2 Timelessly Charming Restaurants in Paris

Alexander Lobrano explores corners of Paris which capture the romance of the past.

À LA RENAISSANCE, PARIS

Tucked away in a residential corner of the very residential 11th arrondissement – the preferred precinct of younger, arty Parisians – this café with a big zinc bar, pink neon signage, wooden banquettes and a cracked tile floor has been a hit ever since it opened in 1919. Open daily from 8am to lam (the kitchen is closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays), the reason the locals cherish it is that it feels unselfconsciously like Paris – the real Paris, and not some irritating, treacly version of it as seen through the eyes of an American movie studio or streaming company.

This is also why there was a collective shudder among its regulars when word got out that Régine Robert, who had run it for the last 32 years, was passing it along to a new team. “God, I hope they don’t ruin it. I mean, it’s my café, I’m in and out of it all day,” fretted a friend who lives nearby. And then she called back a few days later. “So I think everything’s going to be OK. Régine sold to Carina Soto Velásquez and Joshua Fontaine of Quixotic Projects – you know, Candelaria and the Mary Celeste, or the kind of hipster places we actually like. So let’s have lunch.” On my way to meet China for the midday meal, I stopped to stare at a wall with four different levels of wonderfully ghastly, old-fashioned French wallpaper exposed in the course of an ongoing demolition. Seeing these intimate slices of someone else’s life exposed in broad. daylight brought a pang for the exhilaratingly foreign Frenchness of Paris as I found it when I moved here from London to take a job with a New York style magazine in 1986. So much of it has blurred and vanished..

China was already sitting on one of the wooden banquettes at a table in the hidden back dining room. “It’s heaven to be back here,” she said. “Ever since I walked through the door I’ve been seized by a desperate desire to run next door and buy a pack of Marlboro reds. This place makes me want to smoke, because it shoots me back in time so unexpectedly, back to the days when I did smoke, like most people, and we drank wine at lunch, which was always an hors d’oeuvres like marinated leeks, grated carrot or celery root salad, followed by a plat du jour like hachis Parmentier (French shepherd’s pie) or a bavette (flank steak) with shallot and red sauce. Then a crème caramel or apple crumble and a little espresso and it was stealthily slipping back into the office at 2.30pm in the hope that no one noticed.” I told her about the traiteur in the rue Cambon where the propriétaire wore a pink Vichy smock every day, smoked big hams in the fireplace of her country house and made everything from scratch, including the lashings of mayonnaise she used in her salade piémontaise (potatoes, ham or sausage, hard-boiled egg, tomato and chopped cornichons) and salade russe (a macédoine of finely diced vegetables). She also made stunningly delicious terrines. Everyone in the office I worked in went into shock when we returned from our month-long August holiday to find that the traiteur had been gutted and turned into a luxury shoe shop while we were lying on the beach.

In those days, no one ate at their desks and the heart of the city was a hive of teeming café-bistros at noon. Now takeaway burgers, salads and sandwiches rule the roost as a relentless work culture had throttled the Parisian tradition of a proper hot meal at lunchtime.

At A la Renaissance, they’re determined to revive the good times again, which is why there’s a €23 chalkboard lunch menu that gets you a pass or two at the buffet of hors d’oeuvres yes, grated carrot salad, lentil salad, etc. and then you get to choose between two mains and desserts. We both chose the pork braised in cream sauce spiked with mustard and cider, and the apple crumble for dessert. The food was authentic and homey, simple and soothing, and the flavour constellations were profoundly and eternally French.

The nice new owner poured us a juicy natural Chiroubles to start, and then a surprisingly good organic Pinot Noir from near Cahors. So the restaurant will remain well-known for its excellent and fairly priced list of natural wines, and China and I agreed that we’ll definitely come here soon for dinner, when the menu is much more ambitious, including sautéed cèpes and a thick faux-filet (sirloin) with tarragon sauce, a perfect pretext to get into a bottle of wine or two.

The French have a world-weary phrase: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (The more things change, the more they stay the same), and sometimes that’s a very good thing indeed.

87 rue de la Roquette, IIth arrondissement.

Tel. (33) 01 43 79 83 09. www.alarenaissance.com

Lunch menu €23, à la carte €45

PANTOBAGUETTE, PARIS

Despite the centrifuge of gentrification, Paris is still a city where it’s easy to find a brilliant hole-in-the-wall restaurant, or a laid-back place serving excellent and really original food in an off-the-beaten-track corner of the city.

A perfect example is Pantobaguette, which deliciously expresses the frisky, fun-loving, creative personality of the north-facing slope of Montmartre, or the part of this storied neighbourhood that very few tourists ever find their way to. An old friend recently ended up living here after a divorce, and when he called me one night to say he’d found a perfect canteen just a few doors down from his new flat, I happily joined him for dinner a few nights later.

I liked everything about this curious Basque-Asian place from the moment I stepped in the door, since the servers were friendly and the menu, by Rodolphe Graffin, a French chef who’d worked in Korea for several years, fascinated. Since Sven knew the ropes, I let him order, and so we began with an exceptionally luscious pâté en croûte of duck and scallops and œufs ajitsuke (soft-boiled eggs marinated in sweet soy sauce and mirin). Next up, cauliflower tempura with gochujang mayonnaise and a Thai salad; a taloa (Basque flatbread made with corn flour) garnished with broccoletti, Fourme d’Ambert cheese and fig ketchup; and sea bream with white beans from Paimpol in Brittany, a kombu (seaweed) sabayon and peppery nasturtium leaves.

All of these dishes were delicious, and intriguing as they showed off just how cosmopolitan and open to foreign flavours, ingredients and cooking techniques contemporary French cooking has become. If young French chefs are eager to usher in these new elements, they also impose a rigorous technical precision in terms of cooking an ingredient to perfection and also insist that these intriguing new foreign ingredients respect the subtlety that is the essence of Gallic gastronomic seduction. Pantobaguette is a fascinating restaurant that’s well worth finding your way to in this quiet corner of Paris.

16 Rue Eugène Sue, 18th arrondissement, Paris.

Tel. (33) 01 88 48 40 70. www.pantobaguette.fr

Average à la carte €40

From France Today Magazine