the price of convenience: la boulangerie, 75020

In trying to descry the origins of the hazy aura known as restaurant hype, we often overlook its simplest element, which is thrift.

Patronising restaurants is not a thrifty habit in the first place, which is all the more reason for diners to flock to restaurants that are good value for money. Surprisingly few Paris business owners seem to understand this dynamic - that increased turnover, despite the hassle, is sounder business footing than high prices. The result is a surfeit of demand at good-value establishments, or, in a word, hype. But what becomes of the capable restaurants that are just not quite good enough a deal ?

One such haunt is La Boulangerie, a Ménilmontant bistrot I seem to have avoided for the past five years on account of its hypelessness and its faceless, rather confusing name. Imagine my surprise to discover, when I finally ducked in for an impromptu dinner with a visiting friend, that it's in fact a mature, quality-oriented establishment that seems to exist just slightly out of its era. It's pricing is pre-Euro crisis, let's say, and its plating is mid-Chirac. The pleasant hospitality, broad wine list, and the staggering armagnac selection, on the other hand, are all timeless.

swans' way: aux deux cygnes, 75011

My friend M is a Vietnamese chef in New York. A year ago I was encouraging him to open a restaurant in Paris. Just think, I beamed. Natural wine and Vietnamese food ! It's never been done ! Moreover, such a restaurant would perform the conceptual two-step necessary in contemporary Paris to appeal both to Parisians, who hunger for novel, non-Parisian things, and visitors, for whom all things Parisian are novel. For an unintended consequence of France's imperialist adventures in Asia is that, a century and a half later, it seems plausible that Paris would contain excellent Vietnamese food.

Aux Deux Cygnes, a well-appointed dollhouse of a wine bar on rue Keller opened three months ago by polyvalent young French-Vietnamese restaurant professional To Xuan Cuny, is not a destination for excellent Vietnamese food. Instead it's a very personal effort, a synthesis of Cuny's influences, to which world-historical forces are mostly incidental. Even the bar's elegant name is simply a play on words, a French translation of the common Danish mispronunciation of Cuny's first name. ('Two swans.') The Vietnamese angle largely stops with the bar's somewhat bread-driven bánh mì. So there's still room for my old friend M in Paris.

If Aux Deux Cygnes, with its tiny snack menu and appreciably offbeat, southern-focused wine list, nonetheless feels rather new, it's because Cuny herself represents an inroad of Michelin-trained hospitality experience to the historically scruffier field of natural wine in Paris.

bonne chance: lucien la chance, 75017

A familiar quandary arises when discussing places like charming new 17ème arrondissement wine bar Lucien La Chance. I want to encourage them, because Paris needs more casual, no-reservation places that care about food and wine. But I also want many such places to be better than they presently are.

Preventing improvement is a kind of pervasive municipal campanilismo. (Italian for the local loyalty that extends as far as one's local church steeple or campanile is visible.) Most Paris real estate is tiny, and most Paris businesses are tiny, and if a tiny business is popular with its immediate neighbors, why should the owner care how said business compares to businesses on other side of town, let alone ones in New York or London? The hyperactive Paris-media apparatus to which I contribute doesn't help the situation, and the combined effect is to promote complacency in popular places.

So seems best to call it like it is. Lucien La Chance, which opened last month, is pokey and amateurish, and the scatterbrained natural wine list is laughably imbalanced. Yet I quite like the place and will probably return. What the bar presently lacks in sophistication is more than compensated for by its contemporary, youthful format: like Septime Cave, Touller Outillage, La Buvette, and La Pointe du Grouin before it, Lucien La Chance is a great chill place for an unstructured apéro with an unconfirmed number of flaky friends. Owner Guillaume Blanchot has the right general ideas about wine and product, and an amusing fondness for disco.

at my most parisian : la cagouille, 74014

I can pinpoint the precise moment at which, despite language struggles and disgust with service norms and volcanic resentment of patrician social structures, I began to feel at home in Paris.

It was when I was first able to pass along to a colleague a recommendation I had once received for a miracle-worker dry-cleaner. (In this case, a stuffy teinturier who is, at reasonable cost, able to remove tar and bloodstains from garments. Don't ask.) For city life is an agglomeration of knotty problems - from stained shirts to subway strikes to where to entertain on Sunday nights - and to feel at home among it all one must possess ready solutions. For expats, cut off from the oral tradition by which great addresses for obscure services are usually handed down, the challenge is that much greater.

