Chefs Pierre Toitou and Cyril Pham

The new Drum Cafe at the LUMA Foundation in Arles is an excellent example of how good a museum restaurant can actually be when someone cares about serving good food instead of the usual bland industrial food-service catering too often found at museums. The food at the Drum Cafe is so delectable that it’s very much coming here for a meal even if you’re not planning to the visit this new contemporary arts complex, which was recently created from a decommissioned rail yard and train-carriage maintenance workshops.

My curiosity about this place was first aroused very early in the morning a few weeks ago on a train from Nimes to the airport in Marseilles when I looked up from my book just long enough to catch a sudden thrilling glimpse of the new Frank Gehry designed metal-clad tower that has become the emblem of the LUMA Foundation. It came and went so unexpectedly that my reaction was all instinct–backdropped by the morning sky, the tower was intriguingly strange and oddly beautiful.

I’ve been reading about LUMA ever since its creation was announced  by Maja Hoffmann, the philanthropist heiress to the Hoffmann Laroche pharmaceutical fortune, but hadn’t yet found the time to go during a year made so busy by the publication of my new book MY PLACE AT THE TABLE: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris (Mariner Books). Then I learned that Pierre Toitou, whose cooking I’d loved when he was at Vivant and Deviant in Paris, had been cast with Cyril Pham as the first chefs for the museum’s new restaurant, the Drum Cafe.

So on a beautiful Indian summer Saturday in Provence, Bruno and I headed south for lunch and a visit to the museum.

The restaurant is located on the ground floor (rez-de-chaussée) of the Frank Gehry tower on the grounds of the LUMA Foundation. Coming through the door, there’s a bar and a few tables in a dark foyer, while the main dining room has a single large horse-shoe shaped table at the bottom of an atrium lined with book shelves and decorated by polychrome pipes overhead that reminded me of the Centre Pompidou; all of these years later, this architectural feint is still fresh and fun, too.

Seated, we immediately ordered two glasses of a delicious organic white wine made in the Camargue from Viognier grapes and a plate of panisses with cured anchovies and fried sage leaves to nibble on while we studied the menu. Ever since I first ate a panisse (a chickpea flour bar) in Nice as a backpacking student a very longtime ago, I’ve never been able to get enough of them, and the ones served here were very good.

The menu was fascinating, too, since Toitou is such a gastronomic vagabond. As I over-heard him explaining to a neighboring quartet, “My father (Jean Toitou, founder of the Paris fashion label A.P.C.) is a Tunisian Jew and my mother is Russian and Norman. Growing up we ate a lot of Japanese food at home, because my parents love it and traveled to Japan often, but we never had French dishes like boeuf bourguignon, because no one knew how to cook them.” Toitou has cooked everywhere from the Hotel Plaza Athenee (Alain Ducasse) in Paris to London (Sketch by Pierre Gagnaire) to Uruguay. He’s also previously done a Pop-up in Arles with Arrmand Arnal of La Chassagnette and is an avid traveler.

All of this comes through in a brief but intriguing menu of mostly Mediterranean dishes that are brilliantly jolted by techniques and ingredients from other cultures. These small-plate dishes that are meant to be shared are sort of exactly what many people want to eat right now as we tentatively emerge from the COVID pandemic. To wit, this food is fresh, seasonal, health, straight forward and booming with umami, or just the cure for people who’ve become bored by the limits of their own skills in the kitchen after cooking non-stop for months.

Finally, we settled on an oxtail terrine (presse de boeuf) with black olive mayonnaise and a salad of fresh herbs and mushrooms in Satay sauce with chili oil and lime leaves. If the rich and brilliantly succulent terrine was profoundly French in the best traditions of rock of ages bistro cooking, the mushrooms registered like some sort of ecstatically good street-food dish you might come across in Bali. One way or another, both plates were beautifully made, generously served and deeply satisfying.

It was pretty obvious that word-of-mouth was working, too, since many of the other people having lunch around us were curious and gastronomically adventurous locals, or the sort of people who support inventive and creative chefs in smaller towns and rural settings all over France.

As depicted above, our main courses might look a bit ferocious but both dishes were outstanding. Homemade cuttlefish ink cavatelli with a cuttlefish ragu was brightened by a pepperoncini fired red blaze of melted ‘Nduja, the soft sausage from Calabria that’s one of my favorite kitchen helpers. (Why When I don’t have time to cook a sauce as rich and ruddy as the succulent cuttlefish ragout, ‘Ndjua adds a lot of flavor to pasta just tossed with olive oil, capers and a sprinkling of smoked salt.) Frankly, I also liked the way that this dish cocked a snook at the usual conventions of food styling in the age of Instagram, too. What Toitou seemed to be reminding us is that taste should always trump fiddly prettiness and that food should be allowed to look like, well, food.

The plating of the grilled marinated octopus tentacle posed on top of a beautifully made potato cake also seemed intended to titillate with a first impression of gruesomeness. One way or another, it was excellent, since the octopus has been marinated to give its meat a creamy tenderness and the char added wonderful flavor to the dish, as did an Indian condiment, raita, which is yogurt with chopped cucumber, pepper and herbs. The potato cake was a highly engineered version of pomme Anna, minus the large amount of butter usually found in this dish. Instead, the potatoes had been finely sliced, neatly formed into a loaf and baked, to create a garnish I could happily eat everyday.

Since we were planning to visit the galleries in the LUMA tower after lunch, we decided to share a dessert, a slice of tarta de Santiago. It presented as a sort of delicious spiced cake made with ground almonds and was garnished with prunes in spiced syrup.

Curious about its origins, I poked around we got home and discovered that it’s a recipe from Galicia in Spain that dates back to the Middle Ages. Translated into English, its name means ‘the cake of Saint James,’ a reference to the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route that passes through Galicia to culminate at the city of Santiago de Compostella. The top of the cake is often decorated with powdered sugar and an imprint of the Cross of Saint James, but the version served at the Drum Cafe was naked, ecumenical and delicious. Interestingly, the European. Union granted the Tarta de Santiago a PGI (Protected Geographical Indication) in 2010; this means that any qualifying tarta must be made in Galicia and contain at least 33% almonds.

Pierre Toitou is in residence at the Drum Cafe until January 2022, when a new chef(s) will arrive, because the idea of the Drum Cafe is to host a regularly changing roster of different chefs in its kitchen, an increasingly popular restaurant concept everywhere.

N.B. The Drum Cafe is open only for breakfast and lunch.

