yonne bike trip: nicolas vauthier / vini viti vinci, avallon

I'll never forget how Le Verre Volé's Cyril Breward once described Nicholas Vauthier's range of low-sulfur north-Burgundian négociant wines to me. The delicate word he used was "perfectible," which is to say, capable of perfection, and by inference, not at all there yet. (This word is a godsend for anyone who must strive to be diplomatic when asked for opinions on friends' wines.)

Vauthier's Vini Viti Vinci wines had appeared seemingly overnight in just about every restaurant and wine shop I frequented. There was nothing not to love about the marginal appellations - Irancy, Bourgogne Epineuil - or the joyously ribald cartoon labels,* which typically depict mustacchioed transexuals and naked women of all races and shapes in suggestive poses. But the wines themselves initially left me a little cold. At best they were stolid examples of their grapes and not great values; at worst they were just plain flawed.

This was a few years back, though. When last June I saw a chance to pass by Vauthier's home-base of Avallon, I lost no time in requesting an appointment. For I'd belatedly learned that Vauthier had co-founded my favorite restaurant, Aux Crieurs du Vin in Troyes. And I'd already noticed his wines had been improving. The Vini Viti Vinci range now contains some very pleasant surprises, both red and white.

changing the landscape: bistro bellet, 75010

It took me a few years in Paris to appreciate how a single restaurant can cause a seismic shift in the city's dining landscape. Places like Le Verre Volé, Spring, and Au Passage opened as neighborhood spots. But they introduced new dining paradigms to Paris, and quickly became reference points for anyone daring to drag the boulder of French restauration up the hill of contemporary urban life.

To the ranks of those innovators I'd now nominate Nicolas Lacaze's Bistro Bellet, which opened just weeks ago on an excitingly leery stretch of rue du Fauboug Saint-Denis, basically the Cirque du Soleil of sketch. It's an area people keep promising me will gentrify, but until now those promises have seemed about as concrete as reincarnation for the nearly-dead. Bistro Bellet, with its clean décor, laser-sighted service, and conceptual savvy, is like a giant defibrillator for the neighborhood, and the bistrot genre at large.

It's a near-faultless restaurant that serves masterful Provençal-inflected cuisine and well-priced natural wines in a fussless environment from very early (6pm) until very late (midnight). Who's to say whether other restaurants will follow suit, and the innovative idea of turning tables will take root in Paris? For now I'll just say that Bistro Bellet presented one of the most fundamentally satisfying meals I've had all year.

yonne bike trip: le bougainville, vézelay

Deciding where to dine in Vézelay was an easy decision. We cased restaurant's lining the town's one road and lumped for Le Bougainville, the only restaurant where Michel Tolmer's "Epaule Jété" poster in the window indicated the presence of natural wines.

The poster these days is a reliable, if by no means infallible, indicator of a restaurant that prizes good wine. This in turn is a reliable indicator of a good restaurant. Dining on hunches : it's what you do in the countryside. Like oil prospecting, only less nefarious or profitable.

Anyway, my friends and I hit the motherlode in Vézelay that day. Le Bougainville is the realised idyll of a country bistrot: quaint, welcoming, with a wine list to die for and a superlative cheese plate. And chef-owner Philippe Guillemard and his wife Sylvie are like the angels who admit you to heaven after a lifetime of suffering Parisian hospitality. They're quiet enthusiasts who, from their restaurant perched in the shadow of Vézelay's famous basilica, offer the town's visitors a dining experience to rival the transcendental view up top.

nice work if you can get it

For once, I've been writing enough bits and bobs for other publications to warrant a brief round-up post.

- For PUNCH magazine in New York I wrote an enthusiastic profile of La Pointe du Grouin, Thierry Breton's elaborately eccentric wine bar by Gare du Nord, which I've previously covered here.

- The website Paris By Mouth kindly indulged my Beaujolais obsession and published two pieces around the release of this year's Nouveau. One was an essay arguing for the relevance of natural Beaujolais Nouveau, tied to a preview of Paris' best release parties. The other was a review of this year's natural Nouveau wines tied to an account of our attempt to cross Paris tasting them all in one night.

