at home chez la vieille

Early the other evening a client came into the restaurant and ordered a glass of Beaujolais primeur. There were few other clients at the bar at that hour and I decided to fill the air by delivering a short aria about Guy Breton's quixotic dedication to creating the greatest vin de primeur each year - his painstaking quest to perfect a wine type that almost nobody is willing to respect, let alone pay real money for. To create a perfect primeur is like solving a Rubix cube blind-folded in under 90 seconds, only less profitable.

To my surprise, the client was actually listening, and asked follow-up questions. When I mentioned that I wrote a wine blog, and its name, he was astonished, because he had been reading it for the last seven years. Before he left, he quite reasonably suggested I write something to inform readers what it is I am doing these days.

So here we are. Since end-August I have been managing a restaurant in the 1st arrondissement of Paris called Chez La Vieille. It's owned by the American chef Daniel Rose, who I first met years ago, back when my friend Josh Adler of Paris Wine Company worked for him at Restaurant Spring. The short version of how I returned to the hospitality industry is I found myself at loose ends last summer, having utterly failed to make sufficient money writing about food and wine for the previous year. When in mid-summer Daniel sent a message asking if I knew anyone who'd be a good fit to manage Chez La Vieille, I volunteered. Of course, I knew it would mean I'd have to cease penning fanged critiques of other Paris restaurants. That came as a relief at this point. I have spent so long explaining what goes wrong with restaurants and wine lists. Now my job is to demonstrate what can go right, or, more precisely, to draw clients' attention to the few aspects that do go right, to distract them from the train-wrecks, wild-fires, and five-car pile-ups that are part of the nightly routine at even the most successful restaurants.

in with the old: chez la vieille, 75001

I have never quite understood Daniel Rose' conservative streak. I'm too young to remember the initial, bare-bones Spring in the 9eme arrondissement. By the time I met Rose in 2010, he had already moved his restaurant to the 1èr arrondissement and a space that resembles an exec-lounge. The restaurant's service and menu pricing have always felt prematurely elderly for such a dynamic personality. Nor did Rose really switch gears when he took over the weirdo slapstick steakhouse La Bourse ou La Vie last year. He changed the grammatical conjunction, raised prices, improved the cuisine, and sapped the restaurant of its spontaneity.

Rose' recent revamp of the tiny historic 1èr arrondissement bistrot-bar Chez La Vieille is, in its way, more newsworthy than the rave reviews of Le Coucou, his chic New York restaurant début. For, discounting the abortive Buvette below Spring, Chez La Vieille is the first serious move Rose has made towards a more lively style of service.

Spanning two floors joined by a gorgeously warped staircase, Chez La Vieille is a near-complete success, where the humor and verve of its new owner find outlet in a concept as precise and versatile as a Swiss Army knife.

hidden in plain sight: willi's wine bar, 75001

I should clarify by explaining that Willi's Wine Bar, the pioneering Paris wine destination founded in 1980 by British expat Mark Williamson, is only hidden to people like me. For the past four years I've worked a few blocks away from the bar, and until the other week, I'd never been tempted to step inside.

I am, it turns out unreasonably, disinclined towards restaurants known for tote bags and wine-art posters. The children's-book storefront font alone is enough to turn stomachs. Willi's, from the outside, appears to be a wine bar for people who only drink wine when they visit Paris.

Actually, it looks a lot that way from the inside as well. Williamson's decades-long indifference to cool is reflected in the clientele, which I'd wager consists primarily of Paris' least-informed Anglophone tourists and expats, family vacations and business trips whose organisers may have breezed, once, through a Lonely Planet guide from 1997. So upon finally dining at Willi's the other night, I was fairly gobsmacked to discover that Willi's' regulars are, if anything, more informed than me. All this time they've been enjoying, in a friendly, unfussy environment, Paris' greatest Rhône list.

the decline of : la régalade, 75014, 75001, and 75010

I recently called Nicolas Lacase's 10ème Bistro Bellet "a giant defibrillator for the bistrot genre." So it behooves me to explain why I felt the bistrot genre needed resuscitation. Handily, recent visits to the three locations of chef Bruno Doucet's atrophic La Régalade empire have furnished me with exhibits A, B, and C.

The original La Régalade was founded by chef Yves Camdeborde in 1992 at the far border of the 14ème arrondissement. In its day it was ground zero for the bistronomie movement, in which disaffected young chefs were leaving Michelin-starred kitchens and opening simple bistrots where their gastronomic talents could shine at lower price points.