Drum Cafe, LUMA Arles, Parc des Ateliers, 45 Chemin des Minimes – 33 Avenue Victor Hugo, Arles.Tel. (33) 04 65 88 10 00, Average 45 Euros. Open Wednesday to Monday 10am – 6pm, Closed Tuesday. Lunch menu served from noon to 3pm. Reservations strongly suggested via website: https://www.luma.org/en/arles/visit-us/eating-and-drinking-on-the-parc-des-ateliers/drum-cafe

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As the months roll by during the second national lockdown of France’s restaurants, I often find myself thinking of chef Mory Sacko and his intriguing restaurant MoSuke. The reason why is that I desperately hope this exceptionally talented young chef’s intriguing restaurant will survive the financial vicissitudes of the greatest crisis to face French gastronomy since World War II, the successive closures imposed by the French government as a way of tamping down the Covid pandemic in France.

This almost all-white dining room with bamboo laminate topped tables, a few bold splashes of color and accessories of colorful African fabric opened in Montparnasse last September, and Sacko was winning rave reviews for his delicate, elegant, and very personal cooking, a fascinating and unique cuisine that reflects his French nationality, the African origins of his immigrant parents and his deep affinity for Japan and Japanese cooking, when he suddenly had to close MoSuke.

“It was very very hard,” he says. “For me, but also for my team, and it’s harder still that we still don’t know when we’ll be able to reopen again,” he told me by phone recently.

To be sure, the very tall (six feet, five inches), lithe and almost preternaturally gracious and poised 28 year old chef, who grew up in the eastern suburbs of Paris with  his eight siblings eating West African dishes like chicken yassa (with lemon and onions), thieboudienne (fried stuffed fish in a tomato-and-vegetable sauce served with rice), and mafé (beef stew in peanut sauce), has hardly been idle in the meantime. Aside from tending to his nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram, he also won a Michelin star in the 2021 guide to France and is the host of a delightful and popular new television show on France 3, Cuisine Ouverte (Open Kitchen) {N.B. This show is in French and you’ll have to create a free account on the France 3 website to watch Sacko live), which debuted on February 28.

The guiding idea of the wryly but accurately named television show is for Sacko to explore the products of the diverse terroirs (specific geographical regions where specific foods are produced according to specific government regulations) of France. The first show was set in Megeve, the tony Alpine resort in the Savoy, and Sacko was a striking screen presence against a backdrop of snowbound mountains. During this show, he met a producer of reblochon, a typically Savoyard cow’s milk cheese, and then a local chef, Emmanuel Renaut, who has three Michelin stars at a the outstanding Les Flocons de Sel. Both chefs then used the cheese to prepare dishes that reflect their style, with Renaut making the hugely lucky Sacko the most sumptuous looking grilled cheese sandwich I’ve ever seen, aka une croûte de montagne. Think sautéed onions, two types of cheese, including Reblochon, and white wine on country bread.

Manioc lacquered with soy sauce, spinach, ginger, coconut

Sacko’s retort was an intricate dish that elegantly expressed the trinity of his gastronomic identity as a Frenchman of African origins who is besotted with Japan. After smoking the reblochon in hay, he liquefied it with sautéed potatoes and onions, added a dab of wasabi, and  siphoned into deep-fried spheres of toasted bread crumbs, which were then perched on sunny yellow pools of beaten egg yolk seasoned with Japanese plum vinegar. Renaut found the dish surprising, but appealing, observing “I was afraid the wasabi would overwhelm the cheese, but it wakes it up.”

This same leitmotif of lyrical but well-reasoned gastronomic invention and iconoclasm was what I found so thrilling when I had dinner at MoSuke with a gastronomically incisive friend last September.

Both of us loved the roasted lobster with facto-fermented peppers, miso and tomato, a sauve and very pretty dish where the miso’s umami teased the sweetness of the lobster and backdropped the gently soured peppers perfectly. This dish was, in fact, a beautiful cameo of where contemporary French cooking is right now–unfailingly elegant in its aesthetics and flawless in terms of its technical skills, but teasingly racy with unexpected flavours and textures and a sort of complicit one-night-stand sexiness.

If I found Sacko’s version of chicken Yassa–chicken with lemon and onions, a signature dish of West Africa, a bit too refined for my tastes, I loved my friend’s sole cooked in a banana leaf with shichimi tōgarashi (a Japanese mix of seven spices) succulent and delicious, as was its accompanying garnish of attiéké, a dish of fermented cassavas pulp popular in the Ivory Coast, garnished with lovage.

And finally, a truly charming dish of marinated pineapple with bissap (hibiscus) sorbet and a candied shiso leaf. This was food unlike anything I’d ever eaten in Paris before, and so I was very curious to chat with the chef at the end of our meal.

When I asked him about his culinary background, he said, “My Mom’s Malian, but she’s also lived in the Ivory Coast and Senegal, so she knows a lot about West African cooking. She’s a great cook, too” he added proudly. After attending hotel school at fifteen, it was while working in the kitchen of chef Hans Zahner at the Royal Monceau hotel in Paris that he first became interested in cooking.

“It was all new for me, because I didn’t have a French grandmother who made boeuf bourguignon every Sunday,” he said with a grin. “We ate African at home and when I went out with friends, it was for fast food. So I learned French cooking through my work, and I have an outsider’s relationship with it. This let’s me be a little irreverent with tradition at the same time that I really respect it,” he added.

When Sacko became sous-chef to Thierry Marx, an ardent Japanophile, at the Michelin two-star restaurant Sur Mesure at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Paris, he discovered the produce and cooking techniques of the Land of the Rising Sun.
“I fell in love with the aesthetics of Japanese cooking, its precision and perfectionism, its cult of the best produce, and its flavors—African and Japanese cooking both prize umami,” Sacko told me. MoSuke, the name of his new restaurant, reflects this passion, too, since it’s an amalgam of his own first name with that of Yasuke, the first and only African samurai, an emancipated Mozambican slave who lived in 16th century Kyoto.

“There’s a big gastronomic romance between France and Japan, because the two countries recognize themselves in each other. I’m sort of the joker in this story, because I approach both of these kitchens as an outsider, and with my knowledge of African cooking and ingredients, I can shake things up and frame their flavours differently,” says Sacko.

Suffice it to say that I am very much looking forward to dining at MoSuke again and that it should be on your go-to list as well for your next trip to Paris, which will hopefully be very very soon.

