phrederic

Hi there: I just posted an update in reply to Laidback on the midrange restaurants thread, which could have been posted here. More restaurant suggestions but for me that's always a wine subject. I'm trying to put the link below, but am unsure it'll work. I'm trying to avoid the Fish and LDG discussion as I don't like 'em but still think most people will. And probably should. So I put the cross-post as my preliminary contribution to this discussion here. http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showto...0entry1164584 Tchin Tchin!

I'm overjoyed you liked the Charlain, Laidback. And very happy you're in our part of town. We're in the eastern 17th. Little Senegal. The restaurant they previously ran in the rue des batignolles near the rue des dames was good. But the pressures of mostly young, "hip" clients more interested in dimly-lit rooms with hip-hop lounge music and lots of exoticism on the plate than in something as banal as, say, food, made it hard for them to keep the attention focused on what they know and love; a sort of gastronomie rustique. Now, they are really getting into their culinary stride. Alain and Charlène are still experimenting but I think it is really going to be a great place. Thursday, Friday and Saturday they were completely full-up. For a restaurant less than a month old--with virtually no press--that is a positive sign. Alain worked for Senderens, then group Flo before wanting to spread his white-apron wings on his own with a touch of his native Alsace in the stork-infested winds. If you want to see him wax enthusiastic, ask him about our Easter dinner last year at L'Espérance (Marc Meneau's place in Vézélay). I keep expecting him to do a Grand Theft Recipe. As to other suggestions I'll reiterate some from earlier in this thread along with a few others, with added contact info. (Hope nobody get's too upset that I'm repeating things. It sometimes seems hard to find relevant address and phone #'s on egullet amid the plethora of informatory threads. They seem to get tangled in knots. As I've got an Alexander complex I'll just hack through it. Also I can't untie it because I can't figure out how to edit my original post. ) Le Charlain 23 rue Clauzel Paris 9 01 48 78 74 40 Brand new place. Inventive traditionnal, but still solid quality, quantity and atmosphere. The Gingerbread Macarroon with the house Foie Gras is amazing. The Jurasienne de Veau great and still filling. The winelist has 18 euros vdp for the budget but always a large range of wines from the Gaillard Condrieu for the Foie Gras to reasonable 40 euro Margaux for the entrecote..all the way up to very mature Mouton Lafitte and Latour. I wish there were more places like this. Au Crus de Bourgogne 3 rue Bachaumont Paris 2 01 42 33 48 24 Ok. This is one of the exceptions. In the many years I've been eating here the quality has remained consistently great. The prices are reasonable, but cost what it takes to keep it up. Maybe a little boring, not overly inventive, but always very good. The winelist could be bigger, but there is always a puligny or chassagne for the fish, always a decent cote rotie or something cote de nuits for the meat. The Sole is still fabulous, simple and to the point. The Lobster thursdays a steal. And when, in season they do the millefeuilles de fraises des bois, stay away. It all belongs to me and I don't want to share. Le Villaret 13 rue Ternaux Paris 11 01 43 57 89 76 I loved this place as a solid, inventive source of semi-affordable gastronomy and wine. The rognons de Veau, the Pierre Gimmonet 1er cru Champagne for a pittance etc. When the "old man" bowed out I thought it might actually get better. But the last 4 times there it has gone from bad to worse as the prices keep growing and the service has become incompentent-yet-sneering. 2 bad pieces of fish in a row take some forgiving. But good fish is pricey and when the restaurant starts cheating it is always one of the first places you can tell. The wine list is still the reason to come. Le Repaire de Cartouche 8 Bvd des Filles du Calvaire entrance in the rue St. Sebastien Paris 11 01 47 00 25 86 Very good wine list, fabulous patés and terrine (especially whatever the dish up to you to wet your appetite daily), succulent sanglier, gargantuan pave de cerf, the best pot a la creme since my adopted Norman aunt made 'em 22 years ago! And those little cans of sablets au beurre... Well if you know it, you've got to like it. Don't you? Reasonable prices for the quality. If