a new age: la cave de belleville, 75019

Gentrification in Paris seems to happen with the handbrake on. There ought to be a different word for it, one with less negative connotations. Our sympathy for displaced bodegas and barber shops derives largely from the catastrophic swiftness with which their rents get jacked or their clients disappear. Whereas in Paris' handful of perpetually mid-gentrification neighborhoods - Belleville, Ménilmontant, Montreuil, Charonne, Pigalle, and so on - fate takes its time. If one lives and works and searches for decent coffee in these neighborhoods, change can seem damnably imperceptible.

The pork-bun menagerie of Belleville showed new colours last year, however, with the opening of an ambitious wine shop and wine bar,* La Cave de Belleville. The project of three friends from the neighborhood, François Braouezec, Aline Geller, and Thomas Perlmutter - a pharmacist, a gallerist, and a sound engineer, respectively - Le Cave de Belleville is an enthusiastic, accessible enterprise, offering an épicerie counter, a blitheringly large wine selection, and light apéro snacks every day of the week.

I pass by the storefront often. I almost entered once in summertime but was put off by the heat, a disaster for a caviste.** I finally visited for an apéro this December. Almost everything was bad, but I would still return, and would encourage others to do the same. Good wines is in stock, and amid the overall mediocrity sparkles real promise.

n.d.p. in beaujolais: georges descombes, vermont

There was a man hanging around in the driveway when my friends and I showed up on bicycles for a rendezvous with Morgon-based winemaker Georges Descombes back in April. We parked the bikes and tried phoning Descombes, who didn't pick up. The man wandered over, regarding his own cell phone, whereupon I recognized him as renowned Loire winemaker Pierre Breton, with whom we had evidently been double-booked.

It was a stroke of luck for us. Descombes zoomed into the driveway in short order, and in addition to a generous tasting of his celebrated array of Beaujolais, my friends and I were able to enjoy the perceptive commentary of two masterful winemakers, whose mutual appreciation was itself a pleasure to observe. It turns out it was Breton's first time visiting Le Noune, too. (I have yet to discern the precise origin of Descombes' nickname, which is among the most colourful in a region of colourful nicknames.)

That it soon got dark, and that, upon departing the long tasting, I skidded on gravel while racing downhill without headlights from the hamlet of Vermont, and that I fell and broke my collarbone, necessitating a taxi ride to the hospital at Villefranche-sur-Saône, doesn't mar the occasion at all, in retrospect.

eternal return: le dome café, 75014

Upon arriving in Paris, one can take pleasure in almost any characterful feature of the city, regardless of fame or exclusivity. For six years the bins of Chinese vegetables in Belleville and the hair-weave tumbleweed around Barbés fascinated me more than the Louvre or the Musée d'Orsay. But conversely, as earlier this summer I prepared to leave Paris, I found myself drawn to the old, uncurious Paris, and establishments such as Le Dôme Café, the historic Montparnasse seafood brasserie whose iconic fame and ludicrous price point had heretofore completely repelled me.

What changed? I guess I just didn't want to leave the city with the nagging doubt that, in my peregrinations around rive droite wine bars, I was merely nibbling at the edges of what the city had to offer its wealthier diners.

Moreover, the Native Companion was leaving the city too, headed for a different destination. I thought I would mark the unbearably sad occasion by a kind of financial suicide, blowing memorable amounts of euros at Le Dôme on fresh fish, François Côtat Sancerre, and cinematic décor - all the accoutrements of turgid, laurel-resting Paris that, in our time together there, we'd been doing our best to ignore.

clowns: clown bar, 75011

To me, clowns aren't funny. In fact, they're kind of scary. I've wondered where this started and I think it goes back to the time I went to the circus, and a clown killed my dad. - Jack Handey

My distrust of Ewan Lemoigne and chef Sven Chartier's work goes back to the time Lemoigne botched my reservation at Saturne. Had Lemoigne handled the situation with any decency, I would've simply returned some other time. As it was, I didn't return to Saturne for over three years, until a magazine paid for my lunch there in March.

