l’Avant Comptoir in Paris

By Staff Writer Larry Wilson

With many Parisian restaurants closed Sunday nights, I asked food critic Jonathan Gold where to go.

“I would go to L’Avant-Comptoir,” he replied. “Open Sundays and they don’t take reservations anyway so just get there and get in line.”

We met up with a young lawyer friend of Phoebe’s I’d taught to surf eight summers ago when he was in L.A.; he was now transitioning to a career in fashion photography.

His height and local French helped in the no-menu, no-chairs restaurant with offerings on the chalkboard where everyone eats small plates passed through the crowd and where we eventually landed a place at the zinc bar to lean on, gulping glasses of red Burgundy and eating nose-to-tail (well, ears at least) pieces of pig.

Paul-Antoine took us around the corner to the Assemblee Nationale where brass markers laid out the original length of a meter in revolutionary France.

Monday night we were booked, nostalgically, in our only highly fancy restaurant of the trip, Michel Rostang, a Michelin two-star, where I had first eaten more than 30 years ago and where Phoebe and I had dined a decade ago as well. The lobster menu, the bottle of extraordinary Chablis, the desserts that keep coming even after dessert — there is nothing on earth as elegant as a quiet, posh Parisian palace of cuisine.