london calling : the sunken chip, 75010

Ever since moving to Paris I've found London frightful. I think this is because I've come to define quality of life in terms of short commutes and availability of good bread and wine.

It's also because London, despite technically existing in Europe, gastronomically seems to comprise part of the big blank New World. Early industrialisation and the culinary privation of the last century's wars are two factors among many that have conspired to essentially delete the traditions binding the populace to native British cuisine, leaving Brits, like the average American, ahistorical, open to suggestion, lost in the supermarket. What I see when I visit restaurants in London, for the most part, is Manhattan: everything feels market-tested, branded to death, fat with investment - as though marketing execs and interior designers were more important to a restaurant than chefs and restaurateurs.

So, unlike seemingly every other press outlet, I won't congratulate Michael Greenwold, co-chef of 20ème market menu gem Roseval, and James Whelan, propietor of 10ème bar L'Inconnu, merely for bringing a little bit of London variety to Paris with the opening of Paris' first fish'n'chip shop, The Sunken Chip ! (Their exclamation point, not mine.) I find the concept chirpy to the point of being unsettling, and the décor could use roughing up and rethinking. I will instead congratulate Greenwold for coming up with a positively revelatory plate of fish'n'chips, several components of which are a benchmark for both cities, not just Paris.

cuttlefish water ? : la régalade conservatoire, 75009

My chef friend G's last night in town the other evening unfortunately coincided with what you might call the Mariana Trench of August in Paris: that deep lightless ravine of restaurant closures across the city, occurring mid-month, where life as we know it cannot sustain itself.

We decided to go to chef Bruno Doucet's La Régelade Conservatoire, which had remained open because it is attached to a hotel. I'll put off any qualitative discussion of the meal for later, because I'd like to visit the other two influential Régalade locations (Saint Honoré and the original on ave. Jean-Moulin) before I go shooting off my mouth at length.

But one facet of the meal we had warrants individual attention. We were, without being asked, given English menus. For G this was fine, as he doesn't speak French. The problem was that, as it turned out, neither of us spoke the pidgin English of the translated menu, which was astoundingly misleading. We received dishes that bore little relation to what we'd ordered in English, and it was only when, mid-meal, I asked to see the French menu, that I saw what had gone wrong.

n.d.p. in champagne: restaurant l'étoile, troyes

It was perhaps unfair of me, in discussing cave-à-manger pioneer Aux Crieurs de Vin, to refer to Troyes as a one-bistrot town. For the wine-indifferent, there are probably many decent places to eat.

For instance, I have very fond memories of a lunch at Restaurant L'Etoile, a crowingly unpretentious, down-homey bistrot situated just off the square of the Marché des Halles. On its big broad terrace or in its two undesigned dining rooms, a traveler can experience one of those unexpectedly B-plus meals whose afterglow extends well beyond an afternoon.

If, while in Troyes for a weekend, you'd seek anything more for lunch than a perfect andouillette au Chaource and a glass of high-pitched Coteaux Champenois Rouge, well then I don't know what you want.

n.d.p. in champagne: aux crieurs de vin au marché des halles, troyes

Troyes is not unusual among French towns for being home to only one terrific informal restaurant. I understand that similar culinary eco-systems prevail in Mâcon and Orléans and Nevers. Where one might think that bistrots as superlative and as successful as Aux Crieurs de Vin would inspire competition, in reality they seem instead to suck all the air out of the room, as it were. If you want to drink good wine in a sophisticated environment in Troyes, you go to Aux Crieurs de Vin.

Fortunately, there are two locations. The second is wine shop situated across from a fishmonger called Chez Pascal in the town's central covered market, the Marché des Halles. No food is served at the wine shop itself, but there are tables, and excellent wines by the glass, and one is encouraged to purchase immense boat-shaped styrofoam plateaux of shellfish from Chez Pascal and consume them sur place with wines from Aux Crieurs de Vin.

On a Sunday morning it provides a perfect hair-of-the-dog coda to the previous night's drinking, which, if you drank well, necessarily occurred at the Aux Crieurs de Vin's other location. It's a very well-planned system.

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.  

n.d.p. in champagne: emmanuel lassaigne of champagne jacques lassaigne, montgueux

I just got back from a lovely trip to Troyes this past weekend, which reminded me that I never wrote anything about the lovely trip to Troyes I took almost precisely a year ago. Or the trip I took there last Christmas.

