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

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On the eve of a new year, please receive this post as an expression of my gratitude for the huge privilege of good health, lots of travel to slack my insatiable curiosity and discover so many wonderful new chefs, kitchens, and foods, and also the pleasure of writing for so many superb publications. Among ever so many good ones–and believe me, I count my blessings, these were my ten favorite meals in 2015.

France

Le Crouzil, Plancoët

In Brittany, the pretty little town of Plancoët is best known for its mineral-water, which shares a name with the town and displaces national brands on the tables of the proudly locavore province’s best tables, like the exceptionally pleasant Le Crouzil. This family owned Michelin one star table is one of Brittany’s best tables, and it shows off how French culinary tradition is so artfully perpetuated from one generation to the next, since Maxime Crouzil has subtly brightened and lightened the excellent dishes once prepared by his father. Le Crouzil is a great lunch destination during a tour of Brittany, and if the menu evolves according to the seasons, the 60 Euro ‘Elegance’ prix-fixe is consistently one of the best buys in France. Highlights of a recent meal included an hors d’oeuvre of grilled rouget (red mullet) on a bed of spelt risotto in a green apple and herb jus and a perfect sole meunière with roasted baby potatoes and sautéed mushrooms. 20 Rue des Quais, Plancoët, Tel. (33) 02-96-84-10-24, www.crouzil.com Lunch for two $140.

http://www.crouzil.com

JY’s, Colmar

The best destination for an overnight trip out of Paris this winter is the lovely old town of Colmar in Alsace. That’s because the superb Musée Unterlinden has just reopened after a major expansion and renovation (you can read more about that in a little article I wrote for the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/t-magazine/travel/colmar-france-museum-makeover.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ft-magazine&action=click&contentCollection=t-magazine&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&content Placement=2&pgtype=sectionfront):  and also because even with a Michelin star chef Jean-Yves Schillinger’s restaurant JY’s is one of the most underrated tables in France. My blog post on this excellent restaurant:  https://www.alexanderlobrano.com/restaurant-reviews/jys-a-and-wistub…-visit-to-colmar/ 17 Rue de la Poissonnerie, Colmar, Tel. (33) 03-89-215-360. Open Tuesday to Saturday for lunch and dinner. Prix-fixe menus 43 Euros, 64 Euros, 92 Euros, average a la carte 100 Euros. www.jean-yves-schillinger.com 

Paris

Le Grand Restaurant

Chef Jean-François Piège’s new restaurant launches a whole new era in French haute cuisine cooking. Here’s what I had to say about it in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/05/t-magazine/paris-restaurants-new-fall-menus.html 7 rue d’Aguesseau, 8^th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-53-05-00-00. Menus à 80 € (lunch), 110, 190 et 245 €. A la carte 180-200 €. www.jeanfrancoispiege.com

L’Amarante

This excellent bistro in a quiet side street behind the Bastille heralds a delicious renewal of the traditional bistro in Paris. You can read more about it on this blog – https://www.alexanderlobrano.com/restaurant-reviews/lamarante-chef-christophe-philippes-superb-new-bistro-b/ – and also in an article I did on the revival of Paris bistros for the Wall Street Journal: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-new-paris-bistros-1431624971

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In France, the cold weather always makes me hungry for Alsatian food, which I recently satisfied with two excellent meals at JY’s and Wistub Brenner during an overnight trip to Colmar. With the reopening of its superb Musée Unterlinden, which houses the magnificent Issenheim altarpiece in a medieval chapel that was once part of a 13th century convent, Colmar has to be the best weekend away this winter (you can read what I wrote about the newly expanded museum here). If you visit before December 31, 2015, you’ll also have the pleasure of the city’s five Christmas markets, which sell festive goods like Christmas tree ornaments but also beautifully made metal toys, wooden housewares, jam and other preserves, and the raw-milk munster cheese and smoked marinated pork loin that I bought at the Geismar stand in the Marché de l’Ancienne Douane on a refreshingly brisk Sunday afternoon when I’d walked over to have a look at the museum before a guided visit the following morning.

