Since I returned to Paris from vacation, I've been stopped at least twice a day by visitors to the city (I loathe the condescending word 'tourist') who are often looking for directions and a decent place to eat. I feel a nostalgic sympathy for their quandry, too, because the first time I visited the city, en famille, we came in August, too, and were utterly oblivious to the fact that so much of it shuts down as the lucky and sensible French delect their month-long summer holidays. The August problem, in fact, is the reason that my very first meal in Paris was at a Pizza Pino (it's still there, on the Champs Elysees)--it was within walking distance of our now long gone hotel in the rue Marignan and the six of us were hungry. Knowing it would infuriate my father, I said nothing, but I was deeply disappointed to be eating a third-rate pizza on my first trip to Paris. I mean, I'd been dreaming for months of all of the moaningly good delicacies we'd feast on the moment we arrived in Paris. Things looked up considerably after the mediocre pizzas--I still dream about the wonderful cheese feasts we ate in that much missed temple to all things lactic, L'Androuet in the rue d'Amsterdam, some amazing boeuf bourguignon, a Roquefort souffle followed by a peach one, etc.

So suffice it to say that I am always happy to help rescue the innocent, and with this in mind, I'm glad to suggest a very good restaurant, Firmin Le Barbier, that not only serves simple delicious vieille France (old-fashioned) but also has a handful of sidewalk tables with absolutely stunning views of the Eiffel Tower. The service at this restaurant is also not only charming but English-speaking for anyone who needs help with the changes-daily chalkboard menu, and the dining room itself is a small, handsome, stylish space with sleek Italian suspension lamps, terra-cotta banquettes, and exposed brick and stone walls. We went as four and all of us well. I love my oeufs mayonnaise, two hard-boiled eggs slicked with homemade mayonnaise and served with a small frisee salad, while Laurent's sardines with roasted peppers were excellent, and the other two enjoyed their tuna-and-salmon tartare. Next, a remarkably generous serving of pork tenderloin in a light pepper-cream sauce with sauteed potatoes and fresh vegetables for me and Laurent, and cod in a light wine sauce for Carole and Bruno. The portions were so generous, in fact, that the four of us could only nibble at a slice of excellent tarte citron for dessert. Prices here are moderate, and the short wine list is intelligent and fairly priced. Also useful is the fact that this winning restaurant in open for lunch and dinner on Sundays (and closed on Monday and Tuesday). Firmin Le Barbier, 20 rue Monttessuy, 7th, Tel. 01-45-51-21-55.

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And for whatever it's worth, I must confess to having developed yet another inappropriate and nearly out-of-hand addiction. Happily, it's not likely to be fatal, but if I keep slathering Creme de Noix on my toast every morning I'm likely to be wearing stetch-waist trousers by Christmas. I found this luscious ground-walnut-and-honey cream at the market in Cazals in Le Lot, bought three jars two weeks ago and am already down to one, so if anyone should happen to be passing through Le Lot anytime soon, please bring back more Creme de Noix. The producer is Apiculteur (bee-keeper) Le Pouget in Saint Germain de Belair.

Just back in Paris on a sweltering August night, I'm slightly stunned to have exchanged the cool, mossy smelling nights of Salviac in the Lot, one of my very favorite regions of France, for the metallic scents of baked Parisian asphalt, but even this heat can't wilt my high spirits at having eaten so well for two weeks. To be sure, we grilled (fabulous meat from Jean-Pierre Cabanel, the local butcher--homemade sausage, Quercy lamb, incredible veal, etc.) and cooked most of the time--many Mark Bittman salads, at our little honey-colored stone cottage on a hillside, but the few times we went out, we ate wonderfully well in a type of restaurant I'd almost given up as lost in France, which is to say serious, unselfconscious no-nonsense places with a skilled, hard-working cook in the kitchen and a courteous well-drilled staff in the dining room. You could almost call them plain-vanilla restaurants, since they're not trying to win Michelin stars, be fashionable, or break new gastronomic ground. Instead, they exist to offer a delicious and fairly priced meal of well-sourced and lovingly cooked local produce. 

