not drinking poison in paris

The most expensive fallacy of wine travel, to which I habitually succumb, is to assume that, to experience the full breadth of a given region's cuisine, one must dine at least once at a formal restaurant. This is how I convinced myself and my travel companions to dine at Restaurant La Tour, a Michelin-starred restaurant helmed by chef Baptiste Fournier, whose parents owned the restaurant before him.

Fournier previously trained with Guy Savoy and Alain Passard, among others, and in this case the chef's estimable pedigree illustrates why I ought to avoid restaurants like La Tour. High-value chefs tend to produce high-value cuisine, more representative of individual ambitions than of regional tradition. (The phenomenon is even more pronounced at lunch, when chefs don kid gloves.)

In the same way that you can get a Burberry scarf or Gucci luggage in almost any duty-free from Madrid to Dubai, you can enjoy the white-tablecloth cuisine of Restaurant La Tour in almost any upscale rural French restaurant from Puligny to Chablis. Luxury has an anonymising effect. At Restaurant La Tour, this is counterbalanced by an impressive, if not exactly bargain-studded regional wine list that cites the local wines according to village.

A wine town as famous as Sancerre must necessarily have two faces. I'm sure there are other, more interesting restaurants where industry folks dine. (Le Chat in Cosne, or maybe Auberge La Pomme d'Or, which François Cotat recommended because his god-son runs it. The latter restaurant was booked up when we visited.) Lunch at Restaurant La Tour seems aimed at the geriatric wine vacationers who come for the name of the town.

My friends and I all took the set menu. What else, when the alternative is to pay vastly more?

The local goat cheese on the tomato carpaccio was in ice form. The day was almost hot enough to redeem the otherwise pointless flourish.

I seem to recall the fish being mullet. It was fish, properly cooked, but the accompanying peas and carrots betrayed the chief priority La Tour's kitchen (and most Michelin kitchens) at lunch: low ingredient cost.

It's a sign of my boredom during this meal that I forgot take a picture of the wine we drank. Retaining glowy memories of the Vincent Pinard Sancerre rouge we'd had with dinner at Le Chat the previous evening, we ordered the winemaker's steel-aged white, "Cuvée Florès."

Pinard's are fairly critic-proof wines, ones which make the familiar natural / conventional dichotomy a bit moot. They are gleamingly well-made. The only gripe I'd voice about the wines on the whole is that alcohol levels can creep past 14% in some cuvées in some vintages. Not so with the 2011 "Florès," which showed nice lean menthol / lavender tones within its mineral frame.

It didn't seem appreciably cheaper than it would have been in Paris, however, which nullified some of the enjoyment of consuming it in the town of Sancerre.

The ideal client of Restaurant La Tour, of course, would never mention that. It wouldn't even occur to him! He would have chosen La Tour because when he comes to Sancerre he still demands crisp professional service, prompt attention to the ice buckets, and big chairs. He is happy to shell out for these things, and that is where he and I differ.

Restaurant La Tour
31 Place Nouvelle Place

18300 SANCERRE
Tel: 02 48 54 00 81

Related Links:

Sancerre Bike Trip: Domaine Vacheron, Sancerre
Sancerre Bike Trip: Le Chat, Cosne-sur-Loire
Sancerre Bike Trip: François Cotat, Chavignol
Sancerre Bike Trip: Sebastien Riffault, Sury-en-Vaux

A puzzling, undated piece on Restaurant La Tour at Food Tourist, in which the authors harp on and on about how the chef may one day deserve a Michelin star. (He already has one.) The authors say they were especially curious to taste François Cotat's "Cuvée Paul," but they subsequently deem it "quite sweet." (It is the winemaker's non-commercialised off-dry cuvée, largely unavailable on the wine market. To know of its existence is to know that it is an off-dry cuvée.)

Richard Kelley cites La Tour as the most formal dining option in Sancerre.

For a certain class of Parisian, familiarity with the marché aux puces is a basic mark of distinction. It doesn't matter if very few of us do any actual shopping in the stratospherically-priced high design markets north of the city. Les puces constitute the city's most accessible museum and, at once, its most cosmopolitan feature, for the knowledge that Paris entices the world's most discerning interior decorators to spend lavish sums in the center of a chaotic slum is something anyone can enjoy.

Who are these titans of the earth, we wonder, dropping tens of thousands on Finn Juhl chairs and Adnet lamps? Do they or their decorators mind dealing with the strange unhurried merchants who drip bad red wine and cut sausages on the merchandise during transactions? There is even poetry in this: to purchase a luxury item at the flea markets, a client must descend, momentarily, to the world of crowded guingettesand couscous.

But since fall 2012, the world's high-design tastemakers - along with us window-lickers - have had an alternative. Towering at the entrance to the Marché Paul Bert - Serpette, it is a Philippe Starck-designed megalo-bistrot called Ma Cocotte, run by Philippe and Fabienne Amzalak, proprietors of 16ème arrondissement restaurant Bon. Ma Cocotte is positively thronged on weekends, and its success with the flea market clientele reveals something about the separation of aesthetic spheres. Overpriced, anarchic, and irredeemably tacky, it would be Paris' worst restaurant, except that it is not, technically, in Paris.

Pretension drew me in one Sunday in early spring - I wanted to stay au courant with the market and its denizens. So while the Native Companion shopped I dutifully waited twenty-five minutes in line, only to realise when I reached the hostess that I had been standing in line to put my name on a wait list.

This is, of course, punitively bad organisation, bordering on Kafka-esque. The whole point of a wait list is to prevent lines. It should never take so long to take names for a waitlist that another line forms. I questioned the benevolence of God and then repaired for coffee at a nearby couscous joint, where we ought to have stayed for lunch.

Later it took about ten seconds after being seated at Ma Cocotte to realise we had made a huge mistake. The menu, by chef Yannick Papin, consists of French standards and safe faddish imports (cheeseburgers, fish and chips) at tough mark-ups.

The wine list, as ever, reveals Ma Cocotte's target clientele: it is heaped with overpriced Bordeaux, for the truly unthinking conspicuous consumer. Poor Michel Gendrier's ever-reliable Cour-Cheverny was a lonely blip of quality on an otherwise abysmal wine list. I got a beer.

Since the Amzalaks presumably spent a fortune on the services of buffoonish celebrity turd-polisher Philippe Starck, I'd be remiss not to comment on the restaurant's décor, which is at once cacophonic and utterly bland. Books and wacky urns adorn every conceivable shelf-space. Lamp-height lighting partially conceals the dehumanising vastness of the interior. Surveying it, one has the sense of scrolling ever downwards on a website hawking a limitless range of quirky crap.

The NC had ordered a juice when I ordered my beer. We reminded our overstretched server, who grunted at us. After fifteen minutes we alerted a manager, who took up the issue with our absentee server, who, in retribution, ignored us for the rest of our meal, which, despite enormous delays, was to be rather brief.

I horfed down some gummy oeufs mayonnaise and blanched at the NC's flavorless plop of lentils and we continued staring at the cluttered table beside us, which hadn't been cleared of its previous occupants' meal since we sat down.

In the distance, the hostess stand was still visible outside, and various parties still awaiting tables. Instances such as this illustrate why it is important to clear meals that have finished. More than making adjacent diners feel like they're eating in a junk yard, uncleared tables are a blaring indicator of a breakdown in restaurant service. The NC and I stared at the one next to us and it was clear that we were in a deeply mismanaged space.

We cancelled our plats and left.

That wealth does not connote discernment is news to no one. But I still marvel at places like Ma Cocotte, or fashion elite canteen Restaurant Dave by Palais Royal, places whose success seems to depend entirely on the selective aesthetic blindnesses of their otherwise discerning, high-value clientele. Serving packing peanuts to princesses and mouse-droppings to millionaires.

Perhaps it's very middle-class of me to care so much about the relative quality of individual meals. It's true that I might become more blasé about dining if I made more money.

But the act of dining begins and ends with death. There are dead things on the plate and we metabolise them and we, our internal machinery, age as we do so. Wine, too, wears us out. And the minutes we pass waiting for the check at cynical mismanaged restaurants are not returned to us. So it seems important to take these things seriously - at least as seriously as good design.

Ma Cocotte
106 Rue des Rosiers

93400 Saint-Ouen
Tel: 01 49 51 70 00

Related Links:

An twittish January 2014 endorsement of Ma Cocotte at Hip Paris. Articles like this are how you tell honest writing apart from the Paris Charm Industry, an inherently dishonest endeavor.

Another sickening piece that finishes by cutely thanking Philippe Starck at My Little Paris.

François Simon on the opening of Ma Cocotte in Le Figaro.
A boosterish piece on Ma Cocotte in Sortir A Paris.
Le Fooding went so far as to admit that the place is noisy, which in this case is like saying the Titanic had a small leak.

A brief moment of on-stage banter at last Monday's Hamilton Leithauser show at La Boule Noire saw the former Walkmen singer - arguably the most compelling rock vocalist of his generation - complaining about food prices in Montmartre.

"Since when did Montmartre get so expensive?" he asked, before deadpanning, "That's what we talk about in this band."

In the audience my friends and I exchanged shrugs. Where had he gone to eat?* From my perspective, it's never been easier to get an inexpensive quality-conscious meal in Montmartre. The quiet side of the hill boasts excellent pizza at Il Brigante, while the upper slopes of rue des Martyrs are home to Miroir, a totally solid natural wine bistrot. An incongruously good natural wine magnum list is just south of there at the otherwise dire Hotel Amour. And right down the road from La Boule Noire is Le Petit Trianon, which as far as concert-venue cuisine goes, is bested only by Basque chef Christian Etchebest's La Cantine de la Cigale, which is even closer, and even better value for money. It was, oddly, deserted after Leithauser's performance, which either indicates that his fans have no taste, or that I have entirely forgotten what it's like to be a young concertgoer more in love with music than eating well.

It is almost certainly the latter case. But I applaud Paris, and more specifically the Montmartre music scene, for making it so easy to enjoy good music and eat well.

I have, as yet, never visted Etchebest's other two Cantine restaurants, La Cantine du Troquet and La Cantine du Troquet Dupleix. On the basis of La Cantine de la Cigale, I wouldn't avoid a visit to the others, which is about the highest praise I think I have ever mustered for this sort of unabashedly cookie-cutter populist cuisine.

In contrast to almost every other restaurant in Paris, La Cantine de la Cigale's menu seems designed specifically to accommodate those too rushed or thrifty to endure a three-course meal. An ample list of Eric Ospital charcuterie is very kindly priced, and appetizer portions are heapingly-plated. Sometimes this generosity had slightly ludicrous results, as in the fried pig's ear salad I ordered, which was a garish tangle of fatty cartilage, like a wig made of meat.

Much more appealing was my friend D's blazing shrimp à la plancha. I left with a resolution to return for this plate alone, which was almost American in its bounteousness. It was 9€.

More complex dishes came out slightly worse, speaking to a probable deficit of kitchen talent. A leek soup was almost entirely flavorless, despite containing gummy nubs of foie gras. And a bavette ordered rare came out medium.

