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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Roman Ampitheater in Arles

Beyond Le Gibolin, what I love most about Arles, the ancient port on the Rhone River just north of La Camargue in the south of France, is that it makes you muse. This comes from the constant visual elision between the past and present that’s effortlessly legible in its streets and which also gives it a vast but casual wealth of daily beauty. And for me, the current creative quickening of the city is very much due a certain wry but delicate sensibility that’s fed by this ability to wonder about things that are important beyond the thought-dulling busyness of our daily lives.

The Rhone Seen Through a Window at the Musee Reattu

Perhaps this is why the hunger that Arles induces in me is for simplicity, which I reliably and deliciously find and feed at Le Gibolin, a small bistrots a vins in the heart of town on the wonderfully named rue des Porcelets (street of the piglets).

This long narrow restaurant is run by Luc Desrousseaux and Brigitte Cazalas, who previously worked at Le Chapeau Melon in the 20th Arrondissement of Paris for many years before they packed it in and moved south almost a decade ago. Now he’s in the open kitchen at the back of this long narrow space where the walls are lined with bottles of the mostly southern French gibolin (wine, in old-fashioned French slang) they serve to accompany their brief changes-daily chalkboard menu.

Stopping by for dinner here on a warm night when the town was busy on the eve of the inauguration of a big Annie Leibovitz exhibit at the Fondation LUMA, the art complex in a former rail yard that is transforming the city into one of the world’s most important showcases of contemporary art, the room was filled with people talking about art and politics in a half dozen different languages. This made great entertainment for me, too, since I was on my own.

From the brief market menu, I chose one of my favorite provencal dishes, artichauts barigoule, or artichokes braised in white wine with herbs. It’s a delicate dish with a subtle keyboard of vegetal tones, which were amplified here by meaty lardons (chunks of bacon), radishes, carrots and chopped green onions. With a sprinkling of Espelette pepper, it was light, refreshing eating on a very warm night.

In so many restaurants, drinking wine by the glass is a disappointment. But not here, since with my artichokes, Brigitte Cazalas poured me a glass of one of my favorite southern French whites, a Cairanne from the Domaine de l’Oratoire Saint Martin. Quite logically she followed this happy quaff paired with the Domaine’s red wine when she brought me a beautifully cooked rack of lamb with a big mound of garlicky baby spinach as my main course. When I asked where the lamb was from, she explained that it came from the plaine de la crau, the flat grassy steppes below Les Alpilles. In a citrus acidulated sauce of its pan drippings, the lamb was succulent and full of flavor.

Eager to the prolong the feeling of well-being that comes from being well-fed in a companionable setting, I asked what cheese they were serving that night. When Brigitte’s daughter told me it was a pelardon, a creamy goat cheese from the nearby Cevennes, I happily damned the additional calories and was rewarded with an ivory-colored disk of perfectly aged cheese–the chalky interior was surrounded by an envelope of creamy cheese under a soft pleasantly mossy crust and a dribble of grassy green olive oil only made it better. With the cheese, Brigitte poured a dry white from the Ardeche.

Afterwards, I sipped a final espresso slowly for the pleasure of wallowing in my own private sense of well being. Then I paid my bill with a sense of relief for both her and me that the hugely pregnant woman at the table d’hotes nearby hadn’t gone into labor before we’d enjoyed our respective meals. Stepping into the street, I was grateful for a feeble breeze carrying a whiff of jasmine and a little wistful in not knowing when I’d next be having a meal at one of my favorite places in the south of France, Le Gibolin.

13 rue des Porcelets, Arles, tel. (33) 04-88-65-43-14 Open Tuesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner. Closed Sunday and Monday (and Tuesday from November to March). Average 40 Euros.

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@Stephane Adam

Canard & Champagne, a new restaurant in the Passage des Panoramas in Paris, has a very clever concept. Occupying the magnificent landmarked former premises of an 18^th century stationery shop with black-and-white marble floors and a magnificent carved wooden shop in the moody Passage des Panoramas, this casual convivial place specializes in two of the most quintessentially French products imaginable, duck and Champagne. It’s the brainchild of shrewd young restauranteurs Jean Valfort, who previously launched Blend, Paris’s first gourmet burger chain, and Pierre Dutaret, who comes from a famous foie-gras producing family in southwestern France.

Bar at Canard & Champagne @ Stephane Adam

“Our concept is unabashedly cocorico (this is how the French hear the crowing of the cock that is their national symbol, and the word is also slang for patriotism),” says the amiable Valfort. “We also wanted to promote Champagne as a table wine, or a wine that pairs well with food. Too many people think of it only in terms of being a party drink or a special-occasion quaff, but it goes so well with a variety of different foods, including duck and foie gras, the staples of our menu,” he added.

Indeed, it’s easy to order here since you have a choice of two starters—excellent foie gras that comes with an intriguing chutney of fruit and nuts or a green salad, three main courses—magret de canard (grilled duck breast), confit de canard (duck preserved in its own fat) or a steak. Desserts come from the Boulangerie BO in eastern Paris, and they’re superb, especially the Madagascar vanilla and chocolate tarts. And to add to the fun of a meal here, the sommelier is happy to suggest a different Champagne for each course.

What I was not expecting when I went to dinner here with Bruno was an abrupt and very powerful experience of time travel triggered by taste memory.

In fact it was the appropriately goose-bump inducing mineral-rich succulence of the juicy magret de canard (duck breast) that sent me musing in some very murky layers of memory. The stunning deliciousness of this ur French fowl, which was served with potatoes and a flute of delicately fruity Champagne that flattered the bird perfectly, unexpectedly equipped me with a sort of impromptu sextant which made it possible to measure a large stretch of lapsed time with amazing accuracy and flinchingly tender perceptivity.

