despite the name: la pointe du groin, 75010

I might as well start off by explaining that La Pointe du Groin is an alternate spelling for La Pointe du Grouin, a rocky outcropping on the bay of Mont Saint Michel in Brittany. It's also where renowned chef-restaurateur Thierry Breton hails from. Breton, like many of his countrymen, enjoys a good meaningless pun. For his multifarious, rather groundbreaking new wine bar project, Breton has chosen the emblem of a grinning pig - for in French, groin means the snout, and not some other part of pig anatomy.

One may nonetheless presume that the English signification is not entirely lost on Breton. The bar's name is just one of several baffling features of the project, which include, but are not limited to, outlandishly bad décor and an incomprehensible payment scheme in which guests will be expected to exchange their euros for fake money - Groin coins ? - accepted only at La Pointe du Groin.

Despite these obstacles, La Pointe du Groin is primed for succcess. It's spacious, rangey, and weird, offering magnums of natural wine and simple small plates at a price-quality ratio approaching the one achieved when Manhattan was bought for beads. It's a Paris wine bar that explodes the traditional Parisian opposition between egalité and haute-qualité: a place where many can drink well for very little.

kind of sort of open! les trois seaux, 75011

Olivier Aubert on left. 

When I first met Olivier Aubert, he and Nath Acroft were behind the bar at the scrappy Spanish-toned natural wine bar they'd recently opened near the Centre Pompidou, La Bodeguita du 1Vème. They were headbanging along to "Bohemian Rhapsody." In the months since, M. Aubert has evidently been on kind of an entrepreneurial tear, first opening La Bodeguita du IXème near Grand Boulevards, and now, as of last week, a work-in-progress restaurant called Les Trois Seaux on rue de la Fontaine au Roi in the 11ème.

"Les Trois Seaux" translates to "the three buckets," and at the other Friday night's quiet opening party, as my friends M, B, and I surveyed in the fresh red and yellow splotchwork on the walls, I couldn't help wondering whether the bar's new name perhaps derived from a happy afternoon spent with some paintbrushes and numerous bottles of wine. As evidenced by the pace of his restaurant openings, Olivier doesn't seem to be the type to overthink things. I can only hope everyone else in the neighborhood finds the basic ideas as charming as I do: natural wines, informal service, simple tapas...