YOUPI ET VOILA--Hurray, and Here You Go! B-/C+

Photo @ Bob Peterson

   Just about the only enjoyable aspect of dinner at the Brasserie Balzar the other night was the wry, nimble and thoroughly professional service which animated an otherwise woefully mediocre and overpriced meal. What made this particular occasion all the more noticeable is that the prevailing service style in so many of the better and more interesting new restaurants in Paris these days lacks any trace of the same tonic and tenacious desire to please and the corollary desire to have a good time together that made this meal a perverse pleasure inspite of the insolently industrial quality of the food. For in France, good service is never a one-way street. In its old-school idiom, or the one I was inducted into over a long learning curve when I arrived in Paris twenty-five years ago, your waiter or waitress wanted both to charm and be charmed--to be sure, you weren't under any obligation to be charming, but the badinage of a successful meal, more common in bistros than in three-star restaurants but always present to some degree, informed every French meal.

  Now, though, this delightful wait style is becoming rare, as is any service style at all, a reflection of the fact that it seems to have been chucked out as silly, bourgeois, stuffy, or a combination of all three, or like, well, whatever. Hey, I'm here to bring you your food, okay? And if you're lucky, and I decide I sort of like you, I might be nice, but if not, I'm just here to bring you your food, okay? And don't think that just because you're paying, you've got any power over me, because I am really not that into serving you because I'm really not into service. You're no better than I am anyway, so don't even think of giving me a hard time, etc., etc. 

  Sigh. So much for what Americans used to call "Old World Charm." In restaurants like this--the newly opened Youpi et Voilà, for example, even if some of the food's good, you barely have the feeling of being in a restaurant. Rather, you've just gone somewhere to eat. So youpi et voilà, or hurray and here you go. Arriving here for dinner the other night with my friend David, we were hungry and in high spirits. I'd just seen his terrific new flat in the 11th, was happy for him, and also thrilled to finally be in Paris for a while after epic professional trips to Asia and South America, and I think that by showing me the apartment, he might have finally seen some light at the end of the long tortured tunnel that's any major renovation project.

  I also love this funky part of the 10th arrondissement, the blessedly less Bobo east bank of the Canal Saint Martin, and any opportunity to gawk at the former headquarters of the French Communist party, one of the most wonderfully weird buildings in Paris. I'd also read that chef Patrice Gelbart, mostly recently cooking in the Tarn, had recently done a guest stint at the wonderful Le Verre Volé, one of the best bistrots a vins in Paris, and that he uses assiduously sourced local-when-possible, almost unfailingly seasonal produce from Terroirs d'Avenir and other small influential provisioners. 

  Arriving, the small storefront dining room looked like many of the other great young-chef restaurants that have opened in Paris recently--Chatomat, Le Galopin, etc., and though it took forever for him to get around to us, our waiter was friendly when he finally showed up and sort of teasingly explained they only serve a single four-course tasting menu in the evening. We nodded. He grinned.... So, I paried, how would we know what wine to order with this mysterious meal.  "Oh, it's vegetables, fish and meat, with a dessert." 

  After a half-hour, our first course showed up--white asparagus with a coddled egg, a slice of delicious country ham from the Lot, and a scattering of chopped black olive, or a pleasant cameo of angelic springtime eating I've eaten in many other places. In the meantime, forty minutes passed, which was fine in a way, because I was enjoying our conversation about, among other things, how massively over-covered the Paris food scene is these days relative to the real interest or importance of what's going on here, but finally I was about to signal the waiter and find out what was going on, when he showed up. "Have you had the fish yet?" Nope. Fifteen minutes later, a small salad of shaved fennel with garlic flowers and a tiny piece of seared bonito arrived. It was fine, but hardly memorable, and by this time, the balking rhythm of this meal and cheerfully amateur and disorganized service was beginning to test our patience. Even though I strenuously dislike stuffy, formal, pretentious service, and am, like David, inclined to be very forgiving of the staff or kitchen to a fault, because I've been the one standing, the one cooking, it was exasperating that our meal had become sort of a very slow rolling catastrophe.

