Paris, My Way

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Having been to Paris a dozen times in the past twenty years, I pretty much consider myself an expert on the subject — which puts me firmly in the camp of roughly a million other Americans who, at the drop of a beret, will tell you everything you need to know about how they enjoyed themselves over there.

But like anyone who vacations to the same spot again and again, one starts to feel a certain knowingness and possessiveness — a visceral connection to claim it as your own. But let’s not fool ourselves, I may be an accomplished tourist– familiar with Paris’s streets and sites, and able to orient myself quickly — but I’m simply an enthusiastic visitor. With the Olympics coming up this week, and Paris! Paris! Paris! being all over the news, the least I can do for my loyal readers, is offer a few travel tips should you find yourself headed there anytime soon, either physically or in your dreams.

We’ll start with some general advice, and sprinkle in some words of wisdom, heavily sauced with sarcasm…and a buttery Béarnaise, of course.

First, let’s concentrate on the important things.

 Getting there: Take Drugs! Get sleep! We’re talking on the airplane, silly. Benadryl works for me. Gummies for others. Steal your mother’s Valium if you have to, but knock yourself out for at least 4-5 hours of the flight.

You will arrive in the early morning. The airport, even at 8:00 am, will be a mess. Charles DeGaulle is either the biggest headache in travel (worse for departing flights than arriving), or just hugely annoying on par with dozens of other international hubs. It is never a pleasant experience so grit your teeth, get through it, and think of the meals ahead.

Clear passport control, get your bags, and find a cab. Parisian taxis are good and reliable and won’t try to cheat you; but Uber is better. It’s easier to find the cab stand at the arrival terminals than the rideshare pickup areas so hop in and show your hotel’s address to your driver on your phone. Once in town, stick with Uber.

The ride from the airport to the central arrondissments can take anywhere from 30-90 minutes to go 34 kilometers (21 miles) depending on traffic.  The only time it’s ever taken me less than an hour was at 5:00 am, on a weekend, in a driving rainstorm.

Don’t even think about going in the summer. The third time I went to France was in late June, 1998 and it was sweltering, crowded and miserable. And it’s only gotten worse the last quarter century. After two weeks of sweating through crowds and a dozen shirts, I vowed then never to return unless it was sweater weather, and I’ve kept that promise for 26 years. The good news is Paris is more north than people realize (roughly on the same latitude as Rolla, North Dakota(?), and late May is a gorgeous (and quite cool) time to go.

Once you do get there, say, this fall or when the Olympic dust dies down, here is how I attack la capitale de la gastronomie:

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Bring your best thick-soled walking shoes. Better yet, bring two pairs and don’t worry about being fashionable. Nothing brands you a tourist faster than showing off your shiny spats (or spiked heels) when all the locals are tromping about in clunky boots.

Speaking of fashion: scarves are to les hommes de Paris what feathers are to a peacock. As soon as the temperature dips an inch below 70, they wrap their necks in them as if they were trekking through Greenland. Bring one (preferably the size of a bedspread), or buy one there and wear it like a world weary Parisian in love with his blanket.

Final dress code note: Paris is a lot less formal than it used to be. However, in some of the tonier hotels and gastronomic cathedrals, without a sport coat on, you will feel as out of place as a Twinkie in a patisserie. So men: bring a blazer. Women: you’re on your own. These days you can get away with almost anything.

As for accommodations…

Decent hotels are everywhere. Paris is full of great small hotels with clean facilities and helpful staffs. Like everything else, prices seemed to have risen 50% in the past five years. Expect to pay at least $250/night for a decent bed in a smallish room, with plumbing that’s a lot more reliable than it was in 1994.

It may be a bit off-brand, but for twenty years, I was the king of the shitty Parisian hotel — Hotel Malte, Hotel Crayon Rouge, Hotel Therese, Hotel Cambon, Hotel Select, Hotel La Perle — from a Best Western near the Louvre to a hot sheet joint around Brasserie Flo in the Tenth that I used for a one-night stand {food, not sex} — were, for years, where I parked my solo self before trekking to a three hour lunch or four hour dinner.

Then, marriage civilized me. Like most wives, The Food Gal® has more refined sensibilities when it comes to these things, and doesn’t appreciate the charms of tissue-thin linens, pillows the density of cotton balls, and showers the width of a golf bag. For her I bite the bullet and try to book Le Relais Saint-Germain (in the heart of the Left Bank), or Grand Hôtel du Palais Royal (a block from the Louvre and Palais Royal) so she doesn’t have to walk over the bed to use the bathroom.

Regardless of where you cool your heels, it’ll be late morning when you arrive in town and your room will not be ready. This means you’re going to have a few hours to kill before you can wash off the airplane grime — which is why sleeping on the transatlantic flight is so important.

