not drinking poison in paris

One indication I've been doing this blog too long is that certain restaurants and wine bars I've written about have since been sold, or closed down, or been completely revamped. When I last mentioned my restaurateur friend Olivier Aubert, he had, in the space of about a year, opened three restaurants: La Bodeguita du IVeme, la Bodeguita du IXeme, and Les Trois Seaux in the 11ème.

Aubert is presently selling La Bodeguita du IVeme, having shed the weirdly-shaped and generally unsuccessful la Bodeguita du IXeme long ago. Les Trois Seaux is still operational, still a solid wine bistrot where the respectable food and service are undercut by clumsy décor and a silly name. ("The Three Buckets." I have never understood why they use white tablecloths in a space like that.)

Now on rue des Trois Bornes, one street away from Les Trois Seaux, Aubert is at it again: he's opened a pichet-sized wine bistrot called Cave Fervèré, its name a reference to the iron grillwork on the windows. It's another two-man operation, just him and a chef, with a slim menu of provincial staples, and a shelf of solid natural wines at generous prices. What's to get excited about? you might ask. Why follow Aubert's bantering roadshow of openings and closures to yet another address? Because Aubert's restaurants, in their simplicity and utter lack of pretense, represent all that's best about living in Paris, which is to say they feel like the countryside. Also, he is serving a really killer andouillette right now.

Aubert formerly had restaurants in La Rochelle, a clean coastal destination in the center west that also serves as a hub for transport to the Ile de Ré and the Ile d'Oléron. My theory is he hasn't updated many of his formulas since arriving in Paris a few years ago.

One still sees odd countrified dishes on his menus, blasts from the 1990's like a mizuma salad with chicken bits and actual sun-dried tomatoes.

But stylistic misfires aren't uncommon in Paris bistrots, either, and I can at least say that Aubert's are all done in earnest. The salad was tasty. To enjoy such a dish, all one has to do is renounce all shame. I assume same goes for the organic salmon tempura, though I somehow passed on that one.

Far more successful was a fava bean soup, something I adore ordering at restaurants because fava beans are such a costly fussy bitch to prepare at home. (Step 3: After blanching, shell damn beans again.) Aubert's soup was soulful, clean-toned, and rich, smoothed out with just a touch of cream.

On that first visit to Cave Fervèré I happened to be dining with my good friend and ex-high school sweetheart K, who was visiting from San Francisco.

For lack of decent pics from this meal, here's one of K and me at 11ème créperie West Country Girl the previous week.

There's really nothing like re-encountering old cohorts to remind oneself how inordinately one's capacity for drinking has expanded. K gamely kept up as I took the occasion, during our meal, to revisit the marvelous output of Auvergnat estate Domaine du Picatier: their Chardonnay "Le Blanc," Gamay "Cuvée 100%," and their Pinot Noir "Auver-Nat Noir."

My first experience with their Chardonnay "Le Blanc" was several vintages ago, when it left me cold.

Last year's vintage was an improvement, and this years' an improvement on that ; one can literally taste the terroir coming into focus. In the hands of winemakers Géraldine and Christophe Pialoux, Chardonnay from Auverge is showing more and more like good Mâcon: appley, tangy, athletic and trim.

The Pialoux's red production was always solid, particularly their brightly floral Gamay "Cuvée 100%." But here too, starting from a position of strength, the wines keep improving. In 2011 their "Auver-Nat Noir" finally came into its own, briary and agile and immensely quaffable. These wines all range from just under to just over 10€, prix caviste, placing them among the best values of entire genre of French natural wine.

I'd made sure to verify that K was OK with andouillettes before ordering our plats that evening. But she had perhaps been expecting a different sort of andouillette. Aubert's comes on a string (tirée à la ficelle) and is sourced from Josselin, in Brittany, rather than from one of the various putative traditional homes of the andouillette, e.g. Troyes.

Qualitatively, this Josselin andouillette is longer, skinnier, and less crispy, with just a fine lattice of fry surrounding the suggestively pliant rolled flesh. There's also an unappetising nub of beastly string piercing one side, like a Prince Albert of twine. I would nevertheless rate this andouillette well above two other andouillettes I consume regularly at natural wine destinations: that served at Le Vin Au Vert (a bit dull and overfried, last time) and that served at Le Verre Volé (incomprehensibly inconsistent, given that it's been on the menu over a decade).

K took one bite of the Josselin andouillette and blanched like a fava bean, leaving me the rest. In her defense, she had just flown in that same evening from Florence, and a meal chez Aubert is usually a slightly overwhelming experience. He belongs to a thunderously welcoming school of hospitality that is sadly absent in most new restaurants. The dining floor is his stage, and he fills it like Springsteen.

It's not really an intimate setting. The best thing to do is drink up and sing along.

Cave Fervèré
16, rue des Trois Bornes
75011 PARIS
Métro: Parmentier
Tel: 01 84 06 10 52
Map

Related Links:

Les Trois Seaux, 75011
Another post on Les Trois Seaux
The Opening of Les Trois Seaux

La Bodeguita du IVème
Another visit to la Bodeguita du IVème
The short-lived Bodeguita du IXème

A bizarre video of someone pulling the string out of a raw Josselin andouillette

Tasting through the Domaine du Picatier wines with the Pialoux's at Quedubon, 75019
A profile of Domaine du Picatier @ RichardKelley

One would like to cite beauty, good taste, and pleasure as one's dining ideals. But, as in most fields, there are extra-aesthetic concerns. One has to rate establishments according to the scope of their ambition, and according to the service they provide in a given community.

By the latter standard, Bastille-quartier chambre d'hôte L'Auberge Flora is a certain kind of paradise, appearing like an oasis on an otherwise creepy and barren strip of road just east of the Marais. It's the new project of a veteran Paris chef called Florence Mikula, whose previous restaurants, judging by early reviews of L'Auberge Flora, permanently endeared her to a certain generation of Paris food writers. Several elements of the new restaurant are expertly in place, or nearly so: the staff (all ladies, when I visited) are warm and considerate, and a meal is fairly priced, given it's a hotel. What the byzantine menu of tapas lacks in precision or focus it makes up for in sheer novelty. (How nice, once in a while in Paris, not to consume a hunk of meat for dinner.)

But dear god, the décor. It's like getting nuzzled by a unicorn, and waking up surrounded by twittering birds beneath a rainbow on a cotton candy cloud floating magically above a Land Without Men, where wine lists are delivered with butterfly hairclips holding the pages together. (I am not kidding.)

Now I know what certain women must feel like when they enter one of Paris' numerous acclaimed testosterone-charged bro-hole restaurants : Le Verre Volé, Aux Deux Amis, Le Chateaubriand, etc. I set foot in L'Auberge Flora and I think: "No member of the opposite sex has been consulted in creating this ambience."

The problem is, the wrong women were consulted. I have no idea who'd condone such jarringly vile froof. The silver-edged plates on the walls? The incongruous rattan thrones at the entryway? The artificially weathered tabletops? The gourds on said tabletops? The pinecones?

Restaurant décor, like restaurants overall, must be judged according to its ambition and utility, and L'Auberge Flora fails catastrophically on both counts. Its owners have paid interior designers great sums to create an environment that incites livid resentment of the sums paid interior designers. Perhaps more importantly, they have created a hotel in Paris whose décor could only be loved by female Parisians who have not traveled much.

What makes this a shame is that the restaurant, as I mentioned earlier, is demonstrably useful for more than just hen nights.

On the basis of the frightful décor and our own low incomes, my friend IF and I opted against both of L'Auberge Flora's more involved menus, which run either 45€ for three large courses or 55€ for six smaller courses. We witnessed, at an adjacent table, the arrival of former menu's "assortiment de tapas froides et chaudes selon Flora," and were confirmed in our abstention when we saw that it was basically a two-tiered Christmas tree of dainty bar food, all the tapas menu's least-effortful items.

Instead IF and I ordered six items from the tapas menu, with mixed but enjoyable returns. Nothing was outstanding, but an array of parmesan-topped razor clams were well-presented, and a terrine of beef cheek containing a chunk of foie gras was oddly lively and refreshing.

Pigs' feet with sauce gribiche were nearly identical to those served at the Yves Camdeborde's Avant Comptoir in the 6ème.

A half guinea fowl atop polenta would have profited from more flavor in the jus, or any flavor at all.

But the only outright disaster was a dish in which snails and chorizo were stuffed into a marrow bone whose marrow had been unceremoniously flushed into the surrounding sauce. I had ordered it out of curiosity and upon just viewing the thing my curiosity was already completely satisfied. We mopped it up because we were quite hungry, but avoided looking at it for too long or dwelling on the diarhettic texture.

The wine list is about as natural and ethical as one can expect to find at a hotel these days.

While there's nothing on it I'd go wild for, it's also full of things I'd be pleased to encounter whilst fatigued and unwilling to leave a hotel. IF and I started with two glasses of Jean Rijckaert's refined, robotically-precise 2009 Côte du Jura "Les Sarres."

At the same moment we orderd a bottle of Domaine Chantal Lescure's 2010 Côte de Beaune "Le Clos des Topes Bizot," and I sincerely appreciated that our kind servers brought both wines simultaneously, thereby allowing the Côte de Beaune to breathe a bit and also relieving us from having to wonder, as one invariably would do otherwise, whether said servers would ever remember to bring the second wine.

Domaine Chantal Lescure is a Côtes de Nuits estate dating to 1975; I believe Lescure (who died in 1996) was the aunt of my friend Axelle Machard de Gramont of Domaine Bertrand Machard de Gramont, which domaine previously was joined to Lescure and to Domaine (just) Machard de Gramont (of Prémeaux-Prissey) as one larger estate, run jointly by Lescure, Bertrand, and Bertrand's two brothers. I haven't had the wines of Domaine (just) Machard de Gramont. I can say that in my experience Domaine BertrandMachard de Gramont's wines are vastly more soulful and interesting than those of Domaine Chantal Lescure.

The 2010 "Le Clos des Topes Bizot" comes from 50 year old vines in a south-east facing vineyard of 3,5ha situated on the Montagne de Beaune - but none of these details showed much in the wine itself, which was cherry-ripe, bright, pleasant, and basically tasted confected, despite the estates' certified organic status.

Fine for a hotel, anyway. But for a restaurant in Paris ? Probably still acceptable at odd hours of the day on Sundays and Mondays, when L'Auberge Flora is one of the only civilised places open, and when desperation increases one's tolerance for the surreal.

L'Auberge Flora
44 boulevard Richard Lenoir
75011 PARIS

Métro: Breguet-Sabin

Tel: 01 47 00 52 77

Map

Related Links:

An extremely fond, well-observed piece on L'Auberge Flora by Alexander Lobrano @ HungryForParis, although it's worth noting the kitchen hasn't improved as much as he'd hoped at time of writing, back in July.

An extremely fond piece on L'Auberge Flora @ JohnTalbott, who was even fond of the décor.

Avalanche of fondness for L'Auberge Flora @ TableADécouvrir

A profile of L'Auberge Flora @ FigaroScope, which publication, I've just noticed, actually counsels diners on which specific table number to request at restaurants, as though simply by reading a mass market newspaper, readers could become truly in the know, like a horde of quasi-concierges unleashed on unsuspecting Paris restaurants all demanding table number 7. A wonderful idea, and one surely appreciated by restaurant staff citywide.

A drippy little blurb on L'Auberge Flora @ MyLittleParis (Every time I come across this site I begin to vomit butterflies.)

An uncritical profile of brunch at L'Auberge Flora @ OuBruncher, an entire site earnestly dedicated to catalogging Paris' panoply of shite brunch offers.

The remarkable hyperactivity of Paris food-blogging is partly due to the outsize international attention paid what is essentially a medium-sized, semi-provincial city. Thirty million tourists per year arrive in Paris; before, during, and after their vacations, they constitute a readership.

The repetitive nature of Paris food-blogging - and that of Paris dining in general - derives from limited subject matter. Restaurateurism in this medium-sized, semi-provincial city has been, for reasons both economic and societal, slow to catch up to the democratisation of gastronomy that has occurred in the past few decades. Most of the remaining first- and second-wave "bistronauts" of the 1990's and 2000's have long since settled into comfortable routines of semi-pro mediocrity; outside of hotels and Michelin-starred places, one rarely encounters service or cuisine that takes itself seriously.

This is why laudatory coverage of a few restaurants - Frenchie, Le Chateaubriand, Spring, Rino, and a few newcomers including the subject of this post, the 20ème's Roseval - will continue unabated: there stilll aren't enough informal tables whose informality does not excuse staff from evincing actual chops and ambition.* These are the tables that impress bloggers that bloggers can afford. The creative team at Roseval - chefs Michael Greenwold and Simone Tondo and sommelier Erika Biswell - formerly worked at some of these places (Le Chateaubriand, Rino, and Le Chateaubriand, respectively), and to judge by the results of their collaboration, they learned all the right moves. Roseval is the best value of its too-small category: a place where those who work outside the financial sector can experience inventive food and thrillingly obscure wines served by people who believe in what they do.

The restaurant is about the size of an ink cartridge and the space is under-designed : all precisely as it should be. It's worth pausing also to congratulate the Roseval team on the excellent name they chose. "Roseval," sonically, is about as luxurious a word I can pronounce, cascading off the tongue like a velvet stole slipping off a bare shoulder; in literal terms, it is a variety of potato.

The ingredient itself did not appear in the any of the ever-changing menus I've enjoyed at Roseval, but it's almost fair to say that every other ingredient did. If Tondo and Greenwold's work has a flaw, it's a forgiveable one, resulting from the daily intersection of two creative streaks. Some dishes have too many ingredients. Not everything works. But in such a lively collaboration even the failures are engaging.

