Ever since I’ve had teeth, few foods have more reliably made me happy than pizza, and this is why the pizza at pizzaïoulo Giuseppe Cutraro new Peppe Pizzeria in the 20th Arrondissement not far from the Père Lachaise Cemetery made me ecstatic last weekend. With my appetite honed by the recent weeks of being locked up in my Paris flat, I was yearning for some really really really good pizza, because most of what was available through Paris food-delivery apps was pretty mediocre. And the inexplicable international popularity of several huge American pizza chains notwithstanding, there are few things sadder than mediocre pizza.

When I think about it, I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like pizza, because not liking pizza would be as life-threatening and pleasure-killing as saying you didn’t like flowers or kisses. But as a native of southwestern Connecticut, the original home of great pizza in the United States (I expect some cat calls and blow back for this assertion, but it’s true), I’m grew up as a pizza connoisseur, and that was long before I finally made it to Naples and had a first head-spinning experience of the real McCoy, the sultry and stunningly delicious Margherita–just dough topped with crushed tomatoes, mozzarella di buffalo, and a fresh basil leaf of two before a turn in the blister-inducing inferno of a Napolitan beehive pizza oven.

I’d been reading about this place in just before le confinement (quarantine) shut down almost every restaurant in Paris, and I’d decided I’d be willing to travel halfway across Paris to taste the pizza that had won Giuseppe Cutraro, aka Peppe, the “World Champion of Contemporary Napolitan Pizza 2019-2020.” (“The Art of the Napolitan Pizzaïoulo” has figured on UNESCO’s World Heritage list since 2017). To be perfectly honest, it sounded, well, strange. To wit, this pie was sauced with yellow Sicilian tomatoes, topped with mozarella di buffala and provolone, Tuscan ham aged for 36 months, almond slivers and fig jam. But before you conclude that I’m a hidebound purist, I’d quickly tell you that one of my all-time pizzas was and is the one served at Frank Pepe Pizzeria in New Haven, Connecticut, which is topped with little-neck clams from Rhode Island and is just stunningly good.

So “Hawaian  pizza” topped with ham and pineapple and pizzas topped with salad, any kind of salad–absolutely not, but if you respect the pizza as a sort of brilliant blank canvas awaiting the humble new gustatory brush strokes of a real artist, sometimes pizza innovation works out spectacularly well. Like Frank Pepe’s clam pizzas or Giuseppe Cutraro astonishing delicious ‘World Champion Pizza.” The reason this pizza is so good is the same reason that any dish anywhere in the world succeeds, which is that it offers such an exquisitely subtle but still legible compilation of tastes that unite in perfect harmony. The almonds Texture. The yellow tomato sauce Low-acidity to balance the sweetness of the sparingly applied fig jam. The two cheeses Different textures and salinities. Try it, you’ll like it is all I can say.

The other thing that makes Peppe Pizzeria’s pizzas so good is that they allow the dough, which is made from flour imported from Naples, to ferment before kneading it and slapping it around, so that the rolled crust is filled with air pockets and the base is exceptionally light and thin.

Peppe did a stint at Keste on Bleecker Street in New York City’s West Village and also worked in Switzerland before he came to Paris to work as a pizza-maker for the Big Mamma Group in Paris, which has seven Italian restaurants in the capital, one each in Lille and Lyon, and two in London. Peppe wanted his own place, though, so he opened at the end of January, and the restaurant had been packed at lunch and dinner until the lockdown came in mid-March.

Fortunately, however, it was easy to continue working on a takeout basis, so the place has thrived even during the challenging last few months. When we arrived to collect our two pizzas, an order of carpaccio with arugula and a tiramisu the other night there was a huge line of people waiting to collect their pizzas. So we bought two deliciously yeasty Napolitan beers and enjoyed the fresh air of a mild May evening until our order came up and we bolted back across Paris to tuck into our pizzas.

Ever since I ate the lone remaining slice of our Margherita for breakfast the following morning, I have been permanently craving this pizza and ruing the fact that Peppe Pizzeria doesn’t deliver. One way or another, I’ll be back again soon, and maybe next time I’ll try the truffle pizza, which is topped with “truffle cream” (hmmm….), sautéed mushrooms, fresh stracciatella from Puglia, crushed hazelnuts and freshly shaved Italian truffle. The ‘Piccante”–tomatoes from Puglia, mozzarella di buffalo di Campania, Calabrian spianata (spicy salami), pickled onion and shavings of Pecorino Romano DOP speaks to me, too. And a friend who lived nearby says that the gnocchi alla Sorrentina are outstanding, too.

I look forward to the day that we can dine in Peppe Pizzeria’s spacious dining room, too, but in the meantime, the friendly crew behind the tiled open kitchen should get used to seeing my pizza-loving face.

Peppe Pizzeria, 2 Place Saint-Blaise, 20th Arrondissement, Tel. 01-45-35-59-13. Metro: Gambetta or Porte de Bagnolet. Open Tues-Sun for lunch and dinner. Closed Monday. Average 30 Euros. www.peppepizzeria.fr

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After reading several positive reviews of Jacopo, the new moderately priced bistro by Thibault Sombardier, a media-loving young chef who has a Michelin star at the seafood restaurant Antoine and who was also a contestant on Top Chef, the French dueling chefs television show, I met a friend for dinner with high expectations. The address in the rue Vernet in the 8^th arrondissement seemed to auger well, too, since this street had once been the location of one of my favorite Paris restaurants, Les Elysees du Vernet at the Hotel Vernet when several superb chefs—notably Bruno Cirino of L’Hostellerie Jerome in La Turbie, successively made it a dark-horse favorite with a beautiful setting under a verriere (glass ceiling) design by Gustave Eiffel (this restaurant still exists and is today known as Le V, but I have no opinion on it today, since I haven’t dined here in at least ten years).

On the way to dinner I also found myself thinking that a decent bistro in this business-and-tourist district of the 8^th Arrondissement along the Champs Elysees might spare some other hapless debutant visitor to Paris the ordeal that befell me on my first night in the French capital (mind you, I’m still eternally grateful to this day that my parents considered this trip to Europe to be an essential part of the education of their four children). On that steamy August night, however, a reunion meal was on the horizon, since my mother, two brothers and me were meeting my father and sister at a hotel just off the Champs Elysees after having traveled on our own for two months.

During those two months when Mom ran the show, we’d eaten exceptionally well, too, including a superb meal at Cipriani in Venice and another one at the Hotel Sacher in Vienna. For the occasion of her children’s first night in Paris, my mother, who had decided to throw caution to winds and spend a good chunk of an inheritance on this trip, had booked us at La Tour d’Argent. She wanted us to have an experience of French haute cuisine, the view of Notre Dame and the Seine by night, and the dozens of intricately stitched lessons in gastronomy, worldliness and gallantry such a meal would surely offer.

