L'AFFABLE--Good Modern Bistro Cooking but Lacking Affability, B-

 

  While Yves Camdeborde rightly gets major credit for brilliantly shaking up the definition of what a Parisian bistro should and could be when he opened the original La Reglalade in 1992, there were lots of other places that were pushing the envelope in Paris at the same time. On of them was L'Oeillade (The Wink) in the rue de Saint Simon in the 7th. I was living in the rue du Bac then, and went to L'Oeillade often when it first opened, because the chef so deftly applied the best innovations of la nouvelle cuisine (remember that old chestnut?) to traditional bistro cooking with always interesting and occasionally delicious results. Or to wit, he served  stock-based sauces rather than cream-enriched ones, made liberal use of fresh herbs, reduced the cooking times of meat, fish and vegetables, and didn't hesitate to jolt a traditional French recipe with herbs, spices or ingredients from foreign kitchens. In particular, I remember a sublime saute of veal and al dente Spring vegetables brightened by a generous pinch ras el-hanout, the profoundly aromatic blend of spices used in the Moroccan kitchen. 

 

  Unfortunately, L'Oeillade eventually developed sort of an arch vieux garcon (batchelor) personality and the prices went up a lot, so I stopped going. I guess I wasn't the only one either, since it closed down sometime back, but this affluent neo-aristocratic corner of Paris desperately needed a good bistro, so I wasn't suprised when a friend who still lives in the neighborhood--the brilliant Franco-Portuguese daughter of my old concierge who's now a very successful business lawyer, mentioned that the lights had gone at these premises again and suggested dinner.

 

  Her and my friendship blossomed inspite of her fiendishly nasty mother, who was my concierge for years and who has now retired to Porto, because I used to give her all of my old English-language magazines when she was in high school and studying l'anglais and also during long lazy August morning chats when we were often the only people in the building back in the days when Paris went into a month-long summertime coma. Ana loves to read; I love to read. She loves good food; I'm obsessed by it, etc., so eventually a real friendship was born despite the fact that my land lady somehow got wind of our having become pals and told me in incredulous tones that becoming friends with your concierge's daughter is a real ça ne se fait pas, or something that just isn't done. So another thing Ana and I would seem to share is a certain social seditiousness.

 

  In any event, the new place is called L'Affable, and it looked affable indeed when I showed up for dinner the other night, with a great new decor of milk-glass globe lamps and geranium-colored banquettes and an oh-so-7eme crowd of loden coat, cashmere sweater, Moncler parka and Hermes scarf wearers of various ages and both sexes. There was a real buzz in the room, too, but even though Ana and I were fifteen minutes late after having had a glass of wine in a cafe nearby first, the owlish owner told us our table wasn't ready and walked away, which hardly got things off to an affable start. There was no one at the bar to get a glass of wine from, so we stood and chatted rather awkwardly for another fifteen minutes and finally I suggested that we decide on a plan B if we weren't seated within another fifteen minutes. 

 

  Happily, we were, and our waitress was delightful. She apologized for the wait, offered us glasses of very good Pouilly Fume, and set us up right away with excellent hot bread and very good butter. Ana started with a superb terrine de foie de volaille that was brilliant seasoned with a crushed five-spice blend (fennel, star anise, Szechuan pepper, cinnamon and cloves), while I went with a curious sounding steamed egg with salmon, which turned out to be delicious. The egg and several thick chunks of salmon were steamed, garnished with a foamy cream sauce and sprinkled with crushed bacon. This dish was so good, in fact, that I'm sure I'll attempt to recreate it myself, since it'd be a terrific main course for a weekend brunch.

 

  Our 23 Euro bottle of Bordeaux, one of their cheapest bottles, was excellent, too, and reminded me that I have to make more of an effort to overcome my reflex to drink Rhone Valley wines and embrace the Bordelais. Between courses, I sporadically eavesdropped on a spirited and very interesting conversation about the new French version of the Huffington Post at the table next to us--this quartet had trouble imagining how the admirable Anne Sinclair, Dominique Strauss-Kahn's long-suffering wife, could possibly do an objective job, but I never missed a word of Ana's hilarious accounts of her frequent business trips to Saudi Arabia and Qatar--she goes so often that actually owns one of the bizarre full-body swimming costumes women must wear to swim in public there, and her frustrations at not being taken seriously by the Middle Eastern men she often works with, and we also talked up a storm about food and wine, as we always do.

