A Growing Appetite for Bistros in the City of Light

Bistro-mania continues to sweep France. Such noted chefs as Roger Verge on the Cote d’Azur, Francis Garcia in Bordeaux and Michel Rostang and Guy Savoy here in Paris have launched bistros, supplementing their well-known formal restaurants. More recently, when Jacques Maximin opened his elaborate Maximin restaurant in Nice, he installed the modest Bistro de Nice next door.

And in Paris, traditionally the bistro capital of France, new examples of the genre have lately been inaugurated by Andre Genin, proprietor of Chez Pauline (and, like Michel Rostang, one of the French-based chefs who cooks and consults on a regular basis for Fennel in Santa Monica); by veteran Parisian restaurateur Claude Terrail (uncle of Ma Maison creator and proprietor Patrick Terrail), and by Jean-Pierre Vigato of Apicius, which is one of the hottest serious restaurants in Paris today.

The virtues of the bistro--its modest scale, its informality, its reasonable prices, its comforting style of food--are appealing to the public for obvious reasons. For famous chefs and restaurateurs the appeal lies in quick turnover of customers and lower expenses--it’s fast money. Bistros are also places for chefs to hang out, something they can’t do in their formal restaurants. And then there’s the nostalgia factor: Bistro food is, in theory, the food these chefs grew up on.

But I hope Andre Genin didn’t grow up on food resembling that served at his Le Rond de Serviette (“The Napkin-Ring”)--and, frankly, I can’t imagine him wanting to hang out in the restaurant. The place is strangely artificial-looking, with its walls of red cloth alternating with thin beige paneling, its gaudy floral-patterned upholstery, its indifferent old-bistro photo blowups.

It seems not so much a genuine bistro, in fact, as some American chain hotel coffee shop in Paris that has decided to call itself a bistro. I had the impression, the evening I was there, that everybody in the place seemed to be looking around at their neighbors wondering if they were really in the right restaurant.

On the basis of a dinner there, it was clear that they were not .

All three varieties of fish in the assortment of mousse-like rillettes de l’ocean tasted alike, and were entirely too homogeneous for rillettes --rather like tuna salad put through a Cuisinart. A warm goat cheese salad was made with indifferent cheese and tired greens. Hachis Parmentier , a kind of shredded beef-and-potato casserole, was strangely flavorless, and the potatoes seemed starchy.

Only a nice piece of grilled salmon with a suspicion of old-style sauce vierge (sort of a creamy mayonnaise) was agreeable to eat--and it was nothing special. To anyone who has enjoyed Genin’s cooking, as I have, either at Chez Pauline in Paris or at Fennel in Santa Monica, the problems at Le Rond de Serviette are mystifying. I can only assume that he just isn’t paying attention to the place--and can only hope that he will soon start doing so.

Claude Terrail most obviously is paying attention to his bistro, Rotisserie du Beaujolais. The place is plain, with terra-cotta floors, uncluttered walls and a crowd of little white-dressed tables spilling out onto the slightly sloping sidewalk. The menu is minuscule, offering no more than four or five appetizers and a like number of main dishes daily. The kitchen is skilled, but it sticks to the basics. The food is hearty and good. The style here is resolutely Lyonnais--the great French food and wine capital of Lyon being more or less the Vatican of the bistro genre.

Terrail brings all of his cheeses and sausages in from top suppliers in that city, in fact--reportedly the same ones that provision Paul Bocuse. And almost the only wines available are those of Georges DuBoeuf, whose bailiwick is Lyon’s neighbor, the Beaujolais region.

Though the menu changes daily, a typical selection might include tomato salad; hure (pork headcheese); saucisson de Lyon (Lyonnais sausage, firm, medium-dry and thinly sliced), or leeks vinaigrette to begin with, and then quail or veal chops roasted on the eponymous rotisserie; grilled onglet (flank steak) with shallots, or a traditional Lyonnais dish called sabodet rotie au Beaujolais --a coarsely ground and highly flavorful pig’s-head sausage, cut into thick slices and oven-roasted in Beaujolais. Vegetarians and dainty eaters need not apply.

The cheeses offered are always the same: a selection of first-class chevres from both Lyon and Beaujolais, and a Lyonnais specialty colorfully dubbed cervelle de canut or “silk weaver’s brain”--fresh white cheese mixed with chives, salt and pepper and white wine. (The cheese was supposedly a favorite snack of the silk weavers who were once so plentiful around Lyon.) There is usually a superb apple tart--a quintessential bistro dessert if ever there was one.

Traditionalists might very well argue that Jean-Pierre Vigato’s Manufacture--so named because it is located in an old but beautifully renovated tobacco manufacture (manufactory), just outside the Paris city limits in Issy-les-Moulineaux--isn’t really a bistro at all. Indeed, it looks like a contemporary full-scale restaurant in a sort of trans-Atlantic style, with exposed structural-beam ceilings, white cinder-block walls, big paintings hung here and there, Post-Modern furniture and high-design Andree Putman Royal Limoges china.

The menu is hardly in the old-school bistro idiom, either. But there are some bistro dishes offered (e.g. a Burgundian-style salad scattered with lardons or chunks of bacon and topped with an egg poached in red wine, or a simple presentation of eggs soft-scrambled with smoked haddock) and the menu is full of offal and cheaper cuts of meat, potatoes, pulses (lentils, white beans, etc.) and little salads--all typical of bistro fare. Best of all, though, the prices are genuinely bistro-low.

The imagination behind the dishes and the quality of the cooking aren’t bistro-ish at all. Categories aside, Manufacture is simply one of the best new restaurants of any kind in Paris. As evidence of that claim, I offer a gelatin-based terrine of baby rabbit or lapereau , delicate but full of flavor, offset by a perfect little lentil salad; a whole small pate encased in a light pastry shell--meat loaf for grown-ups--served with a Provencal-style salad of mixed bitter greens; a filet of daurade grise , a remarkably delicious variety of sea bream, covered with still-firm diced vegetables and soaking in a light olive-flavored broth; a combination of filet and joue or jowl of beef, grilled and cushioned with split-pea puree.

To clinch the case, I must mention Manufacture’s selection of wickedly good but yet somehow not quite excessive desserts--among them a wisp of caramelized pate feuillete with a slice of French-style gingerbread and a scoop of gingerbread ice cream, a kind of collapsed chocolate souffle with very dark chocolate ice cream on the side, a rich and chewy praline-chocolate tart, and a specialty called simply riz croquante --which suggests a cross between rice pudding and creme brulee .

Desserts of this sophistication, of course, might well be taken as definitive proof that Manufacture is not, in fact, a bistro after all. But when the food is this good, and this reasonably priced, who, in fact, cares?

Manufacture, 20 esplanade de la Manufacture (30 rue Ernest-Renan), Issy-les-Moulineaux. Telephone: 40.93.08.98. Dinner for two, food only, about $75.

Le Rond de Serviette, 16 rue St-Augustin, 2nd arrondissement, Telephone: 49.27.09.90. Dinner for two, food only, about $50.

Rotisserie du Beaujolais, 19 quai de la Tournelle, 5th arrondissement, Telephone: 43.54.17.47 (reservations not accepted). Dinner for two, food only, about $50.