Steak at Jacopo

Lemon tart at Jacopo

Suffice it to say, my late father quickly reasserted himself as the family’s final arbiter of all things financial and told my mother to cancel the reservation, because it was, in his view, an absurdly extravagant and foolish place to take adolescent children. “Why don’t you children wait for us in the lobby downstairs,” my mother suggested.

So we sat in a strange row of four armchairs upholstered in some prickly fabric, and eventually they emerged from the elevator, my mother with tear-streaked cheeks first. We ended up walking down the street our hotel was located on and having a meal at the very same Pizza Pino that still exists at the corner of the Champs Elysees and the rue Marignan today (for the uninitiated, Pizza Pino, is a French pizza chain that’s not even on par with such sorry options as Pizza Hut or Sbarro). For ferocious pizza-lovers from the American state that has the best pizza in North America—that would be Connecticut, thank you, this meal was so mind-bendingly bad that it brought on a bout of collective hilarity that disguised, if not completely healed, the conjugal tug of war that had just taken place. To this day, I remained convinced that any cook who puts canned pineapple rings on a pizza is in need of a urgent psychiatric treatment, however.

Who knows, I thought as I arrived at the door of Jacopo, maybe if half-decent reasonably priced French food had been easy for us to find all of those years ago, my Parisian learning curve would have had a different point of departure. As is my habit, I read the menu before going inside to meet my friend, and it looked promising—there were lots of things I’d happily eat—and it was indeed quite reasonably priced, too. The long narrow dining room was rather odd-looking, however. With exposed cement walls and ceiling, bright modern lighting fixtures, dark stained parquet floors and Navy blue Fiberglas chairs at small metal edged tables, it looked more like a sports bar in a Sunbelt city than a bistro.

The joint was jumping, though, with a happy mixture of after-work office friends, tourists, and some French out-of-towners who’d must have heard about the place via word-of-mouth. Over a nice pour of Petit Chablis for 7 Euros a glass, a price that sort of par for the game in any central Paris neighborhood if you’re drinking better than plonk, my friend and me studied the menu and the crowd. We were fish out of water here, you see, because like most Parisians, we almost never find ourselves on the Champs Elysees for any reason that doesn’t have to do with some business-specific errand. Though the city of Paris has made a huge effort to enhance and renew the appeal of the avenue, it’s just not a place Parisians gravitate to, because they’ve long since written it off as tourist turf, or sort of a much better looking and considerably less illuminated Gallic version of Times Square in New York City.

I decided to order a meal that was as French at Vercingetorix, the great hero of the Gauls. To wit, onion soup and blanquette de veau, while my friend opted for the oeufs mayonnaise—hard-boiled eggs with mayonnaise, another dish as Gallic as Charles de Gaulle’s nose, and cod persille (parsley butter with tomatoes and bread crumbs). Then I glanced at the wine list, which was where I expected the restaurant would be making its margins, and they so they did. If there was one white at 25 Euros a bottle and a red at 24 Euros, it was an expensive roster, an off-page nod at the rents in this very expensive part of Paris and perhaps targeted at a business crowd at noon. Still, two people having a three-course meal and sharing a bottle of wine could get away for about 35 Euros a piece here, and cheaper still with just a glass of wine with their meal.

Salmon tartare

That’s when it occurred to me: We were having dinner in a French version of the Olive Garden (a popular chain of moderately priced fast-casual Italian restaurants in the United States), or a sort of fast casual pastiche of a real bistro designed to deliver familiar affordable indigenous comfort food at easy prices in a setting that forsook the touristy memes of white laces curtains and red-checked table cloths. And this is when the meal suddenly became really interesting, because even if the French supposedly consumed more hamburgers last year than they did jambon beurre, the famous sandwich made with baguette, ham and salted butter, the success of this no-reservations restaurant is a reflection of a deep yearning for the type of traditional French dishes that few middle-class people in France have the time to prepare anymore and which are now most often found in a handful of expensive tourist-oriented bistros in Paris. But would the food be good at Jacopo?

Our first courses were not promising, to say the least. My onion soup was unpleasantly sweet, which made me less unhappy that it had been served in such a stingy bowl, and was garnished with a large obviously pre-made crouton topped with dried out melted cheese. More puzzlingly, the oeufs mayonnaise were frankly terrible; the three egg halves (what happened to the fourth one?) were overcooked and topped with a thick flavorless foam that had no resemblance to mayonnaise whatsoever. “You can’t expect miracles for these prices,” my pal commented as she observed my optimism deflating. Except, that is, when you can.

My blanquette de veal was so good that I knew that if I found myself at lose ends for a meal in this part of town, I’d pop in to Jacopo again just to eat this delicate stew of tender meat, onions, mushrooms and carrots in a silken and light but flavorful cream sauce.

“This is really good,” I told my pal.

“No!”

“Yes! Have a taste,” I said, and she did.

“It is good, but my fish is overcooked and has no flavor.”

A shared and rather sad baba au rhum concluded this gastronomic foray, and I went off into the night undecided about the utility of this place, because on the one hand, it was better than the fast food places and chain restaurants on the Champs Elysees, and also relatively affordable, and on the other, the cooking was decidedly hit and miss.

Fast forward two weeks. On a rainy day around noon, I found myself in this neighborhood again when I went to collect a travel visa from an embassy located here, and as it started to pour, I found myself standing hungry near the doors of Jacopo just as it opened for lunch, and thought, Why not?

This time round, a steamed artichoke with a vinaigrette sauce as a starter, chicken breast in a nicely made sauce with baby lardons and mushrooms and surprisingly good frites brought on the same sort of pleasantly muddled satisfaction I used to feel many many years ago when I ate at…Howard Johnson’s, the sadly now defunct, solidly middle-class, middle-of-the-road Quincy, Massachusetts based restaurant chain that passed as a treat for their fried clam plates and peppermint-stick ice cream with hot fudge-sauce sundaes.

Everything wasn’t good at Howard Johnson’s—you had to know what to order, and the same thing is true of Jacopo, which is nobly catering to a similar demographic niche, too. To wit, if you know what you’re doing, you can have a perfectly pleasant meal here, especially for this part of Paris. My late father would have loved it.

5bis rue Vernet, 8^th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-42-89-20-22, Metro: George V. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Average 35 Euros. www.jacopo.fr

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It’s some of the best news of la rentrée (the Fall/Autumn season) in Paris this year: With the opening of Le Bistrot de la Galette, there’s finally a charming restaurant in Montmartre that actually serves good reasonably priced French food. This beautiful bistro looks like it’s been there forever, but it’s actually the very recent creation of the very talented pastry chef Gilles Marchal, who has worked at the Hotel de Crillon, the Hotel Bristol and many other places, and who has also just opened biscuiterie (cookie shop) not far from his excellent patisserie in the nearby rue Ravignan, both in Montmartre.

