The best restaurant in France?
Plus Proust, Clit bait, Beaujolais Nouveau, dead cyclists & the bouyant state of the French economy
Angle 1: The best restaurant in France?
How do you choose a restaurant? Do you go by decor, ambience, clientele? Far too many authentic-looking and bustling spots rely on frozen mains and powdered sauces. The posted menu? Everybody’s figured out the locavore, farm-to-table bumpf and shtick. The wine list? Only lazy cranks and idiots keep lists that aren’t top heavy in organic, biodynamic, natural, non-interventionist bottles.
So who do you turn to? Crowdsourcing review sites are filled with fakes, sponsored content, astroturfed nonsense. Guidebooks are unreliable—trust me, I’ve written for some of the best known and most trusted.
Online experts? They're usually too far up their own ass to know good from shit. Especially the expats.
Except me, of course. Because I outsource. This week, from Hanzhou Piao, perhaps the most talented cook I’ve ever met, expert at pretty much every major cuisine — French, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Latin American, Italian — and, more pertinent to our purposes here, a gastronome possessed of an oversized appetite of ursine-like voracity rarely seen in members of our species.
Though he never eats breakfast, he sometimes, often, actually—when travelling, or when particularly peckish—eats four sit-down, multi-course meals a day, supplemented with streetfood snacks in between. The reason he is not obese is no doubt mostly genetic, but also because he works hard, and on days off makes 150-170 dozen boxes of handmade dumplings for 36 hours straight, which he then spends most of the next 36 hours delivering around Ile-de-France by bicycle.
As part of my new Six Angles feature, every week Hanzhou is going to tell us about the best dish he ate during the last seven days. Not with a lot of words. He’s a taciturn fellow, and he doesn’t talk with his mouth full. And his mouth is almost always full.
Just the dish. With a photograph. And the address.
Backstory: Hanzhou has worked in some of the most touted and toqued kitchens of Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo, London, New York, Vancouver, Singapore, Osnabrück, Menton, Aix-en-Provence and Los Gatos, California, but he is best known for his Paris dumpling delivery business, which he started during the pandemic and now does most weekends, unless he’s running a pop-up restaurant somewhere. Here’s how it works: on Thursday afternoon he posts his dumpling order form as an Instagram story, which, less than an hour later, he updates thus:
Then he makes them. Then he delivers them. They are by far the best dumplings I’ve ever had.
Anyway, a couple of days ago, Le Doyenné, Sean Kelly and James Henry’s five-month-old restaurant-farm in the Essonne, was named best restaurant in France by Le Fooding. I don’t trust Le Fooding, which sells itself as an edgy alternative to the Michelin Guide but is in fact owned by Michelin. But I do trust Hanzhou, who ate there last weekend.
“You’re not going to find another tasting menu like that anywhere for anywhere near that price. The food, almost all of which comes from the farm, is excellent, and the room, the setting, the kitchen, are amazing. So yes, for the price, 80€, I would say, yes, it is the best restaurant in France. But that price is sure to go up.”
Here are six of the dishes Hanzhou and a group of cognac buyers ate at Le Doyenné. The standout dish for him is the one in the bottom right corner: the marinaded crevettes impériales des marais charentais — imperial, tiger-striped shrimp bred in the Charente-Maritime marshes. The heads were deep-fried, and the ceviche-style shrimp meat wrapped in nasturtium leaves with loads of horseradish.
However, it was not Hanzhou’s best dish of the week. That was this:
A dish at Toyo in Paris with endive, romanesco, bitter melon, cedrat, squash, pepper, artichoke and other vegetables on a bed of anchovies. “Like a bagna càuda. With shaved hazelnuts on top. All cooked well, good quality. The anchovies were great. Balanced. Not salty. Clean.”
There you have it.
Angle 2: Blue signals expansion, red signals contraction.
Among advanced countries, France has been the only country “in the blue” every month this year.
Angle 3: Libération cover of November 15, 1976
The death of Jean Gabin, the shit the president was in because of inflation and the annual Beaujolais Nouveau bash. Back then it was held on November 15. In 1985 the Institut National des Appellations d'Origine (INAO) decided it would be held on the third Thursday of November. Which is today. I’ll be going, after a concert of Hermon Mehari & Alessandro Lanzoni + the Julia Haile Quintet at Le Dynamo, to two of the best wine addresses in Paris: Cave à Michel and the new taqueria pop-up of Chambre Noire.
Angle 4: Clit bait?
The just revealed mascots of the Paris 2024 Olympics are supposed to look like the Phrygian cap worn by Marianne, the national personification of the French Republic, liberty, equality, fraternity and reason, and the Goddess of Liberty.
Mais, uh, non.
Quentin Girard in Libération wrote that having a clitoris as the French Olympic mascot was very good news. Finally, the French population “at last understood what one looks like.” And “from a political point of view, it’s not a bad thing that Paris lets go of its eternal phallic Eiffel Tower…”
Angle 5: Proust at the TGB
On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Marcel Proust's death, the BnF has an exhibition up called MARCEL PROUST: La fabrique de l’œuvre (The making of the work) which they’re calling a “true journey” through the author’s opus, À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). The show contains 370 documents - manuscripts, paintings, photographs, objects, costumes - from the Library's Proust collection and other collections. Including this lovely snap of Countess Greffulhe, née Elisabeth de Caraman-Chimay (1860-1952), the queen of Belle Epoque salons and the inspiration for the Duchess Oriane de Guermantes.
The show also displays Proust’s “paperoles’”, accordion-like paper strips on which he wrote earlier drafts of the story, including this one, which is nearly 2m.
On one of these drafts, Proust’s famous madeleine, the aroma of which, in the final version, kicks his memories of childhood into top gear, was a mere morsel of stale bread (pain rassis). In another a piece of toast (pain grillé). And in a third, a dry baby biscuit.
Angle 6: “Blind Spots”
277 cyclists have been killed in Paris this year so far by truck, bus and car drivers.