Alexander Lobrano
Travel and food writer Alec Lobrano likes to say he has a “bipolar food background,” which he explains by the fact that his parents hail from Boston and New Orleans, two American cities with two very different food traditions. Growing up in Connecticut and spending summers with two great-aunts in New Orleans provided him with a very broad gastronomic background, but this didn’t prepare him for Paris, which he first visited in 1972. He’d just spent six weeks elsewhere in Europe, and he, his mother, and two brothers were meeting his father and sister in Paris. The family had more than one meal at the noteworthy restaurant Androuët, which specializes in cheese, and were even taken down into the cheese cellar by flashlight, an experience he says “hit me right over the head like a hammer.” When, on his last night in the city, he ate boeuf bourguignon and onion soup at a little subterranean place in the Latin Quarter, he savored every drop and craved more. And as he notes in Hungry for Paris, “Little did I know then that this addiction would become the compass by which I would live my life.” Not surprisingly, Alec burst into tears when his family left Paris on that first trip.
Thirty-eight years later, Alec no longer has to wonder when he’ll be back in Paris or plan elaborate schemes to get himself there, as he’s been living in the city since 1986. He served as Gourmet’s European correspondent for ten years and was an editor of the Zagat Paris Restaurants guide, and he feels he sees Paris from the level of the tabletop. In 2008 the first edition of Hungry for Paris was published (Random House), and in 2010 an updated edition was issued. In utter honesty, I can’t imagine anyone visiting Paris, for the first or fiftieth time, and not consulting this guide. It is discriminating without being haughty or ruthless; it is well written, interesting, fun to read, practical, and indispensable. As Alec informs us, he tries a half dozen new restaurants and returns to old favorites each week, and all the restaurants he recommends are places he’s frequented many times. Though this obviously isn’t a guarantee for the visitor—anyone can try a place on an off night, and tastes do differ—he vouches for the “seriousness, reliability, and quality of their cooking.” In addition to the reviews, I especially like the essays, notably “The French Foreign Legion: The Parisian Passion for North African Cooking,” “Table for One,” and “The Rise and Fall of the Parisian Brasserie.” It’s equally valuable to read the section “But What About? Or Why Certain Famous Restaurants Aren’t Included in This Book,” and the section listing places open all or part of the weekend is perhaps alone worth the price of the book. Whether you use the book to search for modest establishments or grand Michelin-starred temples, you will find, as Alec does, “singularly spectacular eating” in the City of Light.
After some years of corresponding only by e-mail, I finally met Alec, in Paris, on an overcast, drizzly day at a café called Le Nemrod. We sat outside on the covered terrace, but after the raindrops began to fall on our table and my notebook was getting wet, I asked if there was another culinary haunt in the area that Alec particularly liked where we could go and take a few photos. As luck would have it, Alec said there was a new pâtisserie that had recently opened that he’d only briefly seen and wanted to revisit, so we walked a short distance to La Pâtisserie des Rêves (see this page). And, yes, for me at least, it most definitely is a pâtisserie worthy of rêves. The photos here of Alec inside the bakery are in black and white, so you’ll have to use your imagination to envision the bright and airy interior and the mod colors of hot pink, lime green, and orange. Rêves is the creation of chef and cookbook author Philippe Conticini, and it is without doubt one of the most creative pâtisseries anywhere in the world. Alec and I found time to chat in between my many oohs and ahhs.
Q: The subtitle of your book is The Ultimate Guide to the City’s 102 Best Restaurants. Why 102?
A: The original number was 101, but that sounded too much like a college intro course, so I added another one. I arrived at the choice of a hundred restaurants because I wanted to offer a broad selection of excellent tables in all parts of the city and in all different restaurant classes and categories without becoming encyclopedic. When I look at a restaurant book with a thousand restaurants, I always find myself wondering, “But which ones are really good?” In Hungry for Paris, they’re all really good—these are the places I’d send close friends who love good food.
Q: I understand that you only replaced about a dozen restaurants for the second edition of your book, which seems to me to be a statement about the consistent quality of places to eat in Paris—after all, it’s possible that you could have had to replace many more. Do you find that the level of quality is generally higher, and that places don’t open and close with such rapidity as often happens in the States?
A: There are fifteen new or revised restaurants in the updated edition of Hungry for Paris, which is indeed a reflection of the fact that the Paris restaurant scene is less novelty driven than that in other major cities on the one hand, and also a reflection of the fact that the best-quality restaurants in Paris are much more enduring than similar tables in, say, London or New York.
