PORTA GAIG, Barcelona, B+, and Why the Sad Ongoing Gastronomic Turbulence at Paris Airports?

 

  To be sure, Aeroports de Paris, the organization charged with running Paris’s airports, seems to regularly announce (much-needed) improvements, and recent renovations of several of the older terminals at Charles de Gaulle are indeed an improvement over the crowded faded seventies spaces they replaced. Ditto recent refurbishing at Orly, Paris’s other airport.

 

  Unfortunately, however, Paris airports still regularly rate a ‘D’ (poor), at best, when it comes to feeding travelers. And I, for one—many colleagues, including my pal David Lebovitz, have publicly moaned over this state of affairs for a longtime. 

  

  It absolutely mystifies me, too, since you’d think that in the post 9/11 era, when most of us inevitably end up with more time than we need on the other side of security because prudence has us guessing our timing conservatively, ADP would recognize that there’s a gastronomic goldmine to made from feeding people who decide to offer themselves a really nice meal before boarding their flight. You’d also think that some higher power that be in France, which is, after all, the world’s leading tourist destination, would have long since recognized that Parisian airports represent a vital opportunity to showcase the vaunted gastronomic reputation of France. Millions of people who’ve never set foot in Gaul have a vague idea that it’s associated with great grub and elegance, so why not pour it on if their only experience of the country is a couple of hours behind customs between flights?

 

  Instead, even in the newer terminals, what you end up with is some weird, gimmicky and expensive-for-what-it-is outlet from chef Guy Martin, at best, or similarly over-priced and just plain dull faux health-food at AKKI, a “healthy” eating chain. Things are so lousy in terms of anything edible at Paris airports that the arrival of a PAUL (industrial bakery) at Orly struck me as a major game changer.

 

  Nothing could possibly cast Paris’s pre-flight mediocrity into a sorrier and more vividly unappetizing light than the superb lunch I recently enjoyed at Barcelona airport’s magnificent Terminal 1 at Porta Gaig, a really excellent restaurant that was opened there last November by Barcelona chef Carles Gaig, who trained under Juan-Mari Arzak and owns two outstanding restaurants in the city. 

  

Porta Gaig, Terminal 1, Barcelona Airport

    Finding ourselves at the airport rather early at the end of a wonderful seaside Catalan holiday, Bruno and I read the very appealing menu posted outside of this place and decided this sleek dining room paneled with pale beech wood and furnished with comfortable vanilla-colored modern leather armchairs at white linen dressed tables would be just the ticket to lift spirits dampened by a sudden severing from the sea, sun and Spanish warmth.

  

   

   What followed was a really excellent meal. Bruno was delighted with a starter of anchovies on pa amb tomàquet, or fleshy pink Cantabrian anchovies on toasted bread dressed in classic Catalan style with garlic, crushed tomato and olive oil, and my canelons, cannelloni stuffed with hashed roast veal and served gratinated in a light Bechamel sauce and a Gaig classic, were sublime. Bruno, who, in his love of salads, is probably almost the more American of our pair, loved the elegant Caesar salad he had as a main course, and my baby squid with artichokes in a ruddy almost funky sauce of chorizo drippings and roasted tomato puree were delicious. The little squid contained that wonderful milky juice you find only in the freshest of these cephalopods, and the carefully turned artichoke hearts were clearly fresh. I thought that the deconstructed crème Catalane that Bruno ordered for dessert would be gimmicky, but was proven wrong—it was a pleasantly light dessert with strong flavors of caramelized sugar and eggy custard.

  

   

  If the food was terrific, the other glory of this table was that the wine list allowed me to finally snag a rare bottle of the white Priorat that I’d been assiduously hunting down all week long to no avail (2007 Mas d’en Compte, FYI). Bref, this was a superb and very reasonably priced meal that left us not only profoundly well-fed but with a freshly budding desire to return to Catalunya again as soon as possible. And surely this is exactly what Paris airport eateries should be aspiring to—promote both Paris and France.  So hey, how’s about a branch of Benoit at 2E or 2F at Charles de Gaulle—Alain Ducasse is such a consummate pro he could pull this off to great advantage, and hell, maybe a couple of Frenchie’s wine bars or Le Verre Vole’s here and there? Why on earth doesn’t France care more about its gastronomic image, and don’t even get me started about the food in the French train stations or on French trains.

