This year, the meals I’ve enjoyed most in France have been at Le Vivier, a charming, relaxed, reasonably priced and very good seafood restaurant in Le Grau-du-Roi, a busy beach resort that’s also France’s second-largest Mediterranean fishing port on the short shoreline of Le Gard. This French departement is west of the Rhone and bound on the south by the Mediterranean and the North by the Cevennes mountains, and it’s to this beautiful quiet green peaceful place that Bruno and I moved as soon as the arduous lockdown in Paris was lifted.

Heading south from Paris to our house in a little village a few miles west of Uzes, the highway was empty, and we exulted in the enormity of the toast-colored wheat fields, vineyard-covered hillsides and sweeping forests, which came as both a relief and a shock after having lived in 140 square meters (1500 square feet) for ten weeks. During le confinement, as it was called in France, I only left the apartment two or three times to do those errands that required my actual physical presence. Bruno would duck out to buy bread, but otherwise we bought almost all of our food and wine online, and our apartment became our tiny continent, with every room becoming a different country with a different mood and personality, and the kitchen, as always, being the heart of our home and the place we met twice a day for lunch and dinner and to do a huge amount of cooking.

At the beach in Le Gra-du-Roi in Le Gard

We cooked boeuf bourguignon, we cooked pot au feu, we roasted chickens, we made Marcella Hazan’s ragu for pasta and lasagna, we indulged ourselves in chef Jacques Maximin’s sea bass recipe, which is in my book HUNGRY FOR FRANCE, with a fish delivered directly to us by a fisherman in Brittany using Chronopost Fresh, France’s brilliant cold-chain-guaranteed overnight shipping service. We made mapo tofu, we made red bean curry. My main recreation was online food shopping and recipe hunting during the longest time that’s ever passed since I moved to Paris in 1986 when I didn’t go to a single restaurant. Every day, I worked as hard on our meals as I did on any of the articles I was writing, because the pleasure of good food had never been more important to me. With our worlds turned upside down, we needed nourishment, comfort and pleasure.

Blauzac

First day in the new kitchen

On the way south, we ate a picnic we’d bought at Marks & Spencer–BLTs, shrimp-and-mayonnaise sandwiches, salads, and chips, in a highway rest stop and watched a farmer fitting a huge block of salt into a stand for the brown-and-white cows who were eagerly watching him through a scrim of trees. And finally we reached our house in Blauzac, which had been in renovation for the past eight months at the end of an eight-hour drive, cleaned up the beautiful new kitchen and made some pasta, put some sheets on the bed and fell asleep with all the windows wide open so that we could enjoy the sweet smells of the earth and the fig tree in the garden breathing during the night.

The market in Uzes

The next morning, we went to shop in the market in Uzes, and it was while browsing the stalls here that  I realized  how much my corona virus quarantine had changed my tastes in food. Not going to restaurants for almost three months, I emerged wanting food that was simpler, more produce-centered and less complicated. “The greatest dishes are very simple,” said the great French chef Auguste Escoffier, and cut off from restaurant cooking in Paris, I was reminded that this is so true.

When I started going to restaurants again, I discovered even more just how much my tastes had changed. The meals that I enjoyed the most were the ones that sublimated good seasonal produce with an artful simplicity. This is what I found the first time I went to dinner at Le Vivier in Le Grau-du-Roi, which wears twin caps as a beach resort and fishing port. The charming owner suggested some oysters from the Camargue, which she served with a condiment I’d never heard of before, oyster pepper. To be honest, I was skeptical, but a tiny pinch of this blend of different peppers made the brute briny flavors of the firm fleshy oysters incredibly suave.

My main course was excellent, too. Freshly landed squid cooked on a plancha until they were just tender and garnished with summer vegetables, including radishes, broad beans, corn, carrots, zucchini and potatoes composed this succulent and beautifully cooked feast, a meal I enjoyed enormously.

So a few weeks later when our plan to drive down to a little beach town in Catalonia was very sadly scrubbed due to a recurrence of corona virus there, we canceled our trip and drove down to the sea coast an hour from our house in Blauzac for a few days in a very simple hotel. If every summer, I yearn to dunk myself in the sea, this year I craved this primal tonic even more than ever. I’d told Bruno about Le Vivier after I’d eaten there alone on my first visit, so we went back for dinner together.

