Le Hangar

12 Impasse Berthaud, 75003 Paris

Métro:  Rambuteau

I live on the border of Beaubourg and le Marais, but more often than not I find myself heading east into le Marais when it is time to go out to dinner.  Why?  Because the whole area around the Centre Pompidou is glutted with overpriced tourist traps. So I was skeptical when I heard rave reviews of Le Hangar, which is tucked just off of rue Beaubourg on the dead-end Impasse Berthaud.  Getting there is a rather strange experience.  You turn immediately from the hoards around Beaubourg onto the deserted Impasse Berthaud, a street that houses little besides Le Hangar and a mildly terrifying-looking doll museum. But despite my reservations about the location, I did hear enough good things about Le Hangar that I decided to take my best friend there during her visit to Paris for the New Year.  It ended up being a perfect night, probably the best one we had during her visit.  Some places don’t even warrant being dressed up in all my fancy adjectives.  I just really, genuinely love Le Hangar.

The décor is neither faddish nor overdone, just clean and simple.  The place is family-run and everyone is extremely friendly.  They bring a small crock of a olive tapenade and toasts while you look over the menu, which is probably not fussy enough to actually qualify as an “amuse bouche,” but it’s nice.  The menu is handwritten and filled with pasted-in additions and subtractions that reflect the season.  When my best friend M visited, we shared an entrée of tender escargot in a black truffle cream sauce.  I had the evening’s special for my main course: a sweet and creamy langoustine risotto.  M had the exquisite escalopes de fois gras, which are essentially fried slices of foie gras served on a bed of olive-oil whipped potatoes and drizzled with duck fat.  When it arrived, she declared that there would be no way she could possibly finish all that liver.  After she took a bite, however, I could barely get in there for a taste.  For dessert, we split the chocolate soufflé, which is served with a spicy cinnamon gelato.  Everything was perfectly executed, right down to the lovely assortment of petits fours that accompanied our coffee.

When A and I returned to Le Hangar last Friday, we shared an entrée of salmon tartare with olive oil and fresh basil.  I thought it was light and subtle.  He said it was “fishy.” I objected and said that I thought it was delicious.  He agreed.  Apparently A doesn’t think that “fishy” is a bad thing.  I guess adjectives are subjective.  His main course of filet de boeuf aux morilles, however, was objectively amazing.  Though I suspect Charlie Chaplin’s shoe would be delicious if you covered it in a morel mushroom cream sauce, Le Hangar expertly handled A’s saignant steak.  For me, the parmentier de confit de canard.  Duck confit is leg meat that has been cured in salt and then poached in its own fat.  Parmentiers are a kind of pseudo-Shepard’s pie made with a variety of meats.  Le Hangar’s potatoes were luscious and smooth, with a nice flavor of nutmeg and cinnamon that offset the fattiness of the duck. It was my first parmentier in France and I’m glad I saved myself for Le Hangar.

Details: So delightful I’m reticent to tell the internets about it for fear that it will get too popular.  Fortunately only six people read this blog and I’d take them to dinner here if they were ever in Paris.  Le Hangar takes reservations, but I haven’t needed them so far (it helps to arrive before nine on the weekends as the place will fill up).  The whole shebang for two (entrée and plat, shared dessert, and a sick bottle of wine) will probably set you back about 100 euro.  Be prepared to be wished a genuine “bonne soirée” by the entire restaurant two or three times when you depart.  Totally charming.  Can’t imagine why you’d eat anywhere else in Beaubourg.