11 rue Raymond Losserand, 14th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01 43 20 21 39, Metro: Montparnasse-Vaugirard or Gaite. Open Wednesday-Sunday for lunch and dinner. Closed Monday and Tuesday. Average 60 Euros. www.mosuke-restaurant.com

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The Loire as seen from the dining room at Assa in Blois.

On the overcast autumn day I went to lunch at Assa, I became so mesmerised by the mirrored view of the low gray sky on the skeining waters of the Loire river that my curiosity about the meal to come had sort of gently drifted downstream by the time the first complimentary hors d’oeuvres came to the table. I was here at this Michelin one-star table because I was hungry and hoped, of course, to eat well, but the spare serene Ryokan-like atmosphere and decor of the dining room had me pleasantly day-dreaming and enjoying the calm and new luxury of being in a quiet attractive place that felt safe during these tumultuous times.

This year, for obvious reasons, I’ve been to many fewer restaurants than I’ve frequented in many years. After the lockdown ended in Paris, we migrated south to our house in a little village outside of the beautiful town of Uzes in Le Gard, and though they’re some wonderful restaurants there, we didn’t go out that often. Instead, we cooked. And cooked. And cooked. Since after the year-long renovation of our house, a trio of linked together 15th century stone houses in the heart of the village, we received a voluminous rotation of visitors, including Bruno’s sister who lives in Florence and her two sons, one of whom lives in Rome as a film student and the other who’d repatriated to Italy from Colombia on a humanitarian flight organised by the Italian government, his mother from the north of France, his sister from Paris with her partner, and friends from Paris, Switzerland and the nearby Luberon.

It was lovely to share our new nest with all of them, but it also meant an enormous amount of, well, cooking. So by the time I ended up on my own at the table at Assa, I was rather glad of my solitude and the fact that someone other than me would be wielding the pots and pans in the kitchen. In these tumultuous and trepidatious times, being in a restaurant also felt like a very sincere luxury, too, since I love the ritual of sharing a meal with strangers and discovering a new chef. Or in the case of Assa, two chefs, Anthony Maubert and his Japanese wife Fumiko, who run this old riverside auberge they’ve so artfully reinvented for a new century.

When the complimentary hors d’oeuvre that began  the four-course lunch menu I’d ordered arrived, it was so brilliant my attention was promptly summoned back to the table and intensely focused on the beautiful and surprising dish presented on a round slice of tree trunk. Two different types of Loire River freshwater fish were presented, one in a spoon as a little dumpling topped with a coriander leaf and the other in a bath of white miso with pickled turnips and puffed rice. The contrast between the garnishes and the firm gently flavoured white fish was fascinating, because it constituted sort of a compass to follow during the meal to come. Using seasonal Loire Valley produce as its anchor, the Mauberts’ cooking was a vivid set of dishes with elegant but occasionally playful melodies equally inspired by France and Japan. It was also consistently beautiful to behold and plated with a keen aesthetic that heightened the pleasure of the palate.

The first course of my meal was the most profoundly satisfying dish I’ve eaten so far this year. A seared slice of foie gras sat on a gelee of dashi and was topped with grilled shiitake mushrooms and raw button mushrooms, with a sprinkling of matcha adding color and a pleasant whispering astringency to this umami-rich dish, a perfect expression of autumn in the French countryside.

The very impressive resumes of the Maubert really showed through in a main course of whiting with roasted celeriac, roasted celeriac-and-buckwheat cream, tender cabbage leaves, citrus caviar, tempura celery leaves and broccolini, goji berries, toasted buckwheat and coins of daikon, too. Anthony Maubert previously worked at Lasserre, Le Manoir du Lys, La Vague d’or in Saint Tropez, Marc Veyrat and Michel Bras. Fumiko Maubert trained as a dietician in her native Japan and then followed her love of gastronomy to France, where she has worked at Lasserre, the Hotel de Crillon and Michel Bras.

If I recognised the poignant reverence Bras has for the vegetal world in the Mauberts’ cooking and enjoyed their visual exuberance, which recalls the baroque style of chef Arnaud Donckele at La Vague d’Or, their style is completely their own. They clearly love vegetables and herbs, too, but as vividly flavoured as the composition of ingredients surrounding the perfectly cooked whiting was, it was also a very legibly healthy dish, where a gustatory coherence was created by the contrasts of the natural flavors and textures of the ingredients in the dish instead of a butter-rich sauce. Fumiko Maubert has a deep interest in making contemporary French gastronomy as healthy as possible while still delivering gastronomic originality and pleasure at the table.

The cheese course continued the meal’s themes of discovery, beauty and originality guided by a rudder of good health. Shavings of aged Loire Valley goat cheese topped some freshly made tofu on tamarin to offer a study in the lactic differences and similarities between animal and vegetable milk. This dish came with a side garnish of crispy puffed rice grains and a bowl of warm fresh goat milk, and it was satisfying and rather fascinating in an alluringly monastic way. A dessert of matcha, azuki bean paste and lemon was so appealing that I promptly ate it without taking a photograph.

Loire Valley wines, including a superb Vouvray, one of my favorive wines, were served by the glass, and the male dining room staff dressed with the straw boaters the French call canotiers and sky-blue cotton trousers were prompt, efficient and warm. During a very challenging year, this was the best meal meal I’ve had so far and one that was deeply nourishing in a variety of ways.

Assa is very much of a destination restaurant, so if you’re looking for a revivifying break in the country in France this autumn, book here and stay at the charming new Les Sources de Cheverny hotel, which is only about a twenty minute drive from the restaurant in the forest.

189 quai Ulysse Besnard, Blois, Tel. (33) 02-54-78-09-01. Open Wednesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner, Sunday lunch only. Closed on Monday and Tuesday. Prix-fixe menus, 62 Euros, 74 Euros, 88 euros, 92 Euros, 114 Euros, Average a la carte 121 Euros.   www.assarestaurant.com 

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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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With the opening of Pavyllon, chef Yannick Alleno has created a convivial new casual restaurant that aims to make his cooking available to a broader public than the one that can afford his Michelin three-star table upstairs at the lovely Pavillon Ledoyen in the gardens of the Champs Elysees. “Pavyllon is sort of my laboratory,” says Alleno, who seems to inherently understand that French haute cuisine is searching for relevance in a new century. Pavyllon occupies a sunny pretty room overlooking the gardens at the same address.

Why Haute cuisine dining, the traditional pinnacle of the French food chain, has not only become exorbitantly expensive but seems sidelined in a city where they’re so many brilliant young chefs serving spectacularly good and much more affordable food in relaxed and charming restaurants like Septime or the recently opened Maison pat Sota Atsumi.

