Alcazar

As part of Pia Myrvold’s art opening on Friday (see related post) we were treated to an excellent dinner atAlacazar, a very contemporary restaurant nearby. Unlike anything we’ve yet been to in Paris, walking into Alcazar gives you the feeling you’re in London or New York (or even San Francisco). It’s a big space, with the main restaurant on the ground floor and a loud and too hip bar on the mezzanine.  We ate in le salon privé which is also on the mezzanine, happily separated from the bar by glass doors that controlled the sound. As Shannon said, this is the kind of place that caused restaurant reviewers to add sound ratings to their rating schemes–Alcazar would get 4 bells or a bomb from the SF Chronicle.

Still, if you’re craving that hip, urban, bar-restaurant scene we would recommend Alcazar. We had a fixed menu (there was a group of around 40 people) which is difficult to make interesting and tasty but Alcazar pulled off both. The first course was smoked salmon with creme fraiche and caviar, served on a blini. It was really delicious and (we think) not just because it was 10pm (our usual bedtime!) and we were really hungry. The main course was chicken in a morel mushroom cream sauce served with asparagus. It was perfectly cooked, an accomplishment given that 40 people were served nearly simultaneously, but it did need a little bit of additional salt and pepper to brighten up the flavors of the gravy.

Au Gourmand

Au Gourmand

This past Friday I took the day off from work to deal with administrative issues here. We went to St. Denis to meet with the Paris 8 staff who are going to help us get our cartes de sejour. We wrote about the struggles with the carte de sejours in a previous post and it turns out we don’t deal with the government ourselves–Shannon’s researcher status means that the folks at Paris 8 deal with it for us. More to come when we finally succeed because, after all, this is a restaurant post.

Between the trip to St. Denis and some other errands, we stopped in the 1st arrondissement. I had scoped out a few possible restaurants and we walked by them one by one. The first restaurant I had previously visited in July with my old friend Reid Hoffman. If it hadn’t been the first we stumbled across we probably would have eaten there. After wandering past a few more and deciding they weren’t right for the moment, we decided on Au Dauphin. When we got to the address we couldn’t find it–it appears to have changed hands. Thrown for a loop, we struck out for Au Gourmand on the nearby Rue Molière. This seemed appropriate since Shannon had just seen Tartuffe two nights previously.

Christophe

Christophe logo

We had lunch recently at Christophe, a tiny speck of a place on Rue Descartes, just off the end of Rue Moufftard. Rue Mouffetard is a charming market street  that has a number of desultory restaurants. If you find yourself ready for a meal as you’re walking up Rue Mouffetard please just keep going as Mouffetard becomes Rue Descartes and you’ll find Christophe where Rue Descartes forms a small plaza as it runs into Rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève.

Despite its small size (maybe 8 tables seating 25?), Christophe is elegant, with dramatic, vase-themed paintings on the walls and simple, contemporary place settings. I complained that it was a bit too quiet and they needed some music. Just then the bells from a nearby church started a long (15+minutes) and beautiful recital, solving the slight problem.

Louis Vins

Louis Vins

We’ll be trying to write about food and restaurants while we’re staying in Paris. This is the first in (hopefully) a series….

Friday was my birthday and Shannon and I were able to arrange a great babysitting option (another post on this later I’m sure) and therefore able to go out to a nice dinner. We chose Louis Vins, a restaurant recommended by Yves Epelboin, a colleague at UPMC (as well as by Pudlo, the definitive restaurant guide to Paris). It was fantastic. You should eat here. Probably more than once, unless you’re only staying one day…

The decor (check the photos on the website, they are pretty good but don’t give a sense of how it feels at night) is very cool. Yellow tabletops, really thoughtful lighting, and quirky but carefully selected objects throughout the room gave the room a more intimate and romantic feel than you would expect from peering in the window at mid-day. We were shown to a table right by the window and were able to watch other couples peruse the menu posted outside. After the appetizers it was all we could do to stop from running out and telling them to come in.