With the accelerating blurring of work and leisure wrought by Twitter, Facebook, email, text messaging and cellphones eroding the old-fashioned idea of what a vacation could and should be in the United States, there’s something deeply admirable and profoundly charming about the way France defends the sanctity of the summer holiday. And if Paris doesn’t wind down as visibly as it did twenty years ago when shops flaunted the fact that they were closing for a good long time by masking their windows with censorious kraft paper–you’d only know that this was there is if you weren’t in Le Lavandou or Saint-Jean-de-Luz, there’s still a reliable, palpable and quite bracing deceleration of daily life that implicitly authorizes you to be late for and/or leave work early, and to abandon yourself to what you feel like doing–lying on your bed all afternoon reading a great novel, for example, instead of all the dreary things you should be doing (preparing accounts for your tax person, meeting a deadline, sewing a button back on a shirt, going to the gym, etc.). French media follows suit, too, with a winding down of life-style reporting, including restaurant reviewing, which annually yields an inevitable cannon-fire of lists of the nicest places to have a meal outside or the summer’s ‘hippest’ tables.

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“No conversational subject warns the world that you’re a bore faster than the weather,” my perspicacious paternal grandmother once cautioned, and she was right, of course. So let me fleetingly mention that the weather in Paris this summer has been just awful, since you need this back story to understand why I enjoyed dinner in the gardens of the Saint James Club in the plummy 16th arrondissement so much the other night.

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Terrine de Campagne at Le Petit Chablisien

It’s taken well over a decade, but the renovation of the Gare Saint Lazare, the busiest train station in France, has finally been completed, and despite the fact that the clear marching orders to the architect must have been to compress the public spaces in favor of rent-paying commercial ones, i.e., shops, overall, it’s a success, especially since they cleaned and repaired the wonderful painted-on-glass portraits of all of the destinations the station originally served when it first opened in the main departures hall. With the station smartened up, it seems likely that the rather drab immediate surroundings of the Gare Saint Lazare will probably go upmarket a bit, too, which would make sense, since it remains a puzzling island of low-rent drabness that straddles three of the Paris’s most affluent arrondissements, the 8th, the 9th and the 17th.

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Having lived there for many years, I observed that the 7th arrondissement is actually a mosaic of very different little neighborhoods. The chunk of the 7th between the boulevard Saint Germain and the Seine, for example, is aristocratic in tone but more worldly and cosmopolitan than the haughtier and most decidedly penny-pinching district bound by the rue du Bac, the boulevard Saint Germain, the rue de Sevres, and the boulevard des Invalides. Then on the other side of the Esplanade des Invalides, the 7th becomes livelier and almost friendly in the snug little neighborhood in and around the rue Saint Dominique that’s favored by young BCBG singles and couples. As chef Christian Constant has discovered, this turf is actually a good restaurant neighborhood, too, because the well-born execs in the neighborhood eat out a lot and there’s also a good tourist trade from all of the small hotels in the neighborhood.

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  Over coffee in a cafe, I recently spent an interesting hour chatting with a brilliant and charming journalist for a nicely produced economic journal in Prague who had contacted me for an interview, because Slovak language rights to HUNGRY FOR PARIS were acquired by a Bratislava publishing house when the book was first published.

Food is Petra’s beat, and passion, and if she loves Paris like I do, I spent months and months in Prague in the early nineties and have a deep affection for the city and the Czech Republic, so we seemed fated to get on. Usually on the other side of the pen and notebook, I also admired her confident manner and good questions. On my way to meet her, it occurred to me that she’d invariably ask me if Paris is still the world’s best food city. And if this is an obviously loaded question, it’s a much more complicated one to answer fairly and intelligibly than it may first seem.

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A Table a la Marguerite

Last week through this website I received an email from a nice lady in Toronto who’d recently been in Paris and who’d had a very disappointing experience at one of the city’s most famous bistros, Chez Georges. Following a response from me, she wrote again, and her message was not only a polite plea in favor of continued exigency and honesty in writing about food in Paris, but an entreaty to remember and respect socio-economic diversity. Here’s what she said:

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