In America, where we tend to class eating establishments all together as restaurants, encountering gastronomy in a bistrot doesn’t scan as such a big deal. The closest American analogue to the shock of “bistronomie” in French culture is probably that moment in the mid-2000’s when, in certain US cities, it became possible to dine very well from food trucks. But where, just a decade on, most savvy diners I know have all grown quite tired of food trucks (except when drunk), Paris after two decades continues to unthinkingly congratulate any classically-trained chef who deigns to cook without the aid of chandeliers. (C.f. the overrated Restaurant Pierre Sang Boyer in Oberkampf.) The still-successful La Régalade restaurants, collectively, comprise the sacred cow of a bistronomie nostalgia cult, whose membership includes throngs of uncritical diners as well as most of the city's established food critics.

So let's get the knives out, shall we ?

the great american sandwich: verjus, 75001

The other day at lunchtime my colleague R and I announced to our high-pitched and highly amusing senior colleague L that we were going out to get sandwiches. As is her wont, she asked us to pick up one for her. I said no problem, I'd text her a pic of the menu.

No no no, she said, just get me jambon à l'os, with cantal...

At which point I was obliged to explain we were not going to any old interchangeable French sandwich place. R and I were going to Restaurant Verjus*, whose newly launched lunchtime sandwich program is essentially a Great American Road Trip of sandwich nostalgia. There's a slim menu of sandwiches, each named after its culinary inspiration: a pork belly homage to Momofuku's David Chang, fried chicken ode to Bakesale Betty in Oakland... It's like owners Braden Perkins and Laura Adrian wanted to adapt the Proustian madeleine to the American palate, and give their numerous expat fans something to make their hearts melt and their mouths water.

sophie brissaud & sauternes at spring boutique, 75001

Writing about the wines of Bordeaux, I feel perennially obliged, before airing opinions, to quote Plato's Socrates, who said, 'If I know one thing, it is that I know nothing.'

My experience with the greats of the region is more or less reflective of my interest in them. Not that I'd ever turn down a glass of Petrus or what-have-you. But with such a teeming diversity of fascinating wines from less commercialised regions all much more readily available for study, it rarely seems with the effort involved to approach Bordeaux. There's a velvet rope of pure hassle and expense around the good stuff: purchasing it is out of the question, and most tastings that present it - especially the public tastings - are insufferably stuffy and boorish affairs, quite far removed from the "dudes hanging out with bottles" template of the most enjoyable tastings.

It's a happy coincidence that the wines of Bordeaux I find most interesting from an aesthetic standpoint - white Bordeaux and Sauternes - are in general slightly more approachable. Good examples of both wines present unique, opulent flavor profiles found nowhere else in wine, but with the exceptions of Château d'Yquem and Haut-Brion, neither wine category receives anywhere near the attention of the region's reds. One encounters the opposite problem: rarely finding the wines, let alone several at once to facilitate comparison. So when I learned my friend the prolific food writer Sophie Brissaud was to lead a tasting of Sauternes at Spring Boutique last winter, I found myself, for once, genuinely exciting about a Bordeaux tasting.

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.

far-sighted: télescope, 75001

... And now for the opening of a laudable venture that Paris actually needs: an elegantly simple coffee-geek café called Télescope, tucked away by Palais-Royal on rue Villedo. It's the debut project of David Flynn, formerly barista at the 18ème's Bal Café and La Caféothèque before that, and Nicolas Clerc, a photographer turned coffee enthusiast. Today will be their first day open to the public for business.

The space is tiny, well-appointed, feels a bit like a seat in a Scandinavian lighthouse. Just four or five tables and a spacious bar, upon which will be offered an array of pastries. I suspect at least some of the latter will be sourced from among the gang of talented expat baker chicks who seem suddenly to be everywhere.(Ofr Galerie, La Candelaria, Brunch Bazar, etc.) In the mornings there will be tartines and toast, and the café's intake from on-premises sipping will be buttressed by a wholesale operation. 

No, Flynn and Clerc don't plan to serve any wine. But Télescope remains wholly relevant to this blog, because I can't write without coffee. And since it's the city's first conveniently located coffee bar, Télescope stands to be my main supply of responsibly-sourced, masterfully-roasted, afficionado-approved coffee, something which, despite the testimonials of every dreamy-eyed tourist, remains a total rarity in Paris. 

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.

soup-er: spring boutique, 75001

I'm late in mentioning this, due to a towering backlog of posts about a recent trip to Piemonte (more to come!), but my friend Josh Adler's cave Spring Boutique has begun serving soup for lunch again. The soup itself is delicious, heaping with rough-cut vegetables and silken meat of the most quixotically exacting Michelin-worthy provenance, this latter obsessional quality being characteristic of Spring chef Daniel Rose's menus.

