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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When Mme. Penny de Bay-Shore, an American friend who runs a wonderful B & B in Honfleur (La Petite Folie) first tipped me off that Alexandre Bourdas of Sa.Qua.Na., a chef from the same delightful seaside Normandy town whom we’re both big fans of, was opening a restaurant in Paris, Pascade, my pulse raced. Why For anyone who loves really good food, it’s been an odd year in the French capital, with a variety of popcorn-like novelties–cheeseburgers, burritos, hot dogs (never thought I’d see this day in Paris), eclairs in sweet and savory versions, and other foods that are part of the media-annointed cannon of upstairs-downstairs trendy cosmo eats, getting a lot of ink from the French press and all of the international outlets that feed on its teats, but with many fewer good new serious restaurants. So I hoped we might see out the year with a bang, i.e., a really good new restaurant after so many wet fire crackers, ego annexes, marketing step-children and other new spots that were almost anything but interesting and sincere.

To be sure, there have been some great new restaurants in Paris in 2013–Roseval, Abri, Semilla and Terroir Parisien (all reviewed on this site, please use the search engine) come to mind, but otherwise, the year really has been much about gadgets and bold-faced names. So in the hopes that Pascade would go beyond these wearisome compass points and serve some really great food, I met a friend from New York for lunch last week. But before sitting down to the table at Pascade, it might be helpful to have a bit of background on Alexandre Bourdas, the chef-owner of this new place.

The Aveyron born and raised Bourdas ran Michel Bras’s restaurant on the northern island of Hokkaido for five years and was profoundly marked by the cuisine and aesthetics of Japan. Returning to France, he set up shop in Honfleur, where his intriguing and intensely disciplined cooking at Sa.Qua.Na shook up the well-heeled Parisian bourgeois clientele who weekend on the Norman shore but also brought immediate renown. Today he has two Michelin stars, and it’s necessary to book several weeks in advance to get a table at his spare but handsome dining room in Normandy.

Well, by the time I got to the table, I’d already learned that a ‘pascade’ is sort of an eggy crepe along the lines of a Yorkshire pudding, and that this was all Bourdas’s new place served, in savory and sweet versions. Still, I thought on my way to lunch, there aren’t many good bet places for a meal in the heart of Paris–Pascade is equidistant to the Opera, the Place Vendome, the Madeleine, the Place de la Concorde and the Louvre, so perhaps this place would be a happy alternative to all of the faux health-food takeaway places that cater to the strike-of-noon paper-bag lunch crowd–think soup, salads and more salads, quiche, and sandwiches.

Arriving, I liked the looks of this place–think ryokan meets cutlery atelier in Saint Etienne in the heart of Paris, or a Zen industrial aesthetic, despite the fact that the service struck me as a bit arch–it was as if staff were already rather taken by the fact that they were in the employ of a much esteemed chef and thus considered that you should cross yourself as you stepped through the door.

There was a big oak and wrought-iron framed table d’hotes in the middle of the room here, but happily, my pal was seated at a table for two, and so after we got over how expensive the wines by the glass are here, we eye-balled the menu and decided to try a pascade with lamb ragout, pak choi, fromage blanc and black cardamon and another with country ham, lettuce, endive, celery remoulade (which I never found), roast chicken jus (which I never found either) and melba toasts.

Since the menu offered no starters, we tucked into the pascades as soon as they came to the table, and if they were pleasant enough, neither of us found them to be so urgently good that we’d want to return to this restaurant. I was also troubled by the fact that the batter of mine–the one with the ham, had too much sugar in it for my tastes, which prompted my friend to comment that they really should have separate batters for the savory and sweet versions.

Partially out of curiosity and partially because we were still hungry–a French food writer friend had already responded to a tweet I’d sent out announcing this lunch by advising me: “Plan on a serious snack–soup, bread and cheese, later in the day–you’ll be hungry, and poorer for it”–we decided to split a dessert pascade, which came garnished with Armagnac soaked prunes, whipped cream, cookie crumbs, nougatine and yuzu. We both liked this dessert pascade more than our savory ones, and I could even imagine stopping by just for a prune pascade pick-me-up on a rainy afternoon, but when our bill came, it was over 80 Euros for two glasses of wine, three pascades, and two coffees, which is an awful lot of money for a meal that we’d have liked a lot more at 20 Euros a head, a much more appropriate price.