I just wanted no part of supporting such an inhospitable hospitality group. Until recently I was boycotting the Saturne duo's newer project, rue Amelot's Clown Bar, for the same reasons. Friends in the Paris restaurant scene, in efforts to persuade me to try Clown Bar chef Astumi Sota's lauded cuisine, would invariably arrive at the phrase, "But Ewan's not even there!"* I wouldn't budge, preferring instead to support nicer people at neighboring places like Repaire de Cartouche, Au Passage, Pas de Loup, Aux Deux Amis, and Le Tagine.

But hell, time passes. I'm about to leave Paris for a few months and I'd like to leave all grudges behind. Lunch at Saturne was excellent in March: I left utterly convinced of Sven Chartier's talents. And despite my differences with Lemoigne, I can certainly applaud the wine list he assembled at Saturne, which ranks among the city's best. Clown Bar, for its part, is a worthy addition to Paris' dining scene, offering an unmistakably upmarket experience of fine cuisine and natural wines in a pleasantly versatile format: small plates, Sunday service, a big terrace, a bar. True, it's more expensive than all its stylistic peers. But Paris has an under-served constituency who want that.

side benefits: table à côté, 75012

Paris has streets that hide in plain sight - overlooked byways that, due to poor sun exposition or traffic redundancy, get circumvented by pedestrians. The forever-shaded length of rue de Chateau d'Eau north of République is one. Another is the Aligre-adjacent rue de Prague, the quiet side street where French culinary journalist Bruno Verjus opened his ambitious restaurant Table in 2013. Despite receiving praise from Verjus' fellow journalists, Table still has its namesakes available most nights, partly due to its discreet location.

Similarly, the Paris natural wine scene has certain esteemed personalities that seem to bend the limelight whenever it nears them, and disappear. Natural wine as we know it in Paris - and increasingly, worldwide - was shaped in its adolescence by the palates of low-key dégustateurs with zero flair for self-promotion: people like La Cave de l'Insolite's Michel Moulherat, now at Issy-les-Mouleaux's La Poudrière, or Olivier Camus, whose struggling Belleville restaurant Le Chapeau Melon is an abandoned goldmine of old bottles.

Another such quietly influential personage is Franck Carré, formerly of La Cave des Papilles and Café Trama. Four months ago Carré opened, in partnership with Bruno Verjus, Table à Côté, a cave-à-manger so discreet and uncommercial as to make one suspect wine sales are secondary to some private creative endeavor requiring office space. (Perhaps he is writing a novel?) Table à Côté seats six on rue de Prague's forgotten sidewalk, and a dozen more inside on a leaden communal table. The menu consists of generous portions of highly-pedigreed meats and cheeses. The only real draw is Carré himself, whose long experience is evident in a slender wine selection containing bottles to marvel the most jaded palate. The other night, for instance, he introduced me to the apotheosis of pineau d'aunis.

n.d.p. in the loire: l'ardoise, angers

Given the tumultuous social jockeying that surrounds dinner invitations during the Loire salons, I hadn't expected to get to hang with my friends Kenji and Mai Hodsgon at all this past January. So I was delighted when they proposed dinner at one of their favorite local bistrots, an unassuming place a few blocks from the Grenier Saint-Jean called L'Ardoise.

And I was more than delighted - astonished! - that the restaurant matched the quality of the company that evening.

L'Ardoise turned out to be that rare, semi-mythical destination for the wine traveler, a marvelous small-town natural bistrot that, like Le Chat in Cosne-sur-Loire or Aux Crieurs de Vin in Troyes, displays more sophistication, humour, and ambition than most of its big-city counterparts.

loire salons 2015: la renaissance des appellations, les penitantes, la dive bouteille, demeter france

I found myself with a late afternoon to kill in Angers on the Friday before this years' tasting salons. With the aim of avoiding drinking at all costs, I nursed a café crème on the terrace of a no-name bar beside a parking lot, where I soon ran into Beaujolais vignerons Karim Vionnet and Jean-Claude Lapalu.

