I recently had a good chuckle over what was surely one of the crankiest restaurant reviews I think I’ve ever read. Ten minutes late for his reservation, a certain French critic had received a call from the restaurant he was on his way to review to inform him that his table would be given away if he didn’t show up swiftly. Suffice it say, this put him into a furiously foul frame of mind, which meant that he shook the offending restaurant soundly by the shoulders before kicking it in the shins. The reason I mention this is because so many different factors affect the way we perceive of and subsequently like or dislike a restaurant.

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“Mais attendez, Monsieur–you brought steaks back to France with you from the United States? Vous etes completement fou ou quoi?” (Are you completely crazy or what?) Well, I’m not going to touch that interesting question from a French custom’s inspector with a barge pole, so I’ll just get it over with and fess up–yes, I often buy a half-dozen organic New York strip steaks at a favorite New York City butcher just before I’m off to the airport. I pack them in layer after layer of shopping bags and put them in my checked luggage, since the air temperature at high altitudes means they’re just fine after a seven or eight hour flight back to Europe.

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The dininig room at Zinc Opera

Ever since I escaped the suburban patch of New England where I grew up, I’ve been an avid student of big cities, among them Boston, New York, London and Paris.  If everything about the world’s great cities fascinates me, one one of the things I find most interesting is to observe they way in which their neighborhoods evolve, which is a process that occurs continuously and often in unexpected ways. Who’d have ever believed, for example, that shabby Fulham where I lived when I was a student in London would become a flower-box bedecked bourgeois neighborhood?

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Photo @ Peter Turnley

The tragic skid into an unappetizing senility that most Paris brasseries have experienced during the last twenty-five years is a subject I’ve often written about, and it remains a sad and sore topic with me, because I so loved the brasseries of Paris before they fell victim to poorly played business schemes to make them part of money-spinning chains. If I’ve always loved the food of Paris bistros more, nothing could beat the city’s brasseries for their irresistible atmospheres of desultory glamour. In my mind’s eye, in fact, the brasseries of Paris will always register as they do in the beautiful Peter Turnley photograph above.

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Poulet de Bresse for 2-4: 95 Euros

On the way up to the  unfortunately named Le Coq Rico, chef Thierry Lébé’s new Antoine Westermann backed rotisserie in Montmartre, last night, I couldn’t help but wondering why no one had ever thought of doing a roast-chicken themed restaurant in Paris before. To be sure, there are lots of places that are rightly or mostly wrongly well-known for their roast chicken in Paris–L’Ami Louis, La Rotisserie d’en Face, La Rotisserie du Beaujolais, Le Pere Claude and Chez Maitre Albert among them (they all get a C+ from me), but even the good ones rarely do it better than my favorite roast chicken purveyors, almost all of which are to be found at open-air Parisian markets.

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