  

Barcelona Airport Terminal 1, Tel. 34-93-259-6210, Open noon-5pm. Average two-course meal 30€. 

CIEL DE PARIS--Sky-High Dining That Doesn't Fall Flat, B-

 An almost universally obeyed tenet of the canon of contemporary tourism unfailingly has tourists shopping for a really good view of any place they visit. I suspect this quaint habit dates back to the era of hot air balloons and improvements in the technology of fair ground rides, which made it possible for anyone with a couple of coins to thrillingly see way over the tree tops for the first time, but beyond that there’s probably always been something refreshingly if head-spinningly humbling about a really good view, since they have a way of putting us in our place. 

  In North American cities, meals with views of the dazzling tentacular metropolis below are a dime a dozen, which is why dining with a view strikes many people as hay-seed corny shading to tacky, but as far as I’m concerned I love a great view while dining. The real problem is that no one needs to be told that it’s usually impossible to find a great meal and a great view in the same place.

   Or do they? In Paris, there's Le Jules Verne in the Eiffel Tower, of course, where the food is good but the prices can induce oxygen deprivation, and of course the other problem here is that you don't get to enjoy Paris's most famous landmark, the Eiffel Tower, bien sur, as part of the view since you’re inside it. And this is why I went off to dinner at Ciel de Paris on 56^th floor of the Tour Montparnasse, the seventies vintage high rise opposite the Gare Montparnasse that’s perhaps the most relentlessly loathed building in Paris for dinner the other night, with great curiosity.

One of my oldest French friends, Christophe, a prosperous pharmacist from Bordeaux who’d once been a ballet dancer, was coming to town with his new second wife, and they’d booked for dinner here. “Alec, I know it’s terribly touristy but Stephanie hasn’t been to Paris since she was fifteen, so I thought it might be fun.” I assured him that no excuses were necessary and quietly resigned myself to the fun of meeting the new wife—my guess was that she’d be a busty blonde, as compensation for what I was certain would be a very ordinary meal at best.

  Well, suffice it to say that I was wrong, full stop. Arriving, the restaurant, where I’d once gone for an ill-fated drink many years ago, had been stylishly renovated (by French designer Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance) with a sort of appealingly campy seventies décor entire appropriate to the Tour Montparnasse—flying saucer cut-out lighting, etc., and Stephanie turned out to be chic brunette who owned a bookstore and who talked about her passion for novelist Jonathan Franzen for the first half-hour we were together.  

  Over a good and surprisingly reasonably priced bottle of Champagne, the views of Paris were magnificent, too. When we got around to it, the menu read rather Business Class, but chef Christophe Marchais delivered a fine surprise with a starter of dressed crabmeat with a rich and ruddy gelee d’etrilles (crabs) for me, smoked salmon with an interesting millefeuille of celery root and Granny Smith apple for Stephanie and escargots with little beignets of boned pig’s feet for Christophe. 

  Main courses were pleasant, too, including a perfectly cooked filet of beef in truffle sauce with a very clever ‘risotto’ of finely diced Charlotte potatoes for me, steamed turbot with baby spinach and a seaweed sabayon for Stephanie, and lobster with black rice and fava beans with an vanilla emulsion for Christophe. This was well-conceived and executed fun festive food that avoided the pitfalls of being frilly and silly, which is what too often happens in high-altitude settings.

  A well-served plate of cheeses came from Quatrehommes, and Stephanie’s chocolate dessert looked like a little model of a Le Corbusier’s villa—all planes and panes, but was delicious. Working in tandem with Christophe Marchais, chef pâtissier Baptiste Méthivier’s desserts are studiously art-directed but also delicious.

   So will I be rushing out the door to eat at Ciel de Paris again soon? Probably not, but that’s because I live in Paris. On the other hand, I’d certainly send visiting view hunters here, since the food and service are good, and the prix-fixe menus make it relatively affordable for a meal with such gulpingly good views of the Eiffel Tower and all things beyond.

33 Avenue Maine, 15th, Tel. 01-40-64-77-64, Metro: Montparnasse. Open daily. Prix-fixe menus: 65 Euros, 114 Euros. Late night supper menu (after 11pm): 44 Euros, 50 Euros. Average a la carte 120 Euros.

