Paris restaurants Archives — Being John Curtas

Paris 2023 – Lunchtime in the City of Light

July 13, 2023July 31, 2023

(Ed. note: It seems half the people we know are heading to Paris this year (Can you say: “pent-up demand”?), so we thought we’d suggest a few places for them to eat, particularly for those looking for the classic over the au courant.)

DEJEUNER ALL DAY – Lunchtime in the City of Light

Lunch kills half of Paris, supper the other half. – Charles de Montesquieu

I like to break into my Parisian tours de degustation slowly, first as a tourist, then as a persnickety critic, and finally as a unapologetic sybarite — the kind who likes to bathe in hedonism like asparagus in Hollandaise. Before completely surrendering to unfettered omnivorousness, it’s fun to play tourist for a few days, and there ain’t a more touristy way to dejeuner the day away than floating down the river on a sightseeing boat.

After that it’s batten down the hatches and and all hands on deck as we stormed Paris’s cathedrals of fine dining like a sans-culottes at the Bastille. Finally, we visit an old friend who, at 123 years old, is more ravishing than ever, especially at midday when dappled with sunlight streaming through her magnificent windows. hese four iconic experiences explain why we love lunching the day away in Paris these days, rather than dining ourselves into a stupor at dinner.

BANKS FOR THE MEMORIES

Our Bateaux Parisiens lunch cruise was booked by our staff (aka #1 Son), who wanted his family to get the full visite de la rivière checked off toute suite, before they settled into a week of museum-hopping and crowd-battling.

(Francophiles)

Amazing but true factoid: despite being crazy about Paris (and this being our twelfth visit in thirty years), this was the first time we have ever been in Seine about it.

Ugh-eye-roll GIFs - Get the best GIF on GIPHY

The sights, as one would expect on a sunny, cool Spring day, were glorious. What was unexpected was how good the food was. For 109 euros/pp they served four courses (and unlimited wine) that would be right at home in an upscale bistro.

They keep it simple, but there was no faulting our four courses of chilled broccoli soup; pâté en croûte; beef cheeks (they offer multiple choices which change seasonally) including chicken supreme below, salmon steak with pilaf, buckwheat with pesto and desserts from Maison Lenôtre — each course demanding pleasant enough attention on its own (as did the more-than-serviceable wine) which is pretty hard to do when you’re competing with the world’s most eye-popping architecture.

(Chicken in Seine)

The staff even did me a solid when I, in typical ready-to-overspend clueless American mode, was ready to grab the wine list and throw down a hundred euros for a bottle.

“Monsieur, your wine eet comes with zee meal eet eez pretty guud; you might want to try eet before you order somezing else.”

(Chip off the old Bordeaux)

And we did, and he was right and eet was. So much for taking advantage of ignorant tourists. In Vegas, they would’ve up-sold you a bottle in a New York-New York minute and never thought twice about hosing you.

You can sense the pride the French take in their culinary heritage with meals like this. In almost any other country, on something so touristy it practically screams “fanny pack”, they would slapdash something onto a plate and call it a day’s gouge. Here, the meal would pass muster at almost any gastro-bistro. It may not be inventive, but it checks all the boxes for an introduction to the cuisine. And the sights are unbeatable.

IN GUY WE TRUST

At the top of gastronomy with Guy Savoy, in pursuit of the fourth star - The Limited Times

From the elevated to the ethereal is the only way to characterize lunching on the Seine one day and then heading to the warrens of Guy Savoy the next day in search of a seasonal tasting menu of the sort you only find in Paris. (Ed. note: my disdain for tasting menus is well-documented, but I make an exception in Paris, at Guy Savoy.)

You walk up immense stairs to the entrance to five separate rooms, each holding four tables and illuminated both by the sun reflecting off the river below and the luminescent modern art hanging from the walls — themselves worth a room-by-room viewing once the tables start emptying. The effect is one of dining in a private club, cosseted by muffled sounds, subtle but attentive service, and nothing to distract you from what appears on your plate.

(Truffles in paradise)

Savoy retains his excellent standing in the Paris pantheon of destination dining despite losing a star in the last Michelin Guide, and absorbing the occasional jabs from bloggers like Paris By Mouth, who found the food bland and boring. Meg Zimbeck’s palate is one we respect, and there is a back-story to her not recommending the restaurant, involving reservations, cancellations, and terrorism(!) which we won’t get into here. All we know is we’ve eaten Savoy’s food multiple times on two continents over twenty years, and with the exception of the iconic Parmesan-Truffle soup (above) and few standard amuse bouches (like the silver-skewered mini-burgers), we have never had a bad bite, or the same bite twice.

Having sung Savoy’s praises so many times before, it almost seems redundant to comment on the effulgence of his cuisine — such as sea urchin so bracing in its haunting, dusky salinity you feel like you’re eating it straight from the Atlantic floor.

(An urchin to satisfy)

As if to guild the lily, Savoy then dresses the mahogany-colored organs of this echinoderm with scallops and caviar in a confluence of flavor which somehow merges into a single gestalt of ocean intensity:

(Egg-cellent)

He follows this brininess with a slice of sweet, in this case a Daurade Royale (gilt-head bream), which is cooked and sauced as all seafood dreams of being:

Each of our courses in the tasting extravaganza toggled between acutely focusing the palate and then soothing it. It’s as if you’re eating more of something than the thing itself. Vegetables were treated simply and given their due, and nods to seasonality were everywhere, such as in a spring lamb chop, no larger than the base of a thumb:

(Mary had a littlest lamb)

It takes a rarefied skills to make food like this work, and to our palate, Savoy never fails to hit the mark.

Lunch is the right move, because even after clocking in at three hours, you still have plenty of time for sightseeing, and walking off all those calories from tous les fromages, in the afternoon.

(Praise cheeses!)

Tariffs start at 250e for three courses (which is more like six courses once you factor in all the extra tidbits they bring you) but you can get north of that quickly if you opt for the full tasting Monty, or go nuts with wine.

The wine list is comprehensively French and full of bargains, if you fancy finding bottles in a restaurant for only double what they cost in a shop. In Las Vegas, the big Strip hotels think nothing of charging throat-clutching 4-500% markups, making every other wine list in the world look like a good deal to us. Be forewarned: if you’re looking for wines under a hundy in these Michelin-starred temples, you’re barking up the wrong tree.

