Though Gare au Gorille is both a bad pun** and the title of a 1952 song by French musician Georges Brassens, what you really need to know is that it’s also the name of a charming and very good new bistro in the Batignolles district of the 17th Arrondissement in Paris. And that this engaging address comes with an impressive pedigree  which really delivers, since chef Marc Cordonnier was formerly Bertrand Grébaut’s sous-chef at Septime, where his business partner and good-natured maitre d’hotel Louis Langevin was sommelier and picked up the relaxed but gracious serving style created at that restaurant by Théo Pourriat. Finally, if you have any interest in dining here any time soon, it might be a good idea to take a pause and pick up the phone, since it’s very quickly become almost as popular was Septime itself. Be forewarned that they don’t answer during serving hours, which can make it even more of a vexing challenge to snag a table here, too..

Having persisted, I bagged a table and found myself walking up the rue de Rome on a rainy night to meet Bruno for dinner. Despite its grand name, this street parallels the broad, deep, stone-lined train cut that leads into the Gare Saint Lazare, and several times I stopped to watch the wonderful urban spectacle created by an arriving or departing train. Since every lit window in every train car framed a miniature portrait on someone on a journey, there was something winsomely fascinating about these metropolitan film strips, which also brought Eadweard Muybridge to mind. Many people seem to find this scenery a bit drab, but not me. Instead, I found myself envying the people who occupied a high apartment with a large artist’s studio window overlooking the tracks, since the promise of travel, the fact of travel has been such a life long passion of mine. With no train ticket in my pocket that night, I was, however, looking forward to a good meal, but found myself vaguely wondering if this popular new spot would be one of those places where I’d encounter a display of bored and sort of slatternly hauteur from the young staff for being fifteen minutes late.

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After working for twelve years in Barcelona, Parisian-born chef Ludovic Dubois, son of the distinguished fromagere Martine Dubois, has returned to Paris and opened Les Poulettes Batignolles. It’s a good-looking modern bistro in a quiet side street with a very appealing Catalan inflected contemporary menu. “I really like the way the Catalans marry seafood and meat,” says Dubois, who runs the kitchen while his Catalan wife Judith Cercos, former sommelier at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Barcelona, supervises the dining room and excellent wine list. “I also developed an appreciation of arroz (rice), in all its many possible incarnations while living in Catalonia, an experience that tutored me in the Mediterranean palate,” adds the amiable Dubois, who apprenticed with Jacques Cagna and Michel Rostang before going off to Spain, where he cooked at the El Palace Hotel, among other kitchens.

Going to meet Marie, the lovely friend who tipped me off to this new address, for dinner on a frosty early winter night, I found myself thinking about how much I like Les Batignolles, a dense village-like neighborhood in the 17th arrondissement that only became part of Paris by decree of Napoleon III in 1860 and which is bisected by the train cut going into the Gare Saint Lazare. The old train yards at the north end of the neighborhood were intended to become the site of the Olympic village, had Paris’s bid for the 2012 games succeeded. Instead, they’re being redeveloped into a new urban neighborhood centered on a large garden named in honor of Martin Luther King. What will doubtless change this part of the city a lot is the arrival of all the courts now found on the Ile de la Cité in a new set of buildings, La Cité Judiciaire, which will open in 2017. For the time being, though, it’s a companionable and unpretentious old Paris neighborhood with a real vie de quarter, or neighborhood life, and with its chic pair of teal blue dining rooms, retro lighting fixtures, warm friendly service, and interesting menu, Les Poulettes Batignolles has immediately become a local hit with an enthusiastic following of regulars.