As ever, a good, well-priced wine list makes mediocre cuisine much more forgivable, and all the moreso given the concert-venue setting. La Cantine de la Cigale's list is positively thronged with natural and biodynamic bargains, with bottles from Mattieu Coste, Christophe Pacalet, and Claude Marechal all in the twenty-euro range.

The 2013 Pacalet Fleurie we shared was, for better and for worse, showing the difficulty of its vintage. I wouldn't have it any other way, of course. But 2013 was, by many winemakers' admissions, a bit of a middling vintage.

A long, cool spring followed by a few hot spells later in the season, and yields as low or lower than 2012. To generalise, I'd say the wines taste a bit pear-shaped and southerly, often lacking, at least for now, the aerial qualities we associate with the best cru Beaujolais. (An exception, so far, has been Remi Dufaitre's 2013 Côte de Brouilly, which was brightly alive and kicking when I tasted it a few weeks back at tasting at Ma Cave Fleury.)

Such nuances as these may of course be lost on the average punter winding down after a brief but inspiring Hamilton Leithauser show. It just makes it all the more miraculous that La Cantine de la Cigale offers them in the first place.

* Maybe Caillebotte?

La Cantine de la Cigale
124, blvd. de Rochechouart
Métro: Pigalle
Tel: 01 55 79 10 10

Related Links:

More concert-space dining: Le Petit Trianon, 75018

A great October 2013 post on La Cantine de la Cigale by Alexander Lobrano, who takes a nice healthy potshot at nearby American concept Le Depanneur.
La Cantine de la Cigale also got high marks from my friend John Talbott.

An intermittently amusing essay on the hazards of fronting a rock band by Hamilton Leithauser at The Talkhouse.

Cosne-sur-Loire is not the most exciting place on earth. It's where life goes on surrounding Sancerre tourism. But it's also where many visiting wine guys stay. So I thought for sake of completion, after my laudatory post on Cosne's lone terrific restaurant, it would worth mentoning also Le Square, which is Cosne's most accessible and convenient restaurant.

No, the wine's no good, and service veers from welcoming to furious according the whims of whoever's working. But there's a lovely terrace on, yes, a square, and as long as you bring enough mosquito repellent it's a lovely place for dinner in Cosne on a Sunday night, when, as far as dining options go, the alternative is noodling for catfish in the nearby river.

A key reason I enjoy these bike trips is the physical effort they entail allows me to enjoy meals at places like Le Square. It is dining-without-aesthetics, or feeding, which restorative activity is almost impossible in cities where economic competition has promoted aesthetic differentiation of food providers.

Cosne is also home to kebab stands, family pizza parlours, and one ambitiously priced, funereal place called Le Forge. (Has anyone been?) But for absolutely standard French standards in a tolerable environment, look no further than Le Square.

We wound up there after debarking the train and shared a bottle of Sancerre rosé from Domaine Patrick Girault, a Bué-based conventionally-farmed 12ha estate of no particular interest. It was representative of its type - brisk, high-toned, showing brief notes of stone fruit and sour berries - and, more importantly, cold.

For what it's worth I'd generally rather drink a conventional Sancerre rosé than a conventional rosé from further south. And it seems salutary to remind myself from time to time that alongside its capacity to intrique and inspire and obsessionally compel, wine can also merely refresh.

E applying copious mosquito repellent in the square in front of Le Square.

Le Square
1, rue des Frères Gambon
58200 COSNE-SUR-LOIRE
Tel: 03 86 28 17 75

Related Links:

Sancerre Bike Trip: Restaurant La Tour, Sancerre
Sancerre Bike Trip: Domaine Vacheron, Sancerre
Sancerre Bike Trip: Le Chat, Cosne-sur-Loire
Sancerre Bike Trip: François Cotat, Chavignol
Sancerre Bike Trip: Sebastien Riffault, Sury-en-Vaux

The Native Companion had been hinting that she'd like to visit Brittany for several years. But since no wine is produced there, it never struck me as a high priority. Brittany is like Ireland with worse beer, worse whiskey, and crêpes. Even the best ciders and apple brandies, I'd long thought, were produced further east in Normandy.

What finally tempted me out to Brittany with the NC was the prospect of a visit with Louis and Joanna Cecillon, of Domaine Joanna Cecillon in Sevignac. My friend Josh Adler of Paris Wine Company had introduced me to their ciders, which he'd in turn discovered via Louis'vigneron brother, who makes very savvy Saint Joseph on the other side of France.

Upon tasting the ciders, I quickly understood why Josh was keen to make the five hour trek to nowheresville Sevignac. The Domaine Joanna Cecillon ciders are truly majestic, wine-like in their depth and perceptibly Bretonne maritime in their acid profile. They are, in my experience, pretty much without equal, a benchmark of quality both for the region and the entire cider genre.

In Paris, the two most frequently-encountered names in the eternal underdog microgenre of Serious Cider are Eric Bordelet and Cyril Zangs, with Julien Fremont a close third. Of these I prefer Zangs' output, the better cuvées of which offer a supremely satisfying minerality at a very approachable price. Conversely, I find myself avoiding Bordelet's effortful ciders, mainly on account of their nakedly ambitious price point and vile marketing. (The labels look like valentines exchanged by amorous reptiles.)

To the ranks of these producers we can now add Louis and Joanna Cecillon, whose fledgling organic estate equals if not surpasses the work of their Norman peers.

Joanna's grandparents hailed from Sevignac and had made cider on an artisanal scale in their day, without owning any orchards. Louis, for his part, comes from a long line of winemakers in the Rhône valley, and learned vinification there.

His experience in cider production, interestingly, came after he and Joanna decided to establish their domaine. While assembling the estate's 11ha, he apprenticed himself to Jerôme Dupont of Domaine Dupont for a few years. Yet, hearing Louis speak, one senses that his experiences in Saint Joseph greatly inform his practices making cider. For instance, the very press the Cecillons use was employed for winemaking in his family since 1933. Additionally, the barrels used to age the Cecillon ciders derive from his brother Julien's Hermitage blanc.

A '98 Hermitage blanc from Louis Cecillon's uncle, celebrated Rhône winemaker Jean-Louis Grippat.

Fourteen different apple varieties are used in the Cecillons' various cuvées. All are harvested, pressed, and fermented separately before Joanna makes the assemblage for aging in barrique.

Since the various types of apples ripen at different stages, harvest goes on from September to December. Louis relates that the early ripening varieties are enormous, whereas the late-season varieties are practically the size of cherries. First fermentation takes place in 2000L fiberglass tanks, with pigeage. The juice passes 5-6 months in 250L barrels after assemblage, with bottles being held for six months before release.

The range consists of three ciders in ascending order of richness: "Divona,""Nerios," and "Nantosuelta."

"Divona," made from late-harvesting apple varieties that the Cecillons cite as their favorites, is distinguished by long, shimmering acid. The orchards are cold, valley terroir. It's a brisk, wakeful cider, with a powerfully chilly persistence, rather like the OCD tendencies that render Parquet Courts' ostensible slacker-rock so compelling.

"Nerios" has a more caramelised nose, though it's still a fairly dry cuvée. It derives from more bitter apples, situated on a hill that Louis compares (of course) to Saint Joseph. The result is a beerier, more robust and slightly tannic cider, with pronounced winter spice and echoing complexity. Switching from "Divona" to "Nerios" is like going from Parquet Courts to "Here."

Switching the other way around is inadvisable, as the "Divona" can't help but scan as a bit shrill afterwards.

"Nantosuelta," whose name means 'valley of the sun,' is the off-dry cuvée, and derives from just one type of apple. While not a bad product in any way, it's sort of the runt of the litter, in terms of complexity. It's the only cider the Cecillons produce that doesn't transcend our expectations of cider.

The Cecillons received us in the company of numerous neighbors, and towards the end of the meal treated everyone to a taste of an experimental eau de vie de cidre that spends three years in barrel. At Josh's house I'd already tasted their unaged, clear eau de vie, which is a pure-fruited, grappa-like pleasure in itself.

But the 2011 barrel-aged eau de vie was significantly more interesting, particularly after drinking tons of "Nerios" with lunch. There's a real link to the particular fruit of that cuvée, along with a silvery, horchata-like depth.

Later we took a walk through the Cecillons orchards. In the orchards that yield fruit for the "Divona," we came upon two swarms of bees. Louis, who is also a keen beekeeper, explained to us that its rare to encounter even one swarm, let alone two on the same day within ten feet of each other. It means you're in luck ! he said.

Still beaming from all the magnificent cider at lunch and the Cecillons' wonderful welcome, we heartily agreed, even after Josh got stung on the head.

Domaine Joanna Cecillon
La Villime

22250 SEVIGNAC
Tel: +33 (0) 6 80 40 40 60

Related Links:

A producer profile page on Domaine Joanna Cecillon by my friend Josh at Paris Wine Company.

Breizh Café, 75003 - One of two places in Paris presently stocking the Cecillon ciders. Shortly before this trip, I found myself drinking with owner Jean-Luc Corbel at Repaire de Cartouche Bar à Vin and when I mentioned who we were visiting in Brittany he immediately exclaimed that the Cecillon ciders were his "coup de coeur" these days

The other, weirdly, is Merci.

I used to complain often about a dearth of actual wine bars in Paris. I defined them as places where quality wine could be enjoyed standing up, without the obligation to book in advance or consume a multi-course meal. But nowadays my old screeds ring a bit shrill, since such places are no longer so rare in the city. In certain quartiers, they exist in densities sufficient to fill a guided tour.

Ironically, with certain exceptions, I still find myself frequenting the ones that have been there all along. This has less to do with the quality of wine on offer than with the character of the company. I learn more from older sommeliers and restaurateurs than I do from their younger, more stylish peers.

One such example is Ma Cave Fleury, the unfailingly festive caviste and wine bar on rue Saint Denis, founded in 2009 by Morgane Fleury, global ambassador of biodynamic Champagne producers Champagne Fleury. The bar contains nothing more to eat than rudimentary charcuterie and cheese plates. And I can admit to liking the Fleury Champagnes, in most cases, for reasons more political than aesthetic. Ma Cave Fleury nonetheless remains very relevant for its central location and for the central role its proprietor plays in the city's natural wine scene. Morgane Fleury is like its fairy godmother, her unpretentiousness and warmth constituting an antidote to the conservative froideur that typifies the public faces of most Champagne houses.

Fleury is a former stage actress, who upon deciding to work for her family's domaine, studied for official sommelier certification at the Université du Vin de Suze-la-Rousse. At the wine bar she proposes a vast, well-priced range of her family's Champagnes, supplemented by the wines of her friends and peers.

She has excellent taste. I can think of few greater or more reliable pleasures in French natural wine than Lise and Bertrand Jousset's 100-year-old-vine Montlouis "Singulière," a taut, pear-fruited Chenin as concentrated as it is pure. Every year, it is a pearl of the region.

If my feelings about the Fleury Champagnes themselves are mixed, it's because the domaine's practices are so noble, and its range so exotic, that it's hard not to have high expectations. The estate covers 15ha, of which 80% is Pinot Noir. Morgane's father Jean-Pierre Fleury began converting to biodynamic viticulture in 1989, making them among the first in the region.