  When it finally showed up, the pan-fried pigeon on a bed of bok choy and wheat berries in a red pepper coulis was delicious. The excellent quality bird had been cooked rare, and the garnishes flattered the thick putty texture of the meat and deepened its fine wild flavor. A glass of red wine, maybe a nice Minervois, would have been terrific with this beast, but I knew we'd be done with the dish before it arrived, and it was getting late.

  It had taken two hours and fifteen minutes to reach this dish, and even though I can spend hours on end at the table, this kind of short-order cooking didn't justify so much downtime. Dessert, a soggy slice of griddled spice cake with rhubarb compote was dull, and we paid the bill, and dashed off into the night in different directions to catch the last Metro. 

 I've since spent a week puzzling over this meal, and have concluded the crew here would be much happier if they were cooking and serving their friends instead of running a general-public restaurant, and also that the metier of waiter or waitress that France so brilliantly perfected over the course of many centuries is in danger. Oddly enough, in fact, with the exception of a brilliant maitre d'hotel at the new fish resaurant Helen in the 8th arrondissement, the last few times I've experienced the sort of serious, charming service that used to be a signature of Gallic gastronomy were in New York and Buenos Aires. 

Youpi et Voilà, 8 rue Vicq d'Azir, 10th, Tel. 01-83-89-12-63. Metro: Goncourt, Château Landonor Colonel Fabien. Closed Sunday and Monday. Lunch menu 20-25€; plat du jour 15 €- prix-fixe dinner menu 36€. 

LES JALLES--A Cool-Operator Bistro de Luxe, B-

   Arriving for dinner at Les Jalles with Julie, a delightful English woman who lived in Paris for many years before recently moving to her husband's native Sydney, and my Alabamian pal Judy, I parted the heavy velvet drapes at door of this storefront restaurant in the rue des Capucines and immediately drank in the decorously provocative atmosphere of a pleasantly perfervid dining room with good lighting--maybe even the best lighting I've seen in a new Paris restaurant for many years, engineered to induce a certain sensualist's nostalgia for the twenties Paris of writer Djuna Barnes and Nancy Cunard. The mis-en-scene was so lush, in fact, that I instantly thought of the brilliant photographs of Brassai in his book Paris de Nuit and also of the harmlessly risque Proustian vintage 'art' postcards that once got a rise out of corpulent old gents with pince nez. So this artfully staged space intends to flatter anyone who walks through the door by casting them into a public tableaux that's knowingly freighted with sexual mystery and, surely to a lesser degree, possibility.

   Thing is, the three hungry and bedraggled journalists we were didn't add any kindling to this beautifully laid but unignited fire, and most of the other clients didn't either, since they seemed to have come through hotel concierges or because they work for the banks and luxury goods companies in nearby offices and know proprietresses Magalie Marian and Delphine Alcover's other terrific restaurant, the Bistrot Volnay, just around the corner. The Bistrot Volnay often has an attractive and appealingly louche crowd, so perhaps these types will try the new address, if they're not scared off by the desire-wilting prices practiced here.

  But wait! What about the food? Oh, right, the food. Well, as none of us work for BNP Parisbas or have the evident wealth of the Middle Eastern gent who was drinking something vivid and green on crushed ice in a snifter with dinner and who kept showing off the emergency navigation locator system on a steel watch as fat as an oyster, we dithered like pensioner librarians, constructing our meals from the tarif backwards, rather than the poetry forward. So Julie demured on a starter, which was a shame, and Judy and I both had the baby fava bean veloute with ravioli stuffed with fresh chevre and sarriette at 15 Euros a serving. 

  The soup was pleasant enough, but needed salt and more depth. While our plates were being cleared, however, I saw our main courses already coming up through the window pass of the kitchen, and stepped on the brakes. We weren't, I told the waiter, in a hurry, and in fact, as a group of friends who hadn't seen each other for a very longtime, we truly didn't want to be rushed. He shrugged--"But your plates are ready, and the service is like that in France."  Or you're a dim-witted foreigner who wouldn't know better. But we did actually know better, and we well and fully stopped the insanity-in-the-making of an hour-long dinner. 

  When we discussed it, the ladies wondered if they weren't trying too hard to turn tables, but I didn't think that was it. Rather, the newly opened kitchen hasn't found its rhythm yet, and neither has the service--I haven't been in a Paris dining room in years where there were so many staff, racing about and almost bumping into each other at the same time that wine remained unpoured and bread baskets empty. I also think this place has been doped by a few very good early reviews and has gotten a bit ahead of itself.

