Padding down the street in a small Slovenian town a week ago, I was stopped cold by a curious display in a shop window.

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Since I moved to the Right Bank ten years ago, I find I visit Saint Germain des Pres less and less often. This is mostly because the neighborhood has become so gentrified that it’s rare an interesting new restaurant opens there and also because most of my friends who previously lived in the area have either chosen or been forced to leave the area as housing prices there climb so relentlessly. So the other night when I met friends at the Cafe de Flore, I found myself looking at this well-trod turf almost with the eyes of a tourist.

It’s still one of the most beautiful urban neighborhoods in the world, bien sur, and the people watching around 7.30pm from the terrace of the Flore was so eye-popping that it was almost worth the 8 Euros they charge for a moderately sized glass of Chablis (The wilting detail? So many of the passersby were carrying shopping bags from the luxury boutiques that have colonized what once one of the world’s intellectual cauldrons). But when it came to chosing a nearby restaurant impromptu for a bistro dinner with friends visiting from New York, I was drawing a blank until it occurred to me that we’d probably find something in and around the rue Princesse, famously known as the “rue de la soif” (street of the thirsty) for its dense concentration of bars, night clubs and restaurants.

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I’ve been to the Cannes film festival often enough to know that most festival-goers are little concerned by good food and that this is also generally true of the convention-goers who flock to this seaside resort town gone conference center on a regular basis, but with summer just about to come out the gate, I want to point out that there’s a really terrific restaurant in Cannes for anyone who’s likely to end up there either on holiday or for professional reasons during the upcoming months–Le 45 at the Grand Hotel.

It was thanks to a friend who lives locally that I found this place, since truth be told I’d never even noticed the Grand Hotel, which sits at the back of a deep and truly beautiful garden right on La Croisette. Until recently, it was the Miss Haversham of the seafront, but now the only son of the owners has taken over the reins and he clearly has ambitions for this place, right from recognizing that it has sort of a fabulous, funky TWA (defunct airline) style decor. Other people might have ripped this out once they took the wheel, mais Monsieur realized that this early sixties vintage look has suddenly aged to a point of rare fabulousness and so chose to renovate.

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  If you’ll allow me, I’ll share a slightly embarrassing little secret: even though I absolutely love to cook, and cook all the time, baking scares me. Why? The science of successful baking has always struck me as requiring a rigor in the kitchen that turns me back into the same sullen adolescent who once got Cs in Algebra–to the fury of my father–in a suburban Connecticut high school (“Your pre-school learning aptitude tests showed the same ability for maths as they did for language, so this inacceptable grade is just a reflection of your reprehensible laziness and pigheadness,” said Dad…and he was right). My free form approach in the kitchen–hey, maybe I’ll add a little pickled lemon to this and why not some browned orzo and then a dribble of Argan oil and a pinch of cumin, etc. has never seemed compatible with the mathematics of baking.

The problem with my reluctance to baking, of course, is that they’re times when I get a real craving for one of those baked goods that made dessert such a major moment during childhood meals–apple pies, maple-walnut cakes, ginger bread, date-walnut bread, strawberry short cake, etc. And then I’ll give in, and poor Bruno will get home and find me standing in the middle of a fine white storm of flour in the kitchen. He always says the same thing, too: “Oh–are you baking? Why?”

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At the beginning of a week in Tuscany, I immediately stopped at a bookstore in Florence and bought an armload of Italian language restaurant guides–the SLOW FOOD OSTERIE D’ITALIA, MICHELIN ITALIA and the L’ESPRESSO restaurant guide to Italy. I also checked out a couple of websites and arrived with a batch of printed pages, so I figured that there was no way that I could fail to eat spectacularly well during my travels here.

Wrong. If I didn’t expect much from the MICHELIN ITALIA, it didn’t deliver much either, leading us to two very ordinary meals in restaurants where the gnocci was industrially made, sauteed zucchini was reheated in a microwave that turned it to mush, the bread was stale, and the grated Parmesan as fragrant and tasty as sawdust,and all of this despite the fact that the front doors of the offending tables were slapped thick with Michelin decals. This is why I think decals are a bad idea, since they live on long past any valid recommendation, and people tend to use them as visual abbreviations to good gastronomic judgement, i.e, “Oh, look, that place has a Michelin sticker, let’s have lunch there.” What I found really sad in my Michelin meals was that I naively never thought that Italy was capable of cheapening its food to such a degree. I also found, as I have for the last decade or so, that this guide’s rudder tacks towards a fancified Gallic style of cuisine I haven’t enjoyed in many years, or in other words, if you’re wondering where la nouvelle cuisine went to retire into a polite senescence it was Italy.

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Restaurant Frederic Simonin, photo by Francis Amiand  After a very long train ride back to Paris from Munich, volcanic eruption oblige, it was a delight to go to dinner at the new Frederic Simonin restaurant near the Place des Ternes in 17th arrondissement the other night. Not only did a flute of Jacques Copinet Blanc de Blanc Champagne really hit the spot, but the chic black-and-white dining room by interior designer Maud Lesur is a lovely setting for a meal–it’s strikingly graphic, the lighting is impeccable, and tables are widely spaced. From the moment we arrived, the service was charming, and the best was yet to come, because if Simonin’s contemporary French cooking is occasionally a little timid, it’s generally superb.

I was very curious about this opening, too, because Simonin has such an impressive pedigree–he previously cooked with Ghislaine Arabian, and then with Joel Robuchon in both Paris and London. So I wondered what his style would be like now that he was no longer riding saddle for another chef. As it turns out, Simon’s cooking is light, fresh, and exquisitely well-balanced in terms of flavor and texture. “What I love about this food is that the chef has so obviously made an effort to create dishes that are full of flavor but light and healthy,” Bruno observed after tasting his main course–delicately scored squid with oven-roasted tomatoes, black olives, fresh basil and a very light vinaigrette.

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