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.

fish out of water: albion, 75010

On whom can we blame the undying, slightly questionable fad for Brit nostalgia ? Pete Doherty? The Kinks? More recently, perhaps my friends at Le Bal Café?

The fleet of establishments launched this past decade plus that nominally hark back to some hazy olde England ideal is staggering, and perhaps it is a sign the trend is nearly dead in the water that even the French - historically somewhat resistant to Brit nostalgia - are leaping aboard. Albion (another one!) is a genteel cave-à-manger opened near Métro Poissonière last year by two longtime Paris expats, Haydon Clout and Matt Ong, who'd previously tended bar and cheffed, respectively, at 6ème natural wine standby Fish. Albion, which serves mediteranean food alongside French wines, has been more or less thronged since opening, and not just by expats.

The irony, of course, is that for better or for worse the only remotely British elements of the restaurant are the ownership (just Ong), the warm(er) service, and the relative spaciousness of the place. Sticklers will point to the odd Elizabethan dessert recipe, and the presence of a British cheese on the cheese plate. But I suspect the success of the Albion the restaurant is due much less to effective branding (it's not) than to how Clout and Ong are cleverly offering 6ème restaurateurism - with its conservatism, and its relative professionalism - to a heretofore underserved market of 10ème gentrification.

la renaissance des aoc's: domaine de l'ecu

Just a petit mot about Domaine de l'Ecu's rocking 2010 Muscadets, which I tasted while waiting in line to taste Nicolas Joly's Savennieres at the Renaissance des Appellations this year. As I mentioned in a previous post, the latter wines were all showing fairly hot and flabby, which let-down made the Domaine de l'Ecu wines shine even brighter, in retrospect. Winemaker Guy Bossard makes what to many drinkers are oxymoronic wines: a range of complex, elegant Muscadets, gem-like in their precision, each named for its soil type:  Gneiss, Granite, and Orthogneiss.

Now, it's not news to me that Muscadet can be profound. I seem to encounter a version meant to knock my socks off at least once every six months: often it's a screaming bargain, by a top producer of Muscadet, with seven to ten years' age on it. As much as I enjoy the experience, this genre of profound Muscadet seems to me to be of chiefly archival interest: somms gather round and nod with surprise and delight that after so many years such simple wines are showing strange inanimate-sweet flavors, none of which are, upon further reflection, very pleasurable. Creamed corn, seaweed, dirty mineral, etc.

What sets the Bossard wines apart is they are not merely good-for-Muscadet. With the exception of the basic "Cuvée Boss'Art," which seems to be a 'what-do-we-do-with-the-leftovers' kind of wine, they all possess a chiseled grace that places them among the most enjoyable whites I tasted at the Renaissance this year.