For example, a slice of eggplant topped with beef tartare and horseradish, pointlessly tarted up by serving the horseradish in ice form, which promptly melted unpleasantly into daubs of egg yolk and caused the meat to go down like pencil eraser and generally ruined the dish.

On same evening, however, everything else was a dream, from the rouget in fennel purée with hazelnuts to the duck with carrots and anchovies to an impeccably-sourced cheese plate.

Another evening presented the headscratcher of a bit of squid served in fine bread soup with anise flowers, olive tapenade, and bone marrow.

All the ingredients were perfect in themselves, but I was nonetheless left feeling like I'd just consumed an inscrutable visual pun, rather than an appetizer. If this sort of plate arrived more than one course in four, it would become wearying; as it is I'm content to call it part of the restaurant's charm. One might call this the Chateaubriand ratio.

Roseval trumps that restaurant very squarely, however, in the wine and service realms. There is service, and it's prompt and warm, rather than dismissive and swaggering. And I was initially stunned to learn that Biswell had previously been a sommelier at Le Chateaubriand, because Roseval's list is lean, adventurous, and fun, whereas I would deem Le Chateaubriand's wine program as a whole to be, all things considered, Paris' worst: unredeemably sloppy and maintained with malign indifference, if maintained at all. (This is the subject of a forthcoming post, so I'll stop there.)

Usually it's quite simple for me to pick out just one exceptionally interesting bottle I've had at a restaurant. But my visits to Roseval have all been marked by several memorable bottles. Upon first entering the restaurant on my first visit my friends at I ordered my friend Yann Durieux's magnificent 2010 Aligoté "Love et Pif," by a wide margin the best Aligoté I've ever known. (Everyone who blind-tastes it calls it as Chenin, for it's length and persistent succulence.)

IThe kick-off bottle on my second visit was also astonishingly good : a perfumey, ebulliant, and vividly alive bottle of sparkling Chenin called "Chalan Polan" by Japanese-Canadian (!) Loire vignerons Kenji and Mai Hodgson, who Bertrand Celce has chronicled very well on his WineTerroirs blog.

I believe it's the least expensive sparkler on Roseval's list; it nonetheless is probably a contender for my favorite thing I've tasted all year. For the first two glasses I was unable to participate in dinner conversation, being too busy trying to search out precisely why the flavours were so entrancing. (Some kind of cinnamon / ozone accord.)

And these were just the whites and sparklers that spring to mind. I was also delighted to find that Biswell was stocking a Nebbiolo-based Costa della Sesia Rosato from Proprietà Sperino in Lessona, the source of some really heavenly high-Piemontese reds I remember from my Mozza days. I'd forgotten rosato was even produced there.

Revelatory or near-revelatory experiences in food and wine such as the aforementioned - I don't want them every night of the week, but at the same time I believe that in a major city they should be on hand. More than just providing pleasure, such experiences can inspire people to think more about what they consume in general. It's only a small stretch to say that this dynamic adds a moral dimension to culinary aestheticism - particularly when it's served at egalitarian prices.

Now, ought we to erupt in congratulations when talented ambitious chefs and sommeliers offer their services to the not-rich? Or should that just be sort of normal?

It's still not normal in Paris. So congrats to the Roseval gang - we'll be hearing about them a lot, and for good reason.

* Actually, Le Chateaubriand is on this list by default. The service staff there display no ambition whatsoever; they are pretty much just the clowns surrounding the ringleader in the kitchen.

Roseval
1, rue d'Eupatoria
75020 PARIS
Métro: Ménilmontant
Tel: 09 53 56 24 14
Map

Related Links:

Wendy Lyn praises Roseval @ TheParisKitchen, though I bristle slightly in noting that she has a descriptive tag called "Brooklyn Attitude" - must we really cite Brooklyn as an influence on anything remotely upstart ? I am almost certain that youth and ambition, as qualities, predate turn-of-the-millennium Brooklyn.

Alexander Lobrano praises Roseval @ HungryForParis

A visit to Yann Durieux's cellar in Villers-la-Faye

In a break from my habit of writing about things long after they've lost all relevance, I thought I'd mention my friend Camille Fourmont's brand new caviste-slash-bar à vin, La Buvette, which opened for business on rue Saint Maur in the 11ème a little over a week ago.

I hadn't seen Camille in a while, and hadn't been aware she'd left her former gig, as bar manager of Inaki Aizpitarte's overdesigned wine bar Le Dauphin. I just happened to be walking by on an errand the other day, when a Julien Courtois wine label in her sparse window display caught my attention.

It's a surprise to see such a cult wine on that stretch of road, which is otherwise dominated by superettes and timewarpy little do-nothing bistrots that seem to survive, like lichen, on air alone. It's also a surprise to peer in the windows and see - good lord ! - a trim, contemporary establishment, where good taste is as perceptible in the décor as it is in the mostly-natural wine selection. There's clean white tiling, and simple tables and chairs, and, mostly importantly for my purposes, a solid and inviting zinc-capped bar.

One would be right to point out that the caviste-per-capita ratio in the 11ème is seemingly approaching one-to-one. In Fourmont's immediate vicinity, there's no shortage of competition: Le Verre Volé, Le Vin de Bohème, Paris Terroirs, the recently opened Cave Fervèré, and the recently relocated and expanded Au Nouveau Nez (on which more to come in a later post). What La Buvette offers that none of the others really do* is a bar - a place where one can hang out and nibble and chat over a glass of actual potable wine.

Only, you can't call it a bar, and neither can Fourmont, due to issues with her landlord, who insists on not having a bar in the building. So La Buvette is a wine shop where one can open bottles and drink them at a bar with a delectable plate of Luques olives, among other snacks (charcuterie, terrines, sardines, etc.).

The wine selection, as I mentioned above, is mostly natural - Fourmont's only criterion is that she quite sensibly wishes to sell only wine she adores. This means a cast of superb producers, on whom she and I enthusiastically agree - Métras, the Courtois clan, Domaine Valette, Alexandre Bain, etc. -

- and then some real oddities, to which she's personally attached and about which I'll remain skeptical until tasting someday. For examples of the latter, you have a conventionally produced white wine from Syria, where Fourmont spent some time, and Rhône producer Alain Graillot's Moroccan Syrah side project.

There were also some totally incongruous bottles of way-lowbrow Cycles Gladiator Cabernet available at La Buvette, testifying to the Paris wine scene's near-total innocence vis-à-vis the wines of other nations. (C.f. the token bottles of Greek and Serbian wines one sees more and more on Paris wine lists.) Still, it's worth remembering that Fourmont is trained more as a bartender than a somm; I suspect what interests her (and me, to be honest) most about a wine is not its precise organoleptic profile, but rather the story behind it. (Although this still doesn't explain the Cycles Gladiator.)

Anyway, after noting the bottle of Julien Courtois in the window, I returned the same evening with my friend J2, with whom I'd planned to have a few post-Christmas decompression drinks. Fourmont plans to change the glass pour selections at La Buvette daily, according to the whims and curiosity of her clientele; on the evening we visited, J2 and I polished off what was left of a bottle of 2011 Métras Beaujolais, among other wounded soldiers.

The Métras was as pure-fruited and slender as an almost-see-through summer dress. Pairing it with banter and olives on a bartop was a pretty perfect illustration of while there ought to be more quality wine bars in Paris. (Italics here intended to differentiate a wine bar from restaurants masquerading as bars.)

Then in walked a gibbering grey-faced man from the street, who, if there were any uncertainty among bystanders about whether he were a creep, instantly confirmed all suspicions by explaining at length and without prompting that he was just checking the place out, just a normal human guy from the neighborhood checking the place out. Fourmont's no fool and she dealt with the creep with a patience I could only marvel at. He gibbered on and on and eventually purchased a six-euro artisanal beer and wandered off, still gibbering to himself.

"That's why I don't want to be a bar," said Fourmont, and we all shook our heads.

It frustrates me greatly that Fourmont and many female entrepreneurs like her are prevented from opening late in the evening because of the near-universal presence in most cities, after 10pm, of leering skinks and stumbling bear-pawed perverts.

On a positive note, however, I'm certain La Buvette will feel measurably more secure when the place is routinely full of appreciative regulars, myself among them. It's a terrific addition to the neighborhood.

* Well, Cave Fervèré has a bar. But it's usually in use as a service bar, rendering it considerably less inviting as a place to sit and hang.

La Buvette
67, rue Saint Maur
75011 PARIS
Métro: Saint Maur
Tél: ?
Map

Closed Mondays.

Related Links:

A surprisingly prompt blurb about La Buvette @ L'Hotellerie-Restauraton.fr

Septimele resto, its relative informality notwithstanding, is a destination restaurant. One needs to plan ahead - not to mention budget, both time and money - to enter its almost-too-well-appointed walls and enjoy chef-owner Bertrand Grébaut's acclaimed market menu, which at dinner is offered only as a 55€ (before wine) "carte blanche" meal of at least five courses. One can't resent any of this: these are the hassles that attend high demand, and they're to be expected at any restaurant whose excellence is a match for its ambition.

But the resplendent success of Septime makes all the more laudable that Grébaut's new project, a wine bar-slash-wine shop catty-corner to the restaurant, is basically a shanty stocked with wine and some meat. It is heroically under-conceived. If Septime is the mothership, exerting a gravitational pull on diners citywide, Septime Cave is the dinghy : a little escape pod for tasteful rue de Charonne locals seeking a random weeknight tipple.

The contrast is arranged in such a way as to reflect well on both establishments. It's a graceful gesture when a restaurant offers a drastically simplified version of its main attraction that can be sampled with neither fuss nor reservation. A similar dynamic prevails at legendary London offal-house St. John Restaurant, where in the hallway adjacent to the pristine white dining room there's a small stand where one can purchase granola, or enjoy a glass of Madeira and an Eccles cake.* Given that the St. John empire might as well be the ur-text for savvy restaurant branding, Grébaut is probably onto something here, whatever the actual financial rewards of the new space prove to be.

He's certainly not gouging the clientele. Wine glasses run from 3€-5€. Prices for the slim menu of simple share plates - cheese and charcuterie, along with minor compositions like ricotta and anchovy - don't exceed the early -teens.

Corkage for the modest selection of bottles is the standard 7€.

Like the restaurant, Septime Cave serves natural wine pretty much exclusively. (As if to make this abundantly clear, the bar display is presently composed of empty wine bottles bearing Jamaican-themed labels by La Sorga, the defiantly funky project of long-haired itinerant natural winemaker Anthony Tortul.)

On the night we visited, my friends and I shared a strikingly lovely bottle of 2010 Chignin "Le Jaja" by Savoie winemaker Gilles Berlioz, who cultivates 3.5ha of mostly biodynamic vines around the village of Chignin.

When purchasing Chignin, or anything made from the Jacquère grape, I tend to prefer the freshest vintage, the better to enjoy the variety's thrill-ride acid. But Berlioz's 2010 "Jaja" will probably change my habits. At just one year removed from current vintage, the acidic jolt remained, but in a supporting role to gossamer-soft, almost holographically-precise notes of nectarine, biscuit, and white flower. The refinement was stunning, especially from a grape variety that has otherwise yet to live down the faint praise of wine writer Andrew Jeffords, who once described it as "the Muscadet of the Alps."

In this regard, Berlioz's 2010 "Jaja" reminded me of Mariel Hemingway's character Tracy in Woody Allen's Manhattan: in the film she's meant to be seventeen, and for much of the film Allen's character (not to mention the viewer) transparently regards her as a superficial fling. Then towards the end she utters the films most urgent truth ("You have to have a little faith in people.") and we're embarrassed to realise she's a real, changeable, three-dimensional woman, despite her age and situation.

I might also mention that the "Jaja," too, is a young-vine cuvée. Berlioz bought the vines only recently and is in the process of converting it from organic to biodynamic viticulture. As with the Tracy character, and with Septime Cave as a whole, one is tempted to announce that the best is yet to come. But perhaps it's already here?

* Last I checked, at least. Most of my impressions of London are years out of date. To wit: just after New Year's this year I revisited St. John Bread & Wine, a restaurant I once adored, and found it in a state of sad decline, with an ossified, overpriced wine list, absentminded service, inconsistent cuisine, and, seemingly, a fruit fly situation.

Septime Cave
3, rue Basfroi
75011 PARIS
Métro: Charonne
Tel: ?
Map

Related Links:

Septime, 75011

A heartfelt note on Septime by Alexander Lobrano @ NYTimes
Praise for Septime @ DavidLebovitz

A charming and digressive piece on the wines of Gilles Berlioz @ LeDomduVin
Some notes on Gilles Berlioz's wines @ IdealWine

I'm still alive. As of now I still intend to continue the blog. I'm sort of husbanding writerly resources at the moment, sketching out drafts of what might one day (if I'm lucky) become a Not Drinking Poison In Paris book.

Not a Paris guide book, nor a comprehensive fact-driven wine book. Some other kind of book. That's my elevator pitch.

There's also been a bit of travel. To my embarrassingly long list of trips awaiting thorough blog coverage - Florence, Bordeaux, Hydra, Bilbao, Avize, Troyes, London, New York, Los Angeles - I can now add Tokyo, where the other evening at a stand near Ometesando station a colleague introduced me to takoyaki, or octopus balls.

Amusingly, the same stand also served Guinness. I would like to see the reverse happen, and Irish pubs begin diversifying their menus with some octopus balls. They're basically just spheres of fried batter and minced octopus - the same genus as the Scotch Egg, perhaps.

We learned the hard way that it's best to let them cool a moment before eating. The batter was still somewhat molten on the interior - like a cross between bechamel and lava - so after our first bites my friend M and I both stood for a while with our mouths agape, laughing in agony, huffing out wisps of bonito skin into the crisp spring evening.

This all occurred at a parking lot full of self-consciously Brooklyn-inspired street food stands called 246 Common. Ordinarily I refrain from using the B-word as a descriptor, but they really hammered the connection home at this place.