So just steps from the sorry tourist-trap tables of the Place du Terte, where wide-eyed people come from round the world to track down the long vanished traces of the bohemian community that made Montmartre one of the world’s greatest artist colonies between 1880 and 1914, at long last there’s a pleasant, uncomplicated, fairly priced and profoundly French place to have a meal.

Walking up the rue Lepic to meet Bruno here for dinner on an Indian summer night, I arrived feeling gently melancholic and a little wistful, since I once had a very close friend who lived on the rue Lepic, and I still don’t understand how that friendship just sort of went missing after a very large distance separated us. Though I’m now happily married (who’d have ever believed that I could pen that sentence! Not me, but what huge happiness it’s brought to a loving couple that’s nearly twenty years old), friendship will always be for me the ballast of a life well-lived and an honestly sacred troth. In fact I think of my friendships like gardens, or rich fertile places that need to be loved, respected and regularly cared for to thrive. This doesn’t mean, of course, that one has to hover over a friendship, or be too exigent about what defines it, since one of my very dearest friends in the world is a man who lives in Sydney and whom I see only a couple of times a decade, if we’re lucky, as we were this past summer, when we met up by the seaside in Spain.

But I couldn’t help but sort of idly musing on what social media has done to my admittedly very old-fashioned idea of friendship as a miraculously created web of intimacy spun on a frame of respect and nourished by humour, honesty and a joyous conscientiousness. The little blue ‘like’ button on Facebook has become a sort of unfathomable shorthand for some form of intimacy born of affinity, which can of course be wonderful, but on the other hand, I have hundreds of ‘friends’ I’ve never met, and whom I’m usually connected to out of possibly reciprocally self-interested need or desire to show the world that we’re ‘friends.’ Ultimately, however, real friends are those people who will forgive your occasional bouts of madness or seriously bad behavior, because they know and love you and so understand from whence this ugliness issues and also that it will pass. Such people are very rare and very precious.

Oh well, maybe the friendship gone oddly asunder lacked the rudder I always believed it had, but one way or another, this particular sweep of Parisian cobblestones will always have tender resonances, and between doing this very personal psychological fine-stitching  and the steep slope I climbed, I reached the table honestly hungry for something as delicious as the oeufs Mimosa (a superior French version of deviled eggs) pictured above.

Bruno was waiting for me, and while we sipping a nice glass of Chablis, the charming woman who runs the restaurant arrived table side to explain it to us a little better. She began with a pleasant dose of history, reminding us that that the original hilltop village of Montmartre had once been the site of many windmills where farmers brought their grain to be milled into flour. At the end of the nineteenth century, a woman from one of the well-established millers’ families, a certain Madame Debray, had the idea of opening an estaminet, or a little cafe, where she served the farmers freshly made galettes and glass of milk. Appreciated for the quality of its simple cooking and excellent baking, Madame Debray’s place thrived, but then when windmills were made obsolete by the arrival of electricity, Madame Debray transformed her cafe into a dance hall that became popular with painters, writers and bon vivants.

“Pour faire une bonne galette, il faut la plus belle des farines,” (To make a good galette (savory crepe), you need the very best flour), Madame Debray once said, and en homage to her, Gilles Marchal decided to base his menu on  pâte feuilletée, or flakey pastry.

What this means is that most of the dishes on the menu use pâte feuilletée as a base or a garnish. To be honest, this news made me fear the cooking here would be a one-trick pony, but the roasted tomato tarts drizzled with pesto that began our meal were excellent for being so light but full of flavor, because Marchal works with organic flour by miller Gilles Matignon and excellent quality milk and butter. The oeufs mimosa were a treat, too, since most adults crave stuffed eggs with the same unexamined avidity that children do candy.

For our main courses, I had the galette Parisienne–with roast pork, sautéed pink mushrooms, raw fresh cream and Comte cheese, and Bruno chose one that was filled with shredded roast lamb and baked Provencal vegetables. Both of them were delicious, but since mine was prettier, it gets the two beauty shots above. There were also several regular bistro dishes–sea bream with a sauce Dugléré (fish fumet, butter, tomatoes, shallots, white wine) and a financière of creamed veal sweetbreads, plus omelettes and scrambled eggs with smoked salmon or bacon, potatoes and fresh herbs. This was the September opening menu, and more hearty traditional bistro dishes will be featured in the months to come.

Every time the attractive good-humored hostess stopped by to pour some more of our always luscious Cote du Py Morgon, we learned more about Marchal’s career and his new restaurant. For example, the handsome bar in the main dining room–we were sitting outside on an Indian summer night, came from an old tavern in Charleroi, Belgium and almost everything else in the dining room had been lovingly purchased at flea markets and antique dealers. “More than anything else, Gilles really wanted to create a neighborhood restaurant, a place where people who live in the area will come often and feel welcome. And of course places with a local clientele often have the type of warm, authentic that visitors appreciate as well,” she added. What she couldn’t say, and I will, is that such restaurants also always need someone in charge with the charm, experience, intelligence and reflexive hospitality skills she so unselfconsciously wields.

Given Marchal’s pedigree as one of the greatest patissiers in Paris, we were both keenly looking forward to dessert. And just as I quietly guessed he would, Bruno chose the puits d’amour, a puff pastry topped with a silken vanilla-flavored pastry cream beneath an amber crackle of caramel, and me, well, my hands usually have to be tied behind my back to keep me away from a good baba au rhum, the sponge biscuit served with a little simple syrup, a splash of good plantation rum from Martinique and a generous tuft of whipped cream with two cults of candied lemon peel. Both desserts exhibited an haute-cuisine excellence, which made eating them at a wobbly table and chairs outside even more of a pleasure.

“That was really good, and isn’t it nice to leave the table feeling well-fed but not heavy,” said Bruno as we walked down the hill. He paused, as I knew he would, to look up at the windows of the friend who moved away so many years ago, and looked momentarily puzzled as he briefly wondered about why this once very special friendship had gone missing out of some kind of non-reciprocated benign neglect. “She’d have really liked Le Bistrot de la Galette, too,” he said, “And I look forward to coming back and trying the cold weather menu, because their cooking is so good and the service is so charming.” All of that, and it’s also very good value for the money.

102 ter rue Lepic, 18th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-46-06-19-65. Metro: Lamarck-Caulaincourt or Abbesses. Open Tuesday to Sunday for lunch and dinner. Closed Monday. Average 35 Euros. www.bistrotdelagalette.fr

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In Paris, the new Salsamenteria di Parma is a very reasonably priced trattoria specialising in the delicious foods of Parma and the famously gastronomic Italian province of Emilia-Romagna. It’s an exceptionally clever and surprisingly good “fast casual” restaurant, too. I say surprisingly good, because for such honest well-cooked food made from expensive pedigreed mostly Emiglia-Romagnan produce the rapport-qualite prix (value for money) is especially impressive.

