LES BOUQINISTES
53 quai des Grands Augustins, Paris
01 43 25 45 94
http://www.lesbouquinistes.com
€86 ($137) for dinner for two, including wine, tax and tip
RESTAURANT LE VOLTAIRE
27 quai Voltaire
01 42 61 17 49
€95 ($152) for dinner for two, including wine, tax and tip
BRASSERIE BOFINGER
5-7 rue de la Bastille
01 42 72 87 82
€75 ($120) for dinner for two, including wine, tax and tip
The notion of doing Paris on the cheap used to be oxymoronic, and the euro exchange rate isn't helping. With one euro costing $1.60, why go to the City of Light? Answer: la crise, as they're calling the global financial meltdown, has infected restaurant prices quite nicely - and servers' attitudes too.
Parisian restaurants are both cutting their prices and offering very inviting fixed-price meals. I spent a week in Paris last month with the goal of eating good dinners for less than $120 for two all in. Some nights, we broke the budget, but it was remarkably easy - and delectable - to be a gourmandizing recessionista in 2009 France.
Two years ago, I would not have had the nerve to order just one course in a serious French restaurant. Today, they're glad to see you come through the door and the previously frosty waiters are no longer treating North Americans like dim-witted tourists. Until last fall, eating on the cheap in Paris consigned one to tourist dreck or the likes of Leon's of Bruxelles, the low rent mussels 'n' frites chain. La crise has made the options far more interesting.
For €86 ($137), for instance, we had a superb dinner at Les Bouqinistes, the junior resto of three-star chef Guy Savoy. As someone who has been happily hoovering three-course dinners for decades, I was astonished to discover that one course offers plenty of food - especially when they give you some extras along the way, which they do.
Les Bouqinistes is a tall, glorious room with two big windows overlooking the Seine. In the long days of spring, the falling evening light is magnificent. Two of us ordered one main course each, a half-bottle of my favourite water (Badoit) and a glass of wine each. They brought ridiculously good crusty buns (but no butter) and an amuse of the creamiest cream of veg soup I have ever tasted.
The lamb comes two ways: pink tender shoulder on a warm salad of baby veg (nobody cradle-robs a garden like the French) and superbly tender ground lamb, both sauced with crystalline thyme-scented lamb jus. Impeccably fresh scallops also come two ways: sweet, little thinly sliced raw scallop coins tossed with baby radishes, tiny cauliflower florets and a splash of aged balsamic and gilded, barely cooked whole scallops on a bed of emerald broccoli purée. With ceremony, the waiter pours a little copper pot of orange-scented beurre blanc in a moat around the broccoli.
Does this guy mind that we order only one course? Apparently not - and nor do the extremely affable wait staff at Le Voltaire, a 60-year-old grande dame of traditional French. Also on the quai across the road from the Seine, Le Voltaire is a blousy French beauty with rose velvet curtains and banquettes, wood panelling, small brass sconces and pink hyacinths blooming in a huge copper fish poacher.
The cheapest mains cost €41 ($65), so dinner for two with cheap wine cannot be had for under $150. But quel dîner! Milk-fed lamb loin is as pink 'n' pretty as it gets, sauced with a pure reduced lamb jus and served with a big pile of crispy frites. We are in classic French nirvana over tender browned sweetbreads sauced with veal sauce montée au beurre and foliote butter (foliotes are tiny, wild black mushrooms) braised with reduced veal stock. On the side, they bring two silver platters of silken purées, one potato and the other squash. Afterward come complimentary sweets: little meringues and buttery sugar cookies.
Enough food? Ha! But our $120 budget still remained an unmet goal, so we went in search of cheaper eats. Normally we avoid the brasserie Bofinger as a tourist trap, but it is such a gorgeously restored art deco establishment with magnificent floral skylights and pink marble. And they now have a great fixed-price dinner - two courses for €26 ($41), which means that two can dine with wine for $120. Best in house is six sweet briny oysters followed by blanquette of salmon
wherein perfectly cooked salmon is swimming in white sauce with al dente zucchini, broccoli and lardoons (a sweet white veg that looks like celery).
The sauce on the salmon embodies everything I adore about French cuisine: It is magnificently buttery and creamy yet fragile, neither heavy nor thick - and there's lots of it. It is the kind of sauce that has one crying: "Quick, bring me a spoon."