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I don’t write much about food here, which seems strange since I live in a city famous for restaurants. However, this week has involved visits to a couple of notable Parisian eateries. So I thought I’d recount our experiences.

Image: Stephen Rees (Creative Commons)

Saturday night I suggested the Polidor, of which I had heard good things. It’s just down the road from me, behind the Odéon. It’s one of the oldest traditional bistrots in Paris, and regular customers included James Joyce, Boris Vian, Rimbaud and Verlaine. Despite its illustrious connections, it is not overrun with tourists and hence offers a menu at suitably reasonable prices.

Having not booked, we thought we’d arrive at the stereotypically Anglo-Saxon hour of 7.30pm – the theory being that we would not have to compete with locals for a seats.  As it was, the place was almost full already, and we got places on a long table in the front room, next to a talkative French couple.  Everyone at the Polidor shares tables, and this is part of the fun.

The place makes the most of its humble bistrot beginnings, and is everything a Paris bistrot should be – mirrored walls, wood panelling and red-and-white checked tablecloths.  It’s noisy and the service is unfussy and rapid: it’s worth remembering that the bistrot was 19th century Paris’ equivalent of McDonalds.

Image: Ed Swierk (Creative Commons)

We all chose the menu fixe at 25EUR. For entrée I had a rather stunning blonde lentil and foie gras soup, which came served in a brown stoneware bowl. In case you’ve never thought of putting foie gras in soup before – trust me, it works, and it’s delicious.

The main course was a rich and satisfying boeuf bourgignon – with chunky carrots. If some of the meat was a tad dry in the middle, the situation was rapidly resolved with application of the oodles of sauce that accompanied it.

For some reason I chose a bottle of Madiran to accompany the meal. It may be the wine with the highest level of antioxidants in the world (one glass makes you cancer-proof for a week), but it was a little heavy-going as a food wine. My theory was that its southwestern origins might have complemented the foie gras soup. However I should have stuck with my first intinct and chosen a Burgundy: more subtle as an accompaniment to the boeuf bourguignon.

Dessert was also simple, understated and divine – a rasberry bavarois in a red berry coulis. Enough said.

Overall: eat fast, eat well. Polidor was excellent value with very good food, good service and an “authentic” bustling atmosphere. For 30EUR a head including wine, you can do a lot worse in Paris.

Polidor
41 Rue Monsieur le Prince
75006 Paris
Menu 25EUR (or à la carte)
Open 7 days

Note – Polidor does not accept credit cards, a policy it has proudly maintained since it opened its doors in 1845.

In the heady days following the Second World War, Paris was the world capital of one of the first modern “youth” subcultures. Before rock ‘n’ roll, before Elvis, before punk, before hip hop, kids flocked to jazz clubs and proclaimed themselves existentialists or beat poets. St Germain des Près was the European centre of the movement, orbiting around figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre and the inimitable Boris Vian.

Today almost all the jazz cellars of St Germain des Près are gone, replaced by specialist boutiques and restaurants. Along the Boulevard, the cafés that were formerly literary haunts of Sartre, de Beauvoir, Juliette Gréco and their offsiders are largely given over to the tourist trade.

One of the last surviving clubs is Papa Jazz on rue Saint Benoit, and it was thence that we repaired last night in search of a few hours of slow whisky and music.

Papa’s offers a perfectly acceptable line in non-offensive, well-played small group jazz and by all accounts an excellent dinner menu. Guitarist Jeff Hoffman was offering some nicely-turned licks in the style of Wes Montgomery, and Philippe Petit’s parallel chords on piano drifted increasingly Brubeck-wards as the evening drew on.

The highlight of the gig was the arrival of trumpeter Ken Barker who sat in for just one song – Bye Bye Blackbird. I caught most of it thanks to the recorder on my iPhone. The performance was pretty good, at least to these jazz-starved ears…

Bye Bye Blackbird, performed by the Jeff Hoffman Trio with Ken Barker

Jeff Hoffman (g)
Philippe Petit (pn)
Pierre Maingourt (b)
Special guest Ken Barker (tp)

Papa Jazz Club, rue Saint Benoit, Paris 6e – 7 May 2010