This high-toned, exceptional cooking is perhaps not as innovative as it once was, but there is no faulting the recipes or their execution. And I’m still dreaming about the urchin and that lamb chop.

TALLY HAUTE

Most temples of Parisian gastronomy are famous for their chefs, but Le Taillevent has always been known for its owners. The Vrinat family opened it in 1946, and moved to the present location (formerly a duke’s mansion, later an embassy) a few years later. For decades now, it has kept the gourmet flame alive as the most classic of sanctuaries — a refuge for those seeking the finest cooking in the most subdued of rooms.

People can be taken aback by the simple decor. At first glance, it is a bit tan on tan bland, but the welcome — from the smiling doorman to the maitre’d to the waiters — is so charming you quickly forget that you’re dining in what used to be a Paraguayan reception area.

You will also come to see your surroundings as a frame designed to showcase the cuisine, which is more modern than you might suspect from the oak-paneled rooms.

(Who gets the pepperoni?)

The ladies menu don’t have prices. Which is a throwback in all the best ways if you’re a traditionalist. If you’re not, I’m guessing they size you up quickly and let everyone in your party share in the sticker shock. But no one in the room looks like they’re taking in laundry to make ends meet, and most booths are populated by well-suited businessmen who know their forks:

(Waiter, what’s this fly doing in my soup? The backstroke, sir.)

Places this tony probably aren’t used to excitable Americans whooping it up over whatever they’re eating and drinking, but we were paying (through the nose) for the privilege, and the staff was more than happy to let us enjoy ourselves. So much for the supercilious French. A sprinkling of gastro-tourists completed the tableau, which was anchored by our corner — two couples out for a whale of a time who didn’t mind spending a house payment on lunch.

And the menu couldn’t be easier to navigate: three or four course lunch menus are offered (from 90-210-275 euros), or ordering a la carte from five starters, six mains, and five desserts, with unlimited cheese from the outstanding trolley being another 30e (more on this below). The simplicity is deceptive, because what seems straightforward soon becomes a lesson in kitchen choreography, as variations on a theme appear with each course, as dishes are bestowed and cleared with almost magical alacrity.

(Inkcredible)

Consider our appetizers: skipjack tuna with cabbage atop matelote sauce; langoustines “boudin” with coral butter; and smooth chunks of cuttlefish and small crispy shrimp suspended in a puddle of squid ink (above) — all of them accompanied by a separate riff on the same subject, calibrated to expand your thoughts about each ingredient.

This is high-wire cookery, and in less skillful hands might be a mess on the plate and a discordant assault on the senses. But in the hands of Chef Giuliano Sperandio every ingredient sings in harmony.

(Here’s a tip: eat more greens)

Almost on a dare, someone ordered the “green vegetables” — and what arrived was a melange of asparagus in an extraction of fava beans (above), served with another bowl containing a scoop of pistachio mousse floating in a sea of sorrel sauce — each bite a study in veggie intensity. The combination of greenery needed to achieve this level of chlorophyll-laden lusciousness is more than just a patronizing nod in the direction of vegetarians, it is a celebration of all that they hold holy, and a prime example of why vegetarian cooking is too important to be left to vegetarians.

Before we leave them, though, we would not be worth our gastronomic stripes if we didn’t mention food and wine pairings, such as the aged Comté gougeres (of which we could’ve made a meal), sipped with a Henri Giraud rosé, while a fragrant, citrusy Didier Dageneau Pur Sang played the role of a complimentary sauce to those langoustines and shellfish. (None of these bottles was cheap — our wine tariff came to about $1,000 for four bottles — but on this side of the pond, our indulgences would cost three times as much.)

We stuck with the white wine theme through the mains, as a Hubert Lamy Saint-Aubin ’17 married well with turbot with caviar sauce, roasted blue lobster, John Dory with peas and bottarga, and a rabbit loin and rack:

…the lagniappe in this case being a stew of thumbnail-sized kidneys in mustard sauce:

(I kidney not, you mustard try these)

…from an animal so young it could’ve been frolicking with Guy Savoy’s preternatural lamb.

As mentioned, the kitchen loves to sneak in these little plates alongside the main event, each carrying through the theme: in the rabbit’s case with those kidneys, and with the roasted lobster, another helping of crustacean under a shell of charred coffee mayonnaise which genuflects to the classic Newbergs of yore:

Each dish an example of the French art in making things taste like more of themselves. Which was also present with one of the most stunning desserts we’ve ever eaten, made from an ingredient we don’t even like. In this case baked grapefruit blanketed with a grapefruit gelee — giving this overly tart, often acrid citrus fruit a whole new dimension, and single-handedly changing our minds about it:

Lest you think this stuffiness translates to the staff, consider my attacking the cheese cart with all the gusto of Homer Simpson at a doughnut shop:

(It doesn’t get any cheddar than this)

All of this is being served so seamlessly you barely notice the passage of time. The mood of the restaurant is convivial, but civilized. If you want to geek out over every plate, the bi-lingual staff is there to help. If your conversation whips from food to wine to whatever suits your Parisian fancy, I can’t think of a more luxe place to indulge. If you missed the point: none of this comes cheap (our final tab came to $1,100/couple with about half of that being wine), but experiencing food this perfect is an indulgence every galloping gourmand owes themselves at least once in a lifetime.

A final word about stars: In recent years both Savoy and Taillevent have been demoted to two stars from three by the famous Guide Michelin. Having eaten in Michelin-starred restaurants for thirty years, I am fairly conversant (at least for an American) in the distinctions which goes into these coveted awards. In France, these ratings are gnashed over with archeological precision. However, to customers (even experienced ones) the distinctions can be hard to parse. The difference between a one and three-starred establishments are fairly easy. A solid one-star experience (like the Burgundian Les Climats) the fuss and accoutrements are a little less fine, the cuisine isn’t as inventive, nor the techniques quite so bedazzling.

Figuring out what the inspectors look for in three-star establishments (and why they knock some off that pedestal), is much harder to discern, but my guess is a lot of it has to do with who is the most “modern” in their approach to cuisine. (Only one of the current three-star Parisian restaurants – L’Ambroisie – could be considered “traditional”.) In that vein, Savoy and Taillevent are traditionalists with a twist, with one foot in both worlds, and all the better for it, no matter what a bunch of trend-chasing arbiters say.