only the service wasn't so intermittent.... Alsaco 10 r Condorcet Paris 9 01 45 26 44 3 Okay Patricia Wells and company are always rediscovering Klaus' place. And sure, it has off nights. But for Alsatian food, Alsaco has the best cellar in town. He'll object, But have a FlammKueche as an appetizer with a bottle of trimbach low-end riesling. Then follow with the Baekopfe with, say a 10 year old Clos St. Hune (if there is any left). Absolute heaven. The place is so well-known that service can get slow. Not Southern Italian slow, more like quaaludes and alchohol slow. But still....Wonderful wine, and simple food to accompany it. He'll usually serve even very rare bottles "à la ficelle", that is to say, if you ask, he'll open the bottle and only charge you for the glasses you drink. Very nice incentive to experiment. Try a few of the famous wacky-flavoured eaux-de-vie for a digestif. Garlic? Cinnamon? I think he's even got a rhubarb. You may need 'em after the food. Real stick-to-the-ribs Strassbourgeoise stuff. La Cloche d'Or 3 r Mansart Paris 9 01 48 74 48 88 Most people know this place on the once-infamous Triangle d'Or as one of the half-dozen semi-acceptable places to eat French at 2am on weekends. Or dine with an actor after the theatre. The quality has gone up and down. It got so irregular I stopped going for about 2 years. But it started improving again and it really is worthwhile. One of the best carpaccios (de filet de boeuf, bien sur) in town. The terrine maison is first rate. The melted half camembert good-and unusual in Paris--when they don't overbread crumb it. But the real reason to go here is wine. It isn't a fabulous list, but they've got 12-15 very good old bottles at rock-bottom prices for what they are... Fous d'en face 3 r Bourg Tibourg Paris 9 01 48 87 03 75 In an area crawling with touristo-phage, brass and cool-grunge renovated, profiteering, restaurants; Fous is still a gem. Very simple, well-prepared food. Sure it looks like somebody's parody of a tiny Paris bistro. But it has always looked that way. Daily specials very seasonal. And they still dare to serve things like good homemade soup à l'ognion without catering exclusively to foreigners. You wouldn't think it on some weekend evenings when one of Jacques Brel's former accordianists comes in to play and everyone joins in song. It can be a bit boring on the palate. But again, the real reason (blah blah blah) to come here is, of course, (I really am obsessed) WINE. The list is pretty good. Nothing fabulous. But he has lots of stuff downstairs not on the list and he'll pull it out with a smile. The owner really cares about wine. Get him talking and he is likely to keep opening bottles till dawn. Actually we HAVE kept opening bottles till quite early. And he practises a very small mark-up. Just make sure he charges you for all the bottles you open. He's been known to forget. Le Parc aux Cerfs 50 r Vavin Paris 6 01 43 54 87 83 If you're looking for something a bit elegant, a little inventive, not too stuffy, very good value, you might want to give it a try. I used to eat here many years ago when it had quite a reputation. The rep came and went, I was disappointed too many times. And didn't go for the space of an elephant's memory. Then a little over 2 years ago when a friend (Chris over at Le Timbre) had a new place open we popped down to try it. He couldn't give us a table. If you've been to Le Timbre, you know why. So we decided to give Le Parc aux Cerfs another try. We've been eating there about once a month since. The Salade de Tomme de Brebis Corse cut hyper-thin with figues confites! With a bottle of decent white burgundy, something a little mineral. The Hachis parmentier de canard. The menu changes frequently so I can't promise that the parfait de framboise au poivre de szechwann will be available. But something delightful is sure. The Winelist is much, much better than most places of similar atmosphere and price range. Still not magnificent, but very good. A nice selection of burgundies and Rhones. Just enough serious bordeaux possibilities that don't break the bank. Another nice touch--the restaurant is in a former Montparnasse painter's studio. They put out paper and colored crayons on the tables so you can pleasantly bicker over who gets to use the aquamarine blue between courses. Good fun. If either of the wonderful ladies that run the place are serving you, it'll be great. The rest of the staff can be less than gracious. Bon'Ap, et honi soit qui boit du vin médiocre!