To wit, I don’t go to Paris haute cuisine restaurants very often anymore, but having been to six or seven of them recently as part of a magazine assignment, I couldn’t help but thinking that I could have eaten just as well–if not better, at a variety of restaurants that would have cost a quarter of what any of these exalted meals did. There was a time when an haute cuisine meal was sort of like going up in a hot-air balloon, or a rare, extravagant and thrilling expedition that offered an enlightening Olympian view of the dining landscape below by dint of serving meals that were so much more head spinningly special, refined, sensual and original than anything you’d probably eaten anywhere else for a very longtime. With a few exceptions, I don’t find that to be true anymore, and I also think that the tight formal formatting of the haute cuisine meal is something that rarely delivers much joy anymore.

These three-star tables are under a huge amount of financial pressure not only because of their exorbitant labor costs, but also because the clientele that can afford Paris haute cuisine dining these days has changed so much. The old-school mix of French clients and foreigners from the U.S., the U.K. and other European countries has diminished at the same time that more and more haute cuisine diners are Asian, Russian, Middle Eastern and hailing from other places with booming economies and very different dining habits and palates. And many customers are also health conscious and environmentally aware in ways that are challenging a concept of luxury dining defined by such foods as foie gras, caviar, sea bass, and other haute cuisine standards.

Clearly, Alleno had all of this in mind when he opened Pavyllon, which serves dishes like beets with chocolate nibs, black olive pistou and ricotta for 21 Euros. He also decided on a counter-service only format, which isn’t new–Joel Robuchon got there first with his L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon, originally in Paris, and now in many other cities, including New York. Perched on a powder-blue velvet-upholstered stool at Pavyllon, you watch your meal being made in the open kitchen on the other side of a wide stone counter, and service is amiable and complicit, a sharp contrast to the drilled, cool and relentlessly calibrated service at many haute cuisine restaurants. “The idea of this place is for people to have a good time,” says Alleno, a remark that sort of underlines how this goal has become so muddled elsewhere.

This restiveness about the future of French haute cuisine is not new–the estimable food critic Francois Simon often complained that haute-cuisine meals were too long when he wrote for Le Figaro and Le Monde, and other chefs, like Pascal Barbot, have wondered about its rote rituals, but it’s become more general. Barbot, for example, serves fresh fruit at the end of a meal at his three-star restaurant L’Astrance, because as he once told me, all of the mignardises and chocolates are just too much. “And does anyone really want a pre-dessert#8221; he once asked me, referring to the appetiser dessert that proceeds the main one at many haute cuisine tables. “It’s all just too much,” he said.

As is true of any laboratory, some experiments are better than others. At a recent meal at Pavyllon, I loved the tart spinach soup with a tiny knob of scamorza and burned nutmeg and the oyster beignet with smoked pike perch eggs, but found the pike perch mousse lined with brioche crusts and celeriac extract a bit timid.

I’ve known Yannick Alleno’s cooking ever since he cooked at the Hotel Scribe many years ago and have always admired his talent, which continues to evolve in interesting ways. So it was interesting to see him riffing on his fascination with Asian cooking via a small plates format at Pavyllon. Some dishes are angelic to the point of being a little plain, like turbot with vegetable ‘pearls’ and salicorne with an herbal jus, while others are succulent and deeply satisfying, including a luscious stroganoff of Wagyu beef under a thatch of celeriac matchsticks and potato straws. The perfect pour with the stroganoff is a glass of the superb Saint Joseph that Alleno is now making with Michel Chapoutier.

Pithiviers of duck and foie gras by chef Sota Atsumi at Maison par Sota Atsumi

On another visit–and there will be one, I’d love to try the boudin noir (black pudding) with suckling pig chops and the Pithiviers of marinated hare with a jus royal, because these pastry tourtes, which are happily very fashionable in Paris this Fall, can be ecstatically good; the best one I’ve had recently was the magnificent duck, foie gras and spinach filled tourte served with quince puree at Maison par Sota Atsumi. I’d also be curious to sample Alleno’s pumpkin-stuffed tortellini and his gluten-free tagliatelle with corn extraction, caviar and crispy chicken skin.

Desserts are excellent, too, including caramel ice cream with Amarena cherries and candied hazelnuts. The wine list is outstanding, too, and they pour a great selection of wines by the glass. Service is eager and charming, too. Usefully, this restaurant is open daily for lunch and dinner, too, and you can book online, which makes it a great option for solo dining. As a laboratory for the future of French haute cuisine, Pavyllon is an interesting and appealing restaurant with some imaginative and technically impressive cooking.

Pavyllon, Carré des Champs-Elysées, avenue Dutuit Metro: Champs-Elysées-Clemenceau, Tel. (33) 01-53-05-10-10, www.yannick-alleno.com/fr/restaurants-reservation/pavyllon Open daily for lunch and dinner. Lunch menu 68 Euros, Prix-fixe menus 145 Euros, 235 Euros, Average a la carte 150 Euros.

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Mieux, which means ‘better’ in English, is a wonderful name for a restaurant, because it declares gastronomic ambition but with a certain appealing humility. This charmingly decorated and cleverly designed bistro just five minutes from my front door in the rue Saint Lazare delivers better than just better, though, since the contemporary French bistro cooking is delicious, and the service is charming. Restaurant Mieux also has a very good wine list.

The bistro, which opened last May, is the project Baptiste Bayle, Giulian Maiuri and Thomas Bonnel, three nice guys who did all of the work of renovating this space themselves, including pouring a cement bar, buffing the Fifties tiles they discovered when they pulled up the floorboards, combing flea-markets for the great-looking bric-a-brac and chairs from a French school that gives this place its homey atmosphere and renovating a secondhand Spaziale coffee machine, which is now used to make great java with Brûlerie de Belleville beans. Guilian, who formerly worked at the Maison Breguet and the Trianon Palace in Versailles, heads up the kitchen.

I first noticed Restaurant Mieux on the way home from doing some errands in the rue des Martyrs, and immediately liking its look and menu, I went in and booked for dinner for me and Bruno that same night. And I marveled at how gastronomic my own neighborhood has become, and in just the terms I like best—intelligently creative contemporary French bistro cooking that highlights carefully sourced seasonal produce and spins on an axis of sincerity and generosity.

