small victories : septime cave, 75011

Septime le resto, its relative informality notwithstanding, is a destination restaurant. One needs to plan ahead - not to mention budget, both time and money - to enter its almost-too-well-appointed walls and enjoy chef-owner Bertrand Grébaut's acclaimed market menu, which at dinner is offered only as a 55€ (before wine) "carte blanche" meal of at least five courses. One can't resent any of this: these are the hassles that attend high demand, and they're to be expected at any restaurant whose excellence is a match for its ambition.

But the resplendent success of Septime makes all the more laudable that Grébaut's new project, a wine bar-slash-wine shop catty-corner to the restaurant, is basically a shanty stocked with wine and some meat. It is heroically under-conceived. If Septime is the mothership, exerting a gravitational pull on diners citywide, Septime Cave is the dinghy : a little escape pod for tasteful rue de Charonne locals seeking a random weeknight tipple.

soup-er: spring boutique, 75001

I'm late in mentioning this, due to a towering backlog of posts about a recent trip to Piemonte (more to come!), but my friend Josh Adler's cave Spring Boutique has begun serving soup for lunch again. The soup itself is delicious, heaping with rough-cut vegetables and silken meat of the most quixotically exacting Michelin-worthy provenance, this latter obsessional quality being characteristic of Spring chef Daniel Rose's menus.

But the service of soup itself - this is also endearing, for being yet another manifestation of a certain gung-ho, whatever-works energy the Spring team bring to their establishments. By now the Boutique and the restaurant's lower level have cycled through a panoply of different iterations and incarnations, all in efforts to channel the restaurant's chief area of uproarious success - it's dinner service - into less formal, more populist attractions, ones for which there's no need to book months in advance. In Paris, home of the cult of the table, and meals that endure until the époisse has run to the floor, they're fighting the good fight.

everyone wins: septime, 75011

I came upon Septime the old-fashioned way: by happening to stroll past one day, and noticing, in addition to the ambitious décor of the restaurant, a flyer advertising a public natural wine tasting, replete with some excellent names. (Cornelissen, Pfifferling, etc.)  I wasn't able to make it to the tasting in the end, but I remembered the address when my friend / colleague D visited during men's fashion week, and she and I engaged in our quarterly trawl through Paris' culinary vanguard.*

Early reactions to Septime have run the gamut from impressed to enraptured. Chef Bertrand Grébaut has serious Michelin-star credentials, having worked in the kitchen at l'Arpège before running the kitchen at Agapé, when latter restaurant earned its star. ParisByMouth reports also that he received a 10,000€ grant from Evian-Badoit to open Septime, which budget, to judge by the cosy-industrial, Monocle-ready looks of the place, probably covered the cost of about seven light fixtures.

I don't mean to patronize. The place is indeed very enjoyably outfitted, with a nice wingspan around each table, and evident attention paid to lighting, ease of movement, etc. - the usual humane comforts that Paris restaurants, and natural wine spots in particular, have traditionally withheld as a method of torturing guests. And this mercy on Septime's part is, I think, just the most visible aspect of a wider change represented by Septime and restaurants like it: the maturation of the natural wine meal, mostly for the better.

savoie-faire, pt 1: domaine belluard at cave de l'insolite, 75011

Michel, owner of La Cave de l'Insolite, who organised the tasting.

As I complained in an earlier post, on one Monday early this past November there were something like eight or nine very good wine tastings happening all around Paris. On the day of, this presented obvious logistical problems that prevented any one oenophile from getting through all of them. (Torrential rain did not help.) Now in the aftermath I find I'm still wading through a surfeit of blog material, much of which seems valuable and worth communicating, slowly fading into irrelevance with the unstinting passage of time...

Anyway, I thought I'd say a few words about the Vin de Savoie tasting held that day at La Cave de l'Insolite, before, like, the next vintages are released. And conceivably a few of you out there in Readerland will be passing some winter vacation on ski trips in Savoy, in which case a survey of the best or more scrupulous wine producers could prove very useful indeed.*