Prunier is back, and it’s better than ever. Most recently owned by the late Pierre Bergé, founder of the Yves Saint Laurent fashion house with the late designer of the same name, one of the most glamorous restaurants in the world has just reopened under new owners, the Swiss investment group Olma Luxury Holdings, with a new menu by Michelin three-star chef Yannick Alleno.

Laurie Ochoa, Ruth Reichl, Nancy Silverton and me

So when Laurie Ochoa, food editor of the LA Times; writer and editor Ruth Reichl (my old boss at the still lamented GOURMET), baking genius and restauranteur Nancy Silverton and I had one meal alone during the trip we led in Paris and Champagne in October (more on that here https://dinnerwithfriendsabroad.com/), I booked at Prunier, because I knew it would be a festive occasion and wanted to try Alleno’s new menu.

This supremely elegant seafood house and caviar counter just behind the Arc de Triomphe opened in 1924. As I told Laurie, Ruth and Nancy over glasses of Champagne as we began our meal, it was some sixty-three years later that I walked through its doors to meet Yves Saint Laurent, of all people, for lunch.

The reason for this painstakingly negotiated and carefully choreographed occasion with a charming public-relations woman in attendance was an interview I was doing of the designer for a London newspaper after I’d left my job as an editor in the office of Fairchild Publications, the fashion publisher that was once the unforgiving arbiter not only of hemlines and good taste in its garment-industry newspaper Women’s Wear Daily, but the cruel judge of the beau monde’s social cachet in the pages of its slick magazine W.

My English editor wanted something “a little racy and a bit naughty,” but I was wary of delivering these goods, since few people in the world were better protected legally in those days than the late designer. Still, it was an important story for me, and so I was anxious when I showed up for the appointment at the curiously early hour of 11am (“It’s so that Yves won’t be high or drunk yet,” speculated my shrewd friend, the late Christa Worthington).

When I arrived I was stunned by the beauty of the art-deco decor of this place and then dumbstruck and horrified to be ushered to a table a large silver bowl filled with crushed ice and a metal tin nestled in this icy mis en scene. It’s contents were glossy and black, so that even though I’d never eaten caviar before, I knew what it was, and I also knew that it was an extravagance to be personally presented with such a huge serving of this storied delicacy.

Yannick Alleno

Unlike Yannick Alleno, who could probably have finished the entire tin pictured above on his own, I’d never had caviar before and was squeamish about the idea of eating fish eggs.

“Really, Alec!!?#8221; Ruth said.

Yup, really. If I’ve always loved to eat, I arrived in Paris with a pathetically pinched and provincial palate par excellence. Most seafood was off limits, and game was too wild for me.  Thirty-six years later, however, I’ve become an avid omnivore, and so I couldn’t wait to tuck into some of the world’s best seafood at Prunier.

And the interview with Yves Saint Laurent While I busy tasting my first caviar, something I immediately fell head-over-heels in love with, the designer left the table to—I don’t know what, and never returned. So I sat there with the stricken PR woman for another 45 minutes eating caviar, oysters and smoked salmon, and then I went home to call London and explain that the interview had been aborted.

Coming out of the Metro, I stopped at the Felix Potin, a convenience store, in the rue de Babylone, to buy some milk, and going into the shop, I immediately recognized the man at the cash register who was buying a huge amount of cheap candy.

The cashier rang it all up, and spoke the total aloud. The designer stood there blushing and sort of dazed.

I guessed that he had no money on him, and told the cashier I’d pay for the candy. Then Saint Laurent looked at me and smiled sheepishly. “Merci, vous etes gentil,” he said. And then he looked at me again. “I’m very sorry. I’m very sorry,” he said, recognizing me. “I don’t feel well today. I’m very sad and I had nothing to say. My life is very difficult right now.”

A man in a dark suit came into the shop, glanced at the cash register receipt, handed me 200 Francs, and led the designer, who lived just across the street, away.

“I hope you at least enjoyed the caviar,” he said over his shoulder. I did indeed.

All of us started off with l’Oeuf Christian Dior, which is a signature dish on the new Prunier menu. It was a sleight of gastronomic elegance more than worthy of the late designer, too, since it came to the table as a perfectly coddled egg with a generous spoonful of caviar on its crown and a buttoniere of chive in a pool of caviar-speckled cream. Beautiful to behold, it was even better to eat, since following the waiter’s instructions that we dig down to the bottom of the bowl with each spoonful of egg, we discovered the feral genius of this dish, which was a  hidden aspic made with essence of jambon blanc (white ham). In effect, a whole ham had been gently sweated for hours on end and the juices it released had been captured and used to season the aspic. This contrast between the lush iodine-rich caviar and meaty aspic created a perfect and very luscious harmony when napped by the yolk of the egg.

Subsequent starters were superb as well, including the salmon-and-seaweed hand roll Nancy ordered, the langoustine carpaccio with caviar cream that seduced me, Laurie and Ruth.

I knew the minute I opened the menu and saw it that I’d have sole meunière, because it’s one of my favorite of all French dishes, and Laurie had it too, because she feels the same way. Here it was impeccably fresh, perfectly cooked, and beautifully garnished with melted butter, capers, a piece of lemon and a side of ethereal potato puree. Nancy had scallops with seaweed butter and a saffron sauce and Ruth ordered line-caught sea bass with a celery gelee and caviar. All of us were extremely happy with our meals.

None of us had been planning to have dessert until the pastry tray arrived. Assured that the figs were from the south of France and the raspberries from Alsace, we succumbed to these beautifully made tarts, and threw caution to the winds by accepting the suggestion of a glass of Champagne with dessert.

“I think Prunier just be the most beautiful restaurant in the world,” said Ruth And I think she just may be right. One way or another, it’s an excellent choice for that special meal you were planning to treat yourself to in Paris, and it’s also very romantic without making any effort to be so whatsoever.

Yes, it’s very expensive, too, but it’s worth every centime.

And if I may, I’d like to suggest that my gastronomic coming-of-age story MY PLACE AT THE TABLE: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris would be a wonderful holiday gift for food-lovers, Francophiles, and anyone who loves a good read.

16 Avenue Victor Hugo, 16th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-44-17-35-85, Open for lunch and dinner Tuesday-Saturday. Closed Sunday and Monday. Lunch menu 68 Euros, prix-fixe menus 125 Euros, 190 Euros; average a la carte 150 Euros. www.prunier.com

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@Romain Laprade

The Divellec is one of the most beautiful new restaurants to open in Paris for a very longtime. As wonderfully louche as Studio K.O.’s Miami-meets-1940s Casablanca-in-Paris decor may be, however, what always matters most to me at a restaurant is the food, which is superb. Still, even though the seafood cooking at this venerable old-school  fish house overlooking the Esplanade des Invalides on the Left Bank has been brilliantly rebooted by young chef Matthieu Pacaud, the son of Bernard Pacaud of the three star L’Ambroise on the Place des Vosges, this reopening has gone oddly under-remarked in a city as food-loving and mad for fish as Paris.

