My hopes for Amarante were high. I remembered enjoying a wonderful meal at Christophe, the previous restaurant of Amarante’s chef-owner Christophe Philippe, although both Richard Hesse (Paris Update’s former restaurant critic) and I had found the decor depressing.
La Sapienza, Eugène Green’s fifth feature-length film, is a significant and often profound meditation on the passage of time, art and architecture, wisdom and knowledge (as the movie’s title implies) and the nature of love. Works by Green that have … Read More
I love Indian food but long ago despaired of finding a really good Indian restaurant in Paris. When I made a new Indian friend, Abhinay, I thought I’d give it another shot. He promised to take a group of us to one he considers “a safe bet for good Indian food.” So the other evening, five of us trooped into Kirane’s, which, according to its business card, means “ray of sunshine.”
In December 2002, fashionista and design writer Lisa Lovatt-Smith threw over a high-flying career at Vogue magazine and devoted herself to saving abused children in African orphanages. She has now turned her sometimes life-threatening adventures into a dramatic and often … Read More
Last week I reported on a sterling experience at Moustache, where we ate well, were treated royally and had an all-around good time. Not long after, I went with two friends to Juste le Zinc, a new restaurant in the eighth arrondissement that had been getting rave reviews, where the food was pretty wonderful but the treatment was less than royal.
Following Alix Delaporte’s success with her first film, Angèle et Tony (2011), which won acting prizes at the Césars for Clotilde Hesme and Grégory Gadebois, the director has teamed up with the same actors for Le Dernier Coup de Marteau (The … Read More
If you find yourself on the Boulevard de Montparnasse after a film wondering where you can have a good meal, as we did the other evening, first leave the boulevard, with all its chain restaurants (unless, of course, you opt … Read More
The bistronomy movement has given Paris many great little restaurants serving creative, carefully sourced food at reasonable prices, but it has done little to make a mark on the design scene. Most of new bistros are content to cosmetically spiff up the interior of the restaurant or café they have taken over and add a few fancy light fixtures. Here, however, is an exception to the rule: Le Mordant.
My usual advice to those who want to eat at popular lunch spots in Paris is to arrive by 12:30, since French people always eat lunch at 1pm sharp. That doesn’t hold true for Sinseng, however. I got there shortly after noon the other day, and the place was already filling up. By 12:30 it was packed. So my advice is to get there at noon, when it opens.
Continuing our run on reviews of French films set in Africa, this week we have Les Jours d’Avant, a short (47-minute) movie directed by Karim Moussaoui that takes place in a suburb of Algiers in 1994. The movie starts from … Read More