So as much as I welcome Alexandre Bourdas to Paris, and as much as I love the idea of someone trying to do something different in the heart of the city, this place just wasn’t special enough to make me want to come back again. If you’re staying in a nearby hotel, however, and don’t mind the stiff prices, it’s just fine for a light bite.

14 rue Daunou, 2nd, Tel. 01-42-60-11-00. Metro: Opera or Madeleine. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Average 30 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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Twenty five years ago, gulp, my brother and I found ourselves moping around the Gare du Nord with two hours before our train back to London on a rainy Sunday. If this scenario was already far from ideal, it was seriously worsened by the fact that we’d had about three hours sleep and had put an alarming dent into a bottle of rot-gut duty-free Prince Hubert cognac when we’d returned to our Left Bank hotel after some bar hopping.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Le Garde Temps dining room (intentionally blurry photo)

Now that the French food press, much of which indulges in a long-standing tradition of effectively shutting down for a month or two during the summer–a luxury few Paris-based Anglophone food writers can afford, is catching up with everything that’s happened in Paris during the last few months, I’ve been reading rave reviews of a new place, Le Garde Temps, which is just a few streets away from where I live in the 9th arrondissement. The deal on this place is that it’s the new table of chef Benoît Gauthier, a clever restaurant manager whose Le Grand Pan in the 15th serves some seriously good meat, and restaurateur Marc Rosenzweig, who’s also run several popular bars on the Left Bank.

So two weeks ago I met my beautiful Turkish friend Ona Tshirta for dinner here. She started with a thin but tasty white bean soup goosed by a shot of Xeres vinegar, and I had the ‘cremeux’ of mushrooms with a poached egg and a bacon chip to start. Both were fine, period. Then she had a veal mignon with a side of gritty girolles mushrooms, and I tucked into some seriously dull cod with a side of pablum like polenta, both dishes garnished with an odd curl of pickled red onion. The dining room was busy, though, and the service friendly, so I decided that maybe this underwhelming meal was due to having misfired in the always scatter-shot process of ordering, or to wit, every restaurant has some dishes that are better than others.

So now I’ve been back several times, and after dinner here last night with three friends, I find myself pretty much mystified as to why this place has been getting good reviews. Bruno’s ‘millefeuille’ of marinated salmon and pasta leaves was one of the dullest things I’ve tasted all year, and if I always enjoy Eric Ospital charcuterie, the two pals who ordered the ‘cremeux’ of mushroom gave their biceps a good workout with the salt shaker. Though reasonably priced, the wine list in rather incoherent, too, with a sort of B team list of natural or organic wines, including the Boone’s Farm apple wine like white Anjou we unhappily ordered to start. Ultimately, though, the limited ambitions of this kitchen are best expressed by the fact that not a single dish I’ve eaten here comes with a proper sauce, which means that it’s basically just a nicely decorated grill joint.

Poached egg, hashed mushrooms, bacon chip

Main courses were similarly decent but point blank dull, too. The only interest in the faux filet steaks that Bruno and I had was accidental for that matter–there was a slightly fishy taste to the meat that doubtless came from a certain promiscuity on the grill. Our consolation prize was a bowl of excellent fat fresh and crispy frites in a style that would be called ‘steakhouse’ in America. The other two had roasted chicken with a side of sweet potato puree and the same dull veal mignon with gritty girolles that I’d already eaten twice.

With its white Metro tile back wall, suspension lamps, exposed stone wall on the left and brick one on the right, this place clearly aspires to copping a New York state of mind, but New Yorkers would never go for such dull food. For anyone hoping for a sweet finish to a meal here, they offer chocolate mousse, a macedoine des fruits, and rice pudding on their chalkboard menu, among other desserts, but cheeselovers will have to head home for any lactic fun, this place being another sad example of how the French are forsaking their brilliant dairy heritage.

All told this place is a studious but uninteresting rehash of many small Paris trends that’s clearly aimed at a lazy Bobo locals suffering from empty-refrigerator syndrome, but what I like best about it is its location, since the rue Fontaine still has an intriguingly sinister array of faux naughty old-fashioned hostess bars where unwitting business men in cheap suits might be shocked back to marital fidelity after paying 100 Euros for a bottle of ‘champagne’ and a finger fumble. If you’ve worked up an appetite after skulking around the dying sex emporiums of Pigalle, perhaps the least erotic square footage on the planet these days, or need to fuel up before a night at the Bus Palladium club across the street, this place is just fine. Otherwise, there’s no real reason to come here. Did I say dull?