Sea bass carpaccio with citrus zest@Jacques Gavard

There are several reasons for this. First, the public relations firm charged with the relaunch emphasized the revived restaurant’s decor over its kitchen. This is doubtless because the chic Paris based Studio K.O. firm, which did the interiors of madly popular Chiltern Firehouse hotel and restaurant in London, also signed the new look for Divellec, too. But unless you’re enough of an interior-design nut to know who Studio K.O. is, it’s hard to see why any restaurant would emphasise its decor–gorgeous though it may be, over its food.

Then the restaurant had also been closed for three years after founder Jacques Le Divellec retired in 2013, so it fell off of a lot of people’s radars, and then those who remembered it, probably had an idea of a place that was slightly stuffy, somnolent and very expensive. Finally, Divellec is located in a very quiet, wealthy, well-guarded, older part of Paris, so it was unlikely to immediately gain much traction with the city’s best young food writers, those types who’d rather go belly to the bar at Clamato.

@Yann Deret

So with all of this in mind on a cold misty Sunday night as Bruno and I walked to dinner here for the first time since the reboot in a companionable silence, my expectations were vague. The truth, you see, is that I’d never actually had a meal at the former Le Divellec, a fusty bastion of politicians and captains of industry at noon, and the same in the evening with their mistresses, that I’d actually enjoyed. To be sure, I had once eaten a sublime grilled lobster a l’Amoricaine here with a stunning bottle of Mersault as the guest of an Irish banker whose freckled cherubic face existed as the perfect foil to his psycho-sexual perversion. But my last meal here, oh at least a good ten years before the lights went out in 2013, was my most memorable, since I had been invited to lunch by one of the most powerful and un-repentently honest food critics in France.

What I remember was the soft stale fishy smell of the dining room, the witheringly haughty service, and an awful lot of bland white sauce lashed all over everything. “How would you describe this meal, Alec#8221; the esteemed critic asked me. “Hotel du Lac,” I replied. He looked blank. “That’s the title of the British novelist Anita Brookner’s novel about a lonely middle-aged single woman who goes on holiday to a sad, sedate, anonymous, expensive hotel on a Swiss lake. She takes all of her meals in the hotel, and even though few of them are described, I imagine that they’d have been like this, soulless under-seasoned over-cooked luxury cooking,” I explained.

No one recognised the critic until after our very disappointing main courses were being cleared away. Then a silent thunder bolt shoot through the room, and a frantic Commedia dell’Arte like performance began when we were served an insanely generous portion of Beluga caviar with shocking speed.

@Romain Laprade

“Oh Mon Dieu,” the critic sighed when the glistening black fish eggs were brought to the table with blinis. “Please….,” he said, waving his hands. “We’ve finished our meal already.” The face of the older waiter who’d just served us was a rigid mask of fear. “I think this might be the best dessert ever invented,” he said, a great line delivered with a poignantly plaintive smile–he was, after all, the solider on the front lines. The half beat of silence encouraged him. “It would be a shame to waste it now,” he said, his body locked in a half-bow. Silence. More silence. A short negative head shake. Several hundred Euros of caviar departed to an uncertain fate, and the scene stirred a ripple in the dining room, a place I always thought of as a theater of unwanted kisses, since the people who paid the bills here were usually avaricious, physically or psychologically, with their guests. You know, the lupine old man with his mistress, the curmudgeonly grandmother making menacing remarks to her grandchildren about the uncertainty of their inheritances, the broken middle-aged couples on the edge of a divorce caused by an infidelity they didn’t have the spleen left to discuss.

This is how restaurants get a reputation in our collective consciousness, with some being tagged as warm and happy, others cold and melancholy. So even if Le Divellec of yore was a storied table that once had a Michelin star, maybe two, and served reliably fresh classically prepared seafood, I think I’d be hard put to find very many Parisians who remember actually having had a good time here. So as we reached the front door, I found myself hoping this curse might have been lifted.

Fair’s fair. Sunday night is not an optimum time to judge any restaurant more ambitious than a brasserie, so as we were seated in a pretty grass-cloth upholstered room with low lighting and lots of plants, I thought, well, what I’m hoping for is just a good meal, not a revelation.

Scallop carpaccio with caviar @ Jacques Gavard

You see the old Le Divellec kind of missed the boat when it came to a sea change in fish cookery that was launched in Paris at the beginning of the 1980s by Gerard Allemandou at La Cagouille and the Minchelli brothers at Le Duc, both in Montparnasse. What they espoused was a bracing just-plucked-out-of-the-sea minimalism that was more Japanese in approach and theory than French.

The self-taught Minchelli, a native of Marseille who now runs Le 21, a confidential and very good little fish house in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, cast off the robes of Escoffier–his sauces, and served fish almost naked.  He invented this dead simple approach to seafood cookery while running his first restaurant, Le Duc, on the Ile de Re, which he later moved to Montparnasse. Long before anyone understood fish would soon become a luxury food, Minchelli was cooking it in such a way as to enhance its natural taste and texture, his reasoning being that it was so good as nature made it that it needed almost nothing more.

Some twenty-five years later, Minchelli’s approach, now adopted by most other Parisian chefs, exhibits its dazzling prescience more strongly than ever. But Pacaud picks up where Minchelli left off is with a new sense of gastronomic wit and puckish aesthetics that this now vintage school of seafood minimalism had been wanting. To wit, yes, we know we should be eating species of fish that are not threatened with extinction, mackerel instead of cod, for example. Yes, we know we should eat lighter, cleaner and less. But on the other hand, even if these lessons have rightly become so integrated into the culinary behavior of modern Paris, it’s still an occasional pleasure to veer off course, or to chose pleasure as a direction over any other point on the compass. So the challenge is to create contemporary fish dishes that don’t mask the natural flavor of the fish but are also inventive, festive, attractive and even a little bit amusing.

This is what I thought while an array of very pleasant hors d’oeuvres began our meal–an oyster napped with peppery watercress sauce and dabbed with herring eggs, a single butter-roasted scallop with a coin of fragrant black truffle and a wood-sorrel corsage. This succession of little dishes did exactly what good hors d’oeuvres always do, which is to offer teasing glimpses of the kitchen’s gastronomic garter belt to excite expectations for the meal to come.