   After our main courses arrived, though, a ripple  of private pleasure passed around our table, since the food here is actually quite good. Though the portion was scanty--they were scallops, rather than the usual nice fist-sized organ, my ris de veau were at once crunchy--the breading, and creamy, the veal sweetbreads themselves, something only a very talented chef could pull off, and Judy loved her big thick pearly white chunk of cod with cooked and raw (thin shavings) of asparagus in a well-made jus de viande.  Julie was a bit less enthusiastic about her steak, which came with a potato gratin rather parsimoniously garnished with morel mushrooms for 33 Euros. 

  We liked our Givry, one of the least expensive reds on their list but still in the 40 Euro range, and service was very pleasant for having been tinkered with. Dessert? No, that didn't come to pass, but here's the menu:

  As it was, Julie was off to meet friends for a nightcap, and no one really wanted to be hit up for another 14 Euros. "Restaurant prices have gone through the roof this year in Paris," Judy observed, while we waited for her bus, "And apart from the perspicacious Philippe Toinard in A Nous Paris, the food critics don't quite seem to want to understand that anything over 50 Euros is quite a lot of money for most people for a single meal." She was right, of course, which made me a bit melancholy on the walk home. If the food was good, what I really liked at Les Jalles was the atmosphere, which isn't something I'll be able to avail myself of very often. 

Les Jalles, 14 rue des Capucines, 2nd, Tel: 01-42-61-66-71.  Métro: Opéra or Madeleine. Open daily for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Average a la carte 65 Euros.

AXURIA--The Discreet Charm of a Neighborhood Restaurant, B+

   If you write about food, there just have to be alot of feral moments, or hours, every week where your passion for taste trumps absolutely everything else you should be doing. These can't be planned, they just happen. And I love it when they do. Since it's been raining and cold in Paris for weeks on end now, the other day, I fired up the computer, made a double espresso, read the NY Times, the Washington Post, and lots of other stuff, went back into the kitchen to make another tall Moroccan tea glass full of nerve thunder, and suddenly found myself spending the next three hours cooking up an impromptu black-bean soup that used up a lot of new garlic, two must-eat-now fennel bulbs, lots of pimenton, and all of the stock that I'd made from simmering a winter's worth of old Parmesan rinds with a ham bone and some fennel seeds for an entire Sunday. I didn't use a recipe, I just cooked on a hunch, adding a can of Italian plum tomatoes, some of the wild oregano I'd harvested in Greece last summer, and a little bit of thyme. 

  I chopped, and I stirred, and I skimmed, and I tasted and tasted, and finally, once the beans were soft, I went back to work, let the whole shebang cool down, and got a lot of work done knowing that I'd have a pretty amazing lunch ahead of me. And the soup was just superb, so good, in fact, that I probably should have written down what I was doing, but I didn't, so it'll be sort of a one-off until the next time I find myself with all of the same ingredients and the same manic desire to cook.

  In a similar vein, if you stop by this site from time to time, you know that I go to restaurants a lot, and you also know that I love them, but the vigilance of eating in a restaurant for professional reasons is often at odds with the off-the-cuff pleasure of sitting down at the table with friends and just having a good meal, a good time. What reminded me of this was the terrific dinner I had the other night at Axuria. One of Bruno's oldest friends in the world, a lovely lady pharmacist with whom he grew up in the same small city in the north of France, lives just across the street from this restaurant and runs the nearby Pharmacie Boucicault. So I think she was probably the one who mentioned that a good restaurant had popped up their neighborhood. One way or another, Bruno's working like a mad man on a huge consulting project in the 15th right now, and often runs late. Since I'm writing another book and he's so busy, we actually even end up with an empty fridge from time to time, which is just about the worst thing that can happen in a life where you and your partner are sane, solvent and heathy.

  But when it sort of did the other night, I suggested we go to Axuria, since my Metro ride from home would give him the time to finish his work by about 9.15pm, and then we'd hopefully meet for a good feed. Arriving, the trendy lounge decor of this restaurant made me a little wary, but the welcome was warm and a quick eyeball of the menu made me hopeful. Agreeing to knock the edges of our mutually macramed nerves, we ordered glasses of Champagne, which was excellent and came with hot miniature grated-cheese topped wands of pastry and excellent ham. The dining room was packed, too, always a good sign, and from where I was sitting, I was also able to see just how successful the service was. Even though there were probably 60 people in the room, no one ever poured their own wine, faced an empty bread basket or idled too long over an empty plate.

