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Fri, 06 May 2005

Paris (2)

My apartment was blissfully quiet, even in the morning, even though my bedroom window overlooked the tiny courtyard that all the residents used to get in and out. I made strong American-style coffee, ate a croissant, watched CNN International with breakfast, and headed out walking. After some time exploring my own neighborhood's bookstores and art galleries and design shops, it was time for lunch, and with no fixed plans I ended up at L'Atelier Joël Robuchon, which is one of Robuchon's new ventures, a hypermodern small-plates place, with an open kitchen, in the Hotel Pont-Royal. It doesn't take reservations, which I though would enhance my chances of just walking in, but it was absolutely packed, and the keeper of the list advised I should come back "around 14h or 15h". Well, I was much too hungry for that, figured I'd catch up with L'Atelier later and ended up down the street at the undistinguished but perfectly good Le Saint-Germain, a bistro-ish place right on the Boulevard.

From the crowd and their plates it looked like an "order the classics" type place, so I went with an assiette de charcuterie followed by the confit de canard with fried potatoes. It was an average-to-good duck leg confit, although I must say I've never had a bad one. (As pleasant as it was, one of my favorite little French places in San Francisco, Le Charm, actually does a much better one.) But the fried potatoes were the hit of the meal: not (Belgian-style) frites, these were flat-cut strips fried (presumably in lard) to a beautiful, golden brown crispness and tossed with herbs and garlic. Possibly the best fried potatoes I've ever had. Independent of any low-carb leanings (suspended for the duration of my stay in Europe!) I've never been a real potato person, but these converted me. The frites at Belgo Centraal in London were delicious, but these potatoes were on a whole different level.

From there I waddled over to the Louvre, which I check in on every trip, and discovered that I was just not really in a Louvre mood at all. So I went out to the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, Paris's best science museum, which is in the far northeast corner of the city, in Parc de la Villette in the 19th arrondissement. All sorts of cool tech and toys, aviation and space, computers, astronomy, biology, everything. Worth a trip. Just at sunset, I walked most of the way back to central Paris, in time to change clothes and head over to Les Halles, since I had a dinner reservation at Au Pied de Cochon.

Au Pied de Cochon is one of the best-known brasseries in Paris, and like many traditional brasseries, has, over the years, morphed into a full-service restaurant well beyond the Alsatian beer and choucroute garni fundamentals. This is one of Tony Bourdain's favorite places, and it has the special distinction of being open 24 hours a day. There are just not that many places you can get a delicious, full-course dinner at 3 AM (we're talking serious French cuisine here; please don't mention Denny's), which is one of the reasons for the complete awesomeness of Paris in the food department. Au Pied de Cochon's 24/7 hours date back to when Les Halles was the immense wholesale food market for the entire Ile de France, and needless to say, kept unusual and long hours. (The market outgrew Les Halles and moved to suburban Rungis; Les Halles is now home to a charmless underground shopping mall.) And in addition to its long hours, Au Pied de Cochon needed to impress the restaurateurs and shopkeepers who hung out at Les Halles, which it did, and has survived Les Halles' relocation and remains very popular.

There's a long menu, and unlike a lot of places in Paris, you can just have the waiter ask the chef to make something custom to your liking, at least during the wee hours or mid-afternoon lull. But the most celebrated specialty of the house is the eponymous pied de cochon grillée, roasted pig's foot. (Grillée, usually translated "grilled", can mean grilled, roasted, or pan-fried, depending on context. Au Pied de Cochon's pig's foot appears to be oven-cooked, but I would not be surprised to learn a frying pan was involved as well.)

I started with the soupe à l'oignon gratinée, which was hearty and filling (it's one of the late-night favorites). Then the grillée itself, lightly breaded and too hot to touch! I had had pig's foot before, both the German/Alsatian smoked style, and the cold, sliced Chinese style, but Au Pied de Cochon's was something else: it's not deboned, and the slow cooking which makes the meat tender means it also falls away from the bones, which are incredibly numerous, and the connective tissue has dissolved as well. So you are provided a little bowl for bones, and an extra napkin. Fortified with some of the house burgundy, I went to work, and it was delicious, though quite a bit of work. No room for dessert!

And so to bed.

After my epic struggle with the pied de cochon, I elected to sleep in, and I looked in the fridge and found some goose rillettes and Vietnamese imperial rolls, and decided that, with black coffee, grapefruit juice, and fish sauce, would make a fine brunch.

I headed back to Les Halles, with the idea of actually seeing the shopping center since it had been closed the previous evening when I ate at Au Pied de Cochon, but it was indeed unremarkable, and I didn't stay. I walked the interesting pedestrian streets east of Les Halles and made it to the Centre Georges Pompidou, which unlike the Louvre I actually was in the mood for, and spent the afternoon there, reserving a little daylight for wandering around Beaubourg and the Marais.

The Marais is an old Jewish district, with kosher restaurants, synagogues, and shops. More recently it has been the center of much of Paris's gay and lesbian community, with clubs and bars and a community center. On my trip in 1997, my friend Darin took me to a marvelous place called Equinox, which featured Quebecois cuisine. (I had rabbit terrine en papillotte, a lovely duck breast with honey and cranberries, and a serious St. Emilion, a 1993 Le Second de Haut-Sarpe.) So when I wandered down the rue des Rosiers, one of the main streets of the Marais, I was very happy to see that it was still there and still popular. I was tempted to return, but really had another idea in mind.

That was to sample the Jewish cuisine of the Marais, which could mean either one of the venerable deli-style institutions like Chez Jo Goldenberg, with pastrami, cabbage rolls, and other Eastern European delicacies, or else Israeli-style food. Since Israeli food is relatively hard to find back home in California, I opted for the latter, and the most interesting looking was the modernistic Mi-va-Mi, which (if my Hebrew is correct) means "who and who?".

It was only 7:30 PM, meaning I was the only customer in the place (Parisians dine late), but I was greeted warmly and took a table my the window. It had been cold and raining off and on most of the day, but I looked up at the floodlight illuminating the restaurant's sign and noticed snowflakes! The idea of eating grilled middle-eastern food at an Israeli restaurant in Paris while it was snowing made me happy for some completely unfathomable reason.

The food itself was a delight, and a good contrast from the heavy cream sauces of the previous couple of weeks. (Mi-va-Mi, being a kosher meat restaurant, cannot serve dairy products, or, of course, pork or shellfish.) What is did have was the mixed grill, consisting of lamb kofte kebab, chicken en brochette, and a merguez (spicy lamb) sausage, served with a very generous assortment of Israeli salads, and a glass of unlabeled and undescribed house red wine which came from a wooden barrel in the corner of the dining room. (It wasn't bad, and was the cheapest wine I drank in Europe, at about $1.75/glass.) I stayed late, as the place filled up, with parties around me speaking Hebrew, Arabic, English, Russian, as well as French, with greater festivity as the wine flowed freely. Definitely my kind of place!

Posted at 21:38 | permanent link

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