Beyond the quality of the food, I find this restaurant fascinating from a commercial and marketing point of view, too, because it so astutely satisfies the big demand for good, healthy, promptly served food in a large city like Paris with some welcome originality. The previously existing lunchtime offer in this 9th arrondissement neighborhood with many offices in the heart of Paris not far from the big department stores and the Opera Garnier ran to a dulling culinary refrain of gussied up burger joints trying and failing to sling a ‘Brooklyn’ attitude;  overpriced salad joints hiding their mediocrity behind jaunty graphics and insistent claims of healthy eating; sad Chinese traiteurs where the food sits in big aluminium trays inside of neon-lit glass cases, something that’s always made me wonder if there might not be a single huge factory somewhere in the suburbs of Paris cranking out these dishes in industrial quantities; and a couple of cafes still serving steak-frites type menus to that diminishing number of Gauls who still like a little glass or two of red wine with lunch and perhaps a Gauloise with their post-prandial coffee.

In contrast, the shopfront premises of Salsamenteria di Parma are decorated with big wheels of Parmesan over the bar and whole Parma hams hanging from hooks on the walls, and there’s a mixture of opera and sixties Italian pop on the soundtrack. The wooden tables are covered with the mustard-colored paper mats you often find in Italy and set with scodella (white china bowls) from which to drink your wine–most of the wines served here are Lambruscos and other rustic and rather raspy Emilia-Romagnan ones. The menu is structured to make it as easy to have a quick bite as it is to enjoy a larger fuller meal, including tempting offers of those foods urbanites around the world seem to love the most these days–garnished flatbreads, garnished salads, and pasta, and also features many dishes that are perfect for sharing, especially the charcuterie and cheese assortments.

To be honest, I doubt I’d have been tempted by this place if it hadn’t been chosen by a visiting friend from Milan who already knew and loved these restaurants for the simple reason of having been so very often disappointed by the Italian food in Paris (the latest letdown was La Comedia in the 5th Arrondissement, where the waiter tried to bully me into buying a 68 Euro bottle of Amazon with the promise of a ‘special gift’ and became sullen, even borderline rude when I declined this laughable suggestion; otherwise, the food here is served in buffoon-ishly massive portions to compensate for its mediocrity and lack of taste).  “This is real Italian, Alec,” insisted Anna. “The company is based in Parma, which I’m sure you know is the headquarters town of the Barilla group, and I think they’ve learned the good lessons of Barilla and avoided the bad ones.”

She’d also chosen this restaurant as the venue for a quick lunch during a one day visit to Paris, and because we hadn’t seen each other in a longtime, I went. Aside from the wine, it was very good. In the Italian tradition of the coperto (coverage charge), we paid one Euro for bread and salsina, a dipping sauce of pureed pepper. We also ponied up another Euro per portion the artichoke and red-onion-and-balsamic sauces. They were all good, as were the Caprese di Parma, freshly sliced Parma ham with mozzarella on a bed of arugula with red peppers in oil and the Poker di Culatello, a tasting plate of culatello ham and other charcuterie.

Anna works in fashion and she talked a blue streak about how much trouble the Italian industry is having competing with illegal copy-cat producers in Asia and hand-work in places like Morocco or Sri Lanka that costs a fraction of what it does in Italy. Finally, she sighed and said: “Well, the one thing they can’t copy is our food. Or maybe they can, but it won’t taste as good as it does when it’s real Italian.” She also told me a strange but revealing little anecdote about how her uncle, an eyewear designer, had lost his job working for a huge well-known Italian eyewear manufacturer, been out of work for four months, and was then contacted by the Chinese company that has been causing his former employer so many problems to work for them as a designer from his home in Ancona. “Un mondo cosi strani!” said Anna; ‘Such a strange world.’

Next we shared some pumpkin-filled tortelli with butter and grated Parmesan and a Maialata, a tasting plate of roasted culatello ham and two types of sausage with nicely made potato puree.

Served within the space of 75 minutes, the meal concluded with some chocolate ‘salami’–a loaf of chocolate, meringue, and hazelnuts, and two good coffees.

Walking home past the local salad bars, Chinese traiteurs, etc. I found myself wondering why no clever young Frenchman or French woman hasn’t conceptualised some branch of French cooking to appeal to the ‘fast-casual’ segment of the market. There are such rich possibilities to decline for such a concept from the regional kitchens of France, and since most of the 33 million tourists who make Paris the world’s most visited city would like to eat French food most of the time while they’re in town, it would seem that the market for such a product is huge.

It also occurred to me that the Italian concept as it now exists would also be a really big hit in the U.S., U.K., and most other European countries and would also work really well in airports and train stations, etc., so it has huge potential. So until the day that a French version of Salsamenteria di Parma comes into existence, I’ll happily return to this cheap and cheerful little restaurant when I have a request for a quick but satisfying lunch instead of a more leisurely traditional restaurant meal.

Aside from the fact that I’ll never be a fan of Lambrusco, or any other Emiglia-Romagnan wine for that matter, and the music was just a little too loud, I enjoyed this place and tip my hat to the clever team who invented this mini-chain of restaurants, since in Italy where the first one opened in Parma, there are now two branches in Milan, one in Cannes and this latest one in Paris, with more coming soon.

40 rue Saint-Georges, 9th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-48-24-58-94. Metro: Trinite d’Estienne d’Orvre, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette or Le Peletier. Average 20 Euros.  www.salsamenteriadiparma.com  Also in Cannes: 86 rue Meynadier, Cannes, Tel. (33) 04-93-99-66-67.

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So I’m having a cautious flirtation with Faggio, the ur hip new pizzeria in ur hip Pigalle in Paris. I’m not sure if it will last for lots of different reasons, but for the time being I’ve found a pizzeria that makes me really happy. The thing is, though, when it comes to pizza in Paris, I’ve fallen in and out of love dozens of times. The reason is that I come from the best pizza belt in the United States, or the long urbanized band of the American East Coast that runs from Boston to Baltimore and which luckily received millions of Italian immigrants a century ago. This is why every major city in this zone-Providence, Rhode Island; New Haven, Connecticut; Trenton, New Jersey, etc.-has at least two or three seriously good pizzerias. And this is why I’ve never found a pizzeria in Paris that measures up to my American baseline, the late and hugely lamented Apizza Center in Fairfield, CT, which predictably bit the dust after an ill-fated attempt to make it modern. much less those I’ve so rapturously eaten in Naples.