If one sharp point of the instrument was stuck in the flesh of the duck the other night, the other was more randomly pinned rather precariously to a summer night on Quogue, Long Island in the late 1960s. Here, in a great gray hen of a wood-shingled Victorian summerhouse, I ate my first duck.

The bird in question had been purchased from the big duck-shaped cement shop—a masterpiece of American roadside kitsch that all of us loved, in the back country behind Quogue back in the days when the hot summer air on Long Island still smelled pungently, almost sulfurously of potato fields and there were enough duck farms around so that ‘Long Island duck’ was a designation on New York City menus.

My parents had been dispatched on a five-week Mediterranean cruise by my grandmothers to mend a marriage that would remain rudderless, and we—me, my two brothers and my sister—went to stay with our adored Grandmother Jean in this huge but wonderfully shabby place with lots of clam-shell ash trays, board games missing cards and other bits and pieces, paperbacks swollen from humidity in lop-sided bookcases and wobbly wicker furniture with hard kapock pillows covered in faded floral patterns. During the week, my heart-stoppingly handsome second cousin Bart—his beauty came largely from his Argentine mother rather than any blood line we shared—took me and my brother John to the beach club, where we spent the whole day in the sea like seals while he chatted up and conquered one pretty blonde au pair girl after another. Meanwhile, my younger brother and sister splashed the minnows and each other in an inlet at the bottom of the lawn where my grandmother could keep an eye on them.

If the weeks were peaceful, the weekends were agitated, because my aunt, a then unmarried book editor who lived in New York City, would come for the weekend with one friend or another and often a pair of boys to boot. While we were content with the cleaning woman’s wonderful fried chicken and potato salad, or hot dogs and hamburgers, this wouldn’t do for the Manhattanites, which is how I found myself sitting at the dining room table starting into a plate a piece of duck, the hairs on its skin still visible and its gray meat napped by the orange sauce someone had attempted to improvise with orange marmalade, Dijon mustard and some Port.

All of the adults came to the table with the remains of their cocktails, watered down by ice cubes that had melted to the size of aspirins. It was a sweltering night, and the sad little fan someone had put on a side chair near the table only really served to remind all of us of just how hot and uncomfortable we really were.

I thought the duck was loathsome—it was too gamey for my pre-adolescent palate, the meat was stringy, and the sauce was at once too sweet and too tart. I noticed that Bart, the apple of my eye, wasn’t eating his bird either, and that my grandmother had laid her silver over her duck to unconvincingly disguise the fact that she’d barely touched it, and to make sure no one thought she was going back to it, she’d already lit a Parliament.

“Alec, you’re always so curious at the table—why haven’t you eaten your duck?” asked my aunt.

“It tastes awful,” I said, and the conversation stopped. All of the adults at the table except my grandmother insisted I be punished for my rudeness.

“Oh, well, my lambs, it’s such a warm night, and maybe duck isn’t something that children are necessarily going to enjoy,” my grandmother started equivocating. But the little mob was not to be stopped, which is why I was sent to bed early without dessert.

I was in my room sitting on the window sill next to the screen window listening to the crickets in the night and hoping I might catch another tantalizing glimpse of Bart taking a shower in the chauffeur’s apartment over the garage where he was staying before he went out, as he did every night, when the door opened. I knew it was my grandmother from the orange point of her lit cigarette as she advanced through the dark. “Here you are, darling.” She’d come up the back stairs to bring me a bowl of vanilla ice cream with butterscotch sauce. We sat next to each other on my bed while I ate my ice cream and she smoked, her ashes falling somewhere in the dark.

“Mother! Mother?! Where are you We’re waiting to start the game,” my aunt called from down the hall. “Alright, sweet dreams, darling, and I’ll see you in the morning,” she said, kissing me on both cheeks. She started away, and then she turned back, “Oh, and one more thing,” she whispered. “Don’t write off duck entirely based on the one we had tonight. It can be delicious when it’s cooked properly the way they do it France. You’ll see one day, I’m sure you will.”

And so I did.

Nothing preserves memory better than scent, food and music.

57 Passage des Panoramas, 2^nd Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 9-81-83-95-69, Metro: Richelieu-Drouot, Grands Boulevards, or Bourse. Open Tuesday to Sunday, noon-12am. Closed Monday. Lunch menus 17.50 Euros, 20.50 Euros; prix-fixe menu 26 Euros; desserts 8 Euros. www.canardetchampagne.com

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When I was growing up in Westport, Connecticut there was a wonderful old farmstand on the Post Road (U.S. 1) called Rippe’s that sold fresh corn, tomatoes and bunches of twine-bound zinnias grown in the fields out back. During the Fall, an ancient cider press filled big glass jugs with delicious caramel-colored cider made from apples that came from the farm’s orchard, along with gourds and pumpkins, and then Rippe’s annual season ended for the year after a few weeks of selling locally grown Christmas trees, pine boughs, holly and mistletoe. Rippe’s is long gone–a gated condominium community now occupies the former farmland–but several years after it vanished, I was amused to discover that Westport had acquired a new store called Hay Day (now also closed), which was a highly styled but completely ersatz riff on a real farmstand. What the new store told me was that someone had figured out that there was money to be made from the nostalgia people feel for real farmstands, a genus that could no longer be sustained in this wealthy suburb due to exploding land prices.

This same strange and strained convergence of forces that replaces the authentic with a pastiche of what’s gone missing is also at work in Paris right now, and a perfect example is Buvette, a new cafe-restaurant cum wine bar in the alarmingly ever trendier 9th arrondissement where I live. Odd though it may sound, it’s the Paris branch of a France inspired restaurant in New York City’s West Village by the same name and it has the same owner, American chef Jody Williams. Stranger still is that the reason I was incited to visit what I assumed would be another Bobo corral in South Pigalle is that French friends who’d been to New York recently came back raving about William’s original address.