After scarfing down some oysters, I had lieu jaune (yellow pollack) in a perfectly prepared shallot-rich beurre blanc, and Bruno tried the rouille Graulenne, a local specialty made with fresh octopus, potatoes and aioli. Both dishes were fresh, flavorful, seasonal and made with the poignant precision of a chef who is proud of their work and eager to please. Should you find yourself in this part of France this summer or in the future, this is a very good restaurant. It’s also very popular, so reservations are imperative.

After dinner, we went for a walk along the canal that connects the fishing port to the Mediterranean to see the historic lighthouse at its entrance, and somehow the pennant of light sweeping over the sea in the darkness made me feel hopeful. With kindness and common sense and science, we’ll get through this epidemic. Good wholesome simple food will help us, too, and we all have to support the chefs and restaurants wherever we live in any way we possibly can right now.

Living in France, I’m aware that many people reading this post may be in places where restaurants are still closed for public-health reasons. I send them my deepest sympathies and wish them to stay safe and well. The pandemic is not over yet in France either, but the French government has done a generally excellent job of responding to it, and people are generally compliant with the government order to wear a mask in enclosed public places. It’s such a very small and easy gesture to make, both to keep yourself safe and respect the health of other people, too.

The view from Blauzac

I’ll end this post with what I hope you’ll consider to be some very good news, too. Shacked up in the south of France, I finally finished my next book, MY PLACE AT THE TABLE: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris, which will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Spring 2021. It’s a coming of age story about how a kid from the suburbs of Connecticut ends up becoming a food writer in Paris. It’s also a tale of luck, love, dreams, hard work, perseverance, good and bad judgment, occasional bouts of insanity and the fact that I’ve loved the language of food as much as I love words on a page as far back as I can possibly remember. I hope you’ll enjoy it, and I want to thank my wonderful editor Rux Martin and the indescribably wonderful and patient Bruno for the safe passage of my story.

Le Vivier, 7 Rue du Commandant Marceau, Le Grau-du-Roi, Tel. (33) 04-66-53-23-36. Open Wed-Sun for lunch and dinner, Closed on Mondays, Tuesday dinner only, Prix-fixe 24 Euros, Average a la carte 45 Euros, www.levivier-restaurant.fr

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Whispering Maitre d’Hotel, hard-working chefs at La Scene

Within minutes of sitting down at La Scène, the new restaurant at the exquisitely renovated Hotel Prince de Galles on the Avenue George V, I concluded that this is very shrewdly conceived new table indeed. Belgian designer Bruno Borrione, whose work I had last admired at Les Avises hotel in Avize in Champagne, has created a beautiful and boldly contemporary restaurant, which suddenly makes most other hotel dining rooms in Paris look stuffy and dated. Here, chef Stéphanie Le Quellec, one of the most talented female chefs in France, works with her team in a stunning matte-finished white-marble-lined open kitchen that’s surely the ‘scene’ to which the restaurant’s name refers. This breaks major conventions of upmarket restaurant protocal in Paris, too, since the kitchen, usually hidden, is in full view and the cooks are cast as characters in the evening’s entertainment.

Suffice it to say, however, that this is a very very serious show.

Borrione fleshes out the idea of this restaurant as a sort of gastronomic supper club with white leather lined tub chairs at white marble pedestal tables, low lighting, good sight lines, and a sort of minimalist cosmopolitan aesthetic that wisely reprises the good art deco bones of the hotel, which just reopened after a two-year $100 million renovation that was accomplished with impeccable good taste by Borrione for the adjacent bar and dining room and most public spaces and the ever-present Pierre Yves Rochon for the rooms upstairs. And FYI, the Prince de Galles, which opened in 1928, owes its name to its original ambition, which was to welcome the Prince of Wales, future Edward VIII, son of King George V, to Paris during his annual visits.

Bar at Hotel Prince de Galles

Despite an entirely absent welcome from the very agitated seeming maitre d’hotel, we settled in over glasses of pink Champagne and read Le Quellec’s brilliant little menu, which hits a perfect bull’s eye in terms of the prevailing gastronomic gestalt at the highest end of the Gallic food chain in 2013. Suddenly, the goal at this most exalted level of French cooking is all about cross-hatching a serious commitment to healthy eating with an equally serious desire for gastronomic pleasure.