Thanks! I'll give you a report on my return. While I'm sure you are right about the tourist-leaning restaurant suggestions of hotel staff, I'll probably have to go to 'em anyway. And specifiy to them I'm a complete killjoy who doesn't want dancing and singing anywhere near my amuse-bouche. I'm looking forward to trying stella and louis. I do like great, home-cooking style places. (re the taxi drivers my experience has been, in most parts of the world, that winemakers and even wine merchants often make the best source for local restaurants. They usually love to eat well). But what we are really trying to find is a few serious, ambitious, restaurants shooting for the highest form of gastronomy they can achieve. Great wine list and knowledgeable sommelier with the best local as well as foreign wines. The kind of place that would have not one, but at least 3 or 4 of the best local olive oils to show off the diversity of the island's products. In France, Italy, Spain and Germany we have many of varying quality and cost. They may not exist on Cyprus. Some countries don't have those kind of restaurants. But most do, even if they have to rely on mostly tourists along with the native bigwigs to make ends meet. We found 3 in Malta. Only 2 in Crete. Quite a few in Turkey with--seemingly--more every year though mostly on the coasts and in Istanbul and Ankara where there's enough money to make it possible for an ambitious place to succeed). But all suggestions ae greatly appreciated. So Thanks again.

Well Athenian, this thread is an invitation to rant and rave so I love it. On the other hand, Greek food--and Greek restaurants whether foreign or domestic--range so wildly between the repulsive and the sublime that there is a veritable embarrassment of experience from which to choose. The worst? The absolute worst? Which doth merit most the hate and bile? Zounds! I wouldn't know where to begin, there have been so many. So many plastic grape vines, the slick table-cloths covered with plates of lukewarm low-quality meat, its fat and gristle congealing. The jaws ache and the gorge rises at the memory of so much rubbery calmer. The weeks-old refrigerated gloppy taramas and tsatsikis. The salads drowning in cheap white vinaigre so potent your palate won't recover for a week. We've all seen it. And at least half of the time we've enjoyed it. The unspeakable retsina lubricating the imagination, Zorba (all apologies to Mr. Kazantzakis) burbling at high volume through the stereo, the view of Piraeus, the old harbor at Chania or just the dancers at the wedding party in the back room.... We've all eaten really bad Greek food and enjoyed the experience. So whither the nadir of hellenistic cuisine? Any one of two dozen restaurants in the Plaka? Those young hip waiters avoiding your eyes to ogle the girls, who occasionally remember to slouch back and forth to the kitchen to return with tepid soup? But no, we can still enjoy the experience sometimes. The conversation, the bustle, the acropolis looming over us, mitigate our disgust to such an extent we can sometimes even fool ourselves into thinking what we just ate was somehow related to food. The Taverna in Hamburg off of the Reeperbahn? Maybe. Those spanokopita somehow managed to become black holes of oil containing many times their mass of warm grease which dripped onto the plate. But it was a student-restaurant. It was cheerful, fun and cheap. It wouldn't be fair to single it out as the absolute worst. Possibly that wildly popular place in Chicago's Greek town. The food all comes out of cans and plastic vats. The latin american waiters teaching everyone to perform some kind of tequila popper ritual with glasses of the worst possible ouzo. When the bread is brought to your table the WHITE has a thick oxidized crust on it. Then again, at a table with 20 colleagues, everyone laughing and toasting, shouting above the bozoukis, it makes a good party. If not much of a culinary delight. The worst? Impossible to say. The worst experience certainly goes to one of the myriad mezze joints in the old town of Heraklion. Full of very happy, very loud people. Jet lagged, tired, not feeling up to rising to the occasion, we just needed food. And they take forever to serve us slop. But it still isn't fair, as, in a different mood, one might be able to forget the nastiness in the plate. The best isn't that much easier. I have so many happy memories of really spectacular greek meals. The apex could be The Grand Bretagne last year in Athens. Restaurants with magnificent views are so often disappointing. But the meal may have been the best Greek meal I've ever had. Not Greek, you say? I differ. The head chef may have been French, I don't remember. But most of the others in the Kitchen were Greek. The ingredients were local. The inspiration was Greek mediterranean. The wine list may of had Chateau Pavie, but it also had a score of wonderful wines made from indigenous grape varietials in Crete and Macedonia. Fabulous food. If the service wasn't impeccable it was still among the best I've seen in Greece. Too rarified? That restaurant in Agios Nikolaos with the life restoring Avgalemno.... Everything fresh as can be. The small old house, wood and stone, perched above the bay and away from the Café du Lac. A winelist to discover and they actually managed to bring the dishes in the order we asked in order to accompany the wines! (This seems to be a problem in Greece. No matter how often I plead, food comes all at once with no respect for which wine is currently being honored) Within Greece, I suppose, it makes sense to ask for the best dining experience on Thera or in the Dodecanese than overall. But I'm trying. In Munich there are dozens of first-rate Greek restaurants. (I have favorites at the Viktualienmarkt and in Sendling). Nothing special in appearance but great food, responsive and rapid sevice. Here in Paris we had a restaurant which seems to have closed in which I had at least 2 of the 10 best Greek meals of my life. (Kalemnos in the Boulevard Montparnasse. If anyone knows where they've gone, please let me know.} So many of the so-called Greek restaurants in the city of light would instantly top a list of the worst in the world. Maybe my problem is this: if mediocre or outright bad Greek restaurants can still evoke pleasant memories, it becomes hard to remember the relative quality in the plate and the wine glass. Anybody have similar feelings?

