Hungry For Paris: The Ultimate Guide to the City's 102 Best Restaurants - Softcover

Lobrano, Alexander

 
9780812976830: Hungry For Paris: The Ultimate Guide to the City's 102 Best Restaurants
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812976835 ISBN 13: 9780812976830
Verlag: Random House Inc, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

An anecdotal gourmand's tour of the finest restaurants in Paris presents a leading food writer's personal choices for the city's best culinary experiences, offering a variety of cuisines, price ranges, and locations and describing each eatery's specialties, menu choices, ambience, owners, and more. Original. 25,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alexander Lobrano grew up in Connecticut before moving to Paris, his home today, in 1986. The winner of several James Beard awards, Lobrano was the European correspondent for Gourmet magazine, and is now contributing editor at Saveur. He writes regularly on food and travel for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Condé Nast Traveler, Bon Appétit, and many other publications in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1st and 2nd ARRONDISSEMENTS . TUILERIES, LES HALLES, BOURSE

Chez Georges chez georges is the gastronomic equivalent of the little black dress—unfailingly correct, politely coquettish, and impeccably Parisian. This is why it was no surprise to find ourselves seated next to the affable and slightly owlish Didier Ludot on a balmy summer night. A self-described antiquaire de mode (antiques dealer specializing in fashion), Ludot runs La Petite Robe Noire (The Little Black Dress) and another boutique specializing in vintage fashion in the Palais-Royal. Since he was entertaining a customer, a stylish Park Avenue blonde who gamely insisted that they speak French so that she “might mend the wreckage of what I half learned in college”—much to her credit, her French was good, and much to his credit, his patience didn’t fail once during a two-and-a-half-hour meal—Ludot’s choice of a restaurant was perfect. Chez Georges is exactly what most foreigners want a bistro to be, which is basically a place where time has stood still on a very French clock (Parisians like it, too, but find it expensive).

Here, the menu is still written out by hand daily and then mimeographed in lilac-colored ink. Brown banquettes upholstered in what the French euphemistically call moleskin but North Americans know as leatherette line both walls of the long, narrow railroad-car-like dining room, and there’s a little bar just inside the front door where your bill is tallied and taxis are called. The decor, such as it is, dates back to its founding in the early 1900s and doesn’t add up to much more than mirrors interspersed with Gothic columns and a pale tiled floor.

The older waitresses who have ruled the roost for decades are gradually retiring, but the younger staff perpetuate a delightful house serving style based on smiles and solicitude. And most important of all, the menu hasn’t changed an iota during the twenty years that I’ve been coming here. This place remains an unfailingly good address for a trencherman’s feed of impeccably prepared bistro classics.

On a warm night, Alice, Bruno, and I raced through a bottle of the good house Chablis and the plate of sausages and radishes that came with a little pot of butter as soon as we’d ordered. Though everyone and his great-aunt is staking a claim to Julia Child these days, I couldn’t resist telling them about how she’d taught me to butter my radishes on my first visit to Chez Georges. Invited to dinner by the late Gregory Usher, an American who founded the cooking school at the Hôtel Ritz and a close friend of Julia’s, I arrived uncharacteristically early and found Child already seated and alone. I introduced myself and watched in fascination as she buttered a radish and chomped away. Then, after a swig of Sancerre, she said, “The radish is one of nature’s most underrated creations.” I smiled, and she added, “It’s a good thing no one overheard me. When you’re my age, a remark like that could land you in an old folk’s home. Still, a nicely buttered radish is just the thing to remind any cook to stay humble and simple in the kitchen. Most foods don’t really need any improving.”

I suspect Child loved Chez Georges for the same reasons I do. Not only is the food delicious, but it’s a good spot in which to channel frivolous, flirtatious postwar Paris, the wondrous city that not only made Julia Child into Julia Child but Audrey Hepburn into Audrey Hepburn, Leslie Caron into Leslie Caron, etc.

