n.d.p. in lyon: brasserie georges, 69002

To recommend a restaurant on the basis of anything other than food, service, or wine has always seemed very foolish, like recommending a tailor because he plays excellent piano. I still recall my revulsion when upon arriving in France in 2009, an acquaintance took me to Derrière, a Paris restaurant famous for containing, in a rear space accessed through a Narnia-like wardrobe door, a sort of playroom, replete with ping-pong. What are we, I thought, children at a birthday party?

Yet I will profess that, during visits to Lyon over the past two years, among my most moving dining experiences has been at Brasserie Georges, a vast, ancient institution where the charm is mostly historical. The food - a solid impression of traditional dishes of Lyon and Alsace - and the wine - a safe selection of mostly reputable conventional estates - are both remarkable only for a restaurant of Brasserie Georges' immense size. It measures 667m2; seven hundred guests can be served per service.

Restaurants on this titanic scale tend to make one feel like a cog in a large machine. The nostalgic triumph of Brasserie Georges is to hark back to an early-modern era when large machines, and even sensations of anonymity, were novel and inspiring. The restaurant was founded in 1836 - the time of Baudelaire - but there is a distinctly Futurist zing in the air. Seated in the reverberating bustle of Brasserie Georges, one feels suffused with a strange hope, resembling the exhilaration of a Hollywood villain expositing over the loud, steady construction of his doomsday device.

not drinking poison in nice: la merenda

The Native Companion and I were in Nice for New Year's. Before we returned to Paris I was able to convince her to submit to the rigmarole necessary to assure a lunch table at La Merenda, the city's most storied address for traditional Niçoise cuisine, run since 1996 by chef Dominique Le Stanc. 

La Merenda famously has no phone, so one must personally pop by to request a table later in the day. As it happened our agenda that morning consisted of wandering aimlessly around the port, so this fit right into our schedule. The restaurant's popularity far exceeds its tiny space, however, and tables were understandably slow to turn that day. We had to circle back round twice after the appointed time came and went. 

I didn't mind. I was enchanted the moment I laid eyes on La Merenda's sparse menu, scrawled on a blackboard posted to its frosted windows. If menu writing is a kind of literature, Le Stanc's menu at La Merenda possesses the hymn-like simplicity of Kafka's shortest works - "The Wish to be a Red Indian," perhaps. In the space of one sentence, Kafka proposes a subject before shearing it away in stages, until nothing remains but a profound absence. All the daily repetition of kitchen work and the generational repetition that has yielded traditional cuisine - all that absence of novelty - is contained on La Merenda's blackboard. The rarity of such a statement - anywhere in the world, let alone breezy, tourist-stricken Nice - gives La Merenda a curious power. At lunch, one can even overlook the dismal wine selection. 

le snacking: au sauvignon, 75007

Back in early November I asked Beaujolais vigneron Karim Vionnet where he'd be spending the soirée of Beaujolais Nouveau in Paris. He said he'd be a little bit everywhere, as usual, but he'd certainly be starting the evening at (inaudible).

"Where?"

"Au Sauvignon," he said, audibly this time, though seemingly without any confidence that it would be an interesting occasion. He rummaged around his paperwork and found the place's card. He didn't seem to know what the restaurant was or how his wines had wound up there, let alone how he had agreed to spend the soirée of Beaujolais Nouveau there - but that may just have been Karim being Karim. My interest was piqued because there are very few places serving natural Beaujolais, or natural wine at all, in Au Sauvignon's Saint-Sulpice neighborhood, which must rank among the dowdiest in Paris. A rich grandmotherliness suffuses the air; one senses the denizens have buying power, but without the willpower to consume, in the way that the elderly, through no fault of their own, simply stop eating much at mealtimes.

I wound up visiting Au Sauvignon for a late lunch in December and was pleased to find that the restaurant, if that is what it may be called, is perfectly adapted to its neighborhood, and in such a way as to render its style of service queerly contemporary for the city at large. The menu is composed entirely of the snack foods deemed acceptable by former generations of well-to-do Parisians who probably disapprove of snacking outside the context of a tough day's shopping at Le Bon Marché. This means tartines, oysters, and omelets at all hours, with osetra caviar available for anyone having a really bad day.

n.d.p. in beaujolais: l'auberge du col du truges, le truges

Living in Beaujolais for the past few months has revealed myriad semi-unknown regional charms. What it has not revealed are many good restaurants. The winemakers I know are kind of sho-ga-nai about the situation, aware that they themselves rarely patronise their rather dire local restaurants.

Most villages have a bar and a restaurant, or one establishment serving as both, pitched at the lowest price range possible for the business to remain viable. (In Beaujolais this is, strangely, still not that cheap. I often dine for the same prices in Paris' better-value restaurants.) In some villages, there persist Michelin-style establishments, but they are perpetually empty-ish, seemingly dependent on the birthdays and anniversaries of the elderly, and on what trickle of Belgian and Dutch tourism still remains. Tourism overall has been in decline since the 1990's, and the corresponding stagnation in the average Beaujolais citizen's income, coupled with the eminent availability of large kitchens in private homes and the laudable persistence of culinary know-how among families, means that the natives simply don't dine out much.

