more to come : restaurant encore, 75009

The recent opening of charming 9ème market-menu restaurant Encore signals the inevitable outright codification of two recent Paris restaurant trends. The first is apparent from the restaurant's name, which follows in the cheery, brand-hungry, ultimately insipid footsteps of Merci, Grazie, and Beaucoup. The second is the fetishization of Japanese chefs. Abri, Vivant Table, Sola, Kei, Le Sôt l'y Laisse, L'Office... And now chef Yoshi Morie, formerly of 6ème restaurant Le Petit Verdot, returns at Encore. Not since Commodore Perry showed up with canons aimed at Edo have the Japanese found themselves in such pressing demand as in present-day Paris restaurant kitchens.

Encore un nouveau resto gastronomique avec un chef japonais ? Oui, encore un, même.

Happily, the opening of Encore also signals wine director Florian Perate's return to France, after a few years spent in London working with UK natural wine heavyweights Les Caves de Pyrène. Perate, originally from Troyes, formerly worked there for my favorite restaurant in the world, Aux Crieurs de Vin, and has been living and breathing natural wine since he was a teenager. What this tells me is that if, on opening night, Encore didn't quite yet possess enough personality to transcend trends, it assuredly soon will. At which point I'll return for an - oh, enough already.

pulled up: racines, 75002

My friend L and I hadn't intended to go to Racines for lunch. We'd planned to go to Gyoza Bar, a very contemporary Japanese concept that has opened across from the pioneering natural wine bistrot. But there was a line at the gyoza place, and we were famished, and finally it amounted to a sort of pilgrimage for this natural wine afficionado to dine at Racines, a restaurant that, under the direction of its founder and former owner, serial restaurateur Pierre Jancou, did so much to promote a certain ethos of natural wine in France and abroad. 

Whether Jancou's famously combative, didactic style of hospitality is a salutary accompaniment to natural wine remains open for debate. I have some friends in the wine scene who seem permanently put off natural wine expressly because they associate it with what they consider to be poor hospitality. For what it's worth, I have the impression Jancou has mellowed since his time at Racines; at his present restaurant, the 10ème's Vivant, I've never had anything but stupendous service. If I hadn't visited Racines before this, it's because I was usually dining at Vivant.

I saw no urgent reason to visit what I presumed must be the husk of a great restaurant; to repurpose a Saul Bellow line, it felt like praying to the gods of an extinct volcano. It's part of Jancou's racket that he sells his restaurant's at the peak of their popularity, such that the best a new owner - in this case David Lanher - can hope for is to maintain Jancou's standards. On the basis of our lunch the other day, I can report that Racines still serves superb food and wine. The restaurant itself remains a beautiful, patinated space. What's missing is Jancou, whose standards - like those of any great restaurateur - are not limited to superb food and wine in beautiful spaces.

save japan: hirotake ooka at caves augé, 75008

I got a kick out of Japanese Rhône winemaker Hirotake Ooka's apron the other day at Caves Augé's Rhône tasting. What on earth can these two things have in common? Actually, I'm told Japan has a pretty thriving and enthusiastic* natural wine scene (as excellently reported here by the far-roaming and indispensable Bertrand Celce). Unfortunately, despite being half-Japanese and working for a Japanese company, I haven't been to said nation since my first and only voyage there at age eleven. I wasn't into natural wine then. 

It doesn't help that I didn't then and do not now speak Japanese. As I tasted through Ooka's wines that day we conversed in French, and the irrelevant coincidence of both being Japanese natural wine afficionados went unmentioned and probably unnoticed on his end, since physionomically I take after my Jewish mother. 

Of Ooka's wines that I've tasted, I'm most impressed by his sparkling Saint Peray. Over dinner at Vivant recently, and again at the Augé tasting, the 2006 was delicate, white-floral, and expressive, a fine example of what makes the Saint Peray appellation such an appealing corner of the sparkling wine world. 

straight classic: le severo, 75014

If we define popular staples as foodstuffs that could conceivably be employed as a "health boost" icon in video games - things like steaks, burgers, and fries - then we've pretty much isolated a segment of cuisine that everyone and their mother have strong opinions on, no matter how indifferent or clueless these diners may be about anything more sophisticated than sesame buns. Classic, simplistic comfort food is just very inviting to armchair critics. This manifests itself nowadays in the rainforest of blogs devoted such cuisine.