That evening, I decided I’d put the holiday throngs at arm’s length by having dinner at JY’s, the Michelin one star restaurant that is probably the best restaurant in Colmar. It occupies a very pretty old half-timbered house on the banks of the Lauch river, which would have you expecting a sort of Hansel & Gretel decor once you get inside. Instead, chef Jean-Yves Schillinger, a native of Colmar who lived and cooked in New York City for several years, opted to create a sleek open kitchen and a relaxing streamlined sort of modern lounge-bar look for his restaurant. I hadn’t been here for a very longtime, so I came to the table hungry, curious and already knowing what I would order, since I delight in the voyeurism of stalking a menu online before I actually arrive at a restaurant. The marinated salmon I’d already picked out was superb, too, and came with enlivening garnishes of horseradish cream, diced beets and cucumbers, rye bread crumbs, mustard cress, and little dots of pleasantly puckery lemon curd.

On a rainy Sunday night, there was something hugely pleasant and peaceful about sitting by myself (I almost wrote, ‘alone,’ but then realized this word unfortunately has a melancholy ring to it for most people) at a large table spread with a crisp white cloth and being a spectator to both what was going on in the open kitchen and the tables that surrounded me on. Nearby, the conversation of a well-heeled foursome see-sawed between the recent French elections and plans for various winter vacations (Megeve, Mauritius–Colmar is a very bourgeois sort of town). There were also two deuces, one a contagiously jolly British husband and wife who were very much enjoying their wine, and the other, an older French pair who seemed to have exhausted all possibilities for conversation many years ago and so studiously avoided each others eyes. I often found the woman looking at me during the course of my meal, and after sending three polite smiles her way, she finally responded with a little grin that sent a blaze of color up her cheeks.

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When I asked chef Kevin d’Andréa why he and business partner and fellow chef Thibault Sombardier had chosen the Belleville district of Paris as the location for their excellent new bistro Mensae, he said, “The neighborhood is really happening right now.” And for better or worse, it is. In fact this old working-class neighborhood in northeastern Paris where Edith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier were born is changing so quickly it’s inducing emotional and sociological vertigo in many longtime residents, like the delightful and sublimely talented chef Raquel Carena of Le Baratin, for example (for more on Mme. Carena’s feelings on the subject, see here).

City planners regularly ignore or underestimate the impact that restaurants can have on the health and evolution of an urban neighborhood. The first example that always comes to my mind is Danny Meyer‘s Union Square Cafe in New York City, since it both anticipated and accelerated the gentrification of a rundown, crime-ridden part of Manhattan when it opened in 1985. Ironically enough, Le Chapeau Melon and Le Baratin may have both had the same seminal impact on Belleville, too. To judge from the comments some people leave about the neighborhood on TripAdvisor, Belleville still elicits a sort of ‘Lions-and-tiger-and-bears, oh no!’ reaction from the world’s well-heeled suburbanites, and the first but rarely only time these people ever set foot in the area is to eat at these restaurants. The same thing is going on in New York City’s Harlem today, too.

Even with the soft French economy, the irrevocable mill of the real-estate speculation that leads to disruptive renovation continues to churn through what remains of those districts of Paris that once housed the city’s working classes, who are now gradually being expelled to the modern suburbs on the other side of the peripherique, the beltway that constitutes the rather constricting collar of the French capital. It’s the same everywhere, too: living in the city has become a privilege. And who can blame the young bobo couples who prefer good architecture, a strong sense of place and history, urban liveliness and diversity and great food to the murky blandness of most suburbs (I speak from experience, too, since I grew up in suburban Connecticut and told my mother as a nine-year-old that I hated living in a ‘melted city,’ which is how I perceived of our suburb, and would move to New York City, where my much envied cousins lived, as soon as I could; and I did).