So I started out with several meaty Joël Dupuch oysters, sliced and garnished with tiny fava beans and penja pepper in a sauce of Matcha tea under an aromatic foam of Umbrian olive oil, a dish that was intensely satisfying for its simplicity, juxaposiiton of textures and rippling notes of complementary flavors. Bruno’s beautiful vegeteable starter made reference to the cooking I remembered Le Quellec doing while she was Executive chef at the Terre Blanche hotel in Provence when it was still run by Four Seasons. To wit it was precise, delicate and extremely subtle, with the baby vegetables and tofu being amplified by plum vinegar, a pistachio condiment and an herbal sorbet. Needless to say, it made the increasingly herbivorous Bruno very happy.

I eat less meat than I ever have before, too, which means that it was a real treat to tuck into impeccably cooked veal sweetbreads with an exquisite riff on a Grenobloise garnish that included tiny cubes of lemon and croutons. The jus was magnificent, too–deeply flavored but wonderfully light, as was a garnish of miniature girolles.

Bruno’s turbot with fresh hazelnuts, wild garlic, crayfish and a foamy shellfish jus showed off the wiry mettle of a really talented chef, too, since everything about this dish was impressive–the immaculately cooked fish, the clever garnishes, and the superb sauce. While my veal sweetbreads were textbook perfect, it was this fish dish that showed why Le Quellec, 30, is destined to become one of the great chefs of France–it was as powerfully original as it was technically perfect.

Desserts were excellent, too. Bruno had an ethereal looking and pleasant tasting pastry composed of lemon-verbena foam, panes of sugar, and raspberries, while I savored a sort of post-modern riff on a millefeuille, which was excellent, with parchment thin and crispy pastry and an airy aromatic vanilla-bean flavored pastry cream.

Service was a little shirty all through the evening, but once the team relaxes–it’s too stiff and too self-conscious, I think this is going to become an excellent and very popular restaurant and rather expect it to emerge as one of the big hits of La Rentree. It was doubtless with this goal in mind that the restaurant wisely did a quiet opening at the end of May, which gives it the time to find its rhythm during the summer. N.B. It will be closed from July 28th through August 18th.

La Scène, Hotel Prince de Galles, 33 Avenue George V, 8th arrondissement, Tel. 01-53-23-78-50, Metro: George V. Open for lunch Monday-Friday. Open for dinner Monday to Saturday. Sunday brunch only. Reservations required. Prix-fixe menus four-courses 125 Euros, six-courses 165 Euros, average a la carte 120 Euros. www.la-scene-restaurant.com 

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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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Mea culpa, but it’s the middle of winter in Paris when the days seem to last fifteen minutes and everyone I know is sun-and-fun deprived and slammed with work. So you do what you can, which in my case meant an impromptu decision to have a big fat burger for lunch after a morning of appointments in the 10th arrondissement. Truth be told, I’d have preferred the Daily Syrien, for Ahmad’s fabulous falafel and turnip pickles, but it was packed, so I crossed the street to Paris New York, the latest high-concept burger joint in Paris and hoped for the best. The brief menu offered a choice of 4 differently garnished burgers made with Breton Pie Noir beef from Le Poncelet, a prestigious butcher shop, or a portobello mushroom burger; fries; cheesecake; various craft beers; wine by the glass at three different price points, the most expensive being Francis Ford Coppola Diamond Collection red and Newton Chardonnay.

