deck & donohue la terrasse at bob's bake shop, 75018

As of early May, Montreuil micro-brewery Deck & Donohue has teamed up with 18ème-arrondissement vegetarian canteen Bob's Bake Shop to liven up the latter's enormous terrace all summer.

Spearheading the project is Daniela Lavadenz, Thomas Deck's superhumanly energetic fiancée, who previously honed her skills in the kitchen at Au Passage and the dining room of Le Six Paul Bert. At Deck & Donohue La Terrasse, she offers a small menu of well-plated snack foods faithful to both the project's ambitions - a casual beer-garden sans garden - and its host, a vegetarian restaurant. The fried-food-and-frankfurter tendencies of the standard beer-garden concept are therefore replaced with hummous, marinated peppers, a slurpably brilliant salmorejo, and roast potatoes with chimichurri sauce, a nod to Lavadenz's Bolivian heritage. Supplementing the terrace's four taps of joltingly fresh Deck & Donohue beers are a bevy of natural rosés by the glass, from the likes of Julien Merle, Château Bas, and Frederic Rivaton.

To anyone like myself, reluctant, during summertime, to plunk down beaucoup euros for lengthy meals at fine Paris restaurants that invariably lack air-conditioning or even basic ventilation, Deck & Donohue La Terrasse offers a form of salvation. But the project's appeal will be tested by its location north of métro Lachapelle, a heavily immigrant neighborhood whose female residents have recently drawn significant media attention to routine harassment its streets. Salvation, in this case, comes with a healthy dose of social consciousness.

the grown-ups' table: le petit keller, 75011

If I were ten years younger, I'd probably spend a lot of time on rue Keller. Recent years have seen a cornucopia of earnest young bars and restaurants open on this Voltaire-area side street, some pristine and intelligent (Aux Deux Cygnes), others less so (Barcardi Mojito Lab). I'd dig rue Keller's slew of vintage boutiques, book shops, and records shops, and the curious contrast between the innocence of these endeavors and the heavily-armed soldiers patrolling the street for the safety of its most famous and incongruous resident, Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

As things stand in this lifetime, however, I haven't spent much time on rue Keller. I do most of my shopping on Amazon, and when I dine out, I seem to gravitate towards businesses run by my elders. My reasoning for the latter is simple: I have more to learn from them. Paris' younger bars and bistrots can blur together at times, particularly if, as is often the case, they're sourcing their wines from the same handful of agents.

But now rue Keller, too, is growing up. The celebrated Franco-Japanese chef Kaori Endo (ex-Nanashi, ex-Rose Bakery) and her husband, the hyper-discreet O.G. natural wine caviste Michael Lemasle (Crus et Découvertes), have transformed quaint bistrot Le Petit Keller into something new and intriguing in the Paris restaurant scene. With ambitious opening hours, refined cuisine drawing equally on western health-consciousness and eastern home-cooking, and a smart natural wine list, the new Le Petit Keller is a savvy small-plates restaurant that dials down the masculine indulgence of the format without sacrificing an iota of sophistication.

n.d.p. in milan: la vecchia latteria

When I met my friend M for lunch in Milan en route to our friend's wedding in Florence, I became immediately distracted by a wine I'd never previously encountered: an obscure Emilia-Romagnan white called Ortrugo.

I've never lived in Italy and I don't speak the language. But I've managed a high-end Italian restaurant in the US, I've bought Italian wine for several restaurants, I've read numerous books on the nation's wines, and I've toured a fair portion of it firsthand, from Ivrea to Puglia. So most of what I encounter there feels more or less legible. Especially wine lists: to walk into an Italian restaurant in Italy and fondly recognise the names on the wine list is, ordinarily, a great comfort.

M and I were wedged into a table at La Vecchia Latteria, an historic vegetarian spot that had come recommended by a jazz guitarist / wine geek friend in LA. Wines available were neither extensive nor expensive; the waiters didn't seem to know a thing about them. They barked out the usual counsel reserved for moron tourists ("You like red? You like white?"). But I was still on a disembarkment-high from Malpensa,* delighted to see my old friend M, and besides, one great thing about white wine in Italy is that the obscurities are often so inexpensive as to constitute no risk whatsoever. (In case of disaster, there's always Peroni.)

bravo: la retro'bottega, 75011

Besides the confusing name* - which has inspired several early reviewers to harp on senselessly about an imaginary nostalgic quality to the service and cuisine - there is, in my view, absolutely nothing wrong with La Retro'Bottega, the lower-11ème cave-à-manger opened earlier this year by former Rino sommelier Pietro Russano and his business partner Salvatore Li Causi.

I don't mean this as a back-handed complement. I mean they got almost everything right.

As someone who has developed what amounts to a physical allergy to bad restaurateurism, I'm filled with gratitude that a place like La Retro'Bottega exists: a comfortable, soulful cave-à-manger with a refreshing, vegetable-driven menu and a masterful selection of well-priced French and Italian natural wines.** Had I euros enough, and time, I'd dine there every night.

the forces of seitan: soya cantine bio, 75011

I like vegetarians fine. But I tend to avoid vegetarian restaurants,* because their common founding precept - that eating meat is unethical or unhealthy or unnatural - runs counter to my own reverence for preindustrial gastronomic and viticultural traditions. Every great western cuisine has contained meat since time immemorial, and most eastern cuisines as well. So part of me is inclined to believe that the late-20th-century rise in vegetarianism in the west is largely a result of a kind of anthropomorphic thinking that is itself only made possible by the modern industry of meat production, which ensures that consumers are never obliged to actually handle animals, except as pets. We now have the luxury of finding it abhorrent, rather than normal for millennia, to kill things for food.

That is the long version of my argument. The short version is: the wine lists a vegetarian restaurants invariably suck, and the food is usually a cultural mishmash of doctored dishes and pathetic meat substitutes. It's like vegetarian restauranteurs, having pre-identified their not-so-gastronomically-demanding market segment,** feel no need whatsoever to impress anyone else.

Let me now get around to saying that Soya Cantine Bio in the 11ème totally won me over, despite all the above skepticism. It would be a rarity in San Francisco or New York, even; in Paris it is downright astonishing: a vegetarian restaurant with an excellent, well-considered natural wine list.

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.)