Real French delicacies

If you want a truly authentic and delicious Parisian dining experience, avoid cafes or restaurants with plastic chairs, writes CATHERINE CLEARY

I HAVE EATEN atrocious dinners in Paris. There have been meals that were simply bad. And then there was the one in Alain Ducasse’s Aux Lyonnaise where we were put in the worst seats in the room. Then we had the deeply unspecial “special” charmingly sold to us without the crucial detail that it was twice the price of other main courses. They may as well have handed us two dunce’s caps with flashing “T”s on them for tourist. In New York we’d be rubes, a 19th-century slang term thought to come from the name Rueben, the everyman innocent country hick.

It’s frustrating to think that your money could buy you something much better if you just had the code to cracking cities like Paris, a key to the door that leads to the secret courtyard garden with its fig trees and scented flowers.

One rule of thumb is not to expect anything wonderful on the plate if you’re sitting on a plastic rattan chair in a street cafe or restaurant. These venues are great for coffee or a drink. There’s a never-ending widescreen people- watching canvas, a dance of glances between watched and watcher. But everyone knows you’ll probably never be back. There’s always another wave of wallets with hungry people attached to them. So what would be the point in lavishing money or attention on the ingredients?

But this time I’ve consulted a friend of a friend who works as a food critic here. We’re at a table with no view, surrounded by French people. Outside, on the steep street, people are photographing the Moulin Galettes, one of Montmartre’s famous windmills which sits opposite the restaurant. Inside Le Coq Rico it’s all new white-painted timber and minimalism like a Laura Ashley-ed garden shed. Not a splash of claret red, a dancing girl or a piece of gilt in sight. The newish place is a chicken restaurant, which sounds uninspiring but turns out great.

Here, the chicken and the egg both come first as the entrees are a choice of one or the other. For anyone with an aversion to giblets, the knotty dark bits fished out of the innards of a bird, typically bagged and binned, this is a restaurant that could change your mind. A plate of poultry giblets (it sounds better in French) for €12 is a set of small flavour bombs, each one deeply satisfying. There are deliciously-dense dark duck hearts, preserved duck gizzards on a cocktail stick with cubes of apple, lacquered chicken wings with just a matchstick bone inside this compressed mouthful of loveliness and spiced cromesquis (a variation on croquettes without the breadcrumbs) that are simply gorgeous. Liam has a poached egg with a muscular “coeur de boeuf” tomato and a Bearnaise sauce.

A main course of a quarter of a Challans free-range chicken comes spit-roasted with giant cloves of roasted garlic. Some of the meat comes on a bone thick enough to attest to a life of walking and the rest is meltingly-moist breast meat. It’s chicken and chips, but better. I get a plate of more “tidbits”, gizzards, hearts, some liver with rolls of calamari in a tangy chicken stock with flatleaf parsley and tiny halved fried potatoes, a fantastic mix of rubbery and liverish textures, each one drenched in flavour.

Desserts are divine, mine a towering concoction of meringue, strawberry sorbet, basil sorbet and cream, Liam’s a chocolate sorbet which should come with coffee sauce but it arrives too late. A bottle of 2010 Bourgogne pinot noir (€28), some fizzy water and an espresso bring the bill to €137, not cheap but modest for Paris. By the time we leave, the place is packed, the restaurant phone that a diner at the table next to us ended up answering at one point as it was trilling on their table, has been ringing all evening. It’s not surprising. This simple chicken restaurant hits all the right notes in the clamour and heave of tourist Paris.

The hunger grumps were gathering like dark clouds as we queued outside a nondescript cafe on the long Rue du Cherche Midi. We had walked past plenty of other places with free tables. “This better be worth it,” someone may have muttered. It was. The Cuisine de Bar is a sister cafe to Poilane, the famous Paris bakery which has been in the nextdoor premises since 1932. Its presence takes the sting out of the queue. You can go in and admire the teaspoons baked out of shortbread and get something to keep you going. We nibbled on the best croissants we’ve ever eaten as we queued, clearing the clouds to manageable levels.

Inside, we went for the set lunch, a tartine or open sandwich, small salad, glass of wine and a coffee for €13.50 each. We shared a table with two other couples. Liam’s guacamole and crayfish sandwich was superb. My tapenade with thinly sliced peeled cucumber a delight. Brilliant ingredients from the crunchy toasted sourdough bread to the toasted cumin seeds for scattering on top. We pushed the boat out and shared a luscious lemon tart (€4.50) to finish, and even got one of those shortbread spoons to stir a strong black coffee at the end. Lunch for two with wine came to €33.50

And finally, if you want to feel like you’ve stepped into Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, Restaurant Petrelle in the 9th is the place. On a quiet street you push through a plush apricot-orange velvet curtain into an experience that’s pure Hollywood Paris. Underneath dusty, ancient-looking chandeliers the walls are painted black, or lined with tapestries, and painted cartoon bookshelves. Objects are scattered from the weird to the kitsch, like the plaster yellow-coated queen Elizabeth waving beside a cast-iron poodle. There is one chef, one waiter and an in-house black and white cat. The food is not cheap (starters are all over €20 mains over €30). But it’s simple seasonal earthy country-cooking. There were marinated artichokes, sensational asparagus (that tasted like it had just been picked), proper new potatoes, a good lamb dish and tender delicious veal.

We skipped dessert and came out at €155, including a bottle of rose at €30.