Well, while I was waiting for my burger the place filled up quickly with a gaggle of twenty-somethings who spent a lot of their time poking away at their phones even if they were with friends. So my “Smoky Blue” burger came, and it was so sparsely garnished with the promised Stilton, bacon and onion confit that they didn’t register on the palate. The fries were lukewarm, but pretty good. The lemonade in a Ball Jar, something I haven’t seen since a meal at Mrs. Wilkes Boarding House in Savannah, Georgia twenty years ago, was more Brooklyn than Biloxi–or tart than sweet, and this was a blessing. This meal happened in twenty minutes, left me 15 Euros poorer, and the most interesting thing about it was that I had the opportunity to taste Heinz Balsamic Vinegar Ketchup, which I found surprisingly delicious–I’d assumed it was a no-interest gimmick, and also to realize that I have become hugely weary of the wave of edible Americana that just keeps washing over Paris.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s nice to be able to get a half-decent burger in Paris (none of the burgers in Paris are better than that), since I remember the days when the truly lousy Joe Allen and a couple of other similarly underperforming faux Yankee tables ruled the roost when it came to nostalgic eats. But the phenomenon has now gained so much self-perpetuating momentum it’s becoming a serious bore. I can’t help but thinking that a lot of the clever young backers of the ever-growing number of Paris burger places have realized that they can be real gold mines, since all you need are some good graphics, some better-than-average sourcing, respectable foot traffic in a neighborhood where a lot of people work in front of computer screens, and you’re done, since there sure isn’t any serious cooking going on in any burger shop. I mean, even a really good Croque Monsieur or Madame require more effort.

So this week wasn’t bringing great joy until I went to dinner at Verjus, American-in-Paris chef Braden Perkin’s place in the Palais Royal. Here Bruno and I joined a bunch of old and new friends for a tasting meal in the new and really great looking indigo-painted private dining room Perkins and partner Laura Adrian, Paris’s most charming bar keep, have created on the third floor of their space between the rue Richelieu and the Palais Royal. As soon as I went upstairs and saw this room–and I’m sorry, no photo, but it was so dimly lit that my iPhone, which was all I had on me, was useless, I was delighted, because it can seat 12 at a pinch and so becomes my perfect recommendation for anyone who wants a private space in Paris. I was also happy, because I’ve always liked Braden’s cooking, but in my antic effort to keep up with the new, new, new I hadn’t been here in a year.

So we ate, and it was fascinating to see how Perkins’ style has become quieter, subtler–well, more French, since he first opened. To be sure, each tasting plate is as intricately and logically constructed as a Swiss watch, and most of them induce real pleasure in anyone who was willng to accord them a more than a few very necessary moments of meditation. But even though Braden still looks like an endearing Grant Wood subject circa 2013, a certain sophistication has set in, and this is a good thing. He hasn’t lost the wiry winsomeness he brought with him in his back pocket when he first showed in Paris after cooking in Seattle, but he’s learned a lot. The thing is, though, most of what he’s learned, he’s intuited from the spectularly good French produce he works with–like any seriously good chef, his produce cues him. And in this case, the cue was to turn the flavor spectrums down a few notches so that we could relish the perfect freshness and natural tastes of his produce.

After an amuse bouche of citrus-cured trout with smoked fingerling potatoes and trout roe, we had a superb little clam chowder made with Portuguese cherry stone clams, celery root, thyme oil, wild thyme, lovage, homemade harissa and a crumbly garlic crouton. This was a beautiful little miniature that created a tiny universe of ricocheting tastes which made me think of minnows left behind in a tidal pond. Then a gorgeous slow-cooked egg yolk under a tiny thatch of frisee on a bed of soft polenta with salsify, sweet onions, baby leeks, pumperknickel crumbs and finely chopped kimchi.

Duck breast with winter sauerkraut, orange, rye, and smoked celery root skin–Braden likes smoke, and so do I–came with a brilliant side of baby spinach leaves, hazelnuts, pickled grapes, crimini mushrooms and frozen foie gras shavings that lasted seconds before they dissolved into the leaves while remaining the base note flavor of this terrific little dish.

Braden’s gifted Korean pastry chef Cassandra offered up three desserts, and if all of them were impeccably conceived and executed, the one I liked best was the walnut tart with bergamot jam. All told, this was a fascinating meal, because it highlighted the ways in which a talented and ambitious young American’s cooking has become more gastronomically elegant–bien sur, we’re talking casual elegance here, the longer he lives in Paris.

Daily Syrien, 55 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, 10th, Tel 09-54-11-75-35. Metro: Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, Bonne Nouvelle or Château d’Eau. Open daily. Average 12 Euros.

Khaosan Road, 52 rue Condorcet, 9th, Tel. 01-49-70-07-06, Metro: Anvers, Cadet, Saint Georges. www.khaosan.fr Closed Sunday. Average 35 Euros.

Paris New York, 50 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, 10th, Tel. 01 47 70 15 24   Metro: Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, Bonne Nouvelle or Château d’Eau.

