Les Résistants, a new restaurant in Paris’s 10th arrondissement, has only been open for a month or so and is already packed, upstairs and down. This may be a sign of support for the approach of the three young owners, … Read More
THIS RESTAURANT CLOSED ON NOVEMBER 8, 2019. Opening a quality restaurant in a train station is a fantastic idea. Three-star chef Éric Frechon has already done it with great elegance at Lazare in the Gare Saint Lazare, and now another … Read More
French Cuisine in 14th arrondissement. Japanese chef Takayuki Nameura, like many of his compatriots, is doing great things with French cuisine in Paris.
The festivities have already started, at least for me. The other day, I had lunch and dinner in two Paris bistros worthy of the name. The first, Jouvence, in the 12th arrondisse-
ment, is both very new and very old.
I must be losing my touch. Not far from where I live is a restaurant called Café Philippe that has been there for two-a-half years but that I had never noticed before. I discovered it while searching for a lunch spot in the Marais.
Strange to say, but until fairly recently Paris’s restaurant scene was rather provincial. If you didn’t want French food, you had to settle for mediocre, dumbed-down Chinese, Japanese, Italian or Indian. Mexican was pretty much nonexistent. The occasional exception was for food from former French colonies in North Africa or Vietnam.
I thought I had mistaken the address on the restaurant-lined Rue de l’Abbé Grégoire (home to the excellent Cézembre) when I saw the beat-up facade of a café whose salad days were obviously long gone. But no, I was in the right place: a new restaurant called Quinsou.
I happened to go to Les Arlots with two Paris Update readers, Jenny and Jonathan, on Armistice Day, when the restaurant was in full celebration of the end of World War I, complete with facsimiles of menus from the war years and toy soldiers on the tables.
They’ve done it again. The youthful owners of the excellent bistros Le Pantruche and Caillebotte have spawned another success. La Belle Maison fully lives up to its name, offering fine food at reasonable prices with friendly service in a pleasant (although sometimes noisy) setting.
I’m all for the concept of “quality” fast food and am glad that it is finally catching on in Paris. Not only has the American chain Five Guys, Barack Obama’s favorite burger joint, opened its first Paris branch (in Bercy … Read More
