Since I moved to the 9th arrondissement some ten years ago, I’ve delighted in the fact that this central Paris neighborhood with wonderful architecture and some fine little museums has remained so little known. Unlike Saint Germain, where I lived in a tiny apartment near Le Bon Marche for many years, the 9th is still a Parisian’s Paris neighborhood, with lots of unusual little shops, excellent food shopping, and a strong sense of community. The difference between these patches of Paris turf was really driven home to me recently, too, when I went to a lovely dinner party on the Left Bank, and all of the other guests were Americans with nearby pied a terres. While I’m not surprised that they love the neighborhood, the problem is they’re now so many part-time foreign owners in that swath of the Left Bank between the Seine and the boulevard Saint Germain it’s long ago started to feel slightly denatured. Foreigners pay prices that make the French blanche, and part-time visitors don’t provide the volume necessary to keep grocers and bakers in business.

Within the last few years, though, the 9th has slowly been rediscovered by that cast of Parisians known as bobos, short for bohemian bourgeois types, or affluent young working couples with cosmopolitan tastes and liberal attitudes. Among other things, Bobos love Asian food (see my recent post on Yoom), New York City and American comfort food, especially hamburgers. So I wasn’t surprised when several locals pals raved to me about a new restaurant in the neighborhood called La Maison Mere. “It’s just like Nolita (North of Little Italy) or SoHo,” they crooned, adding that it was also open daily.

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Photo @ Marc Schwartz

It’s always exciting when a talented chef spreads his or her wings and opens their first restaurant, and at Les Tablettes, Jean-Louis Nomicos’s handsome new restaurant in the 16th arrondissement, there’s a subtle but exhilirating whiff of liberty in the air. Nomicos went to work for Alain Ducasse in Juan-les-Pins when he was just eighteen, and was subsequently placed by the same maestro as head chef at the lovely La Grande Cascade in the Bois de Boulogne before most recently running the kitchen at Lasserre.

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Even though the presence of the four-wheel drive crowd–those blithe young couples who pull up to a restaurant in a gas-guzzling black Porsche Cayenne with 16th arrondissement or Neuilly plates, usually provokes a deep aversion on the part of anyone who’s as environmentally conscientious as I try to be (Bruno thinks I’m nuts to mail empty ink cartridges back to Hewlett Packard for recycling), I still tried to give La Cuisine, one of the new restaurants at the recently renovated Le Royal Monceau Raffles Paris hotel a fair shake when I went for dinner on a recent Sunday night.

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France still suffers from a colonial hangover when it comes to the way it perceives of Asia. If the English have rather admirably come to terms with the loss of their vast once-colored-pink-on-maps-of-the-world empire and only occasionally swoon in nostalgia for the Raj, most of the French still see Asia through the opera glasses of folklore and a rather vain nostalgia. To wit, they want the booming continent with the thousands of churning factories that fill our store shelves to be gentle, alluring, sensual and picturesque. And for proof of my postulation, see what reaction you get when you tell the guests at any Parisian dinner party that the population of Viet Nam is significantly larger than that of France.

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Langoustines in ginger-lime bouillon  It’s a continuing challenge for me to cover the top of the Paris food chain for obvious economic reasons, so I was thrilled when a very old friend–we went to Kindergarten together in Greens Farms, Connecticut, called to say that she and her three white miniature poodles were coming to Paris from the well-known Mediterranean seaside enclave for the tax-fleeing rich where she’s currently shacked up, and could she invite me to lunch at Lasserre? I could write volumes on the life of this brilliant and elegant woman, but suffice it to say that this Anglo-Norwegian (Mom from Bath, Dad from Stavanger) American who married her 76 year old God-father when she was 35 is someone who’d make major good fodder for a novel. Since we were kids together, I’ll restrain myself, but suffice it say that when my mother, two brothers, sister and I went to her very grand wedding a longtime ago, my brothers couldn’t stop themselves–“You just watch,” said my younger brother, “She’ll claw his clothes off the moment the vows are done.” “That’s enough of that,” said Mom, with a complicit chuckle.

Well the old fellow hung on for another twenty years, during which time I occasionally visited their town house in a major European city to enjoy one of the most extraordinary private art collections in Europe–Durer drawings, a Degas or two, a Bonnard, a Renoir, and more–after making a fortune by inventing a small but essential industrial valve, this concentration camp survivor, a really lovely and tremendously cultivated man, rightly knew how to live large.

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After a wonderful week of eating in Rome, one dish stands out beyond all others. Though I went to many excellent restaurants, it was a quiet and solitary lunch at L’Arcangelo in the Prati district that will have me missing Roman cooking once I’ve returned to Paris.

Though many people balk at the idea of dining alone, they’re times when I enjoy it a lot, and on this particular day, when I still hadn’t completely made a mental transition from Paris to Rome, the pleasant welcome of Signora Dandini to her husband’s otherwise empty restaurant immediately put me at ease, as did the fact that she told me to sit wherever I like with a big smile (the accelerating trend towards rather deranged pre-arranged psycho-social seating charts is a noisome trend that seems to have recently jumped the Channel from London to Paris).

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