ROSEVAL--A Gourmet Spud in Belleville, B+

   

  I love Belleville, which is where Paris cross-hatches with Greenpoint, or maybe Bed-Stuy, in Brooklyn. What I mean by this is that the neighborhood is a completely unselfconscious showcase of the profoundly tonic human diversity that had me craving life in a big city in preference to the smugly and knowingly exclusive sociology of the Connecticut suburb where I grew up. Though the real-estate clouds are thickening over this still relatively ungentrified part of Paris, the motley quality of the neighborhood's housing stock is likely, I hope, to keep it safe from that woeful process of urban upgrading that replaces artists and moderate-income people with gentry in search of frisky atmosphere. And for the time being, rents that are considerably lower than they are in central Paris mean that creative people can still work and settle here. 

    

  The latest delicious example of Belleville's appeal is Roseval, a new bistro which recently opened in an old neighborhood tavern worthy of a Toulouse Lautrec painting right across the street from the curiously moving--its architecture, church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix. Though this quartier has been chopped up a bit with new HLM (low-income) housing, it retains a feisty proleteriat feel that's profoundly Parisian and a palpable relief from the city's increasingly globalized center. 

  

  Though it's not cheap, Roseval has instantly won a following among young local epicureans, and since Paris is a small city, the gastro cyber tom-toms went off right away adding people from outside the neighborhood. Like me, for example. Arriving on a warm summer night, Richard was waiting for Bruno and me, and as soon as I walked in I liked this place. Why? It's simple (sic), and there was an immediate warm and spontaneous welcome, and not a single note of pretension or attitude to found fluttering anywhere in the room, pretension and attitude being afflictions that can quickly manifest themselves at ambitious young modern bistros in Paris.

  

   

So once we'd sorted out our wines--a great Viognier and a superb Sangiovese from Emiglia-Romagna (how nice to see a foreign wine or two on the list of young Paris bistro) served by Erika, the Columbian born sommelier who previously worked at Le Chateaubriand, our meal kicked off with a very pretty Valentine of a dish--a single flash-grilled langoustine, with a thin veloute of baby peas and a halved raspberry. I didn't find the tastes of this dish fusing together in any particularly noticeable or interesting way, but the veloute was nicely made and our waiter, Clement, set the tone for the evening with his enthusiasm and eagerness for us to enjoy our meal--again, such a relief from the slightly snarky service that too often prevails at this sort of ambitious newborn table.

  

 

   There was a great crowd in the dining room, too, including a young Belgian fashion designer out on a date with a T shirt wearing body-builder, a famous furniture designer who'd nicely taken his bemused old mother out for a nice meal, and a lot of art bods chattering about gallery shows and their summer holidays. Oh, and us? Summer holidays and the T shirt wearing body builder.

  

   Then thunder struck with a dish made from the restaurant's namesake spud--a sublime puree of smoked potatoes with sauteed onions, baby clams and a garnish of buttered bread crumbs. This one was so good that conversation died completely until the three of us had mopped up every drop of the puree from our plates, and while eating, I found myself thinking that even though the duo of chefs in the kitchen--American-born Oxford (UK) raised Michael Greenwold and Italian Simone Tondo have worked at an impressive constellation of some of the best and hippest restaurants in Paris, including Le Chateaubriand, Rino and Caffe dei Cioppi, the gentle suaveness of this dish brought to mind Bertrand Grebault at Septime more than any other chef working in Paris today. 

 

  Our main course--sliced sirloin with anchovy cream, riced and pureed cauliflower and a few tarragon leaves, continued in this same vein of sincerity, a real reverence for the natural tastes of the excellent produce the kitchen works with, a certain earnestly naive aesthetic plating, and a quiet confidence expressed by impeccable technical skills. 

  

   

  An excellent cheese course followed (with more excellent bread from Christophe Vasseur), and then a strawberry-chocolate-praline dessert that I found too complicated. But this muddled finale didn't even remotely diminish the pleasure of the meal that had proceeded it, and I am eagerly looking forward to going back to Roseval as soon as I return from a huge amount of private and professional summer travel--Greenwold and Tondo are very talented young chefs, and this is a delightful restaurant.

  

  1 rue d’Eupatoria, 20th, Tel. 09-53-56-24-14. Metro: Gambetta, Ménilmontant or Couronnes. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Dinner only: prix-fixe menu 35 Euros, with cheese course 42 Euros, with wine pairings 60 Euros or 67 Euros.