CHOO CHOO-ING UP THE SCENERY

Ah, understatement. The French are known for it. Such minimalists, dontcha know? Brutalist architecture, earth tones aplenty, all cinder blocks and right angles…sometimes you feel like you’re stuck in East Germany, circa 1972.

I kid. I kid.

But a point needs to be made here: modern restaurant design — all hard surfaces, exposed beams, and flat color palettes — is about as interesting as a barndominium.

Which is why we dine in Paris: as salve for the soul and to soothe our senses. For if there’s a cure for everything that is wrong with 21st Century decor, it is lunch at Le Train Bleu — the most spectacular (and Instagrammed) restaurant in the world.

(Toto, we’re not in Taco Bell anymore)

We don’t just go for the eye-candy, even though it is so dazzling they could probably get away with serving rancid headcheese and still be packed to the rafters.

The food — which has always been better than it has to be — seems to have gotten an upgrade. The tartare de boeuf, which used to be huge, is now is more hockey puck than small football, and garnished like there’s a micro-green aficionado in the kitchen. Thankfully, it has lost none of the beefy tang we remembered from a decade ago. Our bread was warm and fresh and served with Échiré butter, and even the side dishes — a bright green salad and thick-cut, creamy-crispy fries — were exemplars of the form:

The Food Gal® — perhaps because her liver was rebelling from a steady diet of foie gras and pâté de campagne — swooned over her tightly-composed Spring salad, and called it a welcome respite from all the charcuterie we had been force-feeding her:

And the staff surprisingly cheerful for a place that expects to turn your table over at least five times a day. All of this is happening in a huge restaurant in a bustling train station with a constant flow of famished travelers, curious tourists, and gawkers traipsing through — a place that could easily get by with thoughtless service and indifferent food, but instead seems to take as much pride in what is on the plate as in what is overhead:

(Work. Work. Work.)

One lunch for two is hardly a reliable sample size, but from our vin rouge colored glasses it looked like everything about LTB had been spruced up, both in and out of the kitchen, since our last visit in 2012.

Cuisine this polished from such a large operation, in such an overwhelmingly beautiful space, catering to thousands of people a day, is a mind-blowing achievement. Instagram, Tik Tok and the like have obviously been good for business (in years past, the place always felt slightly forlorn to us), but this grande dame of Parisian dining has come roaring back. As have all Parisian restaurants.

Vive la France! And Happy Bastille Day!

April in Paris

May 30, 2023July 13, 2023

The trouble with Paris is the human body is only designed to eat 4-to-5 meals a day.

Such is the conundrum we face daily as we ramble down its rues, and contemplate the cornucopia before us.

Spring is the perfect time to provoke the appetite for this moveable feast. The air is crisp but not cold. It may rain a little but there is revival in the air, and spring in everyone’s step. Sun worshipers flock to the public gardens and you can literally feel the city stirring itself from months of slumber. April is too late for somber bleakness to blanket the city in its wintry cloak, and too early for tourists to harsh your mellow. You can dress up (or down) without fear of ruining your clothes through sleet or sweat, and walk all day without rising temperatures stealing your stamina.

Other than October, April is the ideal month to eat your way through Paris.

So gird your loins and crack a bottle of your favorite fermented French libation, for here is another love letter to the City of Light, and why springtime is the best time to pursue its pleasures of the palate.

HIT THE GROUND EATING

(Frites thief)

It was around my third bite of a tangy tartare de boeuf at Ma Bourgogne — one of my favorite bistros in Paris — that I realized one of my dreams had come true: despite my pitiful failure to master all but the most rudimentary words and phrases, I have never felt more at home than when I am dining in a French restaurant in France. (Lest you think me delusional, I can claim a fairly rigorous command of menu French — in comprehension if not conversation.)

“My Burgundy” puts me at ease even before we’re seated. The greeting may be in French (and they easily peg us as tourists), but they still ask (in jovial, broken English) if we prefer sitting outside (facing the gorgeous Place des Vosges), or inside, where the view may not be as spectacular, but neither do you have a highway of pedestrians jostling your table. We have the usual foggy-headedness from fourteen hours in an airplane, so it is comfort food we seek when ordering and we head straight for the classics.

(Grenache v. Mourvedre…how interesting,,,)

The fresh-cut tartare and some gorgeous smoked salmon hits the table while I am bloviating on the virtues of the house wine (50 cl of dense, grapey St. Emilion for 24 euros), as the groggy Food Gal feigns interest through sleepy eyes and soaks up some wine, and the atmosphere.

She finds additional solace in a soothing oeufs en gelee (another impossible-to-find dish on this side of the pond), and even after we’re stuffed and sleepy, we can’t resist the gossamer charms of an île flottante:

(Île of enchantment)

Less than three hours after touchdown, we feel like we’re right where we’re supposed to be.

(Ma Bourgogne)

We then trek back to our digs at the Grand Hotel du Palais Royale — one of the best-situated hotels in all of Paris — before resting up and strapping up for, you guessed it, dinner.

Only a few blocks from our hotel is the candy store for cooks known as E. Dehillerin, which is a stone’s throw from Rue Montorgueil (below) — a pedestrian-friendly street where scores of cafes/bistros/restaurants beckon for a mile.

Stroll another ten minutes south and you find the cacophonous wonders of Les Halles and the Marais in one direction, or the beginning of the trés chere shopping district along the Rue Saint-Honoré, in the other.

(Dream Street)

Rue Montorgueil (pronounce Roo Montor-GOY-a) is filled with joints like this below, all of which tempt you to sit and watch the world go by, or plan your next three meals from a cozy table nursing a cappuccino:

We’ll get to dinner in a minute, but first some oyster discourse …another reason to hit Paris in April before the season ends.

OYSTER INTERLUDE…or PLEASE EXCUSE OUR SHELLFISHNESS

(Marennes v. Belons)

France is the oyster capital of the world, and 80% of all oysters raised in France are consumed within the country. People used to American oysters — even the good ones from Cape Cod and Washington State — are in for a saline surprise when they slurp their way through these tannic-vegetal-metallic wonders, best described as licking a penny under seawater. April is the last great month of the year to get your fill of these briny bivalves, so consume by bucket-load we do.

