Meals Worth a Flight (or a Cab Ride)

“THE shock of the familiar” is how I think of a visit to a once-favorite restaurant after an absence of 20 years, an experience that has shaped my travel plans ever since. The year was 1979, and I was in Paris after a three-week eating trip throughout France to report on the work of the then-young turks of la nouvelle cuisine: Bocuse, Guérard, Chapel, the Troisgros brothers, among others. Fully sated on innovation and culinary cleverness, I was starved for the traditional flavors that defined France to me, and so I decided to seek out the oldest chef in Paris.

That search lead me back to L’Ami Louis, and the 80-year-old Antoine Magnin, the reigning chef since the place opened in the mid-1920s (and hadn’t been painted since). Despite having loved it on my previous visits, I had not been back in years, mostly because I was too often curious about the new and the hot. Though always outrageously expensive, given its worn appearance and total lack of chichi, Louis’s place, as I came to think of it, made me feel as if I had just come home, an impression that gained strength as the food for four of us began to arrive: gigantic, sumptuous snails sizzling in giant shells under a haze of garlic; the housemade, cream-rich foie gras that released its seductively decadent flavor as we spread it on bread toasted over a wood fire; nut-brown roast Bresse chicken, pink gigot of lamb, and the exceptionally crunchy, roseate veal kidneys; potatoes roasted in duck fat and fresh morels adrift in heavy cream. Not a clever idea on the plate, just simple perfection of classics! There and then I resolved never to go to Paris without at least one visit to what remains, under Mr. Magnin’s worthy sucessors, my favorite restaurant in the world as I know it thus far.

read the rest > http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/travel/26personal.html?adxnnl=1&ref=dining&adxnnlx=1241010011-UEStOwkme56lhbiPsY55kQ