Some strange and generally wonderful things have happened to me because of Facebook. A few days ago, I had a message from a woman I’ll call Amanda, a friend I hadn’t seen since high-school graduation. She wrote from Tampa, Florida, where she is living as a recently divorced real-estate agent and said that she’d decided to treat herself to a trip to Paris, a city she hadn’t visited since a college trip many years ago. “I made out with a boy who followed me for twenty minutes in the Tuileries gardens. It was the craziest thing I’d done up to that point in my life–many more since then!–and he was so incredibly handsome I still think of him sometimes. Who knows Maybe I need a good dose of Paris, and it would be great to see you again if you’re around.”

I loved the idea that Amanda, who’d been so pretty and prim and smart, had done something as reckless as kissing a stranger in a public park, and her confession made me wonder how well I’d ever really known her. Oh, to be sure, we were friends, as, it would seem, two of the rare kids in the fast-track college program who were even a tiny bit wild, even in those days. What this meant was smoking joints and going to all-night diners in the down-at-the-heels industrial town next to our wiltingly pretty New England suburb in the orbit of New York City, harmless stuff really, but when she went on to study classics at a very respectable women’s college near Boston, I assumed that those rare errant nights in the diner were behind her.

So I said ‘Yes’ to dinner, and she wrote back right away and told me to meet her for a drink first at Le Select, the cafe in Montparnasse, and then we’d go to dinner. “Oh I know you’re a connoisseur, Alec, but let me chose where we go to dinner.” How very sweet–if slightly strange–that our reunion was so natural. The person I found was a strong, handsome woman with a charmingly self-effacing self of humor, a quick wit, and an omnivorous interest in the world. She was physically very little changed, too–lean, tan, blonde as always, and well-seasoned by the many years gone by. So we drank white wine and laughed at ourselves and the past and started catching up. Still, me being me, I wondered where we were going to dinner, and when she saw me glance at my watch, she said, “Oh, you! We’re just going across the street, and I don’t want to hear a word about what you think of the place. I’ve never been, and I’ve always wanted to go.”

So I went to dinner at La Coupole for the first time in many years, and in the interest of a happy night with an old friend, I didn’t get my back up over her assumption that just because I write about food, I’m fussy or fancy or something. In any event, everyone assumes this, and everyone’s wrong. And recently I’d also been thinking about something that’s wrong with this blog, and most other food publications in any format, which is that we’re all so preoccupied with the new that we never go back and see what the old places are like. The fact that Amanda wanted to eat at La Coupole on her first night in Paris more than thirty years sort of underlined this for me, too.

Amanda had thoughtfully booked dinner online and gave her name to the bored man at the reservations lectern when we came in. Wordlessly, he escorted us to a rather distant quadrant of this vast room, and I said nothing, because this was her evening, and I sensed anything I might have said wouldn’t have mattered, since as far as he was concerned we were just another pair of American tourists, those lemmings he contends with by the dozens everyday. Happy though I was in the present, I couldn’t help but hear the rustling of many shed skins as we sat and read the menu, since at another point in my Paris life of almost thirty years, I ate here rather often. To be sure, it was never for reasons gastronomic, but rather because La Coupole was once one of the anointed restaurants of the fashion tribe in the days when I was an editor for a glamorous fashion publishing company, an incarnation that today strikes me as a rather mystifying bit of bad casting and acting.

“I imagine you know this place quite well,” said Amanda. Indeed I do, or did, I told her, yarning about my days on the style circuit and also reminiscing about the Sunday night dinners I used to have here with a bunch of single friends, none of whom live in Paris anymore. I explained that we once shared a collective brasserie reflex, since Sundays could be melancholic, and so we’d often round ourselves up for a dinner round robin style, which was also the unstated occasion to take a shower and get dressed after a day spent in pyjamas. Brasseries were lively and fun in those days, and so a perfect antidote to the morbid flutterings on the wall of a winter’s evening.