19bis rue Fontaine, 9th, Tél. 09-81-48-50-55. Metro: Blanche or Pigalle. Closed Saturday lunch and Sunday. Average 35 Euros.

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Meeting a friend for lunch at Jaja in the Marais on Bastille Day, I thought, maybe this time I’ll be lucky. Just a week earlier I’d had a decidedly mediocre and expensive meal at the embarrassingly named new Pamela Popo, and on the way home I found myself wondering why the restaurants in this otherwise delightful neighborhood are so often disappointing. To be sure, the Marais has a couple of my favorite tables, like the wonderful Cafe des Musees and Le Carre des Vosges, but this popular and charming precinct also supports of a bewildering number of sub-par eateries, including a lot of crummy see-and-be-seen fashion-driven restaurants. The reason, I think, is that a lot of young Parisians come to this ‘hood to hang out and then grab a cheap bite after a few drinks and before a few more, plus there’s a lot of tourist traffic.

Jaja is the latest address of French food personality Julien Fouin, who he once ran a good food magazine, is often on Gallic culinary television, and who opened the popular but not very good Glou in the nearby 3rd arrondissement two years ago. Fouin knows how to source good product, though, and also how to put together a really good wine list, and since ‘Jaja’ is French slang for ‘wine,’ I was pretty sure that at least we’d drink well.

Arriving, the courtyard space down a passage where Jaja serves during the summer is a lovely place for a meal, although I’d hate to eat in their vaulted stone cellar dining room, which smelled musty and felt claustrophobic when I went downstairs to wash my hands. My friend, another Paris based food writer, and I studied the menu, and she decided on both of the daily specials–an artichoke and arugula salad with Parmesan shavings and roasted tomatoes to start and then the grilled sea bream. Hungry after a not very good Vietnamese meal in the 5th the night before, I started with the ‘Chinese’ style noodles with grilled shrimp and then the pluma, a delicious cut of tender and flavorfully fatty Spanish pork, with sauteed potatoes and salad.

We were well into a discussion about the total madness of the current American budget negotiations when we both noticed that the white Saumur we’d ordered by the glass wasn’t very good, and then our starters arrived. Her salad was attractively presented, but canned artichokes were a let down, while I liked my nice little wooden skewer of firm grilled shrimp on a bed of ginger brightened ‘Chinese’ noodles. The crowd around us ran to a lot of well-heeled couples who’d clearly come to troll the neighborhood’s many good boutiques, a Swedish family with two notably well-behaved children, and several tables of buzz-cut boys with tatooed biceps, a source of envy to both of us, since you have to have pretty meaty biceps to make a tatoo work, and alas, this isn’t the case for either of us.

Deciding to ditch our Saumur, which my friend aptly described as a “head-achy’ wine, she ordered a glass of Coteaux d’Aix rose and I had a sublime pour of red Clos des Fées, which was a real discovery, since I love the whites from this Cotes du Roussillon producer. When I asked her about her main course, she said, “It’s fish. Period.” I fared better with my succulent pork, but some of the potatoes were mushy and everything lacked seasoning.

Intrepid, she tried the red fruit soup for dessert, while I had a pelardon (one of my favorite cheeses) that had too recently been in the refrigerator with a smear of fig jam and a few salad leaves. “Sorry about this,” my pal said over coffee, since it had been her idea to come here. No problem, I replied, since I enjoyed our chat, had been curious about this place, and forever on the look-out for good restaurants in the Marais. Unfortunately, this place not only didn’t fill the bill, but doesn’t hold a candle to such really good recent Paris wine bars as Frenchie’s Wine Bar or Vivant. Overall, aside from the good produce and the interesting wine list, we came away with the distinct impression that this is one of those restaurants where no one’s in charge and no one really cares one way or another if you’re happy with your food and the service. This is a shame, too, since the setting’s so pretty, this place is open daily, and the kitchen has the privilege of working with great produce. One way or another, neither of us felt that Jaja lived up to the little phrase printed on the business card that arrived with our bill: “Vins & Cuisine Sympathique.”

Jaja, 3, rue Sainte Croix de la Bretonnerie, 4th, Tel. 01-42-74-71-52. Metro: Hôtel de Ville, Rambuteau or Saint-Paul. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Average 40 Euros.

