Barbara Joy Cooley's Paris Journal

Paris Journal 2014 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com

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We went outside out comfort zone yesterday. We had to do it; we had to check out the restaurant that, according to TripAdvisor, is the second best restaurant in Paris!

When I first noticed the ranking, Bistrotters was number 3. Then I checked a few days later, and it had risen to number 2. I read the reviews. Spectacular! And the average dinner is only 30 to 40 euros per person, according to that popular travel web site.

Hmmmmm. Generally, you think of the best restaurant in Paris costing something like 400 euros per person (or more).

Of the 12,597 Paris restaurants reviewed in TripAdvisor, Epicure has the number one ranking. It is the flagship restaurant for the luxury hotel named The Bristol. Dinner there costs about 400 euros per person, according to one British reviewer on TripAdvisor. Epicure has three Michelin stars.

That all sounds about right.

But Bistrotters, a casual bistro in the bowels of the 14^th arrondissement (not a swish neighborhood), is number two? Really???? Bistrotters has 918 reviews on TripAdvisor, compared to Epicure’s 615 reviews. Of course, many more people can afford 40 euros per person as opposed to 400 euros, so we should expect more reviews for Bistrotters.

Over the past 17 summers, we have dined at scads of restaurants in Paris, and we eat out almost every night when we’re here. So if a casual bistro is supposedly the number 2 resto in Paris, we absolutely must check it out.

Making the reservation is where it begins to get interesting. The resto’s web site encourages you to make the reservation online (phone is an option, it seems, however). When you do so, you’ll find that you must reserve at least five days, maybe seven, in advance. After you reserve, you receive a confirmation email. You MUST click on the confirmation link in that email or else your reservation n’existe pas.

So right there, the customer base becomes biased toward those with internet savvy.

A couple days before your reservation date, you receive a reminder email. That’s not a bad idea, when you must reserve so far in advance; anyone could forget something after a week goes by.

Curiously, only two time slots seem to be available for the reservation: 7PM or thereabouts, and 9PM or thereabouts.

The resto informs you via email that if you are more than 15 minutes late, your table will be given away. That’s fair. And it informs you that you only have that table for two and a quarter hours. Fascinating.

So what Bistrotters has done is to create two seatings, filling the first one with people who don’t mind dining at 7PM (Americans, Swedes, Brits, etc.), and the second one with people like the French, Spanish, South Americans, and Italians at 9PM. Clever, very clever.

So we prepare to take the long walk to the bowels of the 14^th slowly, stopping to see a couple parks we’ve never visited before.

The first third of the walk was in familiar 15th territory, although we don’t venture over to the shopping part of the rue Cambronne very often. We were delighted to see it thriving yet not gentrified. It just oozes with Parisian charm in an uncontrived fashion.

All the shops you’d expect – the bakers, the butchers, the pastry makers, and the produce vendors – they’re all to be found on the rue Cambronne. The street was barricaded at either end of the shopping section, making it now a pedestrianized street. I don’t know if that is going to become permanent, or if it is just because of infrastructure work now being done at two intersections.

After the rue Cambronne, as we neared the 14^th arrondissement, the nature of the neighborhood changed. The street changes name twice, becoming the rue Paul Barruel, and then the rue Saint Amande. With each name change came more change in the neighborhood. The surroundings became less prosperous, and the apartment buildings were bigger, blockier structures built in the 70s and 80s that greatly increased the population density from that of earlier days.

When we reached the rue de Vouille, which is really just an extension of the rue de la Convention (or vice versa), we took a slight left and headed for the tunnel under the railroad tracks that lead to the Gare Montparnasse. Above us, alongside the tracks, we could hear children playing on a playground that is part of an elevated park created many years ago, probably where some abandoned tracks had once been.

A train roared overhead as we crossed beneath the still-existing track. Sleeping would be impossible under those tracks.

On the other side of the tracks, the street changes names again to the rue d’Alésia. This name I know, not because we’ve been here before, but because I used to read the crime news in Le Parisien. I have not been doing that this year.

The neighborhood there is a marvelous, diverse mixture of people from various backgrounds and ethnicities. That we really liked, noting that it made our part of the 15^th seem to be rather blandly homogenous by comparison.

The excitement and diversity was good, but I have a little trouble with the volume of the voices: so much shouting instead of normal conversation levels!

I use biofeedback to send my blood pressure back down. You know that the sound of babies crying raises blood pressure in women, but not so much in men? Loud voices are like crying babies to me.

First we walked up to the Jardin du Moulin de la Vierge – a nice park surrounding by big apartment buildings. It is named for the many windmills that used to dot the area, a long time ago. The expository plaque for the park reports that there is still one of these windmills left in the Montparnasse Cemetery.

