beyond izakaya: restaurant 6036, 75011

Last fall I helped my friends from 11ème arrondissement German bar Udo put together a small wine list for their new project, a gallery space and Japanese small-plates restaurant called Düo that opened in October.

If I haven't yet written about Düo, it's because I want to give the team there time to work out the service kinks before I start cheerleading about the place. I figured the concept was original enough - inexpensive Japanese small plates and solid natural wines - that buzz would build of its own accord.

I realised I may have waited too long when the other day, just a few blocks away from Düo, my friend E and I stumbled upon the newly-opened 6036, a SIM-card-sized restaurant serving - what else? - inexpensive Japanese small plates and solid natural wines. I guess it's a full-blown trend already. 6036 bills itself as izakaya, or Japanese bar food, but this is a ruse: it's actually a modest and sincere gastronomic experience, helmed by chef Haruka Casters, formerly sous-chef at 10ème arrondissement tasting-menu destination Abri.

overachievers: youpi & voilà, 75010

Exclamations are ridiculous words. We emit them in surprise or joy or horror with little forethought, and this spontaneity places them in an unmediated realm on the frontiers of thought and language. Things get onomatopeic and we seem to speak in cartoon speech bubbles.

Well, to the non-native listener, exclamations in a foreign language are even sillier. I don't know why on earth an ambitious restaurant in Paris would choose a name like Youpi & Voilà, which translates roughly to "Yippee and there-you-are." Most ambitious restaurants in Paris rely at least partly on Anglophone buckeroos, and you don't want that demographic to react like I initially did, which was to never mention the restaurant by name. (I have instructed friends to escort me to the guillotine if they ever hear me utter "youpi" or "zut" or "hop-la" without irony.)

I probably would have avoided the place entirely, if I hadn't popped by for a Gaillac wine tasting one day and realised that my friend Jean-Philippe Morice, formerly a server at Le Verre Volé, was running the dining room. Which makes sense, in retrospect, since Y&P's Gaillacois chef Patrice Gelbart also put in time with the same purple kingpins of the Canal Saint Martin. What Gelbart and Morice achieve together with the new venture - just a stone's throw from their former workplace, on the impressively obscure rue Viq d'Azir - shows great promise, and could indeed merit an exclamation or two, should they manage to reign in certain overachiever impulses in the kitchen.

musk-rat sex: le baron rouge, 75012

An indulgent rave about a totally obscure little wine that has enchanted me all summer: a 2009 Muscat Sec, by Domaine Piquemal, currently available for a mere 8,2eu / bottle à emporter, or 2,9eu / glass at Le Baron Rouge. 

first or second impression: quedubon, 75019

Image swiped from paris-bistro.com.

Rather than devoting weeks of careful thought to My First Post, I figure I might as well just serve up whatever's freshest in mind. At the moment it's the restaurant / cave à vin Quedubon, in the 19eme, where I dined on Friday night in the trusty company of my Native Companion (a Parisian). Since the dinner in question predates the founding of this blog, and I'm no good with forethought, the pictures above are not my own. I filched them. (RESOLUTION: In future posts I'll try to come up with original photographic content.)

Anyway, Quedubon's been on my radar for a while, but this was my first proper meal there. A month or two ago I'd popped by for a wine tasting and was sufficiently impressed with the depth of the blackboard-scrawled wine list that I resolved to return for a full meal, despite the restaurant's unbelievably stupid name. (Surely I'm not the only person who has pointed this out. Imagine an organic restaurant in, say, San Francisco calling itself "Nothing But Good." Diners would choke.) Then some weeks later Quedubon came up in conversation with my friend Guy from Le Dirigeable (a future post...), and he confirmed that, indeed, many of his restaurateur friends had been talking the place up.  All that was left was to await a suitable occasion, which duly arrived when I began to feel guilty for all the help my Native Companion had donated during the course of a challenging catsitting gig earlier this month. (Not worth going into.) 

The verdict?