When Amanda flipped her hair back, I was surprised to see a tiny tattoo of a bird on the side of her neck, and she laughed when she saw me see it. “It was a birthday present from a Cuban guy I used to go out with, and when my Mom was still alive, I rather meanly loved to pin my hair up when I’d go to see her in Connecticut, because for her it was a pure horror. Remember, girls with pierced ears were fast, and all of that snotty garbage we were fed as kids. Well, I sort of like my tattoo these days, or most of the time anyway.” We ordered, and I said nothing about the restaurant, but found it embarrassingly deflated, or devoid of any glamour whatsoever. It was almost like running into a friend who’d once been an ace athlete before she put on a lot of weight or realising that the handsome guy who’d been a star on the high school football team had had some “work” done. The passing of time makes some things vintage and others sad. Still, our older waiter was charming in a wry sort of way, and I was fascinated by the beautiful black woman in the back of the room.

We ordered eighteen Utah Beach oysters, and they were plump, meaty, and wonderfully briny, so the fact that the rye bread they came with was stale didn’t really matter, and if the finger bowls which once might have come with these crustaceans have long since gone missing, they were always a little fiddly anyway, and the plastic-wrapped towelette that replaced them was of no real use either. So we talked, and both of us occasionally ran aground on the sudden incomprehension of the unexpected shoals in our pasts. I mean, how did it happen that I once worked at Cosmopolitan magazine in New York City and regularly used to see Helen Gurley Brown in the hall in a bathrobe with a towel on her head What prevented me from becoming sad, though, was Amanda’s company, the good oysters, the fact that I like the life I have, and I had a huge admiration for the way our waiter was soldiering on despite the fact that there was an incipient going-out-of-business atmosphere in the room. The brasseries of Paris, you see, have become too expensive and too just shy of mediocre for them to trudge along much longer as they are right now.

Amanda ate smoked salmon as a main course, and it was the only time during the evening that her brightness faltered. “This is pretty ordinary,” she said, adding, “And I don’t know Paris like you do, but this place is all about tourists and people from the provinces, isn’t it#8221; Pretty much, I told her, wishing the tourists and the people from the provinces well. I ordered La Couple’s ‘famous’  lamb curry, an odd sounding choice, perhaps, for a brasserie, but I remembered having liked it, probably because it tasted like the curry my mother used to make back in the days when none of us knew a thing about Indian food.

My heart went out to the friendly dignified man who showed up in a children’s birthday party Maharajah’s costume to serve the curry, and I couldn’t help but asking him where he was from. “Sri Lanka, Sir,” he replied with just a tinge of knowing bemusement. To my surprise, the lamb curry was good, or at least in the terms of what I once knew about curry when the little tin of Durkee curry powder in the spice cabinet was my own Joseph Cornell like world of the exotic.

We didn’t bother with dessert, because there wasn’t any point in it, and we needed to digest both our meal and our meeting. Even though Amanda was tired, I had a hunch about what her next step would be. “I think I’m going to sit on a cafe terrace and have a Cognac and bum a cigarette off of someone now, Alec,” she said, reading my mind. So we crossed the road and had a hug before I went into the Metro. “Isn’t it nice that we still like each other after all of these years?!” Amanda said in parting, seizing my line again, and aside from recovering an old friendship, I also appreciated the evening for the unexpected archaeology of returning to La Coupole, a place I’d never have gone without her. The meal wasn’t awful, but it certainly wasn’t worth the money we spent, and since guidebook publishing is generally in such dire straits that few writers ever visit the restaurants they write about anymore and just mostly spade over existing listings, I’m glad to be able to tell you that you don’t need to put this place on your Paris Go-To list anymore. Okay, maybe for some late night oysters on a Sunday, but otherwise you might want to take my word when I tell you that it used to be very glamorous.

