Le Chapeau Melon

With raving reviews from any number of food magazines, blogs, and guide books, we still don't know why it took us so long to make it to a restaurant located about 500 yards from our apartment. Worse, we pass it four times a day on our way to and from the park with Panda. Worst, its founder is one of the co-founders of a neighborhood favorite, Le Baratin. What is wrong with us???

So what's our excuse for avoiding Le Chapeau Melon? Certainly we can't blame the charming exterior and cozy interior, nor the wine bar/table d'hôte concept we love so much. (They carry only organic wines. Highly-regarded organic wines. Too bad we still know next-to-nothing about wine.)


Clearly we have no excuse. Especially since this place makes us look more attractive than any other restaurant we've been to this year. But I digress.

Here's how the menu works: Wednesdays and Sundays, you can order à la carte from a smallish but excellent menu. All other nights that the restaurant's open, they offer a fixed four-course meal for €32.50, with cheese and/or dessert another €6. One slightly weird thing is that they charge a €8.50 "corking fee" if you buy a bottle of wine with your meal. (On the other hand, if you patronize Le Chapeau Melon as a wine store rather than a restaurant, you're charged no such fee.) But they have some sub-€10 wines, so even if you're watching your wallet, the cost isn't prohibitive.

On to the food. The night we were there, the menu included green apple over hearts of salmon in a soy sauce and olive oil base; vitello tonnato, which is cold, thinly sliced veal under a mayonnaise and tuna sauce; cream of mussel and saffron; and cannette rouennaise with celery purée, carrots à l'orange, and sautéed asparagus. They certainly get points for quantity and diversity of protein, and for some creative pairings.

The salmon/green apple dish was fantastic. Sweet and savory competed for attention with every bite. Plus, just look at the presentation: this is dynamic, even architecturally inspired food. 10 points, Le Chapeau Melon.

Annnnd we're taking those 10 points away. Seriously, no amount of photo editing can mask the sheer ugliness of this presentation. Even the (possibly unintentional?) happy face formed by those capers and that olive oil only made the veal look like it might just be trying to eat us. Plus, while it didn't taste bad, we wonder whether vitello tonnato might be an acquired taste.

Ok, that's a little better. And clearly my food photography is to blame for at least part of the unsightliness of this food. But imagine the great leap in beauty that could be accomplished just be throwing a sprig of something green and fresh on top of that saffron-y, creamy concoction. Also, it was a little salty. But mussels are always awesome, and I sopped up the last of this soup like it was my job.

And the restaurant gets its 10 points back with the final dish. Just like the first dish, we have all kinds of colors, textures, and tastes. The celery purée was delightful (we can't wait to get back to our food processor so we can try this at home) and the carrot à l'orange showed just how clever the chef could be. Cannette rouennaise indicates that we were served young female duck that had been raised in Normandy (see also canard de rouen). Considering the rather small portion, it might have been nice to have something a little less fatty (that whole bottom layer was basically inedible), but the meat was cooked just right, and for once there was no sauce to mask the taste of meat - instead, we could choose whether to combine the duck with one (or several) of the vegetables for each bite.

So there you have it: mixed results that fly in the face of all that hype. Considering the price (and the fact that the menu doesn't include dessert - what were they thinking!!??) we'll probably go back to passing this place on our way to Kiwizine, which is right next door, and rightfully still our favorite restaurant in Belleville.

Kiwizine: The Final Reckoning

To celebrate the end of our time here, we'd like to ask a favor of our readers: take a minute to read back through your favorite posts, and send your "top 3" list to panda.a.paris [at] gmail.com. We'll be collecting your submissions throughout the week, and next week (our last in Paris!) we'll post the results. Thanks in advance, and happy browsing!

As many times as we've gushed over Kiwizine, one of our favorite restaurants, we've never actually shown you a characteristic meal. A quick refresher on how it works: they're only open Friday and Saturday nights, serving drinks from 4-8 pm and dinner from 8-12. Each weekend at Kiwizine means a completely new menu, which is the only option both Friday and Saturday nights. The menu is composed of three courses (entrée, plat, dessert) which cost 17.50 euros, total. This makes Kiwizine the best deal in town even before we consider the quality of the food. Here's what we ate two weekends ago, when Becky was in town:

Entrée: Salade d'encornets avec croutons

Squid salad with croutons (which you often don't get on French salads)

A beautiful dish (as you can tell) with various textures for your mouth to enjoy. Even though we knew that these tiny squid were coming, they still surprised us with every bite. We can't remember what the dressing was like, but if we had to guess, we'd say it was a zesty vinaigrette.