The menu was totally tantalizing, too, especially since I’d decided to play the old what-the-hell card, too. By this I mean, that in today’s world everyone I know is so desperately over-worked to such a degree they rarely take the time to spontaneously enjoy themselves. You know, to just say, ‘Okay, screw it. I’m turning off my phone and my computer until Monday, and I’m just going to have a good time without planning it in advance. We work like dogs, we’re not machines, and if we don’t anoint ourselves with the occasional extravagance, what’s the point of the whole thing, i.e., a career#8221; Bruno looked a bit wan when I suggested we just go ahead and enjoy ourselves, because aside from some reasonably priced prix-fixe menus, the a la carte tarifs are pretty stiff.

I was extremely tempted by the tuna-and-dried-fruit pastilla with a coriander and ‘virgin’ celery reduction to start, but finally settled on ecrevisses, meaty little crayfish from Alpine lakes that are rarely seen on Paris menus, with a passionfruit vinaigrette and a cauliflower ‘zephir’ (sort of a soft custard of the same vegetable) at 65 Euros, while Bruno couldn’t resist the sea bass carpaccio with green apple gelee, crushed mixed peppercorns and citrus zest (38 Euros).

If the sea bass carpaccio was exquisite, my crayfish were too timidly seasoned and the cauliflower cream reminded me more of the old Le Divillec than the new one (and in case you were wondering, yes, it lost its article, ‘Le’ in the reboot and is now known just as Divellec) and was also a bit stodgy eighties vintage Robuchon in logic. Maybe the dish would have worked better if the passionfruit vinaigrette was more vivid, since it was nearly undetectable. That said, the crayfish were succulent, sweet and perfectly cooked.

The wine the natty sommelier suggested, a Romorantin from the upper Loire, was as perfect with his meal as his nimble commentary on the bottle. Without being showy, he mentioned that it had been one of the French king Charles V’s favorite wines and that the region was one of the extremely rare ones in France that had not been devastated by phylloxera in the 19th century, so the ancient root stock of the vines that produced the grapes from the wine was made is as powerful an expression of an intriguing and little known French terroir as one could hope for. Formal though he was, he was a very nice man who allowed as how he’d worked in California for many years and had recently returned to France, too.

The Sunday night tables around us were obviously having a good time, too. The stunningly good-looking just out of bed couple where the gent was clearly terrified of racking up too large a bill, the middle-aged couple who discussed almost every forkful of what they ate with the delightful young maitre d’hotel in a ritual that rippled back to paper road maps and the Michelin red guide on the dashboard, and an Italian mother and daughter from Milano who were insane for the decor and loved the food, too.

Following my crayfish, sole with grilled walnut butter and braised salsify with black truffle was magnificent. The distant sweetness of the nut loved the pearly flesh of the fish and the salsify provided textural contrast with the sole and softly punched its iodine with an earthy gust of truffle. Bruno’s John Dory with steamed shellfish–cockles, mussels, tiny shrimp, in sorrel cream was equally elegant.

Though I wouldn’t have wanted it, a cheese trolley should be proposed at a restaurant du plaisir like this one instead of just an assortment of four already plated cheeses from the admittedly excellent Quatrehommes cheese shop in the rue de Sevres where I whiled away many happy half hours back in the blessedly long-gone days when I used a laundromat just around the corner. So since we were well fed and happy, we decidedly to split a freshly baked individual apple tart with caramel ice cream, and it was lovely.

So here’s what I want next time round: line-fished sea bass cooked in a sea-salt crust and served with a citrus sabayon. But since this flops on the deck at 15 Euros for 100 grams of fish, what I can honestly look forward to the next time I visit Divellec is brunch, which may surprise all of the friends I have who know that I normally loathe this meal (Why The gustatory rewards of being dressed and in a restaurant during brunch serving hours on a weekend are almost unfailingly never worth it, and it’s the worst value for money meal in Paris most of the time, since plain old eggs get kicked upstairs by a factor of ten, sometimes twenty, on what they actually cost).

But if dinner was excellent, the brunch menu really speaks to me:

Fresh juice

Hot drink

Selection of bread and pastries

Butter and organic jam

Botarga bruschetta

Perfect egg Florentine

Bass ceviche, lemon juice and pink berries

Scallop burger, fresh herbs

Thin apple pie with toffee ice cream

or

Soufflé of chocolate grand cru, Bourbon vanilla ice cream (extra 10€)

49 €

with a glass of Champagne Thienot 65€

So what do you think Meet me there?

Divellec, 18 rue Fabert, 7th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-45-51-91-96, Metro: Invalides. Lunch menu 49 Euros, Initiation menu (four courses served at both lunch and dinner) 90 Euros, Tasting menu – eight courses, served at lunch and dinner. Brunch menu 49 Euros. Average a la carte meal 110 Euros. Open daily for lunch and dinner. N.B. You can make reservations via their website, too: www.divellec-paris.fr

The post Divellec, Paris | High Tide at Les Invalides, or a Brilliant New Fish House, A- appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

Like most Paris brasseries, La Rotonde was founded long before people started going to restaurants for revelations. No, in those days, people went to restaurants to eat, and they pretty much knew what the menu would look like even before they stepped through the door.

When it opened on the boulevard Montparnasse in 1911, the Left Bank neighborhood was just beginning to attract artists like Picasso and Chagall and it was a busy commercial thoroughfare leading to a one of the city’s main train stations. So people went to La Rotonde to eat, to people watch, to while away an hour or two over a coffee or a glass of wine with the distraction of a book or a sketchpad. But most of all, they went to eat, because that’s why you went to brasseries, the brilliant Parisian invention that made dining out a nonchalant metropolitan pleasure by putting it within reach of almost every pocket and every pocketbook. You went because you were hungry and could get something to eat in a brasserie pretty much all day long and often well into the night.

When I first moved to Paris from London a longtime ago, I couldn’t have explained to you what made a brasserie different from a bistro, but I instinctively liked them, especially since I often worked very irregular hours and me and most of my friends were single. So brasseries were our default choice for a meal, the place to go to snuff out a case of Sunday night blues with friends, or unknot my nerves after work with some oysters and a bottle of Muscadet. They were our one-size-fits-all restaurant, and they reliably offered a good time and a decent enough feed for an acceptable price. (Oh, and the difference between a bistro and a brasserie Very simply, bistros specialize in simmered dishes and sauces, brasseries are about fast cooking, like grilling or frying, with a shellfish stand out front and perhaps a choucroute garni on the menu that refers to their original roots as brewhouse restaurants in Alsace).

And then it all went wrong during the 1990s when most of the great brasseries of Paris were swallowed up by chains, which increasingly resorted to commissary-supplied kitchens and gastronomic shortcuts to make these places as lucrative as possible. The thing is, of course, is that this didn’t go unnoticed, and like thousands of other Parisians, I sadly gave up on brasseries as their quality tumbled and their prices soared.