I get to Troyes often because the Native Companion's family live there. I also look forward to these trips because they allow me to visit my favorite restaurant on earth, Aux Crieurs de Vin. But the highlight of the trip last August was a visit to nearby Montgueux producer Emmanuel Lassaigne of Champagne Jacques Lassaigne, whose marvelous wines are pleasantly ubiquitous at good natural wine spots in Paris.

I first met Lassaigne the winter before at the Salon Les Pénitants, a satellite tasting of the Renaissance des Appellations and La Dive Bouteille. He was red-cheeked and soused and had been reluctant to let me in on the bottle of brilliantly acidic base-wine he was sharing with some mutual-friend wine buyers. You can't take these things personally. As a fan of this stuff - let alone as a potential buyer one day - you kind of just have to grin and bear whatever bedevilment a vigneron you like dishes out. Great vignerons are irreplaceable, and Lassaigne even moreso, as he's one of precious few Champagne producers working without chemical agents, with minimal sulfur treatment and zero sulfur at bottling. Among quality Champagne producers, he's also the one in closest proximity to the NC's mother's house. (A ten minute drive.)

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.

sandwiches du terroir : u spuntinu, 75009

I had a mildly embarrassing moment the other day at U Spuntinu, the colourful Corsican épicerie I've been frequenting for sandwiches lately. I walked in, ordered my warm omelet sandwich and tomato-and-brocciu salad as usual, paid, and left. 

Then I walked back in, having resolved, finally, to purchase one of the many bottles of Corsican wine on offer so I could justifiably say something nice about the place on the blog. U Spuntinu is a mildly exotic and utterly unpretentious lunch takeaway destination operated in a highly-routinised kaizen fashion by a team of formidable Corsican ladies - and what's more, they stock the wines of actual reputable estates like Yves Leccia, Clos Nicrosi, and Domaine Giudicelli, among others. (Domaine Antoine Arena is notably absent.) 

But then I said to hell with it and walked back out again, because really what is the deal with the abysmal price-quality ratio of Corsican wine in general. 

hey one-percenter : le griffonnier, 75008

Hey, One-Percenter ! Ever wished to enjoy a simple French bistrot experience, only significantly nicer, at marginally greater cost ?

Haven't we all. I'm barely solvent, and still I routinely find myself wishing I could simply pay more for a civil experience in Paris. There's a cultural chasm in contemporary French restaurateurism, between the segment that whorishly lunges after money and modernity, and the rest, to whom the very idea of money is vaguely offensive, like a horse suggesting horse-riding to other horses.

The great thing about 8ème arrondissement power-bistrot Le Griffonnier is it's the sort of establishment one thinks must exist, and turns out, in fact, to exist : a place where politicians and bankers eat the same unimprovable French village staples as you do for lunch every day, only their plates arrive with a glistening side of wealth, by which I mean serious service and serious wine.

lettie teague nearly encounters natural wine, remains skeptical

Vis à vis this howler of an article published earlier this month by Wall Street Journal wine critic Lettie Teague, I'm like the medieval juror who shows up late to court only to find the guilty defendant has already been executed. My work here seems to be done.

Teague's article was so journalistically bankrupt, however, and betrayed such an objectionable misunderstanding of the subject of wine in general, that I thought I might blow on the embers around the stake a bit before I return to my day job.

My few French readers might quite like my chief criticism : that Lettie Teague passed public judgment on an arguably French phenomenon without quoting any French people whatsoever. It's like asking Europeans to define barbecue, or brunch. The sources she quoted (full list presented in all its absurdity after the jump) seem to have been chosen at random, or perhaps in the course of research for unrelated articles. Teague's conclusion, after sampling no self-identified natural wines and speaking to precisely one person with more than a peripheral relationship to the scene (Alice Feiring), is that some wines considered natural taste good, others don't, but she doesn't want to hear about it either way. She just wants a nice beverage.

killing it : restaurant bones, 75011

Good or bad, a meal never quite gets replicated, because too many variables are in play. Menus change, weather shifts, vintages turn, staff move on, tables break, bars get worn, hype evaporates - and so on. In Paris, where even basic hospitality remains touchingly uncommodified, restaurants are even more protean than the norm, with the quality of a meal often coming to depend overwhelmingly on whether one's server feels chipper on a given day. A critic's challenge is to arrive at conclusions that apply to more than one experience.