Plat: Filet du jour accompagné de tapenade, de poivrons grillés et des pâtes aux épinards

Fish filet of the day topped with tagliatelle, grilled peppers, spinach, and tapenade

It's too bad that the tapenade looks less appetizing in our photograph than it did in real life, because this was an amazing - brilliant, even - combination of tastes. One of the things we love about the French cuisine we've eaten is that everything tastes best when you get a little piece of each element in every bite. Here we had bitter (the tapenade and spinach), sweet (the pepper), and a touch of salty (the fish) on the pasta base. Regarding the presentation of this dish, we recognized the personal plating style of the chef, Jono. He loves stacking layers of different colors and textures and tastes, as we've seen before: a lamb shank on a bed of puréed sweet potatoes, or another fish filet over grilled zucchini, or tomato-and-basil gambas over toast.

Dessert: Carrot cake

We know what you're thinking: carrot cake? So what? Just remember that this basically doesn't exist in France. In fact, for the most part, the only soft cakes to be had are chocolate (which makes banana cake an even bigger hit here than in the States). So a soft - but not melty - sweet cake with even sweeter icing turns out to be kind of a big deal. And as the lemon garnish might suggest, this carrot cake was a refreshing end to one of the lightest three-course dinners we've had in Paris.

Kiwizine (92, rue Rébeval, 75019 Paris, 06 50 41 61 07), you win.

Mon Oncle le Vigneron

You know what they say: don't judge a restaurant by its façade. I say that, anyway. And Mon Oncle le Vigneron, where we dined last Friday night, proves the validity of my invented saying.

We first wandered into Mon Oncle le Vigneron (which translates to "My uncle, the vintner") while on a search for quality duck rillettes, which we ended up buying there. They also clearly served food, and we were intrigued by the set-up of the place: You can actually watch the owners/cooks at work in the kitchen, which is cordoned off by a glass partition but otherwise shares the same space as the dining/store area.

Not quite a restaurant, not quite a store, Mon Oncle le Vigneron is what you'd call a cave à vin or a table d'hôte. It only has seating for about 20, and on any given night, it serves the exact same thing to everyone. No choice. So it'd better be good. And it was. Especially since a lot of what they serve is what they sell - artisan-produced "produits de terroir" from the southwest regions of France.

A funny thing about serving the exact same thing to everyone: no matter how good the food is, you also have to like it/want to eat it. When booking our reservation, I made the mistake of saying "no" when Madame asked if there were any dietary restrictions she needed to know about. I didn't really consider the possibility (make that probability, given that we're in France) that two out of the three courses we'd be served would derive from pork. Luckily we stopped in a few hours before dinner to check out what was on the menu, I realized my error, and upset Madame by informing her that at least two out of the four of us couldn't quite stomach pork sausage and pork tenderloin. (She was upset because they had already bought all the ingredients based on the number of reservations they had taken.) Ever the gracious hostess, she suggested they whip together vegetarian alternatives. Crisis averted.

And so it was that our first appetizer came to be goat cheese topped with red pepper, olive oil, and spices. True to the original menu, the second appetizer was a plank topped with Basque charcuterie, with some goose rillettes on the side. Food doesn't get a whole lot simpler than this, and it doesn't get a whole lot better, either.

For the main dish, Maggie and I enjoyed a tasty cochon aux pruneaux (literally pig with prunes, it reminded us of tajine, which would never be made with pork) while Becky and Gladis received a "Basque omelette." We're not exactly sure what made it Basque (maybe the fact that it wasn't cooked to dryness like most omelettes?) but whatever it was, it was delicious.


In this next shot - of the palatte-cleansing, classic simple salad we enjoyed between the main dish and dessert - you can just make out the the shelves full of honeys, rillettes, olive oils, wines, and other products sold at Mon Oncle le Vigneron. We cannot stress enough how excellent it all is. If you can, go buy something off those shelves, now.