A brasserie revival has been in the making for a longtime, with chef Eric Frechon getting things off to a solid start several years ago when he opened Lazare and the Minipalais. Last year, chef Mauro Colagreco of Miramar opened the excellent Grand Coeur brasserie in the Marais. Now Alain Ducasse has a new-style brasserie slated for  Les Halles, which will open this spring, and chef Thierry Marx has another one in the works, Le Train Blanc, for the Gare du Nord later this year.

In the meantime, however, the only possible brasserie I could pull out of my hat when I had to find a place for a “cheerful and lively meal”  at the request of a friend who was inviting me and Bruno out to dinner as a Christmas present on a Sunday night the weekend before New Year’s was, rather guardedly, La Rotonde. I say guardedly because if it’s a popular table with an intriguing tapestry of Parisians and out-of-towners woven from   politicians, show-biz types, captains of industry, a complete alphabet of the French bourgeoisie, plus the happy shot of Lurex supplied by well-bred wide-eyed tourists who are more welcome in town than ever, the service can be luck of the draw, sometimes charming, sometimes bored and brusque, sometimes a mixture of all three.

Protective of my friend’s purse and pride–she’d never ever have let us snatch up the bill at the end of the meal as would be our wont, I knew the three-course 44 Euro prix-fixe menu offered a reliably good feed for the money and also that there are several pleasant reasonably priced bottles on the wine list, too: Mâcon AOC Domaine du Gros Mont, La Roche Vineuse 2014, 28 Euros and an organic Languedoc AOC Hecht & Bannier 2014, for example. So we went.

Wild boar terrine by Gilles Verot

There was a nice buzzy in the room when we came in on a rainy Sunday night, too, and it was the occupants of the booths around us provided an intriguing array of vignettes to decipher as a backdrop to our conversation as we perused the menu, which was encouragingly dotted with dishes that deserved organic shout-outs for their ingredients or brand-name produce, like a veal chop supplied by butcher Hugo Desnoyer. Here a noticeably affectionate and very attractive middle-aged brother and sister on one side of the table and their scowling silent spouses who refused to look at each other on the other. And in that corner, the older man and cute younger boy, both with the telltale wet hair of a recent shower, and across from them, hmmm, a heart-warming example of a very rare Parisian genus, a middle-aged man-and-wife who were clearly still besotted by each other.

So everyone in the room was hungry, if for different reasons and different delicacies, but to start Judy chose the wild-boar terrine from the excellent nearby charcutier Gilles Vérot, and after a lot of silent hemming and hawing on my part–the odds were extremely good that I’d regret my choice, in much the same way I always regret ordering anything called ‘risotto’ in France–I rolled the dice and order the quenelle de brochet gratinée façon manta (fluffy pike-perch dumplings with crayfish sauce, a specialty of the Rhone-Alps region), because I love them and I wanted something light. Bruno shot me a dubious ‘Do you think that’s a good idea#8217; kind of glance but then he followed suit. Fifteen minutes later, all three of us briefly enjoyed a contented silence as we sampled our starters.

The squirt-bottle graffiti–Why I mean, really. Why#8211;of balsamic vinegar notwithstanding, Judy’s terrine was politely feral and had the thrillingly varied texture–by turns emollient and chunky–that displays the charcutier’s true art. Our quenelles had nothing to do with the air-plane catering style dish I feared, but were airy, gently fishy, and napped in a hot sauce Nantua (crayfish cream sauce pinkened by tomato paste) that was just as comforting as a flannel blanket in a tent on a cold night.

Our main courses were nicely executed vieille France comfort food, too, and this is exactly what we wanted on this particular evening. “Isn’t this nice#8221; said Judy after sampling her sea bass filet on a bed of white-and-wild rice in a sauce of preserved lemons. “It reminds me of the good old days when you could just enjoy your food without talking it or photographing it to death.” I nodded, and waited a few minutes before I started snapping away again.

In the same way that I was skeptical about the quality of my quenelles, I had my doubts about ordering an aioli, cod and boiled vegetables with garlic mayonnaise, a provencal dish that’s one of my favorites, in a restaurant where I suspected the uptight fear of bad breath might cause the kitchen to be too light-handed with the garlic. But no. The little sauceboat of mayonnaise packed just the garlicky punch I needed after several days of extravagant Christmas food, including foie gras, seared scallops in a sauce of bergamot and Cointreau that I invented, and lobster (for Bruno’s birthday dinner on December 25–yes, he’s a Christmas baby) all on the same day, and brought me back down to earth, which is where I like to eat best of all anyway.

I was fascinated by Bruno’s perfectly cooked Scottish salmon in a sauce Genevoise with nicely made potato puree, too, because I couldn’t remember ever having sampled this particular sauce, which was invented by Escoffier. When I asked the waiter about it, I was surprised by how accurate and in-depth his explanation was, to wit, “The sauce is made from sauce Espagnole [one of Escoffier’s five mother sauces, a deeply reduced brown sauce alternately made with veal stock or hambone stock], a fumet made from salmon heads, vegetables, white wine and lots of butter, bien sur.” It actually even tasted as though it had been largely made on the premises, too, although many restaurants buy in their fonds de sauces these days. Oh, and by the way, if you’re thinking, hmmm, that salmon’s a rather grand dish for brasserie grub, you’re right, but La Rotonde is very much of a black silk-stockings (and hidden garter belts) kind of a place.

Only one of us could manage dessert (it wasn’t me), so we shared some profiteroles, filled with good vanilla ice cream and lashed with a sauce of Valrhona chocolate, and they were delicious. Served with charm and a deep professional knowledge of proper table service, this meal was the kind of feed upon which the good reputation of French cooking was originally constructed, because what this food says is that you can eat well even when you’re not interested in making a fuss about it or spending too much money.

La Rotonde, 105 boulevard Montparnasse, 6th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-43-26-48-26, Metro: Vavin. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Prix-fixe menu 44 Euros. Average a la carte 60 Euros. www.rotondemontparnasse.com

The post La Rotonde, Paris | The Pleasures of Simplicity, B+ appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

This past summer I wrote a happy piece for the Wall Street Journal about the quickening bistro revival in Paris. Since then the trend has gained even more momentum and also attracted the attention of other food writers, which is a wonderful thing, because it attests to the enduring popularity and improving prospects of the cooking that’s the ballast of the French kitchen, bistro food, bien sur. Now, with the opening of chef Daniel Rose’s new 29 seater table La Bourse et La Vie, it looks like another nearly extinct Paris restaurant idiom, the bistro de luxe, or an upmarket bistro specializing in la cuisine bourgeoise, is slated for a comeback.

