the great american sandwich: verjus, 75001

The other day at lunchtime my colleague R and I announced to our high-pitched and highly amusing senior colleague L that we were going out to get sandwiches. As is her wont, she asked us to pick up one for her. I said no problem, I'd text her a pic of the menu.

No no no, she said, just get me jambon à l'os, with cantal...

At which point I was obliged to explain we were not going to any old interchangeable French sandwich place. R and I were going to Restaurant Verjus*, whose newly launched lunchtime sandwich program is essentially a Great American Road Trip of sandwich nostalgia. There's a slim menu of sandwiches, each named after its culinary inspiration: a pork belly homage to Momofuku's David Chang, fried chicken ode to Bakesale Betty in Oakland... It's like owners Braden Perkins and Laura Adrian wanted to adapt the Proustian madeleine to the American palate, and give their numerous expat fans something to make their hearts melt and their mouths water.

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.

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.