Au Passage – Paris

You’d never discover Au Passage by chance. It’s down a dingy back alley barely wide enough for one vehicle, where all you can see are garage entrances, air-conditioning units and washing lines. It is well off the tourist trail. There are no other commercial properties. But when we found it, the restaurant was completely packed apart from the table we had reserved for lunch.

The lunch formula is exceedingly simple. They offer a starter, main, cheese and dessert for a mere 19 euros – less if you start omitting courses. To keep costs low, there is no choice at any stage apart from the main, and no quarter is given to vegetarians. We drank a pair of rustic wines from the Costières de Nîmes – a fat white, and a leathery, acidic red.

The one starter on offer when we were there was a tasty little salad of marinated mackerel with sweet white beets. We had one each of the two choices for main. A piece of barely done (and delicious) trout was served with cauliflower that had been marinated in lemon and oil, and a herby salad. A great dish – lovely elements, lovely combination. The other main was Tartare de boeuf coupé, a deconstructed steak tartare. The beef was coupé, that is, in chunks rather than mince, and all the ingredients came in neat little piles that we had to start by mixing – it felt rather like opening a child’s playset. I’m very partial to steak tartare, but whither this craze for deconstructed dishes? In this case at least, the supposed marginal benefit in customer interactivity with the dish (you mix it yourself – apparently that’s good) is totally offset by the loss of the two or so hours in which flavours of the dish could have been infusing with each other. Oh well.

Time was pressing on and I had a flight to catch. Lunch so far had been a bit slow as our orders seemed to have gotten caught up behind a large tranche of others going through the kitchen, so I couldn’t sample the St.Marcellin or the chocolate mousse.

Dinner is different from lunch – there are choices. Given the low prices and the stripped down décor (it’s close to anti-décor) I’m tempted to call Au Passage the Ryanair of fine dining, but that would be slanderous, as lunch here was an enjoyable experience.

1 bis Passage de Saint-Sebastian 75011

Dans les Landes – Paris

Cuts of offal, ear, nose, head and trotter, it turns out, are as fashionable in France as they are in the UK. Dans les Landes is a bustling wine-bar-cum-bistro offering a Franco-Basque take on tapas, alongside more traditional main courses. We went straight for the tapas.

Parmentier de lièvre au foie gras was a glorified shepherd’s pie with pieces of liver – I wouldn’t have known the mince was hare.

Cous de canards confits et crostillants couldn’t have seemed less Basque: N1 had a lot of fun picking slivers of meat out of every bony nook on the duck necks – an activity I associate more with Chinese restaurants – and the barbecue sauce, which we speculated might have been made with plum wine, didn’t taste like anything we’d expect in a European restaurant. Which isn’t to say it was bad, but it was laden on too heavily for the amount of meat there was.

Pieds de cochons en escabèche came as croquettes filled with gelatinous bits of trotter. We weren’t quite sure where the escabèche came into it; presumably the trotter had spent time in vinegar beforehand. Very tasty, though.

Basque cuisine usually evokes images of hearty peasant food, but it can also mean the far-flung experimental gastronomy of Arzak and Mugaritz, and the more outlandish tapas bars of San Sebastián. The entry on the tapas list at Dans les Landes “Mini hot dog” made me salivate with memories of the tiny Kobe Burger served on a “ketchup bun with banana chips” at A Fuego Negro in San Sebastián; but when the hot dog arrived, it turned out to be exactly what it claimed to be: a tiny chorizo in a bun.

I’ve lost the French for what they were, but we also had fun little rectangular croquette logs filled with polenta and pieces of smoked duck.

Together with some rustic wines, that was enough to satisfy us, and we felt we had exhausted what sounded like the more interesting dishes on the tapas menu. When we arrived, there were plenty of tables free, but it soon filled up – reservations probably required. The staff were pleasant; the Basque rock music became louder and no better as the bar filled up. Dans les Landes is fun and informal, even if it is nowhere near as good as the offalicious English tapas master St.John.