So on a rainy night, I met a friend for dinner, and as soon as I came through door, I was impressed by the impeccable mis en scene of this place, which looks as though it had been sourced from the Williams Sonoma, (the upscale U.S. kitchenware purveyor) and West Elm (the urban hipster home-furnishings supplier) catalogs. Apples were piled in pretty pyramids on the bar, which was awash in very handsome glass cake and pastry stands displaying various desserts. There was something rather Hollywood set-decorator about the shiny stamped tin ceiling–handsome though it might be, and the globe lamps, though, and good-looking though the room was, it looked like it might be a Paris set for a Woody Allen film. The crowd of stylishly dressed bobo locals paying as much attention to their iPhones as their dining companions might have come from central casting, too.

The format of the menu here is small-plates grazing, something I’m always wary of, since so often after meals like this one, I find myself wanting to make some spaghetti around midnight, but the pretty little menus offered a variety of nice-sounding dishes, and we agreed to just order away and share. The first course that arrived at the table was a nicely made slice of terrine, which was served with good bread and garnishes of whole-grain mustard, cornichons and Kalamata olives. Since I love these olives, I didn’t mind the fact that they’re not a particularly French garnish for a terrine, and similarly, I loved the streaky bacon wrapped around the well-seasoned terrine, which actually reminded me more of a very well-made meat loaf than something a master charcutier like Gilles Verot might produce.

Unfortunately, the Croque Forestière–a Croque, or toasted bechamel and grated cheese topped sandwich, that followed was a big disappointment. It lacked the lush emolience of a really good croque–a fried egg might have helped, but there wasn’t one, and the bread was sliced too thick, the Forestière, or wild mushroom, filling had more texture than taste, and it was awkward to eat on a small plate that came with the same olives and cornichons that became the recurring gastronomic punctuation of this meal.

Hachis parmentier, one of my favorite cuisine ménagère dishes, was oddly interpreted here, too. Made to order in a small shallow dish, it had none of the alluring juiciness of a proper long-baked hachis parmentier and instead was just a mound of mashed potato sitting on a bed of underseasoned chopped beef. The walnut oil used to dress a chewy brussels sprout salad had gone off, and a tartine of purple kale ordered out of curiosity came as a woefully unseasoned mounded of chopped vegetable on another piece of thick bread.

While my friend was off in the men’s room, the handsome well-dressed older French professional woman who was dining alone next to us volunteered her verdict on Buvette. “It’s very pretty, mais un peu Disney, and even though the young staff are sweet, they need a real cook in the kitchen,” she said. The off-center strangeness of eating what Americans think of as French country food in Paris was somewhat blunted by the very good chocolate mousse with which we finished our meal, but I left with over fifty fewer euros in my wallet–the wines by the glass are expensive here–and had to fight off off the temptation to whip up some spaghetti carbonara when I got home. Ultimately, the hugely popularity of this address has more to do with its admirable success as an exercise in style–it really is very pretty–and the demand for places with non-stop serving hours than it does with a successful gastronomic signature.

28 rue Henri Monnier, 9th, Tel. 01-44-63-41-71. Métro: Saint Georges or Pigalle. Open non-stop from 10am to midnight, Tuesday through Sunday, Closed Monday. Average 35 Euros.

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A week recently spent in the Loire Valley, which I hadn’t visited for more than a day or two in many years, caused me to fall into love with this magnificent and graciously green patch of France all over again. And this despite the fact that it’s not always an easy place to eat. Oh, there’s lots of good food in the Loire to be sure, but after two or three of the very old-school French feeds that so many restaurants in the region still feel it incumbent to offer, I found myself squirming for relief from the relentlessness of these heavily formatted meals and their self-consciously serious traditional French cooking. The problem is that many chefs continue to believe this sort of dining is what up-market travelers to the region require when the reality is that most people would be made much happier by simpler, lighter, healthier cooking and a service style that’s more relaxed and less sociologically stuffy. As a city-dweller, I’m really not looking for the same thing in the country that I want in Paris either.

Happily, however, a few local chefs have seen the light, and the best among them is young Olivier Arlot, who moved a few miles from Tours to the pretty little town of Montbazon a year and a half ago and took over the premises of a well-respected local restaurant called La Chanceliere. He gave the dining rooms a modern makeover, too, painting the large old exposed beams on the low ceilings dove gray and installing soft artful lighting. So instead of the tedious faux-chateau idiom you so often find in the Loire, this place comes off as a casually chic country auberge, and that’s a good thing.

Having eaten lunch at a pretentious and disappointing one-star restaurant in Blois–the service was glacially paced, the food fussy and unoriginal and the atmosphere hidebound enough to bring on the worst symptom of a restaurant where no one feels at ease, a clientele that speaks in whispers at the table out of misplaced respect some high-handed idea of gastronomically serious meal, neither Bruno nor I were very hungry when we left our hotel for dinner. We might, in fact, have begged off going out to dinner altogether if our hotel had offered the option of a slice of homemade terrine de campagne with a nice big green salad and then maybe some cheese. Instead there were silver candelabras on the tables in the dining rooms and the pale salmon colored linens that are a surefire visual warning that the kitchen could be depended upon to offer a eighties time capsule experience of ‘gastronomique’ dining. So we went out.

