julot-les-pinceaux

Rostang does a brilliant Savora vinaigrette on the side of his "pizza rognon".

I like summer, simply, where every vegetable and fruit is in their full glory. The glorious peaches and eating outside. I think that Senderens and Loiseau are particularly good in that season. Also Pacaud, can be very impressive with berries, and lobsters too. Of course many prefer the fall -- mushrooms and game, and the ripe flavours of the last fruits. That is when many chefs express themselves very well but I would put Besson and Briffard forward. In the winter I think few beat Rostang for the warm and generous food. Savoy is prety good too. The spring I suppose is a season for the new generation chefs who are not afraid of expressing stingy and bitter -- Bras and Roellinger I would say are spring chefs -- and they have that long winter break from which they awake, just like the nature around them. That said, I suppose that the response to your question depends a lot on where we are - I remember that seasons were fairly different in Bavaria than they are in the Paris region, and I'm sure the French riviera is different as well.

A list of all markets in Paris, place and time.

It's boned and the sauce is thickened with blood. Plus truffle sometimes.

The famous organic market of bd Raspail on sunday is on saturdays bd des Batignolles. The bakery at the corner that has flute gana is very good. Many excellent stores in the rue des Batignolles and the market rue Brochant, rue des Moines. Rue des martyrs is pretty awesome as well, with Delmontel the baker facing an excellent cheese shop. Seurre in the same street, too.

Yum. Call us next time.

The fundamentals are that the hare is cooked in wine for a long time and the sauce is thickened with the hare's blood. There are two main versions -- one is a stew, and the meat comes off the bones easily after hours and hours of cooking. The other one is a more sophisticated ("Ali-Bab", "au torchon") recipe: the animal is boned, stuffed with foie gras, truffle and other good things. It's cooked slowly in wine (or better a mix of wine and hare stock, justifying the idea that you need several hares to make a good lièvre à la royale) and the end result looks like a big sausage served in thick slices with the blood-thickened sauce (essentially a reduction of the liquid the animal cooked in).

I'm sure there are endless subtleties, as evidenced by Pti above. But basically I suppose you're right -- the big sausage and the stew, the Ali-Bab and the Couteaux, etc.

It's on the menu right now. I didn't ask whether it would still be here for UE's visit.

Just back from Chez l'Ami Jean: they do it too. In fact, they do both versions -- au torchon et à la cuillère.

