Today at noon, I was ready for a really good lunch, and I knew exactly where and what I wanted to eat. The problem, alas, is that the restaurant in question, the terrific Lisa Elmqvist, is in Stockholm.

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When a new luxury hotel opens in Paris, aside from filling beds, the utlimate goal is for the property to become a fixture in Parisian life. This aspiration explains the inevitable post-ribbon-cutting cycle of carefully cast cocktail parties–think movie stars, aristocrats, politicians and other brand-name personalities, which are then so breathlessly recounted in major French publications. Myself, I rather doubt that this sort of promotion really accomplishes much, since almost laughingly retouched photos of people like Jacques Lang or Emanuelle Beart sipping Champagne have never filled me with any desire to haunt the same premises. Instead, what attracts me to any new hotel is the perception that it may be birthing a myth or a mystery at the core of its new identity, and this is why I was fascinated by the new Shang Palace restaurant at the Shangri-La Paris hotel when I went to dinner there the other night. Whatever other feints this year-old Asian newcomer may have made at becoming Parisian, I suspect it’s this excellent new “Chinese” restaurant that will accomplish the vital goal of drawing Parisians, so that this pricey palace, like any other new luxury hotel, doesn’t end up feeling like an expensive mausoleum.

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Le Garde Temps dining room (intentionally blurry photo)

Now that the French food press, much of which indulges in a long-standing tradition of effectively shutting down for a month or two during the summer–a luxury few Paris-based Anglophone food writers can afford, is catching up with everything that’s happened in Paris during the last few months, I’ve been reading rave reviews of a new place, Le Garde Temps, which is just a few streets away from where I live in the 9th arrondissement. The deal on this place is that it’s the new table of chef Benoît Gauthier, a clever restaurant manager whose Le Grand Pan in the 15th serves some seriously good meat, and restaurateur Marc Rosenzweig, who’s also run several popular bars on the Left Bank.

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Marinated mackerel

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Last supper in Spain

Et helas, all good things must come to an end, including a wonderful holiday in Spain, but I love Paris during la rentree, when the city has an engaging if sllghtly smug and rather self-satisfied energy to it that peters out by Christmas.

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Grilled baby clams at Cal Pinxo

Happily shacked up in a seaside house on the coast between Tarragona and Barcelona, Bruno and I have been binge-reading, napping, and swimming all week, but we bestirred ourselves when friends from Perpignan who are vacationing in Sitges, the lovely resort town just south of Barcelona, called to see if we’d join them for dinner. Having worn nothing but a T shirt, shorts and flip flops all week, it was sort of a grind to get dressed to drive up the coast a little ways for dinner, and truth be told, I wasn’t wild about the idea of finding myself in a restaurant again. Avidly covering the Paris and French restaurant scenes all year, it’s vital to me to hang up my hat every once in a while and eat simple food that I’ve cooked, and knowing Sitges well, I also very much doubted that we’d have a good meal. Why? Despite its rightful popularity–it’s a charming little town with a peaceable kingdom mix of vacationers of every stripe from all over the world, the restaurants are generally mediocre at best.

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