some other, better paris: le dirigeable, 75015

Update: 23/10/2013: I've just heard Le Dirigeable has closed. Bummer. 

Gilles Bénard, owner of another great restaurant, Quedubon, on why he doesn't cross town to see his friends at Le Dirigeable more often: "Ici à Paris, on est très sedentaire..." (Trans: Here in Paris, we're very sedentary.)

Let's see: a 35-hour workweek, an employment-for-life system that gravely disincentivises turnover in any form, lopsided rental law that pretty much prohibits eviction, powerful unions totally opposed to even reasonable sorts of labor reform, whose frequent crippling strikes are viewed as kind of national pastime... No kidding, Gilles! Getting Parisians to cross a medium-sized city for dinner is probably a little like raising the retirement age a wee bit.

But so it goes. Le Dirigeable, one of the city's most well-hidden dining gems, is way out in the 15eme arrondissement. Unless you're an entrenched Parisian family who lives out there, it's a hike. I can enthusiastically attest, however, that it's worth every step. Owned and run jointly by my friends Guy and Franck, this is the sort of natural, unpretentiously fine restaurant that in a perfect world would crown every neighborhood.

Guy & me.

gamay au grand palais: mini palais opening, 75008

Image swiped from bc.edu.

Last night on a surprise invitation from my visiting friend J I attended the re-opening night of the newly refurbished restaurant in the Grand Palais, titled Mini Palais.

Not the name I would have chosen, either. For one thing, the place is huge.But what can you do. I imagine the board of investors for a deep-pocket place like this would probably fill both dining halls.

Really working the antiquity angle with the decor.

chardonnay raised by wolves: gilles et catherine vergé

Image swiped from wildernessclassroom.com.

Many of the most innovative and fascinating vignerons working in France right now conduct serious business under the humble Vin de Table appellation, the laws surrounding which stipulate that said wine can display neither vintage nor grape varietal on the label. Hence you often get labels like this one, which adorned one of the most memorable wines I've had in months.

A label like this says almost nothing, but nevertheless it's total catnip to the wine geek who notices the following things: 

wine list playlist: talulah gosh + old vine grenache

For variety's sake, a little viscious lighthearted song I've been digging all summer. If this song were a wine, it would be a 2006 Vin de Pays de l'Ardeche called "Briand," by Domaine du Mazel, that I drank the other night at Le Dirigeable. Brisk, tart, and deep as a bagel-cut. Neither the wine nor the song is particularly fresh, since by the standards of inexpensive south-central French VdP 2006 might as well be the mid-eighties. Actually there is probably a wider metaphor to be proposed here, about the similar lifespans of pop songs and simple table wines. But then every so often a strange leftfield classic comes along, like this wine, like this song, both of which feel as fresh as the day they were composed.  The wine is an old-vine Grenache and the song is Talulah Gosh.

Image swiped from vin-bio-naturel.fr.

white wine, asian food, asians: gohan night @ café commun, 75012

Here is a link to an NYTimes article that touches tangentially upon one of my favorite pairings: German wine and Chinese food. It's worth reading, even if the author has evidently done backflips with what was essentially a Dining & Wine piece in efforts to make it relevant to the current rash of humiliating American xenophobia.

I mention it (the pairing, not the xenophobia) as preamble to coverage of a really lovely meal I had last Friday at Café Commun, a community events space in the 12eme. The meal was prepared by my Japanese friend M, who's had kind of the opposite career arc to my own.

heaven is an aperitif: le baron rouge, 75012

I count it among my blessings that I don't live closer to Le Baron Rouge. It's a ten minute bike ride, not exactly leagues away, but that's enough to prevent a complete descent into grinning autoconversational drunkenness, which is what would surely occur if I were at liberty to pop in for a quick splash of Muscat Sec, say, before work in the morning.

Why is the place so appealing to me? Why would Le Baron Rouge be my downfall, and not any of the countless other wine bars in Paris? I don't want to go to great length about this (mostly due to blogger self-consciousness about covering the already-breathlessly-covered), but I'll say that no other wine bar so perfectly realizes the romantic ideal of the Rustic French Wine Bar. 

who's the dude in the skirt?

Image swiped from telegraph.co.uk.

The other day while picking up a few bottles at La Cave de L'Insolite, Michel (the owner) introduced me to two Loire valley winemakers who were there promoting their wines. Unfortunately I was in a hurry and couldn't taste with them. But I wanted to plug their domaines anyway, because it feels worth mentioning that these were some really nice nonjudgmental guys. How do I know this? I came straight from work and was wearing sarouels, which from certain angles look somewhat skirt-like, and which I usually don't wear to wine events, or around winemakers, who are essentially farmers, since I'm aware that doing so transmits an image of pure girly-man foppery. But no one batted an eyelash. We chatted about the harvest in Anjou.

Image swiped from blackcdg-ny.blogspot.com.

What to wear to when meeting winemakers? If you knew the long hours spent agonizing in front of the mirror, thinking which dungarees, which boots, which stained tee-shirt... 