Those were the pizzas we ate as a family on Sunday nights, and I loved going with my father to pick them up, since I was as fascinated by the inferno-like coal-burning pizza oven as I was by the teenagers on dates, greaser boys with tattoos and girls with teased hair and dark eyeliner. I loved sitting in the second front seat of my father’s Saab, too, with the three cardboard boxes piled on my knees, and the smell of hot cardboard mixing with those of melted mozzarella, yeasty dough, and the sharp tomato sauce that came out of big cans with Italian writing on them was my favorite perfume of desire before puberty. Ultimately, it was that tomato sauce that made these pizzas so good, since it was sharp, almost acidic, and a perfect foil for the mozzarella and occasional garnishes of crumbled Italian sausage with fennel seeds or mushrooms, real mushrooms, not canned, that had been hand sliced and sauteed.

In Paris, I liked the pizzas at Chez Bartolo in Saint-Germain-des-Pres until they became absurdly expensive and the service so aggressively unfriendly that this little place became infrequentable, and Da Mimmo, which I stopped going to for the same reasons. Il Brigante in Montmartre is still pretty good (the pizza-maker at Faggio used to work there), as is La Briciola, but I find the quality at Al Taglio isn’t what it was. And I won’t pay the eye-watering prices they charge at the dreadfully named Pizza Chic either.

Recently, though, Paris has been in the midst of a wonderful little pizza revolution, as a variety of excellent new pizza places open to rival the sad-sack addresses found all over the city–you know, the places that use frozen dough, pre-shredded mozzarella, cheap tomato sauce and pizza-makers without work permits. Several months ago, I liked the pizza at East Mamma but what I’ve really been wanting is a great pizza place that’s within a ten-minute walk of my front door in the 9th Arrondissement, or a perfect bolt-hole pizza place for a Sunday night.

I’d been hearing good things about Faggio in the neighborhood, so last night we ankled over there for dinner. Arriving, I had SoPi (South of Pigalle, as this almost comically trendy neighborhood has become known) on my mind, and so I was amused when we were lucky enough to find a table in the white-tiled back dining room with its Edison bulb fixtures, and Bruno guilessly remarked: “This place makes me think of New York.” And of course it did, because the room was full of men with Rutherford B. Hayes beards, including owner Fabien Lombardi, ex-bartender and co-founder of l’Entrée des Artistes, and young women with jeans with artfully ripped knees.

What augured better for dinner were the bags of excellent quality Italian Caputo flour stacked on the floor adjacent to the tiny kitchen with its tiled wood-burning pizza oven. Ignoring the three starters, we ordered a Regina topped with Prince de Paris ham, mozzarella and mushrooms for me, and a Montanara, with Parma ham and delicious smoked stracciatella for Bruno, and amused ourselves by watching the local fauna in the exposed brick-walled room during the long wait before the pizzas arrived.

When they finally did show up thirty-five minutes later, they were very good, but we’d drunk deep into our bottle of biodynamic white from the Veneto, which is exactly what happened the other night during dinner with friends at Dilia, a new Italian bistro in Menilmontant. To wit, hipster tables seem to assume an amiably blithe indifference to the apparently dispensable niceties of good service. At Faggio, it wasn’t that anyone was unfriendly, but rather that no one was going to acknowledge that you’d had a long wait before being fed. And of course the wine list was really top-heavy in terms of pricing, since the only way to make the rent if you’re running a pizzeria in Paris is to sell a good amount of pricey wine. So our bill for two pizzas and a bottle of wine was 58 Euros, and the very good white I chose was one of the least expensive.

After dinner, I wasn’t sure if I’d go back, but today I know that I would, since it’s lunchtime and I want nothing more than a pizza Montanara to magically appear on my door step. Next time round, though, I’d probably do take away, and I might also tell the owner that his probably knowing jeu de mot of the restaurant’s name isn’t very funny. In Italian, the official meaning of faggio, is beech, as in a beech tree, but it has another slang meaning as well. Per ‘The Urban Dictionary:’ “Faggio: Scooter from the GTA video game series. It is a derogatory, effeminate play on the name of the Italian scooter brand Piaggio, as scooters (sometimes referred to as vespas) are generally perceived to be only a slightly less emasculating mode of transportation than the segway, the pink tricycle, or an electric barbie car. Secondarily, It can be interpreted as a clear insult directed at the effeminate owners of such modes of transportation (see artfag). Examples: “This beige cream faggio certainly is a slow and gay mode of transportation,” or “That faggio owner certainly looks gay slathered in beige cream.”

72, rue de Rochechouart, 9th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-40-37-44-02. Metro: Anvers or Poissoniere. Open Monday and Thursday-Sunday for lunch and dinner. Closed Tuesday and Wednesday. Average 20 Euros (without wine) 

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Terroirs d’Avenir boutique

While we were enjoying a good, casual, off-the-cuff lunch at Frenchie to Go, chef Gregory Marchand’s breakfast-and-lunch eat-in or takeaway place next to his home table, Frenchie, I thought of the note a friend in New York who follows my Instagram feed sent me recently. “Don’t you ever just want to stay home and eat a big messy Reuben sandwich#8221; she asked, teasing me about the often beautiful and elaborate dishes that I share from the restaurants I go to of a given week in Paris as a food writer. Well, um, yes, in fact, I love a good Reuben sandwich. And sometimes I also like a good Saturday morning lie-in so much that we end up missing our two favorite Saturday morning markets–the organic one in Les Batignolles, which is officially known as the Marché Biologique des Batignolles and is located on the boulevard des Batignolles, and the lavish one on the Avenue du Président Wilson, which is held on Wednesday and Saturday mornings.

There are few things that make me happier than going to either of these markets, especially because I try to avoid going to restaurants on the weekends in favor of cooking at home, which both Bruno and I love. There are times, however, when Morpheus just pulls you back into bed, and when this happens, we’ll make a run to Terroir d’Avenir, a terrific pair of boutiques in the rue du Nil where you can get your hands on the same superb fruit, vegetables, herbs, cheese, fish, and meat this small select company supplies to many of the best young chefs in Paris. And so on a recent Saturday morning, we decided to make a run to this shop, because it’s tomato season, and I trusted they’d have good heirloom tomatoes (they did, too).

After we bought some of the best white peaches I’ve ever eaten, several kinds of tomatoes, herbs, yellow squash, eggplant, fennel, and enough other vegetables to stuff the drawers in both of our small fridges at home, we were hungry. So Bruno suggested we go next door to Frenchie to Go. It’s been open for a couple of years now, but never finding myself in this neighborhood in the middle of the day, I’d never been for lunch, just breakfast, and so this was the perfect occasion. Right from the start, I’ve loved the fact that this place serves non-stop, so that if you tumble out of the Louvre starved at 2.43pm, you can hoof it over here and get a bacon sandwich with egg and cheddar, the best lobster roll in Paris,  a hot dog (homemade, mind you, in a roll from star baker Gontran Cherrier), a pastrami sandwich, fish-and-chips, a Reuben or a pulled pork sandwich.