I tend to retch when confronted with precious, over-designed presentation of street food. But in Tokyo preciousness and effortful design are the norm, so this sort of thing fits right in. Also, it's tucked inside one of the city's most swank shopping districts. I had to imagine how pleased I'd be to have something like this beside, say, rue Faubourg St. Honoré.*

* That Cantine California food truck in the Marché du Faubourg Saint Honoré proves there's demand. It's only there Wednesday lunchtimes, however, and the line is positively staggering. There apparently exist hordes of French office workers who are willing arrange their entire workday around the pursuit of mediocre burgers. I have to assume it is affecting the nation's GDP.

Most comparisons of cities are offered as a way for the speaker - usually an inhabitant of the smaller or less lively of the two cities being compared - to make a display of worldliness and, in doing so, reassure him or herself of the wisdom of winding up in the smaller or less lively city. It's a human phenomenon, as common in Paris as in Boston and San Diego. One also hears it constantly from any New Yorker who has ever chosen to settle elsewhere.*

But, as Italo Calvino hints in his book Invisible Cities, cities might more accurately be considered closed system unto themselves, expressible only in their own terms. Narrator Marco Polo's descriptions of the cities he's seen exceed the imagination his interpellator Kublai Khan, and indeed of the reader. It's impossible to accurately judge one city by the scale of another.

So far, the greatest benefit I've derived from this way of thinking is that it has permitted me to love Le Mary Celeste, an oyster bar some good friends recently opened in the Marais.

Le Mary Celeste - named after a legendary ghost ship - is the third establishment Carina Tsou, Adam Tsou, and Josh Fontaine have opened in the past two years. If I haven't commented publicly on the other two - Marais taco bar-slash-speakeasy Candelaria and rollicking haute-divebar Glass in Pigalle - it's because neither serve wine, and that thematic disincentive was enough to convince me to keep schtum, as I have no great desire to criticise good friends or kick hornets' nests. But Le Mary Celeste does indeed serve natural wine. Furthermore, the trio's establishments have attained such total preeminence in Paris' bar scene that were I to keep silent on Le Mary Celeste, it would reflect poorly not on Le Mary Celeste, but rather on Not Drinking Poison In Paris.**

Fontaine and the Tsous have not just enlivened Paris' bar scene. They've arguably re-invented it.

Good bars in Paris predate Candelaria, of course. There is, notably, Experimental Cocktail Club on rue Saint Sauveur, which opened in 2006. It was as a client of that bar that I first met Carina Tsou and Josh Fontaine, who managed and bartended there, respectively. But the ECC group's subsequent bar openings (Curio Parlour, Prescription, ECC London, La Compagnie des Vins Surnaturels, Beef Club, soon the Fish Club...***) have seen the proprietors reiterate their laudable, if self-evident original idea - good product in a nice discreet environment - in forms more and more legible to the party girls and hollow suits they once screened out at the door. All they've done is keep pace with a drinking market that now demands a dash of gourmet pretension atop the usual plush seats and gilt-framed mirrors.

But how a bar serves is as influential if not moreso than what a bar serves. The ECC group deserves credit for teaching a Parisien clientele that it is cool to have standards about hospitality and cocktails. The Candelaria group has succeeded by insisting that these standards should be assumed - that they are not luxuries in themselves, and need not be treated as such. (The concept of luxury, in fact, is antithetical to honest egalitarian fun in a bar. To even go out to a bar is to permit chance and randomness and strangers into one's life. Otherwise we would just stay home.)

The unifying scrappiness of the Candelaria group's bars therefore serves an important psychological function. It's an inviting form of sprezzatura- of succeeding without appearing to try too hard. People seem to call it "Brooklyn-style," but I think it's more accurate to say scrappiness is simply a mark of sophistication, an evolution in taste that Brooklyn just happened (as often happens) to manifest early. Paris changing, too: you'll find fine product married with scrappy or non-existent design at L'Entrée des Artistes, La Retrobottega, Septime Cave, etc.

This is why the menu design bothers me at Le Mary Celeste. It was the first thing I noticed when I sat down. In what I'm told was an effort to break from what the owners saw as a dull consensus of minimal menu design, they present at Le Mary Celeste not one menu, but four. On separate indistinguishably-sized bits of cardboard. With wacky fonts that slant across the page.

If I didn't know otherwise - if I'd just strolled into the place on a whim without knowing the back story - I'd assume from the menus that the ownership were first-time restaurateurs who were getting bilked by some wily graphic designer who was charging them every time the cocktail list needed updating. This is not the case with Le Mary Celeste, but in business it's important not to give the impression that one is a sucker. Moreover, the maximalist menu malarkey is precisely the sort of thing one typically finds at hokey over-branded over-funded restaurants - L'Auberge Flora, for example, or Terroirs Parisien.

Graphic design quibbles aside, Le Mary Celeste is, for now, the flagship of Paris' re-invented bar scene. Nowhere else will you see people uniting in such droves for fine product unfettered by tableside formality, or tables, for that matter. At the restaurant's heart is a magnificent semi-circular bar that allows guests to stay focused on what they came for, which is, fine product notwithstanding, the other guests.

The restaurant's proprietors have long since proven their mettle at uniting interesting people, and Le Mary Celeste is another roaring success on this front. The vibe is addictive, a echo-chamber of bon mots, a mirror hall of discreet appraisals. The staff appear to be having as good a time as the guests, and that they do so while providing sterling service is nothing short of miraculous.

Over the course of several dinners there, however, I had to remind myself that this is the first real kitchen the group has attempted, not counting Candelaria's trench-warfare taco bunker. Le Mary Celeste's chef, Haan Palcu-Chang, previously worked at Restaurant Kokkeriet in Copenhagen and at Paris' premier haute-cave-à-manger for hypocrites and masochists, Saturne. (Not his fault.)

His menu changes daily, but typically it scans as a greatest hits list of pan-Asian appetizers, with the occasional guest appearance of a curiously taco-like dish. In Paris it comes across as appealingly exotic - how nice not to chew through a steak now and then ! But in practice meals can sometimes seem like a brown rainbow of sweet-n-sour brown sauce variations. (It's partly a result of kitchen constraints: there's no extraction in Le Mary Celeste's subterranean kitchen, so no frying, hence more salady things.)

The menu contains a separate section for bar snacks. Pickled topinambour and beef jerky are both idiot-proof and tasty, as long as one ignores presentation. (A friend of mine memorably described the jerky as looking "like something scraped off a boot after a long walk in the woods.")

The bar's other snack is a perfectly nice-looking kim-chi, but one which, rather gravely, possesses neither the taste of fermentation nor any perceptible spice component, making it not kim-chi but rather a sweet-and-sour cabbage salad. This is the one dish that feels like an actual concession to timid native tastes, a total anomaly in all my friends' businesses.

All this still comprises better bar food than is available anywhere else in Paris, excepting L'Avant Comptoir. (Which in any case at most hours is less a bar than a tourist cattle pen.) And Palcu-Chang's laudable ambition and skill shine through in numerous more successful plates. Modest little lettuce wraps were among the best I've ever had, sensuous and tender, the yakitori-like chicken cooked with a thrillingly light hand. And on a recent evening a mullet ceviché was fresh and succulent enough to forgive the brittle taco-like shell needlessly underpinning it.

But the place is, after all, an oyster bar. In this function everything is delightfully comme-il-faut : the oysters change regularly, they're well-presented, and they arrive in a timely fashion. It's also a minor revelation in Paris to encounter a little oyster diversity - nickel-sized kumamotos from Maldon, flat full-flavored plates belons, and so on. A least three different varieties are on offer at any given time, all of impeccable freshness.

Fontaine and his sommelier Julien Courmont handle the wine list. It's everything I'd hoped for from Fontaine, a good friend with whom I've done a bit of wine travel. Natural-to-organic, well-balanced between classics (Bernard Baudry's heavenly, perpetually underpriced Chinon Blanc) and the inspiring upstarts (Yann Durieux's Aligoté grand-slam, "Love et Pif"). Nowhere else in Paris can you drink this well standing up.

My go-to remains Guy Bossard's magnificent "Gneiss," a total princess of a biodynamic Muscadet, delicate and refined, whose flowery sweet-corn flavors beam down from its towering minerality like a beneficent gaze.

All bottles are appealing and appealingly priced - as I imagine they must be, since at Le Mary Celeste the wine program competes with Brooklyn Lager and Brookyln IPA on draft, and, of course, an ambitious cocktail program, this time headed by the immensely entertaining Carlos Madriz, formerly bartender at left bank boutique hotel L'Hôtel.

Le Mary Celeste's most impressive aspect, finally, is that it manages to present something truly new in in Paris - high quality Asian bar food, paired with a welcoming madcap atmosphere - without leaving anyone out. If you've ever stayed up around a kitchen table trying to come up with restaurant concepts with drunk friends, you'll know how difficult this is. Parisians and expats and tourists all have a reason to get on board Le Mary Celeste - for, respectively, food that isn't French, an ambiance that isn't Parisian, and the oysters we associate with both France and Paris.

You might experience all this, and, as a visiting stylist friend from NYC did, point out that Le Mary Celeste is like a lot of moderate-to-excellent bars in Brooklyn. Good product, rock 'n' roll, on with the evening. That's missing the charge Le Mary Celeste brings to, and receives from, its home port in the Marais. Ask many Brooklyn weeknight drinkers whether they'd rather be doing same in Paris. They'd say yes, not realising that until Josh Fontaine, Carina Tsou, and Adam Tsou came along, it wasn't possible.

* An interesting feature of the Paris - New York relationship is that while New Yorkers tend to unquestioningly adore Paris for how different it is, Parisians are, generally speaking, rather more ready to find equivalencies between the two cities. Witness the brainless Paris Vs. New York blog-turned book that made the internet rounds last year: however cute or wry the individual comparisons were, taken together they comprised an implicit argument for comparing the two cities.

**A fairly tired wine blog, all told, deficient in hard info and prone to florid editorializing. Two stars.

*** I'm hoping they someday open The Baby Seal Club.

Le Mary Celeste
1, rue des Commines
75003 PARIS
Métro: Filles du Calvaire
Tel: None as far as I know. Reserve by email: reservations@lemaryceleste.com.
Map

Related Links:

Meg Zimbeck's early rave about Le Mary Celeste @ ParisByMouth
A blurb on Le Mary Celeste @ LeFooding
A pretty slapdash piece on Le Mary Celeste @ TenDaysInParis, where the author manages to misrepresent the bar's ownership in such a way as to a) leave out Fontaine, and b) imply that Madriz and Palcu-Chang were involved in Glass and Candelaria. Ouch.
A write-up of Le Mary Celeste @ Vogue

A visit to Yann Durieux's cellar in Villiers-La-Faye

The other day at lunchtime my colleague R and I announced to our high-pitched and highly amusing senior colleague L that we were going out to get sandwiches. As is her wont, she asked us to pick up one for her. I said no problem, I'd text her a pic of the menu.

No no no, she said, just get me jambon à l'os, with cantal...

At which point I was obliged to explain we were not going to any old interchangeable French sandwich place. R and I were going to Restaurant Verjus*, whose newly launched lunchtime sandwich program is essentially a Great American Road Trip of sandwich nostalgia. There's a slim menu of sandwiches, each named after its culinary inspiration: a pork belly homage to Momofuku's David Chang, fried chicken ode to Bakesale Betty in Oakland... It's like owners Braden Perkins and Laura Adrian wanted to adapt the Proustian madeleine to the American palate, and give their numerous expat fans something to make their hearts melt and their mouths water.

It works: I've went back three times last week, drawn by the fine weather, Laura's hospitality, and the aforementioned Bakesale Betty sandwich, which in my case sidesteps the madeleine test by being vastly superior to any fried chicken sandwich I can remember consuming in my lifetime. It's just the fried chicken Perkins serves at the wine bar in the evenings, only in a lovely pliant bun with some slaw. But the chicken itself - the crispy, sculptural, yet moisture-rich quality of fry - is rave-worthy.

That I should find myself dwelling on the fried chicken of a chef as talented and as multi-faceted as Perkins - as if he were no more than an haute-gastro Colonel Sanders - is kind of a cosmic joke. But there it is: the fried chicken is that good.

So good, in fact, that Verjus' fledgling sandwich menu becomes a little imbalanced. The other options, while tasty, could use tweaking. The pork belly sandwich comes on a small rice bun slightly too close in texture to the pork belly itself, which meat, when I attempted to consume it, slithered out and landed on my lap, testifying to poor construction.

The comparatively mild pulled-pork sandwich comes pressed into a half-baguette. Here the problem is not one of construction, but rather one of presentation. Half-baguettes look stingy. It's like you're sharing your sandwich with an invisible man who has taken the bigger half. Verjus' sandwiches presently arrive without fries or Kettle Chips or what-have-you, and can look a bit lonely on the plate to begin with. So at 10€ takeaway, or 15€ dine-in with a supplement of baked dessert and a soda, they're a wee bit pricey, owing, probably, to the fact that they're composed of the same Cadillac ingredients Verjus employs for dinner service.

A perfectly wispy succulent snickerdoodle cookie.

Whatever the reason, my colleague L crowed about the price tag all afternoon. Lunch service is a different animal, with different dining priorities. Most people want sides and a sense of abundance, and they want it for next to nothing.

For my part, I have found myself willing - even eager! - to eat small expensive sandwiches for the sake of a civilised environment, friendly staff, and the presence of good wine by the glass.

The other day I was delighted to see that Laura Adrian has added to Verjus' list what must rank as 11ème caviste and wine agent Vincent Lequin's discovery of 2013: the lazer-precise Corbières wines of a very new biodynamic estate called Domaine de la Promesse de la Terre in Lagrasse.