Photo via google.fr

La Briciola

64 rue Charlot, 75003 Paris

Métro: Filles du Calvaire

I regularly talk about how Southern California has made me contemptuous of numerous features of life elsewhere in the globe. These include, but are not limited to: winter, farmer’s markets, and people with normal-colored, uncapped teeth. What can I say, except that Southern California does weather, produce, and cosmetic dentistry very well. One thing that Southern California does not do particularly well, however, is pizza. Moving to Orange County from New York, I was bewildered to discover that the thin-crusted, wood-oven fired, San Marzano tomato, mozzarella di bufala, and fresh basil based pizzas that are ubiquitous in NYC are virtually non-existent in the land of never-ending sunshine. I say “virtually” non-existent because there is a peculiar breed of born-and-bred Angeleno who knows the most amazing place in the most non-descript shopping center somewhere in the Valley where you can get every single delicious thing you could ever dream of eating from anywhere in the world. I’m not going to knock that guy – sometimes he grows up and becomes Jonathan Gold, sharing his adventures in eating and delightful turn of phrase with the masses. Mr. Gold, you are always near the top of my fantasy husbands list. More often than not, however, that guy ends up being one of those sneering SoCal natives who hoard their shopping-center wisdom as a kind of collective fuck-you to the millions of transplants who flood into the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area every year in the hopes of becoming famous just for being famous. Don’t get me wrong, I get tourist-loathing. Native Coloradans like myself have a lot of sneers saved up for Texans on all-inclusive Breckenridge ski vacation. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t know where to get good pizza in Southern California, but I’m sure that there is someone reading this who does. I might ask that if you are such a person, you either share the wealth or keep quiet, otherwise I might have to put you in the corner with my Angry Reader. Oh, and if your suggestion is that I go to Pizzeria Mozza, I’ll beat you to the punch and tell you that I did and am going to give it a resounding, overhyped “eh.” It was fine, I guess, and the celebrity-to-normal-person ratio seemed pretty high if that’s your thing. But it’s pizza, for chrissakes. Shouldn’t there be a little bit of the Everyman in a pizza place? No Everyman has ever walked through the door of Pizzeria Mozza and ordered himself a beer and a slice. Pizzeria Mozza is one of those uncomfortable LA places where all of the striving that everyone is doing leaves the air fetid with desperation and greed. It’s not my scene, but I’m glad you like it. I’ll just say that I think it is a little too smug. As my ex-boyfriend always said, “don’t go breaking your arm patting yourself on the back.” Don’t go breaking your arm patting yourself on the back, Pizzeria Mozza.

All of this is to say that the past few years of my life have seriously lowered my standards for pizza. My criteria have shifted from “Is that with fresh green manzanilla olives?” to “How many minutes did you say delivery takes?  Does that come with cheesy breadsticks or is that extra?” Moving to Paris, I knew that I would have to forget about a few things that I really enjoy eating, like Mexican food. I included pizza in the list of desires better left abandoned. I was thus pleasantly surprised to find La Briciola, a seriously decent Neopolitan pizzeria in my Marais neighborhood. I really appreciate a cohesive aesthetic vision in restaurant décor and they hit the mark at La Briciola with exposed brick, stacked cans of beautiful tomatoes, chalkboard menus, and unfussy furniture. One of the reviews I read online said that the crowd was an intimidating combination of “fashion and gay” (my friend S:  “You be fashion, I’ll be gay.”) Yes, while the neighborhood is a kind of Mecca for emergent fashion designers and gays, and the crowd therefore inevitably slick, La Briciola is a bustling, decidedly friendly place. The bartender is absurdly nice, making sure that you have a glass of wine and a dish of olives while you wait for a table. When we corrected our bill (they hadn’t charged us for our second carafe of their lovely house vino), the waitress brought over limoncello for the table. It’s stuff like that that makes you want to go back to a restaurant and La Briciola has it in spades.

And the pizza? It’s pretty damn good, excellent for Paris pizza, and it kicks the ass of anything I ate in Los Angeles. The crust is thin and foldable with beautiful little blackened bubbles on the bottom. The toppings are all natural and they are exactly what you would expect from a real Italian place (no pineapple here). I had the Romana, a gorgeously basic pie with tomato sauce, mozzarella, and anchovies. Some good eating and two carafes of their lovely house Chianti later, my friends and I found ourselves happily stuffed and inebriated at midnight, having whiled away the entire evening at the restaurant. If you asked me to list my favorite things about Paris, I would tell you that even at a hip, busy, people-waiting-hungrily-at-the-door joint you will never, ever be rushed away from your table. Sometimes that means you aren’t getting in that night and the hostess will probably tell you so. Sometimes that means a long wait. But I’ll happily wait for an hour for a table, especially if there is a bar. There is nothing I hate more than being served the check before your plates have even been cleared so that the table can be turned over as quickly as possible to a new party (I’m looking at you, Mozza). This simply doesn’t happen in Paris. I’m always bewildered that people complain about the service here. I don’t want to know my waiter’s middle name or what he thinks about the weather. I don’t need to be checked on fifteen times and interrupt my conversation with my dinner companion to explain to a stranger how much I’m enjoying my food. I can pour my own goddamn wine and water, thank you very much. And most importantly, if I want to make an evening of a meal, I should be able to. La Briciola is a lovely place to do just that and it deserves a visit.