Two meals in particular remain deliciously memorable. The first was dinner at La Recreation, a truly charming restaurant occupying at old school house in Les Arques. It was founded some fifteen years ago by chef Jacques Ratier and his wife, Noëlle, "with no market research or any of the things that young chefs are doing today. We just jumped in, because after years of working in the Caribbean, the South Pacific and on cruise ships, we wanted to come home." (They're from Toulouse). I knew none of this back story when we sat down at an old-fashioned steel table on folding chairs in the skirts of a giant Tilleul (lime) tree and opened the menu, but we despite a fair number of GB (Great Britain) license plates in the parking lot, which led me to fear the place might be sort of flute-y and Surrey in southwestern France, service was warm, prompt and friendly. We ordered an excellent bottle of Cahors, and ate, and ate. Ratier's five-course meal began with a superb fresh tomato soup, and then I had some sublime foie gras and Bruno a salad of plump white coco beans with a surprising amount of lobster meat, a lovely summer appetizer. Next, Limousin beef in Cahors sauce for me and Quercy lamb for Bruno (correctly served rare and very tender), both garnished with an excellent gratin of potatoes, stuffed zucchini blossoms, haricots vert, and a roasted tomato. I was so surprised by the precision, talent and hard-work in this 32 Euro menu that I finally fell into conversation with Noelle Ratier, who told me the couples' story. Our meal continued with perfectly aged Rocamadour cheese and salad and dessert, a fondant au chocolat for Bruno and a terrific clafoutis aux abricots for me. At a dinner party in Cahors a few days later, it wasn't at all surprised when the delightful Ken Hom, who has a house in nearby Catus, told me that La Recreation is one of his favorite local tables.

Even more surprising was lunch at the Auberge du Sombral in St-Cirq-Lapopie, the Saint Paul de Vence of the Lot, a few days later. Because this delightful little village beloved of surrealist writer Andre Breton was like a tourist ant-hill on a beautiful summer day, I had meager expectations of finding a decent meal here. This place was recommended by my lovely friend Martine in Cahors, however, so we'd booked a terrace table for lunch before setting out for a day of touring the Lot. Again, the welcome here was exemplary, and a glass of Bergerac rose was just the ticket for my tourist addled nerves when we settled in on the terrace and looked at the menu. For 28 Euros, I ate a superb feuillete (puff pastry) filled with cepes in Roquefort cream, confit de canard with a garlicky gratin de pommes de terre, baked Rocamadour with salad, and roasted figs with freshly made vanilla ice cream, a meal that Bruno varied only by having a salad garnished with slices of smoked duck breast as his first course. Beautifully cooked quality seasonal produce, sincere hospitality and a lovely setting made this place a wonderful surprise, and these two meals, along with several others on this trip, made in wonderfully clear that middle-of-the-road dining in France is often still remarkably good.

Auberge du Sombral, St-Cirq-Lapopie, Tel. 05-65-31-26-08. 

La Recreation, Les Arques, Tel. 05-65-22-88-08.

It’s probably one of the best lessons that a summer in France has to offer: anyone who loves the good food of Gaul should get out of town and travel on les departementales, or little country roads, in the hopes of finding someplace like Le Chat in Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire.

 Determined to avoid the numbing dullness of the autoroute on our way to a little stone cottage in a quiet valley in the Lot, we decided to leave the main road as often as we could. Breaking free of Paris traffic, we sped to the Loire, with the idea of stocking up on some good summer drinking in Sancerre and Menetou-Salon. After visiting a couple of caves in Sancerre, we were hungry and so asked a friendly caviste for an idea for a good, cheap, fast lunch. “Le Chat—it’s about fifteen kilometers from here, but the food’s delicious.” And so we backtracked, and after a series of rond-points, we finally escaped the dreary suburban landscape of shopping centers, muffler franchises, etc. that now sadly surround most French towns of any size and ended up in a sleepy little village that seemed stunned by the heat.