If you’re wondering what the difference is between regular bistro cooking and cuisine bourgeoise bistro cooking, the latter is more refined, delicate and likely to make use of luxurious produce than its ruddier and more rustic gastronomic sibling. A perfect example of la cuisine bourgeoise is the riff on artichoke hearts and foie gras served by Rose’s wife, Marie-Aude Mery, who runs the tiny kitchen at the couple’s new restaurant, which is open for breakfast and lunch as well as dinner.

At a restaurant like Chez Pauline, a bistro de luxe in the rue Villedo, long gone but for years a standard-bearer of la cuisine bourgeoise, along with tables like Pierre au Palais Royal and Le Recamier in the days when it was run by Burgundian chef Martin Cantegrit, the firm fleshy artichoke bottoms would have been filled with foie-gras mousse. The base-note tastes of artichoke with its false sweetness and foie gras with its soft waxiness and barnyard funkiness have always paired beautifully, but what improves the dish at La Bouse et La Vie is that the foie gras is served in generous slabs. This rescues this dish from the somewhat elderly lack of texture from which it suffered in its classic version, and to flirtatiously temper the richness of this plush pairing, it’s accompanied by almost aspic-like shallot vinaigrette, a brilliant detail.

So it’s this type of exceptionally shrewd cooking that makes the new version of La Bourse et La Vie such an exciting addition to the Paris restaurant scene. It’s a sexy little restaurant, too, with a gun-metal gray interior by interior architect Elliott Barnes, former partner of the late Andrée Putman, that highlights its best feature, the original 1820s vintage moldings that surround the mirrors which visually amplify the diminutive space of the former stationer’s shop. A few other details wink in sort of a coy post-modern way at the decorative idioms of the traditional Paris bistro, including a heavy velvet draft-blocking curtain at the door, a zinc bar and the modern globe lamp lighting fixtures designed by Italian designer Gina Sarfati in 1965.

Stepping through the door with Bruno, we ran right into the indefatigably cheerful Daniel Rose, who brought us a giant gougère, or puffy cheese-blazed choux pastry, to nibble on with our glasses of Domaine de la Taille aux Loups sparkling wine, a favorite from the Loire.” And then a bit of banter. “This tastes like it was made with Dorie Greenspan’s recipe,” I said to Daniel. “Yup, I pinched her recipe!” True or false, it was delicious, as was the mackerel poached in white wine, a dainty version of a bistro classic, that Bruno ordered as his starter (I, of course, had the artichoke hearts with foie gras, which were superb).

Continuing to indulge my retro culinary curiosity, I had the filet de canette a l’orange, another gloriously rock-of-ages but recently little seen glory of Gaul, and it was an exquisite bird–tender, juicy, cooked perfectly rare with a light golden crust on its skin and a silken sauce of pan-drippings and stock very discretely flavored with orange (I suspect that finely chopped dried orange zest had been made into an infusion and then added to the sauce at the last minute, lest too much heat dull its quietly refreshing citrus brightness). As profoundly satisfying as the duckling may have been, however, what really raised my pulse rate was the superb accompanying side dish of sautéed ceps and figs, a brilliant garnish for the bird.

Meanwhile, across the table, Bruno was quietly enjoying Rose’s clever contemporary revision of one of the all-time greatest bistro dishes, pot-au-feu. Rose didn’t say so, but his fresh and very inspired take on this cold-weather classic would seem to have been inspired by two other now rarely served but decidedly delicious cuisine bourgeoise dishes, boeuf a la ficelle, or beef poached in bouillon, and quasi de veau bourgeoise, the ‘quasi,’ or top of a leg of veal, simmered in broth with vegetables. In Rose’s dish, the quasi was served rare, with bone marrow, poached flank steak, cabbage, carrots, celery and a crispy galette of calf’s head topped with sauce gribiche, and the bouillon was delicately perfumed with chopped mint and lime zest. This exquisite dish was accompanied by some pommes boulangères–potatoes baked with butter and bouillon on a bed of sautéed onions, that I couldn’t keep my fork out of.

Beyond his talent in the kitchen, what Rose excels at is hospitality, and his desire to spoil and amuse his guests creates an atmosphere here that’s at once confidential, charming, and ur worldly in the most Parisian of ways, no mean feat for a guy who hails from the American Midwest. The charming sommelier and an excellent wine list abetted the pleasure of this feast as well..

When we arrived, Bruno spotted a pretty tarte au citron on the end of the zinc service bar and immediately asked that a portion be set to one side. So when it came to the table, he devoured it so quickly, I had no time to take a picture of it, much less taste it. I believe him when he said it was very good, although he did insist that his own is better, and I can attest to how excellent his lemon tarts always are. And me, in a happy way-we-were sort of haze brought on by the fact that this meal had conjured up memories of favorite meals and dishes I hadn’t though about in a very longtime, I tucked into what just might have been the best crème caramel creme I’ve ever had. It was rich, eggy, creamy and redolent of vanilla, and the only thing that could possibly have made it better was a stronger taste of burned sugar in the sauce, but that’s a personal preference. And in keeping with the don’t ask, don’t tell theme of enjoying the evening rather than trying to safe-crack every recipe, I didn’t ask Rose if this gorgeous custard hadn’t also received a big dollop of crème fraîche in addition to the usual cream and milk, but the fluffy pillowy texture made me think it had.

La Bourse et La Vie is a wonderful restaurant.

La Bourse et la Vie, 12 rue Vivienne, 2nd Arrondissement, Paris, tel. (33) 01-42-60-08-83, Metro: Bourse, Palais Royal-Musée du Louvre, Quatre Septembre. Open Monday-Friday for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Closed Saturday and Sunday, Average a la carte 45 Euros.

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In Paris, the assiduously institutionalised exultation of the city’s past poses the same sort of risk as the sugar water in a bee trap. Like many people who live here, however, I forget how easy it is to succumb to the easy nectar of memory and to gloat over the beauty of a place that has pretty much shunned modernity, or at least inside of Le Peripherique, or the beltway that separates the city from the suburbs it ignores.

So as luck would have it, just before going to dinner at the new version of Le Bon Saint Pourçain, a Saint-Germain-des-Prés bistro I’ve know for years, I’d just read Luke Barr’s fascinating and beautifully written book Provence 1970, which puts the relationships of many legendary American and British food writers under a magnifying glass as they interact during a series of cross-hatching visits to Provence. What especially intrigued me in these pages was that two of my heroes, M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child, were both so wary of becoming trapped by the past. Both women saw that France was changing, in ways both good and bad, and so they sought in their own ways to re-situate themselves in their relationship to Gaul, not loving it less but perhaps not needing it as much as they once had. And both women also felt a powerful eagerness live in the present and discover new things, which struck a chord with me, because so many people, myself included a lot of the time, don’t want Paris to change.