Another travel hack I’m fond of is a bit harder to cultivate, but it comes in particularly handy when you have to wait hours for your room:

Ritz Paris: 5 Star Luxury Palace Hotel & Spa - Place Vendôme(Towels so fluffy they barely fit in my suitcase)

Have rich friends! The kind who, in the before times, would’ve been bossing around porters with Goyard streamer trunks strapped to their backs. If you’re fortunate enough to befriend someone in the carriage trade, they might let you hang out at The Ritz (above), Hotel Lutetia, Mandarin Oriental or Cheval Blanc (where the $2,000/night rooms are always ready) before you crawl back to your hovel to begin a week of listening to other people flush their toilets.

Wherever you are, you’ll be dead tired (it’s the middle of the night your time), and in need of a shower. And, if you haven’t read this blog, you’ll find yourself standing in the middle of some hotel lobby, smelling like dried sweat and musty airplane cabin, and wondering what to do until 3:00 pm. This is where planning comes in. This is why leaving meals to chance, especially in a target-rich environment like Paris, is dumber than ordering a cheeseburger on the Champs-Elysee.

Image(Braserrie Flo)

Book a lunch venue for the day you arrive at a nice cafe/bistro within a few blocks of your hotel. Decent bistros are more common in Paris than baguettes these days, and with a little research, you can find a foodie favorite. Consult Paris by Mouth if you want to be in-the-know and au courant, and reserve a week or so before you arrive, knowing that your first meal on French soil will probably leave your waiter wondering whether it is you or the aged Espoisses he’s sniffing.

Here’s a sampling of places which barely scratches the surface of all the cornucopia of dining choices which await you, sort of in alphabetical order:

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Allard

Au Pied de Cochon

Bouillon Chartier

Le Bistrot Paul Bert

Brasserie Floderer

Brasserie des Prés

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Chez L’Ami Louis The link is to one of (the famously dyspeptic) A. A. Gill’s most acerbic reviews in which he savaged the place. Enjoy his prose, but ignore his vitriol. He must’ve been feeling more splenetic than usual, because L’Ami Louis is famous for a reason(s), and the reasons are it has some of the best poulet, foie gras, a haystack of  frites the size of your head (above), and baba au rhum in France. The hardest thing about it is securing a reservation. (Use a concierge.) The staff is gruff, but actually quite nice.

Flottes

Juveniles

La Bourse et la Vie

L’Assiette:

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Le Dôme

La Rotonde

Le Bon Georges

L’Ami Jean

Le Chardenoux

Le Grand Colbert

Le Procope

Le Servan

Le Severo

Lipp

Ma Bourgogne

Rotisserie D’Argent

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You could build a two week vacay around eating in only these and not have a bad bite. But there are bigger fish to fry in Gay Paree (see below).

As you can see, I lean heavily classic when it comes to French food — from cuisine bourgeoise to haute. If you want trendy (lots of tweezers,  Franco-Sino  mashups, high-wattage outposts from some enfant terrible) you’ve come to the wrong place. And If you’re looking for cheap eats, you’re really at the wrong address. That said, the street food of Paris is quite the bargain, and worth checking out.

Begin with a Day One lunch and you’ll start your visit with a thorough immersion in French food culture before you’ve even had a chance to unpack your bags.

After lunch (With a mandatory carafe of wine? Bien sur!) you’ll be more tired than Gerard Depardieu walking up a flight of stairs, but resist mightily the urge sleep. Stagger back to your hotel, and retrieve your bags from the lobby, check in, shower and change, and then….do anything but fall asleep. You’re full, you’re exhausted, and nothing sounds better than hitting the rack….but it’s only 5 in the afternoon. Collapse then and you’ll wake up at 2 am, rarin’ to go with nothing to do,  Dozing off on your first day is a serious rookie mistake and will consign you to days of waking up in the wee hours and conking out in mid-afternoon, which will rob you of days of eating enjoyment.

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This is where French café culture comes in to save the day. We guarantee that there will be a cozy one within a stone’s throw of your hotel. Find it, plop yourself in a chair, order a café crême, double espresso,  or café allongé, and caffeinate yourself to the nines. Take your time. Play on your phone. Read a book. They don’t care if you’re there five minutes or five hours. Once the jitters set in, that’s your sign you can make it a few more hours until a respectable bedtime.

Image(Avg. number of times crossing Le Pont Neuf when in Paris: 10)

Walk your ass off – our second favorite pursuit in the City of Light, and the reason we actually drop a pound or two on every trip. Pick a different neighborhood every day and then start walking. It almost doesn’t matter in what direction — (almost) everything there is to see in Paris is within a four mile radius of the Louvre, and picturesque strolls are everywhere. A few of our favorites. St. Honore du Faubourg (shopping!), Rue de Montorgueil (food), Rue Caulaincourt (gorgeous neighborhood in Montmartre), Rue de la Roquette (Bastille delights), Rue des Martyrs, Rue Rambuteau (cafés galore), Rue des Franc Bourgeois, or the entirety of Saint Germain de Prés, you get the picture.