  

 

  I also found myself hoping that my main course--Argentine beef filet with a citrus vinaigrette, would be as good as my starter, and especially since I'd rather have had the more interesting sounding pork belly with a salsify tatin, but that was sold out by the time we were seated. Well, the beef was excellent--very rare, tender and full of flavor in a light lime vinaigrette with slivered snow peas (mange tout) mixed with bean sprouts and crushed peanuts, a terrific garnish, and Ana loved her grilled scallops with lozenges of roasted red beet in a tangy and light-as-down yuzu fumet. No photos of same, because someone well-known in the room apparently had a fit when he or she saw me wielding a camera--I suspect L'Afffable has instantly become popular both with politicians from the nearby Assemblee Nationale as a place to dine with other pols and/or their mistresses and probably also a locally living celebrity or two. But I did manage a last snap of the friendly folks on the other side of us.

  

  We finished up with a fine plate of cheeses from the nearby and tres snob Bathelemy for me and a pear poached in spiced red wine with excellent shortbread ice cream for Ana. This was intelligent, imaginative, well-prepared food, so I finally asked the waitress who was in the kitchen, and she explained that chef Jean-François Pantaleon had previously cooked at Apius in the 8th and had teamed up with the owlish guy at the door who wasn't very affable--Olivier Helion, to create this chic little bistro that's a gang-busters success. 

 

  Over coffee, I asked after Ana's mother, as I always do, and we had a good laugh, as we always do, since this subject is the only taboo between us. I rather suspect that I was the proxy for the fury Maman felt when the Porto cobbler she was madly in love with as a young woman moved to Brazil with a policeman rather than sucuumbing to her charms, but who's to say. And don't even think of asking me how I found this out.

  

   Walking home on a rainy night after dinner, I mused over the cooking at L'Affable, which, while modern and pleasant, certainly isn't breaking any new ground. Instead what it reveals is how much the Parisian definition of bistro comfort food has evolved during the last twenty years. In 1992, almost no one had ever heard of Tonka beans (the sweet vanilla tasting bean that's so very modish in Paris right now), appearing on the chalkboard menu as a foamy emulsion on half-salted cod steak, or the combava, a sort of gnarly lime-like citrus fruit, that was used in the sauce on my beef. If the lessons of nouvelle cuisine first began to be well and truly integrated into modern French bistro cooking twenty years ago, a sourcing revolution has made the world's produce affordable to almost any Parisian chef and an increasingly well-traveled and novelty oriented public is ever on the alert for exotic new tastes and textures. Contemporary French bistro cooking has thus become so profoundly cosmopolitan that is runs a vague but still acceptable risk of becoming deracinated.

 

  So would I go back to L'Affable. Well, yes, I probably would, with my trailing reluctance being about their prices, which are stiff, and the hospitality style. The waitresses are charming and hard-working but a small stylish Left Bank table like this one needs seriously charming and customer-oriented service if it's going to turn into a long-running address.

L'Affable, 10 rue de Saint-Simon, 7th, Tel. 01-42-22-01-60. Metro: rue du Bac. Closed Sunday and Monday. Lunch menu 26 Euros, average dinner a la carte 50 Euros.

LES DELICES DE SHANDONG--At Last, Superb Chinese Food in Paris, A-/B+

 

  Before I extol Les Delices de Shandong in the 13th arrondissement, it's obvious that I should offer a glimpse of my credentials as a critic of Chinese cooking, in this case, the superb regional kitchen of Shan Dong. Alas, as much as I feel qualified to write authoritatively on the American, British, French, Italian, Spanish and other Western kitchens, it's best to admit that my knowledge of Chinese cooking is rather infantile, or to wit, it's based very much on a personal primal reaction to what tastes good. Oh, to be sure, I grew up eating, and loving, 'Chinese' food of a sort, since Sunday night take-out meals from the excellent 'West Lake' in downtown Westport, Connecticut next to the public library, and the also good 'Golden Door' restaurant in a shopping center on U.S. 1, were a treat I craved as a suburban child with an insatiable hunger for new tastes and flavors, textures and ingredients.

