n.d.p. in beaujolais: l'auberge du moulin, saint-didier-sur-chalaronne

During les trentes glorieuses - the thirty-year heyday of post-war French economic expansion, roughly the late forties through the late seventies - the D906 from Mâcon to Lyon was perennially swarmed with vacationing families and business travelers, who provided a steady clientele for restaurants like Paul Blanc’s Le Chapon Blanc in Thoissey (closed: 2004). Such restaurants have since gone the way of most tourism in the surrounding Beaujolais countryside, succumbing, variously, to the construction of the A6 autoroute, the rise of low-cost airlines permitting cheap pan-European travel, and the Lyonnais population’s notorious (and not-so-mysterious) turn away from Beaujolais wine in the 1990’s. In many towns, all that remain nowadays are cheap roadside PMU’s, often housed in stone buildings bearing sun-bleached, elegiac paint advertisements for the region’s disappeared gastronomic restaurants.

I was therefore overjoyed the other evening to visit L’Auberge du Moulin, a shady terrace that offers, just off the roadside in the sleepy, mouthful town of Saint-Didier-sur-Chalaronne, an immaculately preserved throwback to the fine regional cuisine of yesteryear. The restaurant is acclaimed among local vignerons for its sharp Beaujolais-Maconnais wine list, its delicate fried fish, and its heaping portions of whole frogs.

Yet over a round of eau de vie, long after sundown when mosquitos began urging everyone homewards, I was dismayed to learn that L’Auberge du Moulin, too, will soon close. From September, iron-haired owner Patrick Piron will convert the restaurant, which presently offers lunch and dinner service and one rentable room, into a table d’hôte offering four rooms and private meal service by request. I may be getting distraught over what is merely a modification in service-style, but the fact is that the restaurant, already rather hidden, will become almost imperceptible. And this is indeed a shame, for like its only nearby peer, the Auberge du Col du Truges in Villié-Morgon, L’Auberge du Moulin is a moving demonstration of the heights of Beaujolais cuisine.

you've goust to be kidding: goust, 75002

A magazine I write for sometimes called Punch recently published two interesting pieces about what it means to be a sommelier. The comment threads beneath these articles quickly devolved to something approaching trench warfare, with lines clearly drawn between those who consider "sommelier" a role, like an emcee, and those who consider the term to be more like a title or accreditation, like "PhD" or "Licensed Beautician."

Personally, I would very much like to have already internalized and recited the industry catechism required for certification by any of the big sommelier accreditation bodies. Then my opposition to them could be taken seriously. As it is, any criticism I might offer would rightly have the ring of sour grapes.

I'll stay mum for that reason. I will however say that for a sommelier to emblazon his restaurant's menus with his name and the epithet "Best Sommelier in the World," as title-winner Enrico Bernardo does at his recently Michelin-annointed restaurant Goust, is a laughable act of hubris, one that inadvertently seems to trivialize the responsibilities of a sommelier. It's like calling a certain chair the Best Chair in the World. Ultimately, it's a place where you sit, not terribly dissimilar to the second or even the third-best chair in the world.  A restaurant is a place where you eat and a sommelier is the fellow who helps you navigate the wine list. To truly require the utmost services of the Best Chair in the World or the Best Sommelier in the World, one would in both cases have to be a very demanding ass.

The rest of us who enter Goust planning merely to eat food and drink wine are unfortunately in for a minor letdown, since for all its rigor the sommelier competition Bernardo won had no section on good taste in restaurateurism.

bento stowaway: maori's bento at la conserverie, 75002

When I finished my long overdue first meal at my good friend Maori Murota's bento spot by Grands Boulevards, I descended to the kitchen to thank her, and after doing so, asked what I imagine must be a pretty routine question for her. So, I segued, after learning that she planned to travel to Japan for a month. You going to keep this up when you get back?

It's not that her project, a stowaway restaurant operating inside the cavernous design-hell cocktail bar La Conserverie, isn't successful. She routinely runs out of food to serve, and juggles numerous private cooking gigs on the side. The home-cooked Japanese soul-food she prepares is gem-like and nutritious, a natural hit with her previous milieu, the fashion crowd. (Murota was previously an assistant to Christophe Lemaire.)

It's just that the whole conceptually-unrelated-restaurant-within-a-bar situation seems precarious, barely perched where it is - like a food truck, without the truck, with notably more refined cuisine, if not service. In every major city there are a thousand bloggers with peeled eyes and pricked-up ears searching for good unprofessional authenticity, the outsider art of the kitchen, and when one confirms its existence, as at Maori's Bento at La Conserverie, one usually doesn't wait long for it to disappear. But Murota has always struck me as being more or less chez elle in funny situations. So she's returned from her trip to Japan and has reopened for business this week.

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.