Verjus,  52 rue Richelieu, 1st, Tel. 01-42-97-54-40. Metro: Palais-Royal Musee du Louvre or Pyramide. Dinner only. Closed Saturday, Sunday. Prix-fixe 60 Euros.

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NOTE, September 8, 2014: Chef Philippe L’Abbe is no longer cooking at L’Abeille, so this review remains posted only for reference on this dining room. When a new chef is announced and tried, a new review will follow.

Since it was announced as the newest ‘haute cuisine’ restaurant in Paris, I found myself vaguely wondering what this term actually means these days as Bruno and I drove over to the new Paris Shangri-La hotel for dinner at the just opened L’Abeille restaurant last Friday night. Technically, ‘haute cuisine’ means the highest or finest level of cooking on the French food chain, but since such classifications have been rather wonderfully muddled during the last twenty years, with many haute cuisine chefs like Alain Passard embracing an almost Zen-like simplicity and young bistro chefs like Cyril Aveline at Les Bistronomes engineering an amazing technicity into the bistro register.

Arriving, all of the conventions of haute cuisine were very much in place, including highly formatted service and beautifully dressed tables in a very politely decorated dining room which conveyed the message that a serious meal–both in terms of price and the quality of the cooking, was imminent. The name of the restaurant offered another cue, too, since the ‘abeille’ (bee) is the emblem of the Napoleon family, and Shangri-La has made much of the fact that this grand 1896 mansion was once the home of Prince Roland Bonaparte, Napoleon’s grand-nephew.

Tight round bouquets of yellow roses provided the visual focal point at tables set with seriously good stemware and porcelain and the taupe silk brocade chairs were very comfortable. I couldn’t help wondering, though, why the hotel hadn’t decided to use one of the splendid reception rooms on the first floor for its headliner restaurant, or failing that, a space with a view of the Seine and the Eiffel Tower.

Chef Philippe Labbé, head chef of L’Abeille and also the Shangri-La’s La Bauhinia (named for the orchid on the flag of Hong Kong) restaurant, has one of the most impressive resumes of any cook in France today–he’s worked at Bernard Loiseau, Les Crayeres in Reims in the time of Gérard Boyer, and Roger Vergé, among others, and was also sous chef to Eric Briffard at the Plaza Athénée before taking over the kitchen at the Château de la Chèvre d’or in Èze in the south of France, and so not surprisingly, his menu made for intriguing and rather tantalizing reading over a flute of Champagne. From the elaborately written menu, I expected really good food here, and I wasn’t disappointed.

To be sure, our amuse bouche was a non-starter–a very vinegary salad of beets, and the meal began with an avalanche of same, but both of starters were deeply impressive. Bruno chose the artichokes served two ways–first, as hearts cooked with blood oranges and garnished with crushed pistachios, and then cooked in a pastry-sealed casserole with a orange leaves and served with an elegant nage of artichoke cooking juices, olive oil and blood oranges. It was an elegant, sunny, southern French dish, light and full of flavor.

Totally disinclined to dieting, I ordered the foie gras, also cooked two ways: first as a sort of Gallic candy bar deluxe, cooked mi-cuit and filled with crushed praline and roasted bits of cocoa bean and served with a side salad of chioggia beets, and then quite spectacularly cooked in a small coffer of salt, sugar and ground tonka beans (they have a haunting smell and taste of vanilla). The brick was opened table-side, and the foie gras was just rosy and had the sublime texture of a just set pudding. Sauced with duck reduction and accompanied by a side of baby yellow carrots, this dish was the very definition of ‘haute cuisine,’ or the highest cooking, and eating it, I vacillated between deep pleasure and a profound admiration for the chef.

Next, Bruno’s very rare wild salmon from the Ardour River in southwestern France was simply magnificent, a perfectly cooked lozenge of fish with a crust of toasted almond slivers and an accompanying puree of fresh almonds. Curious to see just how exalted Labbé’s cooking might be, I ordered the lobster prepared two ways. I almost never order lobster in restaurants, because it’s too expensive and also because I have a New Englander’s atavistic preference for it prepared as simply as possible. This dish, however, was stunning. The shelled claws arrived ‘fish and chips’ style–the claws rolled in bread crumbs and lightly fried with a garnish of an exquisite mayonnaise made with lobster coral. The second service was a real hommage to Escoffier–elegant packets of tender Pontoise cabbage wrapped around lobster medallions (tail meat) topped with foie gras and served with a gossamer potato puree generously flecked with black truffle. Rather Robuchonian, this dish was a sleight of consummate Gallic gustatory luxury that wore the ‘haute cuisine’ label like a crown of laurels and was absolutely delicious.

