Le Temps au Temps - one of Paris’s chic-est new-wave bistros

publication date: Apr 15, 2008

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author/source: Fiona Beckett

Le Temps au Temps in a nutshell

Food: Modern French with off-the-wall twists.
Wine: Specialises in natural, organic and biodynamic wines
Style/Decor: Pocket-sized bistro
Service: Slightly harassed. Madame seems to run everything and do the waiting so is understandably a bit distracted. Few concessions to non-French speakers, I suspect.
Who to go with: your best friend. You need to be comfortable about getting close.
Who not to go with: anyone seriously overweight. There simply isn’t room.
Verdict: Very good for fish but my starter was a shocker. Maybe we just struck an off night - the reviews in general are glowing. 
Cost: £££. The fixed price menu is a very reasonable 30 euros.

An hour before we were due for dinner the restaurant rang us to check we were coming. When we arrived, we understood why. We’d read it only seated 24 but hadn’t appreciated just how tight the space was. They have to pull the tables out to get you to your chair.

We were cheek by jowl with our neighbours, a very chic Parisien woman of a certain age with her toyboy, my husband insisted. (Personally I reckoned he was her son. She didn’t flirt with him and Frenchwomen always flirt)

Le Temps au Temps is one of the hotspots in the fashionable rue Paul Bert and the place you go if you don’t want to go where the tourists go (the hugely popular Bistrot Paul Bert across the road)

It looks like a bistro but it’s not quite. More like a scaled-down Michelin one star. The food is ambitious, the portions fashionably small. They call the cooking ‘récréative’ which means playful. When it came to my starter I wished the chef would grow up a bit.

Described as a ‘ravioli vegetale’ with veal tartare and crevettes it turned out to be a sandwich of rather cold tough pasta with a filling of chopped veal, prawns, cucumber, avocado, ginger, mint and - wait for it - mango and passionfruit. Quite horrid.

My husband fared much better with some very nice grilled sardines served - oddly but successfully - with a spoonful of creamy risotto. Fish is obviously the chef’s natural register. Our main courses of cod with bacon and artichokes and sea bass with caramelised endive flavoured with lemongrass and lime leaf were both delicious - wonderfully fresh fish, beautifully cooked. I even liked the lime leaf with the endive, one of my favourite vegetables.

We shared a plate of sheeps cheese with rocket sorbet - another better-judged combination and a dessert of rice pudding with salted caramel topped - less felicitously - with a lozenge of peanut-flavoured ice cream. And the rice was too hard. The chef had obviously never been near an English public school.

Despite all the disparate flavours our wine, a Morgon Côte de Py from Jean Foillard - along with Marcel Lapierre one of the new generation of ‘natural’ winemakers in Beaujolais - came through the meal triumphantly which shows when you remove the bubblegum and banana flavours from Beaujolais it can be a seriously food-friendly wine. The wine list was full of such gems.

I wanted to like this place more than I did. It's small and stylish - a real Parisien experience. But in comparison with the other restaurants we went to on our recent trip of which more tomorrow it was a bit of a disappointment. Despite the fact it's become quite touristy I'd stick to the vastly more comforting - and comfortable - Bistrot Paul Bert.

Le Temps au Temps is at 13 rue Paul-Bert. Tel: 01 43 79 63 40.

Bistrot Paul Bert, 18 rue Paul-Bert. Tel: 01 43 72 24 01