Co-founded* by an agronomist and winemaking consultant called Bruno Weiller in 2011, the mixed agriculture estate possesses 7ha of vines, and produces, among other cuvées, an astonishingly balanced Corbières blanc, whose snowy herbal flavors and precision minerality had me guessing Savoie when Lequin blinded me on it a few weeks back.

I've also tried the estate's three red cuvées, the best of which is, perhaps surprisingly, the cheapest : a rainfall-fresh, crisply mineral Carignan-Syrah-Grenache blend called "Renaissance," as toothsome and balanced as a fine square meal.

* I see from the website that renowned soil expert Claude Bourguignon is also involved somehow.

Verjus
52 rue de Richlieu
75001 PARIS
Métro: Pyramides
Tel: 01 42 97 54 40
Map

Related Links:

Aux Anges - Vincent Lequin's 11ème cave

Alexander Lobrano on Restaurant Verjus' dinner service @ HungryForParis

I might as well start off by explaining that La Pointe du Groin is an alternate spelling for La Pointe du Grouin, a rocky outcropping on the bay of Mont Saint Michel in Brittany. It's also where renowned chef-restaurateur Thierry Breton hails from. Breton, like many of his countrymen, enjoys a good meaningless pun. For his multifarious, rather groundbreaking new wine bar project, Breton has chosen the emblem of a grinning pig - for in French, groin means the snout, and not some other part of pig anatomy.

One may nonetheless presume that the English signification is not entirely lost on Breton. The bar's name is just one of several baffling features of the project, which include, but are not limited to, outlandishly bad décor and an incomprehensible payment scheme in which guests will be expected to exchange their euros for fake money - Groin coins ? - accepted only at La Pointe du Groin.

Despite these obstacles, La Pointe du Groin is primed for succcess. It's spacious, rangey, and weird, offering magnums of natural wine and simple small plates at a price-quality ratio approaching the one achieved when Manhattan was bought for beads. It's a Paris wine bar that explodes the traditional Parisian opposition between egalité and haute-qualité: a place where many can drink well for very little.

Entering La Pointe du Groin (titter away, by all means) is a transportative experience. Specifically, when I visited the other night with a gang of friends, I felt transported to any number of towns in northern Italy, where echoing wine-canteens with communal tables and serious bottles are seemingly almost the norm. The inexplicable design elements at La Point de Groin - a red telephone, a ludicrous graf mural of a bread oven - only heighten the similarity.

On the night we visited, staff was limited to Thierry Breton himself, bumbling around genially behind the bar, and a Japanese cook. There were about two or three other parties, other than our own expanding mob, and whenever a kitchen order was placed, Breton would join his helper in the rear of the kitchen, promptly forgetting whatever wine ordered had been placed with said kitchen order. It's still soft-opening stages for La Point de Groin; rather than read too much into the service I simply volunteered to go fetch the wine myself.

Breton had explained that eventually all wine service will be from magnum.* But for now we had free run of the (superb) wine lists of his two adjacent restaurants, Chez Michel and Chez Casimir. So I spent the evening shuttling back and forth between Chez Michel and our communal table at La Pointe du Groin, where we opened bottles ourselves as we went along.

Breton's pricing on Jura maestro Pierre Overnoy's wines - even a few back vintages - is so kind that it seems almost cruelly obvious to plunder them on a visit to the restaurants. But plunder them we did, promising ourselves to branch out further afield on a subsequent visit. The jewel of the evening was, for me, one particularly energetic bottle of Overnoy's 2008 Arbois Poulsard, a wine whose shimmering brick-garnet colour seemed to twist light into knots around it. Keen long flavours of sour cherry, rose, and aniseed shot across the palate with the precision of high-level badminton.

Meanwhile, I was the only professed fan of a dubiously cheap bottle of 1999 Philipe Bornard Ploussard "La Chamade." How would such a feather-light grape age over 14 years, we wondered? Especially when bottled by Bornard, a vigneron whose popularity among vignerons and sommeliers I know might best be described as unblemished by the wild inconsistency of his wines?

I've had bottles of his that taste like heaven and I've had others that taste like spit. I found the '99 "Chamade" to be holding up astonishingly well, all things considered. Tannins and acid were in order; flavours were fruit-leathery, ruminative, Pinot-like. But everything was complicated by that unplaceable paranoiac note of cellar funk one often gets from old wines of uncertain provenance.**

Plates are all tiny and shareable at La Pointe du Groin. The eponymous dish - the snout of the pig - came breaded and sliced on a hank of arugula, with a vaguely fecal-looking green tapenade. It tasted better than it looked, and the groin itself was succulent and mouth-coating.

Less successful were some underseasoned little pots of oxtail and whipped potato, the sort of thing one is only thankful for if one arrives already drunk. Or, as is presently the case at La Pointe du Groin, they cost 4€. Prices are almost laughably good. Tuna loin on a bed of shaved fennel? 4€. Lamb with lentils? 4€.

A glass of acceptable Sauvignon, while you wait for friends to join you ? 2€.

We had six desserts - kumquat tart, apple tart, and kouign-amann - for 18€ total.

The kouign-amann in particular was pillowy and fresh, an appropriate home-run for a Brittany-born chef-baker like Breton. Baking is a central feature of La Pointe du Groin, which Breton also uses as a hub for his bike-delivery bread wholesale operation. Take a wrong turn on the way to the toilet, and you'll find yourself in a brightly lit underground oven-room, hungrily inhaling the perfumes.

Later in the evening none other than Yves Camdeborde of Le Comptoir du Relais / L'Avant Comptoir dropped by to check out Breton's new kitchen.

As Breton began explaining the coin machine feature to Camdeborde, I returned to the bar to listen in, unsure that I'd truly grasped what still seemed a very silly idea.

This is how I wound up explaining the topical concept of "bitcoins" to both chefs, although by the end of the discussion I don't think any of us were closer to understanding what bitcoins are, why they exist, or why on earth Breton should feel it necessary to create his own currency.*** My friend C astutely pointed out that this had been done before at a certain restaurant chain in America, with mixed critical reaction.

My friend M also foresaw a change in atmosphere, once La Pointe du Groin's soft-opening gets hard. "It'll never be this good again," she opined at the end of the meal.

And it's true: magnum wine service will almost certainly mean a more limited, cheaper wine selection. The place is built for crowds; whether the right one will arrive is by no means assured, this close to Gare du Nord. Most chefs of Breton's stature decline to offer their services at La Point du Groin's price point specifically to keep out a kind of leery cheapo element who tend to linger in Paris' inexpensive public spaces.

But save your groin coins. No amount of bad ideas will stop a good idea whose time has come.

* All-mag service is sort of the great windmill-chase of quixotic restaurateurs around the world. Everyone loves magnums. They look lavish enough that just the sight of them causes mouths to water and wallets to unfold. Keeping wine fresh while serving exclusively from bottles of that size requires a restaurant move serious units, however. I have more confidence in Breton achieving this goal than, say, the well-intentioned bunglers behind 11ème rotisserie Jeanne A.

** It's almost like the trust has to be there for the palate even to perceive things correctly - an idea I won't dwell on, since it slightly undermines the whole project of wine criticism.

*** The only plausible reason I can think of is maybe it's a complex tax workaround. Any thoughts?

La Pointe du Groin
8, rue de Belzunce
75010 PARIS
Métro: Gare du Nord
Tel: None
Map

Related Links:

Paris' greatest brunch, at Chez Casimir
Thoughts on a less-successful magnum-only wine program: Jeanne A, 75011

A December 2012 preview of La Pointe du Groin, by the ever-informed Wendy Lyn at ParisKitchen.
Basically just a list of La Pointe du Groin's menu items at LeFooding.

Some astute tasting notes of Bornard's wines at WineMule.
Notes on the 2006 "La Chamade" at GrapesandGrainsNYC.

Some time after we stopped dating, my ex F moved to a really superb apartment just next to one of Paris' most beloved bistrots and steak-frites destinations, Bistrot Paul Bert. I can be sure she did this purely to make me jealous, because she herself is vegetarian.

Despite this hurdle, we've managed to remain good friends. So back in January it was a tip-off from F that hipped me to the opening of Bistrot PB proprietor Bertrand Auboyneau's then-new place, Le Six Paul Bert, a small-plates spin-off just down the road from the motherships. (Auboyneau also has PB's adjacent seafood restaurant, L'Ecailler du Bistrot.) Initial rumours had given me to believe the new place was to be a wine bar - and the mere idea of a wine bar by the maestro behind Bistrot Paul Bert filled me with a kind of dread and awe, imagining how unbeatably great such an undertaking would be.

But the rumours turned out to be rumours. Leaving aside its functions as an épicerie and its speakeasy-style name, Le Six Paul Bert is Another (Excellent) Restaurant, albeit one that adopts some of the trappings of small-plates wine bars. The effect is to inadvertently highlight, for anyone who may have believed otherwise, how alien the idea of a new world-style wine bar is to Paris.

Plates at Le Six Paul Bert are sized between appetisers and mains, but a formule of three of them plus dessert is still offered, just in case diners really can't wrap their heads around the idea of sharing. Such a dinner sets one back 38€, which is, probably not coincidentally, roughly the same price as the formules as Bistrot Paul Bert and L'Ecailler du Bistrot.

For it's not just Paris diners who resist the idea of an informal wine bar meal. Successful Paris restaurateurs, Bertrand Auboyneau among them, evince little desire to lower their price points, even when the style of service changes.

I would have killed for some Nebbiolo with this.

Hence one pays as much for a meal at Le Dauphin as at Le Chateaubriand; almost as much for a meal at Frenchie Wine Bar as at Frenchie; just a notch less for a meal at Vivant Cave versus Vivant Table; and so on. What often gets forgotten in this Batman - Robin restaurant set-up is that the restaurants - the Batmen - were initially acclaimed for their human informality relative to Michelin places - the Supermen? - pitched at similar levels of quality, often leaving the Robins of the scenario, the wine bars, with little to define themselves beyond even more informality. In the case of Le Dauphin and Le Chateaubriand such a thing isn't even possible, it would have to involve waiters dropping trousers and knocking over tables or something.

Anyway. Service at Le Six Paul Bert, on the other hand, is marvelous. Edouard in particular is as telepathic as he is telegenic, and ought to be cloned and staffed at all fine restaurants worldwide.

Later - after my first visit, pictured here - my friend Solenne Jouan joined the Six Paul Bert team as sommelière and wine director, with predictably excellent effects on the already-superb wine list, which is even more resolutely natural-leaning than those at Auboyneau's other establishments. His lists predate the contemporary vogue for natural wine, but can nonetheless be said to embody its best articulation: balanced, discriminating, and undogmatic, they contain something for everyone.

For me they contain a vivid, baked-nuts & lemon-toned 2007 Overnoy Arbois Savagnin, and, more recently, whatever Jouan has up her sleeve. In my experience, she adds to the list considerably more often than she updates its written contents. There are typically four or so selections each of red and white wines available by the glass. I remember finding it odd there weren't a few more expensive glass selections.

The answer might be found in Le Six Paul Bert's knee-pinchingly uncomfortable bar construction. The stools are too damn high, leaving one's ankles swinging like a toddler. Once again: ceci n'est pas un bar à vin. It only looks slightly like one.

I'll admit to finding the rest of the décor lurchingly overdone and borderline nightmarish in places. (The ornamental lampshade made out of spoons and forks and knives...) But I've been bringing quite a few people to Le Six lately, and everyone seems to outvote me and find it all adorable, so what the hell do I know.

Auboyneau's chef at Le Six is a Montreal native called Louis-Philippe Riel, who displays a confident and unshowy command of the intricacies of the small-plates idiom. A typical menu is full of surprises, although perhaps the most surprising facet is how few vegetarian dishes are available. One comes to expect a few in most menus of this style. Happily on the night F and I went with my other friend M the kitchen were happy to prepare a plate of gnocchi.

I found myself unexpectedly amused by an ingenius taco-like dish of celeriac and veal tongue. I turned over a morsel or two on my own tongue in vain, trying to discern the celeriac, until I realised that it was very effectively comprising the taco shell itself.

Trompe l'oeil effects like this are extremely hard to pull off with class; usually they're either too intellectual or too obvious. This one, rather like the restaurant as a whole, occupies a richly satisfying middle ground.

Le Six Paul Bert
6, rue Paul Bert
75011 PARIS
Métro: Faidherbe-Chaligny
Tel: +33 1 43 79 14 32
Map

Related Links:

An absolute rave about Le Six Paul Bert @ DavidLebovitz
A very positive review of Le Six Paul Bert at HungryForParis.
A neat endorsement of Le Six Paul Bert at Oenos.
An early review of Le Six Paul Bert at GillePudlowski, heavy on the adjectives, including, of course, "bobo."
A pre-opening preview of Le Six Paul Bert at TheParisKitchen

An interview with Bertrand Auboyneau at TheParisKitchen
An interview with Solenne Jouan at NoWineIsInnocent

Natural wine enthusiasts are kind of like vegetarians: we know their preferences, but their reasons why diverge wildly. A few natural wine fans are taking an ecological stand. (It stands to reason that most natural wine restaurants in Paris serve sustainable fish.) Other people just want to avoid headaches. Still others - and in this category I would place most of the vignerons I know - have only aesthetics in mind: they promote natural wine because it simply tastes better.

My own reasons for preferring natural wine are complicated, half-aesthetic, quasi-Marxist, cultural preservationist... I can't choose just one. But it seems to me that one would have to be firmly in the pure-aesthetics camp in order to justify serving natural wine beside steaks shipped from Argentina, as chef Fernando de Tomaso does at his 11ème Argentine bistrot La Pulperia.