 

  Mom would save the printed takeout menu from one order to the next in a drawer next to the wall-mounted phone in the kitchen, and around about 7pm on a Sunday, I'd poke my head around the corner every five minutes to see if she was sitting at the kitchen table filling out the menu before calling in the order. The only consolation for me if she wasn't making fat gray Xs with a well gnawed yellow pencil was the possibility we'd be getting pizza instead--Mom understandably felt that she deserved a night off from shopping and cooking for a family of six, so Sunday was often takeout night, and the promise of favorite foreign foods blunted the terrible melancholy I always felt on the 7th day of the week. 

 

  We almost always had the same things, too: egg drop soup, egg rolls, shrimp toast, barbecued pork spare ribs, fried rice, Moo Goo Gai Pan (an Americanized version of a Cantonese dish that involved chicken with mushrooms, bamboo shoots, snow peas {mange toute}, and water chestnuts in a tame chicken-broth based sauce), egg foo yung, shrimp with cashew nuts, and broccoli, I think, which no one ever ate, with a grand finale of fortune cookies that no one actually ever ate either. These were great kitchen table meals with plastic packets of the hot Chinese mustard my father liked, sweet 'duck' sauce,' soy sauce and the food packed in waterproof folded square white paper boxes with thin wire handles. LIttle did I know that most of what we were eating was heavily Americanized Cantonese cooking, and in fact, my education in Chinese gastronomy got muscled out of the way in the 70s and 80s by the arrival of lots of other foreign restaurants in Westport--a couple of terrible Mexican restaurants, a prissy French place called Bon Appetit that had--get this, sea salt on its tables, and a flock of salad-bar-anchored steakhouses with Olde Taverne style decors and big pepper grinders on the tables. Amazingly enough, Westport even had a Bulgarian restaurant, the Cafe Varna, where we had cub scout dinners that left a lot of little boys politely alarmed by stuffed grape leaves and other Balkan fare.

 

  Aside from a few shocking forays to restaurants in Boston and New York's Chinatowns as a college student--'real' Chinese food was almost alarming for being so much more vivid--I mean, the chicken tasted like chicken, it wasn't until I moved to New York after college and was living on the Upper West Side that my Chinese culinary education advanced, and then it was in the blaze of hot peppers unleashed on Manhattan by the sudden popularity of Szechuan cooking, which made everyone rather embarrassedly aware that China had regional kitchens like, um, Italy, and that what we'd thought was Chinese food was tasty but timid stuff shrewdly edited to politely tantalize our wan palates. The Cuban Chinese food in the neighborhood was a fascinating red herring, though, and occasionally, I'd trek down to Chinatown with other broke young friends.

 

  I don't think I advanced much, however, until the brilliant and courtly editor for whom I was editorial assistant at Random House invited me out for lunch on a long ago birthday. It was a beautiful Fall day, but I labored in the space of a sudden ill-defined social occasion to create conversation that I thought would interest him as we walked up Third Avenue and then cut across to Shun Yee Palace, where I ate my first Peking duck, a dish so good that I stopped caring if my conversation with a man my father's age seemed smart or interesting and just ate, greedily wrapping duck, crispy duck skin and finely chopped scallion (perhaps some cucumber, too?) in hot rice-flour pancakes smeared with plum sauce. This was one of the best things I'd ever eaten, and I just couldn't stop. "The best companions at the table have real appetites," the editor said eliptically as we were walking back to the office, and if i was momentarily alarmed that he might have found me dull, I also had the rest of our lunch in a brown paper bag to look forward for dinner that night, and instinctively knew I'd have plenty of time to puzzle over his bon mots in the years to come. Suffice it to say that I finally figured out that he loved really good food and was the father of four difficult sons, so the relaxed quietude of sharing a really good meal with someone else who was also immersed in their own pleasure was surely a rarity for him.

 

  Okay, then, enough ambered reminiscence. So am I a reliable judge of Chinese cooking? Well, yes, I'd like to think so, and this is why I'd say that if you were only going to go to a single Chinese restaurant in Paris, it should be Les Delices de Shandong, where I ate with Bruno, who lives in terror of red pepper, the other night. I've been reading opinions of this place by French colleagues who know a lot more about Chinese food than I do for a longtime, Sophie Brissaud on her P'tit Pois blog foremost among then, and so was really looking forward to this meal. It was superb.