“The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Have a drink at Harry’s New York Bar. All Americans do. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Then leave cocktails to the sheeple waiting at Bar Hemingway at the Ritz. As good as the drinks are at both of them, you’re here for the food and wine, pilgrim, not to booze it up. Getting drunk on vacation is for this side of the pond. And Germans.

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Adopt a wine bar.

Better yet, explore two or three. Wine is as much a part of French culture as sugar water is to ours. Going to Paris and not drinking wine is like touring Italy and skipping the pasta. You won’t find better French wine anywhere in the world, or at better prices. Here’s few of our faves:

Lucien Legrand Filles et Fils

Dilettantes Cave à Champagne

Willi’s Wine Bar

Ambassade de Bourgogne

La Cave des Abbesses

Most likely you’ll still be full from lunch, so plan on a tipple and light bite at one of these (all of them offer snacks to full meals), and then head to your home base to hit the hay. Don’t ask me to recommend natural wine bars though. We have nothing in common if you enjoy imbibing alcoholic kombucha dappled with scents of mouse droppings and hints of musty closets and sweaty feet.

Get the museums out of the way. My wife had been to Paris three times before she stepped inside the Louvre. Every time we’d walked past it she’d whine, “I want to see the Louvre.” To which I always replied, “There it is, now you’ve seen it. Let’s go to lunch.”

Pro tip: Hit the Louvre early on day two so you won’t have to put up with such misguided caterwauling. You’ll still be getting your sea legs, so schedule a private or group tour as early in the day as you can. We’ve had wonderful luck through Viator, and when you sign up for the small group tour, often it’s just you and the guide. Don’t forget to tip the guide (about 20 euros/pp is appropriate, more if they spend extra time with you, as ours did.) If you’ve got the energy, cross the Seine and knock out the Musée d’Orsay in the afternoon. Dispose with those and you can forever pat yourself on the back for being more cultured than the slack-jawed rubes you call friends back home.

Eat cheese.

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Slurp  oysters.

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The French are the biggest oyster and cheese eaters in the world. Paris is the apotheosis of shellfish appreciation, and glories in its fermented curd culture, so take full advantage.

Skip the Eiffel Tour. It’s a total shitshow these days. You wanna see La Tour Eiffel? Look up from anywhere in Paris and you’ve seen it. Ditto Notre Dame. The approaches to both are crammed with screaming toddlers, obnoxious Instagrammers, and hordes of tour groups speaking everything from Cantonese to Swahili.

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Do not miss a river cruise.  This should be mandatory for first-time visitors. We did a lunch cruise a year ago and the food was remarkably tasty, as were the house wines. The dusk and evening cruises are supposed to be spectacular. Whenever you go, it will be three of the best hours you’ll spend in the city.

Restaurants! Restaurants! Restaurants! Remember, Paris isn’t just the ancestral home of the restaurant, it is also the food capital of the world with at least 44,000 restaurants (cf. New York City, which has four times the population and half as many food outlets). Equally impressive is the fact that most of its temples of gastronomy are open for lunch — and the food is just as good, the portions a little smaller, and the tariff a bit shallower. Plus, you have the added bonus of being able to spend the rest of the day walking it off.

Image(Roasted pigeon at L’Ambroisie)

This territory has been covered extensively on this blog before. To summarize, consider your options:

Guy Savoy might be the best restaurant in the world.

L’Ambroisie is the pinnacle of classic cuisine in an historic setting, and even though the menu is entirely in French, they are extraordinarily friendly and patient with clueless Americans.

Taillevent might be the swankiest place on earth to have lunch. If you don’t want to spring for such an upscale extravaganza, Taillevent’s wine-centric spinoff —  Les 110 de Taillevent  — comes highly recommended by our staff:

Wine Full GIF

The legendary La Tour D’Argent may be the most spectacular combination of food, wine and setting on the planet. The wine list alone is worth a trip:

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Pro Tip: Do not despair. Trying to navigate this tome is more futile than trying to parse French genders. Do what the pros do: Ask for it respectfully; accept it religiously; peruse it solemnly; then point to a region and a price point and throw yourself on the mercy of the sommelier. In multiple visits they have never steered me wrong.

Pierre Gagnaire continues to be one of gastronomy’s most inventive chefs. He’s may be in his 70s, but his restaurants haven’t lost their fastball. Gaya — his cozy seafood refuge, tucked into a Left Bank neighborhood —  remains a stunner, toggling between tradition (impeccable Dover sole, below) and innovative takes on things that swim:

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Another eye-popper is the over-the-top Le Clarence — ensconced among the sconces in a re-tooled 19th Century Golden Triangle mansion. Renowned for its elegant cuisine, Chateau Haut-Brion collection and chariot de fromages, this joint is so fancy, you can be excused for thinking the staff is looking at you as if you have a bone in your nose or a papoose strapped to your back.

