small stakes: le desnoyez, 75020

A few years ago during the Loire tasting salons I had a brief but memorable conversation with a friend who was then in the initial stages of preparing to open a natural wine bar in New York. I had confessed I wasn't very excited by many new Paris restaurants: everything seemed pokey, limited, a little predictable. He replied that, on the contrary, he adored the Paris restaurant scene, precisely because it was so modest, small-scale, and restrained. "You never eat like that in New York," he said. Everything there was comparatively over-the-top.

It's true that there isn't the same pressure in Paris, as there is in New York or London, to achieve a high check average, massive turnover, or both. In Paris the combination of affordable commercial rents, low cost-of-living (compared to other capitals), and abundant small restaurant spaces allows for a level of intimacy in dining that has all but disappeared in other major cities.

Restaurant Le Desnoyez, opened on a shoestring budget by former food blogger Jean-Marc Sinceux in Belleville in autumn of last year, offers a level of intimacy in dining that has all but disappeared even in Paris. The place seats about fourteen. In another capital, such a Lilliputian restaurant might need to enforce a twelve-course tasting menu. Here in Paris, Sinceux proposes an inexpensive bistrot offering, albeit one enlivened by a slim selection of offbeat natural wines and by his surprisingly painterly way with plating.

consider the perks: restaurant lazare, 75008

Bad restaurants, like the proverbial Tolstoyan unhappy family, may be awful in an infinity of ways. We dislike them accordingly. But how we truly hate restaurants is largely divisible into two categories. There is personal emnity: because the ownership or a key staff member has done you grievously wrong. Then there is impersonal emnity: because you sense that the establishment targets a clientele whose tastes you question, whose influence, you suspect, is ultimately deleterious to a culture you value.

My friend and colleague Meg Zimbeck of Paris by Mouth hated Restaurant Lazare in the latter way, which is probably the only way to hate an overpriced 110-seat fortress of a bistrot installed in a wall of Gare Saint Lazare. Pioneering bistronomy chef Eric Frechon is surely not there himself, peeling onions. The staff are replaceable hotelier school grads, so predictable you can't even resent their inattentiveness. What I think Meg resented, rather, was the restaurant's perceived culture of wealth-fluffing and preferential treatment, of stout bankers gorging themselves on guinea hens before boarding first-class cars and careening off to houses in Honfleur for the weekend.

As a fellow writer, with no quantifiable skills and no discernable route to fortune in my future, I hate these (possibly imaginary) people too. And I recognise that Lazare exists for them, while the plebs wait in hundred meter lines for Burger King on another floor of the station. That Lazare thrives is in itself a Pikettian sign of increasing income stratification. So it's with a kind of melancholy that I admit I don't hate Lazare; that I find the place quite useful; that it constitutes a perk of city life I wish I could enjoy more often.

rock out: la cantine de la cigale, 75018

A brief moment of on-stage banter at last Monday's Hamilton Leithauser show at La Boule Noire saw the former Walkmen singer - arguably the most compelling rock vocalist of his generation - complaining about food prices in Montmartre.

"Since when did Montmartre get so expensive?" he asked, before deadpanning, "That's what we talk about in this band."

In the audience my friends and I exchanged shrugs. Where had he gone to eat?* From my perspective, it's never been easier to get an inexpensive quality-conscious meal in Montmartre. The quiet side of the hill boasts excellent pizza at Il Brigante, while the upper slopes of rue des Martyrs are home to Miroir, a totally solid natural wine bistrot. An incongruously good natural wine magnum list is just south of there at the otherwise dire Hotel Amour. And right down the road from La Boule Noire is Le Petit Trianon, which as far as concert-venue cuisine goes, is bested only by Basque chef Christian Etchebest's La Cantine de la Cigale, which is even closer, and even better value for money. It was, oddly, deserted after Leithauser's performance, which either indicates that his fans have no taste, or that I have entirely forgotten what it's like to be a young concertgoer more in love with music than eating well.

yonne bike trip: le pot d'étain, isle-sur-serein

Isle-sur-Serein isn't the most picturesque village in the Yonne.

That honor might go to Noyers, a medieval town containing a superb butcher shop and an impossibly cute gallery-café where my friends from the blog TheTrailOfCrumbs do projects on occasion. My fellow bike-trippers and I got caught in a biblical downpour just before passing through Noyers this past June. So we paused in that town for coffees and beer. I ate like seven gauffres from the gallery-café. We sat around damply and considered how nice it would be to just stay in Noyers.

But nearby Isle-sur-Serein - kind of a one-horse town, by comparison, and not all of it historical - is home to L'Auberge Le Pot d'Etain, a hotel whose rather trad, stuffy restaurant is distinguished by one of the most heartbreakingly great wine lists any of us had ever seen. That list puts the village of Isle-sur-Serein on the map : one glance makes a traveler want to stay a week.

jura bike trip: domaine macle, château-chalon

In Donald Barthelme's short story "The Glass Mountain," the narrator scales the face of a mountain, enduring bitter winds and the taunts and jibes of skeptical acquaintances below, only to be disillusioned upon attaining the summit, where the enchanted symbol he's been seeking turns into an "ordinary princess." The unspecified symbol, with its "layers of meaning," had been worth the narrator risking his life for, whereas a princess, quantified and familiar from fairy tales like the one that inspired "The Glass Mountain," can be discarded without remorse.

After our picnic among the vines below the village of Château-Chalon, we climbed a mountain to reach the cellars and tasting room of Domaine Macle, whose little-seen, essentially undistributed wines remain the enchanted symbol of the whole strange appellation.

