Eating (Too Well) in Paris: Third Stop at Le Gourmet
Another interesting stop on our culinary adventures in Paris, Le Gourmet restaurant offers excellent French cuisine at prices I haven’t seen in Paris in 15 years.
Lunch time, where to go?
This is the third installment in the series of articles I started writing a couple of weeks ago about eating well in Paris. I love food, I love fine cuisine and I want my fellow travelers to enjoy Paris to the fullest. Those are enough reasons to guide you to those places that I am sure you will enjoy.
Lunchtime in Paris is restaurant time. People who work in the city do not carry their bags of food with them. They rarely enjoy the benefit of corporate catering, but even if they do, such catering is no mean feat to anyone’s eyes and taste buds.
Small restaurants perform a vital service: they feed the locals quite satisfactorily, cheaply, and in record time.
What goes for locals goes for travelers, and your next culinary stop happens under those circumstances. After a long morning walk through the picturesque hillside streets of Montmartre, you feel pleasantly hungry. His steps will take you to the Place de Clichy, a busy crossroads between the 17th, 9th and 18th arrondissement (metro station: ‘Place de Clichy’).
Time for a gourmet experience!
the gourmet
You may be hungry, but you’re not stupid. You want to eat well and spend your hard earned money on food worthy of the name.
In my considered opinion, none of the restaurants located around Place de Clichy are worth the money they ask for. I find your cuisine overpriced or downright vulgar. I have never had a satisfactory lunch at any of these places.
So where to go? Not too far.
When you’re on the Place de Clichy, turn to face the downward slope, with the metro station behind you. Point to Rue de Clichy, to the left of Rue d’Amsterdam. Walk down the street for about 200 meters and turn left onto Rue de Bruxelles. Walk another 200 meters. There you are on the right sidewalk.
Your next favorite food stop is at 19 rue de Bruxelles.
Name: Le Gourmet.
Identifiable sign: its French bistro-style façade. And a crowd.
entering the bistro
If you arrive around half past noon, you may have to wait a bit. The place is packed. I have been to this restaurant several times, and I have yet to be there the day it is not crowded at lunch time.
My advice: come around 12:00 am and grab a spot before everyone else.
The place oozes old-fashioned charm, with dark wood paneling, vintage posters, chalked menu boards on the walls, a traditional bar, tiled floor, bistro-style chairs and tables. It smells good, although cigarette smoke can become a problem when the front door is not left open.
The owner and chef bought the restaurant about 2 years ago from its first and former owners, an elderly couple who retired after running the ship for longer than any local can remember. The new owner liked the decoration and decided to keep it as is, with the exception of the façade, which was changed at the beginning of 2006.
In this very Parisian setting, customers feel immediately welcome and are quickly seated by the boss or a smiling waitress. It’s lunchtime and they know the bosses are in a hurry. No unnecessary delays.
Sitting, and menu in hands
In fact, the menu is written in chalk on blackboards that hang from the front and back walls. A remarkable feat for such a small restaurant, the menu changes daily.
Anyone who has lived in Paris for any length of time knows that restaurant menus don’t change beyond the ‘plat du jour’, the main meal of the day. Even the ‘plat du jour’ doesn’t change that much: from week to week, the same dishes tend to return to the menu.
Not so at ‘Le Gourmet’: the menu changes every day and no two weeks are the same. True diversity. Even if you were to eat there every day for 20 days, you could try 20 different dishes.
Gourmet cooking is a mission
The boss comes from the province of Touraine, in western France. He likes to work on traditional French dishes, and his cooking is mainly inspired by the famous regions of Burgundy and Lyon.
Among the ‘terroir’ dishes served at Le Gourmet, you can taste knuckle of veal, prime beef cuts, roasted sea bream, stewed duck (pot-au-feu de duck), pike dumpling (pike dumplings). And the list goes on.
To get fresh produce from her favorite vendors, she gets up every day at 3:30 am to go to the wholesale market (Market de Rungis, located south of Paris). He buys only what he needs for the day, loads up his truck and returns to his restaurant where he will spend the rest of the morning cooking for lunch.
The chef’s motto is “fresh products, traditional preparation”. He uses butter, not margarine. He does not buy frozen products, nor ready-to-use sauces, since he prepares his own sauces. He’s light on spices, which he says are “too often used to hide something.”
Appetizer, main course, dessert, wines
The Gourmet menu typically offers a choice of 4 starters (such as warm goat cheese served on a loaf of country bread), 3 or 4 main courses (meat, fish, poultry) and 4 desserts.
The choice of desserts is also ‘old-school’: depending on the day, your selection may include chocolate whipped cream, baba au rhum (a non-alcoholic rum-saturated sponge cake), biscuits with ganache (a mixture of chocolate, cream and butter), orange cake, fondant cake, floating island (whipped egg whites floating on a French cream), red fruit tarts, etc.
Light wines take most of the wine list. The chef’s hometown is Valencay (in the heart of the Touraine region), and he buys his bottles directly from local producers. The list includes a variety of well-thought-out vines: Gamay, Cabernet, Valençay, Bourgueil, and Saumur-Champigny.
All this for how much?
Beyond the quality of the food served at Le Gourmet, the check is another pleasant surprise. For a meager EUR13 (about $16), you have a full meal served in record time in a very friendly atmosphere. For a few dollars more, you have the wine to complete your experience.
To be honest, there are very few Parisian restaurants that give you so much for such a low price. The Gourmet wins my vote anytime, any day. I recommend it wholeheartedly.
Where?
the gourmet
19 brussels street
75009 Paris
Telephone: 33 (0)1 48 74 53 42
Metro station: Place de Clichy
lunch and dinner
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