 I loved Le Chat right away. With a bar behind a counter, simple Fifties style tables scattered around the room, and a friendly welcome from the waitress, we were propelled back to a mid-1950s France where the idea of having a bad meal, or even a bad casse croute (snack) was still considered to be a tragedy.

So we sipped a delicious glass of Domaine Philippe Gilbert white Menetou-Salon and studied the brief chalkboard menu, which proposed two courses for 16 Euros. I decided on the chilled broccoli veloute with morteau sausage and pine nuts, a sublime summer starter, and Bruno opted for the lentil salad with herring, which came with a deliciously pungent sweet-and-sour vinaigrette. Both were delicious, as were our braised lamb shanks with chick peas, raisins, and lots of coriander. When we decline dessert, the waitress brought us a chocolate-tobacco ganache to share over our coffee, and was charmingly guileless before my compliment:

“If I lived locally, I’d come for lunch everyday.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” she said. “Many people do.” And finally it was through a pleasant chat with the owner of a local garage that I got the back story here—chef Laurent Chareau has worked with Giles Choukroun and Inaki Azpitarte (Le Chateaubriand) in Paris before falling in love with the wines of the Loire and deciding to throw over life in the big city to become the owner of a village café where he cooks a different menu daily for a happy crowd of locals and lucky travelers like ourselves. And what gives this very happy little story an even happier ending is that hundreds of similarly talented young chefs are making the same choice all over France, which means that there probably hasn’t been a better time to eat in rural France since the 1970s came along and set the country on an American style course of suburbanization that almost ruined everything.

Le Chat, 42bis rue des Guerins, Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire, Tel. 03-86-28-49-03. Menus: Lunch: 10 Euros—main course and a coffee; 14 Euros—main course, starter or dessert, coffee; 18 Euros--three courses and coffee; Dinner: 16 Euros for two courses; 20 Euros for three courses; 30 Euros for the tasting menu.

Chatting with a suave French hotelier over dinner on the Ile de Re, the lovely Atlantic island thirty minutes from the train station in La Rochelle that's sort of a French version of Nantucket, the other night, we lamented the fact that Blackberries, email, etc., mean that it's harder and harder to have a real vacation. By this I mean a week or two during which you just plain stop working. Unfortunately technology has so blurred the boundaries between work and leisure that even on vacation most of us are required to keep up with our email, which, depending on your work, involves a constant blizzard of questions, requests and invitations to meetings. 

On the eve of leaving for two weeks in a rented farmhouse in the southwestern French region of Le Lot, I found myself musing over vacations of yore, or those intensely anticipated two-week sojourns when we loaded up the Country Squire (later, the Vista Cruiser) and drove through the night to get to the dock in Hyannis to take the earliest ferry to Nantucket, a place that was then all about rusty bicycles, rusty bed stands with lumpy mattresses and soggy but tasty sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper. Dad, an executive with a major textile company in New York, never called the office, but instead ratched down for a first few days until he became smiling and playful. Food was never particularly important on these holidays, although the grown-ups would go out once or twice for a lobster feast, leaving the kids at home and happy with barbecued hamburgers, corn on the cob, and Howard Johnson's mint chocolate chip ice cream.

As I grew older, and more gourmand, I realized that there was actually some good simple food to be found in the various corner of New England where we vacationed, and what brought the joys of a simple shore dinner back into focus was the excellent meal I had at La Baleine Bleu in Saint-Martin-de-Re the other day. This pleasant twenty-year-old restaurant overlooks the old harbor within the Vauban citadel of this lovely little town, and the menu is dead simple and so just wonderful. I started with a Kir, an apperitif that never tastes good in Paris, and enjoyed a tiny shot of gaspacho before diving into eight plump, briny oysters (and no, they weren't even vaguely laiteuses, or milky, as most are at this time of year. Next, perfectly roasted locally caught cod with local sea salt and pureed potatoes made with olive oil from Crete. We drank an excellent white from the Ile de Porquerolles off Hyeres in the south of France, and finished up with poached white peaches on crumbly shortbread with salted-caramel sauce for dessert.