So I started responding and the response ended up being so long that I put it on my blog: http://www.julotlespinceaux.com/2008/09/wh...le-cuisine.html The characterization of Nouvelle cuisine as light is misleading. If you think of Bocuse, Robuchon, Senderens, Guérard, even Loiseau, Winkler, or Passard. All rely heavily on butter and sometimes cream. One hardly leaves these places feeling light, eventhough there are degrees. The main reason for butter is, that nothing replaces it to capture the flavors. Thanks to butter you can make mono-taste sauces that emphasize the complexity and richness of one ingredients: for instance a thyme or a tarragon butter sauce, served on the side of a fish cooked à l’unilatérale are very typical nouvelle cuisine dishes, still served by Winkler. Today, Passard’s Gratin d’oignon is an example of that mono-ingredient approach, which relies on butter to capture the flavours during the slow cooking and aims at demonstrating that a simple onion can be a grande cuisine dish, and not only some aromatic sidekick in a stock. Technologies for capturing clear, pure tastes have been refined from the traditional to butter to more surprising infusions, mousses, etc. You could consider that the latest in pure nouvelle cuisine was reached in the early 90s, with Loiseau, Robuchon and Veyrat. And water. The other day, Pti made a traditional nettle soup – I had no idea that it would have potatoes and leeks in there and cook for fourty minutes. To me, educated by Loiseau, a nettle soup was only water, salt and nettles, the nettles cooked à l’anglaise for a few minutes, stopped in ice, then blended with the water they cooked in. Same deal with the parsley sauce, for instance. And any soup, really. More than lightness, Nouvelle Cuisine can be characterized by a focus on ingredients and the clarity of their taste. By comparison, traditional cuisine, the Escoffier style, is more about transformation of ingredients, the magic of the act of cooking. Turning stuff that grows in or on the soil into delicious food. It's not that they did not use the best ingredients they have. Cooks always knew that you can't make good food without good ingredients. But in the traditional cuisine, cooking was about the transformation, the recipe, and how to create a taste. Stews, quenelles, are examples of long transformative processes creating pleasant and arguably artificial feelings in mouth. In nouvelle cuisine, it is about emphasising a taste more than about creating one. There is both a more natural and a more artistic approach in a way. You can taste the pre-nouvelle cuisine approach in places like Michel Rostang or l’Auberge Bressane. A pasta or potato gratin are good example, or crêpes Suzettes. Another comparison I like to use is that the difference between Nouvelle and Ancienne Cuisine is reflected in the difference between Chinese and Vietnamese cuisine. Basically (no offence), in a Vietnamese Bo-Bun you can identify every ingredient clearly. In a Chinese Imperial style chicken, there is fusion of ingredients, and while it is delicious, it is actually hard to tell what exactly it is that you are eating. There’s the same difference between nouvelle and ancienne cuisine. A classic of nouvelle cuisine, emphasized to the point of caricature, if you ask me, in Michel Bras’ Gargouillou, is the separate cooking of different vegetables. A Senderens approach to Ratatouille, a Loiseau ragout de legumes, as opposed to their traditional counterpart, all rely on separate cooking and last minute assembly. Of course there has been evolution and progress inside nouvelle cuisine. The first stage was, say, Bocuse, maybe Point, and their food does not taste that distinct to our palates anymore. But if you compare Bocuse to Rostang or to your (OK, my) grandmother’s cooking, you will feel the clarity of taste, the lightening of traditional recipes not in a dietetic but in an aesthetic sense. One dish which I think is a good example of the revolution the Nouvelle Cuisine was is that salade de rougets I had the other day at Gérard Besson. Suddenly, the plate is full of colors and distinct taste, while still being, formally, the traditional salad – a salad in which everything is mixed and soaked and hardly recognizable. As far as the plating is concerned, in Nouvelle Cuisine, it is a logical consequence of the search for control of the gustative experience and the separation and purity of flavors. By the way, what is the difference between Nouvelle Cuisine and California cuisine? I would argue, none, essentially. Except that they rely, like all good cuisines, on local and therefore different ingredients and traditions. Traditions reinterpreted, even reinvented: from Bocuse’s chicken to Loiseau’s frogs, Nouvelle Cuisine has been exactly that. In the Robuchon school, there even some sort of conciliation between traditional and nouvelle cuisine: some ingredients are magnified with clear tastes, but melty, fusionned, regressive tastes are also present like in his pumpkin soup or his potato purée. This Robuchon synthesis is very apparent in the contrast of his two signature dishes: the aromatic herb salad and the potato purée. Both were served on the side of a perfect roast lamb, by the way. When opposing Nouvelle Cuisine to the restaurants that emerged in the 90s, many of them techno-molecular-something, I think that the operating word is cuisine. In French, it is what people do at home as well as the name of the room. It is how the people prepare food. Traditional and nouvelle cuisine are both cuisines – essentially, cooks do the same things we do at home and they do the same things we do. Only they’re professionals. And indeed, while places like Rostang or l’Auberge Bressane, or even Bocuse or Besson, use very similar techniques to what we use at home, the “advanced” nouvelle cuisine is extrelly work-intensive. Robuchon’s purée require hard work for sure, so does Bocuse’s gazpacho or pea soup made from small vegetables pealed one by one. Veyrat invented fat free fries but they take 40 minutes to do instead of 10. And I mentioned earlier using ten different pots to prepare a vegetable stew. You have to have staff and a professional kitchen. By opposition, what you eat at Adria’s, Blumenthal’s, Amador’s, even at l’Astrance, is not cuisine in the sense that it has not much to do with feeding you, it is not an extension or a modification of how you would cook at home. It just has nothing to do with it. What emerged since Nouvelle Cuisine arguably peaked is not better food but a shift or return of emphasis on other dimensions of the fine dining experience than having the best possible food. Novelty and surprise are major factors, as is the show dimension. Adria offers, it seems, an unparalleled stimulation of the mind and a unique reconsideration of the nature of the culinary experience. Amador is both playful and generous. Come to think of it, what else could young chefs do to differentiate themselves? The champions of nouvelle cuisine had created a new orthodoxy and of course set their own bar for excellence. How would you make better, more intense and pure food than Robuchon or Pacaud or Senderens when they’re on? You can’t. They’ve just perfected their art the same way an Escoffier probably had before them. You just can’t beat them to their own game. But you can get tired of their game. Some people do.

seconded

I think no couscous place beats Wally. To me it is a destination restaurant, always a party. Now maybe it is just not fair to compare them to other couscous restaurants because they do "dry" saharian couscous, without the big stock. So, basically a different dish. But it's also unfair to compare them because Wally is way better, if you ask me.

I just ate at the newly reconstructed Zebra Square. It was pretty decent. Nothing to write home about, but ingredients were of quality, recipes were light, prices were not as high as you'd expect given the setting, cooking was even decent. Pasta pesto were textbook, and big (12€). Tartare toscan (with olive oil and basil) was au couteau. The poulet en fermier en cocote lutée was quite pleasant, a white pot sealed with good puff pastry, porcini and onions inside, a good juice (24€). In dessert, the chocolate soufflé was OK too and I had Fraises remontantes et fontainebleau that comes cutely wrapped in plastic foil and smells good when you open it and it sugar-free. Also a glass of Graves at 6€ was totally pleasant. I won't go back but I understand why some would. And I was there before François Simon.