So it's a great comfort to me to have been introduced* to La Cagouille, a poorly-designed, fusty, Charentais seafood restaurant tucked behind Montparnasse in the 14ème arrondissement. Deeply uncool and far removed from any part of town I frequent, La Cagouille nevertheless ranks among the city's best back-pocket addresses, simply by dint of offering very good food and wine - and abundant table availability - on Sundays.

why ask why: la pulperia, 75011

Natural wine enthusiasts are kind of like vegetarians: we know their preferences, but their reasons why diverge wildly. A few natural wine fans are taking an ecological stand. (It stands to reason that most natural wine restaurants in Paris serve sustainable fish.) Other people just want to avoid headaches. Still others - and in this category I would place most of the vignerons I know - have only aesthetics in mind: they promote natural wine because it simply tastes better.

My own reasons for preferring natural wine are complicated, half-aesthetic, quasi-Marxist, cultural preservationist... I can't choose just one. But it seems to me that one would have to be firmly in the pure-aesthetics camp in order to justify serving natural wine beside steaks shipped from Argentina, as chef Fernando de Tomaso does at his 11ème Argentine bistrot La Pulperia.

The practice also identifies the restaurant as being aimed at squarely at native Parisians. Anyone else - all the expats I know and surely every tourist - would prefer, whilst in Paris, to consume any of the numerous renowned varieties of French beef (Charolais, Aubrac, etc.). Many of us have stood by shaking our heads as international meat places like Bang!, The Beef Club, and La Pulperia open, and French restaurant culture sails further into the maw of the global capitalist whale, the belly of which contains everything, as many choices as a Whole Foods Market... Doomsaying aside, La Pulperia boasts pleasing cuisine and a surprisingly deep natural wine list, making it a probably a fine place to return if I ever become truly Parisian. (God help me.)

nightclub wines: silencio, 75002

To my mind the only truly mysterious aspect of David Lynch's new Paris nightclub Silencio is that the bar is the size of a coatcheck.

The space - what I saw of it the other night was a tangle of corridors, a smoking room, and a dance floor - totals 650m2. The result of this size discrepancy is that all the poor punters who succeed in gaining entry (a feat which it turns out can be achieved by simply being young and decent-looking and waiting for ten minutes*) have plenty of time to discuss the conventionally overwrought décor, as they wait eternities for drinks from the psychotically overworked bartenders. Was it really done by David Lynch? Who the hell remembers what the club in Mulholland Drive looks like? Why should being an excellent film director have any bearing whatsoever on the skills required to design a successful nightclub?

Presumably in efforts to minimise waits, Silencio is equipped with a second bar, tucked away in the corner overlooking the dance floor. This bar, however, is completely deserted, because it is the wine bar, replete with eight or ten selections of Douchebag Reds and Predatory Whites entombed in an Enomatic wine dispensing machine. The girl working there looked like her isolation was the punishment for something - perhaps the owners' strange idea that these wines are appropriate in a nightclub setting. This begs the question, then: what would be an appropriate wine in a nightclub setting?

n.d.p. in roma: yes, we have no cesanese: maccheroni

On our final night in Rome our friend / host B made it back to town, having been pulled away by conflicting business and family obligations. He brought us to a spot he frequents in the old city called Maccheroni.

It is one of those restaurants where food quality - fine enough, perfectly satisfying - is very much secondary to the lovely terrace atmosphere and the jocular hospitality of the service. But even here - at a restaurant very plainly not aiming for wine-geek clientele - there is a section of the wine list devoted entirely to wines from Lazio, featuring a few reliably excellent producers, notably Casale della Ioria and Sergio Mottura. I was pleased to see that even in Lazio - a justifiably underrated wine region - the stars got their credit at Rome's restaurants.

