John Talbott's Paris

Where is Swedish Design headed? Good question not answered at the Centre Cultural Suedois.

 

I translated the title of this show as "Where is Swedish Design headed?" and from this show have no idea what the answer might be.

Shan Gout in the 12th: Terrific the 2nd time.

 

Shan Gout in the 12th is a place I'd only been to once before but thought Colette would like as it has unusual Chinese food, especially for Paris.  The amuse bouche of shaved Grannie Smith's had an ineffable herb off-setting the sweetish apple and was a perfect beginning.

The last time I was here I said that the tall man had done the cooking but critics described the woman as chief chef; well, today, all three persons greeted, waited, cooked and bid goodbye; cross-trained to a "t."

We ordered 4 mains: a daily special of Sichuan eggplant, cold chicken topped with chopped herbs, hot spicy pork with ginger and noodles with peanut sauce and teeny tiny shrimp and shaved Chinese red cabbage - all very good.

I still had a truc, and the desserts didn't appeal, so I ordered another cold main, the spiced cucumbers.

With a liter of red wine and 2 coffees, our bill was 68.40 E.

Marc Riboud at the Romantique in Montmartre.

 

Marc Riboud's show at the Musee de la Vie Romantique is one of those shows you swear you've seen before and you have, Riboud's photographs being among the most popular by a Frenchman, save Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau.

He photographed famous persons (Yves St Laurent to Picasso), famous events (the "manifs" of '67 and '68), famous moments (painting the Eiffel Tower) and famous emotions (the election of Barack Obama).

Hurry - it closes July 26th.

Spring summers in with lobster rolls on July 4th.

 

Spring, Daniel Rose's brilliantly successful tiny resto in the 9th, has invented yet another truc for the Saturdays in the Summer of 2009; North American lobster sandwiches (to me a New Englander, called rolls) with French fries cooked in goose fat, followed by watermelon (or raspberries if you're a revisionist) and accompanied by "cheap" wine and/or beer.

We had a great time as always and it's just the thing for a hot summer day, especially the 4th of July.

For those interested, the deal is to reserve your lobster rolls (priced according to the market but 37 E top) via the net (you cannot reserve a table) and while they're open from 12-8, I'd urge you to go at noon when the line doesn't stretch into the street.

Our bill for three with two bottles of St Romain but no coffee (the machine is broken) was 147 E but (disclosure) he comp'd us to the fries and gave us a really reasonably priced lobster.

Louise Campbell at the Maison du Danemark: so......?

 

Let's be brief about this show.

I'm sure Louise Campbell is very talented, successful and ummmm, something else ineffable, and, and, and, I like her signature chairs.

But, but, but.....ah....a whole show is sadly lacking.

Don't bother to go, even though it's free, especially since the boutique has stopped stocking multiple varieties of herring and salmon, Danish bread, etc.

La Maree in the 8th: what a come-down.

 

La Maree in the 8th, which I rediscovered only a few months ago with a food writer friend, after many years of non-patronage, since my three food chums and I originally "discovered" it in the 1970's, had been tossed by the side of the road d/t price/quality intolerability, it was 65 E for lunch, for goodness sake, had made a seeming comeback.  Its menu, salle, et al, was totally revamped 5 months ago, and we had a splendid meal.  You may recall that I said:

6.8 Boy this Golden Oldie has really come back!
La Maree, 1 rue Daru in the 8th, 01.43.80.20.00, is a place I last went to with Colette and a great local friend, MF, a good 20 years ago. It was a special place then, charming, good, reasonably-priced and I don’t know how and why we fell out of love with it. But we did and I’ve passed it many times and wondered how it was doing. But nobody seemed to talk about it much and the prices seemed to creep up (the Pudlo 2009 gives the lunch menu as 65 € and a la carte 140.) In looking at said Pudlo, I see he mentions its transfer from the Trompier family to the Blanc stable but it wasn’t until Francois-Regis Gaudry called it the address of the week two weeks ago that I took notice. The price alone caught my attention – 35 € for three courses (29 for 2), morning or night. It’s the same old place, same old voiturier, same old glass windows. But the food, John, boy! The amuse bouche was a potato soup with chestnut bits, bland enough but a classic for pre-fish stuff. My eating partner and I glommed on the same dishes and had ample tasting of all six. He started with coques mariniere that were classic and good, but I think I scored better with a marmite of shellfish and leeks, including an ample scallop in a terrific ginger and lemon sauce. Then I had a bourride with three fish filets (daurade, monkfish and rouget) again with a great shellfish sauce and he, two big fat, toasty quenelles with a classic langoustine sauce (they called Daru). He chose the cheese which was a smart move; all three, especially the camembert, were excellent quality and perfectly affinated. Then we finished with a dense chocolate mousse topped with toasted almonds. Our bill (with coffee, wine and no bottled water) would have been under 100 € if we hadn’t “had to have” some red wine with the cheese.
Go? Quickly before the big boys blow it out of proportion.

Well, I went back with Colette today to great disappointment.  The service remains top-notch, but  chef (not "the chef") is over the hill me thinks. 

While the amuse bouche soup was OK, my fried sardines arduous to parse and Colette's gaspacho with chevre "ile flottante" was good, the two main fish dishes, the mainstays (sorry) of the meal, were bland beyond any help from salt, pepper or cursing.

Before leaving, Colette ordered her "test of the ancient kitchen" standard, a genuine Ile Flottante, and found it wanting.

With two coffees (listed in the menu as coming with mignardises for 4.10 E), one bottle of fine Pouilly Fume and no bottled water - our bill was 101.20 E.

Paris Places Prices Plunge because TVA reduced to 5.5% - NOT!

Remember the Millennium cyberscare? All the computers in the world would crash, airlines would be paralyzed, VISA cards nulled, etc., etc. I do, I slept in my university hospital office waiting from the call from the E.R. that the world had ended. And guess what, the only negative result was that I missed my morning run at home.

So, on July 1st, 2009, the TVA in fine French places went from 19.6-5.5%. The culinary equivalent of Alan Greenspan, a man we trusted to tell us the truth and get us out of trouble, André Daguin, he of the Hotel de France in Auch (a great place in its time) and father of Ariane Daguin of D'Artagnan, sold everyone on this reduction in his role as the Président Confédéral of the UMIH (Union des Métiers et des Industries de l'Hôtellerie).

The blogosphere has been alive with the sounds of doubt if this rebate would ever reach the customer and even mainstream publications had full page articles on what everyone from Taillevent to McDo’s (fast-food places were not really in the game except for the “game”) intended to do. So,…… since the revolution, I’ve dined at and scoped several places’ chalkboards and menus and guess what? Darned if I could see vast savings.

To be fair; the Gov’t ran full page ads saying “lower prices, creation of jobs, investing [in the future].” And so it was.

One place said 12% reduction on all food; another listed the prices of each item (plat du jour, formule, menu, etc., etc.,) before and after July 1st, yet another promised 1 E reductions per dish. But in the places that we’ve actually eaten, nada, nul, nuttin.”

Two chefs I’ve talked to, both before and after July 1st, said they were just trying to hold their own, keeping costs down, not INCREASING prices, trying to hire a sous-chef and praying.

That’s it from your man on the ground in Paris.

Italy and Max Ernst at the Orsay

 

The Orsay is like the Met or the Louvre, one of the great art bargains of all time.  For a few Euros, one has (at present) 5 different special exhibitions, not to mention the permanent collection.

I really liked the three dealing with Italy - one on paraphrasing the 19th century adage that once one has seen Italy (on the Grand Tour, of course), one can die, one of the 19th century architectural drawings by winners of the French Ecole des Beaux-arts Grand Prix de Rome and the third of Ernest Hébert's portraits of Italian peasants.