The most challenging subject, therefore, is a restaurant that unceasingly challenges itself. My friend James Henry's new-ish place Bones is one of these. Tucked on a side street off métro Voltaire, the northernmost border of the culinary renaissance currently occurring in the Faidherbe-Charonne area (Septime, Le Six Paul Bert, Rino, etc.), Bones was a barnstorming success from the get-go. I could have raved about the meal I had there back in January, a tour-de-force that crested with an unforgettable dessert of fresh almonds, coffee mousse, goat yogurt sorbet, and lemon. But had I done so I couldn't have reported simultaneously on the subsequent expansion of the bar menu far beyond pulled-pork sandwiches; the restaurant's brief flirtation with à la carte service; and the flourishing of its by-the-glass list, which bests most restaurants in Paris in both breadth and quality.

I also would have missed the steady improvement in Henry's bread-making skills. He has good reason to want his bread to succeed: as Americans are to scrambled eggs, so are the French to bread, a subject on which even the dullest nitwits feel entitled to nitpick. When one sits down to dine at Bones, one is treated to a hat trick of forcefully flavourful house-made products - charcuterie, butter, and the bread - that serve as a kind of clarion, a wake-up call to any guests who, perhaps on the basis of Bones' bare décor, were expecting a simple bistrot meal.

the home front : touller outillage, 75011

As preamble to what I'm about to say about new 11ème wine bar Touller Outillage, I thought I'd introduce readers to its surrounding Parmentier neighborhood, where I've been living for the past four years. 

Two parallel roads descend southwest from Menilmontant, one of which, rue Oberkampf, I've previously described as "a waterslide of vomit" until it hits métro Parmentier. There are student bars, concert venues, dire nightclubs, and leery downmarket bistrots straight out of a Jeunet film. The other road, rue Jean Pierre Timbaud, is first occupied by a mosque and the related Islamo-paraphernalia industry, arrayed around a dusty pigeon-painted public square; but southwest of this pious interlude the road resumes the habits of its neighbor and becomes a debaucherous slag-heap of strong beer and kebabs. Bisecting these two roads is rue Saint Maur, a nice enough road further south-east, but one which along this particular stretch houses both a miniature skee-ball hall and a deserted bar themed around race-car simulators.  

When diners, both Parisian and international, complain, with certain justification, that natural wine has become a trendy luxury, they are most certainly not referring to my neighborhood or my street. Which is why I take it as a salutary development - a sign that natural wine is reaching new audiences - when Said Messous, owner of Jean Pierre Timbaud nightclub L'Alimentation Generale, reveals himself to be a closet natural wine fan, and helps his cousin Farid Meza open a roomy, egalitarian, helplessly unhip wine bar like Touller Outillage right next door.  

paris wine company launch

My good friend and frequent travel companion Josh Adler is launching a company that ships wine from France to private clients the USA. He's called it Paris Wine Company, a name I initially hated but which has grown on me slightly since. Unbelievably, the domaine name wasn't already taken, possibly having been passed over as too faceless or ill-targeted. (Pets dot com, anyone?)

Parisians sure won't be buying much wine from him. Parisians by and large don't spend any serious money on wine, and the few that do don't seem to purchase from anyone they haven't known for generations. Josh will mainly be shipping to our fellow Americans, in an importer-distributor-wineseller circumvention that has already teed off several other industry friends. What's good news for private wine clients, these industry friends argue, is bad news for them and the industry they serve.

I can see both sides of the argument. I delve into them after the jump. But the occasion for this post wasn't soul-searching on my part. It was to mention - all philosophical qualms ceding precedence to friendship - that Paris Wine Company is launching tomorrow, July 6th, with a tasting / party at Verjus Wine Bar (75001) at 2pm, featuring superb Angevin vignerons Nicolas Bertin & Genevieve Delatte and Kenji & Mai Hodgson.

the angevin clan, pt. 3: bertin-delatte / l'echalier, rablay-sur-layon

In writing about the generation of young Anjou vignerons I've come to call the Angevin Clan, my chronology has inadvertently worked against central figures Nicolas Bertin and Geneviève Delatte of Domaine Bertin-Delatte.  They're the last of the clan to be discussed, when in fact it was Delatte who introduced my friends and me to Cédric Garreau, and it was at Bertin and Delatte's unfinished house that we all gathered for lunch after tasting with Garreau and Kenji and Mai Hodgson.

