I have no secret places, as critics such as Craig Claiborne had, I tend to focus on places AT LUNCH that cost 100-110 E a couple with a bottle of wine, coffee and no bottled water and I blab and blog on and on about the most miserable of meals, since feedback indicates that my readers appreciate being warned off places as much as touted onto them.
So a bit of digging on this site or looking at John’s Top Ten periodically, usually unearths what I’m doing and thinking. But as summer looms, and prodded by an old classmate who asked me this very question just a bit ago, I thought I’d give it another shot. (One note: this list does not exactly correspond to my numerical rankings, since there are places where we’ve stopped going - such as Le Dauphin or Passage 53 where the seats are uncomfortable, no matter the quality of the food, or that one of my canaries-in-the-mine has identified as having developed some flaw(s), like Thierry Burlot or Septime).
So, here are some of my favorites clustered in categories, Figaroscope-like, that is, they make sense to me. All of which are searchable on the blog.
3 Golden oldies:
Ze Kitchen Galerie (with the caveat that since stardom, it exceeds the 50-60 E and could be called fusion not Parisian cooking)
Spring (with the caveat that one must look carefully at the big wine list to get the bargains)
Le Repaire de Cartouche
3 Relatively new places:
Neva
L’Office
Les Jalles
3 Others:
Le Bistro Volnay – older place with a new chef
Le 122: Bistrot d'Hier et d'Aujourd'hui – ditto
Atao – Seafood on a Sunday which is hard to find for lunch