With the launch of Lazare, chef Eric Frechon’s four-month old brasserie in the Gare Saint Lazare, it looks like one of the weakest links in the Parisian food chain may finally be pitched for a revival. I’ve been a half-dozen times since they turned on the gas, and if the food has always been solidly good, more recently, the service has had some necessary fine tuning (a few staff members wrong-footed things for a while with a Costes brothers establishment style attitude) and it’s starting to develop some real atmosphere as the novelty wears off and it becomes an established part of a very busy neighborhood (the Gare Saint Lazare is one of the busiest train stations in Europe).

As a Parisian for almost thirty years, I’ve long had a soft spot for the city’s brasseries, those lively, bustling restaurants where you can usually just wander in off the street and get a table without a reservation. The first one I ever really enjoyed was the Terminus Nord, just across the street from the Gare du Nord, when my brother and I were feeling a little the worse for wear after a first over-eager encounter with Armagnac the night before and wanted some lunch before I returned to stay at his flat in London and he went to the Gare de Lyon on his eventual way to Greece. We didn’t give much thought to where we’d eat on that rainy Sunday afternoon. Instead it was more a question of finding someplace that was open near the station and where I might trundle my much loathed tweed-sided American Tourister suitcase–these were the days before the addition of wheels to luggage forever changed the lives of all travelers for the better–in the door without being shoed away by the waiters. Instinctively, we guessed that this busy-looking place just across from the station might work, and indeed, when we wandered in with my luggage monster around 2pm in the afternoon, a nice older waiter indicated that I could hide the beast off to one side behind a long heavy velvet curtain and then ushered us to a banquette table in the warm and very pretty art-deco dining room.

The menu appealed immediately, too, and we were fascinated by the older woman sitting next to us. She was wearing a huge and slightly moth-eaten Persian lamb toque, lots of rouge and had striking blue eyes that stood out even more for being surrounded by twin circles of sooty make-up. When she fed a shrimp from her plateau de fruits de mer to the apricot toy poodle in a large tapestry bag on the seat next to her, my brother started laughing, and she glanced at us. “Vous etes des freres?” Oui. “Et vous aves trop bu hier soir, ca se voit!” Oui. She smiled and shook her head. “Vous etes des mauvais garçons? I shrugged, and she laughed. Then her dog barked, and she said, “Tais toi, Abricot!” Apricot, her dog was named Apricot. Who knows exactly why we found it so funny, but we couldn’t stop laughing, and she eventually started chortling with us, so that when the waiter brought our onion soup, he eye-balled the three of us as though we might be a public danger.

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When a beneficent old friend from L.A. with a hefty expense-account called and suggested dinner on Sunday night not too far from his hotel in the 17th arrondissement, I had to think for a while. I hadn’t been wearing my restaurant cap for a couple of weeks after the holidays–like many food writers I know, I’d been eating very simply and leaving the corkscrew untouched in the kitchen drawer for a while after being rather too lavishly well wined and dined during the previous couple of weeks. Then, too, the fact that he’s also a vegetarian threw me a curve ball, the first one being that it was a Sunday night.

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My New Book, now available for pre-order in my Amazon store and holiday gift-giving    

During a recent trip to Vietnam, I found myself musing about the best meals I’ve eaten during 2013, and if I’ve had many really spectacular meals–eating in Paris, my much loved adopted hometown, is more interesting today than it’s been in many years, certain feasts really stood out. Some of them were lavish meals in grand settings, while others were simple feeds with friends in pretty, quiet places. What all of them had in common is a superb level of sincere cooking using excellent produce; warm friendly professional service; and pleasant settings. So here, then, is a round-up of the places I most enjoyed in 2013.

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@ Serge Detalle

As the holidays approach, Paris grows busier like most cities, but even as the shopping-bag-carrying throngs thicken, the French capital retains a refreshing insouciance at odds with the atmosphere of amped-up consumer frenzy in so many other western cities. It’s not that the French don’t enjoy the holidays–they do–but rather that they’re admirably resistant to all and any calendar-generated hype. Blessedly, there’s nothing in France that approximates “Black Friday,” the first day of super-discounted Christmas shopping in the United States after Thanksgiving. You don’t find Santa Claus lurking in Parisian department stores, and the canned Christmas music in public spaces–garages, restrooms, malls, elevators–so common in English-speaking countiries would rightly drive the French to indignation shading to rage.

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@stéphane bahic

It’s hard for me to say exactly when my deep love of good food first surfaced, but suffice it to say that the thing that interested me most when our local newspaper arrived on Wednesdays were the school-lunch menus, which were published weekly so mothers could decide what days they’d pack a lunch for their kids or let eat the hot meal at school. My first school, the Greens Farms Elementary School, had a crew of smiling Italian ladies in hairnets who cooked everything from scratch, so the food was usually delicious. They made lasagna, spaghetti and meatballs, baked zitti, grilled Italian sausages with peppers, and lots of other hearty, healthy dishes, including corned beef and cabbage for Saint Patrick’s Day, and once when my mother ate with us in the cafeteria before an afternoon field trip to a nearby dairy farm, she got up at the end of the meal and went into the kitchen to thank the cooks. I’d returned to the rails for a spoon for my butterscotch pudding, and so witnessed the scene. Abashed by my mother’s thanks, one of the cooks replied, “You’re very welcome, Ma’am, but it’s a privilege to feed the children,” she said.

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In the recent Time magazine article about the world’s most influential chefs, there were many omissions, but among the most important of those in France who weren’t mentioned is surely chef Christian Constant. He trained the whole generation of chefs who created modern French bistro cooking, Yves Camdeborde (Le Comptoir du Relais), Christian Etchebest (La Cantine du Troquet and others), and Franck Baranger (Le Pantruche), and talented young chefs continue to emerge from the kitchens of his constellation of restaurants–Le Violon d’Ingres, Le Cafe Constant and Les Cocottes, on the rue de l’Universite in the 7th arrondissement.

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