The practice also identifies the restaurant as being aimed at squarely at native Parisians. Anyone else - all the expats I know and surely every tourist - would prefer, whilst in Paris, to consume any of the numerous renowned varieties of French beef (Charolais, Aubrac, etc.). Many of us have stood by shaking our heads as international meat places like Bang!, The Beef Club, and La Pulperia open, and French restaurant culture sails further into the maw of the global capitalist whale, the belly of which contains everything, as many choices as a Whole Foods Market... Doomsaying aside, La Pulperia boasts pleasing cuisine and a surprisingly deep natural wine list, making it a probably a fine place to return if I ever become truly Parisian. (God help me.)

It's true that I am perenially complaining about a lack of good ethnic food in Paris, particularly Italian. I do this because Italy is a neighboring culture with a rich and varied culinary history. I don't complain about a lack of Argentine steaks, or of kangaroo meat, for that matter.

La Pulperia's name, as you might have already guessed, is pretty misleading. The night my friends and I visited - a Saturday - there was precisely one octopus dish available, off-menu. And it was the worst thing I ate all night, a sickeningly literal presentation of the listed ingredients: octopus, milk.

I think there had been a kitchen error. The milk tasted like milk, almost unseasoned. There is a Bangladeshi restaurant I frequent whose staff have been kind enough to tolerate me occasionally sending back my salty latchis, because occasionally whoever's preparing it doesn't use enough salt or yogurt and it tastes like a glass of frothy whole milk. This dish was like someone poured said latchi misfire over an octopus. (Which itself sounds like a good idea for a surrealist film.)

The rest of the meal was mostly good news, from a purely hedonistic standpoint. The argentine steaks were delish - fatty, full-flavored, and tender, although slightly overseasoned. (Why ship something around the world, only to mask its flavors?)

Plate presentation was of a considerably higher standard than I'd expected, a testament, I later learned, to de Tomaso's time in kitchens at Le Crillon and the Jardin du Royale Monceau.

In this regard La Pulperia follows the successful trick of restaurants like Le Chateaubriand, whose plating always seems that much more delicate in contrast to the goonish service chaos surrounding it. La Pulperia's proprietors have shoved about two two-tops too many into the available space, even by Parisian sardine standards, with the result that absenting oneself for a cigarette or a piss necessitates a game of live action Tetris with one's neighboring tables.

For those of us not especially interested in Argentine steaks, La Pulperia's chief draw is its laudably deep natural wine list. For this the restaurant deserves more credit than you might think. Good restaurants in Paris order most bottles domaine direct, rather than through a distributor as in the US. So instead of managing, say, five to ten relationships with that many distributors or importers, a wine director with a solid list must manage thirty to fifty individual relationships with eccentric winemakers, whose delivery schedules are dependent upon his or her own demanding personal and viticultural calendar. So deep wine lists are an administrative challenge that most Paris natural wine bistrots have basically just given up on. Hence the rarity of restaurants that even bother printing a list of their natural wines. (Like many small businesses in France, natural wine bistrots often take laxity and laziness to the proverbial next level, in this case by failing even to update their chalk boards.)

It would take a few more visits for me to confirm that La Pulperia's list remains current, which is of course the true test of seriousness. On the night I visited, after determining La Pulperia were out of, or unwilling to part with, a few interesting bottles of 2006 Claude Courtois reds, I simply went with my friend Karim Vionnet's reliably excellent "Vin de Kav" Chiroubles.

A former protogé of Guy Breton, Karim now has his own operation in Villié-Morgon, producing Chiroubles, Beaujolais Nouveau, Beaujolais Villages, and as of last year a Moulin-à-Vent.

I'll admit to having been a little underwhelmed by the Moulin-à-Vent, when I tasted it late last year. Just didn't seem to have the acid poise of his other cuvées. It seems very possible, however, that the vines have only recently come under his care, and that the cuvée will improve as he brings said vines under more enlightened agricultural practices.

In the meantime his 2010 "Vin de Cav" is still performing marvelously. It's what I want when I want red wine - ferrous, buoyant, and brightly acidic - and the price is invariably what I wish to pay when I have already paid for a steak's plane tickets.

To be fair, steak prices at La Pulperia are not appreciably higher than other natural wine steak destinations like Le Severo or Christophe or Bistrot Paul Bert. But the experience at La Pulperia is not yet of the same quality. Sadistic seating and a cackling bro-vibe are aspects of a restaurant I tend to tolerate for the sake of utterly unique cuisine or low prices or both. La Pulperia, for all the appeal of its estimable wine list, presently offers neither.* A true Parisian might think differently, however, so I wish La Pulperia nothing but success with that clientele.

* How about importing international service standards, rather than meat? There's an idea.

La Pulperia
11 rue Richard Lenoir
75011 PARIS
Métro: Charonne
Tel: 01 40 09 03 70 ‎
Map

Related Links:

A visit to Karim Vionnet's cellar in Villié-Morgon
Lunch with Karim Vionnet at Café de la Bascule in Fleurie

Differing cultural standards for sexist content on hilarious display at LeFooding, whose review of La Pulperia leads with commentary on, and a big photo of, the server's breasts.
An informative and well-written endorsement of La Pulperia at FoodIntelligence.
A level-headed review of La Pulperia at Mr.Lung.
A harsh assessment of La Pulperia's lunch at JohnTalbott, where the author did admittedly receive quite boring-looking food, worlds apart from most of the stuff I've seen served at dinner at the restaurant. Worth reading for the genuinely wise maxim at the end, his "rule 5bis."

There would not, initially, seem to be much purpose in my writing anything at all about Procopio Angelo, the eponymous restaurant of a popular Tuscan chef in Paris, once based on rue Faubourg St. Honoré, now transplanted to a back road near Colonel Fabien in the 10ème. Procopio's Italian wine list is representative of the genre as one typically encounters it in Paris: a seeming panoply of regional wines, which upon closer inspection turn out to comprise little more than the diverse ranges of a few titanic producers of supermarket wine. Then you have poor Marco Parusso's decent if overmodern Barolos - always the current vintage - sitting there like duck-decoys for the big spenders who stray in.*

But Procopio keeps cropping up in any discussion of Italian food in Paris. No less than two friends whose culinary opinions I otherwise respect have proposed his restaurant to me as an example of "real Italian."

Sociologist Peter L. Berger famously argued that reality itself is a social construction, an interwoven fabric of institutionalised social perceptions. Procopio Angelo is real Italian cuisine, if, like many Paris diners, one disregards the last twenty years' of Italian restaurateurism and continues to define Italian cuisine in opposition to the technique and complexity of a serious restaurant.

Procopio Angelo encourages this misconception. Its awning advertises house-made pasta, a selling point only marginally more excusable than 'desserts faits maison': both make sense only if one is pitching to a clientele accustomed to frequenting restaurants that serve things not made on premises.

There would be nothing wrong with this if the pasta were actually praise-worthy. It's fine, just normal enjoyable fresh pasta, of the ilk that can be bought at specialty shops in Paris or in decent supermarkets elsewhere in the developed world. And Procopio Angelo's is let down by careless preparations. A tagliatelle carbonara unforgivably utilised bland lardons where pancetta ought to go. It's not like that's a particularly exotic, hard-to-source ingredient, either. As an Italian staple, it ranks right after pasta and tomatoes.

Worse still were the appetizers. Even at that early stage in the meal, the hokey décor had given me a presentiment of what was to come, so I ordered a fritto misto of vegetables, mistakenly thinking it was a more or less idiot-proof dish.

Even setting aside the lackadaisical presentation and the sad rucola strands wilting away beneath it all, the fry itself was blunderingly awful. I had flashbacks to my first waiting gig, a quasi-Italian café near the Boston waterfront, where one night during dinner service the chef simply walked out, obliging the squat surly manager to roll up his sleeves and squeeze into the open kitchen, dubiously claiming he'd attended the Culinary Institute of America. Naturally he didn't know how to make anything. When a pasta order came in, I watched in despair as he located a pot and put water on the burner, apparently unaware that the par-cooked pasta was stocked somewhere in the fridges. With shaking hands he began cutting tomatoes, unaware that the sauce too had been prepared in advance...

Procopio Angelo's fritto misto is indistinguishable from what would occur if Procopio himself abandoned his kitchen and some server gamely stepped up to fill his shoes with no prior training. Neither salt nor flavor, just random veggies, fried limp. I went so far as to ask a server if this was really what the dish was meant to be, or whether there had been some error. The server brought me table salt, Morton's, and some balsamic vinegar.

The classic complaint about Italian cuisine is that, being product-focused and not as time-consuming as French cuisine, many diners feel they themselves could prepare it at home. At Procopio Angelo, they would be basically correct. Even Parisian home chefs would have the savvy to purchase certain ingredients at one of the city's numerous decent Italian traiteurs - Sicile et Co., Paisano, Coop. Latte Cisternino, to name a few - and by doing so they would obtain better ingredients than any employed at Procopio Angelo.

The porcini in the porcini salad were fine.

Ordinarily in situations like the one I found myself in at Procopio Angelo - at a quality-free meal surrounded by friends, none of whom are quite so violently allergic to cynical restaurateurism as I am - I'd just drink myself into an impression of cheerfulness. But even this was a challenge. The lion's share of the list seemed to have been cribbed from gift shops in Procopio's native Tuscany. To be fair, "BIO" selections are marked as such, a nice touch, and one or two reputable producers' entry-level wines are available.

We began with a bottle of Carpene Malvolti Prosecco, which I realised too late was not the decent stuff I remembered pouring from magnum at my old workplace in LA, but rather a mediocre downmarket version of same.

(Carpene Malvolti are an enormous operation. This isn't even their furthest downmarket Prosecco. I remain fond of their "Rosé Brut," often mischaracterised as 'Prosecco Rosé': it's a succulent, full-fruited sparkler made from Pinot Nero and a little Raboso. It's not stocked at Procopio Angelo.)

Relief finally arrived with a bottle of perfectly acceptable Venturini Valpolicella Classico. NYTimes wine critic Eric Asimov has written memorably about the quiet appeal of basic Valpolicella, which tends to be overlooked in favor of ripasso versions and souped-up Amarone. I couldn't agree more with him: good basic Valpolicelli are lovely night-in wines, modestly fruited, containing still the mysterious stalky-savoury element that makes the Corvina-Molinara-Rondinella trio so captivating. They're like the acoustic versions we wind up listening to more often at home than the better-known electric versions:

Venturini are another immense estate - 110ha total - though their reputation remains admirably high-quality, given the vast conventional production. Even their pricier ripassi tend towards precision and balance. Their basic Valpolicella from 2011 showed bright polish, keen acid, and lipsmacking sour cherry - the only convincing moment in an otherwise cynical sham-Italian meal.

* (Never an enormous fan of Marco Parusso, I've nonetheless been relieved at times to find his quite acceptable wines well-represented in many of Paris' totally unsophisticated Italian restaurants, places where the alternatives are Bolla and Ruffino.)

Procopio Angelo
21, rue Juliette Dodu
75010 PARIS
Métro: Colonel Fabien
Tel: 01 42 02 99 71
Map

Related Links:

Coverage of Procopio's move to the 10eme arrondissement at L'Express
A typically credulous endorsement of Procopio's cuisine - and wine list ! - at LeFooding
A rave about Procopio Angelo at GillesPudlowski, who evidently has limited experience with Italian cuisine and goes so far as to call the restaurant 'exotic.'

Better Italian cuisine in Paris: La Retrobottega, 75011
Better Italian cuisine in Paris: Café dei Cioppi, 75011

The Native Companion has lately succeeded in dragging me to more museums. Each time in the ticket line I confront my reason for usually staying home : a bedraggled queue of hat-haired tourists with their hands full of waffles and soda, whacking me with their overstuffed backbacks. Public art ! But we were lucky the other day on our visit to the Keith Haring exhibition presently on view at Le 104, the 19ème arrondissement's echoing, perpetually under-filled municipal art space. We arrived just before the afternoon rush and took in Haring's brilliant, trumpeting tarpaulin work in relative peace, before we departed to our respective workplaces.

On my way out, I noticed that a little épicerie bio had opened right by the glass doors of Le 104's rue Curial entrance, in a space resembling one of those tollbooths lodged in support columns. I popped my head in and was delighted to discover a slim, affordable selection of natural wines on offer, including, among others, Saone organic vigneron Guy Bussière's marvelous flinty Melon de Bourgogne cuvée, "Phénix."

L'Epicerie du 104 opened February 2nd, I learned. Our late-coming, tentative springtime this year means that the shop is only just now attaining relevance as a perfect pit-stop before a visit to Le 104's exhibit and a picnic in the Jardin d'Eole, the overlooked strip of public greenery wedged between Le 104 and the twisting river of train tracks leading to Gare de l'Est.

A 2010 picnic in the jardin d'Eole, predating the opening of the Epicerie du 104. We contented ourselves with Pop Ice.

Bottles of water are 60 centimes and an array of vegetables, juices, pastries, jams, chocolate, and cheeses are for sale.

I hadn't planned a picnic on the day I visited, so contented myself with a German date-nut bar and a bottle of the "Phénix," the saline, almondy flavors of which were a perfect accompaniment to a band practice the following day.

The wine is a curiosity - Melon de Bourgogne from its ampelographical ancestral home near the Saone river in Burgundy, rather than from its present home in the western Loire. (Bertrand Celce at WineTerroirs has a great piece citing the numerous historical efforts to limit, displace, and / or uproot cultivation of the Melon variety in Burgundy.) In itself it's neither expensive nor exceptionally profound - just flinty and pure. But tasting outlier versions of otherwise familiar grapes is always educational for what it can imply about the effects of regional terroir. I've only ever tasted two examples of Burgundian Melon - the "Phénix," and Jean Montanet's spiffing, small-production Melon cuvée. So I remain eager to taste whatever other Burgundian Melon I come across, even as I don't often leap out of my seat for Muscadet.