  We ordered, and since they were so busy, we started with an excellent the-kitchen-needs-time complimentary first course of fish soup that tipped its hat at chef Olivier Amestoy's origins for having such a racey but quiet nervous system of piment d'Espelette at the bottom of deeply reduced and beautifully made fish stock. The white Gaillac, one of the best buys on the list at 27 Euros and a favorite of mine, was a charmer with the soup, too, but also made us happy with our starters, an exquisite composition of seared foie gras and artichokes barigoule for me, and a swell dish of "BBQ" gambas (prawns) on a bed of quinoa for the infinitely more health-alert than I am Bruno (I'd hop into the Seine tomorrow morning if I ever saw myself headed for an 'assisted living' situation where the bread comes sealed in little plastic pillows, rice pudding is the recurring dessert, and a request for a glass of wine would elicit a lot of you-naughty-oldster tutting from a bunch of nurses who were otherwise quietly doing tequilla shots around the corner).

 

  Health--the whole concept winds me up, since I've stopped doing so many things I used to enjoy to kneel at its altar. In any event, I can't imagine that my brilliant and long-suffering MD ("Alec, more exercise, less cheese, less wine, less meat, less salt, less...") would have ever raised an eyebrow at the likely farmed but still good sea bass stuffed with herbs and Swiss chard in a pastry wrapper on a bed f potato puree that I had as a main course, or the unrelentingly nutrition-conscious Bruno's swordfish steak in a lemony sauce with spring vegetables. Both were impeccably well-cooked--we actually discussed the advisability of the swordfish, since it always comes to the table overcooked, and beautifully seasoned.

  When the amiable Monsieur Amestoy came out to greet a couple of tables--aside from his good cooking, this intimate place in a quiet residential neighborhood only stands a chance of working if the locals like him, I nearly grabbed his apron strings to have a chat. Turns out this awfully nice guy is a good-natured Basque who most recently cooked at Chez Les Anges before deciding to go out on his own.

  So how did we end up here, the charming Monsieur Amestoy parried, and Bruno grabbed the bone and told him about his dear friend the pharmacist, whom he of course knew and liked. Echoing things that she'd said about running a successful neighborhood business, he told us that he'd wanted to drop the souffle that Bruno was imminently to be served from the menu, but the regulars were having none of that. "What I know is that good cooking is maybe half of what will make this restaurant work," said Amestoy. "You can't run a successful restaurant without liking people and wanting them to be happy, and you also can't forget that the meal begins the moment someone comes through the front door. Do you feel relaxed? Do you feel happy? This sets up your meal, bien sur."

 

  Whie we were so happily chattering away, our desserts showed up, and M. Amestoy immediately excused himself. "Enjoy, please, while they're fresh and warm," and so we did. I loved my moelleux caramel au beurre salé, crème glacée noisettes, although I sort of wanted to see a flood of melted salted butter caramel spill into the plate when I cut into it--in fact, I'd like to die in a flood of melted salted butter caramel, but it was still quite good. And Bruno had the souffle, and I could see by the furrowed V between his brows that he didn't want to be interrupted during the first minute or two after he'd doused it with the accompanying shot of Grand Marnier. So I waited. "You know what's nice is that I finally enjoy souffles. All of those years in the north of France when they were the baited breathe grande finale to first communion lunches and other soi-disant important meals almost ruined them for me by association, but they're actually such a treat." I dug spoon in too, and yes, they are awfully nice. Just like a really serious, well-drilled, and honest neighborhood restaurant in Paris, Axuria, for example. It's a place I'd cross town to eat at again soon, especially with our most local friends Carole and Laurent.

Axuria, 54 avenue Felix Faure, 15th, Tel. 01-45-04-57-59. Metro: Boucicault. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Two-course lunch menu 22 Euros, Two-course dinner menu 26 Euros (35 Euros for three courses). Average a la carte 40 Euros.