They are sized by number on menus in inverse relationship to their heft: No. 6 being smallest, while 000s (nicknamed pied de cheval – horse’s foot) are big boys for those who love swallowing their fleshy/slimy proteins in tennis ball portions. We look for fines (small-to-medium) Ostrea edulis (called plates, flats or Belons, even though they don’t always come from Belon, yes, it’s confusing) usually in the No. 3-4 range, and always from Brittany, as these are the most strongly flavored (and usually the most expensive). If you like your molluscs on the sweeter side, look to Utah Beach.

Unlike America, oysters in France don’t travel far from seabed to table, so when you polish off a douziane at Flottes or Le Dôme, you will be so taken by their intensity, you’ll forget about how silly you sounded trying to order them in French.

(JC’s Senior trip pic)

One does not live by oysters alone, so at Le Dôme Café one orders them solely as an entry point for a seafood feast amidst an old-school, brass and glass decor that would make Pablo Picasso feel right at home. The look may be classic, but it has aged like a soft-focus painting from the Belle Époque, and the service could not be better. The Dover sole is the standard by which all others are measured. Its firm, sweet, succulent nuttiness puts it on a level worth flying an ocean for:

(Hand-modeling by our staff)

TAKE A HIKE

The language of France may have defeated me, but the streets of Paris have not. Various map apps have turned the city from intimidating into a walkable wonderland.

In the past, we thought nothing of taking cabs or the Metro between sites and neighborhoods. Now we hoof it everywhere. Most of what a tourist wants to see (and eat) is within a three-mile radius of the First Arrondissement, and if you dress for urban hiking (thick, comfortable soles are a must), you will walk off those croissants in no time. And if you like to toggle between the Left and Right Bank (as we do), you’ll become as familiar with the Tuileries as your own back yard:

Exercise is but a side benefit of all the sightseeing done much better on foot. Cars move too fast, and the Metro shows you nothing but your fellow sardines. Walking is the best way, the only way, to properly absorb the mood of a city. Even the ugly walks can be worthwhile; schlepping from the Trocadero to Saint-Germain-des Prés (if you don’t walk along the Seine) is one stolid grey block after another, but you get a feel for everyday Parisian life that you will never see if you stick to the tourist/scenic routes.

Five-to-ten miles a day is a snap for us these days, and a necessity when calories entice at every corner. In my younger years (when ostensibly I was in better shape), I wouldn’t have considered walking from the Eiffel Tower to Les Halles. Now, as an aging boomer, I see that it is less than three miles (2.8 to be precise), and take off without a second thought.

The equation is simple: Urban hiking + bigger appetite – fear of gaining weight = more restaurants to explore.

SO MANY CROISSANTS

Our croissant quest began one morning at Stohrer — the oldest patisserie in Paris — and another at Ritz Le Comptoir: two ends of the pastry spectrum: one as traditional as they come; the other, a modern (perhaps too modern) take on puff pastry as you’ll see from the not-very-classic pain au chocolat below:

(Old school, actually, the oldest school)

(Croissant log au chocolat à la Ritz)

Neither of the above was the best croissant we had in our 17 days of patrolling the streets of Paree. We went high; we went low. We even went to a so-not-worth it 170 euro brunch at the Hotel Le Meurice which featured a tsunami of small plates aimed at the Emily Shows Off In Paris crowd.

(That’s a brunch of plates)

The meal had more moving parts than a Super Bowl halftime show, and like whatever the f**k this is:…was more concerned with choreography than harmony.

To be fair, its croissants were mighty fine even if they were linebacker-sized. (Any mille-feuille aficionado will tell you what you gain in girth, you lose in finesse — sorta like football players):

(Yeast favorite croissants)

Side note: the Meurice was one of the few places we encountered women as servers. Waiting tables in Paris (from the lowliest cafe to temples of haute cuisine) remains a valued profession very much dominated by men. Which is one of the reasons service is so good.

Oh No You Didnt GIFs | Tenor

I kid. I kid…

As for our best crescent roll we tried, that honor goes to an award-winner from La Maison d’Isabelle — which won best in show at some hi-falutin’ bake-off a few years back. In our contest, it was the compact, pillow-soft butteriness (encased in a delicate, easily shattered shell) that separated this laminated beauty from the also-rans.

(Crustomized croissant)

People were lined up every morning for them, as they were taken directly from the baking sheet to the oven to your hand: the kind of only-in-Paris experience that spoils you for French pastries anywhere but here.

(These are a pain to make)

THE OFFAL TRUTH

The offal truth is you can’t find “variety meats” hardly anywhere in America. Americans have no compunctions about inhaling hamburgers by the billions, or polishing off chicken breasts and filet mignons by the metric ton, but put kidneys, sweetbreads, or brains in front of them and they recoil faster than a vegan at a hot dog stand.

This is where the classic restaurants of Paris come in to sate you with pleasures of holistic animal eating. As in: if you’re going to slaughter another living thing to keep yourself alive, you should respect the animal’s sacrifice and make the most of it.

Europeans are much closer to their food, both geographically and intellectually, and that relationship broadcasts itself on the menus of Parisian restaurants older than the United States.

(La Rive Gauche)

To give you an idea how old Le Procope is, they have a plaque out front (just above The Food Gal®’s noggin in the above pic) celebrating customers going all the way back to Voltaire, who, as you recall, died in 1778.

Whatever fat he and Jean-Jacques Rousseau chewed here is lost to history, but no doubt one of them was rhapsodizing over Procope’s blanquette or tête de veau when they did so. Three hundred and fifty years later, this 18th Century artifact (the oldest café in Paris) still delivers the goods, with cheery, old world panache, to regulars and tourists alike, at remarkably gentle prices.

Our “calves head casserole, in 1686 style” was about as hip as a whalebone corset, and all the more delicious for it. Besides being the most wine-friendly food on earth, it is also the most elementally satisfying. No tricks, no pyrotechnics, just foods to soothe the savage breast.

(Calves head, circa 1686)

Having successfully tackled a veal head, it was time to go scouting for lamb– at a cheese shop/restaurant perched atop the tony Printemps store near the Palais Garnier, of all places.