Atop the Col de Truges, however, on the border between high Morgon and Chiroubles, there sits a dowdy auberge whose unadorned Beaujolaise cuisine has remained constant, and consistently excellent, throughout the region's changing fortunes.

sleepwalkin': le bougainville, 75002

A time-capsule wine bar and restaurant like Le Bougainville, ensconced on the dowdy side of the Galerie Vivienne, perfectly embodies the simultaneous joys and frustrations of living in present-day Paris.

On the one hand, much of the city's grace lies in the fact that, mere paces from its financial center, places like Le Bougainville persist. The restaurant is gloriously unselfconscious, evincing an insensitivity to décor that borders on senility. A piano hunches unplayed by the entryway; garish fluorescents zig-zag overhead beside the bar; an almost characterless adjacent dining room still resembles whatever unrelated shop storage area it once was. Local suits and lost-looking tourists dine on goose rillettes, oeufs mayo, herring salad, roast pork: low-cost village fare, untutored but uncorrupted. Complementing all this is an incongruously good wine list containing just about the entire sought-after range of cult Jura vigneron Jean-François Ganevat, at mysteriously great prices.

But as happens so often in Paris, the scent of mystery leads us to the trough of incomprehensibility.

the price of convenience: la boulangerie, 75020

In trying to descry the origins of the hazy aura known as restaurant hype, we often overlook its simplest element, which is thrift.

Patronising restaurants is not a thrifty habit in the first place, which is all the more reason for diners to flock to restaurants that are good value for money. Surprisingly few Paris business owners seem to understand this dynamic - that increased turnover, despite the hassle, is sounder business footing than high prices. The result is a surfeit of demand at good-value establishments, or, in a word, hype. But what becomes of the capable restaurants that are just not quite good enough a deal ?

One such haunt is La Boulangerie, a Ménilmontant bistrot I seem to have avoided for the past five years on account of its hypelessness and its faceless, rather confusing name. Imagine my surprise to discover, when I finally ducked in for an impromptu dinner with a visiting friend, that it's in fact a mature, quality-oriented establishment that seems to exist just slightly out of its era. It's pricing is pre-Euro crisis, let's say, and its plating is mid-Chirac. The pleasant hospitality, broad wine list, and the staggering armagnac selection, on the other hand, are all timeless.

at my most parisian : la cagouille, 74014

I can pinpoint the precise moment at which, despite language struggles and disgust with service norms and volcanic resentment of patrician social structures, I began to feel at home in Paris.

It was when I was first able to pass along to a colleague a recommendation I had once received for a miracle-worker dry-cleaner. (In this case, a stuffy teinturier who is, at reasonable cost, able to remove tar and bloodstains from garments. Don't ask.) For city life is an agglomeration of knotty problems - from stained shirts to subway strikes to where to entertain on Sunday nights - and to feel at home among it all one must possess ready solutions. For expats, cut off from the oral tradition by which great addresses for obscure services are usually handed down, the challenge is that much greater.

So it's a great comfort to me to have been introduced* to La Cagouille, a poorly-designed, fusty, Charentais seafood restaurant tucked behind Montparnasse in the 14ème arrondissement. Deeply uncool and far removed from any part of town I frequent, La Cagouille nevertheless ranks among the city's best back-pocket addresses, simply by dint of offering very good food and wine - and abundant table availability - on Sundays.

n.d.p. in champagne: restaurant l'étoile, troyes

It was perhaps unfair of me, in discussing cave-à-manger pioneer Aux Crieurs de Vin, to refer to Troyes as a one-bistrot town. For the wine-indifferent, there are probably many decent places to eat.

For instance, I have very fond memories of a lunch at Restaurant L'Etoile, a crowingly unpretentious, down-homey bistrot situated just off the square of the Marché des Halles. On its big broad terrace or in its two undesigned dining rooms, a traveler can experience one of those unexpectedly B-plus meals whose afterglow extends well beyond an afternoon.

If, while in Troyes for a weekend, you'd seek anything more for lunch than a perfect andouillette au Chaource and a glass of high-pitched Coteaux Champenois Rouge, well then I don't know what you want.

when all else fails: aux tonneaux des halles, 75001

The classic Parisian defense of chaotic or miserable or under-exploited establishments insists that such places should be cherished for their flaws, since they represent the Paris of bygone age. And there are indeed more than a few restaurants - Le Petit Vendôme ! Le Rubis ! etc. - that truly merit such sentimentalism. But in my experience the Time Capsule Defense is in most cases a strange psychological sleight-of-hand by which restaurant patrons excuse, in addition to the unmistakeable avarice or viciousness or laziness in a restaurant's service, also themselves, for failing to voice any protest.

Eyes wander up from hideous plates to rest more comfortably on ancient vermouth ads and rustic farm equipment adorning the wall. A guest in this sort of restaurant abandons the idea of deriving culinary-aesthetic satisfaction or even sustenance from a meal, and instead considers the whole experience a sort of living museum, of chiefly historical or sociological interest.

"I've been to this museum before!" is what I usually shout in such situations, and skedaddle. If after a concert recently it was actually me who led a few friends to wine bar throwback Aux Tonneaux des Halles, it was only because it was a thronged Saturday night and we had no other choice, and because Aux Tonneaux remains distinguished, among weird Time Capsule Restaurants, for its superb natural wine list.