rebirth of cool: entrée des artistes pigalle, 75009

Everything about Entrée des Artistes Pigalle proprietors Fabien Lombardi and Edouard Vermynck's previous bar-à-manger on rue de Crussol evinced a stubborn, cloistered dedication to cool, which often superseded practical concerns. Each cocktail took up its own page on the finicky list. The wine selection was fearlessly obscure. Hospitality could feel a bit teenage. The music program consisted exclusively of canonical rap.

When I heard they were uprooting that original successful address in favour of a larger space in Pigalle, I worried it might be a case of two artistes fixing what wasn't broke. As the album work - as opposed to the early mixtapes - of an MC like Action Bronson attests, sometimes it's folly to polish an idea whose virtues lay in messy spontaneity.*

But it took no more than a footstep beyond the unassuming threshold of Entrée des Artistes Pigalle to realise I'd underestimated Lombardi and Vermynck's ambitions. The dazzling space is gilt-edged, multi-tiered, Escher-like, with two floors, each with its own bar, served by a kitchen perched on what is, in essence, a stair landing. Gone is the air of bedroom hero-worship that characterised the old address. Lombardi and Vermynck have done what a succession of better-financed Paris bars (Silencio, Le Perchoir) have so far failed to do: create a mature, transportive ambience of Parisian cool, un-derivative of other cities.

return to sender: blue valentine, 75011

At the restaurant I used to manage in Los Angeles, we had an amusing problem. One of the owners was friends with R.E.M., and accordingly that band featured heavily on the mandated nightly playlist. But the members of R.E.M. came into the restaurant relatively often. Whenever we got wind of their arrival, we had to be absolutely sure to switch to a non-R.E.M. playlist, to avoid the cosmic embarrassment that would ensue if the band walked in while their own songs were playing. In such a circumstance (for it did indeed occur once or twice) the entire restaurant comes off looking like the guy wearing the band's t-shirt to the concert.

So, what if you've named your restaurant after a classic Tom Waits song, and then you play Tom Waits all the time in your restaurant? This is lame before Tom Waits even sets foot in the door.

Luckily for the owners of newish Republique restaurant Blue Valentine, that problem is easily fixed. Unfortunately, it's representative of the restaurant's entire concept, which is almost unsalvageable. Blue Valentine is a clumsy attempt to ride contemporary restaurant trends without understanding any of them. Cocktail service, a magnum-only, mostly natural wine list, rock music, and a market menu helmed by a Japanese chef. Woau! But it's like the owners were told about these elements cohering successfully in other restaurants, and then the owners gamely tried to replicate the blend themselves, without first examining any other restaurants.* The result is a pitifully inauthentic experience, one of the most embarrassing meals I've had in years. I felt like the intended target of seduction by a college freshman.

glory days : artisan, 75009

When a restaurant or bar really blows me away, I think I instinctively look for ways to compare it to Bruce Springsteen. It's just a habit I've developed. But I think the analogy is for once justified in the case of new 9ème bar-of-all-trades Artisan.

It's an appealingly under-designed space with a big broad bar, competent cocktails, decent beer, not enough wine, and an astonishingly successful menu comprising miniaturized version of French classics: roast lamb shoulder, steak tartare, etc.

In much the same way that Springsteen's songwriting, while rarely credited with the originality of peak-era Dylan, pleases both in spite and because of its predictability, so too does Artisan's careful craftsmanship draw cheers without being the least bit innovative. In fact, that's what I like best about the place.

beyond compare : le mary celeste, 75003

Most comparisons of cities are offered as a way for the speaker - usually an inhabitant of the smaller or less lively of the two cities being compared - to make a display of worldliness and, in doing so, reassure him or herself of the wisdom of winding up in the smaller or less lively city. It's a human phenomenon, as common in Paris as in Boston and San Diego. One also hears it constantly from any New Yorker who has ever chosen to settle elsewhere.*

But, as Italo Calvino hints in his book Invisible Cities, in which narrator Marco Polo describes a seeming infinity of exotic metropolises that all turn out to be Venice, cities might more accurately be considered closed system unto themselves, incomprehensible to outsiders. Narrator Marco Polo's descriptions exceed the imagination his interpellator Kublai Khan, and indeed of the reader. It's impossible to accurately judge one city by the scale of another.

So far, the greatest benefit I've derived from this way of thinking is that it has permitted me to love Le Mary Celeste, an oyster bar some good friends recently opened in the Marais.

n.d.p. in milan: bar basso

Seeking to wring every last drink out of my brief stay in Milan, I arranged to meet my friend and host M for last call at Bar Basso, a proudly classic, slightly hokey cocktail bar famous for being the birthplace of possibly my favorite cocktail, the Negroni Sbagliato, or wrong Negroni.