How many houses bottle a 100% Pinot Blanc Champagne ? It's fascinating as a specimen, but slightly less so as a Champagne, being a bit one-dimensional and brief on the palate. (With rare exceptions, I find the bubble structure of Fleury Champagnes slightly unruly, and I wonder if they would benefit from longer, slower secondary fermentation.)

Where else can one so easily and affordably access magnums of multiple back-vintages? But I had a bad experience with a frightfully oxidised bottle of the 1996 one New Year's Eve, and have been reluctant to try again since.

The estate's Brut "Fleur de l'Europe" cuvée is more successful, a rich and reliable blanc des noirs. I also find their Rosé de Saignée Brut to be among the best values in rosé Champagne, which as a category otherwise tends to be pretty overpriced.

Fleury also recently released a 2004 non-dosed blanc des noirs called "Bolèro," which was downright majestic: a rosy, perfumed nose and a long, complex palate of pain d'épice.

Interestingly, a Loire winemaker friend with whom I tasted this wine later explained that 2004 was a highly productive year in Champagne - record-breaking at the time - which is why Champagne houses like Fleury have so much '04 wine stocked in their reserves individuelles. He reasoned that the "Bolèro" benefitted from its long aging in tank and barrel, and was probably being released in response to relatively low yields in 2012 and 2013. (Whatever Champagne domaines produce over a collectively-determined yearly yield limit can be added to their reserve individuelle for later release in years with lower yields. No other regions enjoy such a useful insurance system.)

Whatever the explanation, the wine is a highly sophisticated outlier in a Champagne range whose charms lie principally in their Huckleberry Finn simplicity. They taste honest and unpolished, which in the gleaming, confected realm of Champagne, is itself a rare virtue. Ma Cave Fleury, with its casual, communal terrace on a street known for porn and grit, is, in turn, a rarity in Paris: an unpretentious and egalitarian venue in which to enjoy France's most famous luxury product.

Ma Cave Fleury

177, rue Saint Denis

75002 PARIS

Métro: Réaumur-Sebastopol or Sentier

Tel: 01 40 28 03 39

A 2013 piece in the NYTimes T Magazine about Ma Cave Fleury.

A 2010 piece in BK Wine Magazine on Ma Cave Fleury.

A 2010 account of same visit to Ma Cave Fleury by Stuart George at Worcester Sauce.

A 2009 piece in Marie Claire France about Ma Cave Fleury.

A nice endorsement of Ma Cave Fleury by Emmanuel Rubin in Le Figaro.

A hearty 2008 endorsement of Champagne Fleury replete with tasting notes by Jamie Goode at Wine Anorak.

A concise producer profile of Champagne Fleury at Domaine Select.

I'm a bit late in discussing the tsunami of twee Japanese concepts that arrived on my doorstep in the 9ème over the course of last year.

I like Japanese cuisine as much as anyone - indeed, I assume I'm genetically inclined towards it - and Ito Izakaya, Peco Peco, and Tsubame all make a point of serving natural and organic wines, which, until recently, have functioned as a useful indicator of conscious restaurateurism in Paris and beyond.

But these restaurant openings mark the discomfiting moment that a natural-by-numbers wine list became a feature of contemporary Parisian décor, like Tsubame's blackboard, or the hideous scratchy DIY cardboard table in Ito's rear room. Within the context of a Japanese restaurant in Paris, a natural-by-numbers wine list is, perversely, a sign of inauthenticity, an indicator that one is sitting in a Parisian Japanese concept, rather than an unselfconscious Japanese restaurant. Whether there is really anything wrong with that will depend on the rigor of one's aesthetic demands, and whether it is lunchtime.

Peco Peco, a slightly claustrophobic canteen opened by former Bones / Peres Populaires server Benjamin Perrier and his chef Kenji Hoori, is the least pretentious and the least Japanese of the three. I stopped in for a mild vegetable donburi with my colleague L during the springtime, and appreciated the quick, responsive service, the simplicity of the concept, and the slim list of natural vins de soif. (Perrier gets points for stocking actual natural wines - Alain Allier, Stephane Morin, etc. - not just one natural wine plus random organic domaines.)

I regrettably chose a salad to accompany my donburi, a mistake, since it turned out to be just more of the arugula which already accompanied my donburi. The sauce, a sesame-inflected nothing of the sort one finds stateside at Trader Joe's.

If Peco Peco's westernised cuisine is nowhere near on par with the Nanashis, Kaori Endo's increasingly influential Nippo-canteens in the Marais and the 10ème, well, we can't all be Kaori Endo or have her investors. Peco Peco remains a fine addition to Pigalle's lunch options. Should Perrier and Hoori ever wish to expand further, I'd suggest they visit, for inspiration, any given 7-Eleven in Tokyo, where the presentation of take-away foodstuffs blows away the slipshod standard currently sufficing in Paris.

Uneven presentation likewise undercuts nearby Ito Izakaya, another Japanese concept founded by Frenchmen, this time Rafael Wallon and Vincent John Soimaud, two enterprising fellows whose backgrounds are perceptibly more rooted in fashion than in cuisine. (Wallon DJ's fashion shows. Soimaud, according to Wikipedia, played tambourine in a flash-in-the-pan French rock band who were immediately, if briefly, fêted by Lagerfeld. I think these credentials speak for themselves.)

Their experience shows in Ito's eager décor, which apparently ran out of budget in the back room, where my friends and I sweated out a frustrating meal during fashion week. I had not been informed, when I made the reservation, that we'd be seated at a communal table, let alone one made of cardboard and scratchy enough to destroy most shirtsleeves, in a room with almost no ventilation.

Service was for the most part splendid, and my tablemates seemed to enjoy our rinky-dink, zero-ingredient cost portions of aubergine, shiitake, and dashi-toned "Ito Risotto." (The latter is the only filling dish in Ito's teensy ten-course sharing menu.)

Some supple veal tataki in ponzu benefitted from Frenchification, to which I'd credit the discerning native taste for tartare.

The tiny self-proclaimed natural wine list was not very natural at all, and failed to cite the producer of its Champagne - so we drank sake, litres of it, most memorably a grippy and sweetly complex nigori (cloudy) sake called "Dreamy Clouds" by Rikahu brewery in Shimane.

More than an innocuous wine list, poor décor, or timid, business-plan cuisine, what marred the meal at Ito was a particularly bad case of the poor communication endemic to the service-client relationship in France. Ito's menu, for instance, is a model of confusion. Nowhere is it stated that the ten-course tasting menu is intended for two people, but the menu indicates that it will upcharge 30€ for a third person.

More gravely, we weren't told until the end of the meal that due to technical cock-ups the restaurant accepted only cash or personal check, which is rather a catastrophe for a press dinner. I don't plan ever to return.

Conversely, after lunching at Tsubame some months ago with my surrogate grandfather blogger figure, I decided to withhold judgement until I could return for dinner. The restaurant's lunch menu offers just two rather spartan bentos - chicken or salmon - and both had shown a sensitivity to product and cook temp that seemed to bely their witheringly nondescript format and general under-seasoning.

A black sesame ice cream, meanwhile, was glorious matte-finish understatement, the sort of dessert that redeems the trend it's hopping. (Worse black sesame desserts can also be found at corporate lunch chains Cojean and Boco these days. Not to mention Ito Izakaya.)

I left wondering whether the blandness of the bentos was a concession to French tastes, or merely a concession to lunch tastes. I had the occasion to settle the issue last week, over a pleasant meal of izakaya kid-stuff with a colleague in town for fashion week.

The wine list, always a bit of a simplistic gouge, had not changed, so we drank sake, a beverage I greatly enjoy because I know almost nothing about it.

(Whereas the knowledge that my friend Sebastien Riffault's basic "Quarterons" Sancerre is under 10€ wholesale would otherwise have prevented my enjoyment of it at Tsubame, where they charge €36.)

That meal's highlight was some impeccably tender squid with ginger and scallions, rather daringly plated with what appeared to be the beak.

The rest of the evening's small plates were as exciting as choosing a tint of grey for wall-trimming. Sliced tomatoes; a broth so light it barely supported three lonely shrimp halves, themselves bereft of flavour.

But service was engaged and charming, and the open walls of the restaurant's narrow front room are a pleasure in the summer.

Tsubame is the project of Clement Nguyen and Masumi Tao, of upscale 17ème seafood shack Atao, and the duo's greater experience is perceptible; Tsubame is, by a large margin, the most confident and mature restaurant of those under discussion.

Nguyen and Tao know their clientele. But this is, counterintuitively, the problem they share with the owners of Peco Peco and Ito Izakaya. There is nothing shocking about any of these places. They are safe bets, existing mere millimeters outside the comfort zone of your average Parisian diner, just enough to give him or her fodder for bad conversation. Where in Paris, I might ask, is the Japanese equivalent of Q-Tea, the helplessly sincere Chinese joint near Saint Georges that slayed the city's critics before decamping to Grenoble a few years back? Where is the Japanese Deux Fois Plus de Pimente, for that matter? Where is the excitement, the fright, the tears?

Some may rejoice that the 9ème is now crowded with Japanese concepts, simple places for health-and-design-conscious nibblers. I'm still waiting for Godzilla.

Ito Izakaya
2, rue Pierre Fontaine
75009 PARIS
Métro: Saint Georges
Tel: 09 52 91 23 00

Peco Peco
47, rue Jean-Baptiste Pigalle
75009 PARIS
Métro: Pigalle
Tel: 01 53 16 19 84

Tsubame
40, rue de Douai
75009 PARIS
Métro: Blanche
Tel: 01 48 78 06 84

Related Links:

François Régis-Gaudry found Peco Peco impeccable.
Some overcaffeinated word-spray about Peco Peco at Le Fooding.
A rather kind take on Peco Peco's cuisine at Ten Days In Paris.

Vogue France naturally endorsed Restaurant Ito, as did Le Nouvel Observateur. Because it's slightly Japanese.
Time Out astutely called Ito out for tiny portion sizes.
So does Little Black Book, a French blogger who otherwise was completely smitten with Ito's version of Japanese cuisine.

John Talbott rightly found Tsubame a bit mild.
An astute read of Tsubame's culinary shortcomings at this rather impressively-focused blog called CECJ2. It offers encyclopaedic coverage on Japanese restaurants in France, organised by city and arrondissement.

Bad restaurants, like the proverbial Tolstoyan unhappy family, may be awful in an infinity of ways. We dislike them accordingly. But how we truly hate restaurants is largely divisible into two categories. There is personal emnity: because the ownership or a key staff member has done you grievously wrong. Then there is impersonal emnity: because you sense that the establishment targets a clientele whose tastes you question, whose influence, you suspect, is ultimately deleterious to a culture you value.

My friend and colleague Meg Zimbeck of Paris by Mouth hated Restaurant Lazare in the latter way, which is probably the only way to hate an overpriced 110-seat fortress of a bistrot installed in a wall of Gare Saint Lazare. Pioneering bistronomy chef Eric Frechon is surely not there himself, peeling onions. The staff are replaceable hotelier school grads, so predictable you can't even resent their inattentiveness. What I think Meg resented, rather, was the restaurant's perceived culture of wealth-fluffing and preferential treatment, of stout bankers gorging themselves on guinea hens before boarding first-class cars and careening off to houses in Honfleur for the weekend.