Bruno, good Frenchman that he is, ordered a salade de museau de boeuf—thin slices of beef muzzle, a curious crunchy mix of meat and cartilage, which Alice gamely tried, and I went for a sauté of girolles, tiny wild mushrooms, which were delicious, but not garlicky enough. In fact, the microscopic bits of chopped parsley included to make it a real persillade (mix of chopped garlic and onion) alarmed me. No knife I know could have chopped that finely, so suffice it to say I deeply hope Chez Georges isn’t starting to take shortcuts, like ready-made restaurant-supply-company persillade, for example. Alice had a good ruddy ratatouille, in which the eggplant cubes retained their shape but had a correctly soft texture, with the lovely addition of a handful of plump capers.

Our main courses were outstanding, too, including Alice’s veal sweetbreads with girolles and Bruno’s similarly garnished veal chop. Neither was as good as my grilled turbot, a big slab of meaty white fish on the bone with sexy black grill marks like a fishnet stocking. It came with a little huddle of boiled potatoes and a sauceboat of béarnaise sauce so perfect that I polished off what my fish didn’t need with a soup spoon.

I couldn’t resist the wobbly and wonderfully cratered crème caramel in a fine bath of slightly burnt caramel sauce, while the others ate wild strawberries and first-of-season French raspberries with dollops of ivory-colored crème fraîche, confirmation of my deeply held belief that butterfat is bliss. Just as we’d finished our coffee, the blond waitress of a certain age, a handsome woman with a severe chignon, reappeared; she’d changed out of her black uniform and white apron and was wearing a perfectly pressed pink paneled linen skirt and a matching sleeveless top. She bade everyone good night and went, Cinderella-like, into the night. When we left a few minutes later, our transformation went in the opposite direction, or silk purse into sow’s ear, since after several delicious blowsy hours of la vie en rose, our beeping cell phones signaled the impatience of the world outside. This is why I hope we’ll always have the delicious antidote to modernity offered by Chez Georges and buttered radishes.

IN A WORD: The perfect all-purpose Parisian bistro and a great place to hunt down impeccably made bona fide bistro classics like blanquette de veau (veal in a lemon-spiked sauce) that are increasingly hard to come by.

DON’T MISS: Terrine de foie de volaille (chicken liver terrine); harengs avec pommes à l’huile (herring with dressed potatoes); foie gras d’oie maison (homemade goose foie gras); escalope de saumon à l’oseille (salmon in sorrel sauce); coquilles Saint-Jacques aux échalotes (scallops sautéed with shallots); grilled turbot with béarnaise sauce; profiteroles (cream puffs) with hot chocolate sauce. ... 1 rue du Mail, 2nd, 01.42.60.07.11. métro: Bourse or Sentier. open Monday to Friday for lunch and dinner. closed Saturday and Sunday.  •  $$$

Les Fines Gueules
Wine bars are having a major revival in paris, and this one, occupying a pleasant corner just up the street from the Banque de France, is one of the best. The best is its theme, too, since it serves only the finest pedigreed produce. The butter comes from Jean-Yves Bordier in Saint-Malo, the oysters from David Hervé in Oléron, the bread from the Poujauran bakery in the 7th, vegetables from the lord of the legumes, Joël Thiébault, and meat from the star butcher Hugo Desnoyer; all of the wines on offer are organic.

The beautiful zinc bar announces the vocation of this place, and exposed stone walls make for a mellow atmosphere. Since it’s not far from the Louvre, it’s ideal for a light lunch, maybe veal carpaccio with shavings of three-year-old Parmesan, a plate of charcuterie, jamón ibérico (the best Spanish ham) with Buratta, a creamy cheese from Puglia in Italy, and then maybe one of the daily specials from the chalkboard menu—cod with fork-mashed potatoes, zucchini, and pleurottes mushrooms; steak tartare made from Salers beef; or fusilli with Gorgonzola...

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Verlag
Random House Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812976835
ISBN 13 
9780812976830
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
437
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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