Finally, the dessert. There was a plate of brébis (sheep) cheese served without bread, our instructions being to spread out-of-control black cherry jam on each slice; a caramel flan; a chestnut "cream" with a dollop of crême fraîche; and the only bitter taste of the evening, a "no pets allowed" curtain (!) inconveniently placed right next to our table. (This is offered in place of Gladis's un-photographed dessert, which was yoghurt covered with honey that actually tasted like the field of flowers the bees had raided before producing the golden stuff).

All of this almost proved too much to handle, except we couldn't help but finish everything, because how could we waste such delightful food? And that, of course, is a philosophy that gets you in trouble, especially on number four of five consecutive gastronomically-rich evening meals at Parisian restaurants. Oh well, we all have to make sacrifices here and there.

Portraits of Belleville: Jono, Claire, and Lilia (Kiwizine)

Our favorite restaurant in Paris is not one you'll find in the Michelin guide, on Chowhound, or in any food magazine (at least, not yet). It's a tiny place just around the corner called Kiwizine, and technically it's a non-profit "association" with two goals: bring people together around food and drink, and provide the chef, Jonathan Bevan, a chance to experiment in the kitchen. Jono hails from New Zealand (thus the punny restaurant name - say it with a French accent and it sounds like "cuisine"), his wife Claire is French, and their almost-1-year-old daughter, Lilia, is just unbearably cute.

We mostly see Jono, Claire, and Lilia on the weekends, since Kiwizine is only open Fridays and Saturdays. Hopefully someday it'll be open all week, because there's nothing we like more than stopping in with Panda on our way home from the park to make a reservation, to talk about food, or just to say hi.

Sarah's Visit - Part 2

We're still reminiscing about Sarah's visit last month. Here's some more images from a wonderful weekend:

We began Day 2 (after un café, of course) with a visit to the Pierre Soulages exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou:

After a lunch at home of les restes of the delicious (if fraught) quiche Louis had baked the night before, we continued our day with a mid-afternoon snack at Culture Rapide: nutella crepes for me and Sarah, cinnamon sugar for Louis!

Friday evenings at the Louvre, young people under 26 get in free. Unfortunately, Sarah and I are both 26, but just barely, so we had to pay while Louis (the young'un) got in free.

Look, ma, Soulages is in the Louvre! (An American lady behind me said, disapprovingly, "And then, there's this.")

After a couple hours at the Louvre (come on, this was our second museum of the day!), we decided it was time to eat again.We hit up Kiwizine (right around the corner) because the menu sounded utterly divine:

Gambas aux tomates et basilic sur un toast

   Filet du Jour aux épices libanais avec une sauce tarator et taboulé.

   Macaron vanille avec des fruits rouges

What a wonderful day!

Today in Belleville

Today, Louis and I visited two nearby places we've been meaning to go to for some time. First, we headed into the 20th arrondisement to check out Ding Fring, a "charity" shop. All the clothes are second-hand (eco-friendly!) and the proceeds go to a charity (Emmaüs). I'm not quite sure what Ding Fring means (pronounced in French it sounds even weirder). We browsed the quite wide selection of pants, dresses, shirts, jackets, and more. Eventually, I tried on three skirts and came out with a red one in solid wool for only 12.50 euros! (Picture of me in the skirt forthcoming.)

The other adventure of the day was an absolutely fabulous dinner at Kiwizine, a restaurant just around the corner on rue Rebeval. The interesting thing about this place is that it's actually a non-profit association, not a restaurant. This means that anyone who eats there must be a member. To become a member, one pays 2 euros. So we did. And it was totally worth it. The restaurant is only open Friday and Saturday, and there are no choices on the menu. Tonight's menu: pumpkin soup with honey and mustard, garnished with cream and fresh parsley; filet of salmon over risotto with mushrooms topped by asparagus wrapped in ham; fondant au chocolat with raspberry sorbet. There are almost no words to describe the deliciousness of this meal. I can only say that we will definitely be going back. Maybe it's a good thing they are only open two days a week!