They were toting several magnums between them, headed elsewhere. I said I'd see them tomorrow at the tasting, whereupon Vionnet reminded me that they were presenting at La Dive Bouteille, which didn't start until Sunday in Saumur. For the winemakers, evidently, as much as for me and most other attendees I know, the weekend was mainly a social occasion.

I'm guilty of complaining about this dynamic from time to time. The truth is, though, that the pageantry and partying of the Loire salons are signs of a vibrant community, and ought to be encouraged as such, or at very least, gracefully tolerated.  Take, for a counter-example, the Demeter France tasting at Angers' Palais de Congrès, where my friends and I tasted the following morning. Most of the winemakers looked embarrassed to be there, like they hadn't even been introduced to one another. It seemed illustrative of the limitations of merely-biodynamic collective marketing, at a time when even the natural wine off-salons, Vin Anonymes and Les Pénitantes, are metastasizing each year. I missed out on Anonymes this year, in favor of arriving earlier at La Dive Bouteille - a somewhat unnecessary precaution, it turned out, since this years' edition was notably better organised, and seemingly less overrun by local daysippers.  After the jump, some scattered takeaways. Slightly more in-depth posts on a few topics to follow in days to come.

insiders: monsieur henri, 75003

I recently lauded fledgling 11ème wine bar Aux Deux Cygnes for bringing a bit of professionalism and style to its gentrification-frontier quartier. If that establishment's location is central to its charm, the same dynamic applies to another new Paris wine bar, the 9-month-old Monsieur Henri, which manages to be impressively discreet despite being tucked right off the haute-Marais beard-groomer thru-way of rue de Bretagne.

The Marais, of course, is stuffed with twee concepts long on design and short on experience. Monsieur Henri, for better and for worse, has these proportions precisely inversed.

Co-owner Dzine Breyet is a fixture in Paris' natural wine scene, having previously worked alonside Guillaume Dupré at influential passage des Panoramas wine bar Coinstot Vino. But where that bar benefits from the evocative décor of Paris' oldest public passage, Monsieur Henri rather unfortunately resembles a corridor in a small-town sports center. Harsh lighting, a low ceiling, and ill-advised primary-coloured wine storage cages all ensure that no one drinking at Monsieur Henri has come for the glamour. In the Marais, this seems to improve the clientele.

sancerre bike trip: le square, cosne-sur-loire

Cosne-sur-Loire is not the most exciting place on earth. It's where life goes on surrounding Sancerre tourism. But it's also where many visiting wine guys stay. So I thought for sake of completion, after my laudatory post on Cosne's lone terrific restaurant, it would worth mentoning also Le Square, which is Cosne's most accessible and convenient restaurant.

No, the wine's no good, and service veers from welcoming to furious according the whims of whoever's working. But there's a lovely terrace on, yes, a square, and as long as you bring enough mosquito repellent it's a lovely place for dinner in Cosne on a Sunday night, when, as far as dining options go, the alternative is noodling for catfish in the nearby river.

sancerre bike trip: restaurant la tour, sancerre

The most expensive fallacy of wine travel, to which I habitually succumb, is to assume that, to experience the full breadth of a given region's cuisine, one must dine at least once at a formal restaurant. This is how I convinced myself and my travel companions to dine at Restaurant La Tour, a Michelin-starred restaurant helmed by chef Baptiste Fournier, whose parents owned the restaurant before him.

Fournier previously trained with Guy Savoy and Alain Passard, among others, and in this case the chef's estimable pedigree illustrates why I ought to avoid restaurants like La Tour. High-value chefs tend to produce high-value cuisine, more representative of individual ambitions than of regional tradition. (The phenomenon is even more pronounced at lunch, when chefs don kid gloves.)