  

 

  I loved the animation of the brightly lit dining room, and accustomed to the usual get'um in get'em out brusqueness of Asian restaurants in the 13th arrondissement, I was surprised by the polite service. We stared at the menu and negotiated a meal for two very different appetites. I wanted to try the pork-and-cabbage filled dumplings, but agreed to an order of noodles in sesame sauce for Bruno in case the dumplings proved too fiery. Since I didn't know much about Shan Dong cooking, I just couldn't assure Bruno that they'd be something he could eat (To learn more about Shan Dong cooking, you might want to watch this YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs0bUhmcBoA). Well, the dumplings, which were filled with delicately tangy (black vinegar, I think) smoky chunky pork and cabbage were spectacular, and the sesame noodles, though much tamer, were good, too, but I wouldn't feel obliged to order them again if I went back with someone else.

  

 

  Main courses required similar calculation and negotiation. I had no interest in shrimp with cashews at all, but knew they'd be fine for Bruno if the saute of smoked pork with lots of red peppers, celery, Savoy cabbage, and a few fermented black beans was too potent. Well, it was brilliantly potent--one of the best Chinese dishes I've ever eaten, in fact, and with regular slugs of Tsingtao beer, Bruno enjoyed it, too, and we both liked the liserons (oddly called 'blindweed' in English, but resembling a sort of leaf-less watercress) in garlicky emerald-green tofu sauce. And the shrimp with stale cashews was desperately bland, almost as though the chef was offended that someone would order something so dull.

  

  On the way home, Bruno, who works in a busy crowded office while I spend my eccentrically quiet and solitary days in flannel pajamas and sweat shirts to a busy rhythm of my own mad making, admitted that the food was very good, but had problems with the noise. It was noisy, but I barely noticed. Instead I was thinking about who I could draft to go back with me to try the soups, the kidneys, the intestines, the carp, and a dozen other dishes I noticed trailing by with avaricious envy. This is a terrific restaurant. And to think it all started out over egg rolls with duck sauce in Greens Farms, Connecticut.

  

Les Delices de Shandong, 88 boulevard de l'Hopital, 13th, Tel. 01-45-67-23-37. Metro: Campo-Formio. Closed Sunday. Average 25 Euros. 

L'INTENTION--Decent if Timid Intentions in the Marais, B-

 

  Though the ambient consumer culture in most Western countries presents aging as akin to a slowly developing case of the plague, I enjoy the annual privilege of notching another year on my belt. I'm much happier today than I was when I was twenty-one, and I've also lived long enough to see the outlines of an interesting and rewarding life emerging out of the ether of youth. In fact one of the more amusing things as time goes by is a deepening understanding that the to-twenty-something-year-old ears tiresome bromide that 'all experience is somehow useful' actually turns out to be true.

  On those painfully always too early-to-work mornings, because they followed too-bibulous-and-too-late-to-bed evening after evening, when I was grinding cabbage after cabbage to make enough coleslaw to feed a hundred hotel guests at noon--one summer I worked as a salad chef in a hotel kitchen on Fire Island of all places, I never dreamt that this tedium would yield valuable experience. In the space of a few hours, I had to make grated-carrot-in-gelatin salad (the crowd at this hotel preferred orange or cherry Jello, just for the record), macaroni salad, tomato salad, tuna salad, rice salad, three-bean salad, and others, and I went through big institutional jar after jar of Sweet Life brand mayonnaise, bottles of lemon juice and frighteningly cheap olive oil, and, I'm afraid to admit, my hygiene as I hastily executed these chores was, well, let's say it was casual to put it politely. Fortunately, I never poisoned anyone to the best of my knowledge, and during other similar college summers, I also worked variously as a bus boy, a waiter, and a line cook, and I was just awful at all of these jobs. What these long ago activities left me with, however, was a real hands-on knowledge of how restaurant kitchens and dining rooms really work and a profound respect for all players in the restaurant business. 

  What brought all of this to mind the other night was when I showed up at L'Intention, a new bistro in the Marais that opened last July, and the very polite but slightly harried young man in the dining room sheepishly told me that he'd be doing everything himself that night, i.e. all of the cooking and also waiting table, because his waitress was out sick. I assured him that I was sure everything would be just fine, and my friend Greta and I would be understanding. Since there were only three tables of two in the dining room, I was pretty sure he'd be okay, too, but when Greta showed up, I told her we should order right away so that our orders could be staggered between those of the table that was already occupied when I arrived, and those who were seated a few minutes after she sat down.

