another (excellent) restaurant : le six paul bert, 75011

Some time after we stopped dating, my ex F moved to a really superb apartment just next to one of Paris' most beloved bistrots and steak-frites destinations, Bistrot Paul Bert. I can be sure she did this purely to make me jealous, because she herself is vegetarian.

Despite this hurdle, we've managed to remain good friends. So back in January it was a tip-off from F that hipped me to the opening of Bistrot PB proprietor Bertrand Auboyneau's then-new place, Le Six Paul Bert, a small-plates spin-off just down the road from the motherships. (Auboyneau also has PB's adjacent seafood restaurant, L'Ecailler du Bistrot.) Initial rumours had given me to believe the new place was to be a wine bar - and the mere idea of a wine bar by the maestro behind Bistrot Paul Bert filled me with a kind of dread and awe, imagining how unbeatably great such an undertaking would be.

But the rumours turned out to be rumours. Leaving aside its functions as an épicerie and its speakeasy-style name, Le Six Paul Bert is Another (Excellent) Restaurant, albeit one that adopts some of the trappings of small-plates wine bars. The effect is to inadvertently highlight, for anyone who may have believed otherwise, how alien the idea of a new world-style wine bar is to Paris.

n.d.p. in burgundy: le montrachet, puligny-montrachet

The guiding principle of the Bro-gundy road trip my caviste friend J and I took last fall was thrift. It's like this with most of the trips we take together, because I'm congenitally broke, and he's tactful, and neither of us are very fussy about accommodation. We usually sleep on floors. The point, after all, is the wine: learning about the wine and where it's made and about the people who make it. 

But J and I also share an inclination towards targeted profligacy, particularly at those moments when splashing out will tick-off some cultural landmark or other. Internally I categorize these times, which occur with alarming frequency in certain regions, as a sort of sociological expenditure. 

This is how I rationalised doing a bro-lunch with J at Le Montrachet, Puligny-Montrachet's famous formerly-Michelin-starred restaurant-hotel, a staidly ritzy place that would otherwise seem better suited to couples renewing their wedding vows. 

a question of faith: vivant, 75010

The resplendent antique green tilework lining the walls of vin nature entrepreneur Pierre Jancou's new restaurant Vivant seems to have become a kind of Rorschach test for early reviewers. Mentions of the tiling - either disparaging, as when François-Régis Gaudry of L'Express presumed it was 'stolen' from another space gently mocked its artfully banged-up state, or awestruck, as in many blog reviews - seem uncannily reflective of writers' attitudes towards the controversial subjects of natural wine, restaurateurism as creative enterprise, and, of course, Pierre Jancou himself.

How do I feel about the tilework? It's splendid, and original to the space, a former bird shop. I see no other reason to take this salient element of Vivant's simple décor as anything other than a good design choice, unless, never having quite understood natural wines or enlightened restaurateurism, one gleans satisfaction from implying that both are no more than superficial poses. Gaudry's thievery comment scorn is a particularly obvious example; more insidious, if you ask me, are restaurant reviews that almost reflexively describe the clientele of a feted new restaurant as 'bobo,' as even the positive reviews of Vivant have done.

Use of the 'B' word, an identifying feature of hack writing, is basically a sham populist appeal for writers who seek to cosy up to unsophisticated readers. What's worse, in its implication that guests come to a given establishment merely to assuage their own consumerist guilt, the word contains a sad contempt for the very idea that a restaurant might attract a varied, cosmopolitan crowd by dint of its actually being an intelligent, tasteful, ideologically-sound place. Those exist! And Vivant, despite a few earnest missteps, is one of them.