Since we're at the roasting chicken counter, I would add that the most important thing, in my opinion, is to roast the chicken on its legs, flip it often, and only put it on its back for the last 10/15min, in order to have not overcooked white meat.

Not sure what would be better than roasting it. Maybe poaching it first, but that's still roasting. A traditional christmas stuffing is with chestnut and foie gras. Marrons confits (from a box, confits in chicken stock) and dices of raw foie gras poelés. And of course, it's always a good idea to add truffle in the stuffing. Another stuffing I like is simply leeks, onion and carrots also with the foie gras (equally vegs confits in chicken stock, dices of poelé foie gras) Another one is lighter (which might be appropriate since Capon is so fat) where I use cilantro leaves (again mixed with the vegs after confiting). Given the season, and the region, you might want to rely on mushrooms for the stuffing. If you have an industrial size cocotte, you can also go for the salt crust.

Lebey just issued a new guide called "où bien manger quoi à Paris" ("where to eat well what"). Under Lièvre à la Royale, I read: Joël Robuchon (l'Atelier, la Table), Carré des feuillants, l'Epigramme, Gérard Besson, Au Petit Marguery, Senderens, Stella Maris. I trust Lebey on these questions.

Maybe too late, but I would vote for a salon at Le Petit Riche rather than either Gallopin or Mollard

More than these stupid (no offense) listings, I wish someone would take the time and energy to explain the differences in pains au chocolat (or croissants). The truth is, every good bakery has very different viennese pastries. They can be flaky, buttery, melty, slightly flavoured, sweet, airy, earthy, on the nutty side, the burned side... It's really like croissants and pains au chocolat alone are a world of their own, and that's the real glory of this country's food traditions. Btw, I was thoroughly disapointed by this year's "best croissant" (from the Mairie de Paris-sponsored competition) in the 14th for instance.

Cafés serve drinks and some kind of snacks all day and often have some dining options at meal hours -- pretty much like pubs. Brasseries are cafés that serves real food throughout. They're usually more expensive than regular cafés and have slightly more sophisticated food. They often have nice tablecloth, decent China, etc. Very often, they have a "banc d'huitres", i.e. tons of fresh seafood. Also indeed many have some architectural appeal. Foodwise, I think the best is clearly La Rotonde but all Flo brasseries have acceptable compromises. Nothing to write home about in any case. Brasserie are not supposed to be chef-dependent. They serve steaks, fries, and raw seafood. A typical brasserie meal is oysters, then a steak tartare, then a Tarte Tatin or a Chocolat Liégois. Then you have the restaurants, which only serve meals and only at meal hours. Foodwise the most remarkable are the bistronomiques like la Régalade ou Chez l'Ami Jean who offer starred-restaurants techniques and ingredients at bistrot prices, the downside being that they're packed, noisy and tiny. I'll leave it to Pti to define terroir and traditional, if she can. I guess the basic concept is that you have restaurants for all sorts of occasion and budget. Except there aren't restaurant for really broke people anymore (such as the "bouillons"). They still exist and they're still at the bottom of the price range of the restaurant but they're not an option for the lower-class.

Too bad it's already mortgaged !!!

I would want to work with one of those chefs with whom you learn something new everyday no matter how well trained you are. In the past I would have said Robuchon and then, without hesitation, Guichard (I did spend two days in his kitchen and learnt more in those two days than in years). Now I would put Briffard, Guérard and Bocuse first, followed by Pacaud.

I'd ask our French members what they think about what I've only read about in books (principly the pseudonyimous Olivier Morteau); that two of the guiding spirits (I suppose mentors) have been Ducasse and Robuchon and that the Freemasonry connections come into play in their promotion of "their" chefs. ← I think this is essentially correct. With the addendum that the two guiding spirits are often fighting/competing.

Just went today, coupled with a Fish lunch, and that was an extraordinary recommendation. Those guys really know how to choose wine, they have pretty decent, very fresh food, they speak English and they have a very liberal policy re tasting. I just love it and I'll be back, trusting them. Independently from the open sundays, open August thing, I think this is my favourite wine shop.

You do need your passport and clearing at the Swiss border, but Antony is in France. It means you have to count 10 more minutes on your route, unless you get caught with cocaine or stuff. Luna Calvados' post upthread is still perfectly valid. Alleosse, Cantin and Dubois are probably the best, Androuet has a nice network and Quatrehomme has good value. Also there are local good shops without the fame such as the one in the rue des Martyrs close to Rose Bakery.