Walking home from dinner at Restaurant Encore, a new contemporary French bistro with a Japanese chef, the amiable and earnest Yoshi Morie, in the 10th arrondissement last night, I gave a lot of thought to the meal I’d just eaten. Overall, it was pleasant, and I liked the space, a former kosher butcher shop in the rapidly gentrifying rue Richer, and the service, which was really charming, a lot. The impact of the food, however, a suite of tasting plates as part of the 48 Euro prix-fixe dinner meal, was so evanescent that it made only the most fleeting of impressions. To be sure, Morie, who formerly cooked at Le Petit Verdot on the Left Bank, works with impressively pedigreed produce from a prestigious roster of suppliers, including Joel Thiebault (vegetables), Annie Bertin (vegetables and herbs), Terroirs d’Avenir, butcher Hugo Desnoyer, and the Pain des Amis bakery for bread, and several of the dishes we ate were momentarily interesting, but these fragile compositions worked like haiku, offering a brief moment of sudden clarity before rapidly fading away.

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There are few things I love more than discovering a French town by visiting its market, and through many years of doing so, I’ve developed a short list of favorite French markets, many of which are in smaller cities and towns, including Rennes, Narbonne, Arles, Antibes, Saint Remy and most recently, Provins, a charming little town just an hour east of Paris (N.B. If you have a favorite market in a French provincial town, I’d love to hear about it). This past weekend, I also had a chance to shop at the market in front of the Musee des Beaux Arts in the small northern French city of Valenciennes, and I snared a very rare treat that I’ve been reading about for years, a tress of l’ail fume d’Arleux, or smoked garlic from the little French town of Arleux, which is famous for same. In fact, the thrill of finding the taste of smoke and garlic combined made it very hard to go out to dinner last night, since I was chomping at the bit to get to work with the odorific braid now dangling in my kitchen, but we hadn’t seen our friends Laurent and Carole since they returned from a two-week trip to Thailand, so we agreed to meet for dinner at Edgar, the restaurant of a new hotel by the same name in the Sentier, which is one of my favorite parts of Paris.

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Whispering Maitre d’Hotel, hard-working chefs at La Scene

Within minutes of sitting down at La Scène, the new restaurant at the exquisitely renovated Hotel Prince de Galles on the Avenue George V, I concluded that this is very shrewdly conceived new table indeed. Belgian designer Bruno Borrione, whose work I had last admired at Les Avises hotel in Avize in Champagne, has created a beautiful and boldly contemporary restaurant, which suddenly makes most other hotel dining rooms in Paris look stuffy and dated. Here, chef Stéphanie Le Quellec, one of the most talented female chefs in France, works with her team in a stunning matte-finished white-marble-lined open kitchen that’s surely the ‘scene’ to which the restaurant’s name refers. This breaks major conventions of upmarket restaurant protocal in Paris, too, since the kitchen, usually hidden, is in full view and the cooks are cast as characters in the evening’s entertainment.

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On the waterfront: Sitges 

My discovery of Catalan cooking dates to an almost comically unsuccessful stint as an English teacher in Barcelona in the mid-eighties. I had a gap between two jobs in New York and a close friend’s brother, who was then living in Barcelona, told us a school there was looking for two native English speakers to run English conversation classes. My pal had a two-month hole in his schedule, too, so we applied and were hired despite the fact that neither of us had any teaching experience. The school specialized in teaching business English to executives, so reporting to work on our first morning on two hours of sleep and with nearly medical hangovers, we discovered that we were expected to wear jackets and ties at the school–a problem, since neither of us had brought either, and that there were two classes, one for men and one for women. It seemed a no-brainer to me that the women would be easier and more fun to teach than the men, and since my friend came to the same conclusion, we flipped a coin, and I lost.

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The first two times I tried to go to Pierre Sang Boyer’s restaurant in the Oberkampf district of the 11th arrondissement, my luck ran dry. Since they don’t have a public phone number, we showed up one night to find that the restaurant was ‘exceptionally’ closed. Then another time, the crowd waiting to be seated at this compact counter-service no-reservations restaurant was so huge that it would have been an optimistic hour’s wait before we were seated. So my interest drifted a bit, because this place seemed so hard to get into.

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A week recently spent in the Loire Valley, which I hadn’t visited for more than a day or two in many years, caused me to fall into love with this magnificent and graciously green patch of France all over again. And this despite the fact that it’s not always an easy place to eat. Oh, there’s lots of good food in the Loire to be sure, but after two or three of the very old-school French feeds that so many restaurants in the region still feel it incumbent to offer, I found myself squirming for relief from the relentlessness of these heavily formatted meals and their self-consciously serious traditional French cooking. The problem is that many chefs continue to believe this sort of dining is what up-market travelers to the region require when the reality is that most people would be made much happier by simpler, lighter, healthier cooking and a service style that’s more relaxed and less sociologically stuffy. As a city-dweller, I’m really not looking for the same thing in the country that I want in Paris either.

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