Little did I know that the 9th Arrondissement would emerge as one of the best restaurant neighborhoods in Paris when we crossed the Seine from the tiny apartment where we once lived on the rue du Bac and bought our first, and then second, apartments in this arrondissement. But the 9th has turned into a sweet-spot location for restauranteurs, because the offices in this central Paris district assure a busy lunch crowd and then the food-loving locals and tourists from the growing numbers of hotels in this charming part of the city take over in the evening.

Arriving, the welcome was warm and the service immediately warm and alert but relaxed, which explained why the dining room was filled with such a cross-section of residents of the district once known as La Nouvelle Athenes, because so much of its architecture was originally inspired by ancient Greece when this part of the city was first developed from 1819 onwards. During the 19th century, this quartier was popular with artists, writers, musicians and actors, including George Sand, Eugène Delacroix, Alexandre Dumas, Frederic Chopin, Victor Hugo, Théodore Géricault, Pissarro, Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin. It was also known for being a neighborhood of kept women.

This arty liberal tradition lives on in the 9th, which is still home to many writers, photographers, artists, musicians and other creatives, and it’s that increasingly endangered but wonderful thing—a peaceful and unselfconscious historic neighborhood in the heart of a great western city. Gentrification is making it more affluent, but the social tone happily remains unchanged.

The menu here runs to three starters, three main courses and three desserts, sometimes more, which change regularly to reflect the kitchen’s desire to cook spontaneously. “The produce writes the menu here,” our waiter told us when he came to take our order.

On the first night of the year when there was an early autumnal chill in the air and after a summer of salads, I started with the homemade terrine of chicken livers and pork, with the livers adding an earthy unctuousness and the pork some carnal resonance and bite, which came with pickled onions and carrots. Bruno’s bonheur was the veal tartare made with marscapone and seasoned with crushed roasted cashews—an excellent idea, chervil and chives. And because we’d both been curious about the other starter that night, the waiter thoughtfully brought us a little tasting plate of the tomatoes with watermelon, cucumbers, feta, mint and Kalamata olives, a wonderfully refreshing dish that tasted like a happy souvenir of a summer vacation in the Greek Islands.

Our main courses were outstanding, too. Bruno’s free-range pork chop from the Auvergne was succulent and garnished with coarse ground polenta and roasted carrots from the Ile de France and a wonderful saute of wild mushrooms. I was tempted by the risotto with sage butter, zucchini and smoked ricotta, but  I’ve lived in Paris for too long to ever to order this dish in a restaurant I don’t know, because the rice is unfailingly overcooked. So I ordered with maigre (croaker fish) with potatoes, cabbage and clams in seaweed butter, and it was so skillfully cooked that I wouldn’t hesitate to trust the kitchen with rice the next time I come here. Portions were so generous that all we could manage at the end of the meal was a shared portion of stewed juicy ruby-red peche de vigne—the world’s best peaches, with lemon-verbena ice cream and hazelnut crumble. An excellent selection of cheeses was also available.

Restaurant Mieux is a place where you can easily become a regular, and it’s a table I’d happily go on my own, since they have a few spots at the bar for solo diners who’d rather sit on a stool than at a table. It also has several large tables that accommodate groups of six, eight or twelve, which makes it a great choice for an easygoing night out over a very good meal with a group of friends. It’s solidly good but unpretentious restaurants like Mieux which assure Paris’s enduringly superlative gastronomic credentials.

21 rue de Saint-Lazare, Paris, 9th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01- 71-32-46-73.
Métro: Trinite or Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. Open Monday noon-6pm, Tuesday-Friday noon to 1am, Saturday 6pm-1am. Sunday noon-6pm. Lunch menus 21€ and 26€, average a la carte for dinner 40€. www.mieux-restaurant.com

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Victor and Charly, founders of the Brasserie Bellanger

The recent opening of Brasserie Bellanger is another sign of one of the best dining trends in Paris today–the renaissance of city’s affordable dining scene. This category of restaurants had long been abandoned by most Parisians to backpacking students as the food they served slouched towards mediocrity. Now, though, an excellent variety of new addresses are serving up some very good simple Gallic grub at easygoing prices in lively, friendly restaurants, many of which are also usefully open daily. Brasserie Bellanger, which is an easy walk from both the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est in the 10th Arrondissement, is a very good example.

Brasserie Bellanger opened after the piece on affordable dining in Paris I recently wrote for the New York Times, which you can read here, was published, but it certainly belongs in the company of the tables I reviewed in that article. It has an interesting back story, too. Victor and Charly, two friends who previously worked as chefs in the restaurants of Eric Frechon and Jean-Louis Nomicos, decided they wanted to revive the Paris brasserie by returning it to its original mission–good food at good prices served expeditiously in a comfortable lively setting.

So they carefully scouted a location and then spent a lot of time finding the producers who would supply their restaurant, including a farmer in the Aveyron who sends whole sides of Charolais beef to them in Paris and a fisherman in Ouistreham who delivers direct three times a week. Their poultry comes from the Bresse region, most of their vegetables are grown in the Ile de France, and their butter is made by the Laiterie de Kerguillet in Plouay in Brittany.

They were similarly exigent about the drinks served at their restaurant. The coffee they serve is roasted by Joris Pfaff, a prize-winning roaster, and their 100% malt unfiltered beer is made by the Rabourdin brewery in Courpalay in the Seine et Marne. Organic cider is delivered to the restaurant in kegs from the farm of Père Mahieu in Normandy, and the wine list was drawn up to showcase bottles from small independent producers and features a regularly changing selection of natural wines.

Arriving here for dinner on a hot summer night, Bruno and I were seated on the terrace to profit from a feeble breeze. Sipping Champagne and nibbling delicious truffled sausage from the Perigord while we read the menu, we fell into conversation with a jovial man sitting next to us who told us he lives in the neighborhood and comes several times a week. “The decor is a little bit Disney,” he said of the Brasserie Bellanger interior, “But the food is very good and the staff are lovely.”

The menu was an attractive roster of traditional French comfort food, but the prices were so low that I was instinctively apprehensive about the quality of what would follow. I was quite wrong, as it happily turned out, since our starters of oeufs mayonnaise, celeri remoulade and poireaux vinaigrette were excellent. The celeri remoulade was made with freshly grated celery rave, lightly dressed with real mayonnaise and appealingly garnished with crushed roasted hazelnuts, while the leeks were fresh and pleasantly al dente.

My main course of Lagioule sausage with potato puree garnished with chopped chives and salad for 13 Euros was deeply satisfying, and Bruno loved his summer tartare, which was ground beef with chopped olives, fried capers and green zebra tomatoes with a nice warm thatch of golden frites. Our chatty neighbor’s “poisson du jour” (fish of the day) was a nicely served filet of cod with grated zucchini and cherry tomatoes, too. Portions were generous, and the cooking here is light, fresh and precise.

