“My favorite part of a trip to Paris!”
I’m surprised. I would have thought that an exaggerated shrug of the shoulders, and a loud “bof” while exhaling, and maybe a muttered “à quoi ça sert ?” would have been more entertaining. But a simple sneer can be fun too, I guess. 
All that!
Looking forward to it, and some Angelina hot chocolate!
Hope to be there this fall.
I find this thread tremendously interesting and very disturbing We each have our own expectations of not only travel food but daily food. It is so idiosyncratic that these questions and recommendations become close to useless Even among my very favorite dining companions, we champion rooms and chefs that another of us withers from. So, as I’ve begged for so long, a precise description of the food is in the long haul more of a help than a hearty recommendation.
Thanks to you, Daniel, I’m now replacing L’Arcane with Granite!..hence no longer able to combine L’Arcane with visit to Sacre Coeur!
Sacree Fleur in the same area, have rave reviews on its ’ wood-fire- ’ steaks on Tripadvisor, Yelp, Google and a couple of Youtube coverages. With that I can kill both ’ Sacre Coeur ’ & ’ Good & value steak 'with one stone!
Was ’ quantity ’ of food for Le Clarence 90 Euro - 3 course lunch enough? Hate to bring my companion there and we have to end up eating a Big Mac afterwards?! 
Boeuf Bourguignon?! Just one…the Chez Dumonet version, to see what the hype is all about…until I heard Chez Fernand Christine’s ’ Beef Cheek ’ version being mentioned?! The latter arouses my curiosity to compare with Dumonet’s, but most of all, to compare with a ’ really awesome ’ version I had in Tokyo’s Roppongi district, pre-Covid, where the restaurant used ’ Japanese Wagyu Beef Cheek ’ and the sauce reduction was out-of-this-world delicious! Made even more enjoyable when paired with Robuchon’s style creamy mashed potato!!
Having no other version to compare it to, I thought the BB at Chez Fernand on Christine with beef cheeks was excellent. Served in a pot, featuring tender beef, in a rich sauce studded with potatoes.
Charles, perhaps you and your friend could take one for the team and try both for us?
Thanks Parn!
Sure! Why not?!..may be someone from the team can provide us with a couple bottles of good Red Burgundy to go with them? Ha! 
Mme Mangeur, we’ve had the same discussion or rather argument on Chowhound. You love your food porn and write it well. For me, it’s just a snapshot of a restaurant and can be totally different when somebody else goes. I have read reviews with pics and precise descriptions of what was eaten that had me salivating. And then I go to find a totally different experience, a totally different menu, and acute disappointment and resentment that I was so easily susceptible.
I tend to recommend restaurants that have consistently delivered enjoyment after repeat visits. Reliability—and vibe—are much more important to me than a one-off and probably unrepeatable wow.
“Was ’ quantity ’ of food for Le Clarence 90 Euro - 3 course lunch enough?”
It was enough for me. But I don’t like heavy lunches because I have to get back to work. Or heavy dinners for that matter because I like a before and an after at a bar or club or whatever to enjoy the parisian lifestyle. An over-full tummy gets in the way of the enjoyment.
Well discerned and said. I was railing against those undocumented “WOW” and “best of my life”s that tell us little.
What is it about boeuf bourguignon that makes it such an object of lust for foreigners ? It’s only a stew, after all, and just one of the many equally delicious French “daubes”/ stews. And not even very parisian. Which is why it’s not on the menus of most restaurants outside the tourist zones.
If you want to turn your food crawl into a boeuf bourguignon chase, why just two options ? The Café des Musées in the 3rd won Le Figaro’s boeuf bourguignon taste test several years ago and Le Bourguignon du Marais in the lower 4th also seems to serve a good version. And both are less “vieux schnoque”/ old fart and geriatric than Joséphine Chez Dumonet.
The iconic parisien dish is blanquette de veau, BTW.
And oh, what about soufflés ? You don’t seem to have considered them in your food crawl. Tip: Le Récamier off rue Sèvres on the borders of the 6th/7th.
Edit: Oops, this should have been a reply to Charles, not Trish.
My $0.02 is that Montee is one of my favorite restaurants in Paris. I have been multiple times and have always had an excellent meal. Not sure why its star was taken away, but still heading back in May.
I always wanted to go to Assiette Champenoise. I stayed at the hotel for a night or two on one earlier trip with my mom, but she isn’t an adventurous eater, so we did not go to the restaurant.
Sorry for all the ‘dumb’ questions! Looks likes some of you are getting impatient with this foreign foodie from across the ocean?! Ha! Guess each of us who posted on this thread all have our own reasons and agenda when putting forward certain inquiries…yours truly included!