Conceptually pure restaurants like 14ème steak standby Le Severo are partial beneficiaries of this dynamic: the restaurant is rightfully famous city-wide for its marvelous cuts of meat. Nevertheless I can't help feeling that something gets glossed over, lost in the branding, when I read about the place: namely, the impressive sophistication of the panoramic blackboard wine list, which is basically a big billboard for all that is good about Le Severo's supplier, the occasionally controversial* Caves Augé.

beaujolais bike trip: le saint laurent, saint-laurent-sur-saône

We arrived in Mâcon before sundown on Monday evening, and after stowing our bikes and showering in our murdery hotel we resolved to hit the town, where nothing was open. Notably closed was a very nice-looking natural wine bistro in the shadow of the church called Le Carafé, which restaurant came with the recommendation of Isabelle and Bruno Perraud. In desperation I led everyone on a hopeless trawl through the shut streets of Mâcon looking for a restaurant where more than pizza was served, until, ready to surrender to sham-Italian, we espied the town on the Sâone river's opposite bank, Saint-Laurent-Sur-Saône, bathed in late sunlight with with a number of busy terraced restaurants on the quay.

After eyeballing each one, we determined that the best were shut, and of the two that remained, the one that had a table for us looked trashy as all get-out. This left us with Le Saint Laurent, what turned out to be a Georges Blanc restaurant with a vaguely troisième-age air and a thirty-plus minute wait for a quaint and extremely conservative mass-hospitality meal that nevertheless contained several surprises.

utter bacchanalian anarchy at: le verre volé, 75010

My friends R, R2, and A celebrated the last night of their recent visit to Paris with a meal at their favorite restaurant here, the rightly famous Verre Volé. I think we all agree that there are few other restaurants in Paris where fine cuisine and wines are paired with the lurking possibility of sheer anarchy ensuing when two previously unintroduced afficionados begin an arms' race of manic rock-out generosity, purchasing various magnums and sending glasses back and forth over the entire restaurant until the place closes.

Anyway, that's what happened. My friend R started it with a magnum of Domaine Romaneaux-Destezet's 2004 "Saint Epine," impeccably chosen by our friend / server-sommelier Thomas. When the glasses started flying we were anwsered in kind by a cheery Serbian fellow across the dining room. I'd just joined my friends sometime around the cheese course, thinking to share a bottle of wine and call it an early night.

if only: le marsangy, 75011

For several months my friend J had been intermittently proposing we get dinner at Le Marsangy, a dingy unassuming burrow of a bistro midway between our respective apartments, near metro Parmentier in the 11ème. "Really not bad," he'd say, "and a good wine list," before we inevitably decided to go elsewhere for dinner.

We finally got there the other Monday evening, with his wife C and the Native Companion, and discovered he'd been half-right. It made for an interesting meal, because while I consider it settled that I won't bother visiting restaurants that get only the food right, neglecting wine, I had until that evening no definite knowledge of the lower boundary of cuisine I'd stomach for the sake of a good wine list. 

Call it the swill threshold versus the crud threshold.

neighborhood natural: chair de poule, 75011

There are a number of things wrong with my current living situation. I have no oven, for instance, just a cruddy little wall-mounted toaster thing that even a Barbie doll would decline to bake anything in. Another factor is the noise: the traffic, the hooting hordes of drunks at the bars below my bedroom window, the lone schizophrenic homeless hollerer who sleeps, or rather never sleeps, atop the air vent across the street...

I won't leave yet. Too much hassle, too little money, and I have too nice a rapport with my landlady as it stands. And there are some key benefits, one being a charming low-key natural wine bar that is practically on my doorstep, the unfortunately named Chair de Poule.*

It's been open going on two years', but as far as I'm concerned it became a very worthwhile afterwork apéro spot sometime around November, when nearby pokey natural wine bar Gustave et Jules shut its doors, and the two bars joined forces in the Chair de Poule space. One now finds the former bar's cheery, completely unpretentious staff and its low-priced pipsqueak natural wine list inhabiting a livelier space, with an earnest tapas menu, and - crucially - a decent swath of outside seating.

more fun that way: delobre's unsulfured st. joseph at le dirigeable, 75015

Update: 23/10/2013: I've just heard Le Dirigeable has closed. Bummer. 