We concluded our unexpectedly good meal here with a nicely made Paris Brest, and I decided this this would also be the occasion for me to take my first cat photo–the water pitcher on our table. Brasserie Bellanger is a very good bet for simple good-quality French food at very fair prices. N.B. It’s open daily for lunch and dinner and serves non-stop; they do not take reservations.

140 rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, 10th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 07 82 32 92 08, but they do not take reservations. Metro: Barbès Rochechouart or Poissonnière. Open daily. www.victoretcharly.com
Average 20 Euros.

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Through a succession of different owners and chefs, Chardenoux, now known as Le Chardenoux, has been part of my life in Paris for thirty years. Now this storied old bistro has been rebooted as a fashion-forward restaurant redesigned and redecorated to attract a trendy crowd of younger Parisians. For all intents and purposes, it’s basically become an entirely new restaurant.

This is actually the second revision of this address within the past five years, since chef Cyril Lignac gave it a freshening up and added a fleet of contemporary French dishes to the traditional menu of bistro classics when he originally took it over in 2014. You can read what I thought about this first reboot of what had always been one of my favorite Paris restaurants here: CHARDENOUX, Paris-An Eternally Charming Bistro, B+

On my way to dinner at the new version of Le Chardenoux, I found myself thinking about how restaurants can offer a very intimate reflection of larger changes in the life of any city. My short take on the reset of this restaurant was that the 11th Arrondissement has gentrified so much that the previous version of Le Chardenoux probably wasn’t doing the business that Lignac wanted anymore, and so he decided to completely pivot away from the bistro formula towards a fashion-driven table that would appeal to twenty-and-thirty something Parisians. This tribe isn’t especially attracted to traditional bistro cooking, which explains the new seafood centered menu, which also has a burger and sate chicken for non fish eaters. In their eyes, the Belle Epoque style of the restaurant’s dining room probably also reads more as just plain old rather than charming, hence the new decor by trendy London based interior designer Martin Brudnizki.

Even before Brudnizki got to work, this was already one of the prettiest restaurants in Paris, with a big zinc bar just inside the front door and beautiful and very delicate Belle Epoque floral moulding on the ceiling. Happily, these elements have survived some rather radical Miami Beach style cosmetic surgery, but the serene elegance of the decor has given way to a decor that’s meant to look good in Instagrams. Brudnizki filled the previously empty ceiling medallions with busy murals of trees branches and also added some ornate not correctly scaled Baroque chandeliers and a patterned floor that replaced the original workaday tile. He also added some plump ribbed oversized velvet banquettes and a dimmer switch or two to create a sort of louche lounge atmosphere in the evening. If you didn’t know the restaurant before, it’s pretty. If you did, it’s sort of like Charlotte Rampling has morphed into Kim Kardashian.

Cyril Lignac is a consummate culinary professional, so the food here is good. The menu is divided between three subheads–Shellfish & Crustaceans, Raw & Marinated and Sea & Land, along with a short selection of desserts. Coming for dinner with Bruno, we began with Utah Beach oysters served with small chipolata sausages–a delicious combination, like they do in Bordeaux for me and sea bass carpaccio with olive oil, lemon juice and pink pepper corns for Bruno. Both dishes were well-prepared and attractively presented, but I also couldn’t help but thinking that the new menu requires a lot less cooking time and culinary effort than the one it replaced. In other words, these are simple, high turnover items that an only marginally trained kitchen staffer could easily be trained to make. The bottomline, of course, is that more elaborate cooking is time-consuming, and so expensive.

Judging from the crowd in the dining room, Martin Brudnizki’s decor as bait is having the desired effect. The other diners were young, and there were a lot of logo designer handbags in evidence, which created a see-and-be-seen  atmosphere more like what you find at the Hotel Costes dining room or similarly trendy Paris restaurants such as Monsieur Bleu or Le Girafe than a bistro. Since night clubs have almost become extinct in Paris, restaurants have filled the gap as the main venue for socializing among the city’s bright young things.

My langoustine ravioli with cabbage in a spiced bouillon was pleasant as a main course, as was Bruno’s salmon in Thai (lemongrass and lime leaves) bouillon with cockles. Again, both dishes were nicely prepared and plated, and shrewdly conceived to appeal to the new demographic the restaurant is courting. Other options included a lobster roll, which look rather skimpy on a neighboring table for 27 Euros, deep-fried strips of sole with aubergine tempura, sea bass baked in a crust of salt for two at an eye-watering 90 Euros, and scallops with Jerusalem artichokes, black truffles and dark rum.

The dessert not to miss is the excellent vanilla-cream-filled praline-pecan millefeuille, which is made in Lignac’s very good patisserie just across the street.

The new Le Chardenoux is a pleasant restaurant, which is usefully open daily, but I still felt slightly wistful at the end of my meal here. Why These days I can get a lobster roll at lots of other places in Paris, but it’s increasingly difficult to find a dish like the beautifully made navarin d’agneau I ate the last time I came here. Economic globalization is getting some blowback these days, but food trends have never been more international.

All photos by Thomas Dhellemmes

1 rue Jules Vallès, 11th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-43-71-49-52. Metro: Charonne or Faideherbe-Chaligny. Open daily for lunch and dinner. www.restaurantlechardenoux.com. Average a la carte 60 Euros  www.restaurantlechardenoux.com

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Because 2019 is still so new, telling you the meal I had at Ibrik Kitchen the other night was one of the best I’ve had all year doesn’t deliver adequate praise for the excellent “neo-nostalgic” Romanian cooking of chefs Ovidio Malisevschi and Bogdan Alexandrescu a.k.a. Dexter chef (check out his Instagram feed: https://www.instagram.com/dexterchef/). So instead I’ll only say that this dinner was not only the best non-French meal I’ve had in Paris during the last twelve months, but one of the best ones full stop. In fact, this art-gallery-like little restaurant on a side street in the Sentier came as a delightful surprise in almost every way. And now when people ask me what ‘foreign’ kitchens I recommend eating during a trip to Paris, Romanian will now join the usual Israeli, Moroccan, Tunisian, Laotian and Vietnamese.

@Pierre Lucet Penato

This is because these two guys have found a way to serve up the cooking of their homeland that has a frankly brilliant gastronomic equilibrium between tradition and modernity. To wit, they’ve managed to make dishes like sarmale (stuffed cabbage rolls) lighter and fresher without losing their authenticity, and they are also keenly attuned to the aesthetics of the Instagram era.