The Negroni Sbagliato is simply a Negroni made with prosecco instead of gin. Just Campari, dry vermouth, and prosecco. I was introduced to the drink just a few years ago at a restaurant called Dell'Anima in the West Village, whose proprietor Joe Campanale has had great success with a variation involving roasted orange.

The cocktail's genesis story - all successful cocktails have at least one - is that Bar Basso's proprietor's father was mixing a Negroni and grabbed the wrong bottle, presumably realising his error when the ostensible gin bubbled and fizzed. The cocktail thus born is buoyant, bitter, immensely refreshing, and notably less inebriating than a classic Negroni, therefore ideally suited to endless aperitivo hours. It's also completely idiot-proof, with the exception of one time in Paris when I received it in a piddling frouffy champagne flute, which seemed gravely wrong at the time. Then again, before visiting Bar Basso and seeing how a Negroni Sbagliato was served by its originators, how was I to know ?

beef club and beyond: beef club, 75001

Perhaps concerned that by opening Paris' most misleadingly-named wine bar last year, they might have managed to alienate bozos, goombas, and fraternity candidates, the indefatigably ambitious fellows of the Experimental Cocktail Club Group have lost no time launching a new attempt to recapture these critical audiences: The Beef Club, a two story steakhouse-slash-cocktail bar-slash-nightclub, on rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by Etienne Marcel. In the words of Dave Barry, I am not making this up.

With The Beef Club the ECC gents will now compete with local wine-huckster Olivier Magny, whose moron-magnet wine bar Ô Château on same street has until now been the de facto destination for all those who'd wish the pleasures of Paris to be more like those of Las Vegas.*

What can I say? I wish the ECC folks a lot of luck, not least because the Native Companion works for them and is liable to catch hell if I get too vicious. In the spirit of congratulation on The Beef Club, a place I will inevitably overcome my revulsion to visit sooner or later, I thought I might offer some concept suggestions for the next ECC restaurant venture.

balancing act: l'entrée des artistes, 75011

I'm continually making idle chatter about the prospect of one day opening up a wine bar in Paris. The idea is very far from realisation for me, chiefly because I'm hell-bent on becoming a (more) published author before returning to the restaurant industry, but also because I'm not even sure I'd want to do it then. It's not an easy life.

It's thus with a sense of wistful admiration that I encounter a cracking great new bar like the 11ème's L'Entrée des Artistes, a bar à manger that, along with La Retro'Bottega on the other side of the same arrondissement, stands as one of the only places in Paris that approach this wine-bar ideal I have rattling around in my head.

L'Entrée des Artistes even goes farther than I ever would, and offers, alongside a boldly curated natural wine list, a list of cocktails that is the equal of any in the city. If "natural wine + food + perfect cocktails" sounds too good to be true, well, my fear that it might shortly prove to be is what has me returning as often as possible before that happens.

let this not be the future: le floreal, 75010

I wouldn't consider myself assimilated by a long shot. But I've been in Paris long enough by now that there are times I don't feel worlds apart from my adoptive society. From the street markets to the Velib system to the ready availability of natural wines, the place suits me fine - I often pass uninterrupted weeks under the sunny impression that I share some priorities and perspective with Parisians-at-large.

There is accordingly a great rupturing sense of alienation when I get dragged to a wrenchingly misguided but seemingly popular place like Le Floreal, a new-ish nonstop service restaurant opened near Goncourt by the folks behind 10ème bistro hangout Chez Jeanette. Le Floreal, with its huge menu, Mondrian-in-Vegas paneling, and incongruous chandeliers, fairly drips with investment money and ambition - all apparently in service of importing the worst American restaurant trends for ready consumption by credulous Parisians.

n.d.p. in roma: kindred spirits: the jerry thomas project

The Native Companion who I reference from time to time in posts on this blog doesn't (yet) share my enthusiasm for wine, or not to the same extent. Her thing is cocktails, for which I happily also have a minor thing, if not to the same extent.* So she and I had made a deal: she'd endure my relentless quests to locate good restaurants, and my eternal dithering over their wine lists, if I'd endure a potential goose chase in search of good cocktails in Rome.

"Good luck" and "No chance in hell" were the responses the NC and I received from those we contacted in our preliminary cocktail research. It appeared there simply wasn't a scene in Rome. Even our friend L, a native Roman born-and-raised, professed to know of no good cocktail locations in the city. Nevertheless she agreed to accompany us to the nearby Jerry Thomas Project, a speak-easy tip-off the NC had received from one of her bosses in Paris.

It was twilight - about 19h30 - when we knocked on a door that said "Prof. Jerrj Thomas" (sic), on a nothing / nobody street not far from where we'd been sitting in the Piazza de Campo dei' Fiori. After a moment's delay, the door cracked open and a beautiful woman wearing a sweatshirt and enormous insectoid false eyelashes asked us in English what we were doing there.

