On my way to meet Bruno and some friends for dinner the other night, I was in sort of a bad mood. An old college friend had called for a chat just before I went out, and it had been terrific to catch up with him until the talk turned to our work. He’s a very successful lawyer in Washington, D.C., and I, well, I’m a food and travel writer who lives in Paris, bien sur. He mentioned having seen something that I’d written in the Wall Street Journal and said that he’d liked it. I’m so glad, I told him, and then there was an ominous pause. “Alec, one thing I’ve always wondered–I’ve always enjoyed your writing, but why did you decide to write about food when you could be writing about so many other things?” Oh, dear. Where to start? Some day, I’ll answer this question in much greater length and detail, but my brief reply was that my love of food was born as an expedient way for a shy boy to indulge his curiosity about the world and access a dimly perceived sensuality that was, I instinctively knew at the time, inappropriate for someone of my age. Also, there just isn’t a faster way, of course, to know where you are or learn something personal about someone than there is by eating that country or that person’s food. And besides, I’ve always loved to eat, and as the years have gone by, I’ve learned to eat almost anything, or at least once. So my love of food, and writing about, is just as essential to my seeing the world clearly as putting on my glasses every morning after the alarm clock goes off.

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A handsome new park is emerging on the northern edge of Paris in the 17th arrondissement, and it’s named for the American civil-rights leader Martin Luther King. Only a few acres of the new green space built on former rail yards are now open, but the park is beautifully landscaped and will be the centerpiece for a whole new quartier when it’s completed in 2015. For the moment, just a few of the new buildings surrounding the park have been finished, but one particularly good-looking HLM (subsidized housing units) houses not only a bunch of Parisians who must be delighted by their new lodgings, but one of the best modern bistros to have opened in the city recently. It’s called Coretta, after Martin Luther King’s wife, and it’s run by the very talented chef Mexican born chef Beatriz Gomez and her husband Matthieu Marcant, and since they’re already very busy with their excellent restaurant Neva Cuisine in the 8th arrondissement behind the Gare Saint Lazare, they’ve hired chef Jean-François Pantaleon, formerly of L’Affable in the 7th arrondissement, to chef their new table.

Curiously, I first heard about this restaurant from my friend Pascale, an architect who lives in the neighborhood and who praised the design of the duplex space as one of the best she’d recently seen in Paris–most of the time friends recommend their latest discoveries to me because they loved the food. So I did some research, and when I realized that it was a new address from Gomez and Marcant, I booked immediately, since Neva Cuisine is one of my favorite modern bistros in Paris, not the least of the reasons being that it has one of the best young pastry chefs in Paris, Yannick Tranchant , with whom Gomez worked when both of them were in the kitchens of La Grande Cascade.

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Some strange and generally wonderful things have happened to me because of Facebook. A few days ago, I had a message from a woman I’ll call Amanda, a friend I hadn’t seen since high-school graduation. She wrote from Tampa, Florida, where she is living as a recently divorced real-estate agent and said that she’d decided to treat herself to a trip to Paris, a city she hadn’t visited since a college trip many years ago. “I made out with a boy who followed me for twenty minutes in the Tuileries gardens. It was the craziest thing I’d done up to that point in my life–many more since then!–and he was so incredibly handsome I still think of him sometimes. Who knows? Maybe I need a good dose of Paris, and it would be great to see you again if you’re around.”

I loved the idea that Amanda, who’d been so pretty and prim and smart, had done something as reckless as kissing a stranger in a public park, and her confession made me wonder how well I’d ever really known her. Oh, to be sure, we were friends, as, it would seem, two of the rare kids in the fast-track college program who were even a tiny bit wild, even in those days. What this meant was smoking joints and going to all-night diners in the down-at-the-heels industrial town next to our wiltingly pretty New England suburb in the orbit of New York City, harmless stuff really, but when she went on to study classics at a very respectable women’s college near Boston, I assumed that those rare errant nights in the diner were behind her.

So I said ‘Yes’ to dinner, and she wrote back right away and told me to meet her for a drink first at Le Select, the cafe in Montparnasse, and then we’d go to dinner. “Oh I know you’re a connoisseur, Alec, but let me chose where we go to dinner.” How very sweet–if slightly strange–that our reunion was so natural. The person I found was a strong, handsome woman with a charmingly self-effacing self of humor, a quick wit, and an omnivorous interest in the world. She was physically very little changed, too–lean, tan, blonde as always, and well-seasoned by the many years gone by. So we drank white wine and laughed at ourselves and the past and started catching up. Still, me being me, I wondered where we were going to dinner, and when she saw me glance at my watch, she said, “Oh, you! We’re just going across the street, and I don’t want to hear a word about what you think of the place. I’ve never been, and I’ve always wanted to go.”