...of the best: le chateaubriand, 75011

Having lived immediately nearby for going on two years now, it's slightly unconscionable that it took me so long to visit Le Chateaubriand, Restaurant Magazine's 11th Best Restaurant In The World, Le Fooding's 2006 Meilleur Table award, the subject of strange reso raffles at Paris By Mouth, etc. I think I just get a sort of jaded heebie-jeebies whenever I hear reservations are difficult someplace, preferring instead to get low-key Chinese, or simply cook and watch Twin Peaks.

It took a fairly remarkable event to inspire my visit during these past women's collections: a colleague of mine, my friend D, decided to actually plan a meal ahead of time during fashion week. It's something that isn't done very often, just due to the exigencies of work during that period. D, who is part of our New York staff, visits Paris 2-4 times a year, and I think it finally got to her that during these visits we always seemed to wind up at Irish pubs. This time, she and I coordinated an ambitious dining schedule in advance, and top of her list was, naturally, Le Chateaubriand.

It turns out the best way to get a res is just to meander by around opening time, before the restaurant fills up, and ask one of the similar-looking fellows at the bar.* As with 2ème bistro-on-fire Frenchie, calling will only leave you feeling burned. (Whatever. Time will judge the wisdom of the whole absence-of-phone-etiquette-as-marketing trend.) I was happy enough to get a Tuesday four-top a week in advance for the early hour - for France - of 19h30,** and it deserves mention that later, on the day-of, when the restaurant called to confirm and I missed their call and called back seven times until I got through to confirm the confirmation, they were totally cool about expanding the res to five people. That was nice.

It allowed my friends B and V from Grey Magazine to join me, the NC, and D for what was, finally - what else? A really slamming, high-five-worthy meal.

give the pipos what they want: les pipos, 75005

Oddly befitting its location in the university-dominated, student-infested 5ème arrondissement - just off the Pantheon, no less - neighborhood bar à vin Les Pipos can be read as a kind of controlled case study of the transformative effect of the addition of natural wines to an otherwise archetypal Paris bistro.

The results are astounding. Because an insistence on natural wines is invariably a political statement as well as an aesthetic one, the sloppy, gem-laden list at Les Pipos, presented - upon demand - in the usual blithe fashion, has the effect of very discreetly intellectualizing the whole concept. And all the bistro hallmarks that would otherwise provoke only mild annoyance or mild approval - the bumbling service, the simple, richly satisfying cuisine - are rendered respectively more forgivable or winning by the knowledge that, particularly in the 5ème, Les Pipos could really tart up the natural wine angle, but don't.

The restaurant possesses that rare thing for a tourist quartier in a tourist city: genuine offhand charm. Such that, when I popped by the other night with my friends R, E, and IF,* with only an apero and a cheese plate in mind, we instead proceeded to knock back three bottles with a full meal including oysters.

with a little help from derain: julien altaber at la dive bouteille

In any given packed, cavernous, pitch dark wine tasting, it's often difficult to differentiate vignerons whose wines are creating a real buzzworthy stir from those who simply have a ton of friends and admirers. Acclaimed biodynamic Burgundy vignerons Catherine et Dominique Derain certainly fall into the latter camp, probably the former also. I unfortunately missed the opportunity to taste through their current vintages this year at the Renaissance des AOCs in Angers and La Dive Bouteille, because at both tastings there was such a surging throng around their stand that to wait it out for the sake of a few sips of St. Aubin would have meant about forty minutes of waiting shoulder-to-shoulder for pours, during which time I could have tasted, and did instead taste, a bajillion other interesting wines.*

For instance: the surprisingly masterful Bourgogne AOC wines of Julien Altaber, a protogé of the Derains, who after working for them for years has recently begun making his own wines, using their facilities in St. Aubin. When J and I approached, he was standing looking kind of marooned near an entrance to the catacombs, by a barrel upon which stood the three wines he's bottled to date: a 2009 Bourgogne Blanc, and two Bourgogne Rouges, from 2008 and 2007 respectively.

All three were superb, which, of course, accounts for the buzz that had led us to taste his otherwise completely unassuming wines in the first place. (An importer friend from New York had tipped us off.)

loire road trip, pt. II: clos rougeard

Besides the wines themselves, the most unforgettable thing about last Saturday's tasting at Clos Rougeard was mustachioed winemaker Nady Foucault's strange entrance.

My friends J, C, and I had shown up early for our appointment,* along with winemakers Romain Guiberteau (Saumur) and Frantz Saumon (Montlouis), with whom we'd just had a very brief bada-bing-bada-boom sort of tasting at Domaine Guiberteau. By coincidence, they too had an appointment to taste the Clos Rougeard wines that day, so Romain led the way on the short drive to the nearby village of Chacé.

Once inside the unmarked gates of the Clos Rougeard operation, Romain guided us directly down into the dark wet cellar, where we encountered - no one. Romain, who'd been there before, called out a few times, and checked quickly into adjacent corridors, finding no one. We ascended back to surface level and smoked cigarettes for about twenty minutes in the freezing evening breeze, Romain remarking on how eerie it was that everything had been left open and seemingly abandoned.

Soon we were joined by a caviste from Bretagne and his two friends, who had evidently been doublebooked with us for the degustation. They lit cigarettes too.  There were like eight of us by now, standing around like a flock of pelicans, with others still to arrive. We were remarking on the odd incongruity of a nearby palm tree in the courtyard, when the winemaker we'd been awaiting, Nady Foucault, emerged from the same cellar we'd initially checked. He took the time to close the cellar door before balling his big fists at his sides and giving us a look from above his walrus mustache that said something to the effect of "What are you idiots all doing just standing there?"