Laurent Dubois is reputed to have the best croque monsieur in all of Paris, so we escalated to his cheese-centric spot for a jambon et fromage, but ended up swooning over the navarin (stew) loaded with tender morsels of lamb napped with electric green baby peas in a mint-lamb jus sharpened by jalapenos:

(Ewe won’t believe how peafect this was)

On the cuisine bourgeoise level, this was the dish of the trip.

As good as the stew was, we were hunting bigger game. So we strolled through a spring drizzle to Le Bon Georges, a temple of bistronomy which combines classic technique with terroir-focused creativity, hyper-seasonal ingredients, a killer wine list, and very informal but informed service — all squeezed into a cramped, casual space. Like all in the bistronomy movement — the food was simple but surprisingly intense.

Service is by kids who may look like teenagers (with big, patient smiles), but you can tell they are no strangers to dealing with out-of-town gastronauts with all kinds of accents. The chalkboard menu tells you all you need to know (they will happily explain a poussin (baby chicken) from a poisson (fish) to the clueless), and the wine list is Michelin-star worthy in its own right, at prices far gentler than what you’ll find at tonier addresses.

The noise level is tolerable (we were in a back room closer to the kitchen) and the chairs were actually comfortable (not always a given). Describing the food as gutsy doesn’t tell half the story.

(Just getting started)

Clockwise from above left: duck paté en croûte with foie gras and prunes; smoked trout with orange sauce; morels with grilled onions, napped with Comté cheese/vin jaune sauce; and white asparagus smothered in vinaigrette, just the way we like them. And these were just the starters.

From there we proceeded to roast duck with carrot puree, sweetbreads over potatoes, and daurade royale (sea bream) with a citron/saffron sauce. We finished the meal with baba au rhum, soaked with booze drawn with a pipette the length of your arm from which you suck just enough libation from a humongous bottle (containing your spirit of choice) to bring it to your glass. Over the top? Of course, but also effective in sending everyone home with a happy glow.

We also got quite the show from chef Lobet Loic as he broke down a cow udder to include in a vol-au-vent concoction he was working on for the next night’s dinner.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1646381805308657665

“Just when I thought I’ve tried every part of the cow,” one of our social media followers observed. Us too. This was a new one for even an all-animal appreciator like yours truly.

Even our very French waiters told us it was a part of the animal they had never seen broken down for consumption. They were just as amazed as we were.

LISTING DU PORC

Our hunt for oddball animal parts was hardly over after Le Bon Georges and Procope, so to Le Comptoir du Relais Saint Germain we trotted the next day to make a swine of ourselves over Yves Camdeborde’s crispy, rib-sticking pied de cochon:

(I suffer from foot in mouth disease)

Then there was a trek to the far reaches of Montparnasse to try what many call the best cassoulet in all of Paris. (An honest cassoulet being harder to find in America than an authentic choucroute…or a toothsome lamb stew on top of a department store for that matter.)

L’Assiette (“plate”) has received this accolade from Paris by Mouth, who knows her way around a Tarbais, and the version we had in this non-descript spot was so dense with meaty/beany flavor all we could do is quietly thank her in between mouthfuls.

(Cassoulet a L’Assiette)

L’Assiette is the ultimate neighborhood gastro-bistro, so small (we counted 24 seats) and so far off the beaten path that nudging your way past Instagrammers will not be a problem. Even as strangers, our welcome was as warm as those bubbling beans, and as soothing as the Languedoc-Roussillon red wine (Domaine Les Mille Vignes Fitou Cadette) that hit the spot on a chilly night.

Choucroute can go stuck rib to stuck rib with cassoulet, which is why this apotheosis of pork beckons us like a holy grail, and why we usually make a beeline to old reliable Brasserie Lipp to demolish a platter at least once every trip.

We’ve always been in Lipp’s thrall — from its 19th Century vibe to the burnished wood and ever-present cacophony — it is a restaurant where time seems to stand still.

We even enjoy the narrow, elbow-rubbing two-top tables that are so cramped, they make flying coach on Spirit Airlines feel like a private jet.

And we’ve always found the service to be the opposite of the bordering-on-rudeness reputation of the place. Even now, they gave our brood of six the best table in the house for a late lunch without reservations, and our aging waiter couldn’t have been nicer. (At Lipp, “aging waiter” is a redundancy, since some of them look like veterans of the Franco-Prussian War.)

This time, we loved everything about it…except the food.

(Not a naked mole rat)

Lipp’s jarret du porc (above) used to be de rigueur on every trip. This time, like most of our meal, it was disappointing, The portent came from a too-cold house pâté, then succeeded by a slapdash Dover sole and then the chewy pork knuckle, Everything felt perfunctory. Even worse, this “Alsatian” restaurant had but four wines from Alsace on its list. Wassup with that?

Perhaps it was an off day, but the food looked and tasted like no one in the kitchen cares anymore….which is what happens when social media ruins your restaurant.

Luckily, good ole Flo restored our faith in the flavors of Alsace.

(Not on menu: lots of falafel)

If Lipp is getting worn around the edges from over-popularity, Brasserie Floderer is holding its own in the sketchy 10eme Arrondissement. — perhaps for the opposite reason. To get there on foot, however, you’ll have to pass some pretty dodgy blocks and trip over lots of kebabs. You know things have taken a turn for the worse, we thought to ourselves as we surveyed the chickpea-strewn streets, when the falafel stands start popping up.

Against this backdrop of littered streets and skewered food, Flo shines like a beacon from days gone by:

(Toothsome time warp)

The interior feels like a movie set (above) and the menu is as no-nonsense as the 1909 vintage decor.

As the most stubbornly Alsatian of the remaining brasseries, the Franco-German classics check all the boxes: celery root salad (here cubed not shredded), textbook onion soup, and a “Choucroute Strasbourgeoise” of tender pork belly (poitrine fumée), spicy kraut, smoky sauccisse cumin, a second sausage (Francfort) – because a single sausage choucroute is akin to sin when “garnishing” this cabbage.

(Choucroute is kind of a pig deal)

In case you haven’t had enough pork, there’s also a big hunk of shoulder (échine) to finish you off. How something so fundamental can feel so fresh for so long is a secret known only to Alsatian cooks. They also do a seafood choucroute here, named after Maison Kammerzell — the venerable brasserie in Strasbourg — but we were too busy pigging out to try it.