Settling in over glasses of Domaine de la Taille aux Loups sparkling Montlouis, my new favorite vin petillant, the dining room was populated by a mixture of mostly middle-aged Americans and Canadians rewarding themselves with a good meal after a long day of the cycling tourism that’s popular in the region and shy locals out for a special occasion, and the young staff was warm and welcoming. Though I’m often exasperated by amuse bouches, since they rarely deliver what their name promises, I wasn’t particularly interested when ours arrived, but the bright gently sweet flavor of warm fresh pea soup spiked with the jus of gently poached and chopped baby squid was intriguing. The soft brine of the squid did an intriguing minuette with the vividly vegetal flavor of the peas, and our mouths were amused indeed.

Blanketed in foam though they may have been, our first courses were outstanding. I loved my chopped white asparagus with a fried egg and crumbled bacon in a light smoky broth, and Bruno’s lobster ravioli, too often anonymous and barely tasting of lobster, were tender little crescents of homemade pasta filled with perfectly cooked lobster meat and garnished with more of same and served in an intriguing fennel scented froth. The bread served with our starters was excellent, too, and suddenly we were really glad we hadn’t thrown in the towel and missed this meal.

Our main courses, which arrived with pleasant alacrity, were outstanding. My slow-cooked guineau hen breast was served on a bed of semolina with pan juices, baby artichokes and black olives, and the luscious meat was perfectly punctuated by the meaty salty olives and the rich deglaze. The suprise of Bruno’s cod, which had been slow-cooked with salt butter, was an eminently seasonal sauce of of lemon verbena. “C’est vachment bon,” he said after a first taste, and the older French couple sitting across from us grinned. “Il a vraiment du talent, Monsieur Arlot, n’est ce pas, Messieurs,” said the nice lady with an enameled pansy pin that her husband had just given her as an anniversary present (I have the hearing of a bat). Our wine, a 2006 Domaine de la Taille aux Loups Montlouis by Jacky Blot was the best white, was the best white I’ve had in a very longtime–“It tastes like honey and fermented hay,” Bruno observed, in a guileless but accurately lyrical remark.

In a friendly gesture characteristic of a restaurant that really wants to please its clients, I was allowed the strawberry-and-black-olive tart with basil sorbet even though it was part of the 49.50 Euro menu and not the 39.50 Euro one I’d ordered, and it was witty and impeccably made. It would never have occurred to me that slivers of black olive could make strawberries more eloquent, but they did, and the sorbet was a sweet play on the acidity of the fruit. Bruno was delighted by his soup of white peaches with raspberry sorbet in a nage of Vouvray moelleux with raspberries and a few lazer fine ribbons of basil, too.

When I tweeted a photo of Arlot’s lobster ravioli, several people commented that they were weary of foam. I’m not a mad fan of foam–a very consistent element of Arlot’s cooking, either, but in this instance, it’s there for a real reason. To wit, this exceptionally talented young chef uses it as a vehicle for adding flavor to his cooking without resorting to heavier sauces, so instead of foaming at the mouth, I left the table with the profound satisfaction of having had a truly excellent meal and every intention of returning here again as soon as I possibly can.

Hungry at noon the following day on the outskirts of Bourgeuil, we were preparing to settle for a likely mediocre meal in cafe just to get at some salad and avoid the overly long and filling steeple chase of another gastronomic feed when I noticed we needed gas. After filling up, I went inside to the cash desk to pay and fell into conversation with the voluble cashier, who insisted on speaking English to me because she’s currently trying to learn the language before a trip to visit her daughter in Canada. We chatted about traveling in the Loire Valley and about how much I like Bourgeuil wines, and she volunteered that there was a great place to sample them by the glass just up the road, adding that their food was good, too. I protested that I didn’t really want a big meal, and she assured me that I’d be happy at the Cafe de la Promenade.

I liked the rustic looks of this place, which occupies an old gasworks, as soon as we stopped, too. To my delight, the menu offered just the kind of light rustic food we were in the mood for too. Though the ‘hambourgeuil,’ a burger garnished with onions cooked in red wine and sauteed foie gras, sounded tasty, we settled for the formule du laboreur (laborer’s lunch) for two, and it started with a superb assortment of charcuterie–lardons confitted in their own fat, terrine de campagne, country ham, and sausage, and continued with a made-to-order bacon tart cooked in a wood-burning oven. The tart pastry was homemade and all of the ingredients used were organic, so it had a lot of flavor.

A generous local cheeseboard followed the savory tart, which we ate in the garden under a trellis of vines with glasses of Bourgeuil rose on a hot afternoon. This excellent country feast concluded with a just-baked apple tart with slathered with creme fraiche, topped with fine slices of Golden Delicious apple and sprinkled with Calvados. Service was relaxed and friendly, and there was a lot of teasing banter exchanged between us; Sophie, the proprietaire; and the two well-wined electricians having lunch at the table next to us over coffee. This was exactly the type of light but flavorful country feed we were hoping to find, so we bought a bottle of the rose we’d enjoyed and dropped it off at the gas station after lunch by way of thanks. Karine, the cashier, blushed when I offered her the wine but one kind gesture surely deserved another.

Café de la Promenade, 1 avenue du Général-de-Gaulle,

Bourgueil, Tel. 02-47-95-10-87. Open daily. Average 25 Euros. www.cafedelapromenade.com

Olivier Arlot, 1 Place des Marronniers, Montbazon, Tel. 02-47-26-00-67, Closed Sunday and Monday, Prix-fixe menus 29.50 Euros (lunch), 39.50 Euros, 49.50 Euros, 72 Euros. www.olivierarlot.fr

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A Table a la Marguerite

Last week through this website I received an email from a nice lady in Toronto who’d recently been in Paris and who’d had a very disappointing experience at one of the city’s most famous bistros, Chez Georges. Following a response from me, she wrote again, and her message was not only a polite plea in favor of continued exigency and honesty in writing about food in Paris, but an entreaty to remember and respect socio-economic diversity. Here’s what she said:

“What this restaurant, their owners, chef and staff may not appreciate is how rare an opportunity it can be for one to travel to Paris, and to be able to reserve a table at what is reputedly one of the best bistros: one works long hours and saves one’s money for such a trip. The evening of the special dinner is meant to be a memorable occasion with delicious food.  They do need to take care to be reminded that their customers may not be privileged and/or rich, but workers/professionals like themselves who come with respect to appreciate French cuisine of ‘excellence’ , to a place of ‘high standards’.  It was so disappointing.”

