Adjacent to the Cirque d’Hiver (Winter Circus), a handsome 1852 arena between the Place de la Republique and the Bastille, the Clown Bar has always been one of the most charming places in Paris for a quick bite and a glass of wine. Now under new management–a dream team that includes Sven Chartier and Ewen Lemoigne from the restaurant Saturne, plus Xavier Lacaud, it’s suddenly better than it’s been for many years. They recruited talented Japanese chef Sota Atsumi, who cooked at Vivant, another intimate little place with landmarked Belle Epoque tiles, to run the kitchen, and Atusmi’s short produce focused menu, which changes often, runs to intriguing small plates, which are easily composed into a pleasant and very satisfying meal.

There’s also a deep terrace on the quiet street out front, and this has instantly made this beloved address even more popular than ever with a diverse but stylish crowd of Parisians. Coming for dinner the other night with Bruno after I’d returned from New York City the same day, we toyed with the idea of the terrace, but sat inside instead to enjoy the beautifully restored little dining room, a real triumph of French Belle Epoque decor with a glass ceiling in the bar area painted with a circus theme and a wall of tiles from Sarreguemines, the northern town that was once one of France’s great ceramics towns, with a frieze of clowning clowns behind the big zinc bar. The last time I came here, the room, which had been closed for a while, still had walls that were amber tinted by years

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For some time now, many French food writers have been exasperated by the metronome of criticism that’s been coming from their American peers ever since journalist Arthur Lubow startled everyone by claiming the best gastronomy in Europe had migrated south of the Pyrenees in a profile of Ferran Adria for the New York Times in 2003. The idea that French food is not as good as it used to be but even often rather mediocre had been bandied about in food circles for a while before the Lubow lightning bolt struck, but by the time New York based journalist Michael Steinberger‘s book “Au Revoir to All: Food, Wine and the End of France” was published in 2009, kicking French food in the shins as a has-been cuisine had become a veritable cottage industry. Smashing idols is sort of thrilling, of course, but in this instance, not particularly accurate, as I concluded in a piece I wrote on Steinberger’s book for the late and still lamented Gourmet in 2009. And yet the beat goes on, with Steinberger recently doubling back to revisit his thesis in a story for the New York Times.

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Just ten minutes from La Bastille, Les Déserteurs is a perfect example of the new generation of neighborhood bistros that have been renewing Paris’s gastronomic credentials during the last ten years.  Though this culinary renaissance has been happening in broad daylight for a while, the rest of the world has yet to catch on. This is probably all for the best insofar as we Parisians are concerned, however, since a sudden spotlight on one of these newcomers can instantly make it impossible to get reservation within the normal timeframe of being able to predict your appetite for a given type of meal. Then, too, the necessity of booking months ahead of time for a meal in a recently lionized local bistro invariably encourages such heightened expectations that one’s easily set up for a fall. To wit, under these circumstances, being very good just isn’t enough. Instead, a meal is expected to deliver an almost transcendental experience, which is a pretty heavy burden for almost any young chef. And for a diner, too, since sometimes it’s just a nice to go out for a good meal. Period.

Even before I arrived at this new table, the former premises of chef Giovanni Passerini’s restaurant Rino, on a sunny May day, I expected to like it solely on the basis of its puckish name. Before they opened here, you see, Daniel Baratier and Alexandre Céret were second chef and sommelier, respectively at Le Sergent Recruteur, a wiltingly pretentious place on the Ile Saint Louis that assiduously follows the pointless pleasure-slaying old-school drill of what the French refer to as a repas gastronomique (gastronomic meal). These are rather wearisome experiences happily reserved for infrequent ‘special occasions,’ since the point of such a severely orchestrated meal is that you must bow down to the meal meted out by the chef and servers and be politely grateful for it the whole time, too. So even before I’d seen what these guys had gotten up to, I liked them a lot for being deserters. The simple fact of the matter these days is that almost no one likes a long, fussy, formal meal with too much to eat anymore.

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Yes, I love truffles, both black and white, but what really makes go weak in the knees is mandoo (Korean dumplings). Let me explain. I’ve been answering a lot of questions about my favorite foods and my work during the last two weeks, since I just had two books come out within a week of each other, Hungry for France: Adventures for the Cook and Food Lover and the second edition of Hungry for Paris. I’m having a lot fun being on the other side of the question answering for a change–I’m usually the one with the queries–and while I’ve been impressed by the work of my colleagues, I’ve been consistently running into one regular misconception about my work as a food writer that I really need to set straight.

So as I’ve explained to others, No, this man does not live on a diet of foie gras, lobster and truffles alone, much as he loves all three. Instead, I’m a natural-born omnivore who happily feeds at all levels of the food chain, but who has  a particular weakness for Paris bistros of all stripes, i.e. traditional and modern, a deep love of comfort food and home cooking wherever I go, plus a passionate attraction to street food. This doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy rare visits to the highest altitudes of gastronomy, as much indicated by a chef’s effort and imagination as by price or stars or numerical ratings. I do. But rather like you, perhaps, this food rarely coincides with either my more primal desires or my wallet.

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Salt-marinated salmon with citrus cream and favas at Will

Recently I’ve been thinking something’s gone very wrong with the whole process of going out to a restaurant for a meal. Consider this Tweet from Jay Rayner, the Guardian‘s excellent food critic, this morning: “25 minutes of hold music that crackles and breaks up. an online booking system that claims to have no tables. credit card numbers mandatory.” Needless to say, all the poor man was trying to do was make a reservation.

When I first started going to restaurants with any regularity, the only ones that required reservations were the fancy French places on the East Side of New York where I booked lunch for the editor for whom I was working as an earnest but hopelessly incompetent assistant. With the hind sight of years, I’m very grateful to this brilliant gentleman, the late Joe Fox, too, since he might have fired me on the spot for being such a stunningly incompetent typist. Instead, he just shook his head in disbelief at the completed letters I brought in for him to sign. “Good God, Alec! How did manage this? This line drops down, jumps back  up, drops down again, and then flies off the page!” White-Out, a correction fluid in a little bottle with a brush, had recently been invented, and I availed myself of it with such regularity that Mr. Fox used to refer to my letters as my “canvases.” As he grumbled once or twice, the only reason he kept me on was that he liked my reader’s reports. These were the summary outlines that I’d do when I finished reading a manuscript from the huge pile of submissions under my desk, and they ended with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ recommendation. Needless to say, this reading was the most interesting part of my editorial assistant’s job.

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Many thanks to the many people who’ve written with questions about my recently released book Hungry for France: Adventures for the Cook and Food Lover. I’d very much like to be able to answer your messages individually, but since this would take a long time, I think you’ll find answers to most of your questions in the trailer for the book that was produced by my publisher, Rizzoli USA.

Please click on this link to learn more: Hungry for France: Adventures for the Cook and Food Lover

I hope you enjoy listening to this narration, and if you have more questions about the book afterwards, please be in touch.

All best regards,

Alec