any other city in the world: juveniles, 75001

My colleagues and I used to pass this place often on the way to lunch at "Japanese Tapas" restaurant Issé, before the latter establishment incomprehensibly doubled their prices and ceded most of the menu to criminally expensive variations on grilled eel.* I'd read Juveniles was an historically important Paris wine bar, but until the other night after a film with my friend F, I'd put off visiting solely on the grounds that no one whose opinions I respect has ever said a peep about the place. It doesn't seem to be on the radar of quality-conscious people.

This is understandable, given Juveniles' tourist-artery location, and, yes, the general low quality of what F and I snacked on that night. The wine bar's most notable aspect is in fact that which will prevent me from returning very often, despite its proximity to my office: in its pokey, avuncular décor, its cheesing goofiness towards wine as a subject, and its focus on wine as a global field, through which one may ostensibly travel at the pop of a cork, Juveniles could pass for a genial, amateurish, wine-themed bar in any other city in the world.

Cincinatti, Liverpool, Melbourne...

n.d.p. in london: brawn, hackney

In Hackney, east London, there is a quite new restaurant called Brawn whose only flaws are derivative graphic design and a misleading name. It opened in December, the kid sister restaurant of a larger one called Terroirs near Charing Cross. It has a blatantly St. John-inspired logo that consists of a wine bottle drawn to look like a pig.

And "brawn" is the British term for testa, or head / face meat, none of which delectable substance was actually present on the menu. These criticisms, however, are roughly the equivalent of blinking during a meal, for me; something I do everywhere, involuntarily, and they in no way detract from the main achievement of this restaurant, the highlight of my recent London trip: it succeeds in presenting excellent natural wines simply and properly, not as though it were some kind of unnatural feat for them merely to be natural.

This would be commendable anywhere on earth. But it's astonishing in London, where titanic overdesigned restaurant groups are the norm, and natural wines are essentially nowhere to be found.