THE BEEF CLUB--A Mis-Steak in Les Halles, C-

   For the last year or so in Paris, there's been a sudden curious flowering of 'Anglo-Saxon' (the French often benightedly insist on using this medieval term when referring to almost any English speaking country, even Nigeria) restaurant concepts that run from burger trucks and joints to Upper East Side style dating restaurants (La Maison Mere) to some happily very decent Mexican places, with a couple of tedious mini-pastry trendlets (cupcakes, whoopie pies) thrown in for good measure. Since I love a good burger, I've been delighted by the arrival of La Camion qui Fume and Blend, and generally bemused by the profusion of Caesar salads and cheesecake all over Paris, since in the main, this is a harmless set of trends that mostly bespeak the fact that Parisian Bobos really love New York City.

  After dinner at the new The Beef Club the other night, however, I'm starting to have some serious doubts about what this trend means for Paris. If the food scene in every major city is in constant evolution, Paris isn't every major city. It's much smaller than London and New York, and without the same jumped-up financial sectors as those two cities, there's less money to spin the wheels of the local restaurant industry, which is already struggling for a variety of distinctly local factors like the moronic 35 hour work week (whoever France's next president may be, I hope they'll renounce this daft Ruby Goldberg feint at economics once and for all).

  What this means is that a big trend here has a lot more impact that it would in a larger city with a more lavish expense-account dining culture. A perfect--and rather sorry--example is the fact that almost everytime a neighborhood cafe or brasserie is remodeled these days, it turns up with a faux Costes brothers restaurant style decor. Though they're definite signs Parisians are finally becoming bored by the Costes restaurants, the ripple effect of their success is still being copied everywhere. They were the ones who pioneered the local idea of well-sourced brand-name products instead of real cooking, and they also launched a whole sad battery of recipes that are more about assembling things on plates--salmon tartare, sliced tomatoes and mozzarella, etc., or just plain applying some heat here and there than are about the transformational art of cooking. And the new wave of Paris burger restaurants and steakhouses are basically just taking a leaf from the same playbook, since they're all about prestige sourcing, too--meat from star butchers like Yves-Marie Le Bourdonnec or Hugo Desnoyer, plus a smattering of tantalizing culinary snobberies like moutarde de Meaux or Ogleshield cheese, and the smart art of grilling.

  So the menu at The Beef Club offers a rather wilting and warning boilerplate of things that are likely to become ubiquitous in Paris, and what bothers me most about this is that they're not French. I'm very far from being a gastronomic protectionist, but I honestly don't understand why the beef served at The Beef Club comes from farmer Tim Wilson's farm in Yorkshire (yeah, yeah, yeah, it's grass-fed and the breeds are different from what you find in France, but so what--give me Bazas beef or Charolais or Blonde d'Aquitaine any day), but most of all I just don't get this completely misbegotten and off-kilter version of a New York City steakhouse cross-bred with some wispy English version of same  and then lightly extruded through a French sensibility. Paris already has several superb steak restaurants, like Le Severo, so why do we need the Peter Luger modeled, super market-researched The Beef Club when what we're really short of in the City of Light these days are good French bistros?

  On the basis of the crowd there the other night--lots of younger affluent but fashionably bedraggled Parisians who checked their iPhones and Blackberries constantly through dinners with which they mostly drank Coca-Cola Light, I am light years away from being part of the target demographic. Still, I might have liked this place if the food had been better than average and the service half-decent. Since starters were expensive and neither original nor very appealing--Caesar salad, Scotch Egg with salad, and grilled rabbit livers, among others, we went directly to the main courses. 

   I had a very sorry 23 Euro "Beef Burger" (as the Brits call hamburgers, a puzzling but precious little beat of verbal snobbery), a tasteless and rather overcooked burger on a stale roll that exhibited almost none of the promised garnishes of "bacon, grilled onions, lettuce, pickles, red leicester, ogleshield and sauce maison au whisky" and a side of ho-hum frites cooked in duck fat. The others had steaks, which were good, but in no way memorable, and we drank the cheapest red on the wine list, a Gigondas at 29 Euros. 

