Sven Chartier attacked by giant alien oyster at Omnivore

Sven! Watch out !!!! It's behind you !!!

Sabor food magazine - GET IT NOW !

Time for a personal ad!

I wholeheartedly advise all of my readers (with iPads) to download the new food and travel magazine SABOR (free until March 15th) Best digital mag to come out for a long time. And don't be afraid to leave comments on iTunes store if you like it !!

Righteous comment from a New Zealand reader: "I purchased Sabor last week after reading about it on a blog, and am very impressed with the quality and work that went into it (I even wrote you a comment, saying that it's what Lucky Peach could have been had David Chang not been too focused on keeping up his hipster cred rather than providing a quality product)."

Travel and Leisure, Eat like a Local in Paris

Last year the Travel and Leisure staff asked me to pick my Paris insider favorites. Here are a few in their new Eat Like a Local article. Bravo to all included.

Le Mary Celeste

Apart from hot new bistros, fantastic, interesting and envelope pushing food can now be found in Paris bars, most notably, the recently opened Marie Celeste.

Created by Adam Tsou and Colombian beauty Carina Soto Velasquez Tsou, a husband and wife team who met at the Experimental Cocktail Club, this is their third establishment (the others being the Mexican inspired Candelaria and former titty bar turned Pigalle hipster magnet, Glass).

Marie Celeste is basically an oyster bar, with regional French and European small production bivalves, great cocktails from Carlos (formerly of L'Hotel) , Brooklyn IPA on tap, and, most, importantly, small plates from Canadian raised, half Chinese, half Romanian chef Haan Palcu-Chang, who worked at Copenhagen's Michelin starred Thai Kiin Kiin and did stints at Verre Volé, Chateaubriand, Au Passage and Saturne in Paris. Much more than just bar snacks, the food is delightfully playful, well executed and fusion-y with dishes such as Chinese crepes (ie tacos) with beef shin, peanuts, sesame, nicely spiced kimchee, and steamed oysters with black vinegar, shallots and coriander. Haan has got skills and the place is cool, ready to blow up soon. Best bar in Paris at the moment? Oui.

"Serious" writing

A funny thing happened to me. I've never really put much time, effort or thought into this blog, and have been surprised at the amount of attention I've received from people quite serious about their Paris restaurants. Maybe it's the "insider" angle, my general snarkiness (which is pretty absent in most other blogs here) or the fact that I work for a famous and fortunate clientelle in my day job. I've never considered this form of communication as anything other than a venting of my restaurant obsession (it started as a way to placate my friends who were tearing their hair out as I repeated experiences in this or that hot new place).

So it's a bit strange that, now working on a very serious project that involves writing, that the only way that I've been able to break down a block I've been having for some time, is to pretend that I am writing it up on a blog. A way to trick my mind into believing that this is fun and not serious and not grown up and mature. My brain seems to hate serious writing.

But pretending has been helping me turn out some pretty cool copy.

Thoughts?