The service was young, attractive and friendly, and this three-course meal ran a bargain 34 Euros, which is why I'd cite La Baleine Bleu as a perfect example of the best of summertime eating in France. 

La Baleine Bleu, Ilot du Port, Saint-Martin-en-Re, Ile de Re, Tel. 05-46-09-03-30. Prix-fixe menus 28 Euros, 34 Euros, Open daily during the summer.

Lunch with my friend Alain on Wednesday, and what a pleasure it was to hop in his car and head for the country just long enough for some bird song and fresh air to unknot a morning's tensions. Our destination was Les Paillotes, the summer restaurant at Les Etangs de Corot, a charming country hotel that's recently been renovated by the family who own and run the Caudalie line of spas and skin products, and they've done a beautiful job of creating a bower of bliss on the door steps of Paris. Once a getaway for the painter Corot, who loved the bucolic atmosphere of what was then a country village outside of Paris, Ville d'Avray today is one of the rare Parisian suburbs to have retained a palpable sense of its original rural identity, much of which comes from the etangs, or ponds, Corot once made a subject.

What makes this place especially pleasant during the summer is that they have a raised, thatched roof terrace--Les Paillotes--overlooking the pond behind the hotel where they serve during the summer. Having been to the hotel to sample the cooking of their talented chef Benoit Bordier during the winter, I was curious to see how he'd settled in. Though I enjoyed my last meal, I found the service over-groomed and Bordier's cooking much too cerebral and self-regarding for this new setting.

I've been following Bordier ever since I first discovered him at Chez Jean, just down the street from me in the 9th arrondissement, some ten years ago. In particular, Bordier is one of the most gifted fish cooks working in France today and also has a wonderful modern way of cooking vegetables and including seasonal fruit in his recipes. Anyway, suffice it to say, that I retrieved the Bordier whose cooking I've always so deeply appreciated during the course of a superb and refreshingly simple lunch. I started with a wonderful chunky raw green-pea soup poured over an oval of ham-flavored carrot puree, and it was a truly brilliant summer appetizer. Next, a slice of pork belly that had been slow cooked for hours to be spoon tender, then grilled, and finally served with a garnish of chopped black cherries and a wonderfully astringent sauce of lovage and juiced apricots. Again, an outstanding dish, at once humble and deeply considered. Dessert was excellent, too--what could have been better than poached white nectarines with freshly made pistachio ice cream and buckwheat honey financiers. 

I'd be planning to eat at Les Paillotes often during the month of August if they hadn't rather eccentrically decided to close from July 26th through August 18th. So go this weekend, or catch up with the same excellent summer menu when they reopen.

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Before dinner the other night, I hadn't been to Laperouse, that old war horse of a restaurant on the Quai des Grand Augustins in the 6th arrondissement for over ten years. The last time I was there turned out to be one of the most memorable meals of my life, too, since I happened to catch chef Pascal Barbot and maitre d'hotel Christophe Rohat, ex-Arpege, during the cameo appearance that they made here before going on to open their brilliant restaurant L'Astrance, one of my very favorite tables in Paris.

My English friend Madge was chomping at the bit to give this place another go, though--they've just hired a new chef--so off we went on a stiffling summer night with high hopes. Arriving, the restaurant made the same impression as an older, over-dressed woman who'd dozed off in her box at the races. To say there was no social or gastronomic tension on the premises would be to put things mildly indeed. But I love me Madge, and so was bright eyed and busy tailed for this meal. Unfortunately, things got off to a decidedly wrong-footed start when the waiter told us that he was glad we were there so that he could practice his English. I know he meant well, but he wasn't shrewd enough to realize that the none too subtle message he'd just delivered was that he had taken us for tourists, a social gaffe indeed when we hadn't exchanged more than five words. This same high-handed, back-up service irritated me all through the meal--it was as though the crew here insisted that we be subjugated to their preconception that we were tourists for no other reason than the fact that we were speaking English.