Only, none of the wines were available. Not just the two producers I mention above - almost none of the entire Lazio page of the wine list, fully half the entire list. It got ridiculous. There I was, the tourist, reaching supreme exasperation because I was unable to get ahold of one of the most dislikeable acidic bitchface red grapes in Italy, demanding of the genial staff in English, "Are you telling me you have no Cesanese in the entire restaurant? What about all this Cesanese listed here? Don't tell me there was some kind of mad run on Cesanese recently."

n.d.p. in roma: roscioli bakery

A small addendum to Tuesday's post: Roscioli Bakery. Situated kind of catty-corner to the stunning restaurant / alimentari, Roscioli Bakery is a super-informal little bakery / antipasto deli, a fine perch for a snack and a Chinotto on a hot afternoon.

The Native Companion had the opportunity to stop by the bakery when we returned to Roscioli Restaurant the day after our visit to pick up a sack of wine, which, due to a new law that had gone into effect that very night stipulating that restaurants may not sell takeaway bottles after 23h, we had been obliged to leave behind after purchasing in a tipsy spree the night before.*

The thing I found odd about Roscioli Bakery was how strictly the owners have distinguished the concept from the nearby restaurant. At the restaurant I'd spied Lurisia's excellent Slow Food-endorsed Chinotto, whereas at the bakery they served Chin8 Neri**, a brand of Chinotto equally available at random supermarkets in Italy. Similarly, the wines visible at Roscioli Bakery's antipasto dining area were all fairly dull mass market tourist guzzlers - I didn't recognise a single quality-conscious producer in the line-up, which is fairly insensible considering the wealth of inexpensive glass-pour options available in the world of Italian wine.

give the pipos what they want: les pipos, 75005

Oddly befitting its location in the university-dominated, student-infested 5ème arrondissement - just off the Pantheon, no less - neighborhood bar à vin Les Pipos can be read as a kind of controlled case study of the transformative effect of the addition of natural wines to an otherwise archetypal Paris bistro.

The results are astounding. Because an insistence on natural wines is invariably a political statement as well as an aesthetic one, the sloppy, gem-laden list at Les Pipos, presented - upon demand - in the usual blithe fashion, has the effect of very discreetly intellectualizing the whole concept. And all the bistro hallmarks that would otherwise provoke only mild annoyance or mild approval - the bumbling service, the simple, richly satisfying cuisine - are rendered respectively more forgivable or winning by the knowledge that, particularly in the 5ème, Les Pipos could really tart up the natural wine angle, but don't.

The restaurant possesses that rare thing for a tourist quartier in a tourist city: genuine offhand charm. Such that, when I popped by the other night with my friends R, E, and IF,* with only an apero and a cheese plate in mind, we instead proceeded to knock back three bottles with a full meal including oysters.

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...

every night would be nice: les trois seaux, 75011

A few weeks back I posted a note about the intimate pre-opening soirée of Les Trois Seaux, a new bistro à vin on rue de la Fontaine au Roi in the 11ème, in which blog post the restaurant was sort of shown half-built with its pants down, as it were. Since the ouverture proper I've owed it to gregarious owner Olivier Aubert to stop in and have a real meal, which happy obligation I was at last able to meet the other Friday night with my friend IF and his visiting friends from London.

One reliably great thing about newborn restaurants is you can walk-in with a party of five on a Friday night and get seated toute suite. Unlike Aubert's wine bar in the 4ème, La Bodeguita du IVème, Les Trois Seaux is not situated directly beside the Centre Pompidou, so it doesn't have the same built-in audience. Les Trois Seaux is also a more ambitious venture than either of Les Bodeguitas (Aubert co-owns one in the 9ème as well) - there's a real kitchen, a market menu, a chef, Philippe Lerault, who cut his teeth at the Hotel Le Meurice - so it's understandable that the restaurant will take time to gain a following.

Right now, the ingredients for success are there: simple, satisfying cuisine, well-selected natural wines, a spacious dining room, a proprietor with knowledge and charm. Even beyond this, the recent opening of ever-packed wine bar Le Dauphin around the corner has certainly shown there's a thirst for quality in the immediate neighborhood. What remains is for these conditions to be exploited, but not too much.

loire road trip, pt. V: bistrot de la place, saumur

Among the chief occupational hazards of the wine industry are dinners with many other traveling wine professionals. By the time the plats arrive there are invariably more bottles on the table than pins on a bowling lane, and a sort of mad profligate glee takes over, as yet more bottles are ordered, not to replace the unfinished ones already in play, but to provide further points of aesthetic comparison at any cost. If, like me two Sundays ago at Bistrot de la Place in Saumur, you are traveling without recourse to any kind of expense account, you're toast - you have to just surrender to the spirit of the occasion and bring homemade soup to work for the rest of the month.