Domaine de l'R
CHINON 

Domaine du Clos de l'Elu 

ANJOU-LAYON 

(Again, no idea if the wines are any good. I can vouch for their nonchalance in the face of high fashion though.)

we're not on same: les pages du vin, 75005

The other night the Native Companion & I stopped into a wine bar in her neighborhood called Les Pages du Vin, planning to have a quiet glass of white wine while we decided what to do for dinner. I'd popped into this cave à manger a little over a year ago, shortly after they opened and shortly after I arrived in Paris. I remembered how nice the proprietors were. I also remembered being nevertheless kind of unimpressed with their selection of wine, which struck me, at the time, as being a little cold. This is a difficult concept to express. The other night while NC checked her watch I spent fifteen minutes glumly perusing bottles expressly designed to look like classic wine bottles -

- and trying to think of the French term for "slickness." 

musk-rat sex: le baron rouge, 75012

An indulgent rave about a totally obscure little wine that has enchanted me all summer: a 2009 Muscat Sec, by Domaine Piquemal, currently available for a mere 8,2eu / bottle à emporter, or 2,9eu / glass at Le Baron Rouge. 

practically our canteen: le petit vendome, 75002

A few posts ago while raving about Le Rubis I mentioned there were two terrific lunch places near my office in the 1er. Here's the other one:

Here are the owners, as pictured on the menu, which, on those rare occasions it changes, does so via white-out and Sharpie:

I imagine if there's ever any kind of succession they'll just white-out one of the heads and draw in the new owner. (Related anecdote: we had a good rapport with the previous rugged jolly sandwich maker here. One of my friends made out with him. He left without explanation one day, replaced by someone who looked very similar, only a little skinnier. Equally jolly. There is still a sandwich special named after the original dude.)

patronizing the rollmop guy: le marché de la villette, 75019

By which I simply mean that I bought some rollmops from him. I didn't, like, badger him with facetious questions about proper fish-pickling technique.

I've always walked by his stand at the market and kind of pitied him, because his product - all manner of smoked and pickled herring, a real cornucopia of herring - is so deeply ill-suited to commercial display.

Actually, I was so reelingly hung over the other morning that I wound up making a lot of silly impulse buys. Overripe époisses, absurd quantities of young coconut milk, almost a tenner's worth of rollmops...* The latter because someone had told me recently that rollmops (pickled herring rolled around pickles, onions, red pepper, etc.) were terrific for curing hangovers. A total lie. I ate a few and then bicycled home, feeling quite like I myself had been pickled and bent around a cocktail stuffing. 

a slug of henny

A local delicacy I came across earlier this summer, during a very peaceful few days spent on the Ile d'Oléron.

Some people just like cognac in everything, I guess.

I wonder if these will ever catch on like that other famous cognac-based product: 

eternal sad little life: wine by one, 75002

This futuristic style of wine retail always reminds me of the sex scenes in Woody Allen's Sleeper, where the participants enter a phone booth-like construction for a few seconds and promptly emerge looking disheveled and postcoital. What's missing is a certain physicality.

I was particularly saddened to see Nicolas Joly's gorgeous Coulée de Serrant cryogenically packed into one of these moron vaults, awaiting a decade until enough suckers passed through willing to drop 20eu (or thereabouts) on 10cl of wine in a Jetson-type environment. These wine IV-systems always promise eternal freshness. On the off chance that there's no such thing, the Coulée de Serrant, being a dense biodynamic beast of a Chenin, actually still has a good chance of remaining drinkable for the long haul. (Nicolas Joly extravagantly recommends drinking it over the course of a week, a glass per night. Like hell we will, Nick!) For the rest of the wines in this sad hypermodern little mortuary, I remain skeptical. 

The dude working at Wine By One actually asked me not to take photos, apparently because their architect is very concerned about someone ripping him off. More photos after the jump!

thank gana it's september: comptoir gana, 75011

My favorite bakery just reopened.

They were closed all of August, probably out shaking the farine out of their hair on the deck of a yacht off the coast of Corse... Leaving us denizens of the 11eme precisely zero options for excellent baguettes FOR AN ENTIRE MONTH. (These are truly pilllowy crusty lovely perfectly-salted creations, the modest highlight of many a meal.)

if cru beaujolais ever gets too cool...

Then to retain my geek cred I'll start talking up much lesser-known Côte Roannaise reds, named for the town of Roanne, west of the river Loire in the Rhone-Alpes region. (Under an hour from Lyons, I'm told.) Gamay from mostly granitic soil, in the hands of a good producer these are brisk, earthy, acid-packed wines, all rust and wild strawberries. Kind of the Huckleberry Finn to Beaujolais' wilier Tom Sawyer.

I drank a bottle last night as a last-minute farewell nightcap with my friend S, who's had enough of Paris and is leaving today:

More description and a video after the jump.

who needs enemies? aux deux amis, 75011

A brief note on restaurant service, occasioned by my last two visits to Aux Deux Amis, an otherwise excellent wine / small plates place in the 11eme. If you've missed it walking by on rue Oberkampf, it's because it's disguised as any old run-of-the-mill Parisian bar, replete with tacky countertops and lighting that belongs in a dentist's office.