brits call hamburgers, a puzzling but precious little beat of verbal snobbery), a tasteless and rather overcooked burger on a stale roll that exhibited almost none of the promised garnishes of “bacon, grilled onions, lettuce, pickles, red leicester, ogleshield and sauce maison au whisky” and a side of ho-hum frites cooked in duck fat. The others had steaks, which were good, but in no way memorable, and we drank the cheapest red on the wine list, a Gigondas at 29 Euros.

To be fair, service was doubtless off its game because the restaurant had been reconfigured to accomodate two large tables of French food bloggers, but the amateurish and absent-minded behavior of everyone who waited on us drove Michael and Dorie right up the wall. We glanced at the menu for dessert–cheesecake, bien sur; chocolate mousse with crushed pecans and salted caramel sauce; or a fruit salad on a bed of passionfruit mousse, and decided to pass.

“I hate this restaurant,” the normally sugar-sprinkled Dorie exclaimed while we were waiting for the bill, which a waitress finally deposited on the table with an, “Et voila!”

With an an average meal running at least 60 Euros a head at The Beef Club, I couldn’t help but comparing this place to La Rotonde, where I’d had dinner a few nights before with Bruno. There, in a grand old dining room with a decor recalling the first-class dining carriages of another era–brass coat rails and fringed silk-shaded lamps, it was a pleasure to sink into an atmosphere so profoundly Parisian. To be sure, tourists fill the glassed in terrace of this historic Montparnasse brasserie, but the low-lit booths in back are still the haunt of a cross-section of Gallic captains of industry and Left Bank power brokers, and the impeccably calibrated service–polite, alert, vaguely deferential and exquisitely wry, couldn’t possibly be more old school French, which meant that I just lapped it up.

I’d hadn’t been to La Rotonde in at least twenty years, and so had almost no memory of the food whatsoever. And truth be told, I wasn’t expecting much, because I never expect much from Paris brasseries anymore. So what were we doing here Bruno was craving oysters, I was hungry for meat, it was late, and we’d just been to a gallery show of a friend’s photographs around the corner. So Bruno went with the 39 Euro menu, which brought him six Quiberon oysters, sea bass in preserved-lemon sauce on a bed of wild rice and one of the best millefeuilles I’ve had in Paris for a very longtime.

I went with some oysters, too, and then had an outstanding steak tartare made with beef from butcher Hugo Desnoyer and so generously served I almost couldn’t finish it. The tartare came with beautiful little mesclun salad and freshly made frites, and even though the ever dieting Bruno wasn’t drinking that night in penance for a lot of Sagrantino recently consumed in Umbria, I was able to make myself happy with a little 25 cl carafe of white Macon to start, and then the same measure of a good inky Colombo cotes du Rhone before I forced Bruno to share his millefeuille with me.

You won’t get to eyeball the millefeuille, because our pretty blonde waitress knowingly and neatly divided it in half before she served us, and it looked so good that I immediately devoured my half before thinking to record it for posterity. If the menu at La Rotonde name dropped a bit–the Saint Marcellin was from the cranky La Mere Richard in Lyon, sorbets from Berthillon, veal chop and a few other tasty morsels from Hugo Desnoyer, what I quickly understood was that the quality of this restaurant is so supervailing you really don’t even need these hang tags. I can’t remember the last time the little playing-card squares of rye bread served with an order of oysters were actually good–they’re invariably stale and taste like baked dust, but here the bread was delicious. So the next time I’m hankering after a meaty comfort-food feed, I’ll give a definite miss to all of the new ‘Anglo-Saxon’ restaurants in Paris, and head for La Rotonde, where I’ll order the 39 Euro menu, and have the following meal.

1) Terrine du moment de Gilles Vérot

2) Gigot d’Agneau de Lozère (Hugo Desnoyer) rôti aux herbes, jus et garniture

3) Baba au vieux rhum ambré

I’m really looking forward to it, too.

The Beef Club, 58 rue Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1st, Tel. 09-52-52-89-34. Metro: Les Halles, Louvre-Rivoli. Dinner only, Tuesday to Saturday. Average 60 Euros.

La Rotonde, 105 boulevard Montparnasse, 6th, Tel. 01-43-26-48-26. Metro: Vavin. Open daily. Prix-fixe menu 39 Euros. Average a la carte 50 Euros.