So I went to dinner at La Coupole for the first time in many years, and in the interest of a happy night with an old friend, I didn’t get my back up over her assumption that just because I write about food, I’m fussy or fancy or something. In any event, everyone assumes this, and everyone’s wrong. And recently I’d also been thinking about something that’s wrong with this blog, and most other food publications in any format, which is that we’re all so preoccupied with the new that we never go back and see what the old places are like. The fact that Amanda wanted to eat at La Coupole on her first night in Paris more than thirty years sort of underlined this for me, too.

Amanda had thoughtfully booked dinner online and gave her name to the bored man at the reservations lectern when we came in. Wordlessly, he escorted us to a rather distant quadrant of this vast room, and I said nothing, because this was her evening, and I sensed anything I might have said wouldn’t have mattered, since as far as he was concerned we were just another pair of American tourists, those lemmings he contends with by the dozens everyday. Happy though I was in the present, I couldn’t help but hear the rustling of many shed skins as we sat and read the menu, since at another point in my Paris life of almost thirty years, I ate here rather often. To be sure, it was never for reasons gastronomic, but rather because La Coupole was once one of the anointed restaurants of the fashion tribe in the days when I was an editor for a glamorous fashion publishing company, an incarnation that today strikes me as a rather mystifying bit of bad casting and acting.

“I imagine you know this place quite well,” said Amanda. Indeed I do, or did, I told her, yarning about my days on the style circuit and also reminiscing about the Sunday night dinners I used to have here with a bunch of single friends, none of whom live in Paris anymore. I explained that we once shared a collective brasserie reflex, since Sundays could be melancholic, and so we’d often round ourselves up for a dinner round robin style, which was also the unstated occasion to take a shower and get dressed after a day spent in pyjamas. Brasseries were lively and fun in those days, and so a perfect antidote to the morbid flutterings on the wall of a winter’s evening.

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 One of the happier nascent trends in Paris is the growing number of new restaurants that are open on Sunday night, which is good  news not only because they offer deliverance from the usual Sunday night options of the city’s ethnic restaurants and woefully overpriced and mediocre brasseries, but because it’s a good night to go out in Paris. Bruno and I have recently developed the habit of going out of a Sunday night, too, since it means a night off from the kitchen and a calm moment to enjoy each other’s company before the usual busy week ahead. Since we’re not at home, we ditch domesticity–talking about getting a plumber in to fix the kitchen faucet or where we’ll go for summer vacation or our work, or, our least favorite subject, the bills–and just enjoy each other’s company instead. And since I’d been away in Barcelona working for a week, I suggested we go out the other night and hopefully have a good meal at Blue Valentine, a new bistro near the Place de la Republique and not far from the Canal Saint Martin that friends had been telling me about.

I liked this place from the moment I stepped in the door, too, since the welcome was friendly, and the dining room had a funky easygoing charm created by a sixties retro bar, flea-market furniture and some curious psychedelic posters on the walls. We sat next to a couple who were obviously on a date–they were both conspicuously well-dressed for a Sunday night and had that flush of awkwardness that radiates from a tentatively minted couple, and even though it’s not generally a good idea when we’re going to order a bottle of wine, we threw caution to the winds and decided to have a cocktail from the list that was provided as soon as we were seated. As Bruno noted, the bartender seemed really serious with his shaker, and was also carefully bruising fresh herbs and carving curls of citrus, so we expected the drinks would be good, and they were. He ordered a Margarita, which made me smile, because it seemed such an unlikely prelude to dinner on a winter night, but an affectionate bemusement at one another’s gastronomic habits is something to be expected between two people who’ve been at the table together so often over the course of many years. I said nothing about the Magarita–it was his choice, but when I ordered a tasty little number that was Bourbon based, he said, “I think Bourbon is in your D.N.A.,” and I took it affectionately, especially because it’s true. Both of my very different grandmothers were enthusiastic Bourbon drinkers, and if my usually abstemious mother goes for a drink in a restaurant, it’s always a Bourbon on the rocks.  Continue reading…

There’s something chimerical about contemporary Italian cooking, and a partial explanation for this was once provided to me by chef Giovanni Passerini of the excellent restaurant Rino in Paris. Passerini, a Roman, told me he’d moved to Paris, because “Romans only want to eat their own cooking. Parisians are much more receptive to invention and innovation.” In my own experience as someone who visits Italy regularly, the conundrum of modern Italian cooking definitely stems to some degree from the culinary conservatism that Passerini pointed out, but also seems to be attributed to the fact that La Nouvelle Cuisine had an even great impact on Italy than it did in France. To wit, so many of the restaurants that the major Italian guides rate most highly still practice a sort of mannerist modern cooking that espouses the worst of Nouvelle Cuisine fussiness without embracing the really important things it changed.