My appreciation for Haring's work and for L'Epicerie du 104 is also largely dependent upon context. Keith Haring's imagery aimed to be so universal that total commercial co-option was welcomed as an aid to its dissemination; one side effect of its success is that the works barely register in our consciousness when we see them outside of major retrospectives like the one presently on view at Le 104 and the Musée de l'Art Moderne.

A tiny organic food shop, similarly, has almost no impact when we pass it in a neighborhood overserved by similar endeavors - be it le Marais, Brick Lane, Williamsburg, or Daikanyama - where "organic" has become the prevailing consumer ideology. Whereas to find an organic food shop proposing natural wine amid the housing blocks and chicken shacks of Métro Riquet and the avenue de Flandres is a semi-revelatory experience, distantly akin to what NYC subway bystanders might have felt watching young Haring chalking out his dancing, loving figures on the walls.

L'Epicerie du 104
Le CENTQUATRE
5 rue Curial
75019 PARIS

Métro: Riquet

Tél: 01 53 35 50 00

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Related Links:

More museum dining:

Le Bal Café, 75018

Mini Palais, 75008

A great 2011 piece on Guy Bussière by Bertrand Celce at WineTerroirs

A good way for a writer to earn money is to cultivate a reputation for authority on a subject rich people like. Wine and food are quite good. Things like polo, yachting, and racehorses are probably even better. All you have to do is publish a great deal on these subjects and sooner or later some organization will reward you for your apparent expertise with a sponsorship or a panel discussion or a publishing deal. Because you will have attained credibility as bait for a luxury clientele.

French food writer, blogger, cookbook author, radio personality, and now restaurateur Bruno Verjus both exemplifies and transcends this phenomenon. On the one hand, he seriously knows his stuff. His blog, FoodIntelligence, is a treasure trove of good recommendations in any price range. In his writing and in his wide-ranging interviews with chefs and artisanal food producers, Verjus evinces a passionate appreciation for, and a nuanced understanding of, the business of real food.

But Verjus is no stranger to promo work. He helps organise the Omnivore food festival. He works as an advisor to Paris auction house Artcurial and coordinated its first charity auction of gastronomic products. And with Table, his new restaurant on sleepy rue de Prague in the 12ème, he's made an ambitious play for the affections of deep-pocketed food fetishists city-wide. It's a dream restaurant for anyone who has ever cried from a balcony, "Honey, let's go bid on a wheel of 48-month parm !"

A swishy touch-activated glass door slides open and transports you to - Barcelona, seemingly. Hams hang, an open kitchen echoes, garish white lighting trains on the topography of the rock walls. Until one lays eyes on the menu, one wonders how a restaurant with a kitchen this large plans to survive serving so few tables, several of which are situated so as to be ill-suited for anything but large parties.

If the design is a bit overcooked, the concept of Table is admirably simple. Verjus, who in conversation will modestly claim not to be a chef, wishes to present only the artisanal food products that inspire him. To this end the menu at Table assiduously lists the provenance of each ingredient. Fully the first page is devote to "produits d'artisans," cheeses and meats the restaurant is proud to merely slice and serve, including a luminescent, richly flavoursome cured Rouges des Flandres beef. (Pictured right on the mixed charcuterie plate.)

At 18€, the Belgian beef isn't a bargain, but nor, in the age of Bellotta, San Daniele, and Parma, are diners totally unaccustomed to paying premiums for serious meats.

It's Table's composed dishes that cause controversy. This side of menu contains just two options each for appetisers, main courses, and desserts.

Some of the restaurant's early press has complained about lack of choice, but I suspect this wouldn't have occurred if Verjus had chosen to offer less. No one seems to complain about lack of choice in the tasting menus at Rino, Roseval, Septime, le Chateaubriand, etc.

But it must be said that all of those tasting menus contain more, better food, for less money than can presently be had at Table. Additionally, it's bad optics when both a menu's appetiser choices are in the 20€ range. It wouldn't be out of place in a swank hotel, granted. On rue de Prague, amid a concentration of Paris' great neighborhood restaurants, it feels slightly absurd.

On the night I visited with the Native Companion, we decided to share a burrata served atop a keen, wholesome nettle purée.

The amount of purée was as generous as the dish, overall, wasn't: charging this much for burrata - another produit d'artisan - will invariably cause diners to think back to similarly enjoyable burrata experiences of the past, had for less.

Main courses were illustrative of the strengths and weaknesses of Table's concept. The NC's chicken was marvelous, cooked with maniacal precision, by turns glistening and crispy and moist.

The recipe felt like it had been refined for years in a home kitchen; the original presentation (not pictured above; we had taken a few bites) looked like the work of a top-tier professional kitchen. It was a masterpiece.

My barbue, on the other hand, arrived lukewarm, broken on the plate, lonesome-looking. After I took a photograph, a chalk outline and police tape seemed appropriate.

The fish itself was delicious; great care had been taken not to overcook it, explaining the temperature. But for 34€, one expects a less amateurish result, irrespective of the quality of the fish.

A notable feature of Table's design is the pride-of-place reserved for a West African pineapple on a spit. It's a clever, surrealist touch aimed to build anticipation for dessert. The NC and I gamely took the bait, and enjoyed our roasted "boutille de Benin" pineapple slice, even if the price (14€) seemed inflated by the cost of the wall-mounted spit.

I feel repetitive and more than a little petty, harping on about cost. But money is indeed an object for most diners, and menu pricing colours our perceptions of everything that goes on in a restaurant. High pricing makes even kind gestures come across as upsell attempts. Upon seeing me pore through the wine list with interest, my server at Table first explained that it comprised Verjus' personal cellar - and then swiftly presented me with another wine list of older bottles, in case I had been hesitating because prices on the usual list weren't high enough. He needn't have troubled himself.

I applaud Table for being perhaps the only restaurant in Paris to actually list older bottles of natural wine. Even the major players in Paris natural wine typically either have nothing old stock, or transparently refuse to sell it to anyone but their very best clients. Verjus' personal cellar contains serious discoveries : a 2000 Foillard Morgon "Côte du Py," a range of early-2000's Poulsards from Pierre Overnoy, numerous mags of Métras Fleurie from same era...

But Verjus' prices betray a certain sentimentality towards the wines - perhaps a resistance to let them go. Two years ago, I had a bottle of that 2000 "Côte du Py" as Les Itinéraires in the 5ème for less than 90€; on Table's list it weighs in at 195€. For Anselme Selosse's "Substance," which is typically listed on Paris restaurants lists for 200-350€, Table asks 600€. I'm not sure to what purpose one would offer the serious wines one loves at prices that screen out all but wealthy people unfamiliar with the wines' going rates, i.e. rich twits, an over-served market if ever there were one.

Table's predominantly natural wine list does contain several bottles in the late-twenties / early thirties range. Of these, the best value and most interesting were all Italian.

The NC and I had glasses of a skin-macerated Cortese by organic Piemontese estate Lo Zerbone, which I'd tasted the week before with my friend Solenne Jouan at Le Six Paul Bert. (It seems to have just come on the Paris market.) It's hazy, squash-coloured, with a nice zip to its waxen, candied citrus fruit.

With our main course I took a bottle of Grignolino I'd never had before, a 2011 by 15ha Monferrato estate Silvio Morando.

I did this on the basis of pretty much never having met a Grignolino I didn't like. Lean, savoury, tending to show a nice balance between mineral and dark cherry fruit, I'd deem it one of the world's most under-rated grape varieties. On it's home turf in Piedmont, winemakers and wine drinkers alike invariably give it short shrift in favor of showier Nebbiolo or Barbera. But if those two grapes could loosely be considered to represent the Burgundy and Bordeaux, respectively, of the Piemontese wine world, Grignolino has all the pleasurable qualities necessary to be its Beaujolais. At 28€ on Table's list, Silvio Morando's Grignolino wasn't especially cheap for its category - but it seemed so next to the rest of the mark-ups at Table.

I salute Bruno Verjus for his justifiably high regard for his food suppliers. And Table does makes sense as a place of refuge for fine palates at those moments when time or accessibility is more an object than money (conditions that arise fairly often for friends working in the restaurant industry). But to seduce an appreciable portion of comparatively thrifty east Parisians, Table may need some polishing. We dine out partly, if not primarily, to experience the work of real chefs, one of whose chief challenges is finding innovative ways to make fine product cost-effective.

Bruno Verjus, despite his modesty, is indeed a real chef, now with a real kitchen. He has his work cut out for him.

Table de Bruno Verjus
3, rue de Prague
75012 PARIS
Métro: Lédru-Rollin
Tel: +33 1 43 43 12 26

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Related Links:

A dramatically overwritten gush of praise for Table at SimonSays.
A somewhat misleading entry on Table at LeFooding, where if you look at the receipt you realise that these two diners drank only three glasses of wine between them in a three course meal, thereby making the bill look remotely reasonable.
Qualified praise for Table at JohnTalbott.

In the same way that many fine-dining waiters wish to be wizards whose assistants, the busser staff, do all actual plate-clearing, many restaurateurs aspire to invent Perpetual Motion Machines. It's the ideal restaurant: a motor that runs itself, free of vindictive neighbors, staff orgies, mass poisonings, or any of the other baroque malfunctions that can trip up a business and consume the sanity of its management. Ironically, efforts to actually build Perpetual Motion Machine restaurants usually come at the expense of things like soul and hospitality and food quality. Whether we like it or not, these things won't run on inertia alone.

But I suspect there's another way to build a Perpetual Motion Machine. It's by being skilled and loving one's business and not, in fact, wishing to build a PMM as a means of absenting oneself from its daily workings.

Miniscule and modest, 11ème arrondissement Italian restaurant Caffè dei Cioppi would seem to exemplify this business model. Chef-owner Fabrizio Ferrara has for the past four years been garnering great reviews merely for offering actual serious Italian food to Parisians at fair prices, accompanied by well-chosen honest wines. The menu changes at the pace of a glacier; nothing is controversial; everything runs like a dream. The only thing more astonishing than the fact that no one else in Paris has replicated Ferrara's blueprint is that Ferrara himself has not replicated Ferrara's blueprint.

To my knowledge, there's been no expansion, no adjacent wine shop or wine bar, no delivery service, niente. There remains the restaurant's coveted fourteen or so seats, a few cooks, and Ferrara's wife Frederica running the dining room. I first visited the restaurant almost three years ago, and between that visit and one earlier this spring, the only changes I could discern were a few new entries on the wine list.

I've was happy to see that Luigi Giusti's unique Marche wines had remained. My friends and I shared a bottle of his sparkling Lacrima di Morro d'Alba, a lovely expression of the famously perfumey grape: keenly berryish, but dry as autumn leaves, like a Sangue di Giuda for adults.

(Lacrima di Morro d'Alba the grape is not to be confused with the Lacryma Cristia del Vesuvio appellation in Campania, whose reds are based on a Piedirosso / Sciascinoso blend that is, in my experience, markedly less interesting. Lacrima the grape is native to the Marche and is so named for the way its berries tend to split on the vine, causing 'tears' of juice to run down the grapes.)

Now joining practically the entire Giusti oeuvre on Caffè dei Cioppi's list was a crunchy high-Piemontese Nebbiolo-Uve Rara-Vespolina blend by Le Piane called "La Maggiorina."

Le Piane is the project of a fellow named Christoph Kunzli, who's been rehabilitating the once-neglected estate in the obscure Boca DOC since 1998. I was first introduced to the wine a few months back at nearby Italian cave-à-manger La Retrobottega, and I fell pretty much instantly in love. If there's one flavour I miss most in Paris dining besides spiciness, it's Nebbiolo, whose haunting, smoky nuances are utterly unique in the world of wine. "La Maggiorina" is Nebbiolo senza Barolo-envy - just singing crisp mountain fruit and taut side-palate acidity.

The menu hasn't changed much at all. Still masterful, unshowy Italian, short on attention-grabber components like fennel pollen or squid ink, long on satisfaction.

Caffè dei Cioppi is possibly the only restaurant in Paris where one would not be an idiot to order risotto, a simple but voluptuous dish that in French bistrots is routinely abused and debased and pressed into service as a cheap way to prevent vegetarians' dinner plates from floating off into the sky. Caffè dei Cioppi's contains sausage and tastes of saffron and patience.

Another mainstay of the Caffè, rightfully immovable from the menu, is the sbrisolona, a decadent spiced cookie served with whipped mascarpone. It's not pictured here properly because it tends to induce a sort of blissful trance state, during which I forgot to take a photo.

My friends that evening had gamely endured no less than a month of emails back and forth in attempts to locate an evening on the calendar when all of us were free that coincided with a free table at Caffè dei Cioppi.

Booking dinner is, quite frankly, an exasperating process, not least because Caffè dei Cioppi is open just four nights per week, with the other nights reserved for private events, and, presumably, the private life that its ownership prize above money and renown.

I have in the past faulted businesses for similar reasons - for offering a service too transparently and gallingly dependent upon the owner's convenience and / or possible vanity. (Cf. Mmmozza in the Marais, or Du Pain et Des Idées, a savvy marketing operation that occasionally moonlights, as if for kicks, as Paris' greatest bakery.) But grocery shops or bakeries - even the best or most specialty-oriented - are inseparably associated with their public service archetypes in a way that restaurants are not. Bread is a subsidised public service here; impeccably sauced al dente pasta is not. And so we come to the table with a different set of expectations.

It may strike us as absurd that booking a quality-conscious Italian meal in Paris is more difficult than arranging space tourism. But it's not Ferrara's fault. He is providing a sterling product for which there is, at present, no competition.