For my companion and myself, we are both suckers for hearty, rustic beef stews! Apart from a rare encounter or two in Japan, trying to locate a really well executed, red-wine based, fork tender, dark-rich-thick-complex ‘beef stew’ outside of France can be a bit of a challenge…even in French speaking Quebec!! As such, we have decided to savour a couple of ’ authentic French versions ’ during this trip. However, to swarm our eating itinerary with more than 2 or three of this stew will however be an 'overload '.
{ In a way, one can similarly question why foodies love to eat sushi and search out different sushi-ya in places like Tokyo?! After-all, fish is fish, raw seafood is raw seafood and seasoned rice is seasoned rice?! So, what’s the big deal with raw fish and seafood on a nugget of seasoned rice dressed with soya sauce based glaze! However, in the past, there were myriads of ex-chowhounders, spending hours upon hours on that thread discussing just this one subject! }
I am well aware of your city’s tasty, classic - Blanquette de Veau, having tasted it in Paris when I was much younger. However, based on current 'health ’ consideration, due to the ’ cream ’ involved in the cooking of this dish, we would prefer something healthier. Meat cooked in Red wine vs Heavy Cream?! No brainer!
As for Souffle, for sure this will be on our eat list! ( Oh! Small world! I have eaten Le Recamier’ version before! 
). But again, taking into account of current scenario involving ’ blood sugar level and impact on borderline diabetic '. One such delicacy is enough…considering we have to leave room for other desserts from patisserie like Yann Couvreur or Ble Sucre…
To each his own!!
Well considered and stated. You want a quintessential French Beef Stew. You will find this under the stars. While my single meal there was miserable, overcooked veal kidney, I would probably try Chez Fernande on rue Christine. It is reasonably priced and service will not be petulant.
@THECHARLES
I’m not sure if the classic boeuf bourguignon with tiresome and not always tender chunks of beef at Joséphine Chez Dumonet is at all comparable to the always tender beef cheeks modern version, more easily described as a daube/ stew de joue de boeuf à la bourguignonne, at Chez Fernand Christine. The daube de joue de boeuf at the very authentic and time-warp Chez Denise in Les Halles is also a very worthy parisian version of a similar stew.
I take your point about foreigners in Japan searching for “the best sushi”. Fortunately, I don’t have a seat of King Arthur’s Round Table and see no need for mystical quests for a non-existent holy grail. Admittedly, my French palate is very different from the Japanese one and the slight subtleties that turn on my Japanese colleagues leave me bewildered. For me, the differences between “the best” and the 100th best sushi are so insignificant that they hardly matter. And the same for pizza and pasta in Italy, hamburgers in the US, paella in Spain, and falafel in France, Israel, Lebanon, etc. In many ways those “foodie” discussions about the best sushi, best pizza etc are just a modern version of how-many-angels-can-dance-on-a-pinhead theological bickering.
At the risk of sounding chauvinistic I agree that most French daubes/ stews are delicious. I’m surprised that the cuisines of other cultures haven’t adapted the French technique of marinating the meat in wine and then sieving the mirepoix into a thick wine-based stew sauce. My peeve is that boeuf bourguignon (one of my less favourite stews when made with classic chunks of beef) has elbowed all the other fabulous stews off restaurant menus because of tourist demand. In a city of 2.2 million residents, what the (pre-Covid) 35 million tourists a year (of which 16 million are foreigners) want, restaurateurs must necessarily provide. In effect, Paris has become a stew mono-culture. Fortunately, I have my gran to make sensational daube d’agneau provençale and other equally delicious French stews.
There are some typical dishes in the foreigners’ wishlist
Boeuf Bourguignon
Coq Au Vin
French Onion Soup, even in the summer
Julia Child is partly to blame.
I think Blanquette de Veau is less sought out by North American tourists and travellers to Paris because many North Americans avoid veal (not Charles, he is a fan of veal, as am I). I know many Canadians and a few Americans who will eat pork, beef, lamb, chicken and duck, but draw the line at veal and/or foie gras.
Charles, sorry, I don’t buy this Eating For Health argument, coming from you, at all. 
You like beef stew more than blanquette de veau.
Add the Belgian Carbonnade to your beef stew wishlist.
There are pluses & minuses to our recent “foodie” culture (ok… more minuses). The fact that there are so many people now interested in going out to restaurants and finding great places to eat (whatever their definition is) has probably kept a # of chefs/restaurants in business and inspired more people to write about it, sharing info. not otherwise easily accessible. But the “quest for the best” is, overall, one of the big issues, & has a real annoying component. Although THECHARLES is genuinely searching for a satisfying dish and not the Holy Grail, I am amazed at how many people I meet in NYC ask me for the “best bagel” or the “best pizza” or even “the best Italian restaurant”. They seem genuinely depressed when I rephrase their question and tell them about places that make excellent examples of the food they advertise & that their food satisfies my (eclectic) hunger very nicely. I can tell them who (imo, of course) uses too much sugar in their cooking, but I cant tell them if a wood fired pizza is “better” than a gas oven pizza. Not sure exactly what this has to do with anything, but I just felt like sharing
