julot-les-pinceaux

You mean, open during the holiday? That depends on your precise dates, as most restaurants take at least a few days off and many take two weeks off. For instance Chez l'Ami Jean reopens Jan 2, but la Régalade not before the 5th. Ches Christophe will be open except wed and thu as usual. L'Auberg Bressane closes 24&25 and 31&1. La Table de JR (weekday lunch menu 55bi) is open everday. Fish only closes on the 25th. Itinéraires is closed from the 24th to the 30th. I would add l'Acajou to that list, but I have no idea what the christmas holiday policy is.

Here's another article about the crisis of chefs, which I found funny and spot on (in French, babblefish it if you need!). http://www.elle.fr/elle/love-sexe/celibata...ou/(gid)/778091

I don't know the NY food scene well enough, but I would argue that the average quality of meals in France and in particular in Paris is plain bad. And I don't only mean middle range dining. The lack of serious, in my opinion, has spread widely and I recently argued that even l'Ambroisie was not spared. The most reliable restaurant in Paris is Guy Savoy but it is because of the scenography, not the food. Outside of Paris, I find that only some "dinosaurs" and a couple of extraordinary places can actually be trusted. Now to the extent of my limited international experience, Germans and Italian are still taking fine dining and good food much more seriously than the French do.

There's not much more than meet the eyes. Cocotte lutée, foin inside, very hot oven. Passard does it with chicken. It rocks.

There is an Italian pasta shop, rue Lebon, that has not only the best fresh pasta in town but also does great and not über-expensive Italian truffles on order. It's called Via della Pasta, I think. Otherwise my experience is that buying truffles is best left to the pros. As I don't have the connections and don't want to overpay, I find that it is more reliable to eat truffle from truffle specialist restaurants who know not only how to buy them but also how to cook them. That would be Besson, Rostang, Savoy, Pacaud. Also, Pébeyre has a website from which you can actually buy online. They're who most good chefs that do not have their own truffle connection trust.

he's already not in the kitchen place de la Madelein. Why would he be rue de Bagnolet?

Yes. Too much stock market fascination going these days. Or is it something else?

l'Uitr, place Falguière. Bollinger is nice, as are most good brasseries. Garnier for instance.

And there's always Racines. That's not 2006. Are they open saturdays?

I have nothing. I think most major news from this year are only OK, not nearly as exciting as your first two choices, not even as exciting as Spring. Itinéraires, maybe. Or Caïus.

China really is my favourite thing at Rochat. Wonderful plates.

Thanks, ameiden. Nothing lasts forever but here is something wonderful we did not miss.

Table d'hôtes (literaly "guest table", echoing "chambre d'hôtes", which is for b&b). Like this one: www.hegia.com .

Bocuse's style is not contemporary, and therefore diners non familiar with his style of cooking may not fully appreciate perfect stock, perfect béarnaise, homard à l'armoricaine. Who still does Béarnaise at all (Choron, served with seawof in puff pastry, is a tomato béarnaise)? To those who did not grow up among such recipes, at home and in restaurants, this may, at first, only taste rich. So it's not about understanding something, it's about developing a sensitivity that is rarely used in contemporary cuisine. In Bocuse's class as such, doing the same king of "historical" but truly excellent cuisine, I can only think of Besson (except for desserts) and Rostang, restaurants often better appreciated by those people familiar with the tradition of cuisine. If your question is about restaurants that are harder to appreciate for the neophyte, the list is larger, ranging from l'Ambroisie to Roellinger to Winkler. Some are in dialog with a tradition and culture. Some are just following their own route and might be puzzling at first, because one does not know where the action is going on, what to pay attention to. Expectation is essential in the restaurant experience - if you expect l'Ambroisie to be like Guy Savoy in terms of the human experience, you'll be sorely disapointed.

Actually, I shared your feeling on earlier visits about the desserts, and it was possibly partly due to being so full at that point, as everyone is. But this time, while I could not possibly taste many, the ones I had were very very good. I have not checked but I'm ready to bet that the pastry chef changed. There were beef cubes in the soup. The truffle was underwhelming -- no suprise in november of a rather bad truffle year. I'm not sure that Bocuse "never changes" -- recipes remain the same and look the same but either Bocuse changed or I did, since this was by far the best meal I had there. About l'Arpège -- don't know when I'll talk about it in more detail. I wrote a text in French which I'll release soon.

Had my (at least) yearly visit yesterday. It's not only that I think that this is one of the best in France, but, as years go by, I actually think more and more highly of it. I think only a handful of restaurants in France have that level of technical mastery, and also it is a personal, powerful and intense cuisine, if undeniably a time travel as well. I posted some pics here: http://picasaweb.google.fr/ZeJulot/Bocuse02# Thing is, I would not recommend it to inexperienced, non-French diners. As I said, the more I know about food and fine dining, the more I love Bocuse. Actually, I did not even took my younger brother with me exactly for that reason: for his first time, it's much better to take him to Guy Savoy or Ramsay or some more accessible restaurant.

