bait and switch: traiteur ô divin, 75019

When I spoke to Ô Divin Epicerie proprietor Naoufel Zaïm last January, he mentioned he'd soon be turning a nearby defunct clothing shop into a take-out stand offering hot meals.

A transition to take-out cuisine would seem a timely move in the gold-rush era of Deliveroo, UberEats, Take Eat Easy, Foodora, Allo Resto, etc.  If I myself have yet to employ any of those delivery services, it's because in Paris the food they deliver tends to derive from one of two, rather stunted categories of establishment: bad take-out stands offering office-lunch fare, or decent restaurants that nonetheless perceptibly deprioritize take-out cuisine. The Parisian attachment to dining-out is such that there are almost no excellent establishments devoted to take-out dinners in the city.

Traiteur Ô Divin, in an amusing bait-and-switch, is not poised to change this situation - for, despite the name, Traiteur Ô Divin both resembles and functions very much like a wine bar.* Instead of the heaps of pre-prepped cuisine and the fortified cash-register one might expect from a take-out stand, there's a long, spacious bar and seating along the walls. There's an keen selection of natural wines familiar from Zaïm's previous establishments. The cuisine - which ranges from roast chicken to middle-eastern-inflected salads - is available to take-away or to consume on-site. The result is kind of a category unto itself - an odd cross between rue de la Roquette's Chez Aline and rue Sainte Marthe's La Cave à Michel. In short, the new traiteur is a splendid place for an apéro when one is tasked with bringing dinner home.

save this bar: jéroboam, 75011

Pity the lonely aficionado. Imagine being possessed of knowledge and good taste, in a given subject, and yet being condemned, for want of similarly-inclined fellowship, to forever share one's passion with ciphers, suits, and passers-by.

If you have imagined this, it gives you a good foretaste of the potential tragedy of 11ème wine shop and wine bar Jéroboam. Owner Vincent Fiorani made his career in manufacture of children's toys. Until opening Jéroboam last year, he indulged his passion for wine as a partner in 17ème arrondissement wine shop Coureurs de Terroirs. When that association ran its course, he decided to launch himself full-time in wine.

Jéroboam is the result. The establishment counts among its assets an excellent, Marais-adjacent location; a vast, well-priced selection of less-than-obvious wines, including many natural wines and impressive back vintages; and simple, good-value boards of charcuterie, cheese, and cured fish. All of this is, unfortunately, delivered with the earnest marketing blather of a Wall Street English program.

authenticity unnecessary : buvette, 75009

By the time my friend Camille Fourmont opened her Buvette in the 11ème this past spring, rumours had already spread that American celebrity chef Jody Williams was planning to replicate her successful West Village wine bar of the same name in Paris. Fourmont had heard the news too, but she'd already made her own neon sign. There are tens of Café du Métros, a bevy of variations on Au Passage, even more than one Galopin in Paris - what's the problem with a few unrelated Buvettes?*

I can see why opening in Paris struck Williams as a savvy move. She made a late-career switch from Italian cuisine (as practiced at Tappo, Morandi, and Gottino in NYC) to French, and stands to benefit from the authenticity boost that an actual Paris outpost confers. Her Buvette also arrives at a recent high-water mark for Parisian acceptance of new-world-style small-plates wine bars. (The floodgates will soon give completely.)

What's more, replicating the NYC Buvette in Paris doesn't seem to have required Williams to tweak the original concept at all. The Paris Buvette feels eerily - at times hilariously - like a New York restaurant aiming to sell quasi-French small plates to Americans.

n.d.p. in piemonte: cantina dei produttori di nebbiolo di carema

A.K.A. The other Carema, the one not made by Luigi Ferrando.

My friends and I were passing one more night in Switzerland on our way back to Paris. So on the road north from Monforte through Carema country we thought it might make for an interesting pit stop to visit the Cantina dei Produttori di Nebbiolo di Carema, whose wines none of us had tried. They have a U.S. importer - Doug Polaner - but neither my friend J nor I could recall having ever seen the wines for sale there.

Luigi Ferrando's sterling reputation as a producer of quality high-altitude Nebbiolo is partially defined in opposition to his neighbors involved in this cooperativo, so our expectations weren't exactly sky-high. Also, there was a huge lumpy novelty bottle outside of the tasting room, making the place look like some kind of Alpine saloon.

jura bike trip: dinner chez bindernagel

Upon descending into Ludwig Bindernagel's nascent cave space at his chambre d'hôte in Poligny, we encountered - someone else's wines, and a small pile of cheese.

"Oh, let me get that," said my friend D, who'd resourcefully, if cheekily, placed the take-home groceries we'd purchased that morning in the cave without informing our hosts. Ludwig, ever genial, said nothing of it, and continued to show us around the cave. 

We didn't do any barrel tasting - if I remember correctly there was just a tiny lot of Pinot Noir stationed in Poligny, and the rest of his operation is based in Arlay, a nearby villlage that we were unfortunately unable to visit on this trip. Instead we poked around a bit, admiring the work he'd done in clearing the old cellar, and then returned to surface level, where Nathalie had prepared an enormous feast, accompanied - at last! - by a few of Ludwig's splendid wines.