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L’Ogre  Though the location across the street from the exasperating (this building is much too big and it’s impossible to find the entrance) round Maison de Radio in the 16th arrondissement isn’t very convenient, there’s still a lot to like about L’Ogre, a friendly and very lively modern bistro with an attractive and welcoming young staff, great views of the Eiffel Tower, and good solid traditional French cooking.

The main reason this place works so well is that it was born for all of the right reasons. To wit, a bunch of friends who were working as wine distributors and who love good food decided that it would be fun to do a restaurant together. So they took over this old corner cafe and kitted it out with a post-industrial-loft-look, i.e.  factory lamps and visible heating ducts. They kept the old zinc bar though, and made sure the lighting was good, a detail much appreciated by the media crowd who pack the place at dinner, and also decided the chalkboard menu would be sort of a greatest hits roster of simple tasty French classics like terrine de foie gras mi-cuit or rillettes de lapin (potted rabbit) to start, and then pedigreed meat, including an excellent steak tartare, boudin noir and a superb veal chop with shallot cream sauce for two, and shrewdly chosen and very fairly priced wines.

Not surprisingly, it’s all worked a charm, and this place has become a real hit with well-heeled young Parisian professionals. Given the better-than-average cooking and reasonable prices, plus those swell views of the Eiffel tower if you get a Seine facing table, the real surprise is that this place hasn’t yet been trumpeted as a great address for anyone visiting Paris.

L’Ogre, 1 avenue de Versailles, 16th, Tel. 01-45-27-93-40. Metro: Mirabeau or RER Maison-de-Radio-France. Closed Saturday lunch and Sunday. Average 35 Euros.

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Suffice it to say that supermarkets, especially the really big ones, have choked the life out of hundreds of French villages, towns and cities by making it impossible for small merchants to compete, have ringed many of these same places with soul-strickeningly ugly collars of sprawl that are only accessible by automobile, and have privileged heavily processed industrial foods with high mark-ups over fresh healthy reasonably priced seasonal food people cook into good meals at home.

Confronted with this reality, I am swearing off supermarkets–places I almost never shop for anything but clearning products anyway–as much as I possibly can. Instead, I’ll continue to take the time necessary to buy my vegetables at the market or one of the very good green grocers in the rue des Martyrs, avidly frequent my very good butcher in the rue Blanche, etc., etc. The only way to free our food chain from the mad petroleum driven machine that profits huge oil companies, huge car companies, huge retailers, etc., is to just plain stop shopping in these places.

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Returning to Paris after a week spent in Normandy, I was hungry for Asian food, and so decided to act on a Post-It note that’s been stuck to my computer for some months. Knowing of my love for Vietnamese cooking, Kim Ta, the charming manager of Indochine, in the rue Mont Thabor, generously suggested that I might also try Suave in the 13th arrondissement.

Driving across Paris on a rainy night, Bruno and I reminisced about the first time we went to Vietnam and the astonishingly good dinner we ate at The Temple Club in Saigon–Vietnamese ravioli and then Bo Bun for both of us, so flavorful, delicious, and pretty to look at that we ate the same meal three other times while we were there. What fascinated me, too, was how vivid ‘real’ Vietnamese cooking tasted in comparison to most of what’s served in Paris. To be sure, it’s still tough to find certain fresh Asian herbs in Paris; French meat, fish and fowl are different; and they’re other alimentary constraints on producing authentic Vietnamese food in a European country. But this didn’t stop us from hoping that we might be headed towards a place that serves really terrific Viet cooking and which would become a new favorite.

Occupying an attractively decorated corner shopfront on the edge of the Butte des Cailles, or some remove from the antic high-rise action of Paris’s ‘real’ Asian village, Suave–its name oblige, immediately seemed to be setting itself up in opposition to the cheap, popular Asian places with steamy windows a few streets over. Instead, this place had a corner banquette with pillows, a beautifully worked framed embroidery of multi-colored birds on the wall, and gentle lighting.

It was very busy on a Friday night, too, which seemed auspicious, although Bruno rightly pointed out that “il n’y a pas beaucoup des sourires ici” (The service is unsmiling and almost military in its desire to spin as many diners as possible through the money-producing wicket). A starter salade de boeuf was excellent, though, with fine rings of lemon grass; rare and tender beef; and crunchy vegetables, while a mixed assortment appetizers–two spring rolls, two deep-fried shrimp beignet, two taro-root flower fritters stuffed with chopped shrimp, etc. was decent enough but brought Trader Vick’s to mind (Trader Vick’s was a chain of “polynesian” style restaurants, often in Hilton hotels, in the U.S. that reached its hey day in the late sixties, early seventies, and offered a Sears Roebuck take on ‘exotic’ eating).