What the hey, anyway. All of us were fortunate to have had any kind of night out in sleepy Saumur on a Sunday. During the period of the Renaissance des Appellations and La Dive Bouteille, the Bistrot de la Place books up solid, and we'd only snagged a twelve-top thanks to the admirable foresight of my friend J2,* who'd narrowly missed out on a table the year before.

terrific pipsqueak wines: gustave et jules, 75011

One of the central ironies I first confronted, as a wine geek arriving in Paris from the remote asphalt plains of LA, was the shocking difficulty of finding an honest glass of natural wine in a bar here.

It's not actually as easy as you think. Glass pours in all but the best of bars are routinely selected on a basis of either lowest-common-denominator pleasurability, or a proprietor's personal relationships with the vigneron or agent, or some combination of these factors. Neither encourages typicity or expressiveness in glass-pours; in fact they tend to discourage these qualities, which are all I'm really looking for in a glass of wine in a bar on an evening after work. Not miracles, just honesty. 

Now: having defined what little it is I'm seeking in a good neighborhood wine bar, I can set about heartily endorsing the subject of this post, Gustave et Jules. It's an unpretentious little wine bar just down the road from the MacDonald's near Metro Parmentier, and it's remarkable for a wine list that contains almost nothing but brisk inexpensive vivacious dirty life-sustaining natural pipsqueak wines.

nothing to report: la gazzetta, 75012

I'd been hearing great things about La Gazzetta for ages. Finally went there with my folks the other night. My folks are getting on in years, and they're not huge drinkers; in this regard, La Gazzetta was perhaps an inspired choice. Because the service was remarkably attentive, super-professional, great for fussy people - and the wine list was a tedious shrug-worthy let-down. Not even I felt like drinking too much. (And let's remember my parents were in town, usually cause to drink oceans.)

Imagine swiped from fontvert.com.

It wasn't that the wine was all bad. We had a passable if somewhat overripe and limp bottle of Luberon (Grenache Blanc from southeastern Rhone) by Chateau Fontvert that went nicely with the calamari and cod and tuna we ate throughout the 5-course tasting menu. It's just that with the space so well-designed*, the service so wire-tight, Swedish chef Peter Nilsson's skills so evident, why didn't they finish the job with an engaging wine list? It's a pan-mediterranean restaurant, for Christ's sake. They had SO MUCH TO WORK WITH.

i'm not (always) fussy: le rubis, 75001

I work in the 1er arrondissement. It's a short commute for me, and a great place to work, particularly if you enjoy watching tourists in cargo shorts film, actually film, the jewelry in the Chanel window displays. (I for one cannot get over this. Do they expect the jewelry to wave?) For lunch, however, options are slim. You have a lot of places selling over-conceptualized, instant-pasta-in-a-box-type concepts, ideal for people who would prefer to dispense with meals entirely and just take futuristic pills. You also have a lot of decent Japanese restaurants nearby on the rue Saint Anne; I don't mention them much, because they serve no potable wine to speak of, and because I moved here from LA, where the Japanese food is immeasurably better, so I'm kind of unmoved by the neutered undersalted Frenchy version. This leaves the native cuisine, and it's really a testament to the greatness of this country that, even in a tourist-infested business district, there are places I can recommend wholeheartedly. Two, in fact. One is: Le Rubis. (The other I'll post later.)

Calling Le Rubis a bistro would be sort of overstating things. It's more just a timeless unambitious wine bar that serves rustic sausages and a few small plates. The menu has not, to anyone's recollection, ever changed. It's an institution. For the longest time, I'd only ever go for cheese plates and splashes of wine after work, primarily because they don't accept my company-sponsored restaurant tickets. (I know. I have to be frugal somewhere.) Yesterday curiosity got the best of thrift, though, and I had lunch there with some colleagues. I won't go into a blow-by-blow, since the place has already been covered like a Christo in most blogs and journals. Just a few observations: