pierre jancou in cdg homme plus, f/w 2000

As a sort of addendum to my post on Pierre Jancou's splendid new cave-à-manger from earlier this week, I thought I'd share a lesser-known aspect of Jancou's admirable career. 

During our first conversation, a little over a year ago, I happened to mention that I work for a fashion company. Jancou was familiar with the brand - because he'd modeled in one of the same company's runway shows a few years back. 

I remember finding it all a marvelous coincidence. Then, perhaps distracted by the wine that evening, I forgot all about it. But just the other day it finally occurred to me to look around for the images, and, voilà.

for what it's worth: l'écailler du bistrot, 75011

L'Ecailler du Bistrot, the seafood-slinging sister restaurant nextdoor to Bistrot Paul Bert, shares many qualities with the latter legendary steak-frites destination. The décor is traditional but not overbearingly so, the service is snappy and relatively warm for the city, and the wine list, laudably, is tilted towards natural stuff. But - besides the menus - there is one unmistakeable difference between the two restaurants, and it becomes perceptible a few moments after one is seated at l'Ecailler du Bistrot. 

You hear a lot less English at l'Ecailler.  

There are certain very rare occasions in Paris when a lack of Anglos in a dining room can herald the discovery of some rough-cut gem of a resto, as yet unknown to tourists and expats. A visit to l'Ecailler du Bistrot is not one of these occasions; the restaurant, booked solid most nights and situated right beside every good Paris host's go-to for entertaining out-of-towners, is not that sort of gem. Here the lack of Anglos unfortunately means the restaurant provides a service that only the natives in Paris, the Chicago of France, would popularise: very expensive seafood. 

those who know best: le grand 8, 75018

Ask any restaurateur what he or she looks for when dining out, and you'll probably get a perfectly concise description of 18ème bistro hideaway Le Grand 8: simple food, a killer wine list, and, critically, a place that's open on Sundays.

Accordingly, Le Grand 8's dining room positively brims with restaurateurs and natural wine folk, on Sunday evenings in particular. Last week I brought some colleagues there for a meal after our company's showrooms had finished for the day, and upon walking in immediately recognised friends from Autour d'Un Verre, Le Bistral, Le Dirigeable, and the late great Cave de l'Insolite. It took some minutes to actually join the party I'd walked in with, whereupon we sat down to enjoy those same qualities that had drawn all the rest of the town's tastemakers to a few small tables in Montmartre.

not dead

Recent blog silence is due to a dastardly confluence of unavoidable misfortunes: the death of my laptop, and men's fashion week. I wasn't dressing in black for shows this week to look cool. I was mourning my laptop.

The kind* Geniuses** at the Apple store were thankfully able to sort it out for me. In some uncharacteristic fit of rational foresight at point of purchase two years ago I apparently subscribed to Apple Care. It took the duration of men's week for the Geniuses to fix, or seemingly replace most of, my laptop, meaning that very shortly I'll be back to my usual routine of nonstop wine yammering into the nothingsphere.

Below is me and my friend / colleague E, in mostly black:

time and again: les itineraires, 75005

Like, I imagine, quite a few Paris expats, I used to pay a great deal of attention to the New York Times' Paris coverage before I moved here. After one settles in, the articles understandably begin to seem a little exoticist and ooh-la-la. Nevertheless I still thank that paper for pre-briefing me on 2ème cocktail bar Experimental Cocktail Club, where I can still be found far too often, and 5ème market-menu restaurant Les Itinéraires, where I had a fabulous dinner the day I got to Paris, the highlight of which meal was a positively haunting salad of shaved foraged mushrooms, tiny clams, and citrus vinaigrette.

Inexplicably two years passed between that first meal at Les Itinéraires, and the occasion I had to revisit the restaurant the other night with my visiting friend / colleague D, and her friends S and E, editors, respectively, at Vanity Fair and - where else? - The New York Times T Magazine. The meal was memorable partly for sentimental reasons: I spent much of it marveling at how much life has changed since the day I moved to Paris, when my British friend A gave me a lift from London in his parents' car, during which voyage I managed to get struck with a scorching eye infection that I then confused for allergies, causing me to spend much of my first meal at Les Itinéraires, not to mention my first uncertain jobless week in Paris, squinting like a something that had just emerged from hibernation...

Suddenly there I was at Les Itinéraires again, two years in, enjoying some of the most astoundingly impressive wines I've had in years, thanks to Caroline, the rocking sommelier there, with whom I had in the meantime become friends.

hold me closer, vincent dancer: spring buvette, 75001

My couturier friend D had just reached the finish line of a manic work jag spanning two continents designing some dresses worn at the Oscars. She was in Paris for the défilée of the brand she works for, and after the glittering chaos of the fashion show itself, and the congratulatory tumult backstage, I thought she might prefer someplace kind of tranquil for a glass and a bite before the afterparty.

So we popped over to Daniel Rose's subterranean 1èr wine bar Spring Buvette, which, while reliably packed these days, still manages to emit a kind of hotel-lobby civility. There are in fact times when I find it too civil. Then there are times like the other night with D, when the crisp service, and pin-point precise pleasures of the luxe wine list* and the inventive menu are exactly what is called for.

For example: the above plate of sweet urchin with mild horseradish cream, and a glass of esteemed Burgundy vigneron Vincent Dancer's perfectly sculpted 2007 Meursault "Les Corbins."

i have not stopped drinking

Quite the opposite, in fact. The uncharacteristic radio silence is due to fashion week, an unavoidably knackering time of year.

Regularly scheduled updates will recommence next week. In the meantime, here's a photo of my friend E and I draped head to toe in leopard print:

loire road trip, pt. I: late for domaine guiberteau

I had the tremendous good fortune this past weekend to be invited by my friends J and C on a road trip to several enormous wine tastings in the Loire valley. It was particularly nice of them to bring me along given that I don't have a valid French driver's license*, which condition reduced me to the inessential role of ballast for most of the long hard driving. The Loire valley, I discovered, is vast, and mostly empty.

J, who is the wine director at 1er arr. restaurant / boutique Spring, had snagged us two excellent cellar-visits for that Saturday. The second, which I'll report later, was at the illustrious benchmark Saumur estate Clos Rougeard, in Chacé. The first appointment, for which we ran a bit late, was a few miles away at Domaine Guiberteau, in Mollay, where Antoine Romain Guiberteau makes acclaimed natural Saumur whites and reds that in retrospect seem somewhat palpably (and understandably) influenced by a certain nearby illustrious benchmark Saumur estate.

For our lateness that day, we had any of three excuses.

the fashion at the time: l'hedoniste, 75002

Last Saturday the intended cosy casual dinner for two or three with my friend D eventually (and happily) turned into a roving thirsty party of eight, when it turned out a number of other colleagues from NYC and Tokyo were able to join us.* This presented the conundrum of where one might dine not-horribly in the center of Paris on a Saturday with a brigade of people in the middle of fashion week.

Happily, this is just the function in which the recently-opened 2ème restaurant L'Hedoniste excels, for the time being. It is extraordinarily not horrible - even excellent, at times, if one is able to forgive the prices, which are all a notch above what dishes and wine actually merit, and the slightly hapless one-man kitchen, from which most things seemed to leave lukewarm, rather than hot.

But that is the kind of restaurant this is. If it were hot, there is no way I could have invaded on a moment's notice with D et al , and had, despite my criticism, a very enjoyable meal.

office carousing at le bal café, 75018

A brief word on my workplace's excellent office Xmas party, for which I must thank our fearless Président-Directeur-Général, who had specifically requested that Anselme, wine director of Le Bal Café, serve only natural wines at the event. Previously I'd had no idea the PDG even drank, or took any joy whatsoever in things not directly related to work.*

Anselme's list, happily, contains a very adequate proportion of natural wines.** So we all sipped Domaine Plageoles' agreeable buckwheat-honey-toned bubbler Mauzac Nature, and François Chidaine's precise, silvery Touraine Sauvignon all night. It marked the first time I'd ever been to a non-restaurant-industry office party where honest wine was served.

ping ping ping: champagne and high fashion

I'm continually harping on about the basic interconnectedness of most aesthetic fields - wine, music, fashion, art, literature, etc. But I should stress that this tendency of mine should not imply a de facto endorsement of opportunistic cross-industry cash-in nonsense like the above "collaboration" between fashion house Viktor & Rolf and Champagne house Piper-Heidsieck, which I saw at a Champagne tasting a few weeks ago.

For one thing, the premise of the parties' involvement is miserably facile. Fashion and wine are both, at their very worst, luxury industries. A necessarily simplistic idea of luxury is all these two brands have in common.

For another thing, the glasses themselves are monstrously ugly and impractical. I stood and watched that day as the hapless Piper-Heidsieck representative attempted to take them out of their specially-built case and in doing so broke three at their stems. Ping, ping, ping.

jean-luc poinsot (la badiane) tasting: le garde robe, 75001

Z, P, et M. Poinsot

On the night we attended last week's Jean-Luc Poinsot tasting at Le Garde Robe, my New Zealander friend Z informed me she had an "unusual surprise" for me. I assumed the surprise was simply that her excellent, occasionally somewhat reclusive husband P was actually going to join us for once. (P designs for Lanvin and is accordingly perpetually swamped with work.)

Although P did indeed end up joining us, it turns out she had been referring instead to a small green guava-like fruit called a feijoa, which she had been delighted to find at a market here in France, and which she placed in my hand and told me to eat later.

According to Z, everyone in New Zealand has a tree just bursting with feijoa in their back yards. I've yet to eat the thing - it seemed unripe so it's still sitting on my desk - but I really appreciated the gesture, since, as perhaps Z noticed, the guiding philosophy of what I drink and how I eat and this blog as a whole is essentially just a reverence for the native peculiarities of any given region. I'd never even heard of a feijoa.*

Anyway, all this is long preamble to why I dig Jean-Luc Poinsot's wines (thus, why me and Z and P were out that night in the first place). His strong, distinctive range could come from nowhere else on earth but  Provence - the first proof being the winemaker's exclusive use of local varietals, like the strange, scented candle-y Tibouren rosé I covered in a previous post.

how to survive fashion week: la bodeguita du IVème, 75004

I run into the same problem every fashion week. Friends and acquaintances arrive from New York, LA, Tokyo, all over, everyone stressed overworked and thirsty. When we all finish our respective jobs for the day, often quite late, I'm the only one who hopelessly advocates drinking someplace beyond the dead-obvious tourist-infested center of Paris. Since I'm the one living here, not staying in an overpriced hotel near Opera, I'm not really in a position to insist. We wind up at Irish pubs.

Which is why I'm straight-up ecstatic about the opening, just six months ago, of La Bodeguita du IVème, a particularly rock 'n' roll Spanish-themed natural wine bar right smack near the Centre Pompidou. From which my fashion friends can stagger home on foot, if it comes to it. The writing on the door proclaims "Wine's Not Dead!" and the same rebellious, joyous spirit pervades the whole place, from the unfinished walls to the mismatched chairs that have clearly been inherited from previous failure establishments.

The Spanish theme, too, is taken lightly. From what I saw the wine selection consists of nothing but top-notch natural French stuff. When I popped in with my friend P the other night my eye was drawn immediately to a 2005 Cour-Cheverny by Domaine des Huards, with which we rinsed down a plate of marinated anchovies and some simple hearty tortillas.

a junkyard called the future: iPad wine lists

Image swiped from regmedia.co.uk. 

Reading the NYTimes last night, I was bemused to discover that iPad's are being employed in certain restaurants as substitute wine lists.

Actually, "bemused" is sort of a light-hearted way of saying "filled with a profound ambivalence." (If you think I walk around the city all day in a permanent state of bemusement, then you know me very well.)

Instinctively I want to heap this idea in with cryogenic wine preservation systems, in a junkyard reserved for unbroken things that got fixed. But...

oh, you shouldn't have: literary critics, bad champagne

Image swiped from sunnysidenyc.com.

Over at the Paris Review blog, I notice that Parisian literary critic Nelly Kaprielian went to interview Michel Houellebecq armed with a bottle of Veuve Clicqot. It always surprises me when an expert in one field reveals a total lack of sophistication in another field. But, save for the regrettable tendency of English writers to pronouce ignorant dictums on drinking (see Ford Maddox Ford, either Amis, etc.), the two fields have little in common, so I shouldn't blame Mme Kaprielian for name-checking such a dull mass-market cherry-coke Champagne.

Image swiped from jonathanfrance.wordpress.com, c/w Mariusz Kubik.

I do, though. Later in the same article they have a Chateauneuf-du-Pape with Moroccan food, which sounds just wrong.

I think my omnicritical impulses result from having done one or two weird career-switching pirhouettes so far in my life. (Two is if you count studying writing only to immediately begin a largely unrelated mini-career in wine.) Mercifully few people ask me about the writing career - instead they ask about the transition from wine & food to fashion (what I do now, other than write this blog).