But the service of soup itself - this is also endearing, for being yet another manifestation of a certain gung-ho, whatever-works energy the Spring team bring to their establishments. By now the Boutique and the restaurant's lower level have cycled through a panoply of different iterations and incarnations, all in efforts to channel the restaurant's chief area of uproarious success - it's dinner service - into less formal, more populist attractions, ones for which there's no need to book months in advance. In Paris, home of the cult of the table, and meals that endure until the époisse has run to the floor, they're fighting the good fight.

another glass of mexican wine

I have been seeing a lot of articles lately about a sudden wave of Mexican restaurants opening in Paris, a trend in which I have zero interest. Usually I would add some qualifier, about why my seemingly extreme view on an issue is not, in fact, so extreme. But to hell with it: not in my lifetime will it be possible to get what I consider real Mexican food in Paris, for a zillion reasons, ranging from non-availability of ingredients and kitchen expertise to the native population's total intolerance of even the mildest pique of spice. So I save my pesos for the cuisines of populations that have an actual cultural presence here: Lebanese, Algerian, Chinese, etc.

I can think of only two exceptions. One is my friends' place in the Marais, Candelaria, which serves a very tasty Mexican-like cuisine in a sadistically small room in front of the cocktail bar. (My interaction with the food usually extends no further than elbowing my way past it.) The other is Itacate, in the1èr. It's sort of the opposite of Candelaria in terms of ambition and sophistication, but the folks are very nice, and crucially it's right around the corner from a friend's cave; after tastings he and I often have recourse to a few inexpensive basically acceptable resto-ticket-redeemable tacos.

Additionally, as I remembered the other night with some friends of friends, they serve Mexican wine by the bottle, thereby offering an oenological experience that, while not advisable, it as least a real curiosity in these parts.

domaine les mille vignes at spring boutique, 75001

I'll admit to having had a kind of skeptical interest in attending a recent tasting with winemaker Valérie Guérin of Domaine Les Milles Vignes at my friend Josh's cave in the 1ère, Spring Boutique. Like many wine geek friends, Josh and I tend to gently rag on each other's tastes now and then. I accuse him of liking everything too sleek: silky tannins, quiet acid, polite persistence. He rightly accuses me of drinking mostly oxidative unprofessional farmer wines.

We had differed on Domaine Les Milles Vignes' 2007 Vin de Pays de l'Aube Rosé. At 28€ retail, it's up there with the Château Simones and Domaine Tempiers of the world, in terms of baller rosé. Josh was all bee's knees about it. After sharing a bottle with some friends the week before, I was more ambivalent. I appreciated its waxen dark cherryness, its length, and the fact that it was still proudly drinkable after 4 years - but found it a bit unnuanced, particularly for the price. 

A second tasting didn't persuade me otherwise. The tasting with Mme. Guérin was nevertheless quite worthwhile, for the impressive back vintages of Fitou that appeared towards the end of the tasting, and for introducing me to Guérin's superb Muscat de Rivesaltes, the best of its type I can remember encountering.

going to miss you: jean-marie berrux's 2009 "le petit têtu"

The remorse one feels upon hearing that a favored bottle is out of stock at the caviste, probably never to return, is, when one gets lucky, matched by a corresponding delight upon discovering same bottle still in stock at a different caviste. So it went with Jean-Marie Berrux's "Le Petit Têtu" 2009, a Bourgogne blanc I first picked up on the recommendation of the Cyril* at the Verre Volé cave on rue Oberkampf.

Cyril is not prone to voicing breathless praise of things.** Nevertheless when I inquired about this bottle, his usual stoney-faced tone changed to one of frank admiration as he explained that it was the project of one half of St. Aubin-based natural Burgundy négociant duo Sarnin-Berrux; that it was derived from vines just outside the Puligny-Montrachet appellation; and that it was the last bottle he had in stock, partly because he'd bought and drank so much of it himself.

That was all the convincing I needed. I drank it the next evening with my good friend E, who was shortly to depart for China. Duly stunned by the wine, I let her continue pontificating on some righteous point of philosophical disagreement (our usual routine) while, with a blog post in mind, I took a photo of the bottle, and her, ruefully reflecting on the passing of the vintage.

fine, just fine: les fines gueules, 75001

Due to a long ridiculous histoire involving arrests, my sister J3 and her boyfriend J4* missed their intended flight to Paris from Los Angeles, and wound up arriving the day after the extravagant meal at Rino I'd organized to celebrate their arrival. They arrived in time for what I'd presumed would be a low-key hangover day.

That was my eventual excuse, anyway. I had admittedly been hoping that 1er natural wine bistro Les Fines Gueules would, despite its laid-back reputation, deliver some kind of minor whizz-bang, some gastronomic pyrotechnic, some superlative aspect that might knock at least one sock off my American visitors' travel-weary feet.

Nothing was outright awful, or bad even. Les Fines Gueules, as a restaurant, is fine, perfectly fine, considering it's smack in the 1er arrondissement, and it's open seven days a week, and the owners appear to have at one time or another had some good fundamental ideas. All the familiar natural bistro boxes are dutifully ticked: fresh, responsibly sourced ingredients, a well-priced natural wine list, a pleasant informal atmosphere... Nevertheless my guests might as well have still been on the plane, ten-thousand feet up, for how autopiloted the whole experience felt.