Brasserie Flo wasn’t the best meal of the trip. It wasn’t even in the top five. But there was something deeply satisfying about returning to a restaurant, far from the madding crowd, where locals still value out-of-fashion recipes for their pure deliciousness.

Which is why we never tire of Parisian bistros, brasseries and cafés — places with deep roots in country cooking, which have withstood the test of time, and stand in proud opposition to the cartwheels-in-the-kitchen gymnastics of fusion food…and so much falafel.

This is the first part of a two-part (perhaps a three-part) article.

(Jardin des Tuileries)

The Best Restaurant(s) in the World

April 30, 2022May 4, 2022

(Restaurant Guy Savoy, Paris)

If you take it as a given that French restaurants are the best in the world, it only stands to reason that the best restaurant in the world will be in France.

Don’t get your panties in a bunch, I’m not here to dismiss the cuisines of entire countries — only to point out that, like sushi, Mexican street food, and pasta, the places where some food was invented are generally where you will find the highest elevation of the art. And Paris, in case you’ve forgotten, is where the modern restaurant was born in the latter half of the 18th Century.

Of course, the “best” of anything is a conceit and highly subjective. Measuring a “winner” or “the best” of anything — from wine to women — is a nice parlor game, but ultimately a waste of time unless there’s a stopwatch involved.

Whoever wins these accolades usually comes down to who got fawned over the most in a few influential publications — not who objectively gives diners the best food, drink, and experience. Anyone who thinks the several hundred voters who weigh in on these awards have actually eaten at the places they vote for as “the best restaurant in the world” (as opposed to forming their opinions based upon reading accounts of the few who have), has rocks in their head.

“Awards” of this sort are simply a way to give a deceptively false measuring stick to those who don’t know much about a subject. Subjectivity disguised as objectivity, all in the name of marketing to the wealthy with more money than taste. Same as with wine scores and Oscar nominations. The rich need these adjudications to convince themselves they’re doing the right thing, and “The “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” is there for them. As Hemingway puts it in “A Moveable Feast”:

The rich came led by the pilot fish. A year earlier they never would have come. There was no certainty then.

Back when El Bulli was garnering these awards (and I was voting on them), I heard from several colleagues who ate there, and what they described was more of a soul-deadening food slog (an edible marathon, if you will) than an actual pleasant experience.

A close friend (who also happens to be a chef) told me he stopped counting after 40(?) courses of (often) indecipherable eats, and was looking for the door two hours before the ordeal ended. (The trouble was, he said, there was literally no place to go — El Bulli being, literally, in the middle of nowhere.)

But Feran Adrià (like Thomas Keller before him and Grant Achatz and René Redzepi after), was anointed because, as in Hollywood, a few influential folks decided they were to be christened the au courant bucket list-of-the-moment, and woe be to anyone in the hustings to question these lordly judgments. In the cosseted world of gastronomic beneficence (and the slaves to food fashion who follow them) this would be akin to a local seamstress suggesting Anna Wintour adjust her hemline.

Because of this nonsense, we’ve been saddled with the tyranny of the tasting menu for twenty-five years (Keller, Achatz, et al), disguised foods and tasteless foams (Adria), and edible vegetation (Redzepi) designed more for ground cover than actual eating.

As far as I can tell, neither molecular cuisine nor eating tree bark and live ants has caught on in the real world — beyond trophy-hunting gastronauts, who swoon for the “next big thing” the way the fashion press promotes outlandish threads to grab attention.

Which brings us back to France. More particularly, French restaurants and what makes them so special. Let’s begin with food that looks like real food:

(Surf & Turf: Langoustines au Truffes La Tour D’Argent)

….not someone’s idea of playing with their food, or trying to turn it into something it isn’t. This cooking philosophy alone separates fine French cuisine from the pretenders, and gives it a confidence few restaurants in the world ever approach.

For one, there’s a naturalness to restaurants in France that comes from the French having invented the game. Unlike many who play for the “world’s best” stakes, nothing about them ever feels forced, least of all the cooking. With four-hundred years to get it right, and French restaurants display everything from the napery to the stemware with an insouciant aplomb that is the gold standard.

You don’t have to instruct the French how to run a restaurant any more than you have to teach a fish how to swim. Or at least that’s how it appears when you’re in the midst of one of these unforgettable meals, because, to repeat, they’ve been perfecting things for four hundred years. Everything from the amuse bouche to the petit fours have been carefully honed to put you at ease with with being your best self at the table.

(Gruyère gougeres have been around longer than America)

Having been at this gig for a while, I’m perfectly aware that the death of fine French dining, and intensive care service accompanying it, has been announced about every third year for the past thirty.

I’m not buying any of it. When you go to France (be it Paris or out in the provinces), the food is just as glorified, the service rituals just as precise, and the pomp and circumstance just as beautifully choreographed as it was fifty years ago. The fact that younger diners/writers see this form of civilized dining as a hidebound, time-warp does not detract from its prominence in the country that invented it.

Whether you’re in Tokyo or Copenhagen, the style and performative aspects of big deal meals still takes their cues from the French. Only elaborate Mandarin banquets or the hyper-seasonality of a kaiseki dinner match the formality and structure of haute cuisine.

These forms of highly stylized dining follow a path straight up the food chain. There are rules and they are there for a reason, usually having to do with how you will taste and digest what is placed before you. Light before heavy; raw before cooked; simple before complex — you get the picture

You usually begin with something fished directly from the sea. Oysters and other shellfish are a natural match, as is a shrimp cocktail. (A good old-fashioned American steakhouse has more in common, with high falutin’ French than people realize.) Their natural salinity stimulates the appetite without weighing you down.

Man’s evolution into a more cultivated forms of eating is represented by bread, as is the domestication of animals by the butter slathered upon it. (If you want to stretch the symbolism even further, look at olive oil and the fermentation of wine and beer as representing mankind’s earliest bending of agriculture to his edible wants and needs.)

(Early man struggled with the whole pommes soufflé-thing)

From there things get more elaborate, depending on whether you want to go the seafood, wild game, or domesticated fowl route. Vegetables get their intermezzo by using salad greens as a scrub for the stomach to help digest everything that precedes them. (The French think eating a salad at the start of a meal is stupid, and it is.) You finish of course with cheese (“milk’s leap toward immortality” – Clifton Fadiman), and then with the most refined of all foods: sugar and flour and all the wonderful things that can be done with them. A great French meal is thus every bit the homage to nature as Japanese kaiseki, albeit with a lot more wine and creme brûlée.