Swiss- We frequently picnic when in the south and I applaud your desire to prepare in advance. You can buy coolers, both styrofoam and more permanent materials, in any of the larger Hypermarchés. Castorama usually carries 'em too. Much easier, you can buy in any major gorcery store chain (the Monoprix just down from the Place de L'Horloge in Avignon e.g.) what are called Sacs Isothermiques. These insulated bags work quite well for us when planning picnics. Some ice, refrigerated water and even frozen stuff stays cold for most of the day. I've been known to ask cafés and even hotels to keep them in cold storage for me. Works great, costs pennies and much less bulky to transport than a larger cooler. Perfect for a few bottles of Minuty or Cuvee Marine de chez Ott to take to the beach with some fresh fruit and cheeze. Two suggestions for picnics in the Avignon area: 1) At Villeneuve lès Avignon there's a large park on the hill above town at the entrance to the ruins of the fortress. Great views of the Palais des Papes across the river and the winding path of the Rhone up towards Chateauneuf. The town itself is worth exploring and has one of the best--and oldest--cooperatives for making oil in Provence. 2) Take the National south of Avignon, meander through the suburban sprawl and head straight out to St. Remy de Provence. 20 minutes or so if not too much traffic. Go straight through St. Remy and follow the signs to the gallo-romain town of Glanum. Perched in the edge of the Alpilles, with the winding road leading up to Les Baux, you can picnic in a delightful spot. Right next to the Roman Arch, with the archeological site, the mountains and One of Van Gogh's painting spots as a vista. Great place for lunch. Drink a good Baux de Provence with it. Afterwards you can enjoy St. Remy and the De Sade house museum, which contrary to expectation houses not whips and chains but a fabulous collection of Roman objects. Have fun and think of Petrarch.

Can anyone make some suggestions for restaurants in Cyprus? If there was a thread on this I can't find it.... I'm going soon for a couple of weeks. If I find of possibilities I'll type up a report like the excellent recent Istanbul restaurants thread. There's a four season's on the island, so I'll probably stay for a night or two and pick the concierge's brain on suggestions but egulletiers are a great resource. I know it isn't a place one thinks of in relation to Haut Gastronomie, but, hey, on Malta a few years ago I found some fabulous places. Thanks in advance.

A close friend of mine here in Paris has Coeliac's disease and thus must live gluten free. Serendipity! He just last week set up a website and forum called Gluten Free Paris. There isn't a lot of information yet, but some. He hopes it'll become a clearinghouse for sharing gluten free info. The link is: http://linuxmigrations.hd.free.fr/glutenfree/ Lafayette Gourmand has a gluten free section (exit the wine, turn left, just near the seasonal spices). Steve (the friend) also recommends looking at the Lafayette Gourmand brand foods rather than the Bio/Organic. More of them are Gluten Free. (He claims their Piperade basque is a nongluten delight!) For bread the best option he's found is the Naturalia health food chain. They carry an extensive range of GF foods. Unfortunately, fresh-baked is still unfound. We hope the Gluten Free Paris website will turn up discussion and unearth a possibility for fresh bread! Dining with Steve, we have come to find that a lot of the smaller chef/owner restaurants are the best option for gluten free. Once they understand the needs, it is easy for them to know precisely which ingredients might have thickening or preserving agent that can cause problems for Coeliacs. Other than a new bistro which I've recommended and is also on the gluten free site, we've had good luck for him at Chanterelles in the rue LaPlace in the 5th (solid Auvergnat fare).... But that discussion might be best continued in a specialized location for GF? cheers to all