But the city will change, and it does, and often that’s a good thing, especially in the kitchen. And for all of the dozens of very happy meals I’ve had at Le Bon Saint Pourçain through the years, the best dish here was always off-menu, since it was the ineffably charming and rather clubby conviviality of the place. And the food Depending on who was in the kitchen, it was usually just fine, if rarely better than that, or the type of cuisine ménagère (home cooking)  your French maiden aunt might have served you, where the pleasure was derived more from her good intentions than her skills in the kitchen. To be sure, I always liked the leeks in a vinaigrette sauce and the boeuf aux olives (braised beef with green olives), and sometimes there was a good fruit tart to be had as well.

But the best of being here was the banter of François, the beetle-browed owner, and the fun of seeing who else would be there of a given evening, maybe Leslie Caron or Catherine Deneuve or a politician or writer or two, because this was always an ur Saint-Germain-des-Prés kind of place. Happily, David Lanher, the shrewd restaurateur who took this place over, understood all of that, so it was no surprise that he hired a former waiter from the Cafe de Flore to run the dining room, and no one in the dining room did more than bat a complicit eye lash or five the other night when François-Marie Banier came through the door with two friends (and if you don’t know who he is, you can read more about this man, who would have been a wonderful character in a Guy de Maupassant short story, here). I also wouldn’t be surprised if Monsieur Lanher had been behind some last minute accessorising in the dining room as well, see above.

When the waiter came to prop the chalkboard menu up on a chair next to our table, I was extremely curious to see if his next move wouldn’t be to pour us both a welcome glass of white Saint Pourçain wine, since this was one of the hospitality fixtures that distinguished this restaurant for years. Reading my mind, Bruno answered my question. “I don’t think so,” he said, so we had a rather skimpy pour of Petit Chablis instead, and a trip wire went off. As monied and worldly as the regulars at Le Bon Saint Pourçain have always been, they’ve also always been a particularly pennywise crowd who are most expediently seduced by generosity.

So this one little tradition might wisely have been perpetuated, and wines served by the glass should be poured generously. If the menu had very little to do with what had previously been served in this dining room, there was a wink or two at the past, particularly in terms of the marinated leeks in a silky camel-brown Satay like peanut sauce with a coddled egg that I had as my first course. Though it was rather murky looking on a matte black plate, this dish was unexpectedly satisfying–the peanuts actually flattered the vegetable, and everyone loves the drama of slitting open a coddled egg. Bruno’s foie gras with pickled mushrooms was lush, pleasantly salt and peppered, and generously served to boot.

And on a summer night, the discreetly refreshed look of the dining room, with its globe lamps, patches of exposed brick and curtain-less windows (they’d formerly been dressed with the sort of thick lace you might once have seen on your grandmother’s dresser) was appealing in its Gallic simplicity. Our main courses registered as excellent modern French bistro cooking from the moment they arrived at the table, too. My echine de porc (pork shoulder butt) was cooked pink, which is just how I like it in spite of the fact that my mother used to reduce nice pork standing rib roasts to near cinders in the belief that pork had to be nearly incinerated to be safe to eat, and this rosy meat road a bed of sautéed mushrooms and greens lapped with a nicely jus de viande that I’d guess was veal based. Perfectly braised, with a crispy skin, and an identical garnish, Bruno’s free-range chicken was similarly satisfying modern French comfort food, too. And because this was Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where everyone knows the carnal catechism that you should never eat anything starchy or farinaceous in the evening, because it leads, quel horreur, to weight gain, there wasn’t a grain of rice, a potato or a noodle to be found within a block of our table.

As it got later, the early-bird Americans on the terrace left and more and more old regulars arrived in the snug little dining room, eye balling the changes with guarded curiosity, as if still hoping for the best. Since we were at the end of our meal, like the three elegant ladies next to us, we’d spent an evening watching people attempting to diagnose and decide about the change, and every newcomer caused us to exchange fleeting complicit glances. But what consistently brought us to the edge of mirth was the frustration of the regulars at the stingy pours of the wines by the glass–we’d glance at each other, exchange pursed lipped smiles and half nods, and savour this recurring moment, since the few people who still drink in Saint-Germain-des-Prés–so many have lost their toys–are very serious about it.

A good cheese plate and a pleasant modern riff on a baba au rhum (sponge cake with whipped cream and lashings of rum) ended this pleasant if pricey meal, and the grand finale occurred a few minutes later when we were walking to our car and saw Catherine Deneuve peck someone on the cheek before hoping out of his car and immediately lighting a cigarette. Noticing Bruno and me standing there rubber necking, she grinned and said, “Ca va, les garçons#8221; (How’s it going, boys?), which was a rather wonderful conclusion to our Left Bank outing. So the only things that are missing at David Lanher’s reboot of this venerable bistro are the welcome pour of wine, and, I’m afraid, the young eager eyes that would be intrigued by this profoundly Parisian institution but which are very rarely found in gentrified and vaguely geriatric Saint-Germain-des-Prés anymore.

10 rue Servadoni, 6th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-42-01-78-24. Metro: Saint Sulpice or Mabillon. Open for lunch and dinner from Tuesday to Saturday. Closed on Sunday and Monday. Average a la carte 65 Euros.

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They’re few dining rooms in Paris that are so deeply invested with a long and mostly very happy album of memories for me than Lucas Carton, the magnificent landmarked restaurant with a spectacular art-nouveau decor by Louis Majorelle just across the street from the Église de la Madeleine in the heart of the city.

So I was a little anxious when I went to dinner here the other night for the first time in a very long time–my purse doesn’t allow me to be a regular, and ultimately relieved but not surprised to rediscover that young chef Julien Dumas’s cooking makes him a brilliantly worthy successor to Alain Senderens, who had billing as head chef here for almost thirty years, despite the fact that it was his lieutenant Jerome Bactel who’d actually been running the kitchen on a daily basis for a while.

In fact Bruno said that our meal reminded him of his initial experience of Yannick Alleno’s cooking, or a dazzling first encounter with a startlingly talented and rapidly rising young chef, and I quite happily agreed. Dumas is exactly what Lucas Carton needs to remain a relevant and desirable restaurant in Paris in 2015. So ultimately I was able to add another gastronomic sketch to the brief but privileged album I carry around in my head of occasions spent on these premises.

To be perfectly honest, the one that really sticks out in this slender volume of memory is deeply tinted to this day by trauma. When I arrived in Paris from London to work as an editor in the rue Cambon offices of Fairchild Publications, this restaurant was the setting for one of the most excruciating meals I’ve ever had in my entire life. Sifting through the still tender shards of remembrance attached to that evening, I don’t find the name of my host or hostess, but I know it was a Paris fashion designer and that the chic little supper was intended to size me up and ‘welcome’ me to Paris, in that order of importance.