Since Marie once lived in Barcelona, and I’ve spent a lot of time there through the years and it’s one of my favorite cities, it was fun to discover the original but subtle cooking of Dubois and decipher the Catalan influences in various dishes. The Catalan love of seafood–Barcelona is still going mad for sushi and ceviche–was beautifully expressed by an impeccably fresh sea bass tartare seasoned with seaweed and garnished with several types of fish eggs, while the artichoke hearts and salad leaves that came with a coddled egg in bread crumbs with tartare sauce–a perfect tapas sort of dish–reminded me of the tidy lovingly tended vegetable farms seen from the airport train that still fill the flat fertile plains between the city and its airport. This proximate patchwork of farms also explains why the produce in Barcelona is so good. In Paris, however, it comes from the rue de Levis market street where Dubois does his shopping every morning. “My cooking is completely market-driven, so I really need to see and smell and touch the produce myself. It just wouldn’t work for me to be supplied by Rungis (the big wholesale market outside of Paris, bien sur),” said the chef. One way or another, I’m a hopeless sucker for tartare sauce, especially when it’s homemade–this might be explained by the fact that I liked this condiment as much if not more than the fried-clam strips once sold by Howard Johnson’s, a once-upon-a-time sincere Boston-based restaurant chain specializing in respectable quality American comfort food.What Howard Johnson’s never had, however, was the rich, melted-in-your-mouth jamon, or ham, which melded this dish together with a plucky porcine punch. With the possible addition of some good Cabrales, or Spanish blue cheese, I’d happily eat this perfectly pitched umami-rich soft ball for lunch everyday for the rest of my life.

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Yannick Alléno @ Geoffroy de Boismenu

Please note: This restaurant has now been renamed as Alleno Paris; it was awarded three stars in the 2015 edition of the Michelin Guide to France.

When chef Yannick Alléno  turned on the gas at Alleno Paris, formerly known as the Pavillon Ledoyen, on July 1, 2014, it was poignantly apparent to all early visitors to his new restaurant that he was exultantly relieved to be cooking again. After all, he’d been without a Paris kitchen of his own for over a year and a half since January 2013 when he left Le Meurice, the opulent dining room at the Hotel Le Meurice where he’d won three Michelin stars. And for anyone who’s known him as long as long as I have–we first met after the excellent dinner at the Hotel Scribe in 1999 that pricked my curiosity about who’d cooked it–he’d seemed a bit at loose ends during the well-earned sabbatical he’d claimed for himself after a decade as chef at Le Meurice. The reason is that despite some reasonably successful efforts to coin Alléno as a celebrity chef, he’s still much more of a feet-on-the-ground cook’s cook than he is anything else. Or at least for the time being anyway, although I very much doubt the world will ever bear witness for the full Kardashianization of Yannick Alléno. It’s just not his style.

If Alléno backed away from his job at Le Meurice, however, it was both because he needed a physical and creative respite from the ardors of running the huge culinary plant of a major Paris luxury hotel, but also, I think, because of an inchoate ambivalence about the way in which his job duties were evolving beyond anything to do with making a perfect beurre blanc, to say nothing of inventing a new recipe. In this eccentrically mannerist age where the trope of celebrity dictates that it’s more important to be talked about than to actually even have anything interesting or important to say, much less a real talent, the metier of Parisian chef has been awkwardly caught up in the nets of celebrity and the social media that fuels it, too. Suddenly, just being a great chef is no longer enough to land a spot running one of the most glamorous dining rooms in Paris. No, now you also have to be a persuasively charming, seductive, photogenic media personality to boot. You should also show up as often as possible in the people pages of the glossy magazines and beam from the screens of high-traffic websites. You should pen opulent cookbooks, get a TV gig, make your own wine, endorse all sorts of probable and half-probable products, and think of dozens of reasons every month that you and your restaurant warrant a sound-bite or a Tweet. A Kim Kardashian shaped cupcake? Hey! That’s a great idea!

The problem here, of course, is that many of the men and women who are drawn to this physically punishing and relentlessly hard-working metier do so out a real dedication to their craft rather than as a vehicle to fame. To be sure, almost none of them would fly-swat a Michelin star or three if it came their way, but the passion that drives a love of bone-achingly hard work and constant repetitive stress day in and day out isn’t a desire for creative expression, although this certainly becomes part of the metier of any fully evolved chef. Instead, it’s a behind-closed-doors love of great produce, the precision of culinary chemistry, the camaraderie of the kitchen and a collective quest for excellence that begins all over again everyday when the lights go on in the kitchen. This is the world that beckoned to Yannick Alléno as a shy fifteen-year-old apprentice to chef Gabriel Biscay at the Hotel Royal Monceau, and it remains beloved ballast of his career in the same way that it does that of any seriously talented chef.

