a divorce with la vieille

Well, that was quick. As of earlier this month, I've left the manager and wine director position I held for the past eight months at the 1èr arrondissement restaurant Chez La Vieille.

In writing about the restaurant, before and after beginning to work there, I used to emphasise the involvement of American chef Daniel Rose, to differentiate this iteration of Chez La Vieille from the mediocre ones that preceded it at the historic Les Halles bistrot site. Alas, not even the involvement of Rose, who I've been tempted to consider a friend at times, was enough to save my job from his Parisian business partners. Many restaurants have investors who display zero familiarity with restaurant culture or the quotidian rhythms of a food service establishment, people whose actual involvement extends no further than dining as VIP clients from time to time and volunteering hilariously uninformed commentary on the cuisine and wine. Investors of this sort are no more than a benign nuisance when a more informed stakeholder is working on-site. At Chez La Vieille, I realised soon enough, the only informed stakeholder lives in New York.

As it happened, the task Rose had hired me to perform at Chez La Vieille - to turn the restaurant into a fun, raucous natural wine destination - ran counter to the wishes of his Parisian partners, who, like many of their generation and socioeconomic bracket, remain mystified by natural wine and find informal service slightly unsettling. The end result is, I'm back on the job market. Chez La Vieille will chug along, just with less natural wine, and bereft of the talents of the ace chef de cuisine Oleg Olexin, who left shortly after I did (for different reasons). I am poorer than when I began, having made less money working maniac 90-hour weeks than I used to make from stray gigs and writing assignments. Am I richer for the experience of having managed a restaurant on this side of the Atlantic? It has certainly left me cagier about the prospect of ever opening one of my own. Perhaps that is a form of wisdom.

killer instinct: the beast, 75003

Barbecue, arguably, is for Americans what wine is for the French.  What the subjects share is a dialectical emphasis on local cultural tradition, to a degree that handily surpasses that of, say, the New World wine industry. So perhaps it should be no surprise that Thomas Abramowicz, the young French barbecue afficionado behind hype-scorched new Parisian BBQ establishment The Beast, displays a masterful command of the finer regional nuances of barbeque: things like the provenance and flavour difference of the oak and pecan wood used in the Central Texas-style he prefers; or the origins of the sweeter, more pork-based Kansas-style. I knew none of this before the round of Wild Turkey we shared at the close of my meal at the Beast. 

While billing itself as a bourbon destination, The Beast also maintains a tight, inexpensive natural wine list, one that is surprisingly au courant, given the context. For The Beast is a laser-sighted populist commercial endeavor, replete with graphics package and a catchy koan-esque slogan. ('Meat. Fire. Time.') 

Yet the cool wine list and The Beast as whole leave me torn. The restaurant's mass appeal and commercial savvy seem to be in latent contradiction with its small size. Success seems predicated upon rapid table turnover and massive takeout business, neither of which phenomena have much precedent in Paris, a city congested in perpetuity with inveterate table-squatters. So I wonder how the restaurant will thrive without either drastically raising check averages or relocating to a larger premises. In both cases, the experience would change entirely. Hence my ambivalence about The Beast. In its current state, it is among Paris' best new restaurants. But reviewing the place is like being given a cute baby tiger and asked whether you'd like to keep it. 

takes a village: le rubis, 75002

When asked what makes a wine natural, I often reply that a wine is natural when it is bought by natural wine buyers. I'm only being half-facetious: Paris is blessed to be home to several generations of curmudgeonly gatekeepers to the natural wine scene, restaurateurs and cavistes who have been working to define what natural wine is for upwards of thirty years. This cliqueyness has its drawbacks - such as an incomprehensibility to outsiders, unenforcability, etc. - but it also creates a palpable sense of community in Paris.

If Le Rubis, a terrific, new-ish neighborhood bistrot by Sentier, largely escaped notice upon opening in April, it's because reviewers were unaware of its impeccable bona fides in the natural wine community. Or unaware of the value of such cred. Co-owner Marie Carmarans is the ex-wife of celebrated Aveyron winemaker Nicolas Carmarans, and together they were the second generation of ownership of legendary natural wine bistrot Café de la Nouvelle Mairie. What's more, she's often aided at Le Rubis by her husband, Michel Tolmer, a cult figure in his own right for being the illustrator behind the ubiquitous "Epaule Jété" poster that has become, throughout France, the easiest way to identify a natural wine establishment.