La Coupole, 102 Boulevard du Montparnasse, 14th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. 01-43-20-14-20. Metro: Montparnasse-Bienvenue. Open Daily. Average 50 Euros. www.lacoupole-paris.com/en/ 

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Unfortunately, despite its popularity, the Ile Saint Louis has not had a really good restaurant since the original Hiramatsu moved away. Yes, there’s Mon Vieil Ami, but the service there is problematic, it’s become too expensive and there are just too many foreigners, so the one place I ever recommend is the perfectly respectable Brasserie de l’Isle Saint Louis, with its charming interior, anthology of decent old-fashioned French dishes and pleasantly teasing and jocular waiters. Still, such a special place has always seemed to warrant an equally special restaurant, so I was intrigued when I read that the hoary old La Taverne du Sergent Recruteur, a tourist table par excellence, had been reborn as Le Segent Recruteur, an elegant contemporary French restaurant.

Since this new restaurant was on the expensive side, I plied the long-suffering and increasingly resistant Bruno–he’d almost always rather stay home and cook, since, according to him, “We rarely eat as well in restaurants as we do at home,” by making him my guest for dinner. Arriving, the place had a handsome new decor with good lighting and contemporary ceramics in vitrines by Spanish decorator Jaime Hayon, and it was packed with an international quorum of well-dressed couples, most of whom had clearly been sent here by nearby hotels. The open kitchen in the back of the room was a busy hive, but the dining room had a relaxed atmosphere, so we decided to throw caution to the wind and start the evening with a glass of rather dull mono-cepage Champagne (I later discovered that these were priced at a ridiculous 20 Euros a pour, so you’ve been warned).

We were hungry that night, so after twenty minutes went by without a menu, I asked one of the numerous wait staff if we could see one and order. He returned with a puckish grin and handed us two triple-folded sheets of paper that had been sealed with sealing wax. This didn’t bode well, but I opened mine, and experienced an instant blaze or irritation. Here’s what I found:

Partir de Rien: 95 Euros

S’Inspirer: 145 Euros

Bruno shot me a beady eye, and I asked the server if he might explain the menu a bit further. “It’s better if it’s all a surprise,” he said coyly. I said that we’d really rather know what the sequence of dishes in each menu might be so that we could order a single bottle of wine for the meal. “You’re better off having a specially chosen glass with each course,” I was told. While remaining cordial, I told him that we didn’t like shifting from one wine to another during a meal, and that we’d rather start with some white, if that was appropriate, and then add a glass of red somewhere if that was warranted, etc.

“As you wish,” he replied, followed by a quick sing-song recitation of the bill of fare, a tone that implied we were being sticks in the mud. For two fleeting seconds, I thought of paying up for the Champagne and moving on, since we’d clearly blundered into one of those noisome places where we were expected to bow down in astonishment at the chef’s prowess. Or in other words, a restaurant that’s not particularly eager to make its clients happy, but which prefers instead to impose its culinary will upon them.

So we settled for six-course “Partir de Rien” (Indeed), and another twenty minutes went by before we were served two foamy hors d’oeuvres, pumpkin and herbs. They were just fine, but we still hadn’t seen the sommelier when the second hors d’oeuvres came out–an egg shell with a slow-poached yolk and angelica foam, harmless enough but rather deja vu as a concept. After a fair amount of prodding our white Saint Joseph was finally served, much too cold, just as a thoroughly uninteresting carpaccio of beets reached the table with, at long last, some bread and some very good freshly made butter.

Things improved considerably, however, with the following dish, a beautiful compostion of succulent mackerel garnished with cucumber shavings, lazer-fine slices of black radish and wild fennel leaves. This was clearly a signature dish, since the chef himself emerged from the kitchen to flurry our fish with a fine snow of frozen horseradish and yogurt. This very appealing dish reminded me a lot of similar preparations I’ve recently eaten in Stockholm, so a propos of nothing, I mentioned to the chef that it looked “tres Scandinave,” which earned me a glare before he wordlessly withdrew from the table. Bruno thought I’d unwittingly cast some aspersions on his originality with my comment, but this wasn’t my intention–the dish was tres Scandinave, and it was also the best conceived and most satisfying dish of the evening.