Dining room at Ledoyen @ Philippe-Vaurès

So it was exciting to go off to Ledoyen on a soft summer night for dinner with a very witty and food-loving colleague from London. For openers, I couldn’t wait to see what Alleno would be up to, but I was also eager because Ledoyen is one of the loveliest restaurants in Paris. Just a few minutes from the heaving traffic circle that is the Place de la Concorde–it suddenly strikes me that this beautiful but automotively encumbered square offers up an obvious opportunity to retool Paris towards being a greener and more pedestrian friendly city in the 21st century, since it’s an absurd extravagance that the whole square is given over to cars–Ledoyen is a romantic white wedding cake of a building tucked away in the gardens at the bottom of the Champs Elysees that offers a surprisingly instant respite from the aural and mental roars of city life without leaving town.

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On my way to dinner at Le Frank, chef Jean-Louis Nomicos’s very good new restaurant at La Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, I found myself musing on museum dining.

I’ve always had a soft spot for museum restaurants, even if many of them have never previously been very good, because they were such a relief from the long studious hours I was required to spend gazing at saints with arrows sticking out of their sides or fleshy ladies being chased by a satyr or other paintings in the museums I was taken to in various East Coast cities as a boy by my well-meaning mother and grandmother. It’s not that I didn’t like looking at the paintings, but rather that we always stayed much too long, and that the real treat during any visit to the city–mostly New York, but sometimes Boston or Philadelphia–was going to a restaurant. On rainy or snowy days, of which there were many, the ladies in charge often opted for the museum restaurant, however.

So I have vivid memories of the mediocre fried chicken, meat loaf and other hot food served at the now long vanished cafeteria at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. If the food was as dull as the invariably wet-from-the-dishwasher fiberglass tray on which it was pushed down the rails, the restaurant itself was exquisitely glamorous. It was styled like a Roman villa around a central atrium with a big fountain ornamented with verdigris bronze figures, and it used to prick my imagination with yearning to live like an ancient Roman rather than as a boy in a colonial house in suburban Connecticut.

“I bet the Romans didn’t eat meat loaf,” I once said to my grandmother, and my assertion disguised, sort of, as a question elicited a puzzled look from her.

“Well–probably not. But if they did, I expect they’d have covered it with garum,” she said, and puffed her Parliament.

“What’s garum?”

“A fish sauce the Romans used to fancy. I expect it tasted a bit like a cross between A1 Sauce and Worcestershire sauce with a lot of anchovy paste.”

Be that as it may, even garum probably couldn’t have rendered the Met’s gray meat loaf palatable, and these feelings of general dubiousness towards museum food remained my a priori until very recently.

Then several years ago, I had a very good meal at the restaurant at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain when it was run by Basque chef Martin Berasategui (it no longer is). This was followed by an excellent lunch at Danny Meyer’s The Modern restaurant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and then a terrific feed at M. Wells Dinette at the MoMA P.S. 1 in Long Island City, New York. Recently I read that chef Michel Bras is running the restaurant at the new Musée Pierre Soulages in Rodez, too.

The museum restaurant, once the last resort dining choice for grandmothers with their grandsons on rainy days, is clearly on a roll.

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With the opening of Restaurant 52 Faubourg Saint Denis, a studiously hip bistro with non-stop service, shrewd restauranteur Charles Compagnon continues to define the emerging culinary style of Paris’s rapidly gentrifying 10th Arrondissement.

This new place, which occupies a former butcher shop on the Faubourg Saint Denis neighborhood’s busiest shopping street, expands on the style he originally launched when he took over L’Office, the still very good modern French bistro that brought an initial gust of hip into a quiet faded residential corner of the quarter then dominated by Kosher bakeries and butchers. Next Compagnon opened Le Richer, a sort of a Parisian version of a New York coffee shop cum London gastro pub a few blocks away, and now with 52 Faubourg Saint Denis he’s built out his popular formula even more concisely.

In much the same way that New York based restauranteur Danny Meyer’s Union Square Cafe in New York City defined the gastronomic personality of the Union Square neighborhood when it was in the earliest stages of its now fulsomely achieved gentrification, Compagnon is framing a distinctive restaurant idiom for the 10th Arrondissement.

It’s a real winner, too. This place has the same in-the-raw industrial chic as the other two addresses, with a polished cement floor, walls that are still attractively scared by the now exposed grout of the demolished tile work of the butcher shop which formerly occupied the premises, and a an eye-catching bar where you linger over a drink or have a proper meal. Compagnon lived in New York–where he worked at the James Beard Foundation–for several years, and he has proved to be a good student of the myriad styles of casual eating venues that make that city so interesting.

