You’re invited to join the Ultimate French Mediterranean Food-and-Wine Tour from Marseilles to Nice from October 7-14, 2023. I’ll be hosting this trip with Ruth Reichl, Nancy SIlverton and Laura Ochoa, and we’ll be learning why Marseilles has become such a superb food town, sampling some spectacular wines, eating the best of Nice, and concluding our intimate gastronomic journey (this trip is limited to twenty travelers and is already half booked) together with a meal at chef Mauro Colagreco’s Michelin three-star restaurant Miramar. I designed this trip, and I’m really excited about it, becau ..read more

  Prunier is back, and it’s better than ever. Most recently owned by the late Pierre Bergé, founder of the Yves Saint Laurent fashion house with the late designer of the same name, one of the most glamorous restaurants in the world has just reopened under new owners, the Swiss investment group Olma Luxury Holdings, with a new menu by Michelin three-star chef Yannick Alleno. Laurie Ochoa, Ruth Reichl, Nancy Silver and me   So when Laurie Ochoa, food editor of the LA Times; writer and editor Ruth Reichl (my old boss at the still lamented GOURMET), baking genius and restaurante ..read more

In Hebrew, the word ‘Tekés’ means ceremony, with the implication of a celebration. In Paris, the word now has two meanings–the original Hebrew one, and a second one as the name of Tekés, a very popular new restaurant, which is also a cause for rejoicing, because it has brought modern Israeli vegetarian cooking to a city that’s long been lamentably well-known for its indifference to vegetables. The long running exception to this generalization has been chef Alain Passard’s shudderingly expensive Michelin three-star restaurant Arpege, but now people who love good food and eat plant-based diets ..read more

  Tucked away in a mercifully still ungentrified street in the northern Marais, Parcelles is a very near perfect Parisian bistrot a vins, or bistro with a special focus on wine. It’s immediate charm, which comes from the wake of the addresses that proceeded it at the same address, notably Le Taxi Jaune, is joyously authentic and profoundly Parisian, from the big copper-clad bar to suspended factory lamps and a retro cracked tile floor. This isn’t some fly-in-amber address, however. Instead, you instantly sense the suave professionalism and seriousness of the staff from the moment you’re ..read more

Chef Tom Meyer   Stepping through the front door of talented young chef Tom Meyer’s restaurant Granite in Paris unleashed a rush of memories and also inspired hope during a profoundly testing time. Though the COVID epidemic is still very much with us, as of this writing (December 16, 2021), restaurants in France are remain open, with assiduous verification of your vaccination status before you’re allowed inside, and the Gallic gastronomic scene has recovered smartly this year with the opening of many outstanding new restaurants. Deprived of restaurants for much of 2020, the French hav ..read more

Chefs Pierre Toitou and Cyril Pham   The new Drum Cafe at the LUMA Foundation in Arles is an excellent example of how good a museum restaurant can actually be when someone cares about serving good food instead of the usual bland industrial food-service catering too often found at museums. The food at the Drum Cafe is so delectable that it’s very much coming here for a meal even if you’re not planning to the visit this new contemporary arts complex, which was recently created from a decommissioned rail yard and train-carriage maintenance workshops. My curiosity about this place was firs ..read more

  The Paris restaurant scene has deliciously come back to life after the challenges of two recent lockdowns, and a talented new generation of chefs are serving intriguing contemporary French cooking that leaps beyond the cliches of la bistronomie (modern French bistro cooking) with an emphasis on simplicity and sustainability. Though one or more of the restaurants below are currently closed for their August holidays, this is the cheat sheet you’ll want to tuck away for your next trip to Paris L’Arrière-Cuisine. Chef David Rathgeber’s Montparnasse table L’Assiette is one of my favor ..read more

Chef Matthias Marc   Trout tartare with raspberries, fresh horseradish and beetroot coulis   It wasn’t until I went to Liquide, chef Matthias Marc’s new “modern tavern” cum bistro in Les Halles in Paris the other day for lunch that I realized just how much I had been missing restaurants since they shut down in France last October. What I’d been craving was that whole spectrum of gastronomic talent, wit and creativity which will likely forever elude me even during my best moments as a cook. In other words, my palate was just desperate for dishes beyond my ken in the kitchen ..read more

“A flat-out wonderful read, full of the stories and secrets that make eating in Paris what we want to be doing right now. Lobrano has a genius for finding characters at every level of the food chain—the peasant chef, or the grande dame home cook, or the bistro revolutionary with his simple, perfect dishes—and for owning up to tasting foods for the first time and describing them with surprising poetic flair. Reading My Place at the Table on a New York subway, I did something I have never done: I missed my stop.” —Bill Buford, best-selling author of Heat and Dirt ..read more

  As the months roll by during the second national lockdown of France’s restaurants, I often find myself thinking of chef More Sacko and his intriguing restaurant MoSuke. The reason why is that I desperately hope this exceptionally talented young chef’s intriguing restaurant will survive the financial vicissitudes of the greatest crisis to face French gastronomy since World War II, the successive closures imposed by the French government as a way of tamping down the Covid pandemic in France. This almost all-white dining room with bamboo laminate topped tables, a few bold splashes of co ..read more