  To be fair, service was doubtless off its game because the restaurant had been reconfigured to accomodate two large tables of French food bloggers, but the amateurish and absent-minded behavior of everyone who waited on us drove Michael and Dorie right up the wall. We glanced at the menu for dessert--cheesecake, bien sur; chocolate mousse with crushed pecans and salted caramel sauce; or a fruit salad on a bed of passionfruit mousse, and decided to pass.

  "I hate this restaurant," the normally sugar-sprinkled Dorie exclaimed while we were waiting for the bill, which a waitress finally deposited on the table with an, "Et voila!" 

  With an an average meal running at least 60 Euros a head at The Beef Club, I couldn't help but comparing this place to La Rotonde, where I'd had dinner a few nights before with Bruno. There, in a grand old dining room with a decor recalling the first-class dining carriages of another era--brass coat rails and fringed silk-shaded lamps, it was a pleasure to sink into an atmosphere so profoundly Parisian. To be sure, tourists fill the glassed in terrace of this historic Montparnasse brasserie, but the low-lit booths in back are still the haunt of a cross-section of Gallic captains of industry and Left Bank power brokers, and the impeccably calibrated service--polite, alert, vaguely deferential and exquisitely wry, couldn't possibly be more old school French, which meant that I just lapped it up.  

  I'd hadn't been to La Rotonde in at least twenty years, and so had almost no memory of the food whatsoever. And truth be told, I wasn't expecting much, because I never expect much from Paris brasseries anymore. So what were we doing here? Bruno was craving oysters, I was hungry for meat, it was late, and we'd just been to a gallery show of a friend's photographs around the corner. So Bruno went with the 39 Euro menu, which brought him six Quiberon oysters, sea bass in preserved-lemon sauce on a bed of wild rice and one of the best millefeuilles I've had in Paris for a very longtime.

  I went with some oysters, too, and then had an outstanding steak tartare made with beef from butcher Hugo Desnoyer and so generously served I almost couldn't finish it. The tartare came with beautiful little mesclun salad and freshly made frites, and even though the ever dieting Bruno wasn't drinking that night in penance for a lot of Sagrantino recently consumed in Umbria, I was able to make myself happy with a little 25 cl carafe of white Macon to start, and then the same measure of a good inky Colombo cotes du Rhone before I forced Bruno to share his millefeuille with me.

  You won't get to eyeball the millefeuille, because our pretty blonde waitress knowingly and neatly divided it in half before she served us, and it looked so good that I immediately devoured my half before thinking to record it for posterity. If the menu at La Rotonde name dropped a bit--the Saint Marcellin was from the cranky La Mere Richard in Lyon, sorbets from Berthillon, veal chop and a few other tasty morsels from Hugo Desnoyer, what I quickly understood was that the quality of this restaurant is so supervailing you really don't even need these hang tags. I can't remember the last time the little playing-card squares of rye bread served with an order of oysters were actually good--they're invariably stale and taste like baked dust, but here the bread was delicious. So the next time I'm hankering after a meaty comfort-food feed, I'll give a definite miss to all of the new 'Anglo-Saxon' restaurants in Paris, and head for La Rotonde, where I'll order the 39 Euro menu, and have the following meal.

1) Terrine du moment de Gilles Vérot

2) Gigot d’Agneau de Lozère (Hugo Desnoyer) rôti aux herbes, jus et garniture

3) Baba au vieux rhum ambré 

I'm really looking forward to it, too.

The Beef Club, 58 rue Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1st, Tel. 09-52-52-89-34. Metro: Les Halles, Louvre-Rivoli. Dinner only, Tuesday to Saturday. Average 60 Euros. 

La Rotonde, 105 boulevard Montparnasse, 6th, Tel. 01-43-26-48-26. Metro: Vavin. Open daily. Prix-fixe menu 39 Euros. Average a la carte 50 Euros.

SEMILLA--Really Good Contemporary French Food in Saint Germain des Prés, B+

    Since everyone laps up charming Miami born Juan Sanchez and New Zealander Drew Harre, the very successful business duo behind the excellent La Dernière Goutte wine shop and good Cosi sandwich shop in Saint Germain des Prés, honest opinions about the food at their third shingle--the very popular anglophone expat hang-out galore Fish la Boissonerie are usually exchanged in whispers, behind closed doors, and most definitively not for attribution. It's not that that the food at Fish isn't good, but rather, well, um, er, hmmmm, it's that it's pretty dull in view of all the other amazing options available in Paris, and yet somehow the personal popularity of the owners has given this place a permanent Pass Go card. And this is something that's always been puzzling to me, since I know how discerning both of them are about what they eat and drink.