Well, I think bashing Michelin is shooting the messenger. I'm not saying they're perfect judges, but it's not their fault, nor is it a bad thing, that chefs want to be "simply the best" (tune). It's true that the Michelin tends to put too much emphasis on a traditional way of dining which is not only about the food (see Briffard in his Les Elysées years), and that in this sense they are part of some absurd pressure on the shoulders of the chefs and restaurant owners. But, as I argued somewhere else, the fine dining experience -- the space, the ambiance, the nice China, etc, is not entirely irrelevant to extraordinary food, or rather to a certain kind of extraordinary food that demands attention and respect.

This guide is only getting better. Some reviews in particular, e.g. Senderens, Loiseau, Roellinger, Ledoyen are particularly fascinating to read and insightful

I'm looking forward to knowing what Roellinger will do, how he will "continue being a cook in the same house". As usual, François Simon has nothing smart to say and is actually trying to make us believe that he has information he does not. Roellinger always said, and is saying again, that he can only cook in his house. But that's too puzzling for this journalist to understand, obviously, so he says Roellinger will cook at Richeux, the dream of all those who never understood his cooking and deplored that his restaurant was not in the castle. I don't think it's a Michelin story. I think it's just about a very contemporary problem -- doing the best possible food, cooking in a moving, artful way, requires an incredible amount of skills and manpower, and the model of the restaurant makes life extraordinary difficult for cooks (we had that fight somewhere else, with lawyers pretending that they were having a harder work because of the long hours -- let's cook them!). So you have the Ducasse-the-enemy-of-civilization response: make it industrial, processed, mastered, clean and soulless, optimise it big time, and it becomes a suitable business, assuming you already have the prestige to leverage your savoir-faire. But the others, the ones who won't renounce great food but are not necesarily ready to entirely give up their life for the sake of it, are looking for other ways with various successes-- e.g. Senderens, Spring, Hegia, Constant, Le Jeu de Quilles, and now Roellinger. Some , like Westermann, Girardet, Robuchon and, dramatically, Loiseau, just give up.

Anyhow, back to those sweetbreads -- they're here:

Well, if money is no object, the Pithiviers is probably more exciting. But the lièvre is in the lunch menu. By the way, Rostang's lièvre is 78€, cheaper than Senderens.

Le Monde today has its say into our debate with a Ribaut's article about game. They mention the usual suspects, especially Besson and Rostang. And they also add someone I should have thought about, the former chef at Lucas Carton then Senderens, Frédéric Robert. Having tasted the incredible sauce at Senderens now, it suddenly strikes me that tasting the Robert version (at La Grande Cascade), who must be even better because he is such a great executive chef, is a must this season. And the description of the sauce as "miroir" (mirror), as you can see from my pics upthread, is quite appropriate. By the way, here's the article (in French...) http://www.lemonde.fr/aujourd-hui/article/...12412_3238.html And, by the other way, here's Briffard's take on the lièvre -- this is two shoulders, cooked whole and very perfectly (not dry at all), with a sauce that is delicious but of which there is not nearly enough. (the restaurant is Le Cinq) You can see foie gras raviolis on the front, big lardons on top, and you probably can't see chanterelles in the back.

That would be MUCH more expensive. We have a saying in French: "Si vous n'aimez pas ça, n'en dégoutez pas les autres". You just summarized what makes Gagnaire great. Why I just don't want to go again, I respect his work and I'm happy that others truly enjoy it.

I think he does, doesn't he? I mean it does his way but I can't say I ever felt that a meal at Gagnaire left me angry or wasn't a party.

I agree -- Of course Gagnaire, and maybe even Ducasse, have the utmost respect for high quality traditional food. It's the least they can do. But I don't think one can understand Gagnaire if they don't understand that his whole art is determined by a hatred of the restaurant, which he developed when he was a young kid in his parents' restaurant. For him, "restaurant" means the kid's parents are not available and yell at him for asking for attention during the service. It is deeply ingrained. Beyond the cheap psychoanalysis, though, his art is an effort to destroy traditional culinary structures of all sorts, to recreate the restaurant indeed, but by destroying it. As he says himself "it's not always about respecting the ingredients, sometimes it's about abusing them". As far as Ducasse goes, he decided long ago that business was more important than anything and made all he could to reduce fine dining to an industrial, perfectly mastered, process quality controlled, reproductible action. On the whole, I would say both do not care about restaurants as we knew them and that both hold a responsibility in their progressive disparition. Now instead of truly civilised and human places we have on the one hand luxury business "look how expensive!" and on the other hand creative fanzy "look how original!". I miss good. This grumpy Julot session was brought to you by eGullet.