Further, this pair are a happy testament to one of the best things about eating in Paris today, which is that the city has never been more of a beacon for ambitious young gastronomic talents from all over the world. They come here, like Ovidio Malisevschi, to attend cooking school–the Cordon Bleu in his case, and then stay on to do a stage (apprenticeship) or two–he cooked with Frederic Simonin and at La Dame de Pic, Anne-Sophie Pic’s place in the rue du Louvre, before launching projects of their own.  For his part, Bogdan Alexandrescu, one of the best young chefs of his generation in Romania and a star of Master Chef Romania, is a native of Cluj, the beautiful city in northern Transylvania, and recently attended l’Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes du Goût in Paris.

@Pierre Lucet Penato

To be honest, on a rainy Tuesday night, I headed out to meet my friend Agathe for dinner at this new place with modest enthusiasm, because it just seemed so unlikely I’d find food anywhere near as good as the home cooking I enjoyed at several guest houses during a trip to Transylvania, one of the most beautiful destinations in Europe and a place with landscapes on par with those of such famously scenic places as Tuscany or the Loire Valley, last October. Why This type of sincere, hearty, rustic farm cooking almost invariably loses its character when it’s translated to a big-city setting in a foreign country. And memories of my very occasional meals at the other Romanian restaurant I know in Paris, a long-running place on the Left Bank that’s gone slightly senile, dampened my expectations, too. Still, Agathe’s father is Romanian, so she knows this cooking from vacation visits back to the handsome city of Brasov.

Just a few weeks after the holidays, my appetite was skittish, too, but my friend, who has recently moved to the lively young neighborhood with a lot of good restaurants that the Sentier (2nd Arrondissement) has become, insisted I’d be happily surprised. Sitting in the Metro, though, I found myself musing on my first experience of Eastern European cooking at the long-gone Cafe Barna, a Hungarian place in Westport, Connecticut, which served up a memorable annual Cub Scouts banquet of soggy dolma (stuffed grape leaves), alarmingly scarlet goulash and stuffed cabbage that was more like meat loaf draped with wilted cabbage leaves than the real McCoy. Still, it was quite a gust of gastronomic exoticism for me as a seven-year-old kid.

@Pierre Lucert Penato

Over an excellent glass of Slovenian white wine, we perused the menu, and I recognized some of the decorative totems of the dining room from travels in Romania, including a hairy mask from the Murmes region, the tell-tale heart shape decoration on a hand-forged wrought-iron coat rack–it’s a traditional motif in Hungarian speaking regions of Romania, and a couple of willow-switch fly swatters on the wall. Then we ordered from our charming waitress and were engrossed in conversation when our first courses arrived. Immediately I knew this would be a wonderful meal.

I’d ordered pastramă, the roasted Romanian brined beef known as pastrami in most English speaking countries, and it came to the table in a bell jar filled with fragrant fumes. When the smoke cleared, I found myself before a pretty little pile of sliced beef garnished with black Transylvanian truffle shavings. Served with excellent bread from Terroirs d’Avenir, the meat was succulent, gently brined and full of flavor. My friend’s starter–mămăligă cu smăntănă, or cornmeal porridge shaped into patties, then grilled and garnished tangy sour cream, was almost miraculously light and tasted pleasantly of toasted grain. Both dishes were winsomely impressive in terms of their presentation and the quality of the produce the chefs worked with (most beef served here comes from the celebrated Polmard butcher, dairy goods from Laiterie Les Fayes).

During dinner, I also talked about my recent trip to Transylvania, and how good the food had been. What’s been driving this transformation is tourism, and especially agro-turismo style rural guesthouses established in some of the region’s most beautiful villages, including Copsa Mare and Viscri. Much had changed since I’d first visited the region in 2012 to write this article for SAVEUR Magazine: https://www.saveur.com/article/Travels/Eternal-Terrain But better still, most things hadn’t, including the small-scale traditional agriculture and the way so many people still grow and produce much of the food they eat themselves.

Our main courses were excellent, too, with a remarkable lightness and freshness continuing to be the signature of this kitchen. What I especially loved about my sarmale was that the cabbage leaves had been brined before being stuffed, which added a bracing tang of ferment to a dish that’s otherwise as gentle and consoling as a baby’s flannel blanket. The funky garnish of crumbled pork crackling was very welcome, too.

With a pronounced taste of green peppers, Agathe’s chicken goulash displayed the heterogeneity of the Romanian kitchen, which has been heavily influenced by Hungary, Austria, its Balkan neighbours, and most recently, Greece and other Mediterranean countries, especially Italy. The ethnic diversity of the country, which once had a large Jewish population and still has sizeable minorities of Hungarian speaking Szeklers, Moldovans, and Gypsies, is reflected in its cooking, too. In Transylvania, another local cooking tradition is that of the ‘Saxons,’ or German-speaking colonists from the Moselle valley, Luxembourg and the Rhineland who were invited to settle on what were then the lands of the Hungarian crown beginning in the 12th century. They arrived with their food ways, including a love of charcuterie and smoked meats and herbs like lovage and marjoram. When the Communist Ceaușescu regime collapsed in 1989, approximately half a million Saxons fled to a newly reunified Germany under the German nationality law known as Auslandsdeutsche, which offers citizenship to ethnic Germans wishing to repatriate to Germany.

“What makes this dish more Romanian than Hungarian is that it doesn’t include lashings of paprika and sour cream the way it might in Hungary. Instead, the vegetables–onions, tomatoes and peppers have been slowly stewed into almost a thick jam to which the chicken was then added to cook. This explains its succulence and richness,” Agathe observed. Served with  homemade potato puree, it was deeply satisfying, as was the organic Hungarian red wine from Sopron that we drank with this excellent meal.

While we ate our main courses, I had been eyeing the delicious looking beignets being shared by the couple at the table next to us. Called papanaș in Romanian, they’re filled with fromage blanc, garnished with jam or jelly, and they’re irresistible. Since we were lavishly well-fed, we decided to share a dessert, and since it was Agathe who had shared this discovery with me, I let her chose our sweet finale. “You have to try the pistachio cake,” she said, and a large slab of this dense, pudding-like cake filled with fruit and pistachios and topped with a simple sugar glaze and more pistachios arrived at the table. It was so good, I was almost tempted to order a piece to bring home, but caloric caution had me think the better of this indulging this yearning.