AUBERGE FLORA--A Big-Hearted Bistro That Will Only Get Better, B-

   

  Ever since I first sampled her cooking many years ago when she first opened Les Olivades in the 7th after working for Alain Passard, I've been a fan of Florence Mikula, a really nice woman whose cuisine is as generous and straight-to-the-point as the lady herself. Back then in the mid-eighties, provencale cooking was enjoying a new vogue in Paris that was a reflection of the fact the Parisian media elite had thrown in the towel on the Riviera as being overbuilt and too flashy and was moving north to Provence, and specifically into the Luberon, in search of some peace and quiet and the thing they destroy the moment they find it: authenticity. The TGV had made the Luberon a viable weekend destination, too, and so la cuisine du soleil, or provencale cooking, suddenly started turning up in the food pages of French women's magazines, where it was always rightly noted that it was as healthy--olive oil instead of butter, lots of fruit and veg, as it was delicious. 

 

  Mikula, a native of Avignon, not only knew how to cook provencale, but she cooked it really well, which immediately made Les Olivades a huge hit. Eventually, Mikula, who had to fight like a dog to be accepted into hotel school and then to get her first few jobs because of her sex, sold Les Olivades and moved across the Seine to open a very personal bijou table--Les Saveurs de Flora, on the Avenue George V. Though she made some great dishes there--I loved her bortsch with scallops sauteed with foie gras, grilled John Dory with artichokes barigoule, preserved lemon and gnocci, veal sweetbreads with morels and asparagus, and sublime apple millefeuille with salted-butter caramel, I never really took to this restaurant, which catered to a business crowd at noon and a rather anonymous hotel-guest clientele in the evening. In fact it always struck me as odd that someone a vivacious and fun-loving as Mikula would ever have chosen such a decidedly gray-flannel location. 

 

  So I was really curious when I heard that the restless Flora had moved on again, this time alighting in an eponymous auberge--Auberge Flora, which she'd created on the northeastern edge of the Marais not far from the Bastille. This location sounded rather promising, and on the way to dinner with my pal Devreaux the other night, I found myself hoping that this time Flora might finally have found a long-running nest of her own. Arriving, the meal got off to a good start, too, since we were offered olives and three different aperitif sables (olive, cheese, chorizo) with our glasses of very good Pinot Blanc. The young waitress couldn't possibly have been friendlier or more helpful either, and we studied the menu with interest.

  

   

   What Mikula's getting up to here is a small-plates menu at a table d'hotes setting on one side of the bar, or a 42 Euro prix-fixe menu seated at individual tables in the other half of the arrowhead shaped dining room. Since we were seated outside at a sidewalk table on a warm night, we decided to start out with several small-plate nibbles and then sample the main courses from the prix-fixe menu, which can also be ordered a la carte.

 

   

  So we zeroed in on a trio of nibbles and ordered a bottle of Bourgeuil, quite reasonably priced at 22 Euros. The samosas filled with shredded duck were crispy and oil-free, and though they lacked any discernible seasoning, they were a perfectly pleasant hors d'oeuvre. Eggplant caviar was good, too, but exhibited no trace of the pistou oil the waitress explained as the reason for its being described as "a la Jordanienne" on the menu (I've never been to Jordan, so I can't say, but this menu poetry doesn't make a lot of sense to me--parsley oil, maybe, but not pistou), and the shotglass serving was niggling for 6 Euros. And finally, grilled vegetables with melted burrata on a sable was a nice idea, but the sable was cement-like and the cheese garnish stingy. And we had to ask for salt, too.

  

 

  Despite the miscellaneous culinary imprecisions in our starters, I could still detect Mikula's sunny style in every dish, and this was even truer of our main courses. Though it came to the table lukewarm, my rack of suckling pig was beautifully roasted with a nice brittle golden crackling, a generous amount of juicy meat, and a superb garnish of fava beans, mushrooms and black olives in a pork jus. Aside from a hotter temperature, the only thing that might have made this dish better would have been a side of rice, noodles or potato puree to help mop up the delicious sauce. Devreaux's John Dory came as a carefully cooked filet--firm but moist, with a hauntingly seasoned broth filled with wilted fennel and high notes of saffron, fennel and star anise. A well conceived dish, its flaws were that it reached the table less than lukewarm and that someone had run amok with the salt in the kitchen, which made the delicate broth, which called out for a side of steamed rice, an almost shocking brine. As sorry as I was for Devreaux, however, I really, really enjoyed my pork, which instantly reminded me why I've always been so keen on Mikula's cooking.