Thanks for the warning, Fresh. I'm not too keen on Senderens current direction nor the reworking of Lucas Carton in the first place. But le passage sounds awful. I wonder if there's a trend of high-end places trying to remake themselves into something younger, hipper and more cosmopolitan. It wouldn't be hard for such transformations to cause a lack of attention to the quality of the food. By the way, you like the Forum bar? I've been there a few times over the years and never got the "draw" of the place. It seems expensive, stuffy and well, boring. What am I missing?

Sadie- I expect there are few Paris restaurant owners here. I have quite a few friends in the restaurant business here and most are either non-anglophone or so overwhelmed with the Rungis-Lunch-Dinner-repeat routine that they tend to say, "email, I've heard of that. Mais oui, I checked it last month". But it might be a fun egullet investigatory project. If someone posts a thread and we get a good list of questions people would like to ask Paris restaurant owners? Then we take it to 'em and collect their replies. I'm sure Dr. Talbott knows people who would respond. I'd help out if needed. Do you like the idea? Anybody else?

You are quite right Alex. The winelist thing is a digression and only tangentially related to the tourist thing. Some of us just think EVERYTHING has to do with wine. There are many reasons for the winelist phyloxera. One of which is the slow but inexorable effects of a change in French tax law vis a vis restaurants in the early 90's. Another the demographic changes in restaurant-clientele which is, again, only distantly related to the tourist subject. We could start a new thread on this if anybody's interested enough. But I'm really happy you recognize the sorry state of a lot of the cartes des vins. Many people don't even see that the winelists are poor; which is in fact part of why there's a problem in the first place. "Aux Armes, Citoyens! Sortez, Les tire-bouchons! Ouvrons! Ouvrons! Qu'un Vin très pure Abreuve Nos Sillons!" As usual, I got carried away with that last bit.

Bleu- You are quite right about sudden popularity being very dangerous for some restaurants cellars. When you mentioned it, I immediately thought of 5 examples which greatly saddened me. Only 1 was specifically due to a writeup in a tourist guide. 2 were because discovery by and articles in the Nova/Fooding young hip thing, 1 Patricial Wells and 1 Zurban. In every case they simply stopped replacing really good bottles when they were sold and reduced their winelist down to the minimum of easily obtainable négoce-like cheapish wines. Each of the examples that came to mind have remained very popular. Sigh. Serving all those vile bottles Sancerre, Muscadet, and Beaujo. One of my hobbies is helping create winelists for restaurants that want to do a bit more. Often they don't want to. But, in a way, this is a tourist-like problem even if tourists aren't always the cause. Why go to the trouble of providing more when you have plenty of couverts without it? Share the wealth is a good philosphy. I subscribe. But let's raise the bar on the wine lists. It is far too low already.