In the same way that you can get a Burberry scarf or Gucci luggage in almost any duty-free from Madrid to Dubai, you can enjoy the white-tablecloth cuisine of Restaurant La Tour in almost any upscale rural French restaurant from Puligny to Chablis. Luxury has an anonymising effect. At Restaurant La Tour, this is counterbalanced by an impressive, if not exactly bargain-studded regional wine list that cites the local wines according to village.

sancerre bike trip: domaine vacheron, sancerre

Half our group missed the visit to historical Sancerre standard-bearers Domaine Vacheron. They decided to spend the morning by the pool. Later they rejoined us for lunch in Sancerre, where I admitted they hadn't missed much. 

A strenuous, rushed ride up the town's nearly vertical hillside, and then a fairly perfunctory tour of the facilities in the company of some visiting Alsatian winemakers. Our guide was Denis Vacheron, President of the Union Viticole du Sancerrois, uncle and father, respectively, of current winemaker Jean-Laurent and vineyard manager Jean-Dominique. 

I hadn't expected more, of course, as I'm neither an accredited journalist nor any sort of buyer. Domaine Vacheron are big business, with 48ha planted, of which 46ha are in production. They export 60% of their 200,000 bottle production to 45 countries. But they're also certified biodynamic since 2004, and the domaine has a history of ecological production practices. (Denis says they've never used fertilisers or chemicals in the vineyards.) I find the universally-acclaimed Sancerres to be reliable fallbacks on otherwise conventional wine lists. Vacheron wines also usefully illustrate some practices that separate biodynamic wine from the more fugitive concept of natural wine. 

neighborhood natural: les vinaigriers, 75010

What a wonderful world we'd live in, if the elusive Great Neighborhood Restaurant existed in numbers commensurate to how often the term is invoked by restaurant critics.

Most would have you believe that every arrondissement of Paris contains several Great Neighborhood Restaurants. But such a belief is dependent upon the demands of the individual diner. My own criteria - which I don't consider too extravagant - are friendly service, bargain comfort food, and potable wine. Yet within this rubric, great Neighborhood Restaurants prove rarer than narwhals. Far too often I'm directed to ostenstibly solid establishments only to encounter pitifully undersketched beverage programs, as if honest wine in Paris were something we ought to cross town for on weekends.

With these elevated standards in mind, I'm happy to declare promising young canal-area bistrot Les Vinaigriers a splendid neighborhood restaurant. Owners Frédérique Doucin and Thibault Desplats are perceptibly new to the industry, but what they've created in a former auberge on a dreamboat real estate corner is a fine place for a wholesome and mostly unfussy weeknight meal. This summer it's set to be every canalside apero-sipper's back pocket standby when Le Verre Volé is complèt.

sancerre bike trip: le chat, cosne-sur-loire

The town of Sancerre is a bright, windswept agglomeration of medieval belfries and tasting rooms atop a hill with views for miles around. It is precisely what wine tourists want of a wine town.

Cosne-sur-Loire, where we stayed, is where people live and eat kebabs. It is known mainly for being a low-cost upriver alternative to staying in Sancerre itself. Our b'n'b was separated from a graveyard by an autoroute.

But Cosne-sur-Loire has Le Chat, a relatively modern bistrot run by Paris-trained chef Laurent Chareau in the rather isolated southern outskirts. It was the unanimous - and, I'm afraid, only - regional restaurant recommendation of every wine guy I know. A rare balance between rural charm and contemporary sophistication, it puts the whole town on the map. 

sancerre bike trip: sebastien riffault, sury-en-vaux

Twenty minutes into our bike trip around Sancerre last July, as we wended south along the left bank of the Loire, the rear innertube of the Native Companion's bike blew itself to shreds. It had been the one thing I'd asked some bike shop scheisters near Sentier to fix, but in their enthusiasm to bilk me for a thousand other tune-ups and grip replacements, they had apparently forgotten my original request. The back tire had a hole, macgivered with a piece of leather, through which the innertube had become exposed.