- For GREY magazine in New York I conducted an interview with perfumer / photographer / make-up artist Serge Lutens, on the occasion of the pre-release of his new eau de parfum.

The problem is that, with the exception of the Lutens piece, the research and organisation involved in producing the article cost me over half as much as the eventual remuneration. I despair at ever making it all add up. This is why every wine writer you know also tries to sell you holiday gift packs, guided tours, commemorative mugs, etc. 

kid stuff: 58 qualité street, 75005

My friend Christophe Philippe, the demure and talented chef of Restaurant Christophe in the 5ème arrondissement, has misgivings about his quartier. He rightly feels misunderstood: in the shadow of a tourist attraction like the Panthéon, his eponymous bistrot is a cultish anomoly: a spare, principled space, downright churlish in its refusal to cater to popular tastes. Whereas what the students and visiting families in the area want, judging by the success (or at least, unfathomable persistence) of neighboring businesses, are downmarket shot bars, cheap beer, and anonymous crêperies.

Apparently undaunted, chef Sylvain Sendra and the team from Les Itinéraires opened the abominably-named cave-à-manger 58 Qualité Street late last year just a few paces from Restaurant Christophe. 58 Qualité Street - no relation to the Nestle-owned brand of bad chocolates, ubiquitous at British Christmases - serves simple épicerie cuisine and natural wine non-stop until 11pm every day except Sunday. It could have been intended as a way to make tasteful product available to young audiences in the most informal, unintimidating way possible.

The would be the most charitable way to read 58 Qualité Street. It might also just be an underconceived rush-job of an establishment, without any discernible identity or ambition.

where the treasure is : la cave des papilles, 75014

On the regrettably rare occasions I find myself strolling around Paris' 14ème arrondissement, I take a great deal of pleasure in the smell of money in the air. I breathe it in, moony-eyed, imagining that by some kind of magical osmosis, I might later discover, upon exiting the métro back at Barbès, an extra 50 centimes in my pocket.

Unlike other wealthy neighborhoods, like the 8ème or the 16ème, the 14ème contains a concentration of actual tasteful goods and services. The entrenched, mostly white families of this quartier purchase meat and bread and wine as I do, only their meat is by Hugo Desnoyer and for bread they have Ridha Khadher.

Their wine, if they have any good sense, comes from La Cave des Papilles, a veritable Ali Baba's cave of the treasures of natural winemaking France.

yonne bike trip: le vezelien, vezelay

I pretty much fell in love with Vezelay and its lowland twin Saint-Pere in the course of the bike trip through the Yonne back in June. So much so that I revisited both towns again in late July, on a bike trip from a different direction. I was able to confirm that, together, these two discreet little towns have it all. An impressive basilica, a small river, a good local vigneron, an organic brewery, at least one superb chambre d'hôte, and a stunning restaurant, about which more in a subsequent post...

Vezelay also contains, just yards from the basilica, a marvelous local bar, le Vezelien, where my friends and I took refuge during a swift and furious storm that rolled in like divine judgement while we awaited our dinner reservation.

Having optimistically seated ourselves on the otherwise desserted terrace that evening, we hightailed it inside with our beers. There, where in lesser towns we might have encountered a typical soulless PMU-interior, we instead found ourselves in a cozy country pub. Vernissage flyers from the previous three decades papered the walls. Locals engaged us in conversation. A young fellow was busy writing in the corner - with pen and paper ! We weathered the storm in style and trotted off to dinner. It wasn't until I returned in July that I got to experience the salads at Le Vezelien, which approach something like perfection.

a landmark : chez michel, 75010

An address that often seems to get overlooked or underrated in the perennial 'Best Bistrot' features these days is chef Thierry Breton's first restaurant, Chez Michel, opened in 1995.

