As someone who passionately loves good food, there’s nothing I find more fascinating than the privilege of visiting a working restaurant kitchen. When they’re busy and well-directed, working kitchens often offer the same magnificent but unselfconscious spectacle of the physical and cerebral metaphysically melded together as one finds at the ballet, the difference being that dance is usually better lit and deprived of the same olfactory teasing a kitchen subjects you to.

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   Like most Parisians, I always love getting away to the islands, and especially at this time of the year, when the tourist throngs have thinned and they’re still leaves on the trees, which soften the beautiful 17th and 18th century facades of the old houses along their narrow streets. During the winter in contrast, the Ile Saint Louis looks as embarrassedly exposed and vunerable as an old woman unexpectedly surprised in her undergarments. Of the two islands, the Ile de la Cite and the Ile Saint Louis, I prefer the latter, because it remains one of the rare places in Paris with a pleasantly pickled atmosphere of palpable history, and it radiates an aura of secrets and mysteries. And as the writer Edmund White, who once lived here in a charming apartment has observed, there are few better places in Paris to indulge in the pleasure of a long and very deliberately purposeless stroll.

Unfortunately, despite its popularity, the Ile Saint Louis has not had a really good restaurant since the original Hiramatsu moved away. Yes, there’s Mon Vieil Ami, but the service there is problematic, it’s become too expensive and there are just too many foreigners, so the one place I ever recommend is the perfectly respectable Brasserie de l’Isle Saint Louis, with its charming interior, anthology of decent old-fashioned French dishes and pleasantly teasing and jocular waiters. Still, such a special place has always seemed to warrant an equally special restaurant, so I was intrigued when I read that the hoary old La Taverne du Sergent Recruteur, a tourist table par excellence, had been reborn as Le Segent Recruteur, an elegant contemporary French restaurant.

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     “Dear Alec, Looking forward to seeing you in a week, and to introducing you to my sons, especially the eldest, who’s seems to be just about as food mad as you are. I know you’ll be away the first two nights we’re in Paris, so I’ve been poking around your blog to see if I could find a relaxed reasonably priced and decidedly French restaurant just out the door from our hotel in the 1st arrondissement. You’ve written about some terrific sounding spots in the 1st in your book and on your blog, but what I really need is a ‘normal people’ restaurant. Anything trendy would be lost on me and the boys, as would anything too cutting edge. Sorry to bother you with this, but maybe you’d have an idea of a friendly sort of meat-and-potatoes spot that won’t break the bank but will serve us some good food, and, for dear old Dad who’ll be running this excursion and is, as you know, fond of the grape, a nice bottle of wine!”

This was the message I received a couple of weeks ago from Todd, a college friend from Pittsburgh who was taking his sons to Paris for the first time while his wife was on a long business trip in Asia, and it got me to thinking about how rare ‘normal people’ restaurants have become in the heart of Paris. With a few wonderful exceptions, only chain restaurants or slickly designed places peddling the ersatz health food that’s become the new Gallic noon-time normal for office workers–smoothies, salads, soup, etc., can afford to set up shop these days on this prime turf, and this really can make it a challenge for visitors staying in any of the many hotels in the heart of Paris, or that turf defined by the Madeleine, Place de la Concorde, the Opera Garnier and the Place Vendome, to find a reasonably priced, good quality French meal. So I gave this request some thought. I like the Bistrot Volnay a lot, but knew it would be too fashionable for Todd and his boys. Then I remembered. As luck would have it, however, I actually had found a swell little bistro in this neck of the woods a few weeks back, Le Bistrot Capucine.

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For many years, Le Bistro de Breteuil has been a very well-liked restaurant in the silk-stocking 7th arrondissement due to its lovely location overlooking the Place de Breteuil, its charming sidewalk terrace for al fresco dining in good weather, and most importantly of all, its perfectly decent good value prix-fixe menu. For 42 Euros, you got an aperitif, starter, main course, dessert, half-bottle of decent plonk, and a coffee, and the quality was respectable enough so that it pulled as many staffers from UNESCO and parsimonious loden-wearing owners of those vast neighboring flats overlooking the ur-bourgeois Avenue de Breteuil as it did tourists. It was also a perfect place for any group dinner, because there wouldn’t be any tiresome haggling about who owed what, and offered some of the best people watching in Paris.

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   I have the greatest respect for Anne-Sophie Pic, because she’s both an exceptionally talented chef and a lovely person, and I’ve also eaten several superb meals in her restaurants in Valence and Lausanne. And since it’s not even remotely her fault that scent strips–you know, those paper wands used for smell sampling at the perfume counters of department stores, induce a reflexive fit of fear and loathing in someone whose sense of smell was once nearly extinguished by a two-week stint selling gloves adjacent to the dueling perfume counters on the ground floor of the now defunct Filene’s department store in Boston as a broke college student at Christmas, I decided it was imperative that I eat several times at La Dame de Pic, her new Paris restaurant, and give it a long muse lest I come to any hasty conclusions.

It’s also true that the social context of my first meal at the restaurant had been emotionally arduous, and that several weeks ago, I’d received a castigating email from someone who’d read of my struggle to be fair to chef Philippe Excoffier (reviewed on this site), given his association, however tangential, with the Bush administration. In that instance, the reader had not been very alert, since I admitted to my prejudices, explained their origin, and went back to this restaurant several times before offering a public verdict. In any event, I try to be as fair as I possibly can, always, but it’s also true that eating is an emotional and psychological experience, and that we bring ourselves to the table as we are of a given day, or a given meal, and that this inevitably influences the way that we perceive of what we eat. That said, I do my best to use as much of a self-critical tuning fork (sic) as I possibly can to find an equilibrium between gastronomic subjectivity–the inevitable, and objectivity, the hopefully professional.

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Two of the most interesting things going on in the Paris restaurant scene this rentree are the turbo-speed rate with which the 10th arrondissement continues to go gourmand and the wonderful acceleration of the internationalization of the culinary talent pool in Paris. As I’ve mentioned before, in much the same way that Paris has long been the global beacon for talent in the fashion business, it’s now attracting ambitious and talented young chefs from other countries in such numbers that it’s no longer a surprise to learn the chef who just cooked your dinner in Paris is Mexican or Italian or American or, most likely of all, Japanese. The Japanese, you see, continue to revere French cooking with a seriousness and passion that’s long since dwindled in other countries, and this is why talented young Japanese chefs come to France in droves to do apprenticeships in the country’s restaurant kitchens and also why so many of them stay on to open their own restaurants. It make great sense, too, since the the culinary cultures of the two countries venerate best quality produce, admire technicity, and are profoundly fascinated by aesthetics of everything edible.

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