With rain streaking across the window next to my desk this Saturday afternoon, my heart goes out to all of those people who are on vacation and cooped up in seaside hotel rooms staring out at wet beaches. The poor weather in Paris for the last month has a lot of people second-guessing their vacation plans, too, but for anyone looking for a terrific rain-or-shine weekend getaway, I would highly recommend La Grenouillere, which is located in La Madeleine-sour-Montreuil in the Pas-de-Calais.

Brilliant young chef Alexandre Gauthier has just opened eight striking new ‘huttes,’ or cabins, designed by architect Patrick Bouchain, and as long as you pack a good book or two, you’ll have a terrific time here, since these a cozy, all black roosts that come with iPod dock, televisions, coolers stocked with Ch’Ti beer, apple juice and mineral water, and soaking tubs set next to picture windows that overlook the surrounding meadows.

Avocado and monkfish in seawater

The main reason you’ll be here, though, is to eat, since Gauthier is one of the top five young chefs working in France today. Stopping by for dinner the other night, I had an astonishingly good and absolutely fascinating meal in this three century old auberge’s striking new dining room. Dinner began with sea bass carpaccio interleaved with razor-fine slices of nectarine, and continued with a suite of superb dishes, among them a cube of avocado and monkfish in a shallow pool of sea water, green pea gnocci with pea shoots, frog’s legs meuniere, roasted lobster served in smoldering boughs of juniper, and rare beef with salicorne (seaweed) and a nest of grated potatoes in a gentle garlic cream. I loved the grande finale of this meal, too, which occurred when a beautiful young waitress arrived and threw of a transparent sugar globe full of sorrel mousse into plate. Both of us laughed, and the refreshingly astringent mousse was a brilliant conclusion to this meal.

Green pea gnocci with pea shoots

In addition to his 110 Euro eleven-course tasting menu, Gauthier also offers eight dishes for 85 Euros and an a la carte menu. And if you decide you want something tamer, Gauthier also runs an excellent rotisserie restaurant, Froggy’s Tavern, five minutes away in the charming town of Montreuil.

La Grenouillère, La Madelaine-sous-Montreuil, Tel. 011-33-3-21-06-07-22, Closed March, 20 December-4 February, Tuesday and Wednesday except July-August, www.lagrenouillere.fr

Meeting a friend for lunch at Jaja in the Marais on Bastille Day, I thought, maybe this time I’ll be lucky. Just a week earlier I’d had a decidedly mediocre and expensive meal at the embarrassingly named new Pamela Popo, and on the way home I found myself wondering why the restaurants in this otherwise delightful neighborhood are so often disappointing. To be sure, the Marais has a couple of my favorite tables, like the wonderful Cafe des Musees and Le Carre des Vosges, but this popular and charming precinct also supports of a bewildering number of sub-par eateries, including a lot of crummy see-and-be-seen fashion-driven restaurants. The reason, I think, is that a lot of young Parisians come to this ‘hood to hang out and then grab a cheap bite after a few drinks and before a few more, plus there’s a lot of tourist traffic.

Continue reading…

During the twenty-five years I’ve lived in Paris, the rhythms of summer have changed. The first year I lived here, I was amazed at the way the city perceptibly stilled during July and then almost completely shutdown during the month of August. Shopkeepers pasted kraft paper in their windows, and the newspapers ran lists of bakeries that would still be open for any straggler in search of a fresh baguette. Since I was then working as an editor for an American company, I didn’t have the luxury of a month-long holiday, and so I not only became an expert on the French capital in August, but came to love this bestilled and sort of deliciously lonesome season in the city when you never had to worry about getting a seat at a movie if you arrived minutes before the film started and the cafe terraces were filled with people sipping rose wine over salads ignored in the heat.

Continue reading…

Heirloom tomato salad with black cherries

Ever since it opened in 2009, Frenchie, chef Gregory Marchand’s excellent contemporary French bistro in the rue du Nil in the Sentier, Paris’s old garment district and one of my favorite parts of the city, has been one of the toughest places in Paris at which to snag a table. The reason is that even though they’re lots of young chefs in the city who are doing produce-driven market menus these days, Marchand has a brilliant gastronomic imagination that continuously concocts dishes which are beautiful to look at, feature an intriguing balance between varying textures, and are deliciously original in terms of simple but unexpected constellations of taste. I’ve eaten at Frenchie dozens of times, but eagerly look forward to every meal for a new flourish of his nimble culinary wit and ingenuity.

Continue reading…

L’Oeuf Eclate

The new 138 room Mandarin Oriental hotel opened its doors in Paris today, and brilliant chef Thierry Marx fired up the ovens at his new Parisian restaurant, a stunning looking space by Patrick Jouin and Sanjit Manku called Sur Mesure that will seat only forty covers. If you’re not familiar with Marx, you will be soon, and in the meantime, you might want to read a piece I wrote about him for the late but still lamented Gourmet Magazine several years ago: http://www.gourmet.com/restaurants/2009/05/the-new-marxism-in-france

Continue reading…

  Walking to meet friends for dinner the other night at Bourgogne Sud, a new Burgundian table in the drab rue de Clichy, it occurred to me that it’s become very rare for a new regional table to open in Paris these days. If the city was studded with outposts of the various regional cuisines of France when I moved here 25 years ago, many of them have closed as Parisians have become more interested in, well, cheeseburgers and Asian food than the traditional dishes of provincial France.

The highly dubious politics of the owner notwithstanding, I used to love L’Alsaco in the 10th, which served excellent Alsatian food, and Chez Maitre Paul in Saint-Germain-des-Pres for its delicious cooking from the Jura and Franche-Comte. There was a mode for provencale restaurants in the mid-eighties, a reflection of the sudden accessibility of the south of France as TGV (high-speed) train service started, but this tappered off too.

Continue reading…