As I’ve written before, French food is about the extraction and intensification of flavor. Unlike Italians and Japanese, a French cook looks at an ingredient (be it asparagus, seafood, or meat) and asks himself: “Self, how can I make this thing taste more like itself.” All the simmering, searing, pressing, and sieving in a French kitchen is as far a cry from leaving nature well enough alone as an opera is from the warble of a songbird.

With this in mind, we set our sights on two iconic Parisian restaurants: one, as old-fashioned as you can get, and the other a more modern take on the cuisine, by one of its most celebrated chefs. Together, they represent the apotheosis of the restaurant arts. They also signify why, no matter what some critics say, the French still rule the roost. Blessedly, there is no chance of encountering Finnish reindeer moss at either of them.

LA TOUR D’ARGENT

If experience is any measure of perfection, then The Tower of Money should win “best restaurant in the world” every year, because no one has been serving food this fine, for this long, in this grand a setting.

A restaurant in one form or another has been going on at this location since before the Three Musketeers were swashing their buckles. What began as an elegant inn near the wine docks of Paris in 1582 soon enough was playing host to everyone from royalty to Cardinal Richelieu. It is claimed that the use of the fork in France began in the late 1500s at an early incarnation of “The Tower of Silver”, with Henry IV adopting the utensil to keep his cuffs clean.

Apocryphal or not, what is certainly true is that Good King Hank (1553-1610) bestowed upon the La Tour its crest which still symbolizes it today:

History, of course, provides the foundation, and the setting continues to provides a “wow” factor unmatched by all but a handful of restaurants in the world. No place but here can you dine with the ghosts of Louis XIV, Winston Churchill and Sarah Bernhardt, all while seeming to float above Paris on this open door to the city’s past — all of it available to anyone with the argent to book a table.

But the proof is in the cooking — that has been, on our last two visits, as awesome as the view. It’s no secret that the glory had started to fade twenty years ago, and that Michelin — the arbiter of all things important in the French food world — had taken notice, and not in a good way.

A reboot of sorts was announced over five years ago, and by the time we visited in 2019, the kitchen was performing at a Michelin two-star level at the very least. Independent of the view, the service, and the iconic wine program, the cooking (and presentation) was well-nigh perfect. It was all you want from this cuisine: focused, intense flavors put together with impeccable technique and an almost scientific attention to detail.

When we returned this past winter, things seemed be have gotten even better. This time we showed up with a party of six. It was a busy lunch, filled with local gourmets and some obvious big business types, but also a smattering of tourists who (like us) had to keep picking their jaws up off the table as spectacle of Paris and its finest French food was spread before them.

I have never been to La Tour at night, but for my money, lunch is the way to go. The food is unchanged (lunch specials are offered, but you can order off the dinner menu and we did), and the sight of the Seine River stretching beneath you and Notre Dame and the Ile de la Cite in the distance are worth the admission all by themselves.

I suppose the ideal time to dine here would be arranging for a table at dusk, so you could see the lights of Paris come alive in all their blazing glory. But as I’ve argued before, lunch has always been the ticket for us when we want to eat and drink ourselves silly in a fine French restaurant.

There’s nothing silly, of course, about the food. This is serious stuff, but there’s nothing stuffy about it, despite its pedigree — French service having retired the snootiness thing decades ago. Meaning: if you show up and are well-behaved, they are friendly to a fault.

(Canard au sang with a side of burns, coming right up)

Credit for that has to lie with owner André Terrail, the third generation of the family to be at the helm. (The Terrails have owned the restaurant since 1911.) Since taking over a few years before his father Claude’s death in ‘o6, Terrail has kept all the historical provenance of his venerated birthright intact — upgrading the cuisine while still managing to keep the whole operation true to its roots. No easy feat that. We don’t know what the problems were twenty years ago, but on our last two visits, we didn’t see any missteps, either on the plate or in the service. And what appeared before us was every bit as stunning as any Michelin 3-starr meal we’ve had…in Paris or elsewhere.

You take good bread for granted in Paris, but even by those lofty standards, this small baguette was a stunner:

(Face it: you knead this)

Perfect in every respect: a twisted baguette of indelible yeastiness — perfumed with evidence of deep fermentation — the outer crunch giving way to ivory-pale, naturally sweet dough within that fought back with just the perfect amount of chew. It (and the butter) were show-stoppers in their own right, and for a brief minute, they competed with the view for our attention. We could’ve eaten four of them (and they were offered throughout the meal), but resisted temptation in light of the feast that lay ahead.

Soon thereafter, these scoops of truffle-studded foie gras appeared, deserving of another ovation:

(Home cooking this is not)

From there on, the hits just kept on coming: a classic quenelles de brochet (good luck finding them anywhere but France these days), Then, a slim, firm rectangle of turbot in a syrupy beurre blanc, or the more elaborate sole Cardinale:

….followed by a cheese cart commensurate with this country’s reputation.

The star of the show has been, since the 1890s, the world-famous pressed duck (Caneton Challandais) — served in two courses, the first of which (below) had the deepest-colored Bèarnaise we’ve ever seen; the second helping bathed in the richest, midnight-brown, duck blood-wine blanket imaginable. Neither sauce did anything to mitigate the richness of the fowl, which is, of course, gilding the lily and the whole point.

(You can never be too rich or have too much Béarnaise)

We could go on and on about how fabulous our meal was, but our raves would only serve to make you ravenous for something you cannot have, not for the next ten months, anyway.

Yes, the bad news is the restaurant will be closing today, April 30, 2022 for almost a year — until February 2023 — for renovations. This saddens us, but not too much, since we don’t have plans to return until about that time next year. In the meantime, the entry foyer probably could use some sprucing up (since it looks like it hasn’t been touched since 1953), and we have confidence Terrail won’t monkey with the sixth floor view, or this skinny little pamphlet he keeps on hand for the casual wine drinker:

(Not found: 2-Buck Chuck)

If the measure of a great restaurant is how much it makes you want to return, then La Tour D’Argent has ruled the roost for two hundred years. (Only a masochist ever left El Bulli saying to himself, “I sure can’t wait to get back here!”) Some things never go out of style and La Tour is one of them. We expect it to stay that way for another century.