Caffè dei Cioppi
159 rue du Faubourg Saint Antoine
75011 PARIS
Métro: Ledru-Rollin
Tel: +33 1 43 46 10 14

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Related Links:

As far as I know, the only other spot for good Italian cuisine in Paris:
La Retrobottega, 75011

A positive 2011 review of Caffè dei Cioppi at TableADécouvert.

An astonishingly mild 2011 review of Caffè dei Cioppi at GillesPudlowski. Seriously? This is a critic who found 10ème charmless pasta-shill Procopio Angelo "exotic."

Another strangly equable 2010 review of Caffè dei Cioppi at ParisNotebook.

A hearty 2009 endorsement of Caffè dei Cioppi at HungryForParis.
Same in French at by François Simon at Simon-Says.

LeFooding loves Caffè dei Cioppi, which must be frustrating, given that the editorial board has almost no way of differentiating their serious love for Caffè dei Cioppi from their routine loving endorsements of any ethnic food regardless of quality in Paris.

A nice piece on the Boca DOC at PleaseThePalate.

Florence, owing to its peerless artistic heritage of glorious renaissance treasures, is a good place to get suckered on industrial wine. Almost no one cares, however, because almost everyone is a broke study-abroad student content to drink Santa Cristina from plastic cups on apartment stoops. I'm describing myself, actually, age nineteen. I spent a month there, ostensibly studying Italian, in fact just desperately attempting to hook up with fellow students and certain of our tutors. I recommend anyone visiting Florence at age nineteen do the same.

The rest of us - including me and my reunited high school cohorts, now approaching our thirties, in town for a destination wedding - needed something decent to drink last spring.*

While I had predictably maintained no connections from my previous stay in Florence, I had in the intervening years become friendly with the native owner of a fashion boutique in the city. He didn't claim to be a wine expert, but the two recommendations he gave me both proved unimpeachable. The first was a wine shop on the refreshingly non-touristy Via Gioberti, east of the city center, called Enoteca Bonatti, where upon glancing at the shelves I instantly realised I'd need another suitcase for the trip back to Paris. Among the pearls on offer were a masterful Montalcino Rosso by Francesco Mulinari, and Abruzzese biodynamic legend Azienda Agricola Emidio Pepe's rare Cerasuolo d'Abruzzo rosé, which latter wine, I later confirmed with the winemaker's niece, is still not sold outside of Italy.

The shop was founded in 1934 by Pasquale Bonatti. The shop is presently run by Bonatti's grandsons, Stefano and Roberto Righi, with the aid of two longtime collaborators, Selvaggio Denti and Luca Tarchi. I showed up shortly before the shop closed for the afternoon, and, upon seeing the gleeful geek interest I was taking in the selection, Stefano kindly let me linger.

I was surprised to see very few names I recognised about the selections of Brunelli and Rossi di Montalcino. Some part of me had been vainly wishing to see bargain Soldera, I guess. But after I explained I was looking for something very traditional, with molto acidity, Stefano suggested a 2009 Rosso di Montalcino called "L'Aiette," by a young Montalcino winemaker called Francesco Mulinari. Mulinari, unlike the majority of winemakers around Montalcino, had no familial vines, and created his miniscule 3ha domaine himself in 2001. Production is limited to about 4000 bottles total, divided between Brunello, Rosso di Montalcino, and Sangiovese Rosato.

I also read now via MontalcinoNews that Mulinari has apparently just finished producing an experimental cuvée of metodo classico (Champagne method) Sangiovese vinified in bianco, which, to be honest, sounds completely insane and sort of belies what Stefano Righi had told me about Mulinari's traditionalist bent. Given that Tuscany has, in my experience, never produced a single good white wine, I don't expect this particular foray into the unknown will yield any real alchemy. It reminds me of quasi-natural Bordeaux vigneron Dominique Leandre Chevalier's stunt-bottling of very bland Cabernet Sauvignon en blanc, which I'm told was made with the help of Champagne clarifying agents. The latter bottle wins the award for outright pointlessness, since Bordeaux, unlike Tuscany, regularly produces some lovely white wines.

But I digress. I shared the astonishingly inexpensive bottle of Mulinari Rosso di Montalcino with the Native Companion back in Paris while watching Hollande debate Sarkozy.

The Rosso di Montalcino won. It's traditionalist platform of sharp black cherry, tobacco, and winter spices was marvelously well-expressed. It's persistence on the palate polled well with all correspondents. It's a masterful wine, and I still look forward to trying anything else from winemaker, even sparkling Sangiovese, should the wines ever reach France.

As for the Emidio Pepe Cerasuolo: I saved that too for dégustation among fellow afficionados back in Paris.

It was heartbreakingly great. My general impression of other Montepulciano rosati I've tasted is that they're nice, but a little bassy and hard-hitting, like picnicking beside a Lowrider.

Emidio Pepe's Cerasuolo bears no comparison. It's holographically precise, with a lightly musky rose and cherry nose, and a majestic wholeness of raspberry / blueberry fruit on the back palate. A closer breath reveals a light whiff of the grape's characteristic rubberiness, and a delicate note of spring onion. It so far transcends the tropes of the genre, it borders on another one entirely.

Chiara Pepe and Sofia Pepe, whom I met later that year at a tasting at A La Marguerite in Paris.

I left Stefano Righi my card and told him to look me up the next time he passed through Paris on his way to domaine visits in Champagne, which has of course not happened. But one of the many ways in which good wine shops are more reliable than gap-year friends is the former tend to remain indefinitely, like monuments, in the city where you first encountered them.

* It's been about a year since I traveled to Florence for the destination wedding of a friend from high school. If I nonetheless feel okay posting a few notes on the trip's culinary-oenological content now, long after the fact, it's because I suspect that Florence, being a smallish city in central Italy overwhelmingly reliant on the tourist industry, is probably not a hotbed of new activity on this front. I had zero good addresses in mind before arrival. The ones I found or had pointed out to me are probably still there. And it's presently a miserable soaking cold springtime in Parigi, which means the majority of the city's population is either daydreaming of an upcoming vacation or making plans for one as I type.

Enoteca Bonatti
Via Gioberti 66
50100 FIRENZE

Tel: +39 055 660050

Related Links:

A piece on the Mulinari Rossi di Montalcino at VitisBlog.

2013 news of Mulinari working on a sparkling white Sangiovese (?!) at MontalcinoNews.

It's a travel truism that the more friends one travels with, the less one sees. Monuments, museums, and moments of local colour rush past one's eyes, as though one were seeing them through a bus window... Meanwhile one seems to spend hours waiting for one another to finish up in the sodden restrooms of unremarkable cafés full of vending machines.

And when one does at last arrive a destination, the destination itself becomes the subject of debate. Should we not try some other bar ? one's friends ask. One where one of us can get a cocktail, and another can have beer, and another can have wine? None of us are ever satisfied, one's friends admit, before laughing maniacally and cartwheeling off into the Florentine night to harass strangers.

My personal destination, since arriving in Florence for a friend's wedding last spring, had been Fuori Porta, a wine bar tucked in the hills above the via di San Niccolo that a native acquaintance had recommended. I've discussed previously the extent to which the term 'wine bar' is open to interpretation, but as a rule of thumb I've found the concept is more native to Italy, where people take espresso standing, than in Paris, where beverages in general are mostly used as exuses to occupy terrace seating. And indeed, when after much cajoling I did succeed in luring my friends away to Fuori Porta to continue drinking after the wedding dinner, we weren't disappointed. It's one of those rare places where a serious wine list coexists with a free-wheeling atmosphere, where seven or eight tanked young men in rumpled suits can enjoy an impromptu mini-vertical of Castell' In Villa Chianti.

I read that it was founded by owners Andrea Conti and Leonardo Cambi in 1987, with the aim of serving wines from outside of Tuscany. (Similarly, one can often identify places that cater to native wine guys in Paris by how they offer things from outside France. Hence the Greek, Serbian, and biodynamic Italian outliers one often sees on the lists at places like Septime Cave, La Buvette, Cave Fervéré, etc.) Several years later Conti and Cambi expanded and added restaurant service.

Alas, it was late by the time we rolled in, and the kitchen was closed. We took a table on the open terrace, and after a glance at the wine list I zeroed in on a weirdo obscurity I hadn't encountered before: Vermentino Nero.

I was later pleasantly surprised to learn that the Cantine Lunae rosato I ordered had won Gambero Rosso's 'Rosato of the Year' award in its first vintage, 2010; it means the judges were probably as jazzed as I was to taste Vermentino Nero. For a devoted fan of the Vermentino grape, particularly its Ligurian expressions, it's like being a child and belatedly discovering the existance of white chocolate.

Like white chocolate in general, the 2011 Cantine Lunae Golfo dei Poeti Rosato was enjoyable, but nothing life-changing. Just a pale, pin-prick precise coastal rosato, with the same strawberry-acid and red licorice-nub sweetness I associate with a neighboring Ligurian near-rosato, Rossese di Dolceacqua (a red so light it evaporates upon contact with glassware).

It should be said that I haven't tasted expansively in either of these wine categories. If anyone would like to finance a few months on the Ligurian coast, I should quite like to someday.

Ordering too much geek rosato is another surefire way to alienate one's friends, so we switched to grander things : a few bottles of Castell' In Villa Chianti Classico Riserva.

Winemaker and estate founder Princess Coralia Pignatelli della Leonessa needs little introduction; her 54ha estate; based in Castelnuovo Berardenda, is essentially the contemporary benchmark of the whole ultrafamous appellation. The wines are for the most part naturally fermented, and, more impressively, are held from the market until they are deemed ready to drink. Among other things, this sort of attention to stock ensures that the estate (and the international market) is well-furnished with back vintages. Some of my favorite memories of working in Italian wine in LA derive from older bottles of Castell' In Villa, pretty much all of which, in my experience, have displayed the stark, ferrous majesty of the grape in fine form.

I regrettably didn't taste the food at Fuori Porta. I couldn't convince my traveling companions to return in the short time we had left in the city, so it'll have to wait for our mutual friend's next Tuscan wedding.

My traveling companions can't really be blamed. Pretty much any wine geek endures a similar dynamic when traveling without wine allies. One's companions tend to mark anything Wine Guy likes as being chiefly of Wine Interest, incorrectly but understandably opposing Wine Interest with Culinary Interest, Cultural Interest, Social Interest, etc. Fuori Porta is one of precious few places I know of in Florence where all these elements seem to intersect as they should.

Fuori Porta
Via del Monte alle Croci, 10

50125 FIRENZE

Italy
Tel: +39 055 234 2483

View Larger Map

Related Links:

A 2012 piece on Fuori Porta at Tara'sDolceVita.
A 2011 piece on Fuori Porta at BKWineMagazine.

A 2007 piece on Fuori Porta at IoAmoFirenze.

A brief profile of Cantine Lunae at ItalianMade.

A good piece on Castell' In Villa at WineAnorak
Another good piece on Castell' In Villa at Weimax
Some February 2013 notes on Castell' In Villa at NealRosenthal

Florence is the only place I've ever been pickpocketed. As a friend and I snacked on one of the support columns of the Ponte Santa Trinita one evening a decade ago, some genial-seeming locals came up and spoke incomprehensibly about football maneuvers before demonstrating same at close quarters and robbing me in the process. It was all the money I had and I wound up busking the rest of that month.

As a result of this experience, I now walk down busy Florentine streets with my hands firmly placed over my back pockets, looking like some sort of constipated building inspector. Most nerve-racking for me is the famed Ponte Vecchio, a Hieronymus Boschian scene of beckoning trinket-hawkers, trilling gypsy beggars, and glass-eyed cargo-shorted tourists in visors and sweat-colored polos. The jangle of novelty key chains can be heard for miles. While revisiting the city last spring I hurried past it all in characteristic paranoiac style and waited for my friends some blocks ahead.

Imagine my surprise to discover, just a skip away from the Ponte Vecchio, the clean white storefront of 5 e Cinque, a modest, health-conscious, and well-appointed natural wine bar, the city's only one, as far as I know.

My friends and I were planning to kill time before a reservation at a neighboring restaurant specializing in tripe. The kitchen at 5 e Cinque wasn't yet open, but that suited us fine. Proprietor Silvio Garrando, a former antiques dealer, was admirably okay with our crowd of bros taking over much of the dining room and pounding down wine in the off-hours.

It had been the razor-keen biodynamic Gavi wines of Stefano Bellotti that had originally caught my eye at 5 e Cinque.

But as we were a very numerous crowd it seemed an appropriate occasion to check out the "Litrozzo" project of renowned biodynamic Lazio estate Le Coste, whose other wines were at the time (and remain) disproportionately well-represented on more adventurous Paris wine lists. Le Coste is a roughly 10ha estate, scattered in plots around Lake Bolsena, founded by winemakers Gian Marco Antonuzi and Clementine Bouveron in 2004.

It's easy to see why Paris somms like the wines. Atonuzi wrote about wine before involving himself in its production; later, in the course of his studies, he worked with Ardechois OG's Dard et Ribo, Jean-Paul Thévenet in Beaujolais, and Philippe Pacalet in Burgundy. The wines themselves, site specific field blends of often arcane autochthonous Lazian varieties, are rugged and majestic. They're also pretty expensive. If I rarely order them in Paris, it's because I have recollections of similarly great central Italian wines being had for half the price in NYC and LA, and it galls me to shell out what often strike me (perhaps unfairly) as Parisian sucker prices, the result of tiny import quantities or high tariffs or both.

The winery's "Litrozzo" range of uncomplicated litre bottles of vins de soif was therefore a very welcome discovery for me. It seems important to demonstrate to wine consumers, especially in Paris, that the genre of biodynamic Italian wine is not composed solely of Event Bottles. Vindication came a year later, when the other day I encountered Le Coste's marvelous Litrozzo Rosato at Vivant Cave, Pierre Jancou's homey bar-à-vin in the 10ème arrondissement.