To wit, Compagnon has gambled that young Parisians will like the idea of a relaxed friendly no-reservations-required restaurant with healthy, affordable, interesting contemporary cooking as much as New Yorkers or Londoners do. And they do. But this address is also a really appealing address for visitors to Paris, since it’s open daily from 8am to midnight–they serve light eats outside of the main lunch and dinner serving hours, the prices are relatively reasonable, and it offers a keyhole view of one of Paris’s most interesting neighborhoods right now.

The menu is short–four starters, four mains, four desserts–but the prevailing gastro gestalt is modern French comfort food, and this the kitchen does very well indeed.

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On the eve of my California book tour, I’ve been thinking about all the good news from Paris I’ll have to share, since this year’s rentrée (Fall season) has seen so many superb openings, with the best new restaurant among them being Restaurant Pages, a handsome new bistro near the Arc de Triomphe by Japanese chef Ryuji Teshima. I had already been to Porte 12 and Neige d’Ete, the two other stand out newcomers, before I went to dinner at Pages. To be perfectly honest, I arrived for this meal feeling a little weary of the trope of new restaurants in Paris these days: a no-choice tasting menu, a ‘suggested’ glass of wine to accompany every course, acolyte-in-a-temple style service, and produce from the same handful of suppliers. Even if it’s excellent food, there is something wilting and a little unnerving about immediately being able to identify the wares of Terroirs d’Avenir, Annie Bertin, Joel Thiebault, Hugo Desnoyer and other hyped brand-name suppliers of the new generation of ‘artiste’ chefs who are doing what I would describe of as a sort of precious cuisine Angelique (Angelic cooking style), or one that’s very delicate and sort of aggressively innocent.

Still, despite its odd location–the 16th Arrondissement, never a lively or particularly interesting part of the city, which has now gone rather slack due to the palpable exodus of affluent Parisians who’ve decided they just can’t bear to let the government skim them so deeply anymore–this restaurant seduced me the moment I walked through the door. It’s beautiful. Aside from the exposed stone at the back of the room, the walls are white, there’s an immaculate open kitchen up front, tables are comfortably spaced and the lighting from black matte re-editions of lamps that are a famous sixties French design is gentle and beautiful. This initial impression of an alluring serenity was immediately enhanced by the elegance and graciousness of the all Japanese serving staff.

“One of the things I love best about the Japanese is that they’re able to be proud and humble at the same time,” said Bruno, a spot-on observation, since the humility of the serving style here was deeply nourishing and revivifying–you felt like a welcome and respected guest–even before any food came to the table. That said, our waitress, an attractive young Japanese woman who’d grown up in Virginia before going to university in France, seemed to have drunk the whole old-school boilerplate of now very out-dated mannered French formality right down to the horrendous phrases, “Ca vous a plu?” and “Je vous souhaite une tres bonne continuation.” This latter phrase has always puzzled me, because it sounds more like something you’d say to a motorist rather than someone eating a meal. Despite the socio-psychological corset she’d laced herself into, she was charming, and winsomely excited about both the restaurant and chef Teshima’s cooking. It was from chatting with her that we learned that Teshima has previously cooked at Passage 53, Alain Senderens and In de Wulf in Belgium. As impressive as these credentials might be, what impressed me most, however, was that Teshima has also been an apprentice to butcher Hugo Desnoyer, the best meat master in Paris.

Even if I hadn’t known about the Desnoyer connection, I might have guessed it when the first course of our meal arrive, a pretty composition–almost none of the young chefs in Paris actually ‘cook’ anymore, rather they layer flavors and textures in artful compositions–of candy beets, fresh coarsely chopped veal tartare, and a gentle but bracing anchovy sauce. It was an exquisite and very sexy way to begin a meal, since the carefully dosed presence of the potent little fish playfully flattered the baseline minerality of the meat.

Next, an exquisite little miniature: a plump perfectly flash-fried langoustine escorted by shavings of celery bulb that had been baked in a crust of bread and a silky yuzu spiked sabayon. This dish demonstrated a stunning mastery of technique and timing, but it was with the next one where Teshima’s signature started to become apparent.

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