We went with the latter two, plus a large order of fries, and homemade ginger beer. Now the Reuben was a beauty, or just the kind of over-stuffed New York deli style sandwich I sometimes get misty eyed for. The pulled pork sandwich was a good savory munch, too, but would have been better with more pork and less pickled cabbage. Alas, my fries were cold and rather dried out, so I thought of returning them, but than decided to eat some of Bruno’s much fresher ones instead.

What’s great about this place is that it hits a near bull’s eye in terms of catering to a certain atavistic roster of Anglo-American comfort food dishes created by someone who profoundly understands how they’re built in terms of layering tastes and respecting texture that aren’t easy to find in Paris (For anyone who doesn’t know, Gregory Marchand worked for Jamie Oliver in London and then Danny Meyer in New York before he returned home to found his wonderful little empire–Frenchie, Frenchie Wine Bar, and Frenchie to Go, in a then quiet shabby street on the edges of the Sentier, Paris’s old garment district).

Frenchie also serves breakfast, and you can eat on stools at a couple of shared tables, or takeaway and look for a quiet corner. Given the fact that breakfast can be a boring and/or expensive letdown in Paris hotels, I often tell friends to head over here if they want a sturdy breakfast (my favorite is that bacon sandwich with egg and cheddar, and a bacon scone with maple syrup). And it’s also a good place to pull together a picnic before a train or a plane, especially with some fruit and cheese from Terroir d’Avenir.

Don’t miss the wonderful tromp l’oeil wallpaper in the WC either (it’s based on a photograph of a stamped-tin ceiling, like you might find in London or New York), bien sur.

9 rue du Nil, 2nd Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-40-26-23-43, Metro: Sentier or Réaumur Sébastopol. www.FrenchietoGo.com Average meal 14 Euros. Open Monday-Friday 8.30am-4.30am, Saturday-Sunday 9.30am-5.30pm. Closed for the summer holidays from August 10 to August 16.

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“Before, there were just a few really good Italian tables in Paris, but they were also really expensive, or the usual neighborhood Italian places, which were generally pretty mediocre,” says Tigrane Seydoux, co-owner with business partner Victor Lugger of the hugely successful new East Mamma restaurant just across the street from the Square Trousseau in the 11th Arrondissement. “So our idea was to open a ‘casual-dining’ sort of restaurant inspired by the trattorias of Italy that offered good food made with really great Italian produce, which we import ourselves, at reasonable prices,” says Seydoux, who adds that his love of Italian food came from growing up in Monaco, “where you probably eat Italian more often than you do French.”

@Renaud Cambuzat

“Everything chef Ciro Cristiano works with is imported directly from Italy, including our prosciutto, which comes from Bagatto in the San Daniele region, and the wood-burning pizza oven, which was built by Salvatore Acunto in Naples,” says Seydoux proudly. Not surprisingly, this handsome restaurant designed by London interior architect Martin Brudnizki, who’s Jamie Oliver’s preferred designer, has been packed ever since it opened a few weeks ago, with the no-reservations policy leading to a big hungry crowd waiting on the sidewalk outside.

Despite the excellent word-of-mouth on this table, I still couldn’t help but being reflexively skeptical when I came for dinner the other night with Bruno. Why Though hope may spring eternal, my passion for great Italian food has been so consistently disappointed during the twenty-five years I’ve lived in Paris that I make it a point to avoid Italian restaurants here, since what I can cook at home is always so much better. I dislike the fussy, stuffy overpriced Italian places in the 8th and 16th Arrondissements as a general rule–the only exception being Penatti al Baretto, where the food is excellent even if the service is, well, let’s just say over-groomed, and know better than wasting a meal in any of the dozens of neighborhood joints where they sprinkle industrially made pizza dough with grated Emmental–yes, Emmental–on top of a swirl of pre-seasoned tomato sauce that’s bought in huge cans at Metro, the restaurant wholesale supply store that has a lot to answer for.

@renaut cambuzat

If Metro is a big part of the problem with the Italian food in Paris–you can effectively buy almost any Italian dish or sauce ready-made in its aisles, one of the other big stumbling blocks has long been the erroneous but entrenched ideas about Italian food that many Parisians have. To wit, for most, it’s a red-sauce story with pasta and pizza as they main players. That said, it’s doubtless the most popular foreign kitchen in Paris, and though it remains flagrantly overpriced in France, good quality Italian produce is more available today than ever before; I mean, when I first in arrived in Paris, mozarella was an exotic cheese that was hard to find, to say nothing of the now omnipresent burrata.

At East Mamma, the names of the Italian producers that supply that restaurant form an alluring banner at the top of the kraft-paper menus that also serve as placemats, and it’s an impressive list, too, since they’ve not only gone to the trouble of finding organic mortadella, that pistachio-and-fat speckled Emiglia-Romagnan forcemeat meat that became unhappily known as ‘Bologna’ after it crossed the Atlantic and morphed into a cheap lunch-meat staple in the sandwiches of children’ bag lunches, but also bring in the excellent Ortigia line of handmade soaps from Siracusa in Sicily for the restrooms. Touting brand-name produce is, of course, all the rage in Paris right now–is there anyone who dines out regularly left in this city who hasn’t heard of star vegetable growers Annie Bertin and Joël Thiébault, for example#8211;but alas good produce doesn’t necessarily translate to good cooking.

Studying the menu over a spritz–apple-basil for me, and the classic Aperol for Bruno–we decided we’d try the bresaola that the friendly waiter touted–“It’s nothing like regular bresaola, because it’s made with pork” (Oh. Okay. Traditional bresaola is made from air drying beef and comes from the Valtellina region)–and a burrata to start, and then share some pasta and a pizza. The porcine ‘bresaola’ arrived as a plate of appealingly succulent, savory fat-free pieces of cured pork loin, and the burrata pleased by gushing sharply lactic cream when cut into and being remarkably fresh. Other possibilities for the create-your-own antipasti first course included the tempting mortadella, several grades of Italian ham, smoked mozzarella, fresh mozzarella, and Parmesan aged for twenty-four months. Aside from constituting a pleasant bald appeal to anyone’s gluttony, this first course also made it possible to build out for a group, and there were many large groups having dinner here the other night.

All pasta at East Mamma is made freshly daily, and the Bruno’s linguine with San Marzano tomatoes, stratcciatella cheese, a fine grating of lemon rind and several sadly taste-free basil leaves had the reassuring ivory color that comes only when good flour is used, in this casa di Benedetta flour from Altamura.