À Bientôt!

RESTAURANT GUY SAVOY

If La Tour represents the old guard of Parisian dining at its finest, then Guy Savoy — both the man and his restaurant — provides the connective tissue between haute cuisine’s past, present, and a future where new chefs will take up this mantle and teach the world what elegant dining is about.

The Adam Platts of the world may decry the “irrelevance” of the “old gourmet model”, but I stand with Steve Cuozzo in maintaining that the call for luxury and refinement in how we eat (admittedly at rarefied levels of expense), will never go completely out of fashion. Quoting our friend Alan Richman, Cuozzo writes:

As critic Alan Richman eloquently expressed it in the Robb Report a few years ago, fine dining is more than “a demonstration of wealth and privilege . . . It is an expression of culture, the most enlightened and elegant form of nourishment ever devised. Without it we will slowly regress into the dining habits of cave people, squatting before a campfire, gnawing on the haunch of a bar.”

All I can say to the Adam Platts of the world (and younger food writers who echo the same sentiments) is: If you think “the old gourmet model” is dead or dying, plan a trip to France, where formal restaurants are poised to come roaring back, indeed if they haven’t already done so.

Put another way: get your goddamned head out of that bowl of ramen or whatever Nigerian/Uzbekistani food truck you’re fond of these days and wake up and smell the Sauvignon Blanc.

Or just go to Guy Savoy.

(Savoy at his stoves)

If the world’s best restaurant can’t change your mind, nothing will. Before you accuse me of bandwagon-ing, let me remind you that I’ve been singing the praises of Savoy’s cuisine since 2006, and have even gone so far as to travel between Vegas and Paris to compare his American outpost with the original. Back then (2009), the flagship got the nod, but not by much.

Since its move to the Monnaie de Paris (the old Parisian Mint) in 2015, Savoy’s cuisine and reputation have attained a new level of preeminence (which is all the more incredible when you consider he has held three Michelin stars since 1980).

With mentors like Joël Robuchon and Paul Bocuse having departed to that great stock pot in the sky, and Alain Ducasse having spread himself thinner than a sheet of mille-feuille, Savoy now rules the French gastronomic firmament as a revered elder statesman. The difference being that he and his restaurants haven’t rested on their laurels, but are every bit as harmonious with the times as they were thirty years ago. To eat at Guy Savoy overlooking the banks of the Seine from a former bank window, is to experience the best French cooking from the best French chefs performing at the top of their game. There is something both elemental and exciting about his cooking that keeps it as current as he was as the new kid on the Michelin block back in the 80s.

Dining in the dead of winter can have its challenges. Greenery is months away, so chefs go all-in on all things rooted in the soil. The good news is black truffles are in abundance; the bad news is you better like beets.

The great news is: in the hands of Savoy and his cooks, even jellied beets achieve an elegance unheard of from this usually humble taproot:

(Savoy heard we hated beets, so he tried to hide them from us)

As mentioned earlier, a French chef respects an ingredient by looking at it as a blank canvas to be improved upon. Look no further than this beet hash (Truffes et oefus de caille, la terre autour) lying beneath a quail egg and a shower of tuber melanosporum, both shaved and minced:

(Beet-i-ful)

Neither of these would I choose for my last meal on earth. Both gave me new respect for how the French can turn the prosaic into the ethereal –food transcending itself into something beautiful.

Which, of course, is what Savoy did with the lowly artichoke so many years ago, when he combined it with Parmesan cheese and black truffles and turned it into the world’s most famous soup.

There’s no escaping this soup at Guy Savoy, nor should you want to. Regardless of season, it encapsulates everything about the Savoy oeuvre: penetrating flavor from a surprisingly light dish, by turns both classic and contemporary:

(Nobody knows the truffles I’ve seen)

We may have come for the truffles, but we stayed for the filet of veal en croute (below), once again lined with, you guessed it, more black truffles.

(Filet de veau et truffes cuits en croûte is French for: the most delicious meat dish in the history of the world)

From there we progressed through a salad of roasted potatoes and truffles, a bouillon of truffles served like coffee in a French press, then a melted cheese fondue over a whole truffle:

…and even something that looked like a huge black truffle but which, upon being nudged with a fork, revealed itself to be a chocolate mousse. All of it served by a staff that looked like teenagers and acted like twenty-year veterans.

Suffice it to say the wine pairings were as outstanding as the food, all of it meshing into a seamless meld of appetite and pleasure — the pinnacle of epicurean bliss — high amplitude cooking where every element converges into a single gestalt.

We then went nuts with multiple desserts, including a clafoutis (above) and the petit fours carte (like we always do), and rolled away thinking we wouldn’t be eating again for two days. This being Paris, we were at it again later that night, taking down some steak frites at Willi’s Wine Bar .

>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<

I write these words not to convince you that Guy Savoy is the greatest restaurant in the world, or even that such a thing exists, but rather to persuade you of the transcendent gustatory experiences you can have at places like it. Until I’ve been to every restaurant in the world, I won’t be able to proclaim one of them “the best.” Even then, the best would only be what best fit my mood, my likes and my expectations at the very moment I was there.

Adam Platt was right about one thing: “the best restaurant in the world” doesn’t have to be fancy. The best restaurant in the world can be something as simple as a plat du jour of boeuf bourguignon , studded with lardons and button mushrooms in a run-down bistro smelling of wine sauces and culinary history. It can be at a tiny trattoria on the Amalfi Coast or a local diner where everyone knows your name, or that little joint where you first discovered a dish, a wine, or someone to love. But your favorite restaurant, no matter where or what it is, owes an homage to the place where it all started.

Emile Zola’s “The Belly of Paris” describes the markets of Les Halles as “…some huge central organ pumping blood into every vein of the city.” Those markets may be gone, but their soul lives on in the form of Parisian restaurants, which remain, one hundred a fifty years later, its beating heart. To eat in the great restaurants of Paris is to be inside the lifeblood of a great city, communing with something far bigger than yourself. To be in them is to be at the epicenter of the culinary universe and the evolution of human gastronomy — where the sights and smells of the food, and the way it is served, reflect the entire history of modern dining.

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