Details: Open Monday through Saturday for lunch and dinner. Reservations accepted and encouraged, though not mandatory. Pizzas are around 15 euros each. Well-curated list of well-priced Italian wines. Anybody who can tell me what kind of olives they serve you to munch on (enormous, bottle-green, soft-flesh, milky, sweet, and vaguely waxy) gets an extra-special Keeping the Bear Garden in the Background reader prize (probably an obscene, animated, lenticular postcard). Hey, we’re on a budget here.

Le 20 de Bellechasse

20 rue de Bellechasse, 75007 Paris

Métro:  Solferino

Back when I was young, young, young, I lived in Paris for a semester of study abroad. Oh yes, a semester of study abroad from my expensive East coast private university! You know, just like the kids I ruthlessly mock when I am out and about! I am a total hypocrite!  In my defense, I don’t think I was the worst of the worst when it came to being a study abroad stereotype. I was the one who wandered around alone a lot, occasionally breaking up the wandering with reading in cafes and quietly weeping in parks. Which is certainly a study abroad stereotype, but a less offensive one than the kid who spends every weekend in a different European city getting wasted on his parents’s dime.

One of my friends during college happened to live on the rue de Bellechasse during this period of time over a just-opened restaurant, the rather uncreatively named Le 20 de Bellechasse. Her apartment was improbably nice for a Parisian apartment, perhaps more so than I even remember (I was still too young, young, young to know that having a washing machine is pretty luxurious in this town). Come to think of it, the area around the restaurant is actually a strange area for a young person to live. It’s a bit of a walk from the hopping area of St. Germain des Près. It’s only a few blocks from the Musée d’Orsay, but at night it is pretty deserted with the exception of Le 20. But Le 20 is a tiny, bustling haven if you find yourself on that side of town. It might even be worth a detour.

A and I happened to find ourselves wandering aimlessly around the Left Bank last night after watching Antonioni’s 1957 Il grido. We had debated between that and a documentary about a bloody Malaysian military coup but decided that the Antonioni might be less of a bummer. Wrong answer! Unmoored by all the existentialism, and the bleakness, and the suicide (ugh), neither of us had much of a sense of what we wanted to eat. We got to the point where we were going into restaurants, sitting down, looking around uncomfortably, and then leaving, only for A to moan something like “I mean, they were going to burn the fields to put in an AIRSTRIP! In that shitty town?  Really!?” Apparently despite his adeptness in dealing with warlords, I have a softie on my hands. At any rate, after traversing St. Germain and contemplating everything from seafood to Tex-Mex, I finally suggested that we head east to Le 20.

Le 20 is one of my go-to places for visitors. I brought some dear family friends there on their first night in Paris.  I brought my mother and B there on her last night in Paris. It’s always heaving with a splendid-looking young professional crowd and run by a group boisterous young guys who seem to know everybody. Sébastien Tellier is on heavy rotation on the stereo. The menu is unfussy, often seasonal, and written on chalkboards posted around the dining room. They have your basic French bistro fare, from an excellent steak tartare with enormous capers to a dreamy noix de saint Jacques au beurre noisette (scallops in a brown butter sauce). They handle meat especially well at this joint;  I’ve enjoyed their entrecôte, their lamb chops, and their bacon cheeseburger – all served decidedly saignant should you desire. Here is the vocabulary lesson I wish I would have had in Madame Snow’s high school French class (if had gone more often):

bleu: rare (bloody)

saignant: medium-rare

à point: medium

bien cuit: well-done

In France, when they say “saignant,” they mean medium-rare. Nothing peeves me more than what has happened in the United States with the Chilis-ification of hamburger cooking. If your beef is too frightening to be served anything less than well-done, then you shouldn’t be serving it in the first place. It’s bad enough that the vast majority of beef sold for hamburgers in the U.S. is already fatless, dense, and bland, but to serve it grilled to grayish-brown is like getting hit in the face. American food-poisioning paranoia is indicative of a lot of different collective anxieties and that rant is better saved for another day. Suffice it to say that nicer restaurants ought to grind their own beef in house so that the constant low-level fear of poisoning their lawsuit-happy customers doesn’t prevent them from cooking everyone’s meal to the temperature they desire.