Et donc à table, since the Latin word for table is mensa and the one that D’Andréa and Sombardier have created is very good indeed. Arriving, it presents an unexpectedly polished, almost television-studio perfect face to the world, with a service bar of recycled wood, ecru walls, suspension lamps, plank floors, a set of copper cookware on one wall and shelves filled with appetizing jars of preserved mushrooms, fruit and vegetables. So somehow it’s not surprising that the very experienced and media savvy D’Andréa and Sombardier were both finalists on the predictably noisy and not very convincingly gastronomic French television cooking show “Top Chef.”

Happily, however, the meal we had the other night was just about as many light years from a TV dinner as you could possibly get. This kitchen is very serious about its sourcing, always a good sign, with vegetables coming from the Bretonne produce princess Annie Bertin and Joël Thiébault, Armara for fish, Hugenin and Les Boucheries Nivernaises for meat, and Lyon’s La Mère Richard for cheeses (insofar as this last supplier is concerned, I detect that quality has been slipping since the business was bought by a company in Normandy). The menu is intelligently constructed with an appealing assortment of plates to share–frogs’ legs sautéed in garlic and parsley, charcuterie from Sibilia in Lyon, and Basque style squid, then five starters, five main courses, and three desserts.

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Oyster in kiwi juice

An intriguing if imperfect recent meal at the new version of Les Fables de la Fontaine, an expensive Michelin starred fish house founded by chef Christian Constant in its previous incarnation, made me more wiltingly aware of the pernicious effects of listification (if I might invent, I think, a new word) on food writing and the restaurant world than ever before. To wit, if you look at almost any of the lists of the top 50 or top 100 restaurants in the world that are out there, and there are more than you can count, you’ll find Paris invariably does rather poorly in these rankings.

But what does this really mean? That Paris chefs and restaurants are less interesting or innovative than those in other cities? Well, unfortunately that is the take away from these lists, when the reality is that Paris has never been as gastronomically exhilarating as it is today. Why? The city is brimming with new talent from all over the world, and the whole experience of a French meal is being more intensely and incisively scrutinized, tweaked, revised and reinvented than at any time since the last raft of great Gallic chefs, i.e. people like Michel Guérard or Roger Vergé, came on the scene in the early seventies. The new chefs of Paris are obsessively interested in good produce and healthy eating, too.

@AdineMonnier

This demure renaissance ranges from the emergence of a new generation of star chefs like David Toutain (Restaurant David Toutain), Bertrand Bertrand Grébaut (Septime), and Jean-François Piège (Le Grand Restaurant), to the fact that there isn’t a neighborhood in the city that doesn’t have a constellation of small excellent and intelligently inventive new tables, or places like A Mere in the 10th Arrondissement, Le Servan in the 11th Arrondissement (both reviewed on this site) or, somewhat surprisingly, Les Fables de la Fontaine in the 7th Arrondissement.

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Up in Menilmontant, the over-night success of the oddly named Dilia, a new bistro serving stiffly priced prix-fixe menus of contemporary Italian cooking, offers proof that a strong whiff of La Vie Boheme remains irresistible to the world’s style setters. Occupying the same simple little neighborhood tavern that formerly housed Michael Greenwold and Simone Tondo’s Roseval, Dilia has become every bit as much of a modish address as its predecessor since it opened a few weeks ago.

The nervy contemporary Italian cooking of chef Michele Farnesi, who previously cooked at Pierre Jancou’s restaurant Heimat, a place that’s never really caught on, is very good, too. But during a recent dinner here with Bruno and another Parisian couple, it was apparent that most of the people in this small and rather cramped dining room with plank floors, bare white walls and zero décor beyond the light fixtures, weren’t in the room because of the food, but because they’d heard or read somewhere that it was the place to be.

Such is the immediacy of the world’s gastronomic media these days, in fact, that the gas has rarely been turned on more than once or twice at any half-decent new Paris restaurant before it becomes fodder for the insatiable maw of media, more multifaceted than ever in this world of blogs and user-driver or crowd-sourced restaurant sites than ever before. This rabid appetite for the new is wonderful in many ways, because it demonstrates just how deeply engaged by good food a huge swathe of the general public in every country in the world has become, but on the other hand, its king or queen-making powers are frequently deleterious to fragile, newly born restaurants.

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