Arpège retains its 3-star status, with many glorifying its exaltation of turnips, lettuce and the like. Others claim it is past its prime. We are firmly in the latter camp.

Le Climats — a perennial favorite for our annual Burgundian bacchanalia — has closed, and Le Grand Vefour (a must-stop for 27 years) seems to have shed its Michelin history and re-made itself into a glorified bistro. Pity.

If we were to chase les trois etoiles again, it would be at Alléno Paris au Pavillon Ledoyen or Le Prés Catelan. Or Lasserre. We’ve never been, but it’s on our short list. Maybe some day we’ll get there, to Lasserre. In the meantime though, we’ll mostly leave these temples of excess to the nouveau riche gastronauts who frequent them.

not that there's anything wrong with that seinfeld GIF by myLAB Box

You will enjoy yourself much more, and save a little coin, by sticking with lunch at a Michelin 1 or 2-star — where everything is almost as perfect, and what little isn’t is only known to those inspecting the place with a microscope.

Pro tip: Lunch is the right move. After a morning of cultural enrichment, museum fatigue, shopping, or some other waste of time, a proper dejeuner on day two is perfect for your first big deal meal. This is when the big game hunting begins in earnest. Do you want to see what’s new on the gastronomy scene? Visit an old reliable? Surround yourself with luxury? Or try something edgy and out there? It’s time to step up your game and take the Michelin plunge in the last place on earth where the stars actually mean something.

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And don’t leave without at least one meal at Le Train Bleu – still the most visually spectacular restaurant in the world. Be forewarned however, cheap travel and Instagram have turned what was once a beautiful sleeper (attended to solely by lovers of Belle Epoque decor and those waiting for a train at Gare de Lyon) have made it a favorite of the selfie-stick set. It’s probably a tad more breathtaking at night, but tables are easier to come by at lunch. The food is remarkably good for such a large operation. So is the service.

For those not wanting to spend a car or house payment on a meal: most sidewalk cafés have perfectly serviceable set menus (always a fixed price for three courses) which will keep you alive. And don’t underestimate the gastronomic joys of le jambon-beurre or a Breton galette (basically a buckwheat crêpe) — both of which are easily found on the street, food stores or in the boulangeries which dot the city.

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Spend a day in Montmartre. But make it a weekday. Weekends are more crowded than Disneyland on the Fourth of July. Go early, grab a kouign-amann at Le Pain Retrouvé (above) to fuel your quads as you traverse the steep streets:

Image(Today’s menu: lunch, then walk it off)

One full day won’t be enough but it will give you a nice taste of life in the village where Amélie roamed, and one which Toulouse-Lautrec might still recognize. For lunch: duck into Le Coq et FilsAntoine Westermann’s ode to poultry. It’ll be the best $150 you ever spend on a yardbird:

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Hit a farmers market.  This is recommended even if you’re not in Paris solely to eat and explore the food scene. (Quelle horreur!)  The sheer variety of seafood, vegetables, cheese, prepared foods and meats puts eating in America to shame. Since you’re a tourist, you mostly will be gawking instead of buying stuff, so set aside an hour or so to gawk to your heart’s content. The vendors tend to be way friendlier than they used to be.

Visit Père-Lachaise — only if you feel a kindred spirit with Oscar Wilde or Jim Morrison. Otherwise, skip it. The neighborhood is way out of the way, with little to offer but seedy streets until you get closer to Place de la République or the Marais. Plus, it’s full of dead people. Lots and lots of dead people. Underneath mountains of concrete. It’s a Catholic thing.

Cultivate a French Connection.We have a friend. Let’s call her Babette. We can’t claim Babette as our own since we met her through close friends, but now she’s part of the family. She’s Parisian, successful, insouciant, funny, thin, beautiful — one of those gals who falls out of bed looking like she just stepped out of Chanel — and always there to guide us to a hot spot, or help secure a reservation.  She also has the worst taste in men since Britney Spears. There have been so many Jacques, Gilles, Françoises and Hervés we can’t keep them straight. Most of them look like they came straight from Central Casting, or were runner-ups in a Jean-Paul Belmondo lookalike contest. Whatever. This steady parade of suitors somehow makes Babette even more charming. It’s all so very very French, right down to the cigarettes, nonchalant melodrama, and scarves the size of bed spreads wrapped around everyone’s necks:

Lenny Kravitz Oversize Blanket Scarf Was A Runway Trend

Don’t bother learning the language. My travails with the French mother tongue go back half a century. After failing to learn it at least a dozen times, I’m now simply grateful for Google translate, and for the two generations of Frenchmen who have grown up learning English in school. I’m looking forward to my teenage grandson becoming fluent, ready to serve as my translator and squire me around France in my golden years, as long as I’m paying for everything.