To be sure, there are several wonderful exceptions to this retro rut. Massimo Bottura’s Osteria Francescana in Modena is not only one of the best restaurants in the world, but one of the most consistently interesting and audacious, and I also really like Cristina Bowerman’s restaurant Glass in the Trastevere district of Rome. But during visits to Milan, Verona, the Italian Lakes and Venice last year, most feints at anything contemporary were disappointing, usually because they were more exercises in style than taste and often came off as sadly deracinated. So after several recent excellent Italian meals in New York, London and Paris, it occurs to me that the future of the Italian kitchen is as likely to be played out beyond the country’s borders than it is within them, since due to both the country’s poor economy and it’s prevailing preference for traditional cooking, many talented young Italian chefs go abroad to work.

Still, it was a real surprise the other night when Bruno and I went to Viola, a new restaurant in the Batignolles in Paris, and stumbled upon some good and rather interesting contemporary Italian food. Truth be told, I wasn’t especially keen on this adventure–the address had been recommended by a friend of Bruno’s from the gym, and I don’t really like going out much on Sunday nights–but in the interest of fairness, I said “Sure” when he bounced into my office and suggested it. “It’s always good to put a zig-zag in the routine, no?” said Bruno, and so a zig-zag it was. After all, I cringe a little when I think of the dozens–okay, hundreds–of times he’s uncomplainingly accompanied me of a given evening when I knew he’d have been much happier at home eating a salad. When we arrived, the place seemed vaguely familiar, and despite the fact that it’s been attractively remodeled with an appealing sort of loft-like neo-industrial decor, I recognized it as the former premises of Le Bistral, a contemporary French bistro that I always wanted to be better than it ever was.

The service was immediately friendly, and the very pleasant waitress proposed a variety of really good organic and ‘natural’ (un-sulfured) Italian wines by the glass, so things got off to a good start, since good Italian wine is still much too rare in Paris. Then the menu looked, well, interesting, and a decided, and welcome, departure from the usual miscellaneous pasta-and-pizza jumble typical of neighborhood Italian restaurants in Paris, a city that’s still waiting for a seriously good Italian restaurant, and this despite the fact that the most Parisians know and love Italy and its food.  Continue reading…

It may sound odd, but as far as I’m concerned, the best time of the year to visit Marseille is during the winter. This is when the city is quiet without its growing tourist throngs, and the Mediterranean sun is more welcome than ever. The strong wind-scoured light at this time of the year makes the city rather beautiful, too. Marseille is a wonderful weekend away from Paris as well, since it’s only three hours away by TGV train and rooms in most of the city’s hotels go for low-season rates. If Marseille is never a particularly self-conscious city even in high season–it’s bluff disinterest in travelers is one of the reasons I like it so much, actually–it’s even more devoid of any social artifice during the winter.

Spending a few days here recently, I loved the fact that no one asked me about my accent when I spoke French, probably because in Marseille, France’s second largest and perhaps most cosmopolitan city, almost everyone has an accent. The only exception was when I went for lunch to my favorite seafood restaurant, La Boîte à Sardine, which recently moved to a new location near the church of  Saint-Vincent-de-Paul at the top of la Canebière, the city’s storied main artery, which runs down hill to Le Vieux Port, or the old harbor where the city was founded as a colony by the Greeks some 2600 years ago. There’s simply no better place in this port town to get a really good reasonably priced feed of just-out-of-the-water seafood, so I popped in early and took a stool at the counter, since I knew they wouldn’t waste a table at this very popular place on a single diner.

I was very much hoping my favorite dish would be on the catch-of-the-day menu—sea anemone beignets, but when I asked the owner, Fabien Rugi, who directs the restaurant from behind the bar in front of the kitchen, he told me that he hadn’t been able to get any the day before and suggested I go have a look at the fish stand (they also sell fish) to see what else might tempt me. Before I could slip off my stool, though, he slid a glass of white wine across the bar and said, “Votre accent–vous n’etes pas d’ici.” No, I told him, I’m not from Marseille. “Vous venez d’ou? Vous etes Belge?” (Where are you from? Are you Belgian?”) No, I told him, I come from across the sea.  Continue reading…