Bruno’s bo bun–deep-fried nems (spring rolls) and grilled beef on a bowl of noodles was okay, as was my bun cha, a Hanoi specialty of grilled pork on rice-flour vermicelli noodles with bean sprouts, sliced carrots, shredded lettuce, chopped cucumber. What was missing Generosity, for starters–these portions were modest, and also the, um, er, well, suave taste that both of these dishes have in Vietnam.

I’ve had worse versions of both in Paris, but if the basic quality of the food at Suave is respectable, it’s certainly not a place that’s worth crossing Paris for and real connoisseurs of Vietnamese cooking are likely to be a bit let down by this place.

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Like many people who’ve lived in Paris for a longtime, I inevitably find myself having a meal at Terminus Nord every couple of months for the simple reason that it has one of the most enviably strategic locations in the city just across the street from the bustling Gare du Nord. And with a similar inevitability, I come away from every meal at this place crestfallen by the stunning mediocrity of the food and the bored and distant service.

Aside from good company, the only consolations at a really poor lunch today were some excellent Norman oysters to start and the pleasure of whiling away several hours in this visually enchanting dining room, with its odd hybrid of art-deco and art-nouveau, floral-pattern mosaic floor, and wonderfully witty mural populated with caricatures of Belle Epoque Parisian types by turn-of-the-century Russian artist Nicholas Nifontoff. Otherwise, the meal was a train wreck.

I have a very strong suspicion that my ‘gratinee,’ or onion soup had been pre-prepared–right down to its melted cheese topped croutons–in a commissary somewhere, since it came to the table within minutes of being order and was lukewarm, or under-microwaved. A “tartare” of unripe avocado with shredded crab was watery and almost tasteless, and the blinis accompanying some unidentified smoked salmon–no provenance here whatsoever despite that fact that it cost 18 Euros, were cold, coarse and stale.

My two English friends were terribly letdown by the plat du jour–overcooked filets of sea bass, at once leathery and mushy, with an unseasoned puree of fennel, and my choucroute was lukewarm and served with the perfectly round golf-ball shaped potatoes that are alas but just one of the alarming products of industrial-scale catering in France and the charcuterie was flabby and tasteless. The only one who managed a half decent meal was Bruno, who had a decent steak that he wisely didn’t dress with the ramekin of sludgy looking industrial bearnaise sauce that came with it.

Dessert was out of the question after such a letdown, and over coffee my London pals wondered aloud at how it could be that the very simple standard-issue classics of traditional brasserie cooking could be so poorly done. I really hated to make matters worse, but I did tell them that the menus at most Parisian brasseries have been repeatedly pushed through the eye of a needle by teams of accountants to make them as profitable as possible and that they soldier on as money-spinners–adding injury to insult, Terminus Nord is not cheap–for people in a hurry and others besotted by the beauty of their Parisian decors. Guidebooks never delete them and most food writers indulgently turn a blind eye to their failings.

So where should you eat in the environs of the Gare du Nord Well, you can always just order some oysters and a glass of white wine at La Terminus Nord, but wanting a real meal, I’d suggest Chez Casimir, the annex of the excellent Chez Michel, which is open daily, or La Vigne Saint Laurent, a very pleasant bistro a vins about a ten-minute walk away.

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Chez Casimir, 6 rue de Belzunce, 10th, Tel.  01-48-78-28-80. Metro: Gare du Nord. Open daily noon-2.30pm, 7-10.30pm. Prix-fixe menu 29 Euros, Sunday brunch menu 25 Euros.

Terminus Nord, 23 rue de Dunkerque, 10th, Tel. 01-42-85-05-15. Metro: Gare du Nord. Open daily. Prix-fixe menu 29 Euros, average a la carte 40-45 Euros.

Suave, 20 rue de la Providence, 13th, Tel. 01-45-89-99-27. Metro: Corvisart. Open Monday to Saturday for lunch and dinner. Average 20 Euros.

La Vigne Saint-Laurent, 2 rue Saint Laurent, 10th, Tel. 01-42-05-98-20. Metro: Gare-de-l’Est or Gare du Nord. Open Monday-Friday. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Average 30 Euros.

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