My big puffy pizza with an alluringly black-blistered crust was excellent, too, although I was a bit puzzled by the decidedly non-Italian scattering of raw button mushroom slices on the pie. The Italians usually prefer their pizzas plain, but if mushrooms are used, they’re generally sott’olio, or preserved in oil. But this ‘White Regina’ made with tomato sauce, mozzarella, Tuscan ham and mushrooms was a perfect expression of the excellent produce used to make it, and was amply large enough not only for one but two. The Trediberri Sauvignon from Le Langhe that I wanted from the excellent list of Italian wines here was out the other night, so we drank a very pleasant San Antonio Scaia Bianca from the Veneto (incorrectly labeled as being Tuscan on the wine list; thanks, Nathalie) instead.

I cringed when I saw a pail of Nutella being brought to a neighboring table–one of the desserts here is an all-you-can-eat smear-it-yourself Nutella pizza, an idea the provenance of which strikes me as decidedly more inspired by The Cheesecake Factory than anything in Italy, but Bruno’s lemon tiramisu was pleasant, with a lemony taste that fell between lemon hard candies and limoncello (too sweet for me, but nicely made and surprisingly light).

Ultimately, East Mamma makes a commendable and generally successful effort to offer some respectably authentic and well-sourced trans-Alpine cooking to the French capital, but I’d never mistake it for a trattoria. It’s much too shrewdly high-concept for that, which is what places it squarely in the camp of the generally welcome new breed of–well, sorry, I hate the term, too–“casual dining” restaurants being brought to Paris by a growing tribe of clever gastronomically alert entrepreneurs with very good taste. So I think almost any Parisian who loves Italian food would be glad if they opened a branch in their neighborhood, and it’s a place I’d go back to again for another simple, pleasant, fairly priced meal.

133 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, 11th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. 01-43-41-32-15. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Average 30 Euros.www.bigmammagroup.com

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Two of the most interesting things going on in the Paris restaurant scene this rentree are the turbo-speed rate with which the 10th arrondissement continues to go gourmand and the wonderful acceleration of the internationalization of the culinary talent pool in Paris. As I’ve mentioned before, in much the same way that Paris has long been the global beacon for talent in the fashion business, it’s now attracting ambitious and talented young chefs from other countries in such numbers that it’s no longer a surprise to learn the chef who just cooked your dinner in Paris is Mexican or Italian or American or, most likely of all, Japanese. The Japanese, you see, continue to revere French cooking with a seriousness and passion that’s long since dwindled in other countries, and this is why talented young Japanese chefs come to France in droves to do apprenticeships in the country’s restaurant kitchens and also why so many of them stay on to open their own restaurants. It make great sense, too, since the the culinary cultures of the two countries venerate best quality produce, admire technicity, and are profoundly fascinated by aesthetics of everything edible.

A perfect example of why France is so lucky to be on the receiving end of all this talent is young chef Katsuaki Okiyama, who worked at Robuchon, Taillevent and l’Agapé Bistrot before opening Abri, his very simple storefront restaurant in the 10th arrondissement not far from the Gare du Nord a few weeks ago. Meeting a friend for lunch, I walked by this place, since the plastic sign hanging overhead at this address says CITY CAFE, and when I first stepped inside, I wasn’t sure if I was in the right place either, since it only just barely presents itself as a restaurant. Instead, the decor is sort of Berlin proletariat coffee shop, which I like a lot, actually, with a few bare wood tables up front, along the wall and in back. Okiyama works in an open kitchen with a plancha and a grill, which occasionally fills the narrow space with a mist of finely aerated cooking oil which might be vexing were it not for the fact that the food he cooks is not only intriguing but deeply satisfying.

The only choice we had to make on the 22 Euro lunch menu was between fish and duck as our main course–we both went with the fish, a nice fleshy chunk of lieu jaune, or yellow pollack, and after I’d ordered exactly the same terrific wine, Quartz, that brilliant and very modish white from La Sologne, I’d had the night before at the reformated Vivant, now known as Vivant Table and also employing several Japanese chefs, we’d resumed our vageuly tongue-in-cheek conversation about the future of gastronomic journalism. My pal earnestly wondered aloud if there’s still an audience for serious food writing, or if all people really want are recipes and the interesting first-person fulminations of the food world’s better bloggers. Insofar as I’m concerned, I’d like to think there is, even if it’s also true that so many people seem puckishly pleased that blogging has so righteously pummeled the validity of expertise.

I was in the midst of telling my pal about the dinner I’d had at Vivant Table–it was good, but there were some imprecisions in the cooking, and the meal was expensive for what it was, when our first course arrived and stopped the conversation. Composed of a thin slice of beet, a succulent tomato, and shelled crabmeat in a gently meaty nutty miso vinaigrette, it was stunning for being so vivid, light and fresh. To be sure, the earnest Mrs. Dalloway becomes a Zen Master small-plate aesthetics here were similar to those deployed by almost all of Paris’s most ambitious young chefs these days, but that didn’t stop them from being pretty and sincere.

When our next course arrived, it suddenly it made perfect sense that half of the people at lunch that day were journalists, artists and food bloggers. Not only was this potato potage with coffee-cardamom foam delicious, it was as witty and artful as a netsuke. And part of a four-course 22 Euro lunch to boot! My head spun when I thought about what a great buy this place is, especially since we’d spent over 70 Euros a piece at Vivant Table the night before and even the new ratty little Thai restaurant on the rue Taitbout that I’d tried a day earlier had run 20 Euros with a lunch menu and a can of peach-flavored Nestea. And not only was Okiyama’s food exquisitely sourced and cooked, service from the Japanese staff was gracious and charming.

Next up, grilled yellow pollack with spinach, Chinese cabbage, and yellow squash in smoked-salt butter sauce with a dusting of Cayenne pepper–a subtle composition of delicate and potent flavors, soft and sinewy textures that was exceptionally satisfying. In fact, the only regret I had here was that the portion wasn’t larger, a meagerness that echoed something chef Yannick Alleno said to me last week and with which I completely agree: “Tasting menus are fine, but ultimately, we really need and want a substantial main course or we don’t feel fed.” My neighbor’s duckling with duxelles (fine mushroom hash), spinach, artichoke, and carrots in a velvety looking pan-juice sauce looked superb, too, and I immediately decided I’d be back here in a heartbeat for the 38.50 Euro six-course dinner tasting menu. To be sure, anyone whose idea of Paris is Saint-Germain-des-Pres might be discombobulated by this scrappy if perfectly safe 10th arrondissement neighborhood and some people would doubtless be put off by the ur-bohemian setting and under-powered ventilation of the open kitchen, but if these aren’t obstacles, you’ll likely love this place as much as I did.

