After a first visit to Restaurant Philippe Excoffier, I was underwhelmed by the cooking of the chef who ran the kitchens of the American Embassy in Paris for many years and who recently published a book of recipes of the dishes he cooked there for Dorothy Stapleton, the wife of the man George W. Bush sent to France as his ambassador. That early summer night, the dishes that Bruno and I ate with old friends from Los Angeles left us diffident at best. Charles and Kato were off to Switzerland to see her father early in the morning, though, and the three of us had most recently shared an exceptionally good meal at El Faro in Cadiz a few weeks earlier. So I later wondered if perhaps there wasn’t something disjointed about the casting of this evening, which might have been unfair to the chef?

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I have to admit that my immediate reaction when I first laid eyes on Le Temps des Cerises in the rue de la Cerisaie in the Marais was wariness. There was just no way any restaurant with a setting as winsomely pretty and well-preserved as this little 18th century house with geraniums in its second-story windboxes and a picture-perfect mosaic facade could possibly be anything but an egregious tourist trap. Except that it isn’t. Indeed, my opinion changed from the moment I stepped inside and charming young owner Grégory Detouy welcomed us and promptly brought us an excellent carafe of Rhone valley Viognier, along with some crunchy radishes and a shotglass of salt to dip them in, always a good sign.

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I’m not sure exactly why, but while I was perched on a stool in front of a window overlooking the boulevard at the new Chipotle, I found myself thinking of poor old Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico and his wife, the Belgian born Princess Charlotte whose slippery grip on sanity later in life led her to be known as the ‘Mad Carlotta.’ Don’t worry if Max doesn’t ring a bell right away either, since the paper-punch of historical confetti that had an Austrian aristocrat and naval officer briefly installed (1864-67) as the emperor of Mexico with the benediction and patronage of Emperor Napoleon III of France isn’t well known these days. Maybe it struck a chord with me, however, as an historical footnote on a much earlier failed attempt at globalization?

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To be sure, Aeroports de Paris, the organization charged with running Paris’s airports, seems to regularly announce (much-needed) improvements, and recent renovations of several of the older terminals at Charles de Gaulle are indeed an improvement over the crowded faded seventies spaces they replaced. Ditto recent refurbishing at Orly, Paris’s other airport.

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An almost universally obeyed tenet of the canon of contemporary tourism unfailingly has tourists shopping for a really good view of any place they visit. I suspect this quaint habit dates back to the era of hot air balloons and improvements in the technology of fair ground rides, which made it possible for anyone with a couple of coins to thrillingly see way over the tree tops for the first time, but beyond that there’s probably always been something refreshingly if head-spinningly humbling about a really good view, since they have a way of putting us in our place. 

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Ever since I first sampled her cooking many years ago when she first opened Les Olivades in the 7th after working for Alain Passard, I’ve been a fan of Florence Mikula, a really nice woman whose cuisine is as generous and straight-to-the-point as the lady herself. Back then in the mid-eighties, provencale cooking was enjoying a new vogue in Paris that was a reflection of the fact the Parisian media elite had thrown in the towel on the Riviera as being overbuilt and too flashy and was moving north to Provence, and specifically into the Luberon, in search of some peace and quiet and the thing they destroy the moment they find it: authenticity. The TGV had made the Luberon a viable weekend destination, too, and so la cuisine du soleil, or provencale cooking, suddenly started turning up in the food pages of French women’s magazines, where it was always rightly noted that it was as healthy–olive oil instead of butter, lots of fruit and veg, as it was delicious.

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