Musing on this message, I realized that this was a real cri de coeur, and it really struck home with me, because I still remember sleepless nights in a lumpy New York City sofa bed in a tiny studio apartment in Greenwich Village following the crown molding around the room over and over again and wondering how on earth I’d ever find my way back to Europe on a very modest Assistant Editor’s salary.

So what she was saying is that much of the Anglophone world’s food and travel press has drifted off course in the direction of catering to the 1%, or the world’s wealthy, instead of the 99%, which is, of course, where I live. This media tack has been for mostly commercial reasons, of course, and its unintended result is to have fertilized demand for the increasingly rich, diverse, well-produced and ecclectic offer of gastronomic information available on-line. One way or another, I am as deeply committed to good value as I am to good food, and in any event, the two often go together like hand in glove.

The truth of what my Canadian correspondent was driving at had already been much on my mind during the last few months of Paris reporting, too, because this year restaurant prices have just plain gone through the roof. The Beef Club, Les Jalles, and now the just opened A la Marguerite are all practicing prices that make my head spin, and which also evidence a serious disregard for rapport qualite prix, or value for the money. To wit, A la Marguerite, which is the sister of the very good Les Fines Gueules, is a place where it’s really easy to spend 65 Euros/$84 a head on a casual meal.  And if proprietor Arnaud Bradol’s sourcing is outstanding, the quality of the cooking just doesn’t warrant such vertiginous prices. For much less money, I could eat better at the nearby La Regalade Saint Honore, and kicking it upstairs a bit more, I could go to Yam’Tcha or Spring, also in the neighborhood.

I didn’t know this when I arrived, though, and was musing over the really interesting question of why some restaurants of more or less equal quality thrive while others don’t survive–this space was previously occupied by L’Atelier Berger, an earnest restaurant that I went to two or three times after it was opened by a Franco-Norwegian chef a longtime ago but never found compellingly good enough to return to, when I climbed the staircase to the first-floor dining room to meet a friend, Nola Fairhope, who’s an old Paris hand like me. We sipped at white Cheverny that wasn’t worth 6 Euros for a short pour and studied the chalkboard menu.

“Good grief, these prices are rather stiff for a bistro in Les Halles, aren’t they#8221; said Nola. “Hate to be a wet blanket, but I think all of you who write about food have become a bit too cavalier about how expensive many of the city’s new restaurants are. You know I can get a very good meal at Lilane, my little local go to behind the Place Monge, for a lot less than we’re going to end up spending here.”

By the time the friendly young waiter came to take our order, I’d already decided I’d pick up the tab for our wine. I’d liked to have invited Nola to dinner for that matter, but unfortunately–contrary to what many people assume, most food writers have only the most paltry of budgets, if they have any at all. So our first courses arrived, white asparagus with a meaty vinaigrette for Nola and seared tuna with an avocado condiment for me. Four spears of asparagus seemed a stingy serving for 12 Euros–a whole botte (bunch) of white asparagus from Greece was on sale for 2 Euros this weeks at Lafayette Gourmet, but they were perfectly cooked and complimented by their sauce. Served cold, my tuna was a bit dull–more my fault for ordering it though than the kitchen’s in this case. Still, I was puzzled by the way that this restaurant had almost none of the edgy and delicious mojo of Les Fines Gueules. Obviously, something had been lost in translation here, and it seemed to me that the desire to coin more or less the same formula as that served up at the original restaurant but with a higher price tag was something that wasn’t going to fly. Or at least not for me anyway.

To be sure, my main course–an exquisitely cooked rack of butcher Hugo Desnoyer’s lamb on a bed of white beans with piquillo peppers and garlic–was so good that it almost warranted its 29 Euro price tag, but Nola’s fish was overcooked and the courgette ‘spaghetti,’ a fun idea for a home cook perhaps, but a bore in a restaurant for having become such a cliche, was a letdown, especially at 26 Euros. Neither of us much liked the 28 bottle of Papaton, an organic Coteaux de Loir wine that we’d ordered as much by price as anything else, since it remained as rigid and square shouldered a half hour after it had been opened as it was when I took a first slightly fizzy sip.

Since Nola never eats dessert, and I was so well-fed from my fine rack of lamb, we demured on a sweet and called the meal to a close. “There wasn’t much emotion in that cooking,” she said as I walked her to her bus, and after it had carried her off into the night, I found myself even more perplexed by the rather charmless offspring of a restaurant that I’d always liked so much than I’d been a few minutes earlier until I finally realized what A la Marguerite was really all about. All of the enthusiasm of really good locavore sourcing and the excitement about organic and biodynamic wine that had made Les Fines Gueules such a hit has been turned into a marketing ploy for a restaurant that’s gunning for high-spending hipsters–a jazz club will be opening in the cave here sometime soon, and with Les Halles on a obvious upswing due to the renovation of the ghastly cement wart of a shopping mall that replaced the main food market of the city of Paris in the seventies, it’s inevitable that shrewd restauranteurs are already packing into a neighborhood that will surely enjoy a serious redux once the dust has cleared.

One way or another, I have to doff my hat to Bruno Doucet and the remarkably good food he continues to serve at the very reasonably priced La Regalade Saint Honore, just a hop, skip and a jump from A la Marguerite. It’s my go-to address in their neighborhood.