To say that things did not go well that night is a massive understatement. My eight years of French failed me miserably within minutes of being seated between the attache de presse who’d organized the evening and a druggy middle-aged Countess who immediately told that she thought les Americains were “des sauvages” (savages) and who regularly left the table for five minutes or longer to then return with white-powder-rimed nostrils. In retrospect, the least she could have done in those days before I became sensible and settled was to offer to share her loot. In any event, the meal was a horror, and the worst of it was a starter salad, a tumble of pretty little leaves, that looked innocent enough until I noticed a tiny gnarled bird’s leg sticking out of the greenery. This leg was so tiny I couldn’t imagine anyone would actually want to eat it, and I found myself wondering if it might have found its way into my plate by dint of some horrific accident in the kitchen, or maybe it was a practical joke, or maybe….

It was the druggy Countess who see me straight by making me the object of shrieking hilarity for the rest of the meal. “Eeets a delicacy, Alexandre! Un grive, a leeetle wild bird with a good funky taste!” Oh, of course. A good funky taste, well now we’re talkin’. Eh bien sur, I used to see packets of grives all the time at the A & P in Westport, Connecticut when I was a child. Not. So I gnawed on the little nugget of meat on the tortured avian leg, and it to my surprise it was fleetingly delicious, because, well, it had a good funky taste.

Over two decades later, I’m still astonished by the fact that the eleven other people at this table not only did nothing to put me at ease or get to know me better, but actively enjoyed my discomfort and repeatedly maladroit manoeuvres. Walking home, I couldn’t help but thinking of one of my mother’s well-worn anecdotes, which was about a boyfriend from Kansas who accompanied her to a clam bake on the North Shore of Boston one summer night, and after being served his lobster before everyone else, he attempted to open it with a knife and fork like a piece of meat, and, frustrated, said, “This is the toughest lobster I’ve ever eaten.” Everyone else agreed heartily, and then encouraged him to pull the beast apart and crack it up with the lobster-claw-shaped aluminum pincers posed on his napkin. “I only put them out when I know the lobster’s going to be tough,” explained the hostess.

What’s nice today, then, is that Lucas Carton no longer intimidates me. In fact, there’s almost no place left in France that does, since I’d dare to say that I’ve long since cracked the codes of Gallic luxury so thoroughly I’ve actually come full circle and recovered my original innate New England preference for simplicity, which never fails in the kitchen or any other realm of life as far as I’m concerned.

Happily, Julien Dumas, who worked with both Alain Ducasse and Jean-Francois Piege, but whose true gastronomic maitre is Jacques Maximin, one of my favorite French chefs, both for his cooking and his personality, is another acolyte of the late great French food critic Maurice Curnonsky’s dictum that ‘Great cooking is when things taste of what they are.” I first tasted his cooking when he was working at Rech, Alain Ducasse’s seafood brasserie in the 17th Arrondissement, and I was immediately impressed by the delicious gastronomic symmetry of his impressively lucid style.

Much too often the pretentiously named amuse bouches (amuse the mouth, a fancy name for the similarly fancily named hors d’oeuvres) that begin a meal come off more as a fiddly waste of calories than anything that actually provokes pleasure. But not at Lucas Carton, where they do exactly what they’re supposed to do, flirtatiously excite your interest in the meal to come. Dumas’s Parmesan madeleine with citrus rind and deliciously acidulated puree of ‘chou pointu,’ or tender turban-like Pontoise cabbage that’s at its best in the Spring. with match-stick slices of dried mullet were racy little pleasures that couldn’t be dampened even by the rather sullen waitress who brought them to the table.

After a composition of morels and shaved squid that was such a brilliant terre-et-mer (earth-and-sea) pairing that I disregarded my reportorial duties in favor of pleasure, the next course was a luscious lobe of roasted beet-juice lacquered foie gras with roasted beets, beet greens and potato puree. Recourse to the superlative is slippery ice by definition, so I’ll moderate myself and say that I think this was the best foie gras I’ve ever eaten, with a dusting of herbs that included rosemary, plus Maldon salt, and the texture of just set custard.

I hadn’t been to Lucas Carton in such a longtime that I’ve forgotten about the way that meals here are rather insistently trellised to the idea of serving a glass of wine with every dish. I’m not a huge fan of this idea, since I find hoping from on overwhelms the palate and gizzards. That said, the Reisling Kabinett 2007 Piesporter Goldtropfchen Riechsgraf von Kesselstatt from the Moselle in Germany napped the foie gras perfectly by reprising the distant sugar in the beet garnish.

This last remark makes the meal sound awfully serious, and alas, it was, which runs contrary to the reason that most people decide to treat themselves to an expensive meal, which is in the hope of gastronomically amplified pleasure. Unfortunately, French haute cuisine has developed an encrusted, rigid and rather joyless service style that often wilts high spirits instead of teasing them. But hopefully over time the urgency of Dumas’s brilliant cooking will induce a psychic or sociological change in the stiff posturing of the dining room staff.

Dumas is one of the best fish cooks in France, so I was especially curious about the next dish, Whiting with buckwheat. The perfectly cooked filet came encased in a crispy buttery buckwheat crepe in a pool of sauce that tasted like a pil-pil sauce with the addition of buckwheat. It was an elegant and deeply satisfying dish.

Roasted pigeon with a sauce of Sicilian pistachios from Bronte was an inspired idea, too, and Dumas’s perfectly crusted sweetbreads in an sauce of carrot juice and veal stock gentled spiked by mustard seeds marinated in verjus was lusciously earthy.

The La Spinetta Moscato d’Asti served with a dessert of Mara strawberries garnished with jasmine petals, caille, yogurt ice cream and buttery caramelized wafers was a brilliant pairing, too.

Ultimately, this was an excellent meal, which made me eager to go back and try the more affordable menu du march served in the more relaxed dining room upstairs and also the relatively good value lunch menus served in the Majorelle dining room at noon. And since Lucas Carton is now back on my list of special occasion tables both for myself and for anyone who asks, here’s hoping they’ll also soon bite the bullet and remove all and any trace of Senderens wildly ill-considered interior-design attempt to turn one of the world’s most beautiful dining rooms into something trendy. Cooking as good as Dumas’s warrants the head-on beauty of the original room.

9 Place de la Madeleine, 8th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-42-65-22-90. Metro: Madeleine. www.lucascarton.com Menu du Cercle (lunch): 89 et 99 euros. Tasting menu: 179 euros. Average a la Carte: 150 euros. Brasserie le Marché de Lucas (casual dining on the first floor): 45 euros (lunch) et 52 euros (dinner). Closed on Sunday and Monday.

