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.

hot bath: le grand bain, 75020

Chef Edward Delling-Williams is a key figure in the diaspora of mostly-Anglophone chefs emanating from the kitchen of restaurant Au Passage. It may have been James Henry's masterstroke to try that restaurant's intelligent, informal menu format in the haute-Marais, but it was Delling-Williams, his inviting and upbeat successor, who refined and normalized it, making Au Passage, for years, one of the city's most reliably charming tables. (A position it largely maintains.)

Delling-Williams' long-awaited new project is Le Grand Bain, a bar-restaurant opened in partnership with chef de salle and wine director Edouard Lax and interior designer Alexandre Janssens on the Belleville graffiti haven rue Dénoyez. The restaurant opened quietly last December, after significant delays that saw months of Delling-Williams plying his trade itinerantly around other Paris restaurant kitchens.

Anyone who passed through Au Passage during his tenure probably expected Delling-Williams to make a big splash in the kitchen at Le Grand Bain. Yet for now, with few exceptions, his work at the new venture has been remarkably unshowy. Delling-Williams knows by heart the burgeoning audience that exists for a savvy small-plates restaurant in Paris in 2017. In Le Grand Bain's crisp, brut space, he is playing to that audience with the irresistible panache of a seasoned croupier.

the price of convenience: la boulangerie, 75020

In trying to descry the origins of the hazy aura known as restaurant hype, we often overlook its simplest element, which is thrift.

Patronising restaurants is not a thrifty habit in the first place, which is all the more reason for diners to flock to restaurants that are good value for money. Surprisingly few Paris business owners seem to understand this dynamic - that increased turnover, despite the hassle, is sounder business footing than high prices. The result is a surfeit of demand at good-value establishments, or, in a word, hype. But what becomes of the capable restaurants that are just not quite good enough a deal ?

One such haunt is La Boulangerie, a Ménilmontant bistrot I seem to have avoided for the past five years on account of its hypelessness and its faceless, rather confusing name. Imagine my surprise to discover, when I finally ducked in for an impromptu dinner with a visiting friend, that it's in fact a mature, quality-oriented establishment that seems to exist just slightly out of its era. It's pricing is pre-Euro crisis, let's say, and its plating is mid-Chirac. The pleasant hospitality, broad wine list, and the staggering armagnac selection, on the other hand, are all timeless.

worlds collide: les trois 8, 75020

One day I'm going to walk into Le Meurice and stand for an hour on one foot. Then I'll bow and the press will take photos and I'll go down in history, because that is how easy it is, in a restaurant in Paris, to do something no one has ever done before.

Take, for example, the recently revamped Menilmontant hideaway Les Trois 8. It's primary innovation - which, all irony aside, deserves huge applause - is to offer, alongside its focus on excellent craft beers on draft, a modest list of solid natural wines.

So what if covering both these bases in de rigeur for every dive bar from Green Point to Red Hook ? In Paris, worlds are colliding. At Les Trois 8, the gnomish subculture of French micro-brewing is emerging into the light of a versatile night out, and encountering such strange, fantastical creatures as celiacs, women, and wine geeks.

hot potato: roseval, 75020

The remarkable hyperactivity of Paris food-blogging is partly due to the outsize international attention paid what is essentially a medium-sized, semi-provincial city. Thirty million tourists per year arrive in Paris; before, during, and after their vacations, they constitute a readership.

The repetitive nature of Paris food-blogging - and that of Paris dining in general - derives from limited subject matter. Restaurateurism in this medium-sized, semi-provincial city has been, for reasons both economic and societal, slow to catch up to the democratisation of gastronomy that has occurred in the past few decades. Most of the remaining first- and second-wave "bistronauts" of the 1990's and 2000's have long since settled into comfortable routines of semi-pro mediocrity; outside of hotels and Michelin-starred places, one rarely encounters service or cuisine that takes itself seriously.