Rather lamentably, I find I can never manage dessert when eating food this rich, so we concluded with a very good cheese course, and it wasn’t until the next day when I was fiddling around in the kitchen at home at lunch-time that I could have shot myself for passing up desserts like head patissier Francois Perret’s intriguing sounding tarte with a blanc-manger of almonds and a black truffle garnish, a puree of first-of-season baby peas with fresh almond foam and white chocolate sorbet. Zut alors!

  So to answer the most obvious question, yes, L’Abeille is indeed a haute-cuisine restaurant, and a very fine one which seriously enriches the gastronomic landscape of Paris at that. Oh, and despite the plastic-melting caliber of the prices here, would I go back Yes, with pleasure, but I think the service should be allowed to relax a bit so that the beauty of Labbé’s superb cooking isn’t experienced with a constricting corset of outdated formality.

L’Abeille, Hotel Shangri-La Paris, 10 Avenue Iena, 16th, Tel. 01-53-67-19-90. Metro: Trocadero. Open Tuesday to Saturday for dinner only. Average 200 Euros.

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Dining room at Kei

We hadn’t met before, but I wasn’t surprised to find a florid, leonine man sitting at the table I was ushered to. We chatted about the bistro story I had recently done for him, he made several inevitable remarks about how it was surprisingly literate for a piece penned by an American, and then ordered a feast of game in halting school-boy French that surely left a good swath of Loire Valley forest in a decimated quietude with a superb bottle of Burgundy. If the conversation required constant nursing, the meal–a tourte de gibier and roast pheasant, was absolutely superb, so good, in fact, that I found myself drifting off into a haze of pleasure once or twice during his diatribe about the first President Bush. Then we finally arrived at the moment when the solemn waiter placed a snifter in front of him and filled it with Armagnac. Rather alarmingly, he gulped it down in a flash and signaled for another pour. Midway into this second glass, he suddenly got teary and told me his wife had asked him for a divorce because she’d taken up with the carpenter who was doing work on their country house. In vengeance, he’d gone to a maison des filles the night before, and had had some difficulties performing with an Eastern Bloc temptress.

Stunned by his confession, I ordered a snifter of Armagnac and bogusly commiserated with him on the perfidy of the British building trades and the natural awkwardness of finding himself flummoxed by a Slavic beauty half his age. While babbling, I noticed the bemused expression of the Cheshire cat like maitre d’hotel who had clearly overheard and witnessed this entire situation. The grand finale occurred when the bill arrived, and the editor realized that he didn’t have his credit cards or enough cash to pay the bill. I contemplated the 1400 plus franc bill with quiet horror, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t get stuck with it, and then the maitre d’hotel intervened. “Would Sir like the bill to be sent to the offices of the publication that had made the reservation It would be no problem.” So aside from the superb cooking, this old war horse of a place instantly became a Paris restaurant that I would forever hold dear, which is why I was really sorry to read last year that Monsieur Besson had retired, because they just don’t make restaurants like the one he quietly ran for many years on the edge of Les Halles anymore.

With all of this in mind, I really wondered if any new place could possibly live up to the storied reputation of the previous occupant as Bruno and I were seated in the sleek dove-gray and white, and so very Dior, dining room. All of the vieille France paraphernalia–including a large collection of faience cocks, had been swept aside, and a dapper young team had replaced the waiters of yore. But from the very first bite of this meal–a tiny fragile pastry cone filled with cauliflower gelee and crabmeat topped with caviar, I knew that young Japanese chef Kei Kobayashi was a devoted disciple of the finest traditions of Gallic gastronomy, and so he would be after twelve years in France, cooking first at brilliant chef Gilles Goujon’s three-star Auberge du Vieux Puits in the Languedoc-Roussillon and most recently as a student of Alain Ducasse at the Plaza Athenee.