Dans les Landes, 119 bis Rue Monge, 5^th arrondissement

La Cagouille – Paris

Review-sifting and Google-mapping led us to dinner at La Cagouille in Montparnasse, known for fish, white Burgundies and cognac. It is also open every day of the year, handy for Sundays and Mondays, when many Parisian restaurants close.

The décor is a bit lost in the 1980s, with slightly random close-up photographs set off against a glass case containing sand, buoys and old fishing nets. We sucked our way through the complementary bowl of clams and got to studying the menu, which was presented Paris-style on a portable whiteboard. No sooner had we chosen, than the board was swapped for an updated one and we had to choose again. There seemed to be a lot of waiting staff around, and service ranged from young and enthusiastic to bland, via old-school impatient. We were treading cautiously after annoying the staff at Le Ribouldingue the night before, but they very gracefully changed our order at the last minute.

We started with pan-roasted baby sole – nicely peppery – and anchovies which came garnished with deep-fried parsley. Lots of the mains were pieces of pan-roasted fish; easy to do, difficult to get wrong, opined N1, and she scanned the menu for the more elaborate dishes, to test the kitchen. Sole (oven-roasted – just a little more difficult than pan-frying) went well with ginger, while monkfish cheeks was a surprisingly heavy dish. For a start, the cheeks themselves are quite chunky, and they are served with a buttery anchovy sauce – powerful, delicious, quite a lot to get through. Just as well we had chosen a stronger white Burgundy – something lighter would have been overpowered by this dish. Leroy Bourgogne Blanc 1997: only a regional level wine, but it was powerful and sharp, smoky and nutty, with a residual fruit character mostly replaced by a butterscotch and caramelised onion character. I am sure it would have been much less interesting had it been younger, and it really goes to show that sometimes you are better off with a slightly less good wine with age on it than a better but too-young one.

Many thanks to the kind American gentleman who gave us the remains of his table’s bottle of Butteaux 1er Cru Chablis as they departed – if we’d been sharper off the mark we would have offered him a glass of our Leroy. But by then it was all gone. When a waiter later raised his eyebrows at the extra bottle of wine that had appeared on our table, we pointed out it had been a gift and that we hadn’t helped ourselves. He reflected rather wryly that such gifts were fine here but in another restaurant they wouldn’t allow them – although quite how they stop you gifting something you have paid for I’m not sure.

Cognacs were very good:

Grosperrin 1961 – full of vanilla, pepper, slightly farmyardy notes, orange and elderflower, a very complex drink with a lot of alcohol burn, since it weighs in at 48%.

Château de Beaulon 1975 – smooth, buttery, gingerbread, peanuts, salted caramel and Lyle’s Golden Syrup, slightly easier to manage than the Grosperrin at only 40% alcohol.

We managed to increase our bill substantially with wine and cognac, but La Cagouille is keenly priced if you choose those dishes belonging to the formule: 26 euros for a starter and a main. Choosing other dishes pushes the price for the starter and main combination up by about 10 or 15 euros, but the formule is plenty interesting: two of the dishes we wanted anyway were on it.

La Cagouille, 10, Place Constantin Brancusi

www.la-cagouille.fr

Le Ribouldingue – Paris

Le Ribouldingue seemed a good bet - an offal-heavy restaurant, the only Bib Gourmand recommendation in the 5th arrondisement where we were staying, rather competitively priced for the centre of Paris, in a small but grandly decorated setting. Reviews suggested it had seen through a bad patch and had come out the other end.

I was only just thinking as we arrived that we had been in Paris for almost two days and nobody had been rude to us – everyone, in fact, had been perfectly polite – when Madame opened the restaurant door to us and demanded to know if we had confirmed our reservation. Actually, we had confirmed – the wrong restaurant. We stuttered and hawed, but Madame, blocking our way, was not backing down. It looked like there would be no dinner for us at Ribouldingue, and I was already thinking about the Moroccan restaurant N1 had eaten at and enjoyed the night before (L’Atlas, 12 St.Germaine-des-Prés), which wasn’t far away, when suddenly Madame gave up and let us in.

