Stairwell decor at the Hotel Thoumieux  On a really ratty January morning, I hoisted myself out of the exceptionally comfortable bed in my room at the new Hotel Thoumieux and wallowed in a long shower with the geranium-scented Australian made Aesop’s toiletries in the spacious white-marble wash-up stall in the corner of my room. I’d been out late the night before at a place I never go anymore, Le Cafe de Flore, with a dear friend, and needed some heat and aroma therapy to dissolve the party cobwebs which were reminding me that I’m not 25 anymore. During this good lathering up, I was also looking forward to what very talented chef Jean-Francois Piege might get up to at breakfast, since this new 15 room hotel, a place I’d been sent to write up for a magazine, is just upstairs from his terrific gastronomic restaurant and brasserie (decent food but attitude-pertrubed service at the latter) at the same address.

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If Paris is my home and the city I consistently find the most gastronomically rewarding, I also avidly follow the latest openings in many other major cities, since I am not only eagerly in search of good food wherever I go but also find it essential to keep up with the dining scenes in other major food cities as a way of putting Paris in perspective. So on a recent trip to New York City, I was keen to try a few of the places there that received rave reviews in 2010.

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New Year’s Eve barbecue in Cutchogue, New York @ Big Bunny  Though I was very happily shacked up on the East End of Long Island for the New Year (where I ate as many Peconic Bay scallops as I could get my hands on, and also gorged myself on barbecued little-neck clams as part of a superb New Year’s Eve dinner), I’m already looking forward to an exciting new year on the Paris restaurant scene. To wit, they’re lots of major openings in the wings, and for all of those places that can make themselves known early through major PR noise, I know they’re also many talented young chefs who’ll be greeting the arrival of 2011 with no small trepidation as the one in which they decided to take the plunge and open their own restaurants. It is, of course, these small independent tables that interest me most, since even though I’ve been writing about Paris restaurants for 25 years, there’s nothing as fascinating and often moving as the birth of a new restaurant.

**Two new restaurants will debut at the just-opened Paris Shangri-La Hotel in January 2011. The French haute-cuisine table will be run by chef Philippe Labbé, and the Shang Place, a gourmet Cantonese table, will have a team of Hong Kong chefs. The one I’m excited about is the Cantonese table.

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As delightful as the Marais may be, it’s not, with certain exceptions–the Cafe des Musees, for example, a particularly noteworthy food neighborhood, which is why I was delighted to discover the tiny Japanese restaurant Icho tucked away in the rue des Tournelles just steps from the Place de la Bastille.

Taking its name from the Japanese word for gingko trees, this is a pleasant little spot with a pull-up-a-chair sushi counter just inside the front door where exceptionally talented sushi man Aroun Tanovan, a Laotian who trained as Tokyo’s prestigious Tsukuba cooking school, deftly and passionately plies his trade.

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An Elegant Parisienne

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L’ECAILLEUR @ Bob Peterson  A longtime ago, when I’d first learned to eat oysters as the result of a short but memorable love affair during my first few months in Paris, I’d often go to Le Bar a Huitres for a feast on these bivalves with my friends Anne and Peter. They love shellfish, too, and they then lived in the Latin Quarter not far from the branch of this mini-chain on the boulevard Saint Germain at the corner of the rue Saint Jacques. As the years went by and I became both more knowledgeable and more exigent about oysters, I sadly detected a slow but steady drift to the bottom of the sea in the quality of what these places were serving, however. At first it was just the cooked food that really fell off, but the last few times I’d been at one of these addresses, the oysters weren’t terrific either and eventually I stopped going, since one of the wonderful things about Paris is that they’re so many places in the city to have a truly spectacular oyster feast, Garnier and Huitrerie Regis among them.

Occasionally I’d walk by one of these addresses, muse sentimentally over great meals and good times had there in the past, and wish that someone would set these places right, which is why it was with great interest that I read that they’d recently been taken over by Garry Dorr, the son of Willy Dorr, founder of the very successful Bistro & Compagnie chain of bistros, Bistro de Breteuil and Bistro des Deux Theatres among them, where you get a set-price menu of aperitif, half bottle of wine, starter, main, dessert and coffee for 39 Euros. Garry Dorr, 26, is a graduate of the celebrated Lausanne Hotel School, and on the basis of dinner at the Montparnasse branch of Le Bar a Huitres the other night, he’s not only a very smart guy but an aces restauranteur, too.

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