The reasons why are manifold. For one, it's near Gare du Nord, and despite now owning practically the whole block, Breton has proved unable to single-handedly disperse the neighborhood's tenacious loiterers and miscreants. The Paris gastronomes who do brave the trek to the restaurant might still be put off by its glamourless clientele, mainly tired train-travelers and Asian tourists. In my own case, I neglected to dine at Chez Michel for years because the restaurant retained a reputation for being incongrously pricey, a result of an ill-advised and since abandoned highbrow push sometime in the past few years. (This 2011 blog post by Bruno Verjus, for instance, reports that the menu then was 50€. It's 34€ now.)

Whatever the restaurant's ups and downs over the years, it's in a fine groove right now, having attained an effortless sweet-spot consisting of informal service, an idiosyncratic, well-priced wine list, and a menu rendered exotic for its unswerving devotion to Bretonne country-cooking.

an oyster bar for a better paris: clamato, 75011

I squirmed with embarrassment reading a recent NYTimes opinion piece bemoaning "How Hipsters Ruined Paris." Not because I consider myself a target.* But because I recognised another addition to the annals of expat self-hate, a genre to which I contribute from time to time. The author, Thomas Chatterton Williams, drapes his tirade in art history references worn as thin as the five-euro foulards for sale beneath Sacre Coeur. Degas, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec - swaddle it on as thick as he may, nothing can bandage the authority-hemorrhage that begins with the opening clause of paragraph six: "When my wife and I first moved here in 2011..."

Seemingly dismayed that other New Yorkers preceded him to Paris, Chatterton Williams takes particular aim at the proprietors of Glass / Mary Celeste / Candelaria, incorrectly disparaging them as "a bunch of NYU grads." (Only one went there, to my knowledge.) It's hypocritical flanneur posturing to claim, as Chatteron Williams does, that brothels provide a better service to the South Pigalle area than Glass' sharp cocktails. But that author's  desire for a vaguely Parisian experience is something I share, at least with regards to restaurateurism.

Its why I'm delighted that Bertrand Grébaut and Théo Pourriat, the consummately tasteful duo behind Septime, have opened a third establishment on their stretch of rue de Charonne. Clamato - a no-reservations oyster bar with seven tables and a long L-shaped counter - cements their reputation as the standard-bearers for fine contemporary French restaurateurism, unself-conscious and ungimmicky. Clamato's stellar cuisine is accompanied by the same well-selected natural wines and polished service that mark Septime and Septime Cave. The only sign that Grébaut and Pourriat might be succumbing to globalist trends is the goofy name.

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.

yonne bike trip: le pot d'étain, isle-sur-serein

Isle-sur-Serein isn't the most picturesque village in the Yonne.

That honor might go to Noyers, a medieval town containing a superb butcher shop and an impossibly cute gallery-café where my friends from the blog TheTrailOfCrumbs do projects on occasion. My fellow bike-trippers and I got caught in a biblical downpour just before passing through Noyers this past June. So we paused in that town for coffees and beer. I ate like seven gauffres from the gallery-café. We sat around damply and considered how nice it would be to just stay in Noyers.

But nearby Isle-sur-Serein - kind of a one-horse town, by comparison, and not all of it historical - is home to L'Auberge Le Pot d'Etain, a hotel whose rather trad, stuffy restaurant is distinguished by one of the most heartbreakingly great wine lists any of us had ever seen. That list puts the village of Isle-sur-Serein on the map : one glance makes a traveler want to stay a week.

yonne bike trip: alice et olivier de moor, courgis

Alice and Olivier de Moor were the main reason I'd long been keen to do a bike trip around Chablis.

Along with their neighbor in Courgis Thomas Pico, the de Moors represent a small but ascendant generation of Chablis producers whose non-interventionist, low-sulfur wines are steadily approaching the aesthetic heights of the regions' established greats. But even as their Chablis becomes more sought-after every year, the de Moors still operate like underdogs, continually refining their pioneering work with Aligoté and branching out into superb négociant projects.