So the next time I come for a meal here, I already know what I’ll be having–whatever ciorba, or soup, is on the menu, the grilled trout, and an order of papanaș.

Oh, and by the way, in case you were wondering, an Ibrik is a small fluted metal pot with a long handle used to make Turkish coffee, which is very popular in certain parts of Romania, large swathes of which were once part of the Ottoman Empire.

9 rue de Mulhouse, 2nd Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-70-69-42-50. Metro: Bonne Nouvelle. Open Tuesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner. Sunday for brunch and dinner. Closed Monday. Lunch menu 15 €, average a la carte meal 40 €  www.ibrik.fr 

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Astair is the newest address of a trio of the French capital’s most innovative restaurateurs–Jean Valfort, Charles Drouhaut and Jean-François Monfort. This team has real gift for delivering restaurants that hit a bull’s eye in terms of what Parisians want to eat right now (Canard et Champagne and Farago are theirs, too), but their signature talent is the sincere and polished hospitality they unfailingly deliver.

Settling in at this good looking dining room with a natty decor by interior designer Tristan Auer that includes terrazzo floors, ox-blood banquettes and bentwood chairs and an art-moderne style cocktail bar in the middle of the room, we immediately liked the lively and very Parisian atmosphere. Then our waiter, a Frenchman who’d lived and worked in Washington, D.C. for many years, was charming and very knowledgeable about the menu. This was a big help, too, since my mind was racing as I tried to decide what to order. Almost everything on the menu sounded appealing, but the real reason for my slightly frantic indecision was that it’s signed by one of my favorite French chefs, Gilles Goujon, who has three Michelin stars at his superb restaurant  L’Auberge du Vieux Puits in Fontjoncouse in the Aude.

Goujon is that increasingly rare chef in the higher echelons of French gastronomy today, or a cook whose pleasure and purpose is to work in his own kitchen day in and day out rather than build a franchised international empire. He’s as talented as he is modest and friendly, too, which I learned many years ago when I first went to his restaurant for lunch. I was writing something about the best restaurants in the Languedoc just after he’d won his third star in 2010.

Somehow or another, I completely miscalculated how long it would take for me to get to Fontjoncouse from Montpellier, and then I got lost on top of everything else. When I was already forty-five minutes late, I called to apologize and let them know that I was on my way. “No problem at all!” said the man who answered the phone. “Drive carefully, and we’ll see you soon.” It was 1.45pm when I arrived at the restaurant, where the serving hours are normally noon to 1.30pm.

“Welcome!” said Goujon when he came to the table himself with the menu.

Flustered and still flapping, I apologized profusely and suggested that maybe I should just have a single dish, since I’d arrived so late.

“Stop! Please, stop! You are welcome here, and it will be my pleasure to cook for you! No one’s in a hurry today. So take off your watch and put it in your pocket, or you’ll ruin your lunch!” He had no idea that I was a journalist either, in case you’re wondering.

Matted against such kindness, the meal that followed was superb. A coddled egg came with fine slices of black truffle and a thrillingly feral puree of the tuber, plus a warm brioche to mop it all up with. Next, a nacreous rouget filet sat on top of a potato filled with brande de morue surrounded with steamed shellfish and a lashing of saffron rouille; this was one of the best fish dishes I’ve ever eaten, and I’m still yearning to return to Fontjoncouse and eat it again eight years later. That, and a rack of roasted cochon noir pork with a potato puree with boudin and a jus that include the fleshy green Lucques olives from the Languedoc.

When I finally left around 4.30pm, I got sort of teary with gratitude as I unwittingly headed for an entirely different experience, which was an evening alone in a hotel room with a water bed and mirrored walls and ceiling in Gruissan Plage. Needless to say, I wasn’t the one who chose this hotel.

So we settled on two starters signed by Goujon, linguine with squid’s ink and a ragout of squid cooked with cardamom for me and a coddled egg with wild mushrooms and brioche for Bruno.

If both of these dishes were excellent, the subtle flavor of the cardamom in the creamy squid ragout and the way it married with the the perfectly al dente pasta made this one spectacular. Other available starters were resolutely French, including oysters, escargots and frog’s legs.

Though the lamb shank with eggplant, pickled lemons, tomatoes and North African spices is usually served for two, they kindly made an exception for me, and I loved the way the differing tones of acidity in the lemon and tomato cut the richness of the fork-tender meat, while the aubergine soaked up its luscious cooking juices.

Bruno opted for the Bulinade de la Côte Vermeille, another Goujon dish and a ruddy fish soup of filled with mussels, cuttlefish, monkfish cockles and sliced potatoes. “What makes it different from a bouillabaisse is that it tastes like there’s some lard (bacon) in the sauce, and it has stronger flavors of pepper, probably Piment d’Espelette, and garlic than a bouillabaisse does. It’s delicious, but I wish it came with some croutons to mop up the soup a little bit more,” he said.

Rather embarrassingly, I guess I’d stared so hard at our neighbor’s roasted quail with grapes and figs that she asked me if I’d like to try some, and for the first time in as long as I can remember, I allowed pure desire to override the ancient curse of my self-deprecating good manners. “Yes, please, if you don’t mind, just a little piece,” I said. It was a good call on my part, too, since the bird was juicy and gently gamey and the resinous flavors in the hot fruit flattered it perfectly.

Though portions here are hefty, sheer gluttony had us finishing up with a very good fruit-garnished baba au rhum for me and an excellent fig tart for Bruno that vanished before I’d even thought to photograph it.

Beyond the dishes by Gilles Goujon, the menu also offers sole meunière, calf’s liver deglazed with vinegar, grilled sole and cote de boeuf–either Charolais or Salers, for two. What’s interesting here, too, is the way that menu shows off how the gastronomic boundaries of the brasserie are being revised for the 21st century–now many brasseries are offering simmered dishes that were once more often found in bistros alongside such brasserie standards as grilled fish and meat. “Young Parisians have fallen in love with the urban glamour of the brasserie–their liveliness and brisk service, but they don’t necessarily want to eat choucroute garni like their parents did. This is why we asked Gilles Goujon to work with us at Astair–we wanted to create an offer that’s more gourmand,” explained Jean Valfort.

They certainly succeeded, which is why Astair is one of the very best of the new brasseries that are so successfully rebooting this much loved Metropolitan idiom.

Astair, 19 Passage des Panoramas, 2nd Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33)09.81.29.50.95. Metro: Richelieu-Drouot. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Lunch menus 15 Euros, 20 Euros, 25 Euros, Average a la carte 65 Euros. www.astair.paris

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