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.

save japan: hirotake ooka at caves augé, 75008

I got a kick out of Japanese Rhône winemaker Hirotake Ooka's apron the other day at Caves Augé's Rhône tasting. What on earth can these two things have in common? Actually, I'm told Japan has a pretty thriving and enthusiastic* natural wine scene (as excellently reported here by the far-roaming and indispensable Bertrand Celce). Unfortunately, despite being half-Japanese and working for a Japanese company, I haven't been to said nation since my first and only voyage there at age eleven. I wasn't into natural wine then. 

It doesn't help that I didn't then and do not now speak Japanese. As I tasted through Ooka's wines that day we conversed in French, and the irrelevant coincidence of both being Japanese natural wine afficionados went unmentioned and probably unnoticed on his end, since physionomically I take after my Jewish mother. 

Of Ooka's wines that I've tasted, I'm most impressed by his sparkling Saint Peray. Over dinner at Vivant recently, and again at the Augé tasting, the 2006 was delicate, white-floral, and expressive, a fine example of what makes the Saint Peray appellation such an appealing corner of the sparkling wine world. 

still relevant: didier gimmonet at caves augé, 75008

In the run-up to Christmas last year, as cavistes all over Paris were engaged in the annual delirious Champagne salesmanship, my patient friend S and I crossed town in the snow to attend a grower-Champagne tasting at Caves Augé, in the hopes of tasting the acclaimed, near-mythical wines of Anselme Selosse, a famous natural vigneron who was, in the end, not present at said grower-Champagne tasting.

It was a let-down. Most of the other barrels outside Caves Augé were manned by vignerons whose wines were already pretty familiar to me. And it was face-crackingly cold and our toes were little ice marbles. But, you know, we'd come all that way, and we had a few hours to kill before dinner, it seemed a shame to just wander off, defeated...

Anyway, these vaguely alcoholic rationalizations yielded the day's most enjoyable discovery: the consumately well-crafted, Chardonnay-driven Champagnes of Didier Gimmonet. 

not encountering selosse at: caves augé, 75008

You may remember that I had notably failed to meet legendary Champagne vigneron Anselme Selosse at Spring's "Promesse du Vin" tasting a few weeks back, because he was late and I felt awkward waiting around. Well, the other day while I was Christmas shopping at Spring Boutique, my friend Josh (the wine director there) happened to mention there would be another Champagne tasting at the landmark 8ème wine shop Caves Augé the next day, and Selosse was slated to attend.

Pictured above is the barrel where he and his wines ought to have been. 

As my patient, unflappable friend S and I tasted through a lot of other great grower Champagnes in the miserable torrential frozen slush that afternoon, I overheard a Caves Augé employee explaining to someone that Selosse was, in fact, bloqué dans la neige, which is French for "couldn't be bothered to show up in this sickening weather." 

domaine du pech: buvons nature tasting, espace beaujon, 75008

I don't know what I had in mind. When Mâcon vigneron Catherine Vergé told me at the AVN tasting that she was hosting her "Buvons Nature" tasting on rue Faubourg Saint Honoré I guessed I assumed it would be a kind of glitzy affair. I frequently have to visit said rue for work and I'm always tripping over small manicured dogs and choking on the perfume of passers-by.

Turns out the tasting was held in what looked like a converted pre-school rec room of the Espace Beaujon. When I passed through on the first night with my friends F and Z, there were small children shrieking and running around the courtyard and Mme Vergé herself was nowhere to be seen. Happily, glamorlessness aside, the event was pretty much what she'd promised it would be: 15 pretty terrific natural vignerons pouring, chatting, and selling* in a pleasant, relatively intimate environment.

I tasted something fairly memorable at at least half the tables, so rather than write it all up in one grand deluge I figured I'd space it out a bit, and begin by discussing the wines of Ludovic Bonnelle at Domaine du Pech, a biodynamic Buzet (southern France, southeast of Bordeaux) estate whose wines, for me, really encapsulate the excitement and the occasional frustrations of deeply natural wines.

gamay au grand palais: mini palais opening, 75008

Image swiped from bc.edu.

Last night on a surprise invitation from my visiting friend J I attended the re-opening night of the newly refurbished restaurant in the Grand Palais, titled Mini Palais.

Not the name I would have chosen, either. For one thing, the place is huge.But what can you do. I imagine the board of investors for a deep-pocket place like this would probably fill both dining halls.

Really working the antiquity angle with the decor.