In short, theirs is among the most exciting domaines I know of, an exemplary model for how to effectively make and market honest wine in a quasi-industrialised, marquee region. Alice also makes a mean gateau aux pommes.

yonne bike trip: le bistrot des grands crus, chablis

Here's a hoary chestnut of dining wisdom: when choosing amongst countryside bistrots, one doesn't often go wrong sticking to those associated with Michelin-starred restaurants. In the best cases, one gets access to the mothership's wine list, while avoiding fusty lobster-themed dinners that begin and end with variations of costly eclair. The bistrot-offshoot, furthermore, is often where the locals actually dine.

No locals were in sight, though, when after our tasting with Vincent Dauvissat in Chablis, my friends and I eschewed the one-star cuisine of Michel Vignaud at L'Hostellerie des Clos for an early table at Le Bistrot des Grands Crus. Chablis in summertime might as well be Devon: it's positively crawling with elderly well-to-do Brits. If, like me, you have ever given serious thought to who on earth actually orders half-bottles, well, cased closed.

But that's beside the point. Le Bistrot des Grands Crus is straightfowardly true to its name: a place where average country fare provides a wonderful excuse to open bottles of serious Chablis in a comfy courtyard terrace.

yonne bike trip: vincent dauvissat, chablis

It's poor form to be late to an appointment with any vigneron. But anyone familiar with unimpeachable greatness of Vincent Dauvissat's Chablis will understand why my friends and I were particularly concerned about arriving on time to meet the winemaker.

We had biked from Irancy that afternoon, taking an ill-considered route that led through steep, shadeless Saint-Bris onto a stretch of hellish highway (the D965) that we were unable to escape until exiting at Beine, a town west of Chablis distinguished by an artificial lake, the Etang de Beine. In Beine you see a blitz of proud signage for this artificial lake, but before you encounter it, you pass a really swampy mini-lake, which my friends and I incredulously took for the étang before arriving at the real thang. We had a good laugh about this and entertained the idea of joining some bathers at the étang until we realized we were in danger of arriving late to Chablis.

As it happened, we arrived chez Dauvissat a few minutes early. The family member who answered the door gestured to Vincent, who, evidently having just returned from work in the vines, appeared briefly in the doorway eating an apple, wearing denim short-shorts and a bandana. He made an apologetic gesture and disappeared, reappearing five minutes later dressed less like Axl Rose.

authenticity unnecessary : buvette, 75009

By the time my friend Camille Fourmont opened her Buvette in the 11ème this past spring, rumours had already spread that American celebrity chef Jody Williams was planning to replicate her successful West Village wine bar of the same name in Paris. Fourmont had heard the news too, but she'd already made her own neon sign. There are tens of Café du Métros, a bevy of variations on Au Passage, even more than one Galopin in Paris - what's the problem with a few unrelated Buvettes?*

I can see why opening in Paris struck Williams as a savvy move. She made a late-career switch from Italian cuisine (as practiced at Tappo, Morandi, and Gottino in NYC) to French, and stands to benefit from the authenticity boost that an actual Paris outpost confers. Her Buvette also arrives at a recent high-water mark for Parisian acceptance of new-world-style small-plates wine bars. (The floodgates will soon give completely.)

What's more, replicating the NYC Buvette in Paris doesn't seem to have required Williams to tweak the original concept at all. The Paris Buvette feels eerily - at times hilariously - like a New York restaurant aiming to sell quasi-French small plates to Americans.

glory days : artisan, 75009

When a restaurant or bar really blows me away, I think I instinctively look for ways to compare it to Bruce Springsteen. It's just a habit I've developed. But I think the analogy is for once justified in the case of new 9ème bar-of-all-trades Artisan.

It's an appealingly under-designed space with a big broad bar, competent cocktails, decent beer, not enough wine, and an astonishingly successful menu comprising miniaturized version of French classics: roast lamb shoulder, steak tartare, etc.

In much the same way that Springsteen's songwriting, while rarely credited with the originality of peak-era Dylan, pleases both in spite and because of its predictability, so too does Artisan's careful craftsmanship draw cheers without being the least bit innovative. In fact, that's what I like best about the place.