We had to postpone our rendezvous with Chavignol legend François Cotat, whose wife was extremely helpful in suggesting places nearby that might stock innertubes. We found one at a motorcycle supply shop a few miles up the road. The shop was permanently closed, but its owner was constructing an amateur Museum of Antique Bicycles in the shed space, and he happened to have a stock of innertubes out back. No tires, though, so the hole remained precarious, with just an unfixed piece of leather between us and further rural hassle.

It was also swelteringly hot, and in my inexperience I took us on a laughably circuitous route up and down the insane inclines of Sury-En-Vaux to the domaine that had become our first appointment, that of natural winemaker Sebastien Riffault. I say all this to explain why the winemaker arrived in his car to see us cheering and doing donuts in his driveway. We had survived! I don't mean it as faint praise if I say we appreciated the ice cold water Riffault gave us almost as much as his deep, wizardly Sancerres.

from the ground up: yard, 75011

A few weeks ago I organised a hilarious and, thankfully, thereafter utterly unrepresentative meal for a visiting friend at Père Lachaise bistrot Yard. I hadn't been to the restaurant, but had heard about it for years and thought why not. Unfortunately for my friend, who idolizes the strenuous "modernist" cuisine of the likes of Inaki Aizpitarte, Yard was between chefs. We later learned that owner Jane Drotter had been in the kitchen that night, winging it.

All at the table agreed that it was like not even eating at a restaurant. It was like dining in the countryside at the house of a French friend's mother who had never been to restaurants. We fled to Clamato for a second dinner to remind ourselves what food with flavor tasted like, and my friends learned never again to trust me for a restaurant recommendation.

As usual, I was just ahead of my time. Not a week later, I learned that Shaun Kelly, ex-chef of Au Passage, and Eleni Sapera, ex-cook at Bones, were taking over kitchen duties at Yard, instantly rendering it a destination. So my friends and I returned on Friday for an entirely different register of meal. It was a testament both to how much Drotter got right with Yard in the first place, and to the transformative power of a certain circle of young foreign chefs in Paris

heaven is a place...: café trama, 75006

In the course of an otherwise friendly conversation the other day, a chef-restaurateur I know asked me in exasperation whether Paris contained any establishments I actually like.

I protested that, on the contrary, my tastes are quite easily discerned. I like boring restaurants best. One gets so sick of interesting restaurants.

My favorite meals in recent memory are those that would interest most dedicated gastronomic adventurers the least. The first was Bistro Bellet, Nico Lacaze's spiffing bistrot re-boot on the rue du Faubourg Saint Denis. More recently, I fell out of my chair for Café Trama, an impeccably tasteful rue du Cherche Midi restaurant whose reputation as a bourgeois canteen short-sells the enormity of its achievement. With a mild, unshowy menu by chef Bruno Schaeffer, a brilliant wine list by Le Rouge et Le Blanc editor Paul Hayat, and a welcoming, well-appointed dining room run by owner Marion Trama, Café Trama is like a beacon showing the way home to wayward novelty concepts citywide. All it does is positively ace the basics of restaurateurism, something everyone else has seemingly forgotten to do.

loire salons 2014: la dive bouteille, les penitantes, la renaissance des appellations, les vins anonymes

If ever you wish to experience an almost out-of-body sense of superfluousness, visit the January Loire salons and tell the natural winemakers you meet that you are a journalist. Of hundreds of winemakers present, only a vanishingly small percentage are subject to the conditions that would warrant paying you any attention whatsoever, i.e. they use the Internet, have wine to sell, and are aware of the commercial value of positive press. I've illustrated the scarcity of this demographic in a handy bubble graphic after the jump.

