blast from the present: gare au gorille, 75017

What does it mean for savvy young Parisian restaurateurs to advertise their appreciation for post-war cabaret, as chef Marc Cordonnier and server-sommelier Louis Langevin have done with their new 17ème arrondissement Georges Brassens homage, Gare au Gorille?

My dinner companion was blasé about it. She identified it as part of a wider revivalist fad among Parisians her age, rather like the superficial blues revival incited in the early 2000's by the likes of the White Stripes and the Black Keys.*

Gare au Gorille, the restaurant, not the song refrain, is a bit of a Trojan horse in this respect. Perched in Les Batignolles beside the train tracks spanning northwards from Saint Lazare, Gare au Gorille inhabits a quartier I've long considered to be among Paris' Frenchest and most timewarpy, where foreigners are scarce and their influence barely acknowledged. Yet with Gare au Gorille, its nostalgic name notwithstanding, Cordonnier and Langevin have summoned a blast from the present, replete with all the tasteful grace notes of up-to-date Parisian restaurateurism: versatile menu construction, a kindly-priced wine list speckled with foreign selections, and terrific hospitality.

bonne chance: lucien la chance, 75017

A familiar quandary arises when discussing places like charming new 17ème arrondissement wine bar Lucien La Chance. I want to encourage them, because Paris needs more casual, no-reservation places that care about food and wine. But I also want many such places to be better than they presently are.

Preventing improvement is a kind of pervasive municipal campanilismo. (Italian for the local loyalty that extends as far as one's local church steeple or campanile is visible.) Most Paris real estate is tiny, and most Paris businesses are tiny, and if a tiny business is popular with its immediate neighbors, why should the owner care how said business compares to businesses on other side of town, let alone ones in New York or London? The hyperactive Paris-media apparatus to which I contribute doesn't help the situation, and the combined effect is to promote complacency in popular places.

So seems best to call it like it is. Lucien La Chance, which opened last month, is pokey and amateurish, and the scatterbrained natural wine list is laughably imbalanced. Yet I quite like the place and will probably return. What the bar presently lacks in sophistication is more than compensated for by its contemporary, youthful format: like Septime Cave, Touller Outillage, La Buvette, and La Pointe du Grouin before it, Lucien La Chance is a great chill place for an unstructured apéro with an unconfirmed number of flaky friends. Owner Guillaume Blanchot has the right general ideas about wine and product, and an amusing fondness for disco.

somm needed? : restaurant roca, 75017

The friends I brought to Roca during Fashion Week probably thought I was taking them to Beauvais Airport. The restaurant, a charming if somewhat faceless contemporary effort by Julien Ross, a cousin of the owner of 10ème arrondissement middleweights L'Office and Le Richer, is not situated in the pleasant, blithely unworldly Batignolles segment of the 17eme arrondissement. It's situated in the armpit thereof, just a stones throw from the peripherique.

In any other quartier, Roca would be raking it in. Chef Alexandre Giesbert, formerly of Le Richer, cooks precisely what Parisians wish to eat these days: sweetly accessible variations on menu staples, finessed to a sheen and enlivened with the odd exotic ingredient (seaweed tapenade, kumquat). Prices are extremely reasonable.

But Giesbert's cuisine is hobbled by the restaurant's far-flung location, and an almost punitively boring wine list. I nonetheless quite enjoyed our meal at Roca. Where ordinarily I'd loudly proclaim that the restaurant needs a sommelier, I find myself torn. Because our server that evening at Roca did something no sommelier in Paris has, to my knowledge, ever done: he promptly agreed that my first bottle of Marsannay was corked, and fetched another bottle without debate.

b minus: agapé bis, 75017

When I was introduced to restaurateur Laurent Lapaire at Le Grand 8 a few months ago, I confessed that while I'd heard a great deal about them, I'd yet to visit any of his restaurants - not the 17ème's Agapé, not its "bistro" sibling Agapé Bis, not Agapé Substance, his tiny nigh-unbookable haute-gastro kitchen on rue Mazarine. I asked him which I ought to hit first. He suggested trying them in ascending order of price and refinement: first the Bis, then Agapé, Substance last.

To be fair, it's natural for restaurateurs to consider their restaurants as parents would their children. He was probably taking care to provide equal attention, and making allowances for differences of personality. But, taking his advice at face value, some colleagues and I took two taxis out west to the 17ème after showrooms one night this past fashion week, planning to check out the tasting menu at Agapé Bis.

Let's say that if any of us ever make it to the other two restaurants, the bar is set pretty low.

strange but true: françois blanchard at le bistral, 75017

I have to thank my friend the natural Loire vigneron François Blanchard and his brother J3* for their high spirits and admirable fortitude during our dinner at 17ème bistro-à-vin Le Bistral a couple weeks back. François was in town for leisure purposes (a Roger Waters show) but had run into legendary natural Sologne-based Loire vigneron Claude Courtois earlier that day while lunching at @2eme haute-cave-à-manger Saturne, and they had proceeded to drink for most of the afternoon. Sensible mortals would have called it quits there; instead François and J3 went ahead as planned with the big chaotic dinner we'd arranged.

I get to the 17ème about as often as François gets to Paris, which, what with his insanely demanding, rigorously natural vineyard work in Lémére, near Chinon, and my preference for less timewarpy parts of town, is not very often at all. But I'm always grateful for the chance to discover another natural wine spot, and it's even more of a pleasure to check in with François to see what sort semi-visionary strangeness he's been coaxing from his vines lately.