Les Invalides is a must — especially for history and military buffs. Perhaps I’m remembering my visit(s) through a rose-tinted haze, but I seem to recall The Food Gal® being riveted by the intricacies of the French 75 field gun, and questioning whether Napoleon was premature in releasing Marshal Ney’s cavalry at Waterloo.

Image(The Food Gal® pondering the intricacies of French artillery)

Pretend you’re a Frenchman — which is best done by exploring every inch of the Luxembourg Gardens and the Jardin des Tuileries. Pack a lunch, grab a seat, and watch the world walk by. There are no two more romantic parks anywhere in the world. It’s only about a 30 minute saunter between them, so set aside a day for urban hiking, provision yourself at Marché Maubert or Marché Saint-Germain and go nuts.

Hotel bathrooms are your friend. The one downside of walking for hours on end (and finding yourself miles from your hotel) is you are always keenly aware of your bladder’s capacity. While small cafes and restaurants frown on you popping in just to empty your vesica urinara, larger hotels always have facilities on the first floor, and generally don’t mind if you use them (as long as you are dressed like you could be a guest). I’ve been told public toilets dot the sidewalks all over Paris, but my chances of using them are roughly the same as the Louvre being turned into a Wal-mart.

Eat (and drink) in Montparnasse. Just the way Hemingway and James Joyce did. The cafes – La Coupole, La Closerie des Lilas, Le Dôme, La Rotonde, Le Select —  are legendary. The seafood is impeccable, and the atmosphere straight out of the Roaring 20s. These are the joints that literally created the term “café society”,  and each is an eyeful, generally welcoming, with copious indoor and outdoor seating. This makes them especially attractive for those who haven’t booked in advance. Being a bit removed from the tourist corridor also means you’ll be rubbing knees more likely with locals than cargo shorts. A visit to at least one should be on every foodie’s itinerary.

A Floor-By-Floor Guide to Galeries Lafayette Paris Haussmann – Blog(Toilet paper and big screen TVs on Aisle 4)

Shop the way human beings were meant to: in department stores. Department stores in America are an endangered species, but Galeries Lafayette (above), Le Bon Marché, Printemps, BHV, La Samaritaine— are shrines to civilized shopping and still going strong in the City of Light. Most are architectural gems in their own right, and whether you’re buying or browsing, it is time well-spent. Added bonus: most have restaurants/food halls/gourmet grocery stores associated with them which are a treat unto themselves, and a perfect place to plan a picnic.

Make a pilgrimage to Poilâne. It’s roughly the size of my closet, and many Parisians scoff at its international success, but this is where it all started — the shop that made the world fall in love again with French bread.

 “Paris is a place where, for me, just walking down a street that I’ve never been down before is like going to a movie…Just wandering the city is entertainment.” – Wes Anderson

What have I missed? Strolling the Seine. Poking around the Jardin du Palais-Royal. Soaking up the history of the Place de Vosges. Croissant hunting (this award-winning knockout is from La Maison d’Isabelle):

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Copper cookware browsing at the iconic E. Dehillerin. Haute couture.  Immersing yourself in the cacophony of the Marais. Exploring the Trocadero, Champs-Elysee, Bois de Boulogne . The Opera House (Palais Garnier), Catacombs, Arc de Triomphe (another shitshow, but give it a whirl), Musée Cluny, the Sorbonne, the Latin Quarter, Pantheon, and a dozen other museums. (One of these days, we’ll get to Musée Carnavalet, the museum of the City of Paris.) It’s all there for the taking, or you can simply stroll around for days, snapping jaw-dropping pictures until your thumbs get tired.

Hemingway called Paris a moveable feast and truer words have never been written. But it is much more than just the best food city on earth. Paris my way will always be the greatest banquet in the world for the intellect, the senses and the soul.

Take us home, Edith:

 

The Best Restaurant(s) in the World

Image(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:

Image(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.

Image(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.)
Image(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

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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:

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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:

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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:

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….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.

Image(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:

Image(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

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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:

Image(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:

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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:

Image(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.

Image(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:

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…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.

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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

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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.

Free Man In Paris

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I was a free man in Paris

I felt unfettered and alive

There was nobody calling me up for favors

And no one’s future to decide Joni Mitchell

American writers have been rhapsodizing about Paris since Ben Franklin’s powdered wig was peeking down some bustier. There’s not much I can add — literary-wise — to the musings of everyone from Henry James to Ernest Hemingway, but I can share a few pointers on what to see and where to eat, along with some musings of my own about what makes the City of Light so compelling, one-hundred years after Ernest & Friends fell in love with it.

The culture of Paris insinuates itself into your soul if you let it. Americans love to talk of snooty Frenchmen and various un-pleasantries, but those are the carpings of the intentionally uncomfortable — the sorts who arrive in any foreign environment looking for something to bitch about.

All you have to do to enjoy yourself in Gay Paree is give in to the Parisian vibe (by turns energetic one minute, and insouciant the next). Leave your American expectations at home, relax, stroll around a bit, and say “bonjour!” and “s’il vous plait” about thirty times a day. Do that and they are almost as nice as Italians.