A field blend of Greghetto, Cannaiolo, Colorino, Vaiano, and Ciliegiolo, the Litrozzo Rosato is, like the rest of the winery's output, bottled with neither sulfur nor filtration. The palate is brief but memorable, a brisk honest attack of fine-grained acid and crunchy red berry, kicking up bright dusty tannins like an angel touching down.

5 et Cinque takes its name from a Ligurian sandwich of the same name, which in turn takes its name from the historical price of its staple ingredients - focaccia and cecina, 5 lire each. The restaurant's menu offers more involved dishes, specializing (undogmatically) in vegetarian dishes. Prices are very kind - another rarity for a place so close to a central tourist destination, and something I'll be especially thankful for next time I get my wallet jacked.

5 e Cinque

Piazza della passera 1
50125 Florence
ITALY
Tel: +39 055 2741583

Related Links:

N.D.P. in Florence : Enoteca Bonatti

N.D.P. in Florence : Enoteca Fuori Porta

N.D.P. in Piedmont

N.D.P. in Milan

N.D.P. in Rome

It's amusing to note that at time of writing the first Google result for 5 e Cinque is a listing on a forum for vegetarians called HappyCow.
Good 2012 pics of 5 e Cinque at ADustyOliveGreen.

A nice pictorial piece on 5 e Cinque at Tara'sDolceVita.

A brief mention of a 2013 meal at 5 e Cinque at Cross-Pollinate.

A brief mention of 5 e Cinque at DreamOfItaly.

A terrific account of a 2011 visit to Le Coste at Louis/Dresser.

A brief piece on Le Coste at WineAnorak.

Vivant Cave, 75010 : Presently serving the "Litrozzo" by the glass.

From L: Kenji Hodgson, Cedric Garreau, M, Mai Sato, Nicolas Bertin, J. Taken in Bertin's vineyards.

After departing from La Dive Bouteille this past January, my friends J, M, and I went to visit a few newly-installed Angevin vignerons. We'd planned to make separate appointments with three domaines - Mai & Kenji Hodgson, Cedric Garreau / Gar'O'Vin, and Bertin-Delatte - but upon learning that their proprietors are all good friends and collaborators, it was decided we'd all taste together at each cellar and then have lunch.

For J, M, and I, tasting at the three domaines that morning was revelatory. It might have just been an on-palate day.* But after just about every taste, we were having "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" moments, looking at each other, like Cortez's sailors, "with a wild surmise."

All of these vignerons are onto something. All are members of a collective of organic Angevin vignerons who organise tastings together, loan each other equipment, and generally support one another in the daunting task of making and selling quality wine from Anjou, a famously schizophrenic region, nigh-on uncategorizeable, home to everything from industrial Cab Franc rosé to ageless Quarts de Chaume. The collective officially call themselves "The En Joue Connection," which has facetious gangster-ish implications that I will relegate to a footnote.* I can't speak for the entire collective, because I haven't tasted all the wines. But with regards to Bertin-Delatte, Vins Hodgson, and Gar'O'Vins, I thought it might be more helpful to think of what they're presently achieving in Anjou in terms of some other poets, namely the Wu-Tang Clan.

When the Wu first burst onto the NYC rap scene in 1993, it was an embarrassment of riches. Nine new voices, stylistically distinct, but complementary, uniting to create a universe unto themselves. Bertin-Delatte's consistently complex Chenins and the domaine's central role in organising the clan make it probably the Ghostface of the bunch. The smooth-talking, fine-grained likeability of Cedric Garreau's reds make him Method Man. Vins Hodsgon's expressions of Chenin, Cabernet Franc, and Grolleau, meanwhile, have the high-toned intellectual precision one associates with the GZA's rhyme schemes.

I'd been keen to meet Kenji and Mai Hodgson since first reading about them on Bertrand Celce's indispensable WineTerroirs blog, and soon after tasting, at Paris 20ème restaurant Roseval, their stunning sparkling Chenin, which at the time I described as possessing a "cinnamon / ozone accord."

The Hodgsons' story is irresistably bizarre: they're Japanese-Canadian winemakers who've settled in Rablay-sur-Layon via Vancouver and the Tochigi Prefecture of Japan. Kenji and Mai met in Vancouver, where Kenji studied engineering before abandoning it to work as a wine writer. Further curiosity led them to intern at Coco Farm Winery in Japan, and later work at the Joie Farm winery in the Okanaga region of British Columbia. Along the way they became interested in natural wine, experimenting with low-sulfur use and natural fermentation with the winemaker at Coco Farm, and tasting widely among the plethora of French natural wines imported in Japan.

So Kenji and Mai up and moved to France in 2009. They worked harvest at Chateau de Stony in Frontignan, and later with Mark Angeli of Ferme de la Sansonnière in Anjou. A year later, with encouragement from natural Loire luminaries like Olivier Cousin and Claude Courtois, they purchased their first vineyards in Rablay-sur-Layon, just south of the Layon river that gives its name to the famous sweet wine. They now farm 3ha of vines, and share a drafty cellar and equipment with another young vigneron, Damien Bureau, who wasn't present that day.

There are so many astonishing facets to this story. Such as: how on earth does one decide to be a wine writer in Vancouver, home to some of the world's most draconian and obstructive liquor laws? It would be like deciding to be a sex columnist in Riyadh. I'm also unable to resist observing that the Hodgsons moved to France at about the same time I did, with about the same level of language expertise (nil). Since then, they've integrated into a French rural community and established a wine domaine. Whereas all I seem to do is bicker about coffee service and make countless enemies...

Anyway, I'm in awe of people who know what they want to do and pursue it single-mindedly. And the Hodgson's determination has already paid dividends, in terms of quality at least. Their wines are superb. They produce a still and a sparkling dry chenin, three red cuvées, and a rosé, all in tiny quantities, and all typified by a tense, soaring acidity that is catnip for sommeliers.

Stylistically, the Hodgson's wines straddle two worlds: one senses the detail-oriented finesse of the winemaker's backgrounds in contemporary conventional vinification, as well as the pure-fruited honesty of the rangier natural scene they've embraced in Anjou. The wines don't taste like those of their mentors (Courtois, Cousin, Angeli, etc.): they taste thrillingly new.

Mai had prepared a nice rice / egg / carrot / celery / pea salad that we had at lunch later that day.

We arrived to taste at the Hodgsons' shared cellars in the midst of a torrential downpour, hence no photos of the outside. Inside we tasted barrel samples of "Faia," their Chenin, dry as a sword-blade; "O Galarneau," their burnished old-vine Cabernet Franc; and "La Grande Pièce," a keenly cranberryish Grolleau.

The highlight for me was a Cabernet Franc from a schiste and clay soil parcel near Layon formerly owned by fringe-natural vigneron Benoit Courault. If Courault's wines can sometimes strike me as representative of what oxygen does to excellent fruit, the same fruit showed much more poise and expessivity in the Hodgson's hands.

Later over lunch with we tasted a bottle of the 2010 "Heart & Beat," a tiny production rosé that sees a year in barrel and a year in tank before bottling. Rosés in the contemporary wine market suffer from numerous prejudices, one of which states that they must be consumed very, very fresh. But acid and freshness are all in balance in the "Heart & Beat"'s crunchy strawberry-rhubarbe profile, presumably a result of what was probably a whanging surge of acid in the original Cabernet Franc must.

Like a classic GZA verse, it's a wine that evidently takes some time to unpack before its intricate construction becomes clear.

* If an off-palate day is when everything tastes weird, no matter how much bread one chews, an on-palate day is when even breathing near gas stations feels symphonic.

** In French, to "mettre un fusil en joue" means to take aim at something or hold it at gunpoint. It refers to the way one holds the stock of a musket against one's cheek when one is aiming. How the phrase retains any hint of threat is beyond me. Have you ever been held up at musket-point?

NEXT: Cedric Garreau / Gar'O'Vins, the Method Man of the Angevin Clan

Vins Hodgson

Le Breil
49380 Champ-sur-Layon
Tel: +33 (0)6 48 41 03 90

Related Links:

An offer on the Hodsons' wines from my friend Josh Adler at ParisWineCompany. (Free registration required.)

La Dive Bouteille 2012 Round-Up

Bertrand Celce's excellent piece on a visit to Vins Hodgson at WineTerroirs.

Celce also accompanied Kenji and Mai on a sales trip to Paris, which he covered on WineTerroirs.

The evening before our visits with newly-installed Anjou vigneron Cédric Garreau and the rest of the Angevin clan back in January, my friends J, M, and I found ourselves at Angers natural wine bar Le Cercle Rouge, sharing a nightcap with some US importers with whom J and M were discussing working. It was during the time of La Dive Bouteille, La Renaissance des Appellations, and the various satellite tastings, and we'd assumed we'd run into a few vignerons and fellow industry folk at La Cercle Rouge that night. But we'd evidently missed a memo, because the place was quiet as the grave. If I concentrated, I imagined I could actually hear echoes from the wild bacchanal in the surrounding hills where all the vignerons and the more clued-in buyers were probably spraying each other with pétillant naturel and doing impressions of Americans.

If we nevertheless stayed at Le Cercle Rouge for the duration of two bottles, it was because the wine we were drinking - Cédric Garreau's 2011 "Le Lulu Berlue" - achieved the almost impossible : it was marvelously palatable to five weary palates that had endured a sequence of professional tastings earlier in the day. (Ordinarily such circumstances are the only moments in life where one craves Kronenberg.)

The "Lulu Berlue" is an odd duck, a sparkling carbonic-maceration Cabernet Sauvignon, mouth-rinsing, pure, and black-fruited, sort of like fine Loire Lambrusco. It hit the spot. The next day when we visited Garreau's tiny shed of a cellar in Chanzeaux we were able to confirm that all his red wines - all three - share the same soulful purity of fruit that made the "Le Lulu Berlue" so entrancing. They're wines that feel fundamentally healthful, and they herald a new voice in Angevin winemaking, one whose maturity of expression is surprising given its only Garreau's second vintage.

Garreau doesn't come from a family of winemakers; on his website he explains that his professors at the oenology school he attended in Bordeaux consequently encouraged him to specialise in wine commerce, rather than winemaking. (Liberté ! Egalité ! Old Money !) He nevertheless made his way back to Anjou after stints waiting tables in Ireland and WOOFing in New Zealand, and in 2010 he set about searching for vineyards to create his own domaine. The estate remains tiny, with just 2.7ha presently under production between Beaulieu-sur-Layon and St. Lambert du Lattay.

There's an Anjou Rouge of Cabernet Franc, an Anjou Villages of Cabernet Sauvignon, and the aforementioned "Lulu Berlue." In the future there will be a Chenin as well, from a vineyard called "La Soucherie." We tasted the grippy, grapefruity 2012 from barrique, of which there were a total of two: total yield it was 4HL from 50 ares of vines.

J at one point asked Garreau about the wax caps he uses on his Anjou Villages - it seemed a lot of work for what is, presently, a very inexpensive wine. Garreau explained that his semi-retired father, who was a vineyard manager for nearby estate Château du Breuil, just really enjoys applying wax caps. So Garreau fils has a source of free labour for that particular task.

When tasting them from bottles, I have trouble picking a favorite among Garreau's reds. But from barrique that day in early February, the 2012 Anjou Rouge was tasting best. From 80yr old Cabernet Franc vines adjacent to a forest in Beaulieu-sur-Layon, the wine was fulsome and bright, with a grape-soda nose and high-toned notes of licorice amid the buoyant black fruit. And again: that healthful, tilled-earth freshness, a quality I otherwise find most often in the ruggedly natural reds of Ardeche vigneron Andrea Calek.

Cedric, we were to discover at lunch, is also a terrific baker who makes a killer tarte aux pommes.

I wouldn't describe Garreau's wines as super-complex at the moment. But I would describe them as supremely enjoyable, and inarguably original : inexpensive, fine-grained, wild-floral reds, utterly free of the moody, green / mushroomy flavours sometimes associated with Loire Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc.

Like Method Man's eponymous solo track from the Wu-Tang's 1993 debut, the actual lyrical content - in which the Meth basically just cycles through nursery rhymes and spells out P-A-N-T-Y-R-A-I-D-E-R - is secondary to the stylistic gesture on display, and the rapper's irresistible voice.

Garreau's ouevre is similarly hard-hitting, similarly persuasive. And I suspect his career arc will be comparable to Method Man's, at least with regards to crossover potential. These wines should all be chart-toppers.

Next: Bertin-Delatte / L'Echalier, the Ghostface Killah of the Angevin Clan

Cédric GARREAU - Gar'O'Vins
L'Espérance
CHANZEAUX
Tel: 06 03 29 06 67

Related Links:

Angevin Clan Pt. 1: Mai & Kenji Hodgson, Rablay-sur-Layon

An offer on Cedric Gareau's wines by my friend Josh Adler at ParisWineCompany. (Free registration required.)

More on Cedric Garreau at WineTerroirs.

a village called paris : cave fervèré, 75011

planet of women : l'auberge flora, 75011

hot potato: roseval, 75020

call it a caviste: la buvette, 75011

small victories : septime cave, 75011

not dead

beyond compare : le mary celeste, 75003

the great american sandwich: verjus, 75001

despite the name: la pointe du groin, 75010

another (excellent) restaurant : le six paul bert, 75011

why ask why: la pulperia, 75011

ma dai ! : procopio angelo, 75010

good works: l'épicerie du 104, 75019

the highest bidder : table de bruno verjus, 75012

the ideal : caffè dei cioppi, 75011

n.d.p. in florence: enoteca bonatti

n.d.p. in florence: enoteca fuori porta

n.d.p. in florence: 5 e cinque

the angevin clan, pt. 1: mai and kenji hodgson / vins hodgson, rablay-sur-layon

the angevin clan, pt. 2: cédric garreau / gar'o'vins, chanzeaux