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“Mais attendez, Monsieur–you brought steaks back to France with you from the United States Vous etes completement fou ou quoi#8221; (Are you completely crazy or what?) Well, I’m not going to touch that interesting question from a French custom’s inspector with a barge pole, so I’ll just get it over with and fess up–yes, I often buy a half-dozen organic New York strip steaks at a favorite New York City butcher just before I’m off to the airport. I pack them in layer after layer of shopping bags and put them in my checked luggage, since the air temperature at high altitudes means they’re just fine after a seven or eight hour flight back to Europe.

We eat one the day I get home and freeze the others as a special treat to be meted out, if you will, during the months before I can get back to the butcher again. Yes, of course there’s wonderful, wonderful beef in France, but you just don’t get the same sublime trifecta of taste, texture and tenderness in any other beef in the world that you do with the very best American. With one very notable exception, a particular cut of French meat I found myself thinking about quite often during a trip to Buenos Aires, from which I came away disappointed by the city’s parillas.

Not long before my trip to South America, the beef loving Bruno and me broke our usual rule that steaks are best eaten at home and decided to splurge on Le Severo, which I think is the best steakhouse in Paris. This was hardly a spontaneous decision, of course, since you have to call several weeks ahead of time to snag a table in former butcher William Bernet’s always jammed-to-the-rafters dining room deep in the 14th arrondissement behind the tourist belt of the boulevard Montparnasse. Aside from that, I don’t go often, because it’s expensive, very crowded, very noisy and very popular with American lawyers whose voices could bore through metal. Not all American lawyers have voices like that–my best American friend in San Francisco and my brother are certainly exceptions, but the ones who come here seem to have clocked this place as some sort of Parisian version of the Palm steakhouse (it’s not), and so crow with pleasure at being in the know.

Ah, but when I give in to this place, the pleasure is intense. Though there’s usually a feint or two at the vegetable kingdom among the starters, I know it’s half-hearted, and so am never tempted the way that I might be by a garlicky iceberg lettuce salad with crumbled bacon and chunks of ‘blue’ cheese in an American steakhouse (writing that description, I’d give a finger for one of those salads right now) or the grilled provolone in an Argentine one. Instead, in an act of unblushing madness, we ordered plates of Bernet’s sublime Auvergnat ham and the best chorizo I’ve ever eaten in my whole life. And the fact that it’s served with thick pats of yellow butter reminds me–as if that’s necessary, of why I love France so much. I mean, talk about gilding the lily.

So the charcuterie is one great reason to come here, and the sharp knives and good bread, two others. The fact that Bernet has one of the most wonderful real-people, i.e. great bottles of wine at prices normal people can pay as a splurge, wine lists in Paris is another enticement, and the people watching is fascinating. But I’m not going to beat around the bush, I come here to eat a pavé de rumsteak from nearby butcher Hugo Desnoyer grilled on a salamandre, a piece of equipment I don’t have at home, with a tiny magic mountain of some of the best frites in the whole world.

Bruno made the mistake of ordering a filet the other night, and while it was delicious–Desnoyer’s meat is just plain sublime, it wasn’t half as good as my pavé de rumsteak, which offered the perfect Gallic knock-out punch to my perhaps vestigially patriotic attachment to great American beef.

They’re several desserts on the menu, including a creme caramel, but I’ve never seen anyone order one for the simple reason that this place is all about going to a bona-fide Cro-Magnon orgy. To wit, dessert would just be too damned dainty after a feed like this. After he’d finished his meat, Bruno excused himself to wait for me outside–he can’t handle the noise past a certain point, and despite the fact that this was meant to hurry me, I finished every shred of the meat, crumb of potato and drop of magnificent Crozes Hermitage at what I deemed to be a correct rhythm, pointedly ignoring his pacing on the pavement outside. The reason, you see, was summed up by the rumpled and rather tipsy businessman who stumbled out the door after me after I’d paid the bill for a cigarette. “Putain!” (F–k!) he exclaimed, after sucking on his Marlboro. “Was that meat good or what!#8221;

Le Severo, 8 rue des Plantes, 14th, Tel. 01-45-40-40-91. Metro: Mouton Duvernet. Closed Saturday and Sunday Average 55 Euros.