  The simple little dining room with exposed stone walls, modern art on the walls, modern lighting fixtures and dark wooden tables had the same winsomely sincere aura as the short menu did, too. The three starters--mache salad with hazelnuts and a beet-and-tarragon vinaigrette, parsnip soup garnished with boned confit de canard, and leeks with a poached organic egg, salad and a creamy mustard vinaigrette all appealed and were all offered in PT or GT--half or full portions, a nice touch, as was a risotto with pumpkin and Parmesan cream. 

  There were three main courses, too: poached roasted guinea hen with smoked bacon, creamed cabbage and chestnuts; daube de boeuf with baked polenta; and salmon slow cooked with winter fruits (quince, apples and pears) and vegetables (carrots, parsnips and turnips) in a casserole. Well, we both ended up ordering a half portion of the leeks and the daube de boeuf, because that's what we both wanted. To be honest, I tried to cajole Greta into the risotto and the salmon, but she wasn't budging.

  The leeks were pleasant--neatly trimmed and tender and the accompanying egg perfectly poached. I'd have liked the vinaigrette to be more authoritative, though, and this dish very much needed more salt and pepper. The daube de boeuf was not quite what I was expecting either, since it came as a decidedly cartilagenous single slice of tender beef in a curiously sweet red wine sauce with nice little Nicois olives and a wedge of slightly dry oven-baked polenta. If it was a nicely made dish, the sauce lacked the ruddy depth of a really superb daube like the one chef Dominique Le Stanc serves at La Merenda in Nice, and I'd have preferred the polenta to be creamy and rich with Parmesan as opposed to solid.

  I've thought a lot about these two dishes during the last twenty-four hours, since I make a sometimes agonizing effort to be fair to a chef as sincere and competent as Cédric Barbarat, who previously cooked at La Cour Jardin restaurant at the Hotel Plaza Athénée and most recently at Sofitel Pullman de Versailles. As I learned many years ago, working in a kitchen is seriously hard work, so working in a kitchen and simultaneously running a dining room is a real high-wire act. So under the circumstances, this was an agreable meal that was served with charm and generosity, but I'd like Barbarat to channel his lustier instincts in the kitchen, where I think he's currently too timid, and then this nice little bistro will likely see me again. Oh, and he should also take the cheeses he's planning to serve of any given service out of the fridge earlier, and refuse delivery of a cheese that was as many miles from being ripe as the camembert that was served with the Saint Maure and compte that comprised the cheese course we split as we finished up an excellent bottle of Le Petit Canon de Lariveau, a canon-fronsac by winemaker Nicolas Dabudyk that's a terrific food wine and a great buy at 22 Euros a bottle. Overall, though, Barbarat's intentions are good and mine are too.

L'Intention, 3, rue du Roi-Doré, 3rd, Tel. 01-42-74-31-22. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Average 40 Euros.

BLEND--'Gourmet' Burgers in Paris, B+

  Since I'm unapologetically obsessed by good food, it amost never happens that I leave the house without knowing where I'm going to eat. Most of the time, in fact, my destination has been carefully researched, and when possible, I love reading a menu online beforehand, partly to tease my appetite but also because this way I can construct my meal meditatively before being distracted by a waiter or a waitress or the good conversation of a friend. This advance planning isn't only because I absolutely hate the idea of having a bad meal, but is also due to the fact that even in Paris the odds are so hopelessly stacked against spontaneity. These days, just winging it almost never works and reservations are almost always required.

   

  Last night, though, I'd gone for drinks with my friend Christian, and both of us had been too busy to do any restaurant research beforehand. Since we were meeting near the Place des Victoires, I'd vaguely thought that it might be useful for research purposes to see what the food's like at Le Grand Colbert these days, although I very much doubt it's good (if you've been lately, please let me know if I'm right or wrong), and also knew that we could always go to Les Fines Gueles, a bistrot a vins that we both love. 

  

  Unfortunately, it got late on this rainy night, and Les Fines Gueles was packed when we swung by, so I was thinking that maybe Citronelle & Galanga, a good Vietnamese, would do the trick, and we were on our way over there when we noticed the brightly lit shopfront of a new business in the rue d'Argout and wandered over to see what it was: a new burger joint. But not just any burger joint--and they're lots of those in Paris these days (see: http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/eurofile-the-new-american-tastemakers-in-paris/?ref=food). Instead, this was a small room with a very good looking and well-dressed crowd sitting on oak stools at oak tables tucking into big juicy burgers made with meat from Yves-Marie le Bourdonnec, one of city's very best butchers. And it glowed with a certain irresistibly bluff urban chic.