[This post is a reply to a digression on Paris midrange restaurants thread that probably should be its own thing] Methinks you are being disingenuous here, Menton! But mentons? I'll bite, in good faith, and pretend to accept the gauntlet lying lonely on the ground. "You are simply a tourist, as a skunk is a skunk, a parasitic variation of the human species, which exists only to be tapped like a milk cow or a gum tree." -Robert Byron Tourist bashing is one of the great old noble sports with origins going back at least as far as Strabo. And still thriving. (Tourist baiting, on the other hand, is a slowly dying art; probably due to the quality of the prey. It also doesn't pay so well anymore. The Florentines and the Romans still practice it some. Ask directions in front of the Duomo for, say, Oltr'arno or the Piazzale Michelangelo. Make sure you have an attractive female in tow. Approach that group of well-dressed young men lounging by the sacristy. Ask them if they speak English, French or German. Do not let on if you speak Italian. You are likely to spend an amusing afternoon. As they guide you through town you will learn much of dubious educational value, but watch closely the faces of your indigenous friends. They will not smile or laugh. Tourist baiting is serious business. That the Signoria was a debtors' prison and is now a municipal girls boarding-school will challenge your basic ability to swallow anything, but persevere! You are the tourist, it is your role in this time-honored practice. When told that the Ufizzi was built as a torture-chamber by the Holy Office and recently converted to an amusement park by the Walt Disney corporation, nod, smile, and say something innocuous like, "interesting, that explains the long lines". At the Ponte Vecchio, accept appreciatively the information that those houses on top are built so that at the time of the yearly flood, when the Arno rises, people can cross the river by scampering across the rooftops. If you have played your part well by this point, a suggestion from you to stop at that delightful winebar--just next to the gate which opens on to the path of the more circuitous way up towards the Piazzale Michelangelo--will be accepted. And after a bottle of Montepulciano, or maybe the Tignanello if you're flush, but NOT the Sassicaia, or two, someone will proffer the nugget that this very ramshackle building in which you sit was designed by none other than DaVinci. Solemnly but deferentially suggest that it might have been Marcus Agrippa. Or Virgil. Someone will smile. And someone else will state categorically that this VERY building was built by Julius Caesar. Da Verro! And more players will begin to smile and even giggle. The session of tourist baiting will end with much laughter and goodwill all around. Probably with drunken toasts to increasingly improbable historical figures punctuating the early evening. Ah, the fine old tourist baiting of old. The moments of daring and courage. The Neapolitan graduate student guide, with a straight face, intoning in the middle of the Cloaca Maxima of ancient Neapolis, that this was an underground road for moving evil Roman soldiers in an out of an oppressed Naples. How charmingly ironic what with all of the excrement that once flowed through that passageway. The Turkish curator and the footprint of the Prophet. The Spanish professor at Ronda and the bullfighting costume of Hemmingway. Oh, so many memories of a great art. I'm sure you have your own.) Tourists. Gods be praised I'm not one of them! I'm a Traveller, YOU are a tourist. And vice-versa of course. Those damned sneaker-wearing, flourescently-garbed, loud-mouthed, gaping hordes of befannypacked barbarians clogging the sidewalks of Paris and Manhattan. They engender such pedestrian road-rage that coming home from work or doing your shopping becomes a frantic obstacle course fueled by barely repressed fury. They create havoc in the Metro by persisting in having 22 of 'em lining up together to buy tickets while the leader spends 32.6 minutes trying to negotiate some kind of deal with the teller. "Bahnjehr Mersyer, Avez Vous une Discount pour groups? Ou Seniors?" They mill cluelessly around the top of stairs blocking ingress and egress, immune to every plea of "Pardon, Excusez-Moi, Pardon, J'AIMERAIS BIEN SORTIR S.V.P!" They dine at unreasonable times, en masse, so if you arrive at table at 20h00 your entrées don't come till 21h00 because there are 37 of the pesky creatures clamoring for dessert at the same time. Even in small numbers, their aesthetic crimes are heady. Labeled with North Face and Patagonia, brightened by unlikely brash colors, they make a semi-civilized urban landscape look like an assisted-living snowboarding expedition. We're not like them. No way. Not ever. Right. Well, hmm. I try not to be. At least I try. I mean, well, there are tourists and then there are tourists. But I remember a trip to Arizona over the christmas season a few years ago. Wearing the necessary Paris drizzle protection dark overcoat. Real shoes. Walking--not driving--along the road. People looked at me like an alien. Our friends were all starving by the time we were willing to sit down to dinner and we were invariably the last people in restaurants (how very weird for us to be last in the restaurant when finishing our meal often as early as 22h30). I was a tourist. Traveling insulated from my environment, peering out at it, oblivious to the effect my strangeness had on it. How many people had to swerve around me on their daily motorized commute? Did it irritate them? Probably. So okay. We're all tourists sometimes. And the hordes bring in money, and keep things we like, such as restaurants and winebars, in business. So what's