Q: When you first moved to Paris, in 1986, you bought three restaurant guidebooks. Which ones were they, and what were their shortcomings?
A: I bought Patricia Wells’s The Food Lover’s Guide to Paris, the Michelin guide, and the Gault Millau guide. The one I used the most was Patricia Wells’s book, because it offered a complete portrait of every restaurant in terms of cuisine, history, décor, and clientele and had a friendly, reliable tone. The Michelin guide in those days was still a sphinx (this was before they started adding a few tag lines of copy) so it wasn’t very helpful, and I found Gault Millau rather too Gaullist and self-congratulatory in tone. I travel a great deal for my work as a food and travel writer, and so I often avail myself of guidebooks, Web sites, etc., as a consumer. With this experience, I wrote the Paris restaurant book I’d be hoping to find if I were visiting Paris as an adventurous and intrepid food lover, or looking for a subjective survey of the city’s best restaurants with write-ups that would fully prepare me for the experience I’d have if I chose this place—Where is it? What’s the atmosphere like? Who goes there? And so on. I want all of this information in addition to an erudite judgment of the kitchen, and if I’m going to carry a pound or two of paper with me on a trip these days, I also want something that will be fun to read.
Q: Is there a food guide to another city in the world that you thought was well done and that might have inspired you for your own book?
A: The restaurant guide that first made me aware of the literary possibilities of restaurant guides was Seymour Britchky’s The Restaurants of New York (1977), which offered witty, amusing, useful portraits of a constellation of New York City restaurants that this author, a very good writer, liked. It was published by Random House and the editor was Joe Fox.
Q: When you were growing up, what were some books or movies that inspired a love of travel? And similarly, what have been some of your favorite books about Paris or France that you treasure as an adult?
A: My love of travel began as soon as I learned to walk, a curiosity that was profoundly nourished by my paternal grandmother, Jean, who was one of the most intrepid travelers I’ve ever known and who fanned the flames with black-and-white postcards from Egypt, India, Persia, Peru, and many other places. As soon as I learned to read, I devoured a series of books called The Land and the People of … that I found at the Westport, Connecticut, public library. These nonfiction books presented the history, geography, etc., of a variety of different countries and I couldn’t get enough of them. I also had an aunt who worked as an editor for a New York publisher, and she gave me a series of books that were the portraits of the lives of a little boy and a little girl in a variety of different European countries. I read the French book so many times it fell apart, but still remember it vividly—the kids lived in Paris but went to Nice to visit their grandparents, who owned a hotel. Their grandmother put a vase of mimosa on the night table in their room and fed them petits farcis. I was desperately jealous. Since reading, eating, and traveling are my compass points, it’s hard to think of a book that hasn’t inspired me, but I especially love Henry James, Proust, Cervantes, and Thomas Hardy, all of whom provoked a fierce desire to inhabit the worlds they described, and I also love Elizabeth David, A. J. Liebling, M. F. K. Fisher, Richard Olney, and Julia Child, in terms of falling in love with French food. I’d also tip my hat to The Cuisine of the Sun (Random House, 1976), a wonderful Niçoise cookbook by Mireille Johnston, and The Belly of Paris by Émile Zola, in the new translation by Mark Kurlansky (Modern Library, 2009), which is still the best gastronomic pornography I’ve ever come across.
Q: As there are quite a number of American expatriates living in Paris, do you see them often, or get together for, say, Thanksgiving?
A: The American community in Paris is smaller now than it once was, because Paris is an expensive city in terms of housing and Asia seems to be attracting a lot of those footloose young types who want to experience another culture these days. Since my partner is French, I live a more French life than many of my expat American friends, some of whom have a tendency to stick together. Thanksgiving is one occasion that we Yanks will get together, and not one of them goes by without a grateful discussion as to why French turkeys are so much better than American ones—they’re not overbred and are raised free-range on a healthy diet that does not include antibiotics or growth hormones. Most American turkey is pretty terrifying. Most American foods are available in Paris these days, but there are still some things I lug back with me from any trip to the United States, including chipotles in adobo sauce, fire-roasted jalapeño peppers, California raisins, cornmeal, and Lipton onion soup mix (for dip).
Q: Which arrondissement do you call home, and if forced to name your favorite café or bistro du coin, what would it be?