As a fellow writer, with no quantifiable skills and no discernable route to fortune in my future, I hate these (possibly imaginary) people too. And I recognise that Lazare exists for them, while the plebs wait in hundred meter lines for Burger King on another floor of the station. That Lazare thrives is in itself a Pikettian sign of increasing income stratification. So it's with a kind of melancholy that I admit I don't hate Lazare; that I find the place quite useful; that it constitutes a perk of city life I wish I could enjoy more often.

A restaurant in a travel hub is by its very nature a mass-hospitality experience, or, as the poet and songwriter David Berman so memorably put it, "like Christmas in a submarine." The spirit will always not be present.

So we must modify our demands of a restaurant experience in a travel hub. Mine are, in descending order of importance: availability, promptness, edibility, potability, comfort, politeness. Nowhere on this list do such virtues as creativity, empathy or soulfulness feature; I can also do without the rarified heights of cuisine I'd demand if I were to pay similarly augmented prices elsewhere.

Lazare was a tough booking when it first opened last fall. Phones rang and rang unanswered and attempts to book via email were - as they still are, in my experience, everywhere in Paris - totally fruitless. But to judge from every visit I've made to Lazare this year, things have changed. The difficulty of attaining a reservation is now proportionate to the quality of the food and service and ambience on offer, which is to say it's no biggie.

The restaurant's design is what you'd expect of a contemporary high-budget brasserie update. The bar retains a bit of classical allure, but everything else is a flashy study in harsh spotlights and contrasts. The white dishware stacked over all the walls makes one pine for an earthquake.

Lazare's cuisine, by chef de cuisine Thierry Colas, is impressive, but only in context. Expensive charcuterie arrives pre-sliced and pre-plated and chilly from the fridge; better pork belly and guinea hen can be had for less expense at Paris' many traditional restaurants not situated in train stations.

Ditto the safe, slightly overpriced wine list, which is almost London-esque in its conservatism. This however is appropriate to the restaurant's location - it is hard enough pushing natural wine is to any normal distracted diner, let alone one who has a train to catch or is crabby from travel. Lazare's list at least contains the solid organic burgundies of Claude Maréchal, whose Auxey-Duresses 2011 was in fine glimmery primary form when we dined there.

An wintry and decadent dessert of baked apples in a little crêpe sack topped with caramel ended our dinner on a high note.

By this time we had basically forgotten the meal's lone service cock-up, when the server mistranslated my friend P's American accent and brought him an astonishingly overpriced child's pasta serving instead of the guinea hen he'd ordered. The server's initially refused to admit any wrongdoing, but international service norms won the day over innate Parisian mulishness, and we were thankfully not charged for the pasta. Such interactions are among the only moments I am ever grateful not to be in a more intimate restaurant.

Other such moments occur between mealtimes. Across Paris, restaurants that seek to impress are almost unanimously shut between the hours of 2:30pm and 8pm. Meaning that fits of craven hungover gourmandise almost always go unsatisfied. I recent found myself staggering across Paris in search of breakfast at 5pm, having spent the entire day in a shuddery, echoing state of booze-induced dysphagia. Can you imagine my joy, when I discovered that Lazare's one hot dish on offer that day at that hour was a huge ham and potato omelet?

I duly washed it down with a glass of Lapierre Morgon and a coffee, and left thirty minutes later with a spring in my step, thirty euros lighter. Did I get ripped off, for eggs? Did I mind ?

In Paris, unlike in New York or London, it is downright refreshing to indulge in new luxury conveniences. Restaurant Lazare should be understood as one of those, rather than as a restaurant.

Restaurant Lazare
Centre Commercial Gare Saint Lazare, rue Intérieure

75008 PARIS

Métro: Saint Lazare

Tel: 01 44 90 80 80

View Larger Map

Related Links:

Meg Zimbeck's furious 2013 take-down of Lazare.

Alexander Lobrano's 2013 piece on Lazare reads a lot like an apology for Meg's piece.

John Talbott enjoyed Lazare in 2013; along with seemingly every other opening reviewer, he presumed it would remain a difficult reservation.

An uncharacteristically in-depth dissection of Lazare by my friend Wendy Lyn at The Paris Kitchen. It sort of reads like she was auditioning for a consultancy position on Frechon's next endeavor.

Despite my enthusiasm for the Yonne town of Vézelay, I had, until a few weeks ago, still yet to pay a visit to La Soeur Cadette and Jean Montanet, the area's lone excellent winemaker. He just never seemed to be home when I was in town. After two stays in Saint-Père on separate bikes trip last summer, it had become a source of mild embarrassment.

A recent visit from my parents gave me the occasion to rectify the situation. The Native Companion and I organised a family trip and the first order of business, before even booking our regular chambre d'hôte, was to see if Jean Montanet was around. For as much as I adore Vézelay's basilica and nearby natural wine bistrot Le Bougaineville with its heavenly cheese cart, it's still the luminescent Chardonnays, violetty Pinot Noirs, and mineral Melon of La Soeur Cadette that put the town on the map.

La Soeur Cadette is actually a holding company for the wines of two semi-distinct organic-certified domaines, both named for Jean Montanet's wife Catherine: Domaine de la Cadette (a reference to Catherine's status as the youngest of her family), and Domaine Montanet-Thodon, which bears Catherine's maiden name. The former domaine was founded by Jean and Catherine in 1987. The latter was founded by Catherine and their son Valentin in 2000, with Valentin taking on increasing responsibility for winemaking at Montanet-Thodon. Jean and Catherine have since separated, but the family still shares facilities, a commercial apparatus, and, of course, Jean's considerable winemaking expertise.

Recently, at Le Siffleur de Ballons, Bistro Bellet, and several other fine Parisian natural wine standbys, I've been fairly blown away by the 2011 vintage of Montanet's assemblage Chardonnay cuvée "La Piecette." It was the 2013 of this cuvée we tasted first, from two barrels, and later the 2012 from bottle.

The cuvée's curious name, Montanet explained, is a made-up word, invented by accident by a visitor who couldn't seem to understand the difference between a typical barrel, or pièce, and the smaller Chablisien feuillette. I liked all the wines, she'd said. Especially the one aged in piècette!

An assemblage of grapes from various parcels including "La Chatelaine," the wine's exact make-up varies each year. The 2013, tasted from feuillette, was surprisingly coherent on the palate for a wine still undergoing fermentation, showing long acid and crisp pear fruit. The wine will spend one year in barrel, and will be racked once after malo.

A 2012 of same wine we later tasted from bottle seemed in an intermediary stage - slightly wan, without the high-flown apple-blossom brilliance the 2011 is lately showing.

More in form was a 2011 Montanet-Thoden "Clos du Thoden," from 25-year-old clay soil Chardonnay vines rented from the Michelin-starred chef Marc Meneau. Montanet explained that the rest of his own vines are on more limestone soils, so it was sort of an exploratory new experience vinifying clay soil fruit. (He used a more piquante analogy.) The wine was rich, athletic in structure, with sweet celery notes.

Another highlight of the day's tasting was the 2013 "Champs Cadet," a Bourgogne Rouge from very thin, rocky soils that spends 9 months in barrel. It was in blaring primary spirit, with a violet nose, pink citrus acid, and curl of raspberry fruit on the mineral palate. The kicker was that this klaxon of a young Pinot was a mere 11.4° alcohol. Montanet, like more than a few other vignerons I know, had a rather disastrous 2013, losing 60% of his production. It makes it all the more impressive that with the remainder he can turn out minor wonders like the "Champs Cadet."

The following day the Native Companion and I went to check out Domaine de la Cadette's caveau, a wine shop-slash-event space where Montanet receives most visitors.

There we were very well entertained by Thierry, one of the Montanets' ten employees, who showed us the winemaking facilities and opened a bottle of the domaine's brand-new négoçiant cider, made with apples from Jean's native Normandy.

Crisp, dry, and volcanically effervescent, it was a very encouraging first effort, and at very least an amusing way to pad out production in a lean vintage. Montanet also maintains several presumably more lucrative side projects, including consulting on cellars in China and Azerbaijan.

Given winemaking standards at other Vézelay domaines, one wishes more local winemakers would engage his services...

The overall region constitutes an underachieving viticultural cul-de-sac slung between Chablis and Burgundy proper. It actually lays closer to the Nievre appellation of Côteaux de Tannay, whose rather neglected wines I had the chance to taste last summer when my bike broke down in Clammecy during a village rafting fair.

A woodcarving artist with a toolbox provided the pliers we needed to jerry-rig the spring keeping my bike chain taut, and we took the occasion to sample, along with the local ice cream, some depressingly conventional Melon and Pinot Noir. (I squirmed listening to someone enumerate the labour-saving virtues of machine harvesting.)

I have sort of a pet interest in Melon de Bourgogne from Bourgogne, rather than its contemporary home in the western Loire. Accordingly, one of my first questions for Montanet had been whether he could think of anyone besides himself and Guy Bussière in the Val de Saone making credible Burgundian Melon.

"Non," he said, and shook his head, either in resignation or disbelief.

La Soeur Cadette
47 rue du Pont
89450 SAINT PERE
Tel: 33 (0)3 86 51 83 21

Related Links:

N.D.P. in Burgundy: Le Bougainville, Vézelay
N.D.P. in Burgundy: Le Vezelien, Vézelay

A good profile of Domaine La Soeur Cadette at the site of their longtime US importer, Kermit Lynch.

I was sitting at Le Bist'Roch in Nuits the other afternoon with my friend R when he brought my attention to a photo of a nude man posted above the bar. "Hey," I said. "That looks a lot like Devendra Banhart posing nude with a three-litre bottle of red wine."

Le Bist'Roch is not the sort of place where one expects to see nude photos of freak-folk singers. It's a hardscrabble natural wine joint attached to legendary natural Burgundy domaine Prieuré Roch. The other table that afternoon was a group of fearsomely wasted rural bachelor partiers who had been drinking since the previous evening. (We'd seen them earlier that morning in Beaune. The groom-to-be was dressed as a gigantic penis.)

Indeed, the picture turned out not to be Devendra Banhart. It was simply a harvester at Domaine Marcel Lapierre who had participated in the photography project of a fellow harvester, a calendar of various harvesters posing nude with grapes and wine paraphernalia. "It's more fun when it's a month with a girl posing," explained Totor, the Bist'Roch's manager, handing us the calendar.

Anyway as you know harvest is an unbelievably stressful time for winemakers. A whole years' work hangs in the balance.

I thought it would be bigger news when late last year Inaki Aizpitarte opened a shoebox-sized wine shop between Le Chateaubriand and Le Dauphin. Instead, outside of a few blurbs in the French press, it was basically a non-event. Curiously, and rather appealingly, this seems to have been intentional.

You have the shop's almost Google-proof name, Le Cave, a French pun* that doesn't scan in English. You have the shop's quixotic concept, which is to offer exclusively non-French natural wines. You have the fact that food is sold to-go, but no food is available for consumption on premises - not a cheese rind, not the barest sliver of charcuterie. Yet a rotating cast of the shop's exotic, borderline faddish wines are available by the glass.