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If you work at home like I do, going downstairs to get the mail is a highlight of the day–what welcome distractions from my keyboard will I find when I open the mailbox Yesterday there was a bubble-wrap mailer from W.H. Norton in New York, and I ripped the package open in the cobbled hallway of my building in eagerness to see what it contained.

It was a thrill to find a copy of my friend Adam Ried’s beautiful new book “Thoroughly Modern Milkshakes” enclosed. Adam, whom I met when he and his partner moved to Paris for a year, is one of the most naturally talented cooks I know, so I couldn’t wait to get upstairs and dive into his new pages. Right off the bat, this beautifully produced book–lovely photographs, good paper, excellent editing, all a real rarity in the modern world of publishing, was a charmer. He’d told me about the book when I saw him in Cambridge, Mass. where he lives last winter, and having had the pleasure of many meals cooked by Adam, a former editor at Cook’s Illustrated and presently the cooking columnist for the Boston Globe and kitchen-equipment specialist on PBS’s popular “America’s Test Kitchen,” I was certain it would be a lot of fun.

And so it was, with the head notes, or the introductions to each recipe, being so much fun to read that I immediately sent an email about a generalized power failure in my Paris neighborhood to the poor woebegone editor who was awaiting an overdue story from me, and cozied up in the kitchen, my favorite place to read, with his book. Talk about good timing–in the midst of this ambient gloom, when everyone I know is counting centimes and hopefully hunting down life’s simpler pleasures, a milkshake cookbook is a real bull’s eye.

If I still think fondly of the banana-vanilla-ice-cream-and-maple-syrup milkshakes Mom made with our noisy but indestructible Waring blender as an after school treat, Adam showed me that the genre offers vastly larger and more intriguing possibilities, including a vanilla, rum and grilled cashew shake, a maple-bacon shake (two of my favorites flavors in one fell swoop), and a triple peach and buttermilk shake. Suffice it to say that my Kitchenaid blender got a real workout last weekend, and that the maple-bacon shake has become my all-time favorite.

This charming book is ideal for families, the newly divorced, singles of all ages, and as a house present for anyone you might be visiting this summer. As Adam says, “Shake, Rattle and Roll.”

———

So finally the weather in Paris broke, and I was suddenly hungry for a real feed but not in the mood to prepare any meal more complicated than a plate of the sublime Corsican charcuterie I’d brought back from a recent trip and a tomato-mozarella-basil salad with one of my new favorite olive oils–Christian Mons Catoni’s “Fruite Noir,” which is made from lightly fermented black Corsican olives. What I really wanted was to sink my teeth into a good steak, and when Bruno got home from work, we compared our respective desires (happily, they were in synch) and set out for Au Boeuf Couronne in the distant 19th arrondissement.

I had been here since a long ago dinner during which actress Leslie Caron spent the whole evening attacking a tete de veau with a mallet, a process she did with her usual elegance, although both Judy and I ended up being spattered with various bits of calf’s head, but a friend who just moved into this neighborhood–La Villette, or the district where Paris’s slaughterhouses were once located, recently raved about a steak feast she’d had there. So we put the top down on Bruno’s little black convertible and set off through a mostly empty city that seemed to be regularly punctuated with billboard’s advertising a new halal chicken loaf.

The restaurant hadn’t changed a wit since I was last there, nor, thank goodness, had the menu. Deciding to defy the cholesterol odds for a change, I ordered a frisee salad with a poached egg and lardons and a filet, while Bruno went with the marrow bones (which looked like they’d come from a dinousaur) and a faux filet. I was rather let down that they weren’t doing their sublime pommes soufflées, or potato slices fried so that they puff up, but the pommes dauphine the waiter proposed in their stead were worth the trip across town. These perfectly deep fried golden nuggets of choux pastry mixed with mashed potatoes had a slight whiff of nutmet and were absolutely heavenly with one of the best pieces of meat I’ve eaten in a very longtime. The frisee salad wasn’t cooked to order–the lardons were cold, as was the egg, and a squiggle of reduced raspberry vinegar had no business being on the plate whatsoever, but our main courses were a triumph, the waiter was charming, and it was a real pleasure to be in an old-fashioned Paris restaurant that didn’t reek of marketing.

Open seven days a week all year long, this delightful place really is worth the cab fare for diehard carnivores.

Au Boeuf Couronne, 188 avenue Jean-Jaures, 19th, Tel. 01-42-39-44-44. Metro: Porte de Pantin. Average 45 Euros.

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