After two excellent meals in a pair of the most overtly touristy restaurants in Vienna this week–Figimuller and Plachutta, I found myself wondering why Paris can’t do as well as the Austrian capital when it comes to responding to certain culinary cliches with quality. To wit, even though it may make many serious food-lovers roll their eyes, most travelers go forth with a short-list of gastronomic experiences they just have to have in a given city, region or country. Pizza in Naples anyone? Paella in Valencia? And Wiener schnitzel, and maybe tafelspitz in Vienna?

Figimuller, in business since 1905, is tucked away in an alley off of Wollseile strasse in the heart of the city, and the only reason to eat here is for a transcendental experience of wiener schnitzel, which they do brilliantly. To be sure, they ham it up a bit–their schnitzels are so enormous they’re larger than the plates they come on, but the quality of the breading, made from three different kinds of crumb, and the veal itself is outstanding, and with a side salad of greens on top of potato and cucumber salad and a mug of Gruner Veltliner, you end up with a very good meal for a very fair price.

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Though vegetables are slowly but surely attracting the serious interest of a growing number of Paris chefs, the French capital still lags very far behind such cutting edge cities as San Francisco or Sydney when it comes to eating green and leafy. To be sure, central Paris is suddenly truffled with sleek-looking take away places that want you to think they specialize in ‘healthy’ eating, i.e. salads, because of their souped-up design visuals, but for anyone who is a committed vegetarian Paris remains a challenging place to eat well.

Though I am not vegetarian, I have many friends who are, and I love the regular meat-free meal. So aside from a couple of reliable local favorites–Bob’s Kitchen leaps to mind for its fabulous vegetrian ‘stew’ and all-vegetarian futomaki, plus terrific smoothies, I find that too many vegetarian places in Paris veer between an attitude of exalted preciousness, i.e., everyone who isn’t vegetarian is an ignorant pig, and/or a chip-on-the-shoulder late hippy pleasure-is-so-bourgeois foolishness. And worse than either of these attitudes is the fact that so few of them are any good.

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Okay, to be completely honest, the only kind of shopping I really enjoy is food and wine shopping. The rest I do under duress and out of necessity, which is why I found myself at Printemps Hommes, the men’s wear branch of the Printemps department store the other day in a bad mood. I had planned to nip in and out to get a birthday present, and they’d discontinued the brand of British made knitwear I was looking for, so I ended up rather desperately meandering around in search of a suitable gift, and I hated it.

Vexed that this errand was taking more time than I had for it, I decided to make myself more comfortable by visiting the men’s room on the third floor of the store. When I arrived, however, I found myself in front of something called a Point WC, or a sort of bizarre boutique selling sanitary equipment and accessories. With slow horror, I realized that the store had franchised out its toilets and that it would now cost a Euro to use the facilities. When I politely asked the woman who was staffing the stand how long this had been going on, she exploded. “If you don’t like it, you can go somewhere else! Go to Galeries Lafayette! Go buy a big Mac, I could care less, suit yourself. We’re hard working people! This is a store! Why should it be free to use to the toilets?! We’re here to make money! Tant pis pour toi!,” she spat with an Antillais accent.

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As much as I love wandering the steep stone-paved lanes of Montmartre very early in the morning, on a rainy day, in the dead of winter or maybe in August–all times when the tourist throngs are gone and you can feel the bawdy past of this perched hilltop village before it was engulfed by Paris a century ago, the one thing I never expect to find anywhere near the Place du Terte is good food. Why? Because the sheer volume of tourist foot traffic means that local rents are sky high, which drives most restaurateurs to use every trick in the book to make a profit–bought in salads, pre-prepared sauces, industrially baked desserts, all of these sad cheats are on lavish display in this micro neighborhood (they’re other parts of Montmartre with some terrific restaurants, the zone I’m referring to centers on the Place du Terte).

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L’Ogre  Though the location across the street from the exasperating (this building is much too big and it’s impossible to find the entrance) round Maison de Radio in the 16th arrondissement isn’t very convenient, there’s still a lot to like about L’Ogre, a friendly and very lively modern bistro with an attractive and welcoming young staff, great views of the Eiffel Tower, and good solid traditional French cooking.

The main reason this place works so well is that it was born for all of the right reasons. To wit, a bunch of friends who were working as wine distributors and who love good food decided that it would be fun to do a restaurant together. So they took over this old corner cafe and kitted it out with a post-industrial-loft-look, i.e.  factory lamps and visible heating ducts. They kept the old zinc bar though, and made sure the lighting was good, a detail much appreciated by the media crowd who pack the place at dinner, and also decided the chalkboard menu would be sort of a greatest hits roster of simple tasty French classics like terrine de foie gras mi-cuit or rillettes de lapin (potted rabbit) to start, and then pedigreed meat, including an excellent steak tartare, boudin noir and a superb veal chop with shallot cream sauce for two, and shrewdly chosen and very fairly priced wines.

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Before I serve up the usual meat and potatoes, I’d like to urge all French speaking foodlovers to read the current issue of the news magazine LE POINT (For those who are unfamiliar with the French press, the country has two major news weeklies, LE POINT, and L’EXPRESS, rather like the good old days in America, when the country had two serious news weeklies in TIME and NEWSWEEK, both sorry shadows of their former selves, which is why I subscribe to the ECONOMIST). In any event, this duo has a dulling tendency to ignore the pressing affairs of France and the world in favor of recurring cover stories that rate the best hospitals in France, tiresomely regular articles on real-estate, freemasons, and other mind numbing subjects, which is why I was so surprised to find a really fascinating and urgent cover story on “les grands surfaces” (supermarkets) in LE POINT. Though not as exhaustive as it could or should have been, this serious collection of well-reported stories at least began to examine the catastrophic effect that supermarket style retailing has had on the French diet, the French countryside, French cities, French health, and a variety of other aspects of life in France.

Suffice it to say that supermarkets, especially the really big ones, have choked the life out of hundreds of French villages, towns and cities by making it impossible for small merchants to compete, have ringed many of these same places with soul-strickeningly ugly collars of sprawl that are only accessible by automobile, and have privileged heavily processed industrial foods with high mark-ups over fresh healthy reasonably priced seasonal food people cook into good meals at home.

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