Next we found the Square Alésia-Ridder. That place was teaming with little kids playing in a big sandbox and on playground attractions. We looked like grandparents sitting on a bench watching our little ones play. This park is decorated by two murals on adjacent buildings. One, an abstract painting by Serge de Turville (1924-2005), was created in 1980. The other was done in 1992 by “streetartist” Bryan Becheri and looks like cave drawings. Fun!

When we were rested, we strolled up the rue Raymond Losserand, the main shopping street for that neighborhood, and enjoyed it but thought it would benefit from some pedestrianization.

Just off of that street, on the rue de Gergovie, we noticed a sizeable shop specializing in bottled beer. I’ve never seen that before in Paris. It had a cute name: Chop‘in, pronounced shoppin’.

At the rue Pernety, we found an usually large, street-level entrance to the metro, line 13. We turned around there and on our way back down the rue Raymond Losserand, we were very pleasantly shocked to see a quaint-as-can-be narrow cobblestoned street called the rue des Thermopyles. We walked partway up this lane, even though it was almost time for us to be making our way to the restaurant.

Many of the buildings on rue des Thermopyles are draped with wisteria and other vines, forming a verdant canyon effect. The street is named after the Battle of Thermopylae, which happened in 191 B.C. A private property owner selected that name, and the street was a private, chained-off lane through 1958. The next year, it was opened to the public, but it retained its private name.

We arrived at the restaurant before 7PM because I’d read that people line up at the door before 7. True enough, moments after we arrived, others came and stood in line behind us. We all had reservations, but I guess we all wanted good tables and we didn’t want to risk being late, knowing the tables could be given away.

That gave us time to study the blackboard menu in the window before we entered.

The owner, a young man named François Gallice, and his assistant greeted us warmly. We were given a choice of a table by the window in the front corner, or a table in the back dining room. We selected the window.

Tom ordered the creamy gazpacho as his starter course. He was feeling better, and decided on the three-course option at 37 euros instead of the two courses for 30 euros. For his main course, he ordered the lamb (no surprise), which was a special cut with a supplemental price. His dessert? Pain perdu, a rich offering -- that was a clear indication that he was feeling much, much better than the day before.

All three of his courses were superb, yet he said he would definitely never say that this is the second best restaurant in Paris.

I had the ragout of calamari, which was merely good. The calamari was rubbery, and tough. But the vegetable base of the ragout was delicious. For some reason, the concoction was topped by crispy potato sticks that I didn’t think added anything to that dish, except for visual excitement. The dish was slightly bland, but I fixed that by adding pepper.

I would swear the wine I ordered was supposed to be 8 euros for a glass, but we were charged 9. However, it was very, very nice: a white Bordeaux made from 100 percent chardonnay grapes, from a vintner named Chablis!

My main course was the croustillant de poitrine de cochon – crispy pork belly. I adored the sauce and veggies, but the pork itself was overdone and half of it was dry. I had ordered it because it got rave reviews from others, so maybe this was just an off-night for the chef, whose name is Erwan le Gahinet, by the way.

My dessert, a peach crumble, was delightful. It came upon a chocolate sablé, and was topped by a scrumptious crumble accompanied by a little scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Because we each ordered all three courses, and because of the supplement on Tom’s dish, and the slightly expensive wine, this was our most expensive dinner in Paris so far this summer ($138.24 on the credit card bill).

The service was really friendly and fine, except that we had a very long wait for the dessert. Our service took much longer than those who’d entered and ordered after us, so I wonder if that was because the chef was having difficulty with our order – probably my troubled poitrine de cochon.

One of the unusual aspects of the restaurant, given the level of cuisine, is that the host and his helper were dressed so utterly casually, in blue jeans and dark shirts, with shirttails out. That’s not a criticism; just an observation.

We did read that François had a bit of a theatre background before getting into the restaurant business, and so maybe this explains that little eccentricity.

After the dinner, we decided to walk all the way home, even though the metro was nearby and convenient. Three courses each seemed to demand post-dinner activity. And it was early enough that we had plenty of daylight to negotiate the slightly unfamiliar territory.

The fairest comparison I can make with Bistrotters is Le Blavet – because of the type of cuisine, size of restaurant, and setting off the beaten track. The better option, in our opinions, is Le Blavet, on the rue de Lourmel.

The proprietors of Le Blavet are not internet savvy, however. Their restaurant is ranked number 1,964 out of the 12,597 restaurants in Paris, according to TripAdvisor. But we say, it simply isn’t so.

The proprietors of Le Blavet would never dream of arranging things so that they’d have a full house at 7PM, and then another entire seating at 9PM. 7PM is just too early for most Paris restaurants to be in full swing.

And you won’t find many English speakers in Le Blavet. And that resto probably doesn’t want too many of them. But you will find great value, and wonderful, consistently delicious and beautiful food at Le Blavet. I’m just saying . . . .

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