Oh, and the food. Lots of giggles, since there were dots of sauce and tiny pansies scattered over almost everything. If you happened to have missed la nouvelle cuisine the first time it went round, this is the place to come for a right-out-of-the-original-anthology of same. Though Madge's terrine of heirloom tomatoes was very pretty to look at and made her happy, my "green gaspacho" was a drab business, the worst bit being the garnish of way over-the-hill langoustines wrapped in phyllo pastry and deep-friend. Next, my sea bass filet was nicely cooked, but the garnish of red endive and fig sauce acidulated with Banyuls vinegar completely overwhelmed it. 

Stuffy, expensive and out-of-date, Laperouse offers a veritable catalogue of the most extreme flaws of French cooking at its most hidebound in 2009.

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The red-and-gold label of the round wooden LE PETIT camembert box has been one of the most reliable emblems of pleasure in my life for many years. Even when I didn't have the time to seek out a really good fromagerie, I could pick up a raw-milk LE PETIT camembert in any Parisian grocery store, which is exactly what I did the other day when I was more or less on the mend from a serious case of Eastern European food poisoning. Monsieur Le Docteur had told me to avoid dairy like the plague for at least five days, but after three days of Japanese rice and bouillon, I jumped the rails while buying paper towels and dish soap at my local worst-case (i.e., don't have time to walk any further) supermarket. On my way to the cash register, the red and gold label flashed, and I thought, oh, blink it, I haven't eaten a good camembert in way too long, lifted the lid on one, found it perfect to thumb pressure, and dashed home to smear it all over some toasted pain Poilane.

Unwrapping the waxed paper that contained the cheese, I was literally chomping at the bit, and when the toast jumped in the toaster, I brushed it with good olive oil and gave it a sprinkle sea salt and piment d'Esplette and sat down at the kitchen table for my treat with a glass of Morgon. Engrossed in the latest issue of The Economist, I was perhaps less attentive to my cheese than I might have been, but after less than a minute I knew that something had gone wrong. 

Yes, the cheese was as runny as one could hope, but it lacked the mellow, earthy, mushroom-y goodness that has always made me love camembert. On a hunch, I dashed to the fridge and yanked the box out. No where did I see those most important words for any camembert lover: LAIT CRU (raw milk). The creeps had gone through with what they'd been threatening, which was to start making one of France's most emblematic cheeses with pasteurized milk. 

So Lactalis, this God-damned industrial dairy thought they could sneak under the radar after all. Last year they admitted they weren't going to be making much raw-milk camembert anymore, but then sort of backed down following an outcry. What followed was that camembert seemed to disappear--only the nastiest brand of all, Le President, was still regularly available at my local market, which is why the reappearance of LE PETIT made me so happy.

Bait and switch is what they've done, however. And I'll not only never buy a LE PETIT camembert again, but went on to the Lactalis website to see what else they make so that I can very purposefully boycott it. I suggest you do the same--if France stops making raw-milk cheeses, the world will be an infinitely poorer and sadder place.

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Les Etangs de Corot, 55 rue de Versailles, Ville d'Avray, Tel. 01-41-15-37-00. Average 40 Euros.

Sometimes when I have mixed feelings about a restaurant, I like to submit it to a time test. To wit, will I remember what I ate a week later? Over a week after my meal there, the much lauded Le Passage 53 in the hip Passage des Panoramas didn't stand up very well. To be sure, I have a huge admiration for Hugo Desnoyers, the superb butcher who is one of the main backers and who furnishes the restaurant's sublime meat, but overall, I found the service mannered and the cooking pleasant but timid and rather self-conscious. A perfect example was an amuse bouche of broccoli creame garnished with a crunchy hail of raw broccoli buds. Tasty enough and not a bad idea, but if the point of an amuse bouche is to tantalize you for what's to come, this little cameo was underwhelming. 