Restaurant A la Marguerite, 49 rue Berger, 1st, Tel. 01-40-28-00-00. Metro: Les Halles; Louvre-Rivoli; Pont Neuf. Open daily. Lunch menu 29 Euros, average a la carte 65 Euros.

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Buttermilk fried chicken

Even though I like winter and would find it disorienting  to live somewhere without real seasons, the mid-way point of this leafless gray season in Europe does bring on a certain restlessness. It may be light deprivation–although this winter’s been relatively sunny and mild for Paris, or a surfeit of roasted root vegetables, or my hatred of wearing socks, or a combination of all three, but I could use a change of scene, and without buying an airplane ticket or hopping a train, I found one last week when I stopped by the new Verjus wine bar in the Palais Royal. On a wet night, this place was warm, cozy and friendly, and also packed with an outgoing international crowd who were sipping Laura Adrian’s excellent wines and snacking on the really delicious small-plates of Braden Perkins, the two comprising the couple who own and run this place.

It was reassuring to see it doing so well, too, because with a couple of exceptions, notably in Le Fooding, it’s been rather disappointing to follow the dribble of tepid, pat-on-the-head polite reviews that this terrific restaurant and wine bar opened in December by Americans Perkins and Adrian has received in the French press. I’ve eaten there several times now, and Perkins’s cooking, which was very good the first time I went, just gets better and better, as is generally the case with any solidly good new restaurant, or to wit, it takes time for any chef to settle into a new kitchen and find his or her rhythm.

So what might explain the Gallic reaction to Verjus I can’t say for sure, but it may be a reflection of the great undeclared battle for Google rankings that’s quietly being duked out between the robust and intensely reactive Anglophone gastro-blog community in Paris and the rather more lumbering mainstream French food press. There are at least a good dozen excellent well-read English-language blogs covering the Paris gastronomic scene, and they often get there–there being a new restaurant, shop or bar, first, with the result that the reviews which pop up from the churn from Google’s search engine are in English not French, and in some quarters, this may rankle to the extent of provoking muted enthusiasm for places that have had major shout-outs from Paris’s English-language cyber press.

Be that as it may, I think this critical competition is salutory, because it ultimately leads to better and more varied information for people who care about great eating in Paris, and also that Verjus is a wonderful and important addition to the gastro-scape of Paris. The small-plates menu in the wine bar (open only in the evening from 6pm-11pm) is a great way to discover Braden Perkins’s cooking without committing to one of the pricier tasting menus upstairs or remembering to book far enough ahead in advance to snag a table, too, and this grazing format perfect for a night out with friends, too.

Perkins’s small-plates menu is a wonderful series of temptations you can heedlessly abandon yourself to, too:

SAVORY

Celeriac dumplings w/ dan-dan sauce, chives & toasted peanuts 7€

Charred broccoli w/ korean rice cake, anchovy, lemon & parm 6€

Pan roasted clams w/ chorizo, lime, chervil & garlic crouton 7€

Buttermilk fried chicken w/ napa cabbage slaw & micro greens 8€

Crispy basque pork belly w/ pickled red chilies & spicy kewpie mayo 8€

Joe’s shoestring fries w/ togarashi & catsup 4€

CHEESE

A selection of cheeses from maison Hisada w/ house accompaniments 14€

SWEET

Silverton’s butterscotch buddino w/ whipped cream 5€

House s’mores w/ Valrhona chocolate 5€

Shoestring fries

Settled in with excellent glasses of white Crozes-Hermitage, my friend Corinne kicked off with the roasted broccoli, which was excellent, and I went with the celeriac-stuffed dumplings, an incredibly clever and delicious idea–potstickers filled with slices of cooked celery root perhaps splashed with black vinegar and served with a creamy sesame-peanut-chilie sauce. Unfortunately there weren’t any clams the night we came by–this neo-Lusitanian preparation sounded alluring, but the shoestring fries were excellent, and the buttermilk-battered fried chicken with some Asian inflected cabbage slaw and a little corsage of sprouts was superb. In fact, this chicken was so good that it’s a good thing this wine bar isn’t open at noon, or it would doubtless lure me away from my keyboard at least once a week. We loved the perfectly aged cheeses, and the butterscotch buddino en homage a Nancy Silverton, too, and I once again came away from this address with not only an eager desire to return but an ever-deepening admiration for Perkins’s intricate culinary wit.

Verjus Wine Bar, 47 rue Montpensier, 1st, No phone, Metro: Palais-Royal-Musee-du-Louvre, Pyramide or Bourse, Open Monday-Friday 6pm-11pm. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Average 20 Euros.

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Over the past year, the shaggy heart of the 10th arrondissement–as opposed to the already trendy part along the banks of the Canal Saint Martin, has emerged as one of the more interesting up-and-coming food neighborhoods in central Paris. I love Vivant, Pierre Jancou’s beautiful new bistrots a vins here, and also really like L’Office, which has a 9th arrondissement postal code but is really part of this neighborhood, and now just at the year’s end, Albion, another sweet little bistrots a vins (bavins) has added more momentum to this really charming–because it’s still not completely gentrified, corner of the city.