What does Le Cave offer that could possibly make it a destination ? Nothing. And I imagine this suits the Chateaubriand group fine, since their two adjacent restaurants already have enough overflow to require the services of a waiting room, which is Le Cave's primary function. Happily, staffing what could easily have been a lean mean man cave is a razor-sharp lady called Beatrice, who, seemingly alone in the restaurant group, has serious hospitality skills. And so Le Cave becomes, despite itself, a low-key weeknight destination, one which I prefer to both restaurants.

That Le Cave's concept is mildly revolutionary in Paris is an indicator of how difficult it is to sell non-French wines in France. This is because typical Parisians are breathtakingly cheap when it comes to wine expenditure, and largesse is culturally discouraged. Paris' two key audiences who do routinely drop serious sums on wine - tourists and select wealthy, conservative natives - are for different reasons inclined towards French wine. So the market for high-quality non-domestic wine remains very boutique.

The only reliable Parisian audience for curiosities from Greece, Serbia, Georgia, and so on are the staff of other geeky restaurants. Le Cave's focus on non-French natural wine therefore manages to delight its core audience, while simultaneously coercing foreigners to consume non-French wine as they wait for a table. It's sort of genius.

Beatrice tells me the cave contains about 200 references, not all of which are displayed on the walls. If I am wary of this claim, it's only because I've been burned by Le Chateaubriand sommelier Sebastien Chatillon's blitheringly unprofessional wine program before, and because the wines actually displayed on Le Cave's walls are precisely the same ones available at, say, Frenchie Wine Bar, Septime Cave, Clamato, Bones, or basically any hip Paris restaurant with a young, curious somm who is nonetheless handcuffed by the limited amount of good non-French natural wines that make it into France.

There are the same five Greek producers, the same four Spanish ones, the same dozen of Italians. Often I like the wines themselves. But without greater context - including, yes, conventional wines from these nations - one can learn almost nothing from them. (For instance, had I always restricted my Italian wine education to Italian natural wine, today I would, by default, still know diddly about Italian wine at large. But this is not the case, and this is why I would have liked to see greater depth and range in Le Cave's selection.)

Le Cave's take-out is dementedly overwrought in a rather lovable way. The week I tried it the dish on offer was chakchouka, a north African vegetable stew. I had assumed it would come pre-heated in a plastic tub of some sort. Boy was I wrong !

Upon taking the order Beatrice produced a rather medical-looking vaccuum-sealed sack of cold red stew, and told me to wait while she fetched the garnish - parsley and pomegranate seeds, packaged separately - and an egg, which she very kindly wrapped in several layers of paper when I told her I'd be transporting the chakchouka via Velib.

It was delicious kid stuff, family meal cuisine so fulfilling that I could overlook the exceedingly low ingredient cost, and the fact that the olives appeared to be pre-pitted. I still can't think of any better take-out in the city for 13€.

And while I'd waited for Le Chateaubriand's kitchen to pack pomegranate seeds, I'd been able to enjoy a spiffing glass of Radikon. The "Slotnik" (80% Chardonnay, 20% Friulano) is made by Stanko Radikon's son Sasa, whose stated aim is to release younger, more readily drinkable orange wines than his father's broody time-capsule output. A bottle I enjoyed with friends recently was indeed wonderfully accessible, with rich, apricotty tones, bright acid, and pastry aromas.

It's admittedly not the sort of wine I'd choose for, say, an event meal at Le Chateaubriand. At at event meal at Le Chateaubriand, it is the sort of wine they'd bring me when I asked for something else. But in the context of Le Cave, and a quick splash before heading home, young Radikon's perfect.

* "Cave," when used as a masculin noun, is French slang for an idiot. This is actually a good joke, given the context.

Le Cave
129 avenue Parmentier
75001 PARIS
Métro: Goncourt
Tel: 01 48 74 65 38

Related Links:

Le Chateaubriand, 75011
Le Dauphin, 75011

A pre-opening interview with Inaki Aizpitarte about Le Cave at the Wall Street Journal.
An interview with Sasa Radikon at Louis/Dressner.

My friend M is a Vietnamese chef in New York. A year ago I was encouraging him to open a restaurant in Paris. Just think, I beamed. Natural wine and Vietnamese food ! It's never been done ! Moreover, such a restaurant would perform the conceptual two-step necessary in contemporary Paris to appeal both to Parisians, who hunger for novel, non-Parisian things, and visitors, for whom all things Parisian are novel. For an unintended consequence of France's imperialist adventures in Asia is that, a century and a half later, it seems plausible that Paris would contain excellent Vietnamese food.

Aux Deux Cygnes, a well-appointed dollhouse of a wine bar on rue Keller opened three months ago by polyvalent young French-Vietnamese restaurant professional To Xuan Cuny, is not a destination for excellent Vietnamese food. Instead it's a very personal effort, a synthesis of Cuny's influences, to which world-historical forces are mostly incidental. Even the bar's elegant name is simply a play on words, a French translation of the common Danish mispronunciation of Cuny's first name. ('Two swans.') The Vietnamese angle largely stops with the bar's somewhat bread-driven bánh mì. So there's still room for my old friend M in Paris.

If Aux Deux Cygnes, with its tiny snack menu and appreciably offbeat, southern-focused wine list, nonetheless feels rather new, it's because Cuny herself represents an inroad of Michelin-trained hospitality experience to the historically scruffier field of natural wine in Paris.

Cuny previously polished her skills in both front and back of house at Copenhagen's fêted restaurant Relæ, and briefly for deranged Paris wine villains Saturne. Watching Cuny serving bottles at the bar or fixing plates in the kitchen, it's impossible not to remark the precision of her movements and her sense of time management, both rarities in a scene that has tended to define itself in opposition to professional hospitality. Service at Aux Deux Cygnes has quite a bit more in common with the nearby Septime / Clamato clan than with the anarchy that often reigns at nearby Bones.

This cuts both ways. Clamato, for instance, is where I send people who wish to have a good meal. Bones is where I send people who wish to have fun. Aux Deux Cygnes, for its part, might stand to benefit from a little more anarchy, a little more scuff on its polish.

As it is, my friend E, upon entering the other night, remarked that it looked like a wine bar in Tel Aviv. (Difficult, in light of current events, to use the Israeli capital as a model of pristine order. What my friend meant, I think, was that Aux Deux Cygnes looks like a modern new world wine bar.) In the same way that my soul rebels when I see a menu that looks like a business plan, I recoil slightly when interiors look too much like design blogs.

Cuny deserves real credit for putting together an interesting wine list despite inexperience, limited budget, and zero allocation clout. The list at Aux Deux Cygnes, by emphasizing outlier categories like Languedoc whites and Swiss reds, manages to retain interest without following trends or touting big names.

Where else can you put down two distinctively different bottles of natural Chasselas at the bar?

I'll admit to being less than enchanted by Languedoc vigneronne Mylène Bru's 2013 "Lady Chasselas," an unsulfured Vin de France from 50 year old vines near Sète. Acid was still present, but the fruit felt a bit monochromatic. It still made for an interesting contrast to the first wine we had, a 2012 Chasselas called "Un Matin Face Au Lac," by biodynamic Savoy-via-Burgundy vigneron Dominique Lucas. In this cuvée, aged in cement and amphora, Lucas seems to have overcome the grapes innate wishy-washiness through lees-aging; the resultant wine was a portrait in fine yeastiness, lime-peel, and flint.

Aux Deux Cygnes' menu, like its wine list, it just distinctive enough to spark interest, consisting of prettified versions of things many of us could produce adequately at home. A caviar d'aubergine (above) boasted flowers and herbs and, somewhat insensibly for a dip served with bread, croutons.

How many times have I wished for a bánh mì to be made with a proper baguette, instead of the vile industrial packing-foam bread that Vietnamese joints in France must go out of their way to source? Aux Deux Cygnes' version remains undefinitive, alas, for while it succeeds on the bread front it fails to fill it with much. Most of my own sandwich was taken up with chunks of carrot.

With her opening cook soon to depart, Cuny is multitasking admirably at the moment, providing wine service between visits to the kitchen to plate dishes. And I applaud her for being open Sundays, for opening up shop on rue Keller, the gentrification frontier where rue de la Roquette turns knifey, and for generally helping to counterbalance the masculine bro-rocracy that still obtains in the Paris natural wine scene.

But Aux Deux Cygnes can't help but feel a little nascent, rather like Jane Drotter's YARD before the arrival of chef Shaun Kelly. It's a pretty shell of an establishment, but for it to thrive with just twenty or so seats, check averages will probably have to rise, something which will require sharper cuisine and more expensive wines.

Or anarchy. In Paris, anarchy is always an option.

Aux Deux Cygnes
36, rue Keller
75011 PARIS
Métro: Voltaire
Tel: 0688827369

Related Links:

An uncomfortable article on Aux Deux Cygnes at Paris Bouge. It's reads sort of like a review of To Xuan Cuny's face.

A short but less tacitly sexist blurb on Aux Deux Cygnes at A Food Tale.

A nice visit to Dominique Lucas at Terroirs de Vins.

Clamato, 75011
Bones, 75011

I recently lauded fledgling 11ème wine bar Aux Deux Cygnes for bringing a bit of professionalism and style to its gentrification-frontier quartier. If that establishment's location is central to its charm, the same dynamic applies to another new Paris wine bar, the 9-month-old Monsieur Henri, which manages to be impressively discreet despite being tucked right off the haute-Marais beard-groomer thru-way of rue de Bretagne.

The Marais, of course, is stuffed with twee concepts long on design and short on experience. Monsieur Henri, for better and for worse, has these proportions precisely inversed.

Co-owner Dzine Breyet is a fixture in Paris' natural wine scene, having previously worked alonside Guillaume Dupré at influential passage des Panoramas wine bar Coinstot Vino. But where that bar benefits from the evocative décor of Paris' oldest public passage, Monsieur Henri rather unfortunately resembles a corridor in a small-town sports center. Harsh lighting, a low ceiling, and ill-advised primary-coloured wine storage cages all ensure that no one drinking at Monsieur Henri has come for the glamour. In the Marais, this seems to improve the clientele.

Breyet and his co-owning partner Rebecca can't be faulted for excess innovation. Monsieur Henri's menu contains nothing you haven't seen at every other Paris wine bar, at prices reflective of the surrounding quartier. Some effort does seem to have been made to diversify the usual offerings of burrata and charcuterie... With other varieties of burrata and charcuterie.

I'd argue that this is basically as it should be, which is to say it is the menu of a wine bar, and not the menu of a restaurant masquerading as a wine bar.

Befitting Breyet's experience, the natural wine selection at Monsieur Henri is broad, and contains more than a few unusual bottles. There are ups and downs, nonetheless. I made the mistake once of trying Chateau de Coulaine's Chinon blanc before examining the wine's potent 14.5° alcohol. It would have tipped me off: the wine was disjointed, ungainly, and wan, among the worst examples I've ever tried of this moody, niche category of Chenin.

Much more pleasurable was a very traditional, almost rustic sous-voile Arbois Breyet served us on another occasion.

