Photo @ Bob Peterson

Just about the only enjoyable aspect of dinner at the Brasserie Balzar the other night was the wry, nimble and thoroughly professional service which animated an otherwise woefully mediocre and overpriced meal. What made this particular occasion all the more noticeable is that the prevailing service style in so many of the better and more interesting new restaurants in Paris these days lacks any trace of the same tonic and tenacious desire to please and the corollary desire to have a good time together that made this meal a perverse pleasure inspite of the insolently industrial quality of the food. For in France, good service is never a one-way street. In its old-school idiom, or the one I was inducted into over a long learning curve when I arrived in Paris twenty-five years ago, your waiter or waitress wanted both to charm and be charmed–to be sure, you weren’t under any obligation to be charming, but the badinage of a successful meal, more common in bistros than in three-star restaurants but always present to some degree, informed every French meal.

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Arriving for dinner at Les Jalles with Julie, a delightful English woman who lived in Paris for many years before recently moving to her husband’s native Sydney, and my Alabamian pal Judy, I parted the heavy velvet drapes at door of this storefront restaurant in the rue des Capucines and immediately drank in the decorously provocative atmosphere of a pleasantly perfervid dining room with good lighting–maybe even the best lighting I’ve seen in a new Paris restaurant for many years, engineered to induce a certain sensualist’s nostalgia for the twenties Paris of writer Djuna Barnes and Nancy Cunard. The mis-en-scene was so lush, in fact, that I instantly thought of the brilliant photographs of Brassai in his book Paris de Nuit and also of the harmlessly risque Proustian vintage ‘art’ postcards that once got a rise out of corpulent old gents with pince nez. So this artfully staged space intends to flatter anyone who walks through the door by casting them into a public tableaux that’s knowingly freighted with sexual mystery and, surely to a lesser degree, possibility.

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If you write about food, there just have to be alot of feral moments, or hours, every week where your passion for taste trumps absolutely everything else you should be doing. These can’t be planned, they just happen. And I love it when they do. Since it’s been raining and cold in Paris for weeks on end now, the other day, I fired up the computer, made a double espresso, read the NY Times, the Washington Post, and lots of other stuff, went back into the kitchen to make another tall Moroccan tea glass full of nerve thunder, and suddenly found myself spending the next three hours cooking up an impromptu black-bean soup that used up a lot of new garlic, two must-eat-now fennel bulbs, lots of pimenton, and all of the stock that I’d made from simmering a winter’s worth of old Parmesan rinds with a ham bone and some fennel seeds for an entire Sunday. I didn’t use a recipe, I just cooked on a hunch, adding a can of Italian plum tomatoes, some of the wild oregano I’d harvested in Greece last summer, and a little bit of thyme.

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   For the last year or so in Paris, there’s been a sudden curious flowering of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (the French often benightedly insist on using this medieval term when referring to almost any English speaking country, even Nigeria) restaurant concepts that run from burger trucks and joints to Upper East Side style dating restaurants (La Maison Mere) to some happily very decent Mexican places, with a couple of tedious mini-pastry trendlets (cupcakes, whoopie pies) thrown in for good measure. Since I love a good burger, I’ve been delighted by the arrival of La Camion qui Fume and Blend, and generally bemused by the profusion of Caesar salads and cheesecake all over Paris, since in the main, this is a harmless set of trends that mostly bespeak the fact that Parisian Bobos really love New York City.

After dinner at the new The Beef Club the other night, however, I’m starting to have some serious doubts about what this trend means for Paris. If the food scene in every major city is in constant evolution, Paris isn’t every major city. It’s much smaller than London and New York, and without the same jumped-up financial sectors as those two cities, there’s less money to spin the wheels of the local restaurant industry, which is already struggling for a variety of distinctly local factors like the moronic 35 hour work week (whoever France’s next president may be, I hope they’ll renounce this daft Ruby Goldberg feint at economics once and for all).

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    Since everyone laps up charming Miami born Juan Sanchez and New Zealander Drew Harre, the very successful business duo behind the excellent La Dernière Goutte wine shop and good Cosi sandwich shop in Saint Germain des Prés, honest opinions about the food at their third shingle–the very popular anglophone expat hang-out galore Fish la Boissonerie are usually exchanged in whispers, behind closed doors, and most definitively not for attribution. It’s not that that the food at Fish isn’t good, but rather, well, um, er, hmmmm, it’s that it’s pretty dull in view of all the other amazing options available in Paris, and yet somehow the personal popularity of the owners has given this place a permanent Pass Go card. And this is something that’s always been puzzling to me, since I know how discerning both of them are about what they eat and drink.

So it was with a somewhat anguished reluctance to be critical that I met my friend Christian for dinner at Juan and Drew’s new place, Semilla, just a few doors away from Fish la Boissonerie, the other night. I really wanted the food to be good so that I wouldn’t enter that awkward twisting-in-the-wind space between being a good egg–they’re too many fawning Paris food websites around, and doing my job as a writer. The problem, you see, is that if the food hadn’t been good, I’d have to say so irregardless of what feathers might be ruffled in the small pond of people who write about restaurants in English in Paris. So do I like being critical–not especially, but it comes with the territory, and I got used to it a longtime ago, since I learned this job while working for one of the best  restaurant critics to have come along in my lifetime, Ruth Reichl, of the late and but still lamented GOURMET Magazine.

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photo @ paul brissman

I’m not sure exactly why it happened, but somehow or another, the whole business of making a simple restaurant reservation has turned into an irritating, multi-step time-consuming chore in most of the world’s major cities. And the way in which restaurants cavalierly treat those of us who are willing to put up with this steeplechase completely ignores the two obvious realities–no restaurant would stay open without customers, and a restaurant reservation is a sincere and serious expression of desire and curiosity on the part of a customer with regard to a chef’s cooking and hospitality style and a commitment to experience it.

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