The modish style of a single menu also seen at other excellent recently opened Paris restaurants like Jean-Francois Piege’s Thoumieux (gastro table, not brasserie), Kobayashi proposes 6 or 8 dishes, with a choice of meats and desserts. Habitually wary of tasting menus, since they invariably go on longer than I am either hungry or want to remain at the table, we opted for the six course meal, which began with a sublime shot glass of gently sweet and deeply flavored corn soup garnished with a black-truffle topped biscuit. Next, a sprightly and very pretty presentation of surprisingly airy foie gras garnished with flowers and shaved baby vegetables, which the sommelier wittily paired with a glass of vin doux from the Cap Corse region of Corsica.

Cooked en cocotte, two perfectly cooked lobsters followed, garnished with grilled baby leeks and an excellent sauce of red and yellow peppers. “He’s a very good student of the French kitchen,” Bruno observed while we ate this luscious crustacean, and he was right–Kobayashi is a very serious young chef, with impeccable technical skills and an obvious reverence for French produce and technique. He’s so dutiful, in fact, that we rather searched for his signature, but finally decided that this intense studiousness is indeed the chef’s calling card.

Kobayashi’s restaurant also confirmed my earlier hunch that Paris is indeed in the midst of a very welcome revival of a certain type of well-dressed adult table with seriously gastronomic cooking, with other excellent examples of this new take on the tables bourgeoises of yore being 39V, Les Tablettes and Frederic Simonin, all of which have opened within the last few months and all of which I have recently reviewed on this site (please use the search engine to read these reviews). What’s interesting and quite heartening about this development is that is evidences a serious generational renewal in Paris’s gastronomic landscape–now it’s not only the city’s bistros that are being rebooted for a new century, but it’s gray-flannel tables as well.

Next up, a succulent rack of baby lamb from the Pyrenees with a crunchy golden crust, a nob of lamb’s liver, a Noirmoutier potato, a spear of wild asparagus and a gossamer jus that was rich in flavor but impressively fat free. A lovely cheese course followed–don’t miss the two year old Comte, and then two charming desserts, a layered chocolate mousse for Bruno and behind of pretty meringue grill in a deep bowl, a refreshing melange of fresh citrus segments and sorbet for me. The mignardaises were final evidence of the top-of-the-class technicity of this solidly talented young chef, too–a Matcha tea macaron, shortbread wands to be dipped in melted salt caramel, and a lush dark-chocolate petit four.

All told, a really excellent meal, and since the slightly balky service will doubtless find its groove and this place develop a more perceptible personality once the breathe-held-tight nervousness of its opening days are behind it, this is an excellent address for a romantic meal, a special occasion, an extravagant tete a tete, or an important business meal.

Kei, 5 rue Coq-Héron, 1st, tel. 01-42-33-14-74. Metro: Les Halles or Louvre-Rivoli. Lunch menus 38 and 48 € (4 or 5 courses), Dinner menus 75 et 95 € (6 or 8 courses)

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Meeting my friend David, who’s gastronomic perceptiveness functions at the speed of light and is almost unfailing accurate, for dinner, we sipped glasses of Picpoul, that cheap but under-rated Languedoc best-buy supermarket white, here poured at a very fair 3 Euros a glass, nibbled delicious pitted black olives, and tried to decide if we were up for the six-course tasting menu. As a rule, I loathe tasting menus, since it always seems pretty  improbable any chef will be able to play a symphony on my palette when we’ve never met, but since we were very curious, we decided to jump in, a pretty harmless gamble, too, for 35 Euros.

So away we went, with a first-course of excellent quality crabmeat dressed with lime zest, basil, and fine slivers of Granny Smith apple, a generous dollop that neither of us could find even tiny fault with and so just eagerly enjoyed. Next, a lovely soup of rougets (red mullet) with a great presentation–the sweet waitress, the chef’s wife in a dusty pink angora dress, ladled the hot soup over fine slices of raw fish garnished with tiny rings of cebettes (green onion, but not scallions), and for me, even though this soup lacked a little fire–I’d have added some piment d’Esplette or piment de Cayette, maybe a few strand of microplaned ginger, was just delicious, and a wonderful testimony to the chef’s talent and good-humored capacity for hard work.