Domaine de Saint Pierre are a 5,5ha estate in the village of Mathenay, north of Poligny. I have the impression that many Jura producers seem to be tilting their production towards ouillé wines these days, preferring to avoid the polarizing flavours of the veil and to compete in a more generalised white-wine marketplace. I can't help but consider this a shame, since those veil flavours are what make Jura wines so intensely distinctive. At any rate, Domaine de Saint-Pierre's 2008 Savagnin de Voile was refreshingly old-school, long and lean, with the characteristic pecorino sardo / sourdough flavours richly in effect.

It wasn't even the only terrific Jura white being offered by the glass that night - I'd spied a magnum of Les Bottes Rouges' Arbois Chardonnay "Léon" in the bar's ample ice bucket.

Ultimately the value of a divey geek wine bar like Monsieur Henri lies in individualist eccentricities like that. Monsieur Henri contains magnums of challenging wines. It offers cult eau de vie de cidre. It is perceptibly run by someone with a passionate investment in the scene.

The bar's décor probably wasn't intended to put off anyone who doesn't share the same passion. If it has that effect, so much the worse for them. The rest of us geeks now have a place for a quiet glass in the Marais after Versant Vins closes in the evenings.

Monsieur Henri
8 Rue de Picardie

75003 PARIS

Métro: Filles du Calvaire

Tel: 01 57 40 67 76

Related Links:

A terse blurb on Monsieur Henri by Emmanuel Rubin at Le Figaro. One wonders what use such a hyper-reductive format of restaurant criticism is to anyone besides Emmanuel Rubin and Le Figaro, who, rather than actually examining a restaurant, merely inform us that they've been there.

Le Mary Celeste, 75004
Glou, 75004

In trying to descry the origins of the hazy aura known as restaurant hype, we often overlook its simplest element, which is thrift.

Patronising restaurants is not a thrifty habit in the first place, which is all the more reason for diners to flock to restaurants that are good value for money. Surprisingly few Paris business owners seem to understand this dynamic - that increased turnover, despite the hassle, is sounder business footing than high prices. The result is a surfeit of demand at good-value establishments, or, in a word, hype. But what becomes of the capable restaurants that are just not quite good enough a deal ?

One such haunt is La Boulangerie, a Ménilmontant bistrot I seem to have avoided for the past five years on account of its hypelessness and its faceless, rather confusing name. Imagine my surprise to discover, when I finally ducked in for an impromptu dinner with a visiting friend, that it's in fact a mature, quality-oriented establishment that seems to exist just slightly out of its era. It's pricing is pre-Euro crisis, let's say, and its plating is mid-Chirac. The pleasant hospitality, broad wine list, and the staggering armagnac selection, on the other hand, are all timeless.

How refreshing is it, in this part of town, to see a solid, quality-conscious wine list that is not a natural wine list ?

Regarding it, I felt transported to the 6ème arrondissement, to places like Fish and Semilla, where one can rediscover wines already introduced to America long ago by Becky Wasserman and Kermit Lynch and Neal Rosenthal...

Seriously, though, I do admit that the natural-hegemony on the wine lists of young, ambitious Paris restaurants is getting out of hand. At a certain point, it comes at the expense of variety. And in any case I'd rather drink Marsannay master Sylvain Pataille's basic Bourgogne Rouge any day than, say, a bottle of Yann Durieux's red Hautes Côtes at twice the price.

But prices on Boulangerie's list reflect a time before caves-à-manger came to dominate east Paris. I have to continually remind myself that these sorts of mark-ups are normal elsewhere in the world.

Feeling pinched that evening, my friend and I knowingly committed the Paris dining peccadillo of sharing an appetiser. Our loss: a plate of sautéed baby squid was flavourful and cooked to perfection, an unexpected sunburst of mediterranean seaside charm.

A main course of slow-cooked Limousin beef was a minor disappointment, dry and bitterly seasoned.

My companion probably ought to have been alerted by the menu description "au condiment thai." Chefs in French bistrots do Asian inflections with all the subtlety and nuance of a boeuf in a China shop.

My own mackerel in saffron beef broth were tastier. In their unusual surf'n'turfiness, they reminded one to what extent restaurant menus are dictated by peoples' dietary restrictions. Fish main courses very rarely arriving swimming in meat juice. In this instance, as in other, more refined ones (like James Henry's omnivorous plating at down the road at Bones) I appreciate the commercial blindness of the gesture. (At Bones, it is presumably self-conscious, intended to signal seriousness to diners. I do not think this is the case at La Boulangerie.)

We concluded the meal with an almost impeccable cheese plate, composed of cheeses refined by Alléosse, a venerable Paris cheese house whose website, I note in passing, has been memorably described by my fellow natural wine blogger Eva Robineau as "a true instrument of torture." Their Brillat-Savarin, happily, was quite the opposite.

After our meal I chatted briefly with co-owner and dining room manager Nordine Nidhsain, who was unflappably chill and welcoming. He complemented my shoes and I complemented his Armagnac collection. He explained that the restaurant had existed since the early 20th century, but that he and his brother Hassan, the chef, along with a third partner, Fabienne Gérard, in 2005. Fabienne had been our extremely genial server that evening. How was everyone so nice? I found myself wondering. Is it because they don't do much business ?

To put La Boulangerie's pricing in perspective, here are some other Paris restaurants with superior cuisine offering at least three-course menus at 36€ or less: Bistrot Paul Bert, Café des Musées, Bistrot Bellet, Chez Michel, Repaire de Cartouche.

But you cannot walk into many of these restaurants on a Friday night with three friends and easily get a table.

Personally, I hope one day to graduate to patronising more restaurants that are not quite a good deal. The calmness of their service, and the last minute availability of a table, are, at the end the day, easily worth another few euros. It is the price of convenience.

La Boulangerie reopens for service on the 19th August.

La Boulangerie

15 Rue des Panoyaux

75020 PARIS
Métro: Ménilmontant

Tel: 01 43 58 45 45

Related Links:

A rather measured, underwhelmed note on La Boulangerie in Le Fooding. (Perhaps the only unenthusiastic review on that entire site.)

A surprisingly astute review of La Boulangerie in Time Out.

A chef friend whose opinions I value highly once raised a sceptical eyebrow when I praised La Retrobottega proprietor Pietro Russano's cooking. At the time Russano, a former sommelier at the late restaurant Rino, had just opened his low-key 11ème Italian cave-à-manger and, as is often still the case today, he was manically performing all roles: sommelier, server, host, and cook. My chef friend argued his cuisine was too untutored.

I had no rebuttal, because it's true Russano is mostly self-taught. If the dishes I've received since at La Retrobottega rarely reach the heights of the magnificent pickled squash salad Russano served on my first visit, they're nonetheless reliably soulful, curious preparations: roast aubergine atop couscous, or burrata served with mango, white mushroom and chive. Russano is an improvisation artist, if not in the high-jazz register of the greatest chefs, then in the blustery, street-level manner of a freestyle MC.

This is the best lens through which to understand his new project, a junkyardy wine shop and épicerie on rue de la Roquette that he has rather pungently entitled Squatt Wine Shop. (Two t's intentional.) Russano explains the name is a reference to squatter culture in places like Berlin. I'm unable to resist observing that 'squat' is also what dogs do in the street in places like Paris, or that it's what one finds in one's bank account after too many wine expenditures... No, the word has no good connotations in English. Perhaps Russano's wine shop will be the first, for Squatt is overstuffed with unusual French and Italian selections, not to mention sincere personality, making it the antithesis of Paris'ubiquitous Nicolas chain, one location of which is, amusingly, located directly next door.

Russano is from Puglia. Were he from Abruzzo, he might remember the recent earthquake and invest in more stable wine storage. For now, a severely limited design budget means it's wisest to remove backpacks before entering the tiny, crowded space.

The selection is a 30% - 70% split between Italian and French wines. The Italian proportion is set to increase, with Russano beginning to import more wines directly, and this will represent Squatt's primary draw: Russano, along with Pierre Jancou and RAP's Allessandra Pierini, has for the past four years been one of Paris' only lifelines to quality Italian wine.

My visit to Squatt the other day turned up one unexpected - I might even say unprecented - delight: a balanced, bright Puglian white.

Although slightly overpriced at 18€, the 2013 Polvanera Minutolo Russano recommended was a minor revelation. He cautioned that the wine was merely organic, not natural per se, and the wine was indeed a bit straitjacketed and shut for the first ten minutes after opening. Then it suddenly bloomed, showing herbal aromas and articulate flavours of cedrat and lime alongside a forthright juiciness, maintain acidity even when tasted beside some bass ceviche I'd made.

Polvanera is a 20ha domaine founded west of Bari in 2003 by winemaker Filippo Cassano. Although the domaine is more known for its high-altitude, oak-free Primitivi, I was curious about the Minutolo because to date I'd simply never had a good Puglian white. Nor had I ever tasted Minutolo, confusingly also called Fiano or Fiano Aromatico, despite not being related to Campania's more celebrated grape of the same name. I later learned the grape is the subject of a revival effort that began only in 2000. With the first recovered plantings being made in 2001, I presume the very first wines of this effort were reaching the market just as I stopped working in Italian wine. (God, I feel suddenly old. Older than Minutolo.)

Squatt's French selection is presently a little patchy. While I applaud Russano for consciously avoiding stocking the same limited coterie of natural wines one finds everywhere in the 11ème, something tells me his selection would benefit from a few marquee names, if only for marketing purposes. It's easier for consumers to trust his offbeat discoveries if they're stocked alongside a few recognizeable names. As it is, the most famous French natural wine name in Squatt's selection is young Beaujolais upstart Benoit Camus, not yet a superstar by any stretch of the imagination. (Though, on the strength of his kinetic, blackfruited 2011 Vin de France "Le P'tit Camus," perhaps he is well on his way.)

Squatt also stocks a solid range of Italian and imported craft beers, one of which, Danish brewer Fanø's Rye-nocerous IPA, I greatly enjoyed on tap recently at Ménilmontant bar Les Trois 8.

Russano plans to expand the vacuum-packed Italian charcuterie on offer, and, less promisingly, to exhibit the work of "young artists" in the remaining 2 square meters of wall space. I told him the artists would indeed have to be very young to agree to such a thing. There's a pre-school on my street, for instance - perhaps a good incubator for young artists.

It's a given, anyway, that I won't be returning for the art. I'll be returning for outlier wines and Calabrian chili flakes and for a more inspired, idiosyncratic alternative to his next door neighbor.

Squatt Wine Shop
112, rue de la Roquette
75011 PARIS
Métro: Voltaire
Tel: 01 71 24 82 80

Related Links:

La Retro'bottega, 75011

A 2012 piece on Polvanera at Wine Wisdom.
A 2013 piece on Polvanera at Ole Udsen Wine Blog.

A 2012 piece on Polvanera's Minutolo at Exalted Rations.
A 2010 piece on Minutolo at Italian Wine Review.
A horribly written 2010 piece on Minutolo at VinoWire.

Nearby:
Bones, 75011
Chez Aline, 75011
Aux Deux Cygnes, 75011

When the Native Companion and I first visited Champagne winemaker Emmanuel Lassaigne in Aug. 2012, the maestro of Montgueux had tantalised us with the impressive shaggy-dog story of his forthcoming "Clos Sainte Sophie" cuvée. Lassaigne, who by his own admission makes at least one one-off cuvée per year, is no stranger to experimentation. But the "Clos Sainte Sophie" seemed a kind of perfect storm of narrative-sell.