 

  Since portions are generous, we concluded with a marinated demi Picodon, one of my favorite cheeses, and two tots of Close des Fees, one of the Languedoc's best reds and a joy to find poured by the glass. Several desserts appealed, but the lavender tart which has always been my favorite Mikula finale wasn't on the menu, and in the back of my mind, I decided to hold off, because I know that this is a restaurant I'll very happily be visiting again. Yes, the kitchen isn't up to speed yet, but the menu's fascinating, they work with great produce, the service is charming, and the prices are reasonable. Oh, and they're open seven days a week, and the multi-formated setting makes it a great place for anyone dining alone.

 

  44 boulevard Richard Lenoir, 11th, Tel. 01-47-00-52-77. Metro: Chemin Vert or Breguet-Sabin. Open daily from 6.30am to midnight, Lunch noon-3pm, dinner 7pm-11pm. Light eats available off hours. Average lunch 30 Euros; Prix-fixe dinner menu 42 Euros; average four course small-plates menu 30 Euros.

PAN--Hip and Hyped, C-; La Bigarrade--Take Two, and Still Terrific, B+

  With the accelerating blurring of work and leisure wrought by Twitter, Facebook, email, text messaging and cellphones eroding the old-fashioned idea of what a vacation could and should be in the United States, there's something deeply admirable and profoundly charming about the way France defends the sanctity of the summer holiday. And if Paris doesn't wind down as visibly as it did twenty years ago when shops flaunted the fact that they were closing for a good long time by masking their windows with censorious kraft paper--you'd only know that this was there is if you weren't in Le Lavandou or Saint-Jean-de-Luz, there's still a reliable, palpable and quite bracing deceleration of daily life that implicitly authorizes you to be late for and/or leave work early, and to abandon yourself to what you feel like doing--lying on your bed all afternoon reading a great novel, for example, instead of all the dreary things you should be doing (preparing accounts for your tax person, meeting a deadline, sewing a button back on a shirt, going to the gym, etc.). French media follows suit, too, with a winding down of life-style reporting, including restaurant reviewing, which annually yields an inevitable cannon-fire of lists of the nicest places to have a meal outside or the summer's 'hippest' tables.

  This summer, the annointed 'hippest' table in Paris is Pan, a place in the increasingly hip 10th arrondissement, though not the Canal Saint Martin and vicinity, but rather the rue de Paradis and those streets in and around the rue du Faubourg Poissoniere (For whatever it's worth, I fear that a tipping point in the vicinity is inevitable within the next year or two, since the unselfconsciousness and alluring grottiness of the neighborhood just won't be able to withstand this much media attention, especially since this sort of froth fertilizes real-estate prices). Though hipness generally discourages any interest on my part--too many hip restaurants get away with mediocre food, because they're hip--ever hear of the Costes brothers?--a few glowing reviews of this place led me to think it might be a good spot for a much looked forward to tete-a-tete with one of my closest Parisian pals, who, alas, will soon be moving to London. So I met Christian for dinner on a muggy night when both of us would surely have preferred to be sitting outside.

  The dining room was beautiful, though, for being an odd and engaging riff on something both Euro fifties via East German design studios--the wallpaper, and sixties--the flea-market faux Danish modern chairs and tables, plus great lighting and a pretty parquet floor. Our server--one of the owners, I think--was friendly, too, so things looked good from the starting block, and I also liked the rather random menu of Mediterranean inspired modern dishes--gaspacho with chorizo, watermelon with marinated feta, etc., and good solid Gallic comfort food. As is increasingly often the case in such 'young' restaurants, our starters--Christian went with the delicious pork rillettes--rich, fatty, smoky, and well-textured, and I had the baby artichoke salad on a bed of arugula with a fresh mint vinaigrette but none of the promised Parmesan shavings, were much, much better than our main courses.

 

   I was surprised by the rather audacious pricing of the wine list, too--I mean the rue Martel is still along way from becoming the Avenue Montaigne, and it took a long time for a our wine to come, but again, the service was pleasant, if sort of cheerfully dissheveled. Then our main courses showed up, and the meal fell off a cliff. I ordered fregola (small almond-shaped pasta) with baby clams and tomatoes, while Christian had ricotta-stuffed ravioli. I could see that his ravioli, which came with no trace of the Swiss chard, hazelnuts or sage mentioned on the menu, were egregiously overcooked, because they were stuck together in a clump at the bottom of a small bowl. More charitable than I am, he described them as "okay," a word I'd never flatter my fregola with. A quick glance at the photo below will document the first problem with this dish--what on earth was the kitchen thinking to garnish a summer pasta with unripe hot-house salad tomatoes? Given the difficulty in obtaining good tomatoes in Paris even during the summer, I think I'd have oven-roasted some Roma tomatoes or used snippets of sun-dried ones instead of these hard, flavorless, greenhouse-grow-light red ones. But the real problem was that the pasta was not only so completely overcooked it had the texture of baby food but it had been seasoned with nothing more than cream and salt. So this was hands-down one of the worst dishes I've eaten in Paris in months, and despite the fabulous company, attractive setting, and pleasant service, there was just no saving this meal. To be sure, I had read that the dish to order here was the hand-chopped steak tartare, but there was still no excuse for this decidedly unappetizing performance.   

 

   Christian and I adjourned to a sidewalk terrace for coffee and another glass of wine, and on the way home, I found myself wondering how on earth anyone could have vaunted the cooking at Pan. And here's where I found the hitch--in Paris, food writing is more and more often to be found under the umbrella of so-called 'Style' supplements instead of in dedicated settings on its own, which means that it has to play some sort of supporting part in the increasingly frantic chase for fashion, cosmetic and perfume advertising placements. This is the only reason I could find that a place like Pan, an instant favorite of the fashion tribe, would ever get such a major look in from the French papers before they signed off for summer. To be fair, however, not all 'Style' supplements are joining this game, since Francois Regis Gaudry's write-up of Pan in L'Express Styles--the best 'Style' supplement in France in my opinion, expressed a politely bewildered opinion on this place, too. 

PAN, 12, rue Martel, 10th, Tel. 09-52-51-63-70. Metro: Chateau d'Eau or Poissonnière. Open Tuesday-Friday for lunch and dinner, Saturday dinner only, Closed Saturday lunch, Sunday and Monday. Average a la carte 45 Euros. 

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   Though some friends I've sent there have been exasperated by the concept of the blind-folded (i.e. unidentified) tasting menu at La Bigarrade, and more than a few have carped about the prices at this tiny little restaurant in Les Batignolles and also the slightly grand demeanor of the service, for me, it's consistently been one of the most intriguing and satisfying contemporary French restaurants in Paris, which is why I was horrified when I heard that chef Christophe Pele, who opened the place, was shipping out. 

  A friend who lives locally reassured me that Yasuhiro Kanayama, the Japanese chef who has replaced Pele, is equally brilliant, however, so I brow-beat Bruno--who also gets impatient with long drawn-out tasting menus, into going for dinner the other night. And we had a superb meal, which debuted with an avocado curl with fresh coriander and a cumin biscuit and continued with micro-planed cauliflower with shaved squid and an exquisite crabmeat with vanilla-spiked sabayon. The rhythm of the meal was impeccable, too, with these sublime little cameos arriving at exactly the moment that you'd quietly decided you'd like something more.

    Though compatible with Pele's approach, Kanayama's cooking is actually much subtler and even more quietly provocative when it comes to sensual contrasts of texture, as seen in a sublime little dish of lobster with grilled banana in lemon-verbena foam (who'd have guessed that the acetone in the banana would flatter the lobster's natural sweetness so suavely?).

   Turbot with bonito broth and smoked eggplant (below) nodded at the Japanese palate without making some sort of awkward Occidental mannerist feint (much too often the case when Western chefs fiddle with Asian food).

    Juicy pigeon breast with cockles and tamarind paste was elegant and deeply satisfying, too.

  Bruno, the dessert lover in our duo, deemed the chocolate cake with Matcha powder and cream reason alone to return to La Bigarrade. All told, a really superb meal, and if David Toutain at Agape Substance is the one who pulls off this sort of gastro snap-shot performance better than anyone else in Paris right now, La Bigarrade remains an urgently well-recommended restaurant in my book.

 La Bigarrade, 106 rue Nollet, 17th, Tel. 01-42-26-01-02. Metro: La Fourche. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Prix-fixe menus 35 Euros, 55 Euros (lunch), 65 Euros, 85 Euros.