By now, however, we’d been at the table for over two hours, which I wouldn’t normally have even noticed, since I love being at the table and could talk to Bruno until the cows come home, but the only way for such an involuntary tasting menu to work is for the rhythm of the dishes to remain relatively well-syncopated. When there are long delays between courses, exasperation sets in, which is what I overhead at the table to my left, where the two husbands staged a rebellion and abbreviated their plodding steeple-chase of a meal by a dessert. This format also requires a lofty level of talent to come off, too, since the diner responds to the heightened expection of it all by focusing intently on every dish. All of which is to say that our next two courses–turbot with grilled artichokes in an acidulated sauce and wonderful suckling pig with caramelized crackling, were good but came no where near the level of David Toutain of Agape Substance, the current Parisian maestro of such tasting menus.

Going on three hours now, we decided to cut things short, too, and concluded with an excellent fresh fig tart with vanilla ice cream. The bill for this meal ran over 300 Euros, which was rather heart-breaking, since it inevitably invited comparison to all of the other places we might have gone instead for a better and more enjoyable meal. Aside from the excruciatingly slow and disorganized service, the problem with this place you see is that the chef is more interested in showing off his culinary prowess, such as it is–and he does have talent, than he is in creating a sincerely memorable evening for his clientele.

41 rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile, 4th, Tel. 01-43-54-75-42. Metro: Maubert – Mutualité, Pont Marie or Sully – Morland. Closed Sunday and Monday. Prix-fixe menus 95 Euros, 145 Euros.

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Poulet de Bresse for 2-4: 95 Euros

On the way up to the  unfortunately named Le Coq Rico, chef Thierry Lébé’s new Antoine Westermann backed rotisserie in Montmartre, last night, I couldn’t help but wondering why no one had ever thought of doing a roast-chicken themed restaurant in Paris before. To be sure, there are lots of places that are rightly or mostly wrongly well-known for their roast chicken in Paris–L’Ami Louis, La Rotisserie d’en Face, La Rotisserie du Beaujolais, Le Pere Claude and Chez Maitre Albert among them (they all get a C+ from me), but even the good ones rarely do it better than my favorite roast chicken purveyors, almost all of which are to be found at open-air Parisian markets.

For some reason, the spit-roasted fowl at Paris markets is almost always excellent, and even though it’s not cheap, it’s a lot cheaper than what you’ll be nicked for at most sit-down Paris restaurants. Since I’ve liked Mr. Westermann and enjoyed his sincere and artful cooking ever since I first sampled it–I was dispatched to Buerehiesel in Strasbourg by a New York magazine after he won three stars in 1993, I’m always eager to see what he’s up to. Unfortunately, I’ve found him to have gone rather consistently off course since he left his Strasbourg restaurant to his son Eric and started opening restaurants in Paris. Mon Vieil Ami on the Ile Saint Louis was quite good when it first opened–I loved the Alsatian inflected farm food, but the service never settled in correctly and its become too expensive, so I deleted it from the last edition of HUNGRY FOR PARIS and don’t go anymore. Drouant, Westermann’s other Paris table, is similarly mystifying to me–I’ve never enjoyed a meal there and don’t understand the kitchen’s odd, gimicky archly urban rustic cooking.

But Mr. Westermann is a delightful man and seriously gifted chef, so off we went to the highest peak in Paris on an arctic evening. Arriving, the presence of an amiable voiturier immediately told me what sort of clientele they were gunning for, or people not like me, which is to say high-rollers who show up in their four-wheel drive fume- spewers and don’t mind spending 10 Euros to get someone to take the ton of metal off their hands. And almost from the moment we stepped inside, I knew this place wasn’t going to work for me and held my tongue.

  Well-groomed robo-staff types went through the motions of a welcome like the vain and excited ushers at the Cannes film festival, and the white decor felt like a hollowed out sugar cube. To be sure, the working rotisserie off to one side was faced by a counter where you could eat alone, and a few people were dining there, but overall this “m’as tu vu” place felt as though it should be in Courchevel instead of Montmartre. Or in other words, it smelled like a money spinner from the get go.

