@ Adrien Durand

As a child of suburbia, I love cities with a passion that goes back to my earliest memories of trips into New York City from our safe and pretty but hopelessly dull nest in suburban Connecticut. I was hugely envious of cousins who were growing up in Manhattan, and once, on the way back to the woods from a Sunday visit to them in the big metropolis, I infuriated my father by suggesting that they were really the lucky ones to live in New York.

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Often there’s no faster route to high spirits than a sudden surge of spontaneity and a good dose of extravagance (deeply considered penuriousness somehow just never seems to work). So on a gloomy Saturday morning, Bruno and I set out on a gastronomic expedition that I was certain would raise our weather-dampened spirits. We were heading to the new butcher shop that Hugo Desnoyer had opened in such a remote and very quiet corner of the remote and very quiet 16th arrondissement that it barely seemed like Paris when we got there.

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This year in Paris, a late, damp and often overcast Spring has been pushing and pulling my appetite in all different directions. To be sure, I’ve eating as much French grown asparagus–both green and white, as I can get my hands on, but the gray skies and cool temperatures have left me yearning for sturdier comfort food than I’m accustomed to craving at this time of the year. Then I went to dinner the other night at Les Climats, a very pleasant new restaurant in one of my favorite restaurant venues in Paris, the elegant Belle Epoque dining room of a handsome old dormitory building that once housed young single ladies who worked for the P.T.T. (Poste Telegramme, Telephone), and found my seasonal groove again.

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Unfortunately it doesn’t happen very often, which is why I appreciate the very rare pleasure of spontaneously deciding to try a restaurant in Paris even more. As a food writer, you see, I’m obviously obliged to keep up with the latest new addresses, and since I don’t like going to restaurants on the weekend if I can avoid it–as a rule of thumb, Parisians generally cook or entertain at home then, which leaves the city’s restaurants to suburbanites or tourists, and I’m also too busy to go out to lunch, this leaves me five available meals per week to test the latest openings. This may sound adequate, but recently a whole week went by during which I didn’t find a single meal that was worthy of writing up here, even if only in negative terms.

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Pierre au Palais Royal: Asparagus with aioli Maltais, quails’ eggs, hazelnut gougeres

Though I certainly wouldn’t enjoy a meal in an ugly dining room, and actively avoid places that are too noisy (happily still less of a problem in Paris than in other cities I know well, notably New York and London), I’ll gladly admit, as I have many times before, that for me the appearance of a restaurant very much takes a backseat to the quality of what I find in my plate in terms of my overall judgement of its worth. To be sure there are a few restaurants in Paris–Le Train Bleu at the Gare de Lyon and, once in a blue moon, Vagenende (St-Germain-des-Pres) among them, that I’d go to mostly because they are so beautiful, but otherwise, I’m reflexively willing to overlook an unfortunate decor in favor of good food.

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Everyone has their own personal geography of gastronomic pleasure, which is why you might occasionally have trouble navigating mine without some help. My love of stuffed grape leaves? They were served as part of father-and-son Cub Scout banquets at a Bulgarian restaurant which once rather improbably existed in the decidedly Topsider shod Connecticut town I grew up in. A weakness for fresh mangos? I associate them with the first heady days I lived in my own apartment on West 85th Street in New York City; I’d never eaten a mango before, and noticing them for sale outside of a bodega one night on my way home from work, I bought one out of curiosity, almost lost a thumb trying to cut through the thick pit I didn’t know they had, and finally peeled off a patch of green skin and cut out a juicy deep orange chunk of the fruit, which was sweet, succulent, sensual, tropical. And during that same new-in-New York time frame, I also developed a life-long love of pastry stuffed with poppy-seed filling. This was not something I grew up with either–the baked goods in my life up to that time ran to cinnamon-crumb-topped coffee cakes, brownies, layer cakes, the occasional pineapple upside-down cake and apple pie, bien sur.

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