ô god no: ô château, 75001

I didn't stage this photo. That issue of Stuff magazine was actually lying around when we arrived.

On this blog, and elsewhere in life, I'm routinely chided for having drastic or polemical views about things. The title of this blog is a ready example. There are presumably many in the wine industry who would take exception to the embedded implication that to drink any wine other than natural wine is to drink poison.*

To hell with 'em.

No, but seriously, I do hold more nuanced views on these subjects than might be perceptible from certain statements I make. (I try to explore these nuances in footnotes, parenthetical asides, and digressive introductions.) But I find that in the din of contemporary blog-journo chatter, unless one says something memorably, what one says makes very little impact. I prefer to convey something of what I genuinely feel about a subject to a reader, even if now and then I get a pang of remorse when phrasing a complicated issue in terms that are harsh, or reductive, or vaguely violent.**

That being said, my friend J and I visited newly opened club-à-vin O Château: The Wine Bar the other Saturday evening, and while J left puzzled by the experience, and refrained from passing judgment, I myself walked out - shortly after we walked in - with refreshingly unshaded ideas.

O Château embodies everything I detest about the wine industry, and if the place were to burn down tomorrow, the unlucky proportion of honest wines captive inside would all meet happier fates than remaining seen there.

hold me closer, vincent dancer: spring buvette, 75001

My couturier friend D had just reached the finish line of a manic work jag spanning two continents designing some dresses worn at the Oscars. She was in Paris for the défilée of the brand she works for, and after the glittering chaos of the fashion show itself, and the congratulatory tumult backstage, I thought she might prefer someplace kind of tranquil for a glass and a bite before the afterparty.

So we popped over to Daniel Rose's subterranean 1èr wine bar Spring Buvette, which, while reliably packed these days, still manages to emit a kind of hotel-lobby civility. There are in fact times when I find it too civil. Then there are times like the other night with D, when the crisp service, and pin-point precise pleasures of the luxe wine list* and the inventive menu are exactly what is called for.

For example: the above plate of sweet urchin with mild horseradish cream, and a glass of esteemed Burgundy vigneron Vincent Dancer's perfectly sculpted 2007 Meursault "Les Corbins."

fit for a king: la robe et le palais, 75001

It doesn't seem at all fair that a few short blocks of the 1èr arrondissement are home to so many great wine destinations. Just a stones' throw from the excellent cave-à-manger La Robe et le Palais, where I had a joyous no-occasion celebration with some friends the other night, you have Spring, Spring Buvette, Spring Boutique, and Le Garde Robe, which latter wine bar was founded by the Robe et Palais folks. I can't decide whether it strikes me as shrewd or confusing that the name of their newer place is so similar to that of the old place.

Name aside, the differences are unmistakable. La Robe et le Palais is like the Something Else By The Kinks to Le Garde Robe's Face to Face: a significantly more mature, ambitious work, even if the albums share similar production values and general subject matter.

any other city in the world: juveniles, 75001

My colleagues and I used to pass this place often on the way to lunch at "Japanese Tapas" restaurant Issé, before the latter establishment incomprehensibly doubled their prices and ceded most of the menu to criminally expensive variations on grilled eel.* I'd read Juveniles was an historically important Paris wine bar, but until the other night after a film with my friend F, I'd put off visiting solely on the grounds that no one whose opinions I respect has ever said a peep about the place. It doesn't seem to be on the radar of quality-conscious people.

This is understandable, given Juveniles' tourist-artery location, and, yes, the general low quality of what F and I snacked on that night. The wine bar's most notable aspect is in fact that which will prevent me from returning very often, despite its proximity to my office: in its pokey, avuncular décor, its cheesing goofiness towards wine as a subject, and its focus on wine as a global field, through which one may ostensibly travel at the pop of a cork, Juveniles could pass for a genial, amateurish, wine-themed bar in any other city in the world.

Cincinatti, Liverpool, Melbourne...

blogging about blogging about the new soup at spring boutique, 75001

I was Christmas shopping at Spring Boutique last month and my friend Josh there introduced me to another Paris food blogger who began taking pictures of the soup I bought. So I took pictures of her taking pictures of the soup I bought.

Wendy Lyn does the Paris Kitchen blog. She evidently has a keen eye for new material.

j smells: spring buvette, 75001

My friends C and J (both ex-Experimental Cocktail Club) were celebrating some progress on their hotly-tipped forthcoming cocktail / taco venture. I was celebrating selling a short story and a wine article in the same day. By the time we all mosied over to Spring Buvette to get some food in us, I was already tipsy, and they had been celebrating a little longer than I had.*

Which is the only way I can explain the following photo series, in which J can be seen actively nosing everything we ordered, and some things we did not order. (Thanks, Daniel et Sofian!)