All this is to say that they cook a really good burger at Le 20. Two of them and a couple of pints quickly pulled A and I out of our Antonioni-induced funk. Oh, and did I mention the fries, which come out on huge plates for everyone to share? Perfect. We didn’t stay for one of the best moelleux au chocolat (molten chocolate cakes) in Paris for my money, but if you find yourself at Le 20, you certainly should.

Details:  Open everyday for lunch and dinner except Sunday. A great place to grab a bite after visiting the Musée d’Orsay. The moelleux au chocolat takes twenty to forty minutes to prepare, so think about ordering it with your meal.

Le Pick-Clops

16 rue Vieille du Temple, 75004 Paris

Metro: Hôtel de Ville

One of my earliest memories is of helping my mom make meatloaf.  As any good meatloaf chef will tell you, it’s best to mix the ingredients together with one’s hands so that everything doesn’t get too overworked.  I was always the designated hand-mixer.  I loved doing it, not just because the feeling of cold raw meat between my fingers was pretty divine.  I loved it because when she wasn’t looking, I could totally sneak a clump of raw beef, egg yolks, and onion to eat.  This memory suggests that Clarence has been around for a long time, the dirty little bastard.

Fast forward to the present day and I find myself in the dreamy position of living in a culture that actually sanctions eating that sacred combination of raw filet, shallots or onions, egg yolks, and capers. Oh, yeah, throw in some mustard and Worcestershire sauce. Can I tell you how much I love steak tartare for a moment? I love it more than almost anything. I love how it looks. I love its name – supposedly to commemorate the Tartars, fierce warriors who wouldn’t stop riding to build a fire to cook and instead ate their meat raw. My boyfriend Wikipedia tells me that a variation on this story is that the Tartars kept their meat under their horses’ saddles so that it would be tenderized by their riding. My boyfriend also tells me that steak tartare used to be called steak à l’Americaine, which cracks me up because most Americans would shudder at the idea of eating a pile of raw beef. But serve it with a salad and some fries and you’ve got standard fare at any Parisian bistro.

I had a pretty killer steak tartare last night at one of my favorite places in the Marais, Le Pick-Clops.  This place has such an excellent vibe.  Everybody is so nice.  The waitstaff is nice.  The bartenders are nice.  The patrons are nice to each other (and nice-looking). It’s nice in the morning for brunch, nice in the afternoon for a coffee and some grading, and nice in the evening for a rum punch and dinner.  It also seems to always attract one real character.  Last night it was an adorable older woman who kept on her full-length mink coat and red hat and didn’t budge from her fizzy water for the two hours we sat there.  I took a picture of her for you while pretending to take a picture of my friend B.

The one drawback is that Le Pick-Clops is loud, but not like The Yardhouse on a Friday night in Newport Beach is loud (that reference is for YOU Orange County!).  The soundtrack is amusingly questionable.  During the first afternoon I spent at Le Pick-Clops, I listened to the entirety of Nirvana’s Nevermind followed by an indeterminate Eminem album.  But most of the time it is a standard hipster mix that gets progressively more electronic as the night progresses.  B was wincing slightly by the end of our meal, I was fist-pumping.  Different strokes.

The décor is totally charming, kind of a dressed-up 1950s style diner with multicolored Naugahyde chairs, Formica tables, Coca-Cola kitsch, lots of mirrors, and turquoise paint.  My favorite part is the ever-flattering pink, orange, and gold neon that provides the majority of the lighting (also the reason why I adore the bar at Le Palais de Tokyo).  I look excellent in neon (and so will you).  The food at Le Pick-Clops is really satisfying and the drinks are a bit more creative than what you see elsewhere in Paris, which not really a town for cocktails.  While the steak tartare is sublime, if you are feeling a little less bloodthirsty, try L’Inca salad, comprised of mixed greens, lentils, quinoa, and avocado (the latter two things are pretty rare on the salad front around here).

Final note for French language dorks:  We Anglophones puzzled about the name for a while, but I asked the bartender tonight and he explained that it means a person who bums cigarettes.  How excellent to have a such a word.

Details: Open seven days a week.  Conviviality mandatory.