Along with co-owner Geraldine Sarfati and chef Roberta Tringale, Marie Carmarans has created the closest thing the right bank has to the 6ème's Café Trama : a refined, contemporary bistrot with the confidence and smarts to remain simple.

reborn: vivant cave, 75010

Given that this is a wine blog, I usually avoid posting on chef career moves. The practice risks stoking the already outsize demand in Paris for internationally-trained chefs who can legally work here. Additionally, there are other blogs following kitchen politics far better than I ever could.

But the recent hire of chef Svante Forstorp at ex-Pierre Jancou wine bar Vivant Cave seems unusually significant. Forstorp previously cooked in Paris at Café Smorgas, Aux Deux Amis, Bones, and Nuba, and has made friends everywhere along the way. He's a chef's chef, with a frank plating style and fondness for smoked salt.

Vivant Cave, for its part, was poised to become yet another pretty ex-Jancou restaurant shell, until Forstorp darkened the doorstep. Forstorp's characterful presence almost singlehandedly makes Vivant Cave a destination, paradoxically the best new restaurant of the much-fêted, meaningless rentrée without even being a new restaurant.

coming round again: à la renaissance, 75011

Like any frequent host in Paris, I've learned to grin vacantly through inarticulate endorsements of "little neighborhood bistrots," those magical gold pots every tourist manages to discover at the end of the RER B rainbow. What our clients, friends, and relatives are discovering is usually not quality, but cuteness, for when one arrives in Paris from a New World nation, almost everything appears quite shrunken, frank, and twee. 

Whereas, in reality, the odds of stumbling upon a unambitious, mostly unknown establishment serving sincere and reasonably well-informed food and wine in Paris - the most visited and most discussed restaurant scene on earth - are vanishingly small.    

Yet, astonishingly, that is how I and my friend and colleague Meg Zimbeck of Paris by Mouth both independently came upon A La Renaissance, an anachronistic 11ème bistrot which, in all aspects save prices and opening hours, resembles its anonymous small-town-square archetype. That we hadn't heard of A La Renaissance before wouldn't be surprising, were it not for bistrot's massive natural wine list, and the fact that, almost alone among Paris natural wine spots, it is open past midnight seven days a week. In the revitalized Voltaire area, newly studded with destinations like Septime, Clamato, Bones, and Le Servan, A La Renaissance is an under-acknowledged pioneer.

reign of terrine: repaire de cartouche bar à vin, 75011

Who knew what to expect when chef Rodolphe Paquin, le roi de la terrine, announced he was turning his divisive bistrot Le Repaire de Cartouche's rue Amelot dining room into a wine bar ?

Paquin's friend and peer Thierry Breton opened his own bar à vin last summer, La Pointe du Grouin, to strange, circusey results. As much as I enjoy that bar, it's representative of a tendency among French restaurateurs - even ones as free-thinking as Breton - to view customer service as a binary proposition, either on or off, present or completely, chaotically absent.* Very rarely in Paris does one encounter the nuanced, calibrated dynamics of places like Septime Cave, Clamato, Le Mary Celeste, or Camille Fourmont's Buvette, younger concepts by younger, hungrier restaurateurs who are now inspiring their forebears.

With Le Repaire de Cartouche Bar à Vin, Paquin proves he hasn't been snoozing for the last 17 years since he opened his restaurant. His wine bar demonstrates an awareness of all that makes Paris' other contemporary wine bars great: a small, responsive menu of shareable items, a long, cornered bar you can actually use, an open door to the street for standing and smoking. But Le Repaire de Cartouche Bar à Vin has three striking advantages over the others: Rodolphe Paquin himself, his bistrot's national-treasure wine list, and his lauded terrines, which latter are among the greatest examples of France's original bar food.

here's your future: frenchie to go, 75002

In the not-too-distant future, when Paris drops the pretense of being French, Le Fooding will organise several multinational corporations to erect a statue in honor of Frenchie founder Gregory Marchand.