This is why laudatory coverage of a few restaurants - Frenchie, Le Chateaubriand, Spring, Rino, and a few newcomers including the subject of this post, the 20ème's Roseval - will continue unabated: there stilll aren't enough informal tables whose informality does not excuse staff from evincing actual chops and ambition.* These are the tables that impress bloggers that bloggers can afford. The creative team at Roseval - chefs Michael Greenwold and Simone Tondo and sommelier Erika Biswell - formerly worked at some of these places (Le Chateaubriand, Rino, and Le Chateaubriand, respectively), and to judge by the results of their collaboration, they learned all the right moves. Roseval is the best value of its too-small category: a place where those who work outside the financial sector can experience inventive food and thrillingly obscure wines served by people who believe in what they do.

somm needed: le chatomat, 75020

The second-most curious thing about the inconsistently ambitious new 20ème bistro Le Chatomat is the name, which in American English sounds unavoidably like "laundromat." I have some French familiarity, of course, but even this only led me to imagine an unappetizing cross between a cat and a tomato. It was only towards the end of my meal there that I was reliably informed by a friend of chef-owners Alice di Cagno and Victor Gaillard that the restaurant's name is intended as a punning tweak on the name of a more famous Paris restaurant, Le Chateaubriand: Chateau + (sounds like) Brillante vs. (sounds like) Chateau + (sounds like) Matte.

If that sounds like astonishingly obscure, insidery, borderline nonsensical reasoning, suggestive that the proprietors live at least part-time in a closed internal dream world, we may still forgive them because the food is terrific. What I am less likely to forgive, and what implies a similar weird naïveté regarding contemporary dining convention, is the most curious thing about the place: that accompanying the marvelous and underpriced Michelin-lineage (Le Gavroche, Ledoyen, L'Arpège), globally inspired (Brazilian / Italian / French) cuisine on offer at Le Chatomat, is a pokey loser wine list containing nothing of any interest, clearly put together by a mediocre caviste seeking to unload some vacuous backstock.

C'mon, you want to say. You couldn't find a single well-informed somm in this city?

galaxie 500 & romorantin: au nouveau nez, 75020

Well, it wasn't precisely a pairing. My friends and I were pre-gaming at Au Nouveau Nez on the way to Saturday's Dean Wareham show, where the songwriter was slated to play only his classic late-eighties / early-nineties Galaxie 500 work. I'd arrived early, a lucky thing, since it's my unavoidably antisocial habit to lose myself in perusal of any wine selection for upwards of fifteen minutes before any drinks get poured.

Au Nouveau Nez 20ème proprietress Agnès and I got to talking about the wines of the Courtois family: a range of biodynamic Loire wines from Sologne, mostly field blends, mostly Vin de Tables, all labeled according to who in particular made the wine: Claude, le pere, or his son Julien, or his other son Etienne. Agnès, her partner Nadine (who runs the Au Nouveau Nez in the 11ème), and I had all recently tasted many of the Courtois' wines at the La Dive Bouteille tasting in Saumur, and we all left with different favorites.

Nadine preferred the reds. Agnès and I preferred the whites - almost to exclusion, in my case. (The reds, while sturdy and honest, strike me as slightly muddy and unfocused.) Nevertheless we were all charmed by the style of the Courtois clan in general, which, like Dean Wareham's old band, rests on an exotic tension between the maximal - everything-but-the-kitchen sink grape blends, numerous cuvées, Galaxie 500's arena-sized reverb - and the minimal, as represented by the simplicity and coherence of the results, the vinous equivalent of Wareham's two-chord homages to Lou Reed.

proper pre-gaming: au nouveau nez, 75020

Wait, you say.  Didn't he already post about Au Nouveau Nez a few months ago? It sounded like a nice tiny cave à grignoter.*

This is the other location. There are key differences. Foremost among them the other night was the proximity of this location to a 20ème concert venue, La Flêche d'Or, where my friend H and I were planning to see Brooklyn dream-pop band Twin Sister later that evening. La Flêche d'Or doesn't sell tickets in advance, and since Twin Sister are one of just a few contemporary groups that genuinely interest me, I had been somewhat anxious about arriving early enough to get tickets.

That proved unwarranted, since in the end the place was half-empty. But it did give H and I a fine excuse to check out l'autre Nez, where we caught up about his eBook company over a relatively recent - 2005 - bottle of Matthieu Coste's brilliant biodynamic Côteaux Giennois Gamay, "Biao."

beaune & brains: le baratin, 75020

The funny thing about pairing with cervelle de veau is, at least in my case, I'm not necessarily looking for something that will accentuate or highlight particular flavors of brain. With brain I'm actually seeking a wine that, while not totally effacing what's characterful about the organ, will perhaps sand away or obscure some of the ferrous tang that can accompany the taste of brains.