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After I stepped into the vestibule at Le Duc, a long-running seafood house in Montparnasse, a delightfully nostalgia-freighted evening pushed out from the dock the moment I was seated at a corner table in the wood-paneled dining room. With its jaunty nautical decor–the late great French restaurant designer Slavik was surely inspired by one of Gianni Agnelli’s Riva speed boats when he set to work here–and conditionally lordly service, this place is rather like the catch-of-the-day oriented little sister of Le Voltaire, another vintage beau-monde monument of a restaurant on the Left Bank. And like Le Voltaire, it’s a place that not everyone will “get” or like, because it could be accused of being clubby, expensive and old-fashioned.

Indeed it’s all of those things, but l still liked it enormously, and after a superb meal here, I’d rank it right up there with Rech and Dessirier as one of the best seafood restaurants in Paris. But first, back to Slavik and the question of restaurant decor. Before a knock-off version of Jacques Garcia’s Napoleon III bordello style dining room for the Hotel Costes became the new boilerplate for Paris restaurant decors, it was Slavik who ruled the roost of Paris restaurant design, especially in the seventies when he did Chez Georges near the Porte Maillot and L’Européen across the street from the Gare de Lyon. If there was always something a little corny and larger-than-life about Slavik decors, many of them have aged to real charm. Unfortunately, this is also often the very same moment that restaurant owners who dread being called ‘old-fashioned’ dream of gutting their Slavik decor and replacing it with yet another bad version of Garcia’s now also dating look for the Hotel Costes.

Hopefully Le Duc will be spared, because it has a bona-fide retro glamour, and the same might also be said of its clientele, a veritable gratin de Paris that included Alain Minc, Philippe Labro and the Contessa Brandolini the night I was somewhat improbably cast into their midst by the generous dinner invitation of a friend. Recognizing a few famous faces–a political advisor, a writer, and an Italian aristocrat, respectively, momentarily propelled me back to the days when I’d just arrived in Paris and was working as an editor for the American fashion-publishing company that pioneered the modern-day people press. Part of our job while attending fashion shows and other events was to cull as many famous names as possible for later use as seasoning for our reviews. I hated intruding on total strangers to beg a quote, and I hated the fact that these mumblings were awarded so much importance, but against the backdrop of today’s high-velocity celebrity-driven marketing, all of this looks rather quaint in retrospect. The people we stalked in those days had beauty, talent or breeding, or all of the above.

So Le Duc is a bastion of the Parisian old guard, which is sort of ironic given the fact that the original owners, the Minchelli brothers, completely upended traditional French seafood cooking when they hung our their shingle over thirty years ago (the restaurant has since changed owners). The Minchellis were the ones who set French fish cooking on a Zen path, liberating the Parisian catch-of-day from smothering baths in hot cream or too much butter; and when Paul Minchelli wanted to go even further on this path, he went his own way, and first opened a wonderful eponymous restaurant in the 7th Arrondissement before finally ending up with the charming and very good Le 21 in Saint-Germain-des-Prés today.

So now you’ve stepped through the door, and had a cordial but slightly distant welcome at Le Duc, which you find exasperating, and then you’re seated and notice that other tables are receiving better service. This makes you mad, even a tiny bit crazy, because you believe that the restaurant experience should be democratic–to wit, anyone who’s succeeded in making a reservation and who arrives with a valid credit card should receive exactly the same service as anyone else in the room. But the truth is that it doesn’t work this way, and not just at Le Duc, but dozens of other restaurants in not only Paris but New York, London and other cities. And if New Yorkers  have more experience of this conundrum than people from the middle of America, who tend to really take it on the chin, that doesn’t mean they like it either. So here’s the tripwire in this review. If the idea of going to a restaurant that doesn’t mete out exactly the same formulaic service to one and all like an Olive Garden makes you nuts, you might not be happy at Le Duc. This isn’t to say that the service at Le Duc  isn’t good–it is–but rather that it plays quiet favorites with its regulars, because this restaurant spins on the axis of its regulars.

Truth be told, I picked up on all of this while watching the room from a back-to-the-wall seat in a corner table, and it was beginning to rankle a bit, too, but then the food started coming out.

We shared an order of sea-bass carpaccio served with garlic bread toasts and an order of plump Scottish langoustines with mayonnaise, and both were superb. And so they should have been at these prices, but on the other hand, best quality wild (as opposed to the pervasively farm-raised) seafood has become a real luxury. There’s not a lot of it around, there will be even less of it around tomorrow, and it’s complicated to catch and get to market. So it’s expensive. Period, the end. The four langoustines went for 60 Euros ($74), which is very serious money in my book. Worth it Yes, if you have that kind of dough or someone else is buying or even if you’ve saved up your hard earned centimes for a kick-out-the-walls luxury feast that hasn’t been anointed by the Michelin Guide (Isn’t it amazing that the Michelin Guide still serves as the ultimate reference for all things gastronomic in France with so little discussion, even in the increasingly high-dudgeon and sharp-elbowed world of blogging?). These langoustine tails were succulent, redolent of the sea, and perfectly cooked, just begging for a slather of the just-made Piment d’Espelette spiked mayonnaise in a little pot that I’d have wrapped up and taken home had I come to table with some Saran wrap.

Since I’m weary of tasting menus–Hey, chefs, please, oh please let me chose what I want to eat and how I want to eat it without imposing an “experience” or a “concept”–I deeply enjoyed my roasted sea bass with baby clams and an exquisite thyme-flecked beurre blanc. My host’s sole grilled on a salamandre was gently charred marine bliss, too, and I loved our garnishes, too–riz venere (black rice) for me and a silky potato puree for my benefactor.

Both because I live in dread of my sneakily expanding girth and most seafood places don’t do dessert very well, I was thinking of giving the sweet end of the meal a miss. Then a surging feeling of well-being suddenly drove me off the course of prudence. Oh what the hell, I want a baba au rhum, and if it’s not good, I won’t finish it.

But it was, and I did, and I also helped my friend with his millefeuille, which was fait maison (homemade) and excellent. Ultimately, Le Duc is throw back to the days before so many chefs decided that they were more important than their customers–their message, their vision, etc.–and that’s one of many reasons that I enjoyed this place so much. Bien sur, there’s more than a whiff of snobbery in the room, but the only reason you’ll be a dartboard here would be because your indignant behaviour painted a target on your back. So would I go back on my own nickel and without the social shield of accompanying a regular Well, yes, I would, not often, but when wanting a seriously good seafood meal with a bit of pomp, as in pompous, and circumstance, plus a fine show in the room, this would be a perfect choice. It’s so profoundly Parisian, too, that I hope it never changes.

243 Boulevard Raspail, 14th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-43-20-96-30. Metro: Raspail. Open Tuesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner. Closed Sunday and Monday. Lunch menu 55 Euros. Average a la carte 100 Euros. 

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