  So it was with a somewhat anguished reluctance to be critical that I met my friend Christian for dinner at Juan and Drew's new place, Semilla, just a few doors away from Fish la Boissonerie, the other night. I really wanted the food to be good so that I wouldn't enter that awkward twisting-in-the-wind space between being a good egg--they're too many fawning Paris food websites around, and doing my job as a writer. The problem, you see, is that if the food hadn't been good, I'd have to say so irregardless of what feathers might be ruffled in the small pond of people who write about restaurants in English in Paris. So do I like being critical--not especially, but it comes with the territory, and I got used to it a longtime ago, since I learned this job while working for one of the best  restaurant critics to have come along in my lifetime, Ruth Reichl, of the late and but still lamented GOURMET Magazine. 

  Since Christian likes white Cheverny, we tucked into a carafe of same--wines on the terrific list at Semilla, which means 'seed' in Spanish, come by the glass, carafe and bottle and are well-chosen and reasonably priced, especially for this expensive Paris turf. Since we hadn't seen each other in ages, we were chatting up a storm and almost chronically incapable of paying attention to the menu and ordering dinner, but then the somewhat theatrical impatience of the waiter, who had been here since the days that this space was the never very good Le Temps Perdu, brought us in for a landing. 

  Okay, so we'd start with half portions of the smoked salmon and the Corsican charcuterie from Pascal Fiori, and then share an order of the griddled shitake mushrooms, before rather unimaginatively both having the blanquette de veau with a side of ratte potatoes with braised garlic. To be sure, there were lots of other terrific sounding dishes on the menu--among them, a rib steak for two with bordelaise sauce, squid risotto with a persillade, and yellow pollack with celery puree and meat jus, but since both of us had been traveling non-stop for the previous couple of weeks, this was one meal where we wanted to eat what we wanted to eat (I remain alarmingly convinced that I consumed at least an entire cow during my recent trip to South America). And in the meantime, this place looked great, with big exposed shiny metal ventilation ducts overhead and exposed stone walls, or more new Barcelona bistro than Paris actually, and the crowd was lively, keen and attractive. In fact for a brand new restaurant, this place already felt like a neighborhood institution, which was very telling.

   I could easily have eaten a platter of the nice meaty shitake mushrooms, but we decorously made due with three, which were dressed Spanish style with good oil, Xeres vinegar and chives, and then we greedily tucked into one of the best blanquette de veau I've ever had, tender veal in a silken gently acidulated sauce with shavings of green asparagus, fava beans and other Spring vegetables. This dish was so good, in fact, that I momentarily drifted out of our conversation, carried downstream by the thought that this is a restaurant that I know I'll be eating in often during the months to come and so really looking forward to seeing how the menu evolves through the seasons. I was also musing that this just might be the best new Sunday night address in Paris when Christian lasooed me back to our conversation. "This is just so good," he said, noting that it was the first time his appetite had quickened since having caught a bug while traveling in Asia.

   So now I was curious about who was in the kitchen and asked the heroically theatrical waiter. He explained that it was a young team of chefs from the first-rate Ecole Ferrandi, which is probably where I'd go in Paris today if I wanted a serious professional culinary formation, under the auspices of Meilleur Ouvrier de France (MOF) Eric Trochon: Somehow this didn't surprise me, because this food was so fresh, sincere, tender and young. Desserts sound terrific, too--citrus-fruit soup with orange-flower ice cream, shortbread with lemon cream and meringue, aloe vera cream with exotic fruits and a caramel tuile, but lavishly well fed and happy, we decided to share a nice assortment of cheeses from Quatrehomme and take a walk on the sweet side of things next time round. One way or another, this is a terrific restaurant, and a stand-out in a city where there's a brilliant and ever burgeoning offer of cosmopolitan bistro cooking with good old-fashioned French bones.

Semilla, 54 rue de Seine, 6th, Tel. 01-43-54-34-50 . Metro: Mabillon, Odéon & Saint-Germain des Prés. Lunch menu 19 € (starter, main course), dessert 8 €, a la carte 20-50 €.