The Clos Sainte Sophie is the only one of the Champagne region's 13 clos situated in the Aube. It's owned by the family behind French undergarment brand Le Petit Bateau. Cuttings from the vineyard were used to plant the first wine grapes in Japan in 1877. Lassaigne reached an agreement with the elderly owner to purchase the grapes starting in 2010. Lassaigne's plan for them? To age the wine in barrels previously used for Cognac, Mâcon-Solutré, and Vin Jaune, the latter sourced from Jura heavyweight Jean-François Ganevat.

I remember finding this strange, since the whole purpose of the venture - to showcase the Clos Sainte Sophie - would arguably be obscured by the exotic barrel-aging. But during a visit to his cellars with my friend Nick Gorevic of Jenny & François Imports last week, Lassaigne offered some clarification: he'd blended the various wines from the respective barrel types, thereby removing some of a taster's more trivial guesswork. Then he clarified again: actually, he'd kept the Vin Jaune barrels apart, since the wine aged therein had, oddly, not seemed to evolve much. Most illuminatingly, however, he went ahead and opened a bottle of the 2010 for us.

My tasting notes should be read with a grain of salt, since I knew a little about the still-unreleased cuvée beforehand. Was that why I detected a sort of bassy Cognac note on the nose? Lassaigne seemed to disagree, but he did allow that, even after thorough cleaning, the Cognac barrels had after six months added a whopping 2º alcohol to the wines aged inside them. The wine we tasted was 40% Cognac fût, with the rest have been aged in fût de Mâcon.

The nose seemed closer in spirit to "Les Vignes de Montgueux" than Lassaigne's other cuvées, though replacing the fresh muskiness of the former was a low-toned autumn-sweater note. In the mouth the "Clos Sainte Sophie" was sinuous and long, with lightly caramelised flavors of almond brittle and tamarind offsetting the wine's chalkiness and still-youthful acid. The effect was both visceral and cerebral, a hard-hitting and subtly genre-bending wine.

Interestingly, the Cognac influence aside, I found the wine to be less overtly oak-touched than Lassaigne's oak-fermented cuvée, "La Colline Inspirée," whose time in barrel sometimes seems to come at the expense of the fine bead that typifies the rest of domaine's wines.

Lassaigne standing between "Le Cotet" (right) and a deeper-soil plot used for "Les Vignes de Montgueux" (right).

This first vintage of "Clos Sainte Sophie" will be likely be released next year or the year after. So far, Lassaigne has produced four vintages of the wine, 2010 - 2013. But he's unsure whether he'll be able to continue making the wine this year, as the sons of the proprietor of the Clos Sainte Sophie have taken responsibility for renewing the contract, and, as Lassaigne put it, they're dreaming of luxury when it comes to pricing. Lassaigne was scheduled to discuss terms with them the day following our tasting.

Lunch. (Aux Crieurs de Vin was, rather tragically, closed that week.)

Whatever the results of Lassaigne's negotiations with the Valtons over the Clos Sainte Sophie, the winemaker has other tricks up his sleeve. More recent experimental cuvées include wines made from fruit purchased from a plot called La Grande Côte, which the winemaker divided into three lots, entitled Alto, Tenor, and Soprano, which will see a graduated degree of oak-aging versus bottle aging, and which will be sold in packs of three. Basically it's a sommelier quiz kit.

We were about seven bottles deep into 'tasting' when a young photography crew showed up to take pictures of the domaine for Galeries Lafayette, a rather terrible French mall to which Lassaigne still sells wine out of loyalty to its previous wine buyer, Bruno Quenioux. Lassaigne invited them to have a few glasses with us, but they demured, saying that their photography assignment had just taken them through Bordeaux, whereupon they listed for us a lot of conventional luxury wines they'd recently had the good fortune to taste.

Lassaigne, characteristically indefatigable, pressed glasses into their hands anyway, rather as though he were offering something far superior...

Domaine Jacques Lassaigne
7 Chemin des Haies

10300 MONTGUEUX
Tel: 03 25 74 84 83

Related Links:

Visiting Emmanuel Lassaigne in Aug. 2012

Like any frequent host in Paris, I've learned to grin vacantly through inarticulate endorsements of "little neighborhood bistrots," those magical gold pots every tourist manages to discover at the end of the RER B rainbow. What our clients, friends, and relatives are discovering is usually not quality, but cuteness, for when one arrives in Paris from a New World nation, almost everything appears quite shrunken, frank, and twee.

Whereas, in reality, the odds of stumbling upon a unambitious, mostly unknown establishment serving sincere and reasonably well-informed food and wine in Paris - the most visited and most discussed restaurant scene on earth - are vanishingly small.

Yet, astonishingly, that is how I and my friend and colleague Meg Zimbeck of Paris by Mouth both independently came upon A La Renaissance, an anachronistic 11ème bistrot which, in all aspects save prices and opening hours, resembles its anonymous small-town-square archetype. That we hadn't heard of A La Renaissance before wouldn't be surprising, were it not for bistrot's massive natural wine list, and the fact that, almost alone among Paris natural wine spots, it is open past midnight seven days a week. In the revitalized Voltaire area, newly studded with destinations like Septime, Clamato, Bones, and Le Servan, A La Renaissance is an under-acknowledged pioneer.

I might as well come straight out and say that reason A La Renaissance is not more popular is its menu requires some navigation. As with fellow eastside time-capsule restaurant La Boulangerie, pricing at A La Renaissance is on the high side, for what you get. Over the course of several visits this past August (during which dead month the restaurant, impressively, did not close), my usual tactic was to share a not-overpriced plate of charcuterie as an appetiser, following it with a sound steak accompanied by violet mustard.

Basically, I will do anything to avoid overpaying for appetisers involving house-cured salmon and / or diced avocado arriving in a repurposed water glass, which elements are almost as common as frites on outmoded menus in France.

What do you get at A La Renaissance, for your tolerance of simple cuisine? Warm hospitality and a splendid terrace, sunny and un-thronged.

Most importantly, for my purposes, you get a seriously impressive list of natural wines at fair prices, almost unanimously sourced domaine direct by longtime owner Régine Robert.

A La Renaissance owner Régine Robert

A La Renaissance's clientele, at time of writing, is what might be described as village-onzieme, pre-gentrification holdovers whose copious leisure time is spent self-immolating in Ricard and Gitanes. It is the last place one expects to find a brilliantly up-to-date natural wine list. How up-to-date ? During August, the Dominique Belluard's luminescent "Les Alpes" was available by the glass. For 6€, a price that undercuts Paris' more famous restaurants by 25%-50%.

Mme. Robert's tastes embrace both perennial favorites like Jean-François Nicq to underdogs like Beaujolais newcomer Raphael Champier. At times her sway is impressive: A La Renaissance is the only place I've found in Paris proper that stocks Domaine Chamonard, whose winemaker, Jean-Claude Chanudet, refuses to sell to Parisians.

When I returned with friends at Lunch recently, Mme. Robert recommended a marvelous bottle of 2010 Collioure blanc "Vall Pompo" by organic Banyuls winemaker Bruno Duchene.

I've met Duchene on several occasions at Kevin Blackwell's lively tastings at Autour d'Un Verre. I seem always to underestimate his wines, probably on account of their labels, which seem to have resulted from outsourcing graphic design to local pre-schools. The wines look a lot cheaper than they are.

I'd never had the chance to taste this cuvée of Grenache Blanc with a few years' age on it. (It was released in 2011, and is, alas, not sort of bottle that typically gets saved in restaurant cellars.) It was limpid and lovely, with keen acid, and waxen, evolved notes of grapefruit and tarragon.

Many of the serious industry drinkers I know seem to gravitate, after shifts and on their nights off, almost inevitably to Le Mary Celeste, the only other bar I can think of that serves a good wine list quite late every day of the week. That bar will always offer a more reassuringly cosmopolitan experience, and, by no coincidence, a vastly superior fling-pool of ditz tourists and fashionistas on whom to prey.

But with Paris' culinary center of gravity having shifted towards the Voltaire area in recent years, it wouldn't surprise me if A La Renaissance were primed for a mini-renaissance of its own.

When I arrived in Paris five years ago, I sought out bars like Mary Celeste-predecessor Experimental Cocktail Club for late night drinking, because these places assuaged a certain anxiety I seemed to share with many young Parisians - that the city where I lived was somehow outmoded and behind the world. Five years on, I'm no longer as young, and the explosion of crudo-esque cuisine and popcorn shops and natural-by-numbers wine lists has inspired rather the opposite anxiety: that the city where I live is overrun with novelty and superficial gourmandise, blog-food and variations on deviled egg. Whatever happened, I find myself wondering, to drinking and dining simply and unselfconsciously?

These are habits that persist, in places.

A La Renaissance

87, rue de la Roquette

75011 PARIS

Métro: Voltaire

Tel: 01 43 79 83 09

Related Links:

Gilles Pudlowski completely misses the point of A La Renaissance in his 2013 post about the restaurant.

Remember that scene in Wayne's World, where Wayne and Garth do impressions of various US states, before being confounded by the unsatirizable dullness of Delaware?

I find the joke applies equally to Paris' 12ème arrondissement, a pancreas-shaped swathe of east Paris containing the marché d'Aligre, the Bois de Vincennes, and not much else. Between these two destinations, beneath the oft-overlooked Coulée Verte, lies a no-man's land of wide-laned roads and faceless residential blocks, as if the families lodging north of the Gare de Bercy tangle, faced with a choice between typical rail-side rat-commerce and nothing at all, chose the latter. Before last week, I'd only had reason to venture there once, in order to visit Au Trou Gascon, a well-priced one-star Michelin restaurant to whose Armagnac library I have, sadly, not since had the occasion (i.e. euros) to return.

Alarmingly, it now seems I may be back in the neighborhood rather often. My friend Mike Donahue - 12ème resident, fellow Philadelphian, and brew maestro behind Montreuil beer upstarts Deck & Donahue - recently introduced me to the re-vamped Les Caves de Reuilly, an august address for quality wine in Paris that seven months ago came under new ownership. The new owner, Pierre Le Nen, hails from Brittany, studied wine in Paris, and at some point in between, worked in the Vancouver and attained what is, in Paris, a rare fluency in both English and good hospitality. Under his direction, Caves de Reuilly maintains a balanced, mostly-natural wine selection and a vast, expandable terrace, where one can enjoy the former with zero corkage fee. For any Parisians feeling gipped about 2014's summerless August, Les Caves de Reuilly's terrace is a marvelous place to recoup.

The terrace really is a thing to behold - the sort of bar feature that could only exist in isolation, for in any more populous district in Paris, adjacent businesses would protest. Here, there's nothing adjacent, or no nightlife at least.

We first shared a bottle of Claire Naudin-Ferrand's lovely 2012 "Clou 34," an glowy, sharp-tongued old-vine Aligoté whose rear label, I noted, is somewhat misleadingly worded.