Smaller versions of the same statue made of Claudio Corallo chocolate will be sold in Frenchie To Go, which by then will be a fixture in frequent-flyer lounges throughout the western hemisphere. As now, the original Frenchie To Go location on the rue du Nil will be frequented principally by foreigners for whom the experience of eating a pulled pork sandwich in the City of Light is unforgettably tickling. "Can you believe it?" they'll beam at one another between bites. "We're in Paris!"

The attraction-packed rue du Nil, of course, will be unremarkable by then. For it will have become an urban planning template for much of the city. (Already, some well-intentioned financeers have plans to create another foodie wonderland by Arts et Metiers.) Actual Parisians will have long decamped outside la Peripherique, where a fugitive culture of sitting around consuming nothing in well-preserved cafés will persist. For city real estate - even of the momentary kind, like a seat at a restaurant - will be priced beyond the means of all but visiting princelings. The latter will flock to Paris from all over the world in order to taste, at Frenchie To Go and its many imitators, the absolutely definitive versions of the cuisine they remember from turn-of-the-century food blogs.

pioneers: le tagine, 75011

I started frequenting my friend Marie-Jo Mimoun's adorable Morroccan restaurant Le Tagine about two years ago. Mimoun has a superb little Rhône-focused wine list, featuring, among others, such legends as Domaine Gramenon, Dard et Ribo, and Jean Foillard. Yet on every visit I'm surprised by how little wine is consumed in the place. The haute-Marais clientele, largely white and French (i.e. non-Muslim), seem to stick to beer.

I can only assume it's because Le Tagine doesn't look like a wine place. It looks like a chill spot for some ethnic food with the family on a weeknight. And I get the impression that Paris diners - native and tourist - are more reluctant to purchase serious wine from people who don't look classically French.

Justin E. H. Smith, professor of history and philosophy of science at Université Paris Diderot, recently touched on this bias in a terrific NYTimes Opinion piece, where he astutely cited the link between European nativism and "the celebration of terroir and 'Slow Food'." It's a discomfiting alliance based on resistance to globalism and its effects. At worst, as in the case of Friulian winemaker / hatemonger Fulvio Bressan, the resistance is manifested as outright racism. In France, we see certain slippery creeps organising anti-Muslim protests under the guise of "sausage and wine" parties beside mosques. On a far more innocuous level, you have the fact that quality terroir-driven wines in France - let alone natural wines - are consumed almost exclusively in identifiably French restaurants.

In the case of Le Tagine, an overlooked gem of a restaurant that boasts stupendous service and solid soulful Morroccan cuisine alongside its well-priced wine list, it's a crying shame. On the plus side, there's almost always a six-top free when I need one.

hidden in plain sight: willi's wine bar, 75001

I should clarify by explaining that Willi's Wine Bar, the pioneering Paris wine destination founded in 1980 by British expat Mark Williamson, is only hidden to people like me. For the past four years I've worked a few blocks away from the bar, and until the other week, I'd never been tempted to step inside.

I am, it turns out unreasonably, disinclined towards restaurants known for tote bags and wine-art posters. The children's-book storefront font alone is enough to turn stomachs. Willi's, from the outside, appears to be a wine bar for people who only drink wine when they visit Paris.

Actually, it looks a lot that way from the inside as well. Williamson's decades-long indifference to cool is reflected in the clientele, which I'd wager consists primarily of Paris' least-informed Anglophone tourists and expats, family vacations and business trips whose organisers may have breezed, once, through a Lonely Planet guide from 1997. So upon finally dining at Willi's the other night, I was fairly gobsmacked to discover that Willi's' regulars are, if anything, more informed than me. All this time they've been enjoying, in a friendly, unfussy environment, Paris' greatest Rhône list.

yonne bike trip: nicolas vauthier / vini viti vinci, avallon

I'll never forget how Le Verre Volé's Cyril Breward once described Nicholas Vauthier's range of low-sulfur north-Burgundian négociant wines to me. The delicate word he used was "perfectible," which is to say, capable of perfection, and by inference, not at all there yet. (This word is a godsend for anyone who must strive to be diplomatic when asked for opinions on friends' wines.)