As is so often the case, the main courses were a shade less alluring then the starters–sea bass in a somewhat bland foam with salsify and perfectly cooked duckling breast with a polite slaw of red beets (nice combination, that), but both were very good, and we were having a very good time, because the service was so sweet but unintrusive, eager but professional.

We slotted a slice of wonderfully creamy Gorgonzola with a miniature salad and could-be-better hazelnuts (no one should ever buy nuts pre-roasted–they go off instantly), before our two desserts and were glad we did.

“I really like this place. It’s not perfect, but I like the people, the open kitchen, the crowd–it’s fun and the food’s good,” said David, and I entirely agreed. Next, panna cotta with strawberry puree–rhubarb, maybe with grilled almonds and candied ginger, would have been better at this time of the year, but this was still good, and then a dish that brought on a weird rush of memories from the days that I was a flat-broke student in London and went to Sunday lunch at the flat of my local librarian because I liked her so much, looked forward to a good roast, and love the little box of After Eight mints she’d put out with the Port at the end of our meal. At L’Agrume, a pod of chocolate mousse swam in a Jet 28 (mint liqueur) bath, and was a fine way to end a very pleasant and very impressive meal.

Given the current gastro landscape in Paris, I fear this place will be lionized before the sweet young chef (citing his name is not yet necessary, but he cooked in a lot of fancy places before hanging out his own shingle) gets a chance to cross his Ts and dot his Is. So I’d say go now before the world rushes in, and enjoy a winsome cameo of young French culinary talent in the 21st century.

————-

I can’t quite decide why the upper 17th arrondissement continues to produce so many good new contemporary French bistros (L’Entregedeu, Hier et Aujourd’hui, La Fourchette de Printemps are all favorites), but think it may be a great combo of low rents and a reliable local clientele, i.e, affluent people who know and love good food.

One way or another, it’s a pain-in-the-neck neighborhood to get to, so I always show up at any new restaurant in a cranky pants frame of mind thinking, This had better be good. Le Bouchon et L’Assiette having gotten some good local press, I was pretty sure I’d be able to let my hair down after a long walk in the rain, and I did, in fact, like these two small dining rooms, anonymous low-budget spaces where all of the visual fun came from retro posters that vaunted the chef’s Basque-southwestern French roots and a peek-a-boo kitchen where you could see him cooking up a storm from the shoulder up.

Dining with two French nationals, a Franco-American (the lovely Claire Quimbrot) et moi meme, we brought a great galaxy of taste to the table, and our meal launched well with excellent starters–boudin noir with mache (lamb’s ear lettuce) for Sylvie, a charming French woman who’s lived most of her life in the U.S. and so hungers for really funky French food like boudin (black pudding is the unappealing English name for this soft black sausage made with pig’s blood), carpaccio de haddock for Bruno and foie gras with red cabbage slaw with hazelnuts for Claire and I. The foie gras was generously served, home-made, and good quality, but lacked culinary punctuation–a reduction of Xeres vinegar, some sour cherries, I don’t know, but something to back-stop it’s richness.

Next Bruno and and Sylvie went for thick slices of yellow Pollack, a fish enjoying a certain popularity in Paris these days because it’s less threatened (and cheaper) than cod, with salsify in a rather dull cream foam, and a shared duckling breast with delicious golden crispy skin and red beet slaw for Claire and I. We finished up with a shared plate of Saint Nectaire, the cheese that always makes me think of country school houses in the 19th century for its herbaceousness, generosity, and full-barrel Gallic lushness, and a homemade gasteau Basque that was excellent.

With two of us going prix-fixe and two a la carte, with a single bottle of average Irouleguy red, this meal landed at 50 Euros a piece, which was more than it was worth. Still, there’s talent in the kitchen, and I’d gladly go back at noon for the 22 Euro menu.

L’Agrume, 15 rue des Fosses Saint-Marcel, 5th, Tel. 01-43-31-86-48. Metro: Saint Marcel or Gobelins. Closed Sunday and Monday. Average 40 Euros.

Le Bouchon et L’Assiette, 127 rue Cardinet, 17th, Tel. 01-42-27-83-93. Metro: Ternes or Villiers. Closed Sunday and Monday. Average 40 Euros.

The post Two Great New Bistros: L’AGRUME, B+/A-; LE BOUCHON ET L’ASSIETTE, B appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.