Naudin-Ferrand cites the years the vines were planted in the various plots that make up the cuvée - but while it's plausible that the Aligoté vines from 1902, 1953, and 1936 are still in production, I'd be very surprised if Le Clou's 1034 vines were yielding much at all, and a closer read reveals that Naudin-Ferrand doesn't explicitly claim they are...

For a snack we introduced Donahue's visiting friends to some perfectly acceptable rillettes de crabe, and thereupon realised that rillettes are a hard thing to explain. They have no equivalent in English culinary idiom.

Further complicating the situation is the fact that rillettes de mer are, despite the shared term, quite differently composed from normal rillettes (of pork or duck or goose). Where the latter are a fatty, salty, but basically unseasoned meat paste, rillettes de mer are like little improvisational cocktail dips in which the mincy, best-left-unconsidered leftovers of seafood production are blended with a surprisingly omnivorous array of grandmotherly ingredients ranging from tarragon to cream to goat cheese to red pepper.

I've yet to encounter any truly mindblowing rillettes de mer, but they make for a refreshing alternative in wine bars like Caves de Reuilly where the other options are run-of-the-mill cheese and charcuterie. To his credit, Le Nen is aware his charcuterie suppliers are not spectacular at present and he's working on improving the bar's products.

The wine selection, happily, is already splendid. It's all the more appealing to me, right now, for being natural-agnostic: laudably balanced between identifiably natural wines, and quality wines from winemakers who for whatever reason have nothing to do with the natural wine scene.

Le Nen agrees that a background in well-made conventional wines is extemely helpful, if not outright crucial, for appreciation of the rather more limited spectrum of contemporary natural wines. But his selection also reflects an awareness of his outer-borough clientele's palates. Les Caves de Reuilly's website, similarly, offers a full-frontal assault of beginner-friendly wine education services. This sort of thing typically puts me off (particularly when coming from a relatively debutant caviste), but when combined with the freewheeling energy of the bar's terrace, it testifies to Le Nen's savvy in pitching to more than one clientele.

As long as warm weather holds, Les Caves de Reuilly is a geek wine bar inviting and spacious enough to accommodate aging parents or a stroller. How many neighorhoods have such a bar?

Les Caves de Reuilly
11, boulevard de Reuilly
75012 PARIS
Métro: Dugommier
Tel: 01 43 47 10 39

Related Links:

Other good 12ème spots:
Le Siffleur de Ballons
L'Ebauchoir

Given that this is a wine blog, I usually avoid posting on chef career moves. The practice risks stoking the already outsize demand in Paris for internationally-trained chefs who can legally work here. Additionally, there are other blogs following kitchen politics far better than I ever could.

But the recent hire of chef Svante Forstorp at ex-Pierre Jancou wine bar Vivant Cave seems unusually significant. Forstorp previously cooked in Paris at Café Smorgas, Aux Deux Amis, Bones, and Nuba, and has made friends everywhere along the way. He's a chef's chef, with a frank plating style and fondness for smoked salt.

Vivant Cave, for its part, was poised to become yet another pretty ex-Jancou restaurant shell, until Forstorp darkened the doorstep. Forstorp's characterful presence almost singlehandedly makes Vivant Cave a destination, paradoxically the best new restaurant of the much-fêted, meaningless rentrée without even being a new restaurant.

A visit the other night with my friend and editor Meg Zimbeck of Paris By Mouth began as a feast and turned into a bacchanal. Seemingly half the Paris wine and restaurant scene turned out to sample Forstorp's work-in-progress menu.

The good news begins before anything leaves the kitchen: prices seem to have come down slightly since the restaurant's previous incarnation. Gone are Jancou's perplexing stabs at pasta; replacing the Italian bent of the old menu is a magpie aesthetic that, while rooted in France, borrows from as far afield as Lebanon, Japan, and Forstorp's native Sweden.

A tomato salad with shiso leaves was literally smashing, a splendid example of Forstorp's effortless contemporaneity.

The tomatoes had been torn apart, as if they had, on their way to the plate, first passed through the earth's atmosphere. It's a complex gesture, tearing a tomato apart like this; it evinces a daring unconcern for the tomato's natural dimensions, and perhaps even a note of comical frustration with the tomatoes available in Paris. Those in the salad were of high if not stratospheric quality. Their preparation exceeded them brilliantly.

There are very few chefs whose work I'd bother dissecting in this way. Forstorp himself is a cerebral fellow though. I suspect it might carry him away at times. On the slim menu the night we went there were two separate colours of tuna, the sort of study in minor variation that chefs typically find more interesting than their clients.

To be fair, they were drastically different dishes. The thon rouge was relatively unsuccessful, salt-curing have rendered it slightly ear-like in texture, which jarred with desserty accompaniments of crême fraîche and lemon curd.

The thon blanc in seaweed sauce, on the other hand, was as hearty as it was nuanced, with a pleasantly swampy presentation that foregrounded a flavoursome roast courgette.

The first of many wines that evening was the most memorable for me: a keen, succulent, herbacious Viognier from young Ardechois winemaker Gregory Guillaume, who began his 3ha domaine in just 2011. The cuvée was quite aptly entitled "Lucky"; it seems providential indeed that Guillaume, in just his 3rd vintage, has made the best Ardechois Viognier outside of Andrea Calek's significantly pricier white. Sommelier David Benichou, formerly of New York's Ten Bells, deserves major credit for keeping the restaurant's wine program interesting.

The establishments Pierre Jancou sells typically congeal into formulaic luxury versions of their former greatness: see La Crèmerie, the self-replicating Racines restaurants, or, for that matter, Vivant Table, the unconvincing highbrow concept next door to Vivant Cave. They are fine places to consume fine product, but they often lack personality.

Vivant owner David Lanher (who also took Racines off Jancou's hands, and who maintains the nearby Restaurant Paradis) has neatly solved this problem at la cave by bringing on Forstorp. It's not a stretch to read this as acknowledgement, from an older guard of Paris restaurateurs, of the expanding influence of the little culinary expat network that links the kitchens of Au Passage, YARD, Bones, and now Vivant Cave.

You might imagine that James Henry, the chef responsable for the still-echoing success of Au Passage in summer of 2011, is smiling somewhere. And you'd be right. He was there that night too, supporting his friend.

Vivant Cave
43 rue des Petites Écuries
75010 PARIS
Tel: 01 42 46 43 55
Métro: Bonne Nouvelle

Related Links:

Vivant Cave during the Jancou era

When asked what makes a wine natural, I often reply that a wine is natural when it is bought by natural wine buyers. I'm only being half-facetious: Paris is blessed to be home to several generations of curmudgeonly gatekeepers to the natural wine scene, restaurateurs and cavistes who have been working to define what natural wine is for upwards of thirty years. This cliqueyness has its drawbacks - such as an incomprehensibility to outsiders, unenforcability, etc. - but it also creates a palpable sense of community in Paris.

If Le Rubis, a terrific, new-ish neighborhood bistrot by Sentier, largely escaped notice upon opening in April, it's because reviewers were unaware of its impeccable bona fides in the natural wine community. Or unaware of the value of such cred. Co-owner Marie Carmarans is the ex-wife of celebrated Aveyron winemaker Nicolas Carmarans, and together they were the second generation of ownership of legendary natural wine bistrot Café de la Nouvelle Mairie. What's more, she's often aided at Le Rubis by her husband, Michel Tolmer, a cult figure in his own right for being the illustrator behind the ubiquitous "Epaule Jété" poster that has become, throughout France, the easiest way to identify a natural wine establishment.

Along with co-owner Geraldine Sarfati and chef Roberta Tringale, Marie Carmarans has created the closest thing the right bank has to the 6ème's Café Trama : a refined, contemporary bistrot with the confidence and smarts to remain simple.

Le Rubis, confusingly, shares a name but nothing else with another Le Rubis in the 1èr arrondissement, a charming, stonklingly old-school Beaujolais bar run by Josette and Albert Prat. Here I might as well round out the elaborate intra-Parisian restaurant scene backround info and mention that Carmarans' Le Rubis took over a space on rue Léopold Bellan formerly occupied by natural wine bistrot L'Hédoniste, which restaurant I'd always found to be well-intentioned but overpriced.

Le Rubis chef Roberta Tringale's straight-faced cuisine is practically an inversion of L'Hédoniste's aspirational saucework. The spare presentation a plate of sautéed squid on my first visit made me blanche, thinking I'd accidentally ordered what was intended to be a diet-conscious dish. The squid, however, was perfectly tender and subtly seasoned, and needed no further adornment.

On another occasion - an office party I'd organised to celebrate the end of fashion week - the lucky half of my colleagues received richly flavourful Black Angus steaks, plated with similar simplicity.

Thrill-seeking critics might find the menu a bit ho-hum. Tant pis for them. I'd deem it a rare example of an unself-conscious, quality-oriented contemporary bistrot menu. Why are such menus rare? Because new business owners in Paris are presently fleeing the bistrot format, in favor of a photogenic menagerie of overpriced small-plate Japonica...

Le Rubis' service hours are less conventional. A relatively long lunch service is offered from Tuesday - Saturday, extending into apéro hours, but dinner is offered only Thursday and Friday. It's confusing to remember, and would seem to imply an unhurried approach to financial remuneration on the part of the ownership. So would the prices on the wine list, which are uniformly reasonable, with many good options in the 20-25€ range.

Languedoc winemaker Alain Allier's rosé cuvée "Galéjade" was in glowy form when I tasted it at lunch on Le Rubis' roomy terrace. A melon-friuted blend of Grenache and Cinsault that in 2013 showed less pithy oxygen-influence than I'd percieved in previous vintages, making it a fine addition to the perennially under-attended genre of turbid natural rosés.

And as our staff party wound down Marie produced a bottle of Antoine Arena's Bianco Gentile for us all to share, delighting us almost as much as her husband's improvised illustration on my copy of his book.

It was an immensely enjoyable evening by any measure. By that of office parties, which are typically strenuous, negotiation-intensive affairs, it was a dream. Le Rubis' staff are a model of warmth and reactivity, such that the event felt rather like business among friends. In the sense that we all knew the same circle of restaurateurs and winemakers, it very much was.

Lately I've come to believe that it is largely this sense of community - moreso even than the inherent qualitative or moral value of natural wine as an ethos - that is responsible for the success of natural wine in Paris. Your average drinker, in Paris as elsewhere, can't tell bubbly from bathwater. But it takes no special expertise to discern when one has entered a tight subcultural enclave. I suspect that, like myself, many clients return to natural wine establishments for just this reason. The familiar faces exert a human appeal. In such places one does not merely drink, one reaffirms one's place in a community; in going out, one feels very much at home.

Le Rubis
14, rue Léopold Bellan
75002 PARIS
Métro: Sentier
Tel: 09 84 39 42 49

Related Links:

As ever, my friend and occasional dining foil John Talbott has preceded me to Le Rubis. He seemed to appreciate the food but had a poor service experience.

Emmanuel Ruben, in his review of Le Rubis for Le Figaro, provides his readership with his usual one micron of poor judgment. "Readership" in this case is perhaps too strong a word; so is "review," and, for that matter, "judgment."

A significantly more informative, though no less critically suspect, piece on Le Rubis at the Glougueule website which sells Michel Tolmer's book.

A review of Le Rubis at Le Pourboire.

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