Okiyama’s cooking was so excellent, in fact, that I was already a semi-ecstatic convert by the time dessert arrived. Instead of being just a sweet little P.S., however, it delivered an unexpected knock-out punch. We’re talking about the best millefeuille I just might ever have eaten–a magnificent rubble of delicately caramelized buttery brown pastry leaves garnished seconds earlier with vanilla-flecked creme patissiere and lazer fine slices of dried and fresh nectarine. This was easily the best happy ending I’ve enjoyed all year, in fact, and it underlined the 360 degree excellence of this miniature kitchen and its remarkably self-exigent high-performance staff. This inflection of charm, excellence and affordability won’t last long, so go now.

92 rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, 10th, Tel. 01-83-97-00-00. Metro: Gare du Nord, Poissonnière or Cadet. Closed Sunday. Four-course lunch menu 22 Euros, six-course dinner menu 38.50 Euros.

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I’m not sure exactly why, but while I was perched on a stool in front of a window overlooking the boulevard at the new Chipotle, I found myself thinking of poor old Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico and his wife, the Belgian born Princess Charlotte whose slippery grip on sanity later in life led her to be known as the ‘Mad Carlotta.’ Don’t worry if Max doesn’t ring a bell right away either, since the paper-punch of historical confetti that had an Austrian aristocrat and naval officer briefly installed (1864-67) as the emperor of Mexico with the benediction and patronage of Emperor Napoleon III of France isn’t well known these days. Maybe it struck a chord with me, however, as an historical footnote on a much earlier failed attempt at globalization?

In any event, the dog days of August and the fact that we’re momentarily gypsies since–surprise, surprise!–the renovation work being done in our flat is taking twice as long as planned, offered a perfect pretext for me to nip around the corner and lose my Chipotle virginity yesterday at lunchtime. To be sure, I’ve spotted branches of this hugely successful American ‘Mexican’ fast-food chain in various U.S. cities, but if I’m in New York or Boston or Philadelphia or, or, or … the last thing in the world I’d ever do is eat at a fast-food place, even one that’s copped a pretty good reputation. I mean can you imagine eating at an Olive Garden in Rome or a Red Lobster in Boston My curiosity had also been piqued and primed by the fact that such estimable Gallic guardians of good grub as Le Fooding and L’Express Styles have actually given this first French outpost of the U.S. chain good reviews. I mean, Le Fooding giving a thumbs up to an American fast-food chain is sort of like a priest admitting that he doesn’t believe in God or Julia Child confessing that Twinkies are her favorite pastry.

So I ducked around the corner from my current temporary digs late in the afternoon after the lunch rush, and was immediately surprised by the friendliness of Chipotle’s staff, who rather poignantly seemed to have realized the only interesting thing about their work is that it offers them a chance to practice their English, since only two of the ten people who went down the rails before me were confirmed Francophones. And these nice young kids speak English really well, too. Anway, with jet-lag firing up my always red-hot appetite for Mexican food, the first thing that kind of let me down was that there weren’t enough side dish possibilities. Okay, chips and guacamole, fine, but what if you wanted to be a total slob and get a side of rice and beans No can do. The beverage selection didn’t set my hair on fire either, since I think you have to have been born below the Mason-Dixon line to like Dr. Pepper and drinking nothing but water with a meal always strikes me as self-flagellantly monastic. Why not create some fabulous faux Mexican non-alcoholic drink with sparkling water and lime cordial Unlike most fast food chains, Chipotle doesn’t try hard enough to up-sell. No cactus-paddle confit tart for dessert, no nothing.

The site of those little molded red-plastic baskets that used to be all over the place in more up-market American fast food places like Howard Johnson’s or Friendlys gave me a happy twinge, though, and after a lot of hemming and hawing I decided on the daily special, which was their ‘lime-marinated’ barbecued chicken burrito. So my server slapped a big flappy burrito on the grill and attended to the serious fillings–I went with the two different offered types of beans, black and pinto cooked with bacon, rice and chicken, and then it was on to the sauce lady with her three degrees of hot sauce, grated cheese, tasteless sour cream, and maybe a few other things. Dosed with what hoped would be seriously hot chile sauce, this nice young woman wrapped up my big load, nestled it into a paper lined red basket, and away I went, my pockets lighter by 11.50 Euros.

A lot has been made about Chipotle’s commitment to well-sourced produce, so I bit into my meal papoose with a lot less reluctance than I’ve ever felt before unknown fast food before. Immediate problem: my entire Mexican-American food pod was lukewarm to cold. And then the flavors seemed out of balance, with several shaded tones of acidity floating on a nobly caliente scrim of chile sauce. Not bad, but not good either. But I kept going, because I was there, and I’d paid for it, and I was hungry.

Then something odd happened. I looked down at my basket and realized I’d been so distracted by the fun of the weirdo people watching provided by les Grands Boulevards that I’d ignored my food pod for a good five minutes, which in my book is the equivalent of being in the middle having sex with someone and suddenly saying, “You know what Let’s just watch TV instead.” Oh, I finished my burrito, and it was sufficiently better than any other American fast-food I’ve ever eaten to mean that Chipotle will score on my radar in airport terminals and places like that, but it’s not a place that’s going to be seeing me again anytime soon.

Walking home, I found myself thinking that the most interesting thing about lunch was that it showcased how good Americans are at inventing highly rationalized production systems. The problem is that they’re almost inevitably deployed towards mediocrity than quality. Now that I’m on a franchised food roll (sic) (sick?), the next time I go to the U.S., however, nothing’s going to keep me away from an Olive Garden or a Red Lobster. I just need to know.

20 boulevard Montmartre, 9th, No public phone, Metro: Richelieu – Drouot, Le Peletier or

Grands Boulevards. Open daily. Average 12 Euros.

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One of the oddest features of Paris’s cityscape has long been the corridor of tawdry sex shows and shops that line the boulevards de Clichy and Rochechouart between the 18th and 9th arrondissements. Though this neighborhood originally thrived around the turn of the 19th century as a venue for cabarets, dance halls and theaters, it skidded into tour-bus-passenger porn during the 1950s and 60s, a decidedly unlovely commercial legacy of Paris’s now long-defunct reputation as the friskiest city in Europe.

Many of the buildings lining this corridor are actually quite beautiful, though, so I’ve long wondered when the migration of Eros to the internet would doom these sorry businesses. Now, with the recent renovation of the Place de Chichy having been accomplished and the renewal of the beautiful Egyptian style art-deco movie house Le Luxour at Barbes-Rochechouart well under way, it looks as though this once bleak turf is finally being rebooted for a more socially salubrious future in the 21st century.

New cafes and restaurants are also opening in the area, notably the delightful Le Petit Trianon, which occupies the ground floor of a magnificently restored theater of the same name. This ambitious project is the work of restauranter Julien Labrousse, who also relaunched the historic Hotel du Nord in the 10th arrondissement and Abel Nahmias, a cinema producer who is the son of restaurant critic Albert Nahmias and chef Olympe Versini of the excellent Casa Olympe.