Having founded their 3ha estate in 2008, Bertin and Delatte have a few years more experience than the other vignerons at the lunch table that day. But Bertin only gave up his part-time job tending vines for nearby estate Domaine Pierre Chauvin the week before we visited. (Cedric Garreau, for his part, still does vineyard work for other estates to make ends meet.) Bertin may have encapsulated the challenges facing a young vigneron in the Coteaux de Layon when we asked him whether he'd ever tried his hand at making the region's eponymous sweet wine: No, he said, because he doesn't like drinking it, it's hard to make, and it's hard to sell.

Bertin and Delatte make just one wine in any appreciable quantity: L'Echalier, a mostly young-vine dry Chenin that, I was to realise over lunch that day, I had always been drinking too young. Can I be blamed ? It's what one usually does with young-vine Chenin in that price point. How was I to know, before meeting and tasting with the winemakers, that "L'Echalier" positively blooms in the bottle after two years?

the angevin clan, pt. 2: cédric garreau / gar'o'vins, chanzeaux

The evening before our visits with newly-installed Anjou vigneron Cédric Garreau and the rest of the Angevin clan back in January, my friends J, M, and I found ourselves at Angers natural wine bar Le Cercle Rouge, sharing a nightcap with some US importers with whom J and M were discussing working. It was during the time of La Dive Bouteille, La Renaissance des Appellations, and the various satellite tastings, and we'd assumed we'd run into a few vignerons and fellow industry folk at La Cercle Rouge that night. But we'd evidently missed a memo, because the place was quiet as the grave. If I concentrated, I imagined I could actually hear echoes from the wild bacchanal in the surrounding hills where all the vignerons and the more clued-in buyers were probably spraying each other with pétillant naturel and doing impressions of Americans.

If we nevertheless stayed at Le Cercle Rouge for the duration of two bottles, it was because the wine we were drinking - Cédric Garreau's 2011 "Le Lulu Berlue" - achieved the almost impossible : it was marvelously palatable to five weary palates that had endured a sequence of professional tastings earlier in the day. (Ordinarily such circumstances are the only moments in life where one craves Kronenberg.)

The "Lulu Berlue" is an odd duck, a sparkling carbonic-maceration Cabernet Sauvignon, mouth-rinsing, pure, and black-fruited, sort of like fine Loire Lambrusco. It hit the spot. The next day when we visited Garreau's tiny shed of a cellar in Chanzeaux we were able to confirm that all his red wines - all three - share the same soulful purity of fruit that made the "Le Lulu Berlue" so entrancing. They're wines that feel fundamentally healthful, and they herald a new voice in Angevin winemaking, one whose maturity of expression is surprising given its only Garreau's second vintage.

the angevin clan, pt. 1: mai and kenji hodgson / vins hodgson, rablay-sur-layon

From L: Kenji Hodgson, Cedric Garreau, M, Mai Sato, Nicolas Bertin, J. Taken in Bertin's vineyards.

After departing from La Dive Bouteille this past January, my friends J, M, and I went to visit a few newly-installed Angevin vignerons. We'd planned to make separate appointments with three domaines - Mai & Kenji Hodgson, Cedric Garreau / Gar'O'Vin, and Bertin-Delatte - but upon learning that their proprietors are all good friends and collaborators, it was decided we'd all taste together at each cellar and then have lunch. 

For J, M, and I, tasting at the three domaines that morning was revelatory. It might have just been an on-palate day.* But after just about every taste, we were having "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" moments, looking at each other, like Cortez's sailors, "with a wild surmise." 

All of these vignerons are onto something. All are members of a collective of organic Angevin vignerons who organise tastings together, loan each other equipment, and generally support one another in the daunting task of making and selling quality wine from Anjou, a famously schizophrenic region, nigh-on uncategorizeable, home to everything from industrial Cab Franc rosé to ageless Quarts de Chaume. The collective officially call themselves "The En Joue Connection," which has facetious gangster-ish implications that I will relegate to a footnote.* I can't speak for the entire collective, because I haven't tasted all the wines. But with regards to Bertin-Delatte, Vins Hodgson, and Gar'O'Vins, I thought it might be more helpful to think of what they're presently achieving in Anjou in terms of some other poets, namely the Wu-Tang Clan.