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. 

SAINT JAMES CLUB--A Pricey but Pleasant Pastoral Soiree in Paris, B-

 

   "No conversational subject warns the world that you're a bore faster than the weather," my perspicacious paternal grandmother once cautioned, and she was right, of course. So let me fleetingly mention that the weather in Paris this summer has been just awful, since you need this back story to understand why I enjoyed dinner in the gardens of the Saint James Club in the plummy 16th arrondissement so much the other night. 

   

  Urban dining al fresco, you see, is one of the grand Gallic pleasures of a Parisian summer. Not only is it the height of corny romance--and no harm done for it, either--but being seated outside on a Parisian sidewalk, or even better in a private garden, allows you to study and savor the city and its inhabitants in a way that you just can't do when you're in motion. Before I moved to Paris, I had little experience of this particular summertime pleasure, since the cities I'd lived in previously--Boston, New York and London, just never embraced the cult of fresh-air gastronomy the way that Paris has. That being said, the regrettable little fly-in-the-ointment about outdoor dining establishments in Paris is that they often serve expensive and rather mediocre food, something they rightly calculate they can get away with when the mercury rises and everyone wants to sit outside and enjoy a breeze.

  

   

    All of this rattled around in the back of my mind when my friend Corinne suggested dinner at the Saint James Club, an elegant semi-public semi-private club cum hotel in the 16th arrondissement. Last winter, the hotel was much in the French press after a visually bubbly makeover by a Franco-American decorator named Bambi Sloan. Now, apparently, a new chef, Virginie Basselot, had left a previous post at the Bristol working with Eric Frechon to take over the kitchen here. One or two early reviews of her cooking were so harsh as to be not entirely credible, but still...this place wouldn't be cheap, and what if the thumbs-down reviewers weren't all wrong? So I fretted, because they're few things in the world that make me more violently despondent than a bad expensive meal.  

 

  On the other hand, I hadn't seen Corinne for a while, and when I checked the weather forecast, the day she'd suggested was forecast to be hot and sunny. So I threw my hat in the ring, I mean after all, how bad could the meal actually be?

 

  Arriving, the Saint James Club was impressive and a tiny bit intimidating, but after coming through the front door, I was surprised by a warm greeting from an attendant, who immediately escorted me to the garden terrace behind the limestone mansion where my friend was waiting. Along the way, I made a note that this place has one of the best looking hotel bars I've ever seen in Paris.

  

   

  The garden terrace was full, with people having drinks at white wrought iron tables, and three large hot-air-balloon-like pavillions, a reference to the fact that this address was the site of Paris's first aerodrome, and the place from which hot-air balloons, known as Montgolfières in French, first lifted, or drifted, off. On a warm night, gentle gusts of linden-flower perfume from trees in this very green corner of Paris seemed to have dopped the well-dressed crowd into a relaxed good humor, and seated with Corinne, we sipped Champagne and eyeballed the appealing, if--as I expected, rather fearsomely priced menu. And yet, it was a beautiful night, and the occasional bout of extravagance is vitally tonic, so I decided not to fret the prices, and just have what I hoped would be a good meal.

 

  Corinne started with a poignantly sincere and very generously served dish of fresh peas in a velvety and bright green pea broth with a flan of onions and a garnish of fine briefly sauteed ribbons of Black Forest ham, which was delicious, while I was warned off of my first choice--the poached egg and white asparagus in arugula juice, by a snatch of conversation from a neighboring table--the asparagus came chopped up in a timidly flavored green soup with an over-cooked egg, or so I heard, and went with the tartare of wild sea bass with wasabi root and herb crumpets instead. I only order any kind of tartare (raw meat or fish) in an establishment I trust, so this turned out to be a very well-rewarded act of faith--microplaned wasabi root underlined just how impeccably fresh this fish was and the warm crumpets were homemade and redolent of chives and thyme. 

   

  The service was absolutely delightful, too--prompt and very charming, and so we were in fine fettle when our main courses arrived. Corinne had an exquisitely beautiful chunk of snowy white cod on a fine confetti of green vegetables glossed with lemon-balm butter, a truly ideal dish for a blistering night, while I chose the rack of lamb. The lamb was pleasant enough--a well-trimmed little rack of lamb, but the accompanying lime-zest spiked hummus was underwhelming. The dish that I'd come back here to eat this summer--and I would return, is definitely the cod.

  

 

  Working our way through an excellent bottle of Saint Aubin, one of the last reasonably priced Burgundies, we both decided on the stewed raspberries and rhubarb with fontainbleau cheese--a sublimely airy whipped cream like cheese with a nice lactic bite, a perfect dessert on such a warm night. And then we dawdled over coffee, which was served with a nice selection of little nibbles, before Corinne finally glanced at her wrist and saw that we needed to make a move if we were going to get the last Metro. The bill? Oh well, it was about 130 Euros a piece, but this interlude was still less expensive and perhaps vastly more refreshing than an overnight trip to Barcelona might have been, as the Cinderella factor of finding ourselves waiting for the train in a hot tunnel emphasized. Sometimes, in fact, there really is no place like home, especially when there's such a talented and gentle-spirited cook in the kitchen and you can linger in a beautiful garden for a suite of midsummer hours.

 

  Saint James Club, 43 avenue Bugeaud, 16th arrondissement, Tel. 01-44-05-81-81. Metro: Porte Dauphine. Open to non-members only for dinner from Monday to Saturday and for Sunday brunch. Reservations required. Average a la carte dinner 100 Euros.

LES 110 de TAILLEVENT--An Expensive Hommage to Bacchus That's Just Not A Corker, C+

   

  Since this particular meal would not only include the discovery of an impressively pedigreed new restaurant but a reunion with Roger and Adelyn, two wonderful friends from Australia who have a huge knowledge of and enthusiasm for good food and wine, I was really looking forward to dinner at Les 110 de Taillevent the other night. This just-opened brasserie de luxe has replaced Taillevent's first off-spring, L'Angle du Faubourg, just around the corner from la maison Mere, and it was conceived with the specific vocation of pleasuring vinophiles by pouring some 110 different bottles of wine from the Taillevent cellars by the glass in 7 or 14 centiliter pours.

   

  Arriving, I loved the new look of this always rather awkward space by omnipresent interior designer Pierre Yves Rochon, who seems to have designed almost every new hotel to have opened in Paris during the last five years. Here, it looks as though he may have been channeling the great Alsatian marquetry artist Spindler, since the room radiates warm wood tones, has golden lighting and clubby leather upholstered chairs. Roger, Adelyn and Swiss friend Maeggie were already seated and sipping Champagne when Bruno and I arrived, and happiness and hilarity reigned as Roger and Adelyn gifted me with two different types of Sarawak pepper--doctors both, they'd been at a medical conference in Borneo on their way to Paris. It took a while--an unfortunate foreshadowing of the service to come, but Bruno and I finally received our glasses of Champagne, which no one bothered to ID, a surprising slip up in a restaurant dedicated to viniferous connoisseurship.

   When I opened the menu, my heart sank a bit, too, since prices were hefty, and Roger had already gallantly insisted on taking us all to dinner. Still, I thought, at least the food will be good in a restaurant under the aegis of Taillevent, especially since I've always loved chef Alain Solivérès's cooking (the actual chef at Les 110 de Taillevent is Emile Cotte, who previously worked at Le Pre Catalan, Meating, and several other Paris tables). A different selection of four wines by the glass had been selected to accompany starters, fish, meat, cheese and desserts, but off the menu, a much larger number are available by the glass and the bottle. Studying the different possible wine pairings, I immediately realized how hard it would be to make this restaurant work properly. Unless you're serving experts or confident know-nothings, wine by the glass at high prices needs a fair amount of cheerful and patient explanation--why, exactly, is one wine perhaps a better choice than another, etc., an exercise that be both fun and elucidating if the staff have both the personality, expertise, and time to carry it off. Given the very diverse starters at our table, I quickly decided we'd be better off drinking by the bottle, however, and so ordered a lovely white Bellet to go with our first courses. Alas, our first courses arrived before our wine, and the special glass of Jurancon that Roger wanted with his foie gras required further prompting.

  

 

   I loved my sauteed squid with gently smoky sun-dried tomatoes on a bed of salad leaves, and the bone-dry Bellet paired perfectly with this starter, too. Bruno's smoked salmon was pleasant, but not very generously served; Adelyn described her dressed crab with fennel and dill as "timid," which, knowing her, really meant, slightly disappointing; Roger wolfed down his foie gras with apricot chutney, and Maeggie seemed pleased with her cold pea soup. As the cruise director for this meal, however, my enthusiasm was rapidly waning. The food was pleasant but undistinguished, and it was completely maddening to have to keep asking for our wine to be poured. No serious sommelier should ever have allowed that 90 some odd Euro bottle of Bellet to get ice cold in a bucket, either.

 

  Our main courses continued the debuting theme of the meal, too--good quality produce prepared with admirable professional precision but no noticeable signature, a point-blank absence of creativity, and a deflating lack of generosity in terms of garnishes and side dishes. An up-market restaurant spinning on an axis of sophisticated food-and-wine pairings should practice a reflexive abundance and aspire to an ambient joyousness, both sorely lacking here. Knowing how much the Aussies love good wine and wanting them to drink things they might not easily find in a small town down under, but also respectful of the melting point of Roger's charge card, I chose a Saint-Péray as our next bottle. And it was delightful. Never once, however, did the truly charmless sommelier engage with me or anyone else at the table about what we were drinking, although he needed to be reminded three times before the long-suffering Roger finally got the stiffly priced glass of Pommard he'd wanted to drink with his rack of lamb.

  

 

  Adelyn was happy with her sole meuniere, which cost something like 60 Euros; Bruno had a dainty little vol au vent (and some soup when we got home); Maeggie went with the merlan Colbert (breaded whiting with a nice caper mayonnaise and fried parsley), and I ordered the ugliest dish of the evening, which was steamed cod with a stingy morel or two, several spears of asparagus and what I think may have been the same jus de viande sauce that garnished Bruno's vol au vent. 

  

  Since the desserts weren't particularly interesting, we shared two different cheeses--an organic Sainte Maure and a superb 26 month old Comte, and called it quits. Because of the lively conversation and some good wine, I think everyone enjoyed the evening, but regretted having chosen this expensive and joyless place for a very special occasion and would be disinclined to return.

  

Les 110 de Taillevent, 195 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, 8th, Tél. 01-40-74-20-20. Metro: Courcelles or Georges V. www.taillevent.com. 39 Euro prix-fixe menu, Average a la carte 75 Euros.