A: I live in the ninth arrondissement between the church of La Trinité and Saint-Georges, and the best little bistro in the area is the wonderful Chez Georgette (29 rue Saint-Georges / +33 01 42 80 39 13), a friendly place that does wonderful French home cooking and is very reasonably priced. The café I go to most often is the Café La Rotonde (2 place d’Estienne d’Orves), because it’s just downstairs, the people watching is terrific, and the staff is nice. My two favorite cafés are Le Nemrod (51 rue du Cherche-Midi, in the sixth—they do superb croques-monsieur and -madame, great steak tartare, and their Morgon Vieille Vignes is one of my favorite wines—and the Le Nemours (Place Colette, in the first), because it has a great terrace, good coffee, and is right next to the gorgeous gardens of the Palais Royal.
Q: How often do you cook at home, and what are the cookbooks you use most often?
A: I love to cook and don’t see how anyone can write about food without being a passionate cook. The cookbooks I refer to most often include La Cuisine du marché by Paul Bocuse, Marcella Hazan’s two Italian cookbooks, and James Beard’s American Cookery.
Q: What are some of your favorite day-trip destinations outside of Paris?
A: The medieval city of Troyes, which has the most spectacular collection of stained glass in France, is a superb overnight trip from Paris, and it also has two truly delightful hotels: Le Champ des Oiseaux (champdesoiseaux.com) and La Maison de Rhodes (maisonderhodes.com). La Mignardise in Troyes (lamignardise.net) is a very good contemporary French bistro, too. As long as it’s not high season, when it gets too crowded, I also love Barbizon in the Seine-et-Marne region south of Paris. The brasserie at Les Pléiades hotel (hotel-les-pleiades.com) is excellent, and the Boucherie de l’Angélus (64 Grande Rue, Barbizon, / +33 01 60 66 40 27) is one of the best all-purpose grocers in France—their meat is superb, they have a terrific assortment of cheese and charcuterie, a small but good selection of vegetables, and even a nicely stocked wine department. When I crave a quick trip to the seaside, I head for Le Touquet on the English Channel in Picardy. The Hôtel Westminster (westminster.fr) is a polite, affordable old-fashioned hotel, and I love the fish soup at Perard (restaurantperard.com), a popular long-running fish house there. I also never miss a meal at La Grenouillère (lagrenouillere.fr) in nearby Madeleine-sous-Montreuil—Alexandre Gauthier is one of the most interesting young chefs in France, and I can’t think about his poached lobster tail served in a smoldering juniper branch (for the perfume) without my mouth watering.
Q: Do you envision expanding Hungry for Paris to include other culinary-related favorites such as pâtisseries, boulangeries, charcuteries, ice cream shops, coffee and tea salons, chocolate purveyors, bookstores, street markets, florists, and tabletop stores?
A: Since I don’t want to make Hungry for Paris too much of an armload, I am planning to expand my Web site (hungryforparis.com) to include write-ups and listings of my favorite cafés, charcuteries, tea shops, etc. In my experience, most people only go to one or two of these places—whereas they’ll go to many restaurants—so I’d rather offer this information online and let people cut and paste from my site before they travel.
Q: At the risk of becoming outdated, what are some restau-rants you’ve recently discovered that you’re particularly impressed by?
A: In Paris, I love Frenchie, La Cave Beauvau, Jadis, and Yam’Tcha, all of which I include in the updated version of Hungry for Paris. Outside of Paris, the best meal I’ve had recently was at Sa.Qua.Na in Honfleur—superb fish cookery in a really charming Zen-style dining room. During a recent trip to Istanbul, I fell head over heels for Çiya—I had no idea that the Turkish kitchen was so brilliantly diverse, and I loved some of the sour-savory tastes of the dishes I tasted there.
Q: When you’re not thinking about or writing about food in Paris, what are some of your favorite ways to spend time in the city?
A: Whenever I have a few minutes free, I head for the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or one of the city’s many other wonderful museums—and always by foot, since Paris is one of the world’s great walking cities. I love walking along the stone-paved banks of the Seine, and I love strolling through the city’s food markets, too. And there’s no better way to spend a sunny afternoon than to head for the Jardin du Luxembourg, the world’s most perfect urban park, with a good book. For me, the Jardin du Luxembourg offers the ultimate unself-conscious display of European civilization, with all of its grandeur, beauty, endearing flaws, and petty hidebound codes.
You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food.
—Ernest Hemingway,
A Moveable Feast