And then we looked at the menu, which was frankly absurd. Two of us ordered the creme de volaille (creamed chicken) soup as a starter, and even though it was delicious, I was really bothered by the idea that they were charging 11 Euros for a ladle and a half of soup. This starter should have been served in a deep tureen at these prices, and before it came to the table, we should have been offered a help-yourself chicken-liver terrine to soothe us into the spririt of the place over our aperitifs. Instead, this restaurant felt as though the entire menu had been pushed through a very expensive computer-generated cost-analysis program at least five times before they unlocked the front doors for the first time.

Roast pigeon: 38 Euros

Since we were celebrating a friend’s birthday, I  kept my beak shut during our dinner, but when 75 minutes went by between our starters and our roasted birds– we’d ordered a pigeon for one and a poulet de Bresse that was caggily described as serving 2-4, I slipped away to see what was going on. What I found was a restaurant that desperately needed a real maitre d’hotel, or someone with a supervailing eye who could greet newcomers, time the kitchen and track the staff all at once. Instead, there was no one home at this place all through a very long and rather trying meal. When it finally arrived, all of the fowl was overcooked, and the airplane style portion-controlled side dishes were offensive. When someone has ordered a 95 Euro roast chicken, salad, frites and macaroni gratin should come to the table in abundance.

Oh to be sure, they brandish some major brand-name birds on the menu–Challans, Bresse, Coucou de Rennes, Géline de Touraine, etc., and their cooking is, as the French would say, “correcte,” but the harsh lighting and total absence of generosity at this restaurant were a heart ache, especially since it was my idea that we come here and my friend Laurent sent me a single-line email after we’d all parted company: “Alec, Pigeon a 38 Euros–Putain!”

Le Coq Rico, 98 rue Lepic, 18th, Tel. 01-42-59-82-89. Metro: Lamarck-Caulaincourt. Open daily. Average 50 Euros, with no drinks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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So why the stodge fest in this great-looking little place with cobalt blue walls, industrial lighting, and the scuffed up wooden floors that are meant to recall, um, er, Soho I went for Saturday lunch with one of many French friends who claim to love American food. She wanted a Caesar salad, a dish I could never imagine ordering in a restaurant, and what came to the table was something that might have been created by a drunk at a motel salad bar–chopped iceberg lettuce, oddly uniform chunks of lukewarm chicken breast, and a hair-pomade consistency dressing that had no taste at all.

Since I’m defenseless when it comes to onion rings, I had to have some with my bacon cheeseburger. If the burger was respectable enough, the accompanying “fries” were greasy, unpeeled potato quarters, likely baked, and an increasingly common cheat in busy profit-conscious French kitchen where real fries demand too much time and effort. To be sure, the “bacon” had nothing to do with real American bacon either and the bun was too large and too dense. But the beef was good, and if this burger didn’t clock in at 13.50 Euros, or almost twenty bucks at current exchange rates, I might be tempted to return from time to time. Oh, and the onion rings Just plain awful, as in in deep-fried. oil-impregnated little O’s with the alarming consistency of a flabby arm. Or actually they reminded me of a deranged experiment a friend and I attempted a longtime ago with a box of Mrs. Paul’s Onion rings while on a Spring break trip to North Carolina. College students with empty pockets, we avoided restaurants and spent most of a week living on sandwiches. Then one hot afternoon on the way to the beach, we stopped at a convenience store to buy beer and the onion rings called to me from deep inside of a frozen food case. The problem, of course, was that we had no where to cook them…but wait! Maybe we could leave them on a piece of aluminum foil on the hood of the car while we were swimming and the sun would cook them! The soggy, greasy muck that we found when we returned three hours later immediately went into a litter bin, and I swore off a career as a physicist.

HAND, 39 rue de Richelieu, 1st, Tel. 01-40-15-03-27. Mo Pyramides or Palais Royale. Avg 20 Euros.

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