Tackle: 58, rue de la Réunion, 75020
Hours: Open Monday-Saturday for lunch & dinner. Open Sunday for lunch solely.
Phone: +33 1 43 67 51 15
Web site / On-line Reservations / Fb / Instagram
It comes as a shock to come across, amid the side-streets of Paris’ sleepy, gastronomically-underserved 20ème arrondissement, the old-time bombast of the painted façade of restaurant La Vierge, a.ok.a. A La Vierge de la Réunion. A resort in a bygone period, the bottom ground now homes an egalitarian and immaculately tasteful wine bistrot, by restaurateur Greg Again (Café du Coin) and the well-traveled younger chef couple Elsa Marie and Julian Could, whose prolonged résumés embrace stints at Paris’ Septime and Clermont-Ferrand’s Le Saint Eutrope, respectively.
Lunchtimes in La Vierge’s expansive, well-lit eating room see Elsa Marie plating countryside classics like pork stomach with roast carrots or hake brandade, executed with worldwide panache at small-