To be fair, I was more than distracted by my friend La Mime's enchanting conversation and also from the fact that my long legs couldn't find a comfort zone on the low, metallic chairs in this over-lit, under-decorated and very badly ventilated space (the "side walk" smokers from Le Passage 53 and several other restaurants stepped outside as required by law, but the draughts in the passage meant that their second hand smoke was sucked right back in the door). The first half-memorable dish of the evening was a tartare of cameo pink veal tartare with chopped razor shell clams and Granny Smith apples, a sensual but deja vu meeting between mer and terre, with the veal struggling to be anything more than a sweet mineral-rich foil to the potent iodine of the clams. A twiddly portion of turbot was good enough, and a thin strip of guineau hen was beautifully cooked and full of flavor, but overall our six or seven course tasting menu lacked real passion and was way overpriced at 65 Euros. So would I go again? Probably not.

53 Passage des Panoramas, 2nd, Tel. 01-42-33-04-35. Metro: Grand Boulevard. Closed Sundays.

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Whether you live in Paris or are just visiting, Reims, the Champagne capital has always been a great day out. And now that this bubbly ville is only 45 minutes from Paris on the new TGV Est, it's more appealing than ever. They're the Champagne caves to visit, bien sur, but the locals museums are superb, too, as is the cathedral that so fascinated Monet. And with the opening of Le Jardin, the new brasserie at the famous Les Crayeres hotel-restaurant, the city also has a truly enchanting place for lunch. Le Jardin is also under the supervision of chef Didier Elena, the Monaco born chef who cooked chez Ducasse for several years, mostly notably in New York City. It's a great way to get at his cooking without spending an arm-and-a-leg, too, since the average bill at Le Jardin is about 45 Euros a head as opposed to 200 Euros a head at Les Crayeres. During a recent dejeuner a la campagne--it was such a pretty day that four of us jumped on the train and went to Reims just for lunch, we loved the superb charcuterie starter, which include some sublime jambon de Reims, red tuna and avocado tartare, and a terrific Caesar salad to start (Romaine with chicken, shrimp, a poached egg and a dressing with a perfect anchovy-Parmesan bite). Main courses were very good, too, including an excellent and very generously served gratin of crabmeat, rotisserie roasted pork belly, a textbook perfect sole meuniere, and boudin blanc with apple-onion compote. A tempting array of side dishes, a very American concept, included Parmesan-rosemary frites, haricots verts with toasted almonds, and a French take on onion rings, and in this arena, only the gnocci fell short of mark--texture all wrong and very bland. We finished up with one of the best lemon tarts any of us had eaten in a long time and also a wonderful nougat glace with caramel au beurre sale. Mark my words, someday scientists will discover that regular consumption of caramel au beurre sale (caramels made with salted butter) had been incontrovertibly proven to significantly improve the human life span.

Weather permitting, Le Jardin also has a charming terrace overlooking the park-like setting of Les Crayeres, and if it's cool or rainy, a hip Soho inspired dining room by interior decorator Pierre Yves Rochon--think exposed brick walls, an open kitchen behind plate glass, factory lamps and big picture windows. The menu of 21st century comfort food has taken Reims by storm, too--many Champagne execs eat here every other day, so be sure to make a reservation. 7 Avenue du Général Giraud, Reims, Tel. 03-26-24-90-90. Open daily. Average 45 Euros.

If you work at home like I do, going downstairs to get the mail is a highlight of the day--what welcome distractions from my keyboard will I find when I open the mailbox? Yesterday there was a bubble-wrap mailer from W.H. Norton in New York, and I ripped the package open in the cobbled hallway of my building in eagerness to see what it contained. 