I never take it personally. Since at present I have the luxury (or misfortune, depending on when you ask me) of not buying and selling wine for a living, I kind of just moon around the various tastings and do my best to make the sort of fleeting interpersonal connections that become useful at later dates, such as when I'm trying to secure interviews, or volunteer for harvest work, or plan bike trips around tasting appointments. "I'm the guy who stared at you and waved from across the restaurant in Angers! Who said hello with from behind the restaurateur accompanying your Canadian importer!" etc. (These are fictitious examples, but not far from reality.)

I leave it to readers to judge whether this constitutes a useful perspective on the Loire salons. This year I accompanied my friend J to La Renaissance des Appellations, Salon Les Penitantes, Les Vins Anonymes, and La Dive Bouteille. What follows are some scattered takeaways.

beyond izakaya: restaurant 6036, 75011

Last fall I helped my friends from 11ème arrondissement German bar Udo put together a small wine list for their new project, a gallery space and Japanese small-plates restaurant called Düo that opened in October.

If I haven't yet written about Düo, it's because I want to give the team there time to work out the service kinks before I start cheerleading about the place. I figured the concept was original enough - inexpensive Japanese small plates and solid natural wines - that buzz would build of its own accord.

I realised I may have waited too long when the other day, just a few blocks away from Düo, my friend E and I stumbled upon the newly-opened 6036, a SIM-card-sized restaurant serving - what else? - inexpensive Japanese small plates and solid natural wines. I guess it's a full-blown trend already. 6036 bills itself as izakaya, or Japanese bar food, but this is a ruse: it's actually a modest and sincere gastronomic experience, helmed by chef Haruka Casters, formerly sous-chef at 10ème arrondissement tasting-menu destination Abri.

at my most parisian : la cagouille, 74014

I can pinpoint the precise moment at which, despite language struggles and disgust with service norms and volcanic resentment of patrician social structures, I began to feel at home in Paris.

It was when I was first able to pass along to a colleague a recommendation I had once received for a miracle-worker dry-cleaner. (In this case, a stuffy teinturier who is, at reasonable cost, able to remove tar and bloodstains from garments. Don't ask.) For city life is an agglomeration of knotty problems - from stained shirts to subway strikes to where to entertain on Sunday nights - and to feel at home among it all one must possess ready solutions. For expats, cut off from the oral tradition by which great addresses for obscure services are usually handed down, the challenge is that much greater.

So it's a great comfort to me to have been introduced* to La Cagouille, a poorly-designed, fusty, Charentais seafood restaurant tucked behind Montparnasse in the 14ème arrondissement. Deeply uncool and far removed from any part of town I frequent, La Cagouille nevertheless ranks among the city's best back-pocket addresses, simply by dint of offering very good food and wine - and abundant table availability - on Sundays.

paris wine company launch

My good friend and frequent travel companion Josh Adler is launching a company that ships wine from France to private clients the USA. He's called it Paris Wine Company, a name I initially hated but which has grown on me slightly since. Unbelievably, the domaine name wasn't already taken, possibly having been passed over as too faceless or ill-targeted. (Pets dot com, anyone?)

Parisians sure won't be buying much wine from him. Parisians by and large don't spend any serious money on wine, and the few that do don't seem to purchase from anyone they haven't known for generations. Josh will mainly be shipping to our fellow Americans, in an importer-distributor-wineseller circumvention that has already teed off several other industry friends. What's good news for private wine clients, these industry friends argue, is bad news for them and the industry they serve.

I can see both sides of the argument. I delve into them after the jump. But the occasion for this post wasn't soul-searching on my part. It was to mention - all philosophical qualms ceding precedence to friendship - that Paris Wine Company is launching tomorrow, July 6th, with a tasting / party at Verjus Wine Bar (75001) at 2pm, featuring superb Angevin vignerons Nicolas Bertin & Genevieve Delatte and Kenji & Mai Hodgson.