If you're passionate about eating well during your next trip to Paris, you couldn't ask for a better travel companion than Alexander Lobrano's charming, friendly, and authoritative Hungry for Paris, the first new comprehensive guide in many years to the city's restaurant scene. Lobrano, Gourmet magazine's European correspondent, has written for almost every major food and travel magazine since he became an American in Paris in 1986. Here he shares his personal selection of the city's 102 best restaurants, each of which is portrayed in savvy, fun, lively descriptions that are not only indispensable for finding a superb meal but a pleasure to read.
Lobrano reveals the hottest young chefs, the coziest bistros, the best buys--including those haute cuisine restaurants that are really worth the money--and the secret places Parisians love most, together with information on the most delicious dishes, ambience, clientele, and history of each restaurant. A series of delightful essays cover various aspects of dining in Paris, including "Table for One" (how to eat alone), "The Four Seasons" (the best of seasonal eating in Paris), and "Eating the Unspeakable" (learning to eat what you don't think you like). All restaurants are keyed to helpful maps, and the book is seasoned with beautiful photographs by Life magazine photographer Bob Peterson that will only help whet your appetite for tasting Paris.
Praise for Hungry for Paris: "Every time I go to Paris I call Alec and ask him where to eat. Nobody else has such an intimate knowledge of what is going on in the Paris food world right this minute, and there is nobody I trust more to tell me all the latest news. Happily, Alec has written it all down in this wonderful book and now I can stop bothering him." --Ruth Reichl
"Hungry for Paris is a brilliant book with an almost fatal flaw: the writing is so enchanting you may never leave home to go to any of Alec's favorite places. Few people know,love and appreciate Paris restaurants the way Alec does; no one writes about them better or with more charm." --Dorie Greenspan, author of Baking From My Home to Yours
"When I was nineteen, I went to France to study, but instead, I just ate. The experience changed me: I came back to the United States, and a few years later, started Chez Panisse. In Hungry for Paris, Alec Lobrano describes his own gastronomic awakening, probably better than I could! This book is a wonderful guide to eating in Paris." --Alice Waters
"I dearly hope Monsieur Lobrano has an unlisted phone number, for his book will make readers more than merely hungry for the culinary riches of his adopted city; it will make them ravenous for a dining companion with his particular warmth, wry charm, and refreshingly pure joiede vivre. Lobrano is a sly raconteur, a respectful critic, and the very best kind of insider--one who genuinely longs to share all his best discoveries." --Julia Glass, author of The Whole World Over and Three Junes
"Organized by neighborhood and interspersed with delightful sections on such matters as eating alone. . . . This is the sort of guide you read before you go to Paris... Lobrano tells you what to expect and how to act."-Los Angeles Times Book Review "Lobrano . . . fleshes out his luscious prose with tempting photos. Hungry for Paris is like a cozy bistro on a chilly day: It makes you feel welcome." -Washington Post Book World
"Le Grand Vfour....
Excerpts
Chapter One...
Chez Georges chez georges is the gastronomic equivalent of the little black dress--unfailingly correct, politely coquettish, and impeccably Parisian. This is why it was no surprise to find ourselves seated next to the affable and slightly owlish Didier Ludot on a balmy summer night. A self-described antiquaire de mode (antiques dealer specializing in fashion), Ludot runs La Petite Robe Noire (The Little Black Dress) and another boutique specializing in vintage fashion in the Palais-Royal. Since he was entertaining a customer, a stylish Park Avenue blonde who gamely insisted that they speak French so that she "might mend the wreckage of what I half learned in college"--much to her credit, her French was good, and much to his credit, his patience didn't fail once during a two-and-a-half-hour meal--Ludot's choice of a restaurant was perfect. Chez Georges is exactly what most foreigners want a bistro to be, which is basically a place where time has stood still on a very French clock (Parisians like it, too, but find it expensive).
Here, the menu is still written out by hand daily and then mimeographed in lilac-colored ink. Brown banquettes upholstered in what the French euphemistically call moleskin but North Americans know as leatherette line both walls of the long, narrow railroad-car-like dining room, and there's a little bar just inside the front door where your bill is tallied and taxis are called. The decor, such as it is, dates back to its founding in the early 1900s and doesn't add up to much more than mirrors interspersed with Gothic columns and a pale tiled floor.
The older waitresses who have ruled the roost for decades are gradually retiring, but the younger staff perpetuate a delightful house serving style based on smiles and solicitude. And most important of all, the menu hasn't changed an iota during the twenty years that I've been coming here. This place remains an unfailingly good address for a trencherman's feed of impeccably prepared bistro classics.
On a warm night, Alice, Bruno, and I raced through a bottle of the good house Chablis and the plate of sausages and radishes that came with a little pot of butter as soon as we'd ordered. Though everyone and his great-aunt is staking a claim to Julia Child these days, I couldn't resist telling them about how she'd taught me to butter my radishes on my first visit to Chez Georges. Invited to dinner by the late Gregory Usher, an American who founded the cooking school at the Hôtel Ritz and a close friend of Julia's, I arrived uncharacteristically early and found Child already seated and alone. I introduced myself and watched in fascination as she buttered a radish and chomped away. Then, after a swig of Sancerre, she said, "The radish is one of nature's most underrated creations." I smiled, and she added, "It's a good thing no one overheard me. When you're my age, a remark like that could land you in an old folk's home. Still, a nicely buttered radish is just the thing to remind any cook to stay humble and simple in the kitchen. Most foods don't really need any improving."
I suspect Child loved Chez Georges for the same reasons I do. Not only is the food delicious, but it's a good spot in which to channel frivolous, flirtatious postwar Paris, the wondrous city that not only made Julia Child into Julia Child but Audrey Hepburn into Audrey Hepburn, Leslie Caron into Leslie Caron, etc.
Bruno, good Frenchman that he is, ordered a salade de museau de boeuf--thin slices of beef muzzle, a curious crunchy mix of meat and cartilage, which Alice gamely tried, and I went for a sauté of girolles, tiny wild mushrooms, which were delicious, but not garlicky enough. In fact, the...