As I was somewhere over the Atlantic, coming back from ten days walking the streets and haunting cafes from Montparnasse to Montmartre, it occurred to me that this might be my writing future: travelogues for those who might wish to follow in my footsteps in the coming months/years. My covering the Las Vegas food scene has reached its natural end; there are no more mountains for me to climb here, and frankly, it’s more fun these days to see the world rather than wander around (again and again) in my own backyard.

(If you’re dying to hear my mellifluous tones pontificate on where best to exercise your palate in Sin City, tune in Fridays to What’s Right with Sam & Ash — where we whoop it up about food while recapping my eating week.)

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Unshackled by the bonds of servitude to Sin City, I am thus free to eat the world, where, quite frankly, the food, wine, and scenery are better (and often cheaper). Consider this a combination of food diary and love letter to my favorite city in the world, where the sights and smells never fail to astonish me, and where eating and drinking well is as easy as rolling out of bed.

But before you can embrace all the picturesque wonderfulness, you first have to get there, and sad to say, that will be more annoying than anything you encounter once you arrive.

News flash: Flying remains a pain in the ass.

Air France is a shell of its former self. A country’s airline — be it SwissAir, Lufthansa or whatever — used to tickle you with anticipation (“As soon as you board, you feel like you’re almost in the country,” I used to tell my kids.) Now you’re on an airbus in more ways than one. They throw some cardboard food at you a couple of times and wheel a shitty beverage cart up the isle twice (first, an hour into your eight-hour transatlantic haul; then again six hours later), and that’s it.

No cans of soda, no mixers, nothing but water, crappy coffee, tepid tea and supermarket wine. Pro tip: load up on snacks and beverages at the airport. What’s become an insult to passengers has been a boon to SmartWater and SlimJims. None of this applies if you fly business- or first-class, which we never do, preferring to save our $$$s for the food and wine which lie ahead.

Enough negativity, let’s get to the fun stuff.

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Traveling is living intensified. – Rick Steves

Paris the “Being John Curtas” way means you literally lose yourself there; park your worst instincts back home and drink it all in, every waking moment. I become more sanguine, taciturn even (about everything but the ubiquitous dog shit).

Every time I see Paris’s low profile and history-drenched boulevards, I feel like I’m an awestruck ten-year old seeing a big city for the first time. Rick Steves’ quote is no more true than on the streets of Paris, where your senses are excited on every block, and awesome architecture defines every corner.

The French invented blasé (the word and the mood), but no matter how many times I’m in the city (this last trip was my tenth), that’s the one feeling I never have. I’m too busy picking my jaw off the pavement…when I’m not using it.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast. – Ernest Hemingway

Image(When I’m in Paris, I’m on a seafood diet: when I see food I eat it.)

The Food. The wine. The seafood! (sea above) The size of the brasseries and the sheer number of cafés means you’ll never go hungry, no matter what the hour.

It’s really one of the most impressive things about Paris: the mind-blowing number of places to feed and refresh yourself. They’ve always been in abundance, but the patisseries/boulangeries (technically not the same thing, but often combined) seem to have doubled in number over the past decade.

The Style: men in snappy coats and women being worn by heroic scarves.  No t-shirts or cargo shorts, please. Someone asked me what the French don’t like about Americans and the answer is simple and understandable: the way we dress.

Finally: awesome architecture and history envelops its iconic restaurants. The sheer beauty of them should not surprise (the French invented the modern restaurant, after all), but the stunning interiors (and how well they’ve aged) are still enough to take your breath away:

Image(Le Grand Colbert)

If you can’t enjoy yourself walking around Paris, you need to have your pulse checked.

My advice to anyone traveling to France or Italy is to always find a café to call your own, preferably close to your hotel. Stopping by every morning will start to make you feel like a local, and by your third visit, even the frostiest waiter will start to smile when he sees you.

 Walking, smelling, sitting, sipping cafe au lait. “Encore, s’il vous plait” we say.(“please bring another”)…and your favorite waiter will let you sit there all day, diddling your phone, reading a book, or planning where next to eat  — which is the surest way to make you feel like a Frenchman.

Amazingly though, we actually lose a few pounds on every visit. Five-to-ten miles of walking each day will do that, no matter how many baguettes or soufflés you inhale. Sage advice: use your mornings to plan your pre- and post-dejeuner walks.

If The Food Gal® is lucky, I occasionally agree to a little shopping, just to buy some marital harmony. (Poor thing has always operated under the illusion there is something to do in Paris other than eat and drink.)

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Breakfast, you ask? Fuggidabadit. In France, breakfast (aka “petit dejeuner”) is good for only one thing: thinking about lunch. Some coffee and a croissant is all you’ll need to fuel you for the first few hours of the day. From then on, it’s Katy bar the door/calories here we come, as temptations await on every block.