Well, I was gently hassling my friend Guy about having served us a different vintage of Burgundy than the one we'd ordered from his list at 15ème restaurant Le Dirigeable. It hadn't been done intentionally; he'd evidently just jumped the gun on updating the vintage on the list and then unknowingly served us the 2008 instead of the 2009.

"It's a big deal!" I teased. (It sort of is, though. 2008 was nothing like 2009; the wines are drinking in wildly different states. That wine from 2009 would have shown a lot livelier, less savoury.)

In revenge, he insisted on choosing the next wine. He produced a Saint Joseph by a small natural Rhône producer called La Ferme de Sept Lunes. I recognized the wine's label and promptly began voicing various protests: how I'd had the wines before, they were a bit polished, how generally I'm not much into Rhône wines, whites or reds,* how I needed something lighter for my steak tartare... I was being an ass, in short.

It turns out what Guy was serving us was the winemaker Jean Delobre's unsulfured cuvée, "Le Chemin,"** which, on the contrary, I was keen to taste. I'm not a hardline no-sulfur flag-waver, but if the one thing I have against a given wine is a slight lack of personality, then bien sûr I'd like to encounter it again in an unsulfured version. It's like catching up with an acquaintance who has in the meantime stopped taking medication and taken up drinking again. There are certain risks - but some people are just more fun that way.

thanksgiving in paris: three magnums & la dinde

It's a curious sign of expat-titude that you forget about Thanksgiving. All ten of us who managed to meet up - seven Americans in total - happily managed to whip it together with all of two days' notice this year. It helped that, in what was perhaps a telling display of priorities, Josh from Spring had already ordered la dinde from a fellow at the market, even before remembering to invite anyone.

It's was also a great joy to do Thanksgiving with a few fellow wine geeks for once, rather than, you know, actual family.*

big heart, small plates: la cave de l'insolite, 75011

La Cave de l'Insolite, my friend Michel's offbeat natural wine lair near Oberkampf, has just begun serving a tiny menu.

In proper insolite fashion, this was done with zero fanfare. Michel touched up the paintwork on the place, and threw in a few new tables. When I say 'new' in this context, it is a very relative term; regulars can rest assured that the tables are rustic and antique-seeming, and the place is still spacious, whimsically decorated, and soulful.

I passed through last Friday and lucked into a mini-tasting of the new menu with the gregarious Olivier Chabanis of Domaine des Agates, a 27ha-or-so organic estate in the center of the Rhone Valley that produces wines under the Côteaux du Tricastin AOC*.

Guillaume et Olivier

riesling & rice vinegar: alsace-japon dinner

My friends M and H and I were even to the very end unable to decide on a catchy name for the Alsace-Japanese-themed dinner we hosted at my landlady's place the other night. The idea was to serve my friend M's stunning Japanese / Chinese home-cooking with a range of interesting Alsatian bottles, whatever we could turn up on a week's notice. The theory being that these are the type and quality of wines that I wish were available in great Asian restaurants, but which very rarely are.

I suggested we call it the "Axis Powers Dinner," but the idea was rejected on the grounds that Alsace isn't really Germany, Italy wasn't involved in our dinner at all, and then, of course, general tastelessness.

But I'm proud to say that even without a good title, we managed to stay admirably on-theme throughout the night's drinking, with the exception of a tremendous 1997 Georges Vernay Condrieu that my friend J brought, for which we had no choice but to, er, forgive him. Due to recent interruptions in Paris wine deliveries caused by a late Alsace harvest this year, it had actually been surprisingly difficult to find anything particularly special from the region - so after numerous slender just-pleasant base bottlings from Stentz-Buecher, Binner, Kreydenweiss, etc., the persistent, savory-honey, beeswaxy Condrieu hit with all the force of a A-Bomb. (Sorry.)

M's amazing hand-drawn menu sketch after the jump.