We were a bit ruffled, and passingly considered making a break for it. But Madame had calmed down and we settled in. She did give us a mysterious explanation why our 2008 Burgundy couldn’t be decanted, which I suspect boiled down to the fact there was no room on the small table (it is a bit cramped here.) We started with rognons blancs (lambs’ testicles) and tetine de vache (udder). The rognons blancs were delicious, tasting less of strong kidney than some I have had, done in small coins in a parsley sauce. The udder came in small, fried squares, and had none of the marbled texture or milky taste it had at Viva M’Boma in Brussels, where they’d assured us the only other place we might find it on a menu would be in Lyon – but it seems these sorts of cuts are coming back into fashion.

Mains: guinea fowl was lovely – crispy skin and nice fatty layer - roasted with mustard seed, citron and ginger, a delicious combination. Partridge was not so well done – one of the two halves of the small bird was not so much undercooked as uncooked. For steak, yes, for poultry, no. It took a few extra slugs of (undecanted) red wine to get through that one. A shame because the accompaniments – a watercress sauce, and a chestnut and celeriac mash – were lovely. Some other lucky diner got the largest serving of bone marrow I have ever seen.

Desserts were actually wonderful. A gentian ice cream with Campari and pink grapefruit was sharp, creamy, but bitterly palate cleansing – top class. Poached pear came with spices and a marron cream, and was again notable for not having been sweetened – superb.

So, a hit, apart from an undercooked (uncooked) partridge and hit-and-miss relations with the staff. N1 is convinced that the very quiet waiter did tell us we were being “filthy” for mopping with bread, but I can’t believe that, since it came as such a genuine, simple comment. Lost in translation, I am sure. Madame did seem to think we were unmannered English peasants, so much so that I may actually be tempted to turn up one day in a peasant costume and see how that goes down. N1 thoroughly approved of the fact that we were the only non-French diners there.

Restaurant Le Ribouldingue – 10, Rue Saint Julien le Pauve, Paris

Viña Ardanza 2000, 2001 – La Rioja Alta

Talking of great Rioja vintages, 2001 is among the very best, a year of Grandes Reservas and Reservas Especiales not made in lesser vintages. Viña Ardanza is the name given to one of the range of wines made by La Rioja Alta, one the more classic bodegas. They produce a range of wines from lighter to greater, thus:

Viña Alberdi – a crianza

Viña Arana – a slightly lighter reserva

Viña Ardanza – a fuller-bodied reserva

Gran Reserva 904 - getting powerful

Gran Reserva 890 - rather grand! And not cheap, nor for drinking young.

They are all made from the classic Rioja blend, essentially Tempranillo backed up by Garnacha, then small amounts of Graciano and Mazuelo. 2000 was a pretty decent vintage in Rioja, but 2001 was stellar; La Rioja Alta is proud to declare that Viña Ardanza has been released as a reserva especial only three times, in the great vintage of 1964, in 1973 and now in 2001. (I’m surprised they missed 1970, also a great vintage – and 1981, too, come to think of it).

Viña Ardanza Reserva 2000

Quite dark for a Rioja, still with a bit of a purple tint suggesting youth. Classic Rioja on the nose: creamy vanilla with forest fruits, a little cinnamon. There’s plenty of oak there, though not as much as in some reservas. It’s a shade thinner in the mouth than the bouquet led me to expect, smooth, with notes of mushroom and game showing up as I give it time. Smooth and ready, but still quite young, it could happily evolve over another decade. (I do like my wines mature; and Rioja is especially well-suited to aging.)

Viña Ardanza Reserva Especial 2001

Forest floor again, but immediately heavier and gamier than I’m used to in Ardanza – also the oak seems noticeably more toasted. Tart, tannic and leafy on the palate, it definitely needs aging – more so than the 2000. The mushroom and game notes grow with time. Quite powerful for a Rioja, quite heavy-bodied, not as good a drink yet as the 2000, but when it’s had that tannic edge taken off it will be superb.