  

 

  The menu looked terrific, too, and we instantly decided to give it a try. The two young owners couldn't have been more welcoming when we stepped inside either, so we stood and started drinking a fabulous bottle of Bordeaux while we waited for a table. Chatting with the French owners, we found out that one of them had lived in California, the other New York, and that they'd recruited the delightful Camille Malmquist, an American in Paris baker and blogger, to do their baking for them, including the best hamburger buns I've ever eaten, and, later, a superb miniature cranberry topped cheesecake.

 

  I was all set for a "Cheesy"--a burger made from a specially composed mix of ground beef from Le Bourdonnec with English cheddar, bacon, homemade barbecue sauce, onion, pickles and iceberg lettuce--never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I'd actually want to eat iceberg lettuce, which is just about the only salad I knew as a child when Mom would cut a head into wedges she called 'hearts of lettuce' and we kids called hunk o' let, slathered with either Stop & Shop Italian dressing or Marie's blue-cheese dressing, but to our despair, they were sold out of everything but the "Sweet," a monthly special veal burger with garnishes that were vaguely inspired by Vietnamese Bánh Mì sandwiches, to wit, carrots, pepper and mint, but also grilled Parmesan shavings, chorizo (which I never found) and arugula. Ditto the sweet potato fries--all they had left were regular fries, but they were homemade.

  

 

  Even though I'd have liked this magnificent mound of meat cooked much rarer, this little baby turned out to be a beauty of a burger, and the fries were terrific, too. The oak stools were sitting on were carved with a stylized version of a burger, the service was just charming, and if we weren't already in the thrall of Bacchus, they had a great short list of beers we could have been sipping. Chatting further with the owners, they explained that they want Blend--the name is intended to refer to Le Bourdonnec's 'secret' mix of meats, to be a showcase for the "friendly, fun, alert, involved" service they both enjoyed so much when they were living in America. Oh, and if this place is a success, which is more than likely to be, they bashfully admitted they'd open other branches of Blend in Paris, and then maybe beyond.

 

  We finished up with Camille's superb little cheesecake, and on the way home, I marveled at the fact that hamburgers have become so popular in Paris--when I moved here 25 years ago, they were still a poorly prepared novelty item at places like Joe Allen's in Les Halles, and also that the city now has some really good burger places. So what happened? Well, lower airfares have meant that a whole generation of younger Parisians have fallen madly in love with New York, and lacking the stern gastronomic codes of their parents, they eagerly embraced the city's comfort foods, which seem so redolent of a certain personal liberty.

  

 

  And what about me? Was it heresy for anyone who's lucky enough to live in Paris to chose a nice juicy burger over a perfectly roasted chicken or a cast-iron casserole of boeuf bouguigon? Of course not, since the hunger before any meal is an evanescent expression of who and how you are at that moment. The most powerful cardinal points of any good appetite--novelty, adventure, nostalgia and biological cravings beyond my capacity for scientific analysis, gently pricked by such keening qualities as rarity and a desire for self-expression, should never be ignored, and last night, the proper prescription for me was a really good burger. Amazingly enough, in Paris now you can get one. And hats off to Camille Malmquist again for those amazingly good hamburger buns.

 

  44 rue d'Argout, 2nd, Tel. 01-40-26-84-57. Metro: Bourse, Sentier or Les Halles. Open daily. Average 25 Euros.

LES AFFRANCHIS--A Charming Neighborhood Bistro, B

  After lavish good eating over the Christmas weekend, my appetite entered this week on tender, timid paws, and were it not for the pleasure of a jolly night out with Johanne, George, Joe and David or a tete a tete with my delightful friend Dorie, I'd certainly have been tempted to maintain a slightly monastic regime, which in my book runs to soup and salad with decorous portions of fish, chicken and pasta. I'd been hearing good things about Les Affranchis, a new bistro in the 9th not far from my front door, however, and since it was also one of the rare recently opened tables that hadn't shut down for the week between two holidays, I booked there the other night for dinner with Dorie. 

