On the way to meet a friend for dinner at L’Atelier d’Antan the other night, I found myself musing on a subject that’s been preoccupying me for the last week or so. To wit, has culinary media pushed too hard in terms of insisting that chefs be relentlessly creative? Mea culpa? This thought first occurred to me during a recent trip to central Europe. Arriving hungry at a country inn after a long drive, I spotted grilled white polenta with wild asparagus, cured pork belly and ‘mountain cheese’ (fresh mild curd cheese) on the menu and couldn’t wait for this starter to come to the table. And then it did, and these beautiful ingredients had been subjected to some pretty terrible gastronomic vandalism–a squirt-bottle zig-zag of wasabi cream was scribbled over the dish, which was also incomprehensibly garnished with fresh pineapple and mango, so that what otherwise would have been a really nice plate of food was nearly inedible. The chef wasn’t a young Turk, as I expected, either, but rather a very experienced middle-aged woman with a great local reputation.

Continue reading…

Sometimes only a pizza will do, and when I get that urge, I skip the fancy ‘zza spots in Paris like the unaccountably expensive Pizza Chic or the mad-house La Pizzetta near me in the 9th (decent enough pizzas but crummy service) and head to a place I’ve been going ever since 1986, when I arrived in Paris to work as an editor in the offices of Fairchild Publications. I was living in a hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, and knew no one, so meals were necessarily solo affairs that I sort of dreaded (I hadn’t yet become winningly blase about the idea of having a meal alone, and have to admit that learning to dine alone was one of the great turning points in my life). So I’d scrounge around then neighborhood casing restaurants to see if they looked like places I could do on my own without feeling too hopelessly dorky, and this is how I found Pizza Positano on a rainy Tuesday night after going to a movie.

Continue reading…

Crab in tarragon-spiked shellfish aspic in its own shell

I love the quieter parts of Paris, or those neighborhoods that no one visits unless they happen to live or maybe work there, and by this measure, the new Auberge du 15 in a very quiet and off-the-beaten track corner of the 13th arrondissement, was a place that I was likely to like even before I arrived for dinner with a friend the other night. After many years of living in Paris, I still don’t know this neck of the woods, so I was using my Plan de Paris when I came out of the Metro and ended up taking the long way round to this place, which meant that I passed a charming little park at behind the Gobelins Tapestry works, and en route also spotted a lot of failed 1970s vintage urban renewal projects. All I can say is that Le Corbusier really has a lot to answer for in terms of his catastrophic ideas of skyscrapers in gardens, a model that’s failed in almost every city where it was ever attempted.

Continue reading…

Continue reading…

The view from a terrace table at Zubeyir

Everytime I go to Istanbul, I love  this city more, and this as much for its incredible food as for its richly layered mantle of history, energy and friendliness. There recently on a too short trip, I arrived with a full list of new restaurants that I wanted to try, but as soon as I’d dumped my suitcase and computer at the hotel, I was back out the door and racing through the streets of the wonderful Beyoglu neighborhood to get to my all-time favorite kebab shop, Zübeyir Ocakbaþý, for lunch. To be sure, Paris is heaving with kebab places, but none of them hold a candle to this seriously good and very friendly restaurant, which is a place I often dream of when standing in front of an empty fridge at home at noon.

Continue reading…

I rarely find myself in Saint-Germain-des-Prés anymore, because it’s become the cockpit of luxury-priced tourism in Paris, and no longer exerts any pull whatsoever for anyone in search of good food. Still, so many visitors to the city have recently complained to me about the dearth of good restaurants in this storied neighborhood, I decided to check out the new Left Bank branch of Chardenoux, a beautiful old bistro in the 11th arrondissement that was once one of my favorite restaurants in Paris. Unfortunately, the current version of the original Chardenoux is a pastiche of the old one, serving decent but timidly seasoned and over-priced bistro food.

Continue reading…