greece invades china: q-tea, 75009

My friend D visits us each men's fashion week from Athens, where he has an excellent high fashion boutique in the Kolonaki area. (Just a stone's throw from the riots, in fact. His shop has so far been spared any looting, possibly by dint of its not having any windows.) After his visit this past January, we got to talking about Greek wine, and he kindly insisted on bringing over some bottles of my choosing in June.

The problem is, I know almost zilch about Greek wine. The only place besides Greece, to my knowledge, where one can taste it in educational quantities is, of course, New York. I wound up just emailing D some PDF wine lists of reputable NYC places and telling him I remembered reading nice things about Assyrtiko.*

D, in typical fashion, showed up with a generous sack of interesting bottles, most of which we cracked open after showrooms one night over a B.Y.O.B. dinner at 9ème Chinese gem Q-Tea,** thereby creating another incidental politically-odd pairing.

alright (for paris): la mer de chine, 75013

On the separate recommendations of both Cyrils from the Verre Volé restaurant and cave, respectively, I went with some friends to check out an unassuming Chinese place in the 13ème the other Sunday called La Mer de Chine.

I ought to mention immediately, just to get it out of the way, that I was hopelessly unable to resist referring to the place as Le Merde de Chine, even before we sat down and some but not all of the dishes justified the scatological wordplay.

savant chinois: q-tea, 75009

Instead of offering a straight informative review of Q-Tea, a criminally unassuming Chinese restaurant in the 9ème, I'd like to sketch a blurb of a pop-academic article I'd like to write someday, on the subject of selective aesthetic blindness.

(When greatly moved by something, I get the instinctive urge to produce a response commensurate, in ambition, to whatever it was first moved me - in this case, the greatest Chinese food I've ever tasted.)

white wine, asian food, asians: gohan night @ café commun, 75012

Here is a link to an NYTimes article that touches tangentially upon one of my favorite pairings: German wine and Chinese food. It's worth reading, even if the author has evidently done backflips with what was essentially a Dining & Wine piece in efforts to make it relevant to the current rash of humiliating American xenophobia.

I mention it (the pairing, not the xenophobia) as preamble to coverage of a really lovely meal I had last Friday at Café Commun, a community events space in the 12eme. The meal was prepared by my Japanese friend M, who's had kind of the opposite career arc to my own.