Vauthier's Vini Viti Vinci wines had appeared seemingly overnight in just about every restaurant and wine shop I frequented. There was nothing not to love about the marginal appellations - Irancy, Bourgogne Epineuil - or the joyously ribald cartoon labels,* which typically depict mustacchioed transexuals and naked women of all races and shapes in suggestive poses. But the wines themselves initially left me a little cold. At best they were stolid examples of their grapes and not great values; at worst they were just plain flawed.

This was a few years back, though. When last June I saw a chance to pass by Vauthier's home-base of Avallon, I lost no time in requesting an appointment. For I'd belatedly learned that Vauthier had co-founded my favorite restaurant, Aux Crieurs du Vin in Troyes. And I'd already noticed his wines had been improving. The Vini Viti Vinci range now contains some very pleasant surprises, both red and white.

yonne bike trip: le bougainville, vézelay

Deciding where to dine in Vézelay was an easy decision. We cased restaurant's lining the town's one road and lumped for Le Bougainville, the only restaurant where Michel Tolmer's "Epaule Jété" poster in the window indicated the presence of natural wines.

The poster these days is a reliable, if by no means infallible, indicator of a restaurant that prizes good wine. This in turn is a reliable indicator of a good restaurant. Dining on hunches : it's what you do in the countryside. Like oil prospecting, only less nefarious or profitable.

Anyway, my friends and I hit the motherlode in Vézelay that day. Le Bougainville is the realised idyll of a country bistrot: quaint, welcoming, with a wine list to die for and a superlative cheese plate. And chef-owner Philippe Guillemard and his wife Sylvie are like the angels who admit you to heaven after a lifetime of suffering Parisian hospitality. They're quiet enthusiasts who, from their restaurant perched in the shadow of Vézelay's famous basilica, offer the town's visitors a dining experience to rival the transcendental view up top.

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 champagne: aux crieurs de vin (bistrot), troyes

Just as the town of Troyes in the Aube can be said to contain a history of France - from its origins as a Roman settlement, to its role as a medieval trade capital, to its present state of post-industrial muddling - so does Troyenne cave-à-manger Aux Crieurs de Vin, the town's one great restaurant, contain a history of natural wine in France.

The restaurant and wine shop was founded in 1998 by Jean-Michel Wilmes and Nicholas Vauthier, two wine afficionados who'd previously worked together at an unlikely place : faceless wine retail chain Le Repaire de Bacchus. Vauthier, when I spoke to him recently at his cellar facilities in Avallon, admitted that he and Wilmes were "among the worst" clerks to work in that shop - because it didn't stock anything they liked. Wilmes and Vauthier preferred natural wines, particularly from the Rhône, Beaujolais, and the Loire.

So they astutely wagered that in sleepy Troyes - a 90 min. train ride from Paris' Gare de l'Est - they could create a clientele for the wines they loved. Fifteen years later, the restaurant is still packed. Aux Crieurs de Vin has since expanded with a stand at the town's central Marché des Halles. Vauthier has departed, striking off in 2008 to make wine as a négociant under his ViniVitiVinci label. He sold his share of the company to a friend of Wilmes, fellow wine lover and former textile industry executive Franck Windel. In the kitchen, fixing up the most heavenly simple cuisine imaginable from expertly sourced ingredients, remains Wilmes' mother, Françoise. And in the cellar remains another history of natural wine in France : back vintages of the classic cuvées of France's natural wine vanguard, at extremely honest prices.  

the highest bidder : table de bruno verjus, 75012

A good way for a writer to earn money is to cultivate a reputation for authority on a subject rich people like. Wine and food are quite good. Things like polo, yachting, and racehorses are probably even better. All you have to do is publish a great deal on these subjects and sooner or later some organization will reward you for your apparent expertise with a sponsorship or a panel discussion or a publishing deal. Because you will have attained credibility as bait for a luxury clientele.