This relaxed and good-looking new place is the brain child of Hayden Clout et Matt Ong, former bartender and chef respectively at the very popular Fish la Boissonnerie on the rue de Seine in the 6th, and stopping by for lunch the other day, there was a great atmosphere in the room, because so many of the tables were occupied by office parties out for a Christmas lunch. I haven’t worked in an office on a daily basis for years, but observing these gatherings from a safe distance, the pleasures and perils of office life came rushing back to me from the days that I worked at New York publisher Harper & Row and my office ‘window’ opened on to the air shaft that ventilated the kitchens of La Grenouille so that day in and day out I’d eat my nasty little hot dog from Paley Park or slice of pizza while inhaling sumptuous gusts of sauteeing shallots and roasting meat many floors below. Office life had its bright spots–if I got in before my colleague Tony and he wasn’t there by 9.15am, I’d fill his coffee mug and leave half of my bagel on his desk as an “I’m here” decoy for our persnickety clock-watching boss, a maiden lady (she actually referred to herself as such) from northern Maine, and low spots. My other neighbor left me pink “While You Were Out” phone messages with the time written in large red numbers and circled, so that same maiden lady would know that I hadn’t come back from a rare lunch out at the New York Women’s Exchange–grilled cheese or tuna salad and a Martini for $4, and not surprisingly very popular, by 2.30pm on a Friday afternoon.

Ultimately, I wasn’t cut from the cloth of office obedience, I mused as I watched a table of ten ladies haggle over who owed what on their lunch bill. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t often go out to lunch unfortunately because I can’t often desert this keyboard, but I hadn’t seen my friend Tina since June, and if she could manage lunch after staying up until 3am with her feverish son, so could I.

The brief comfort-food menu here was very appealing, so much so in fact that we dithered for a while before making up our minds. Vichyssoise with oysters sounded good, but not on drisly day, ditto a salad with Roquefort, apples, pancetta and walnuts, and foie gras with a reduction of balsamic vinegar predicted a nap I didn’t have time for, so we decided to split an order of fusilli with pancetta, spinach, and mushrooms in a light cream sauce.

It was delicious and generously served, and the white Coteaux du Giennois Domaine Villargeau that amiable Kiwi Hayden Clout suggested went down a treat with this starter. Next, I went for the roasted pork with carmelized onions and an emulsion of white onions, which pleasantly surprised by being garnished with thick slices of boudin noir, and Tina opted for the grilled duck breast with winter vegetables. Both were delicious, although I found the seasoning a bit timid–maybe a little cumin in the onion emulsion Some crushed coriander seeds with duck A little piment d’Espelette for both dishes?

The food was good, though, and it was very pleasant to sit at a large table in this attractive, well-lit room. We both liked the friendly, laidback service, and nice if brief selection of wines. Though we were curious about the lemon posset–a sort Elizabethan pudding, for dessert, we decided to split a cheese plate instead, and the Brillat-Savarin, Roquefort and Etivaz were well-ripened and came with a dab of chutney and a little mesclun.

Ultimately, Albion is an agreable neighborhood restaurant, and would also be a great spot for lunch on your way to or from the Gares du Nord or L’Est, both of which are black holes in terms of their gastronomic offerings; the last time I was hungry at noon near the Gare de l’Est, I had an underwhelming frankfurter at Traiteur Schmid, which, for a place in business since 1904, could and should do much better than what they serve up at a little counter here. Next time round, I leave time for a good lunch at Albion.

80 rue du Faubourg Poissoniere, 10th, Tel. 01-42-46-02-44. Metro: Poissoniere. Closed Sunday and Monday. Average 35 Euros.

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In any event, this dining room and Costes brothers type crowd come off as a sort of flying-saucer landing in the hip little ‘hood that was put on the Paris food map by Daniel Rose at Spring and Adeline Grattard at Yam’Tcha. Their compass points, however, are a deep love of good food, a democratic amiability and a passion for old stone, since both chefs painstakingly renovated and exposed the ancient walls that surround them. At Racines 2, in contrast, there’s a touch of old stone here and there but the main visual action is the Philippe Starck decor, some of it clever, like the mud-encrusted wicker bee-hive chandeliers but most of it deja vu for anyone who’s been to Bon, the original Starck designed restaurant in the 16th arrondissement, or the Royal Monceau Paris Raffles Hotel. One way or another, this restaurant feels very out of place in the rue de l’Arbre Sec, which is one of my favorite little streets in the heart of Paris. Even more alarming than the decor or the crowd, however, was the menu.

For starters, it was short and difficult, because not only was it rather unappealing, it was also very expensive, with a risotto garnished with scallops, cockles and ‘truffles’–I asked whether they were white or black and where they came from, which is the obvious prerequisite to deciding if this dish was worth 36 Euros, and to his credit, the nice young waiter went off to find out, told me they were from Burgundy, and I passsed on this dish, and a cote de boeuf both veering towards 40 Euros, a lot of money for a bistrots a vins. So Mr. Nutmeg started with a pastry wrapped package of boudin noir on a bed of salad, and I opted for the ‘salade craquante,’ which wasn’t, of pedigreed vegetables from Annie Bertin.

   I have great respect for Madame Bertin, who grows organic vegetables on a farm in Brittany, and also for Joel Thiebault, the Yvelines legumes meister, for that matter, but seeing Madame Bertin’s name on this menu made it apparent to me that the codes of locavore eating are being co-opted into Louis Vuitton style luxury brand names for conspicuous consumption. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if it indicates an ever broader public awareness of where our food comes from and also means that the demand for organically raised produce will grow, but in this setting it came off as more of pretext to charge high prices.

And speaking of luxury brand names, the bread here is from Poujaran, which isn’t named on the menu, but suffices by being very good. The wine list, in a student’s notebook, was a curious little document, too. To their credit, there were lots of pleasant easy-drinking wines in the 20-25 Euro price range, including the very good red Corbieres we glugged down (they also carry a white Corbieres, which is a terrific wine) and also an assortment of foreign wines, a welcome development in a city where they’re still too rare, but prices took off like a hot-air balloon from the low end of the scale, with a run of pretty ordinary Beaujolais wines clocking in at around 50 Euros, which is much too expensive for what they offer.