wrong with tourists? What's wrong with tourists? In restaurants? Often quite a bit. Even if the situation is as complex as tourists everywhere else. Sure, as everyone here already knows, Tourism helped create the climate for Gastronomy and serious restaurants. The once-useful and still influential Guide Michelin was written for tourists. In many parts of the world, even some parts of western Europe, it is still primarily tourists that allow higher end restaurants to exist. Until recently locals in Southern Italy and Languedoc-Roussillon wouldn't--or couldn't--support better establishments. While cooking at home was of a very high level, good restaurants were hard to find. This is still strongly the case, in my experience, in Turkey, Greece, Malta, the former Yugoslav states. The best restaurants cater mainly to tourists. (It is similar to another egullet discussion thread about restaurants in Thailand and Southeast Asia. Home-cooking and Street-fare are great, restaurants much more seldom so. Those few that are cater to foreigners.) But in France, Italy, Spain, the UK, and Germany, we have large local subcultures searching for various types of, for want of an easy expression, Gastronomy, that are willing and able to support a large number of good restaurants without being solely dependent on tourists. In France, due to the astronomical number of tourists we receive each year, the effects of various kinds of tourism on restauration is enormous. In Paris even more so. One of the more obvious problems associated with this is what I'll call relative clienteles. If a restaurant has a large percentage of revenue coming from a clientele, a market niche, it will tend to pay most attention to that group. If more and more of the clientele is made up of tourists then it will bend towards serving what tourists want and what tourists like. "So what", one might say, since we are all tourists at some point then it doesn't matter. But it does. Because the one commonality for tourists is that they are not from here. So the things they like will not be the things from here. Yes, some tourists, and particularly culinary-minded ones, will order the Os a Moelle, the ris de veau, the rognons, the pigeon, the sanglier, the langue, the biche, the pieds et paquets, etc. But not very many. And places that depend on tourists will serve fewer and fewer of these things. Similarly, simply because they aren't from here, their taste will take time to develop for things from France. A lot of restaurants with a healthy tourist population will stay away from serving the stronger cheeses. French and Anglo-Amercian taste in beef tend to differ a bit. With the Anglo-American side prizing tenderness, and often requesting their meat more well done, a restaurant that has many of them as guests will naturally tend to buy more of the cuts that work that way. Few chefs can afford to keep buying cuts of meat that don't sell. Another thing that follows from "tourists aren't from here" is that they aren't at home either. So many tourists, (particularly these days the English football fans, ouch) don't behave the way they do at home. Or maybe just the way they do at home, but more so. That's normal. If you're on holiday, you're going to relax. But you also are eating new things and sometimes not adapting well to the local schedule or practice. This can create other problems. From the large loud tables of bickering yanks to the boorish roast-beef footballers. Imagine what often happens to service when a clientele becomes primarily touristy. If most of the customers are unfamiliar with both the food AND the language? I've barely scratched the surface here, but I'm not trying to invoke anti-tourist sentiment. I'm only saying that, yes, tourists can change a restaurant. Sometimes that's actually a good thing when it encourages a restaurateur to make better things, find fresher ingredients, push his staff to a new level. If the tourists are egulletiers? Great. But often, simply the existence of a large customer group, with money and low--or just foreign--expectations can make the restaurant patron feel like the Robert Byron quote above. When I hear tables of Americans, Brits or Italians in one of my favorite restaurants. I smile. I hope that they're bringing new, good, repeat business to a place I like. When every time I'm back at the restaurant I hear more of them I start holding my breath. When I sit down, hear no French around me, see new Frommer's (or the like) stickers in the windows I pray. Anybody have similar sentiments? A better analysis? I've got to buy a new fanny pack and some day-glow track suits for my next vacation....

John- The article in Le Monde doesn't indicate, but have you--or anybody else out there--heard any rumors about whether Henri Voy is going to open a restaurant with his new cheese shop? His old Ferme St. Hubert restaurant attached to his shop in the rue Vignon was a blessing to us cheeseheads. I've heard that he had troubles after expanding too fast with his second restaurant but don't know if there's any truth to that. At any rate thank you for the article link. I'd been wondering what happened to him.

Thanks for the suggestion on the Bis de Severo Felice. We'll give it a try soon. Always on the lookout for an exceptionnal côte de boeuf.

Tatin- I'd be curious to know what you didn't like about L'Enoteca. I've taken a lot of people most of whom have gone back.... The 2 serious complaints I've heard are 1) from someone with a big appetite; the portions can be small and the price adds up fast if you start adding courses and do, say antipasti, pasta, meat or fish, cheese and dessert. and 2) The service can, occasionnally, border on rudely incompetant. Was it something like that?