For several summers running, Bruno and I spent our holidays on the beautiful Greek island of Paros, but this year, because I needed to do research for my next book, we did a pair of long wonderful drives through France on our way to a house by the sea in Spain. I love Spain, too, but I missed the delicious food we’d eaten on Paros. The house we stay in there has a whole shelf of Greek cookbooks, and I cooked my way through them with the pleasure of discovering real Greek home cooking, and Paros also has many good restaurants. So on a rainy night in Paris when a busy day had left the fridge pretty bare, I found myself craving a good Greek meal. A friend who lives near Sevres-Babylone had told me she often picks up take away meals from Evi Evane, a nearby Greek traiteur, and when I investigated, I discovered that they also run a restaurant in the rue Guisarde.

I’m usually a little wary of dining on the rue Guisarde, which is part of the lively little precinct of bars and pubs that comprise a still very popular party destinations for unattached twenty and thirty something Parisians, because this ‘hood is more about booze than good food. But motivated by potent Hellenic cravings, and curious, we decided to give this small place the benefit of the doubt.

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  “I know you’re going to hate me for this,” said a friend calling from Berlin, “but I’m calling for a restaurant recommendation. I checked your book and I looked on your blog, but couldn’t find anything that met the difficult requirements of my parents, with whom I’ll be in Paris over the weekend.” Yes…. “They want to eat really good fish on Sunday night in a place with a good view of the Eiffel Tower. I told them that this was highly unlikely but I hope you don’t mind my checking with you anyway.” Since she’s not only a close friend and my go-to source for restaurant information when I go to Berlin, I couldn’t say no, especially since I really like her parents.

Her father once owned a chain of shoe stores in Brooklyn, and the first time I met him, I was wearing a pair of loafers with a hole under my big toe in one sole. As an editorial assistant in New York City, I lived meagerly from pay check to pay check, and I was waiting for my next check to take my one pair of good shoes to the cobbler. Anyway, I trekked out to Brooklyn on a snowy day for a fantastic dinner and a night of brilliant conversation with my pal and her book-and-opera loving parents. Mrs. Schindelheim made the best pot roast I’ve ever eaten, with a superb homemade chicken-and-vegetable soup to start.

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Twenty five years ago, gulp, my brother and I found ourselves moping around the Gare du Nord with two hours before our train back to London on a rainy Sunday. If this scenario was already far from ideal, it was seriously worsened by the fact that we’d had about three hours sleep and had put an alarming dent into a bottle of rot-gut duty-free Prince Hubert cognac when we’d returned to our Left Bank hotel after some bar hopping.

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   I love the 10th arrondissement, because it still has a lot of real Parisian atmosphere and hasn’t yet become infested with Starbucks and Subways. Instead, this until recently rather forgotten corner of Paris is continuing to emerge as one of the city’s most interesting food neighborhoods, mainly because of the happy chicken-and-egg situation that low rents make it a great location for young chefs setting up shop on their own and the creative types who’ve been colonizing the quartier steadily for the last ten years provide them with an eager local audience.

Having lived most of my life in large cities, I’m fascinated by urban ecology, and walking to dinner at Le Galopin last night, I sensed that the east bank of the Canal Martin has reached that sort of perfect ripeness between renewal and decrepitude that usually presages a tipping point. The last time I was in the rue Saint Marthe, where this wonderful bistro is located, was when I went to La Tete dans Les Olives (which I reviewed on this site) a year ago, and this narrow cobbled street so Parisian it looks like it could be a Hollywood backlot had changed a lot. Many of the little houses here had brightly painted doors and had clearly been renovated and there were several fun-looking cafes and interesting new restaurants. To be sure, I still passed two drug dealers decked out in major rapper bling, but they’re part of the urban ecosystem, too, and they wouldn’t be around if demand wasn’t creating supply.

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Because I avoid going out to lunch–it’s lovely, but takes too much time, and five is the maximum number of dinners out that I’m willing to do during a given week, I don’t get back to many Paris restaurants that I’ve tried and liked as often as I’d prefer. So I made an exception to my life as a shut-in during the day when my freshman roommate from college turned up unexpectedly and called to say that he had a lunch reservation at Yam’Tcha, a wonderful restaurant in one of my favorite Paris neighborhoods, which is that great stretch of ancient turf between the rue de Rivoli and Les Halles in the 1st arrondissement. Despite the fact that the destruction of Les Halles was one of the greatest urban planning disasters any major western city has ever been subjected to, these atmospheric side streets survived untouched and they heave with terrific food shopping–I’ll take any excuse to buy a baguette at Julien (75 rue Saint Honore), or browse in the many great boutiques in this neighborhood.

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The Marais (traditionally the 4th arrondissement, and in the parlance of local real-estate agents, more and more of the 3rd arrondissement) is one of the most charming parts of Paris, but consistently under-performs other popular Paris neighborhoods in terms of the quality of its restaurants. Why? It’s a major nightlife quarter, so many of the people who descend upon the neighborhood from elsewhere in the city are content to have a mediocre pizza or a quick and unmemorable Asian meal before they go bar-hopping.

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