It's surely my lack of art history training that caused me to "just not get" what Max Ernst was driving at with his collages called Une semaine de bonté [A Week of Kindness] that filled almost all the southern rooms on the 2nd floor and I like Max Ernst enough to have come whisker's distance from buying a glass piece by him in Venice.   One thing that did occur to me was that with Ernst, again, we have an artistic icon who enriched American not European art because of Anti-Semitism and Nazisim.

Likewise I found the Donation of Philippe Meyer to be a second-rate bunch of Bonnard's, Vuillard's and Cezanne's with one wonderful redeeming painting - that by Vilhelm Hammershoi, previously unknown to me.

Ze Kitchen Galerie: Victoria's Messenger arrives.

 

Don't get the Victoria's Messenger reference: minute Papillion.

Ze Kitchen Galerie is to me what Chez Georges is to Francois Simon, or L'Ami Louis was to RW Apple Jr; it's my lodestar, my center of gravity, my knowledge that all is right in the world and I can eat splendidly well at a one-star place, for Lord's sake, for 50 E at lunch - so when Colette and I arrived and saw our guests from the state of red rocks standing outside talking to the waitstaff we knew we were in big trouble. 

Bombscare, sushi chef stabbed, frigo off all night - what?  No, the power had just been cut in the quartier, who knew when it would be restored?   Looking around, oh yah, that's right, there are all these chefs and plongeurs, etc., from Laperouse, etc. sitting around smoking and looking totally bored.

Oh man.  Now, John Talbott's Paris has a lot of features, but one of them is not an iPhone/Blackberry-readable map of John Talbott's "Greatest Hits."  But John Talbott's two Betz cells still connect once in a while and in a few seconds had delivered the route of march: around the corner, down the quai, across the bridge, along the opposite quai to Quai-Quai and if they wouldn't have us, schelp up the road to Le Reminet.

Just as I announced my plan, not 100 meters from Ze, one of the junior staff rushed up and said that "William sent me, come back, the current is back on."  My thought was back to the denouement of the Dreigroschenoper when Queen Victoria's messenger arrives and pardons Mack the Knife just before he's about to be executed. 

Indeed, on returning to Ze, there was the chef himself up on the step ladder fiddling with a smoke alarm or somesuch.  A man for all seasons,to reference another Broadway favorite.  Cool as a cucumber; schmoozing with the folks, you'd never know he was almost shut down by EDF. 

Now, I'm sure that the meal we had, on the heels of this, was even better if there'd been no reversal of fortune but it was, once again, one mighty fine meal.  Because all they had were the evening menus, they told us, "just order, we'll figure out the lunch prices later."  Now I understand why when I send people here assuring them it's a very reasonable meal, they come back to me with resentment in their eyes.  It's a really terrifically priced meal at lunch; at dinner, you're on your own, folks!

Disclosure: he comp'd us to an intermezzo of a fruit soup with a cheese croquette and one of his wild, exotic, sliced radisshy condiments.  

Frenchie in the 2nd: again a simply wonderful experience.

 

Frenchie, the improbably named resto, with the impressively changing menu and impossibly low prices, sited on an incredibly tiny, unknown street, is a true gem.  Richard Hesse of Paris Update, reports that it's now impossible to"walk in," at night and I'm here to report that that goes for lunch as well.

Four of us went yesterday and despite the limited choices - 2/2/2 - for great food and 19 E, who's complaining.

The firsts were a "salad" of watermelon and pignola nuts and an offsetting acidic dressing and a selection of antipasti, that given the temperature, were largely vegetables.  All delicious.

The mains consisted of sea trout with a great zippy horseradish sauce and a risotto with a ragout of lamp, eqyally tasty.

For dessert we all shared two cheese platters- Forme d'Ambert, Brie de Meaux, St Nectaire and a chevre.

With a carafe of Muscadet, bottle of Cotes de Rhone, 2 coffees and a small Badoit = 57.55 E per couple.

Keep on trucking Gregory!