THE RESTAURANTS

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Straight off the plane, still groggy from jetting the ocean, we staggered into L’Ami Louis (above) perhaps the toughest bistro ticket in Paris. It was worth the wait, which for me had been twenty-five years — a quarter century of hearing about its allure to ex-pats, celebs, and galloping gourmands, followed by a revisionist decade of how gauche and “not worth it” it was. It is the one bistro critics love to hate. Especially British critics, as you’ll see below.

Founded in 1924, they only things that have changed in ninety-seven years are the prices and the dress of the patrons. Some have called its interior “museum-like”, others, like the late, great, splenetic A. A. Gill described it as a “painted, shiny distressed brown dung…set with labially pink cloths which give it a colonic appeal and the awkward sense that you might be a suppository.”

All nasty Brit-lit gymnastics aside, what you find when you enter is a classic, narrow, well-worn bistro that feels as comfortable as a pair of well-worn Wellingtons. Where Gill found “paunchy, combative, surly men” waiting tables, all we saw were affable-if-brusque, seen-it-all pros.

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Gill (who died in 2016, and whose hemorrhoids must’ve been acting up in ’11 when he wrote those words) also savaged the food. As much as we were a fan of his knives-out style, we found ourselves silently pleading with his ghost throughout our two-hour lunch. Au contraire, mon frere, we muttered continually. From an ethereally silky slab of foie gras to our deviled veal kidneys to the famous roast chicken (above), this was Parisian bistro cooking at its most elemental and satisfying. True, the recipes probably haven’t changed since Bogart was wooing Bergman, but that’s part of the charm. 

Where Gill found the foie to be “oleaginous and gross”, our bites were of the smoothest, purest duck liver. A mountain of shoestring fries came with our oversized bird, and better ones we had trouble remembering. Ditto the escargot, brimming with butter and electric green parsley — shot through with garlic in all the best ways.

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No fault could be found with the wine list either (pricey for a bistro, but not off-putting), or  a baba au rhum the size of a human head.

“Brits love to bag on the Frogs,” is what we thought as we were paying the bill and thanking the staff. The prices (for solids and liquids), are high but not enough to put you on our heels, especially if you’re used to Las Vegas. (Our lunch came to about 400 euros/couple, with about half being wine.) 

Gill concluded his hatchet job by calling L’Ami Louis the “worst restaurant in the world.” It may not be the best, old-fashioned bistro in Paris, but it’s a long way from deserving such opprobrium. I’d call it a must-stop for our next visit, for that terrine de foie gras alone:
 
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As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans. – Ernest Hemingway

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Le Dôme remains le ultimate seafood brasserie in a neighborhood swimming with them. All gleaming glass and brass, it has become a de rigueur to stop for oysters whenever we get to town. Montparnasse is chock full of good restaurants, many of which, like Le Select (1925), La Rotonde (1911) and La Cloiserie des Lilas (1847), are haunted by the ghosts of Gertrude Stein, Hemingway and Henry Miller.

These cafes formed the social hub of Roaring Twenties Paris, and, amazingly, continue to hold their own today, one-hundred years after they became American-famous.

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Like many of its equally famous neighbors, Le Dôme is huge, so don’t think twice about dropping in on a whim for a douziane plates and a glass of Sancerre.

Classics like Breton lobster and Dover sole (above), are prepared so perfectly they remind you why these dishes became renowned in the first place, and if you want to hunker down for a full meal, LD dazzles with best of them. The freshness of its cooked seafood is legendary, even in a town known for legendary fresh fish and shellfish.

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For dessert: don’t miss the mille-feuille Napoleon (sliced from a pastry the size of a rugby football) — which elicits ohhs and aahs for both its appearance and taste.

A note about the supposed insufferable French: this was our third visit to Le Dôme in the past four years, but we are hardly “known” to the management. On each visit, whether as a walk-in solo or with reservations and guests, we have always received a friendly welcome from the solicitous staff — who couldn’t be more helpful in either guiding us to the best oysters of the day, or which wine to pair with them. You get out of restaurants what you put into them, and if you walk into Le Dôme with happy heart, it will only make you happier.

A walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of life. —Thomas Jefferson

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From Montparnasse one day, we trekked up the hill to Montmartre the next, to visit Le Coq et Fils (formerly Le Coq Rico) — Antoine Westermann’s paean to poultry.

Climbing up to Sacré Coeur and exploring the nooks and crannies of cobblestoned streets of this “village inside a city” puts you in a mood to take down an entire yardbird accompanied by a variety of other Westermann signatures like poultry broth “shots” (perhaps the most intense chicken soup ever made), duck rillettes, and egg mayonnaise “Westermann’s Way” (a gorgeous puck of the best egg salad ever tasted):

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But the undeniable stars of the show are the whole birds, and we opted for a four pound Bresse specimen of unsurpassed flavor:

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Image(Poulet de Bresse-my-soul)

From the crispness of the skin to the fineness of the grain to the richness of the flesh, these are flocks which put to shame the universal putdown of “tasting like chicken.” Of course the olive oil-drenched pommes puree and straight-from-the-fat frites don’t hurt your enjoyment of this beautiful bird, either.