French food writer, blogger, cookbook author, radio personality, and now restaurateur Bruno Verjus both exemplifies and transcends this phenomenon. On the one hand, he seriously knows his stuff. His blog, FoodIntelligence, is a treasure trove of good recommendations in any price range. In his writing and in his wide-ranging interviews with chefs and artisanal food producers, Verjus evinces a passionate appreciation for, and a nuanced understanding of, the business of real food.

But Verjus is no stranger to promo work. He helps organise the Omnivore food festival. He works as an advisor to Paris auction house Artcurial and coordinated its first charity auction of gastronomic products. And with Table, his new restaurant on sleepy rue de Prague in the 12ème, he's made an ambitious play for the affections of deep-pocketed food fetishists city-wide. It's a dream restaurant for anyone who has ever cried from a balcony, "Honey, let's go bid on a wheel of 48-month parm !"

another (excellent) restaurant : le six paul bert, 75011

Some time after we stopped dating, my ex F moved to a really superb apartment just next to one of Paris' most beloved bistrots and steak-frites destinations, Bistrot Paul Bert. I can be sure she did this purely to make me jealous, because she herself is vegetarian.

Despite this hurdle, we've managed to remain good friends. So back in January it was a tip-off from F that hipped me to the opening of Bistrot PB proprietor Bertrand Auboyneau's then-new place, Le Six Paul Bert, a small-plates spin-off just down the road from the motherships. (Auboyneau also has PB's adjacent seafood restaurant, L'Ecailler du Bistrot.) Initial rumours had given me to believe the new place was to be a wine bar - and the mere idea of a wine bar by the maestro behind Bistrot Paul Bert filled me with a kind of dread and awe, imagining how unbeatably great such an undertaking would be.

But the rumours turned out to be rumours. Leaving aside its functions as an épicerie and its speakeasy-style name, Le Six Paul Bert is Another (Excellent) Restaurant, albeit one that adopts some of the trappings of small-plates wine bars. The effect is to inadvertently highlight, for anyone who may have believed otherwise, how alien the idea of a new world-style wine bar is to Paris.

a village called paris : cave fervèré, 75011

One indication I've been doing this blog too long is that certain restaurants and wine bars I've written about have since been sold, or closed down, or been completely revamped. When I last mentioned my restaurateur friend Olivier Aubert, he had, in the space of about a year, opened three restaurants: La Bodeguita du IVeme, la Bodeguita du IXeme, and Les Trois Seaux in the 11ème.

Aubert is presently selling La Bodeguita du IVeme, having shed the weirdly-shaped and generally unsuccessful la Bodeguita du IXeme long ago. Les Trois Seaux is still operational, still a solid wine bistrot where the respectable food and service are undercut by clumsy décor and a silly name. ("The Three Buckets." I have never understood why they use white tablecloths in a space like that.)

Now on rue des Trois Bornes, one street away from Les Trois Seaux, Aubert is at it again: he's opened a pichet-sized wine bistrot called Cave Fervèré, its name a reference to the iron grillwork on the windows. It's another two-man operation, just him and a chef, with a slim menu of provincial staples, and a shelf of solid natural wines at generous prices. What's to get excited about? you might ask. Why follow Aubert's bantering roadshow of openings and closures to yet another address? Because Aubert's restaurants, in their simplicity and utter lack of pretense, represent all that's best about living in Paris, which is to say they feel like the countryside. Also, he is serving a really killer andouillette right now.

pierre jancou in cdg homme plus, f/w 2000

As a sort of addendum to my post on Pierre Jancou's splendid new cave-à-manger from earlier this week, I thought I'd share a lesser-known aspect of Jancou's admirable career. 

During our first conversation, a little over a year ago, I happened to mention that I work for a fashion company. Jancou was familiar with the brand - because he'd modeled in one of the same company's runway shows a few years back. 

I remember finding it all a marvelous coincidence. Then, perhaps distracted by the wine that evening, I forgot all about it. But just the other day it finally occurred to me to look around for the images, and, voilà.