It was a thrill to find a copy of my friend Adam Ried's beautiful new book "Thoroughly Modern Milkshakes" enclosed. Adam, whom I met when he and his partner moved to Paris for a year, is one of the most naturally talented cooks I know, so I couldn't wait to get upstairs and dive into his new pages. Right off the bat, this beautifully produced book--lovely photographs, good paper, excellent editing, all a real rarity in the modern world of publishing, was a charmer. He'd told me about the book when I saw him in Cambridge, Mass. where he lives last winter, and having had the pleasure of many meals cooked by Adam, a former editor at Cook's Illustrated and presently the cooking columnist for the Boston Globe and kitchen-equipment specialist on PBS's popular "America's Test Kitchen," I was certain it would be a lot of fun. 

And so it was, with the head notes, or the introductions to each recipe, being so much fun to read that I immediately sent an email about a generalized power failure in my Paris neighborhood to the poor woebegone editor who was awaiting an overdue story from me, and cozied up in the kitchen, my favorite place to read, with his book. Talk about good timing--in the midst of this ambient gloom, when everyone I know is counting centimes and hopefully hunting down life's simpler pleasures, a milkshake cookbook is a real bull's eye.

If I still think fondly of the banana-vanilla-ice-cream-and-maple-syrup milkshakes Mom made with our noisy but indestructible Waring blender as an after school treat, Adam showed me that the genre offers vastly larger and more intriguing possibilities, including a vanilla, rum and grilled cashew shake, a maple-bacon shake (two of my favorites flavors in one fell swoop), and a triple peach and buttermilk shake. Suffice it to say that my Kitchenaid blender got a real workout last weekend, and that the maple-bacon shake has become my all-time favorite.

This charming book is ideal for families, the newly divorced, singles of all ages, and as a house present for anyone you might be visiting this summer. As Adam says, "Shake, Rattle and Roll."

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So finally the weather in Paris broke, and I was suddenly hungry for a real feed but not in the mood to prepare any meal more complicated than a plate of the sublime Corsican charcuterie I'd brought back from a recent trip and a tomato-mozarella-basil salad with one of my new favorite olive oils--Christian Mons Catoni's "Fruite Noir," which is made from lightly fermented black Corsican olives. What I really wanted was to sink my teeth into a good steak, and when Bruno got home from work, we compared our respective desires (happily, they were in synch) and set out for Au Boeuf Couronne in the distant 19th arrondissement. 

I had been here since a long ago dinner during which actress Leslie Caron spent the whole evening attacking a tete de veau with a mallet, a process she did with her usual elegance, although both Judy and I ended up being spattered with various bits of calf's head, but a friend who just moved into this neighborhood--La Villette, or the district where Paris's slaughterhouses were once located, recently raved about a steak feast she'd had there. So we put the top down on Bruno's little black convertible and set off through a mostly empty city that seemed to be regularly punctuated with billboard's advertising a new halal chicken loaf.

The restaurant hadn't changed a wit since I was last there, nor, thank goodness, had the menu. Deciding to defy the cholesterol odds for a change, I ordered a frisee salad with a poached egg and lardons and a filet, while Bruno went with the marrow bones (which looked like they'd come from a dinousaur) and a faux filet. I was rather let down that they weren't doing their sublime pommes soufflées, or potato slices fried so that they puff up, but the pommes dauphine the waiter proposed in their stead were worth the trip across town. These perfectly deep fried golden nuggets of choux pastry mixed with mashed potatoes had a slight whiff of nutmet and were absolutely heavenly with one of the best pieces of meat I've eaten in a very longtime. The frisee salad wasn't cooked to order--the lardons were cold, as was the egg, and a squiggle of reduced raspberry vinegar had no business being on the plate whatsoever, but our main courses were a triumph, the waiter was charming, and it was a real pleasure to be in an old-fashioned Paris restaurant that didn't reek of marketing. 

Open seven days a week all year long, this delightful place really is worth the cab fare for diehard carnivores.

Au Boeuf Couronne, 188 avenue Jean-Jaures, 19th, Tel. 01-42-39-44-44. Metro: Porte de Pantin. Average 45 Euros.