During the course of a major recent French road trip, I couldn’t help but wondering how eating in the highway rest stops of France’s excellent national highway system went so dismally wrong. In one highway rest stop after after, the edible offer was consistently mediocre to miserable and gallingly over-priced, a state of affairs that’s absolutely bewildering when you consider that the original Michelin guide was born a little over a century ago to direct motorists to great eating as they traveled around the country.

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Septime

It’s peony time in Paris, and we have a big vermillion bunch in the living room, and some ivory-colored ones in a smaller vase on the kitchen table. Everytime I trot out of my office to make a cup of tea or rustle up some lunch, these flowers swing a winsome punch of pleasure, too, and this is exactly what I experienced the other night over dinner at young chef Bertrand Grébaut’s new restaurant Septime in the 11th arrondissement. While established chefs sometimes rest on their oars, fledgling ones are often like puppies in their eagerness to play and please. To be sure, Grébaut is a considerably experienced cook, having worked in the kitchen at Alain Passard’s Arpege for two years, also at Joel Robuchon, and most recently at L’Agape, a pretentious and overpriced place in the 17th arrondissment that I never cottoned to, but his cooking still exhibits a delicious earnestness and a sincere desire to delight.

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Le Procope

Having written about Paris restaurants for many years, I’ve learned that there’s nothing more unwelcome than the relentless expert. To wit, if many friends seek me out for restaurant advice, others are less passionate at the table than I am and are more interested in just having a good time. So when I sense this to be the case, I leave my expert’s hat on the hook at home, and head off to dinner for the pleasure of good conversation more than anything else. Sometimes it’s actually a real treat to let someone else chose where we’re going to eat anyway, and sometimes it’s oddly useful for me to end up in a place that it would never have occurred to me to set foot in either, a case in point being Le Procope, the storied restaurant a few steps from the Odeon on the Left Bank.

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Its a tough challenge to create a successful neighborhood restaurant in Paris these days. Almost by definition, prices should be low enough so that the locals will reflexively come for a meal, and the profit margins on affordable dining in Paris these days are razor thin. Then there’s the question of the menu, which can be very tricky, too. In the 9th arrondissement in the heart of Paris where I live, the locals like traditional French bistro cooking but also appreciate the novelty of more inventive contemporary French cuisine. Curiously, though, very few restaurants in the neighborhood have thought to create the type of really clever and very appealing menu served by chef Frédéric Barette at Les Coulisses near the Place Saint Georges.

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