The NC told her we were thinking of getting a drink. The woman said they didn't open until midnight. We said okay, we'd return later that evening, and the woman bid us goodnight, closing the door.

We were wandering off, halfway up the street, when the woman called after us, "How did you find out about us?"

n.d.p. in roma: precision auto: freni e frizioni

The eternity we spent awaiting our fake reservation at Da Enzo was all the more galling because we'd actually left a very fun scene behind in order to arrive on time. Our friend / trusty guide D had taken us to Freni e Frizioni (tr. "Brakes and Clutches"*), a bustling aperitivo bar housed in a former auto-body shop on Piazzetta del Politeama in the Trastevere. From 19h to 22h each night the place is thronged - from the long bar to beyond the terrace seating on the adjacent square - with tourists and locals, drawn to the simplistic, clubby cocktails, and a remarkably generous antipasti buffet. 

The bar's self-conciously haphazard art-bar décor seems to belie one of the city's more sophisticated commercial operations. The sheer scale of the place indicates this, as does the coherent graphics design package.* Nevertheless the prevailing atmosphere the night we went was that peculiarly Italianate excitement that arises when highly regimented systems are seen falling into utter disarray, every man for himself, all in good fun. 

n.d.p. in roma: obikà, for all basic needs

I love traveling, but I don't profess to be any good at it. In particular I am bad at budgeting time for leisurely transportation itself, with the result that, regardless of where I am, I feel as though I've just been hurled there without warning. (When flying Ryanair, this simile hews uncomfortably close to reality.)

The Native Companion* and I arrived in Rome the other Friday afternoon in characteristic fashion: wild-eyed, confused, and pressed for time. Due to her work schedule and the timing of our flight, she hadn't slept in 24 hours. I had a work meeting I had to get to, and a house-key I had to retrieve, and to all this was added the responsibility of ensuring that the NC didn't walk into traffic or keel over from exhaustion. Neither of us had eaten.

It was kind of a godsend, then, that our taxi to the Balduina neighborhood happened to pass by a location of renowned mozzarella bar chain Obikà, which I recognized both from my one other trip to Rome, and because it had been the original inspiration for the restaurant I used to manage in Los Angeles. By making certain violent gestures I was able to get our taxi driver to stop and let us out. I then used very similar gestures to request a table and subsequently order us a wide plate of gorgeous life-saving mozzarella.

n.d.p. in london: 69 colebrooke row, angel

Having at some point decided my recent wine explorations in London would amount to almost nothing, just a lot of screw-capped new-world Chenin, I was proportionately more eager to visit the city's various cocktail destinations.

Possibly I was just more eager to drink. It doesn't matter.

I met my Parisian New Zealander friends P and Z at the unassuming molecular mixology bar 69 Colebrooke Row, near Angel, where the first and only disappointment of the evening was hearing from the genial leggy server that the bar's general manager, a sharp woman called Cara I'd once gotten drunk with in Paris, was away from London for the holidays. Oh well. Even without the personal touch, 69 Colbrooke Row makes a profound impression - chiefly because its whole underdone ethos is a successful (I hope?) refutation of the dead-obvious lux approach I found so dull at ECC Chinatown.

n.d.p. in london: ECC chinatown, soho

In London I met up with my New Zealand-via-Paris friends P and Z*, and since we all share an interest in good cocktails, we took the opportunity to check out the new Chinatown location of the Parisian bar group Experimental Cocktail Club.

ECC founders Romée de Goriainoff, Olivier Bon and Pierre-Charles Cros have lassoed a really tremendous site for their first cross-channel endeavor: it's a former nightclub with a 3am license located above a Chinese restaurant on a mobbed street just south of mobbed Soho. Once you claw your way in the unmarked door (which, confusingly, opens outwards but has no handle), you find yourself ensconced in the plush cushions of capital L-luxury, two ambitious floors of it.

So, as much as the lack of signage might hint at the sort of low-key elegance that typifies the original ECC location on Rue Saint-Saveur, the new bar is in fact another grand ante-up beyond Prescriptions, ECC's most recent, and most vulgar, bar in Paris' 6ème arrondissement.

cocktail curiosity shop: izrael, 75004

One key piece of advice for drinking in Paris: almost never order cocktails. They just plain suck here. With the notable and laudable exception of the Experimental Cocktail Club mini-empire, the cocktail scene in Paris is about as sophisticated as a half-stocked BU frat party in the mid-to-late nineties. For evidence, just look to the ubiquity of mojitos, which in the rest of the civilized world ceased being cool, and began to be recognized as just a watery hassle, about a decade ago. (I can and will write a whole separate post on how keenly I wish for that drink to disappear.)