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

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

Continue reading…

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.

Continue reading…

Most animals hibernate during the winter, but not me. My annual digestive downtime occurs every August during the ten days I spend in a small Catalan beach town. While I don’t actually stop eating, I do look forward to the invigorating simplicity of the food I eat there. To wit, after dining in Paris and many other large European cities all year long for professional reasons, it’s a pleasure to eat pan tomate, the olive-oil-and-garlic anointed tomato-juice smeared toast beloved of the Catalans, to make a whole meal of nothing but clams steamed in a little oil, garlic, parsley and white wine, and eat no dessert more complicated than melon or the succulent peaches that grow in the hills nearby. Stepping to one side and eating simply isn’t only a pleasure, however, but a necessity, because I feel it’s incumbent upon me to sit down to any meal I might write about with a real appetite, sincere enthusiasm, and honest curiosity, because cooking is such hard work that it would entirely unfair to present myself at the table otherwise.

It’s always exciting to return to Paris after this much loved annual break, too, since while I’m away my palate eventually begins to crave food that’s more creative and complex than what I can find in the beach town, and this is why I was looking forward to dinner at A Mere, a contemporary French table that opened a few weeks ago in the gastronomically blossoming 10th Arrondissement, when I went the other night. Bruno was already drinking a nice glass of Austrian Grüner Veltliner, a preview of the excellent wine list created by Mikaël Grou, a sommelier who had previously worked at Le V at the Hotel George V, when I arrived. “We’re back to menu haiku again,” he said, pushing the nine-entry menu–three starters, three mains, three desserts–across the bare wood table to me. By this he meant that the dishes were somewhat obliquely described as just a list of three ingredients.

I knew what he meant, which is the rather tedious tendency of many young Paris chefs to mystifying menu minimalism,  but in this instance, I wasn’t bothered, because this verbal feint was actually pretty accurate when our first courses arrived. The only important ingredient that hadn’t been listed in my starter described as ‘Tomatoes Green Zebra, Lieu, Cassis” (Green Zebra tomatoes, yellow pollack, currants) was faiselle, or the softy runny white cheese that provided the lactic base backdrop that allowed the varying tones of acidity in the other ingredients to become so interesting. The variety of texture in this dish made it exciting, too, since the currant skin and seed brought more mouth feel to the raw marinated fish and the pulpy tomatoes. Lemon balm leaves and flowers (Melisse, in French) provided some puckishly pertinent punctuation to this dish, too.

Continue reading…

I’ve been in love with Brittany for nearly thirty years, which isn’t surprising, because I grew up in New England. From my very first visit, this friendly delightfully shaggy and craggy green Celtic province of western France that’s lapped on its back and belly by the Atlantic Ocean has always struck me as an even better version of my own much loved home turf. Why? Well, the food, among other things.

If I’ve always loved the tourist Brittany of crepes, oysters, langoustines and homard (lobster) a l’amoricaine, over the course of the decades I’ve lived in France, Brittany has become one of France’s foremost gastronomic regions. Today it rivals, maybe even trumps, parts of Gaul with more established and deeply rooted gastronomic cultures, places like Burgundy and Provence, for example.

These were the thoughts that were bobbing around in my head as we greedily scarfed down a half dozen wild oysters on the edge of the port of Cancale before heading to a superb Sunday lunch at La Table de Breizh Café on a beautiful recent summer day. Since I first dined here a year and a half a go, Japanese chef Raphaël-Fumio Kudaka’s restaurant has become one of my favorite tables, and I was looking forward to having a meal here with Bruno, who loves Breton produce and Japanese cooking as much as I do.

Arriving, we were the first customers of that Sunday lunch service, so we eschewed the Japanese style tables, and opted to sit at the counter where we could watch Kudaka and his team at work and also enjoy the sweeping views and salty breezes of the aquamarine-colored Bay of Mont Saint Michel , which was dotted with exposed oyster parks at low tide.

Since there are only two tasting menus available here on Saturday and Sunday, 75 Euros or 135 Euros, it was easy enough to make a choice. With a train ride back to Paris before us after lunch, and having lavishly well eaten during the previous days, we went with the former, to which we added a tempura course at a supplement. That taken care of, I was able to explain the genesis of this restaurant to Bruno.

After hotel school in Dinard, Breton Bertrand Larcher worked in Switzerland and then moved to Tokyo, where he opened that city’s first Breton crêperie in 1996. Eventually he returned to France and opened crêperies in Cancale, Saint-Malo and Paris that rebooted a genre made stale by tourist induced mediocrity by using seriously good quality produce, much of it organic, and making his crêperies into little showcases for the superb foods of his home province. When Larcher met Raphaël-Fumio Kudaka, who had previously worked with Olivier Roellinger in Cancale, they decided to open a restaurant where Kudaka would cook his own very personal Breton-Japanese cuisine.

Continue reading…

Terroirs d’Avenir boutique

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

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

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

Continue reading…

When summer blooms, the urge to dine outdoors sweeps through many major western cities, but perhaps nowhere is the choice of an al fresco dining venue more fraught than it is in Paris. Why? Landing a choice fresh-air table is a great Parisian seasonal game. If anyone can decide to sit down on one of the city’s hundreds of cafe terraces and order one of the worlds best summer meals–a glass of rose, an omelette and a green salad (more often mediocre than not, alas, in the French capital these days, since cafes generally contend with a clientele that’s even more centime-sensitive than any fast-food restaurant. To wit, break an invisible mental price barrier–most recently fifteen Euros, now twenty—and your clientele starts melting; what this means, of course, is constant cost-cutting in the kitchen), not everyone has the well-filled purse and social wiliness required to bag a table at a place like Le Restaurant du Palais-Royal, which occupies a corner of the Palais Royal and possesses a small seasonal terrace which overlooks not only the magnificent arcades and facades of this former royal residence in the heart of Paris, but its the stunningly beautiful gardens as well.

So fiercely in demand are these tables of a given summer day when the weather is good, that Parisians have long ignored this restaurant’s formerly uneven cooking and eye-watering prices. Now, though, with the arrival of a new chef, Philip Chronopoulos, 28, ex L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon, Le Restaurant du Palais-Royal not only offers an ethereally charming setting for a meal but some superb contemporary French cooking as well.

Artichokes poivrade at Le Restaurant du Palais-Royal

Just for the back story, Paris’s love of fresh-air dining in beautiful bucolic venues was born of the romantic movement in the 18th century and flowered during the 19th century, when many of the city’s then newly built parks included a restaurant or two. Then as an ancient Gallic fear of draughts–courants d’air, which were thought to be cause colds or that vast category of diseases once known as ‘fevers’ faded with access to better medicine, improved urban hygiene and new ideas about health which held that fresh air and sunshine was good for you, picnicking became a popular past-time and guinguettes, or open-air pleasure barges, came to line stretches of the Seine and the Marne. Cafe terraces long the broad avenues and boulevards that Haussmann drove through the city became a fixture of Parisian life, too.

Continue reading…