The birds are sized and sold according to how many you want to feed (e.g. a guinea hen and smaller birds are sized for two). The wine list was modest in scope but interesting and reasonable, and the service couldn’t have been better.

For dessert we took down an Ile Flottante (“floating island”) — a lighter version of this classic — with a softball-sized meringue so airy it seemed to be floating above the creme Anglaise beneath it.

I have been in Paris for almost a week and I have not heard anyone say calories, or cholesterol, or even arterial plaque. The French do not season their food with regret. Mary-Lou Weisman

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Watching your calories is the last thing you want to do at L’Ami Jean — the au courant favorite of Parisian foodies  — a bistro which resists mightily the Brooklynization of casual Parisian dining

As with L’Ami Louis, its slightly older cousin across the Seine, you enter something of a time warp when you cross the threshold into a crowded, narrow room — whose general appearance hasn’t changed since Maurice Chevalier was breaking into talkies.

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Cheek-by-jowl everyone sits, the crowd being a mixture of internet-educated gastronauts and local trenchermen who’ve been expanding their ample bellies since the 70s. (From the vantage point of our sole, round six-top along the wall, the diners seemed to be running at about a 10-to-1 men-to-women.)

The effect is one of a raucous eating club in a cramped space where appreciating hearty, rustic food is the coin of the realm.

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Having taken serious umbrage to Gill’s evisceration of L’Ami Louis, I must raise an exception in the other direction  — in this case to the lavish praise universally heaped upon Stéphane Jégo’s ode to excess. We have nothing against wild boar stews and roasted pigeons drenched in wine. And we are hardly one to quibble with rough-hewn bricks of paté de campagne or nutty/puffy lobes of sweetbreads roasted with thyme. But when we considered our meals as a whole at this temple of bistronomy, what stuck with us was the textural, taste and visual sameness of our multiple courses — more  cuisine bourgeois-than restaurant cooking — finesse-free food heaped into bowls…which is probably the point. Nothing wrong with any of it, mind you, but no standouts, either.

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Service was the definition of “harried” but also almost preternaturally fast. They screwed up our white wine order, but brought the “wrong” bottle that happened to go beautifully with the food at the same price.

For dessert, get the signature rice pudding with caramel sauce, even if your ribs are pleading for something less to stick to them.

In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is freedom, in water there is bacteria. – Benjamin Franklin

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If food is the body of good living, wine is the soul. – Clifton Fadiman

The same advice I gave about cafés above applies to wine bars. There is wine aplenty in the area — Juveniles, Le Rubis, A L’Heure du Vin — so calling the First Arrondissement a “target rich environment” for oenophiles is like referring to Le Louvre as a nice art gallery.

We’re more Right Bank than Left Bank these days, so it’s a no-brainer to make Willi’s Wine Bar our home away from home.

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Oh Willi’s, how do we love thee? Let us count the ways:

Your wine (of course, specializing in Rhones both new and aged), either by the glass or bottle, always interesting at a fair price; the food (classic bistro fare but made with flair and good groceries by chef Francois Yon); excellent bread; exceptional cheese; and best of all, a friendly welcome (whether you are known or unknown).

English is freely spoken (it’s still owned by the Brit – Mark Williamson (below) – who founded it in 1980) and your staff is cheerful and knowledgeable, and their patience (with idiotic Americans who can’t decide what to order) is as long as the bar (above). 

And then, of course, there are those iconic posters: 

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And finally: the location — just a block from the Palais Royale — in the heart of where-it’s-happening Paris.

In other words, Willi’s is just about perfect, whether you’re hungry for a full meal, or seeking a simple sip. It’s as much restaurant as wine bar, but no matter what you’re looking for, it will send you away smiling.

Paris nourishes the soul, is how Victor Hugo put it, and Willi’s nourished us, in more ways than one on this trip.

We always returned to [Paris] no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. – Ernest Hemingway

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As the sunlight fades over the distance of the Left Bank, a Parisian day always seems to end quietly, but regretfully, like a sigh.

There are few magic spells left to be woven in the world and this city still weaves one of them. How many cities on earth can you say that about? 

When good Americans die, they go to Paris. – Oscar Wilde 

Something else occurred to me 36,000 feet over the Atlantic: I am my best self in Paris — engaged, entranced and relaxed like nowhere else on earth. Perhaps it will be where I end my days. Who knows? There are worse ways to go.

This is the first part of a two-part article. Next month we go big game hunting among the haute-est of the haute cuisine temples of French gastronomy. 🥂🍾🇫🇷