Both Mr. Nutmeg and I ordered the Basque pork belly with vegetables as a main course, and when it arrived at the table, it was a pretty unappealing looking hunk of fatty under-cooked meat without the gorgeous crunchy skin that Bruno Doucet pulls off with the same, or rather, a better version of the same product, around the corner. So we sent it back, and it was rapidly returned gray instead of pink. The side of organic vegetables was pretty much the same as what I’d had as a first course, and the meat was stringy, lacking in flavor and still not cooked correctly, so we both ended up leaving most of it behind.

   Since we’re both cheese boys, we split some cheese to accompany the rest of our wine, and it came as a messy bunch of slices of Morbier and Cantal that had been ill-treated, i.e., the cheese had sweated too much from having been in and out of the fridge, and so had lost its appropriate textures. Since the restaurant was very busy, I wondered if the waiter would remember to bring us more bread, but he did, and in fact, the service here is noticeably cordial and efficient, a further sign that the heinous mode for haughteur in modish restaurants in Paris launched and perfected by the Costes brothers is finally going out on the tide.

Overall, there was something about this place that remind me of Marie Antoinette pretending to be a shepherdess in Versailles. To wit, the idiom of the neo-bistrots a vins had been hijacked for the purposes of aping something simpler and sincerer, or such real neo-bistrots a vins as the wonderful Verre Volee, Vivant, La Cave de l’Insolite or Au Passage.

And perhaps the oddest thing about this pastiche is that the original Racines was both so good and so directional in birthing the neo-bistrots a vins trend. Suffice it to say that if I want to spend 70 Euros on a meal, I can think of a lot of much better places to do so than Racines 2, and if you’re curious about the Starck decor, you can take in from the street.

Racines 2, 39 rue de l’Arbre Sec, 1st, Tel. 01-42-60-77-34. Metro Louvre-Rivoli or Pont Neuf. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Average 50 Euros.

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In Paris, the new-wave bistrot a vins, or casual wine-oriented bistro with a short changes-often menu and a carefully selected list of wines that are usually organic or naturel—made without sulphites, is filling the hole in the local food chain left by the slow-rolling but ongoing demise of the traditional bistro. How are these places different from trad bistros Well, the food is lighter, produce-centric, seasonal, inventive and often comes in a small-plate format. A real effort is also made to write menus that flatter the wine list and vice-a-versa.

  In Paris, the new-wave bistrot a vins, or casual wine-oriented bistro with a short changes-often menu and a carefully selected list of wines that are usually organic or naturel—made without sulphites, is filling the hole in the local food chain left by the slow-rolling but ongoing demise of the traditional bistro. How are these places different from trad bistros Well, the food is lighter, produce-centric, seasonal, inventive and often comes in a small-plate format. A real effort is also made to write menus that flatter the wine list and vice-a-versa.

   This trend is so important and constantly gaining in momentum that barely a week or two goes by without the opening of another neo-bavins (my accronym for neo bistrots a vins). Neo-bavins Au Passage, reviewed on this site, was one of the big hits of the summer in Paris, too, and now the fresh-out-the-gate La Cave de l’Insolite is the address that has fans and followers of this welcome trend talking.

  Stopping by for dinner mid-week on a night when we were tired shading to cranky, Bruno and I immediately appreciated the friendly welcome of one of the two brothers who runs this place and a delicious glass of Touraine Fie Gris as an aperitif. The chalkboard menu was brief but appealing, and after we’d ordered we got up and went over to the open-shelf wines to select something for dinner. A long-standing fan of Cotes du Rhone, I’ve recently grown tired of them and have been liking lighter French reds like Irancy and Arbois red recently, so we plucked a bottle of Arbois Pupillin de Chez Bonnard from the shelf and returned to the table to wolf down good bread and wonder at the provenance of several large tables of young Russians in this off-the-beaten-track new spot. I was also curious to see what the chef from Belfast would get up to.

Things got off to a half-full, half-empty start. Bruno’s home-made salt-marinated salmon with an arugula salad and a dab of excellent mayonnaise with tiny cubes of red peppers and all kinds of fresh herbs was outstanding and generously served. My veloute of leeks and parsnips came to the table as a very thick micro-waved puree and lacked panache. Not only was it an ugly pea-green color but it needed help—maybe a dribble pumpkin-seed oil, a few grains of coriander and a big pinch of sea salt.

Next, it was a bit dull of us, but this meal was about being hungry, not writing a restaurant review, so both of ordered the veal steak with beets and potatoes. It was great meat cooked rare and served with perfectly cooked sliced beets of several colors and quartered oven-roasted baby potatoes, and two hungry men loved it, especially with the Arbois Pupillin, which had been decanted into a squat carafe. We recovered our usual exploratory tandem with dessert, with Bruno wolfing down a terrific rice pudding with sour-apple compote and me racing through a homey, old-fashioned crumble made with quince, a much under-rated fruit, confit (poached in sugar syrup).

“Aside from the food, which I really liked, what was wonderful about that place was that we had so much space at the table, there was the great atmosphere that’s generated by people eating well, and the service was really friendly,” said Bruno in the car on the way home. “If it were in our neighborhood, I’d go often,” I replied, a comment that drew a snort and the sweet snipe, “You say that all the time.”  I suspect that this place is going to heat up fast, especially because the prices are so fair, so if you’re curious about the neo-bavins trend in Paris, hit this one soon.

La Cave de l’Insolite, 30 rue de la Folie Mericourt, 11th, Tel. 01-53-36-08-33. Metro: Saint-Amboise. Open Tues-Sat for lunch and dinner. Sunday lunch only. Lunch menu 14 Euros. Average 30 Euros.

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