  Arriving, I liked this place immediately, since the service was notably friendly and attentive, the room was nicely lit, and as I took the place in, I noticed that it had been decorated by someone with a remarkably good eye, a sense of humor and a good searcher's sleight of hand at the local fleamarkets. An old-fashioned gramophone occupied one corner of the service bar, and there were wryly amusing posters and old advertisements framed on the walls. The Paris they riff on is mostly the city during the fifties and sixties, which creates a soothing atmosphere of a rather amorphous nostalgia, right down to the fact that the young waiter--less schooled than I am in the possibly perceived slights of sexism, eagerly exlained the animated image of the little red go-go dancer on the restaurant's website as evoking the days when Pigalle was still unabashedly naughty.

  Dorie and I sipped a good Pouilly Fume at a very fair 7 Euros a glass and dithered a bit while studying the brief chalkboard menu, because it was so appealing.

 

   Dorie decided to the have the 'Cesar' salad with Parmesan shavings to start, while I eagerly renounced the feint at healthy eating I'd been feigning and went with the terrine de campagne. Both dishes were excellent. Dorie's salad came in a rather awkward deep tear-shaped white porcelain bowl, and the perfectly coddled egg and uber Ducassian neatly trimmed lettuce betrayed the fact that young chef Pierre Petit had passed through the kitchen at Rech, part of the Ducasse stable, as well as working at the Hotel du Palais in Biarritz, the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco, Ledoyen and the wonderful Le Beurre Noisette, among other addresses, all within the space of twelve years. This dish was as winsome as an Easter morning, though, with one of the only Caesar sauces I've ever tasted in France that came anywhere near the real McCoy, and my terrine was earthy and almost seething with flavor, with a perfect coarse texture, and a slab of toasted country bread and a little ramekin of cornichons. 

  So we were off to a very good start, and the phantom thought in the back of my mind as I enjoyed Dorie's always charming and incisive conversation, was that the renewel of the neighborhood bistro in Paris has now reached a rather glorious full gallop. To be sure, you're not likely to find a rock-of-ages coq au vin or blanquette de veau at a place like Les Affranchis, or the superb Le Pantruche nearby--another of my neighborhood favorites, but instead, bright, light, reasonably priced and intelligently inventive contemporary French cooking. The alarming heaving and creaking of the global economy notwithstanding, 2011 has been a brilliant year for good eating in Paris. It's also been a terrific year for anyone who loves good wine in restaurants without spending a fortune, since the white Saumur-Champigny we drank at dinner here was superb and fairly ticketed at 29 Euros.

 

  Main courses were terrific, too. I know I should eat less cod, for the simple reason that I'd like to leave some of this fine fish in the sea for the children of my nieces and nephews, but couldn't resist the roasted cod here because of its garnish of fennel bulb carbonara. Now this was an extraordinarily clever and delicious idea--the fish placed on a sort of fennel bulb compote with a Parmesan cream that was good but not assertive enough and a few lardons strewn through the vegetable. Dorie decided on fish, too, maigre, a firm white Atlantic fish from southwestern France that often goes under the unfortunate English name of croaker, and it came with diced piquillo peppers, an herbal pesto and grilled pine nuts as an expression, perhaps, of the fact that chef Pierre Petit is half Basque. As good as this fish was, however, what I liked most about it were the oven-roasted 'frites' of sweet potatoes (yams?), which I unsuccessfully attempted to recreate at noon today.

  After the main courses, things took a turn south. The cheese plate we shared wasn't very good and the rice pudding that followed wasn't adequately creamy, its candied pineapple and passionfruit topping a disappointment, too. I wasn't too surprised by this, actually, since the weakest link in the blossoming neighborhood bistro revival is invariably dessert, which seems to get sort of a cursory look-in an hour before the doors are unlocked for lunch or dinner by weary young chefs who don't have the luxury of a sous-chef to hive this part of the meal off on to.

  So would I come back? Yes, indeed--I'm already looking forward to inviting two delightful new nieghborhood friends--a brilliant French conductor and a remarkably talented American born pianist, to dinner here just after the New Year. I know that Emmanuel and Andrew will enjoy this place as much as I do, and I fully expect that it'll be even better in a year's time than it is today.

5 rue Henri Monnier, 9th, Tel. 01-45-26-26-30. Metro: Pigalle or Saint Georges

Closed Sunday and Monday.

Menus: 18 Euros (lunch), 25 Euros--two courses, 32 Euros--three courses.