from the ground up: yard, 75011

A few weeks ago I organised a hilarious and, thankfully, thereafter utterly unrepresentative meal for a visiting friend at Père Lachaise bistrot Yard. I hadn't been to the restaurant, but had heard about it for years and thought why not. Unfortunately for my friend, who idolizes the strenuous "modernist" cuisine of the likes of Inaki Aizpitarte, Yard was between chefs. We later learned that owner Jane Drotter had been in the kitchen that night, winging it.

All at the table agreed that it was like not even eating at a restaurant. It was like dining in the countryside at the house of a French friend's mother who had never been to restaurants. We fled to Clamato for a second dinner to remind ourselves what food with flavor tasted like, and my friends learned never again to trust me for a restaurant recommendation.

As usual, I was just ahead of my time. Not a week later, I learned that Shaun Kelly, ex-chef of Au Passage, and Eleni Sapera, ex-cook at Bones, were taking over kitchen duties at Yard, instantly rendering it a destination. So my friends and I returned on Friday for an entirely different register of meal. It was a testament both to how much Drotter got right with Yard in the first place, and to the transformative power of a certain circle of young foreign chefs in Paris

all the right ingredients: jeu de quilles, 75014

Imagine you must throw a party. You invite your most amusing friends into a room with a balcony after sundown and open numerous bottles of sparkling wine. There is a band. Performance art. DJs. Clowns, sword-swallowers, and a man who walks around on his hands. But to your consternation, no one speaks to each other for the duration of the event.

Great party, they say, on their way out the door. Keep me in the loop for the next one.

I feel this way about certain natural wine restaurants. Like the friends in the above scenario, I sincerely appreciate the effort that has gone into getting all the right ingredients in place. Desnoyer meats, natural wines, manifestly fresh fish, etc. At Jeu de Quilles, a suberbly charming market-menu place in the 14ème, these elements are supported by that other, nigh-on unattainable Paris luxury, great hospitality. All that I felt was lacking, after a recent by-no-means-unenjoyable meal there, was a unifying vision: a reason all these good things have been gathered together.

i feel you: philou, 75010

I'm increasingly convinced that, for Parisian restaurateurs, the greatest challenge is not to find the best location or to source the best ingredients or to stock the best wines, but simply to inspire a cheery staff. Even a reliably polite staff is an achievement in this city. There's a very simple in-built societal reason for this, having to do with the disproportionately enormous costs of hiring and firing people in France. When French service staff, enduring the punishing stress that typifies restaurant work, behave as though they own the place, it's because, in effect, they do. Getting rid of a bad egg involves painful negotiations that can end with the employer paying two years' worth of the ex-employee's salary, a cost few restaurants can afford.

Philou, a winningly sharp, modern bistro tucked just off the Canal Saint Martin in the 10ème, has been garnering beaming reviews from all corners since it opened this past August, and while all the other criteria for success are certainly in place - well-priced natural wines, a solid market menu, the nearby canal - it was the engaged, reactive service that was the runaway highlight of a recent meal there.

To wit: a party of foppy Anglophones strides in, takes an eternity to order, and Linda, the superinformed and apparently telepathic server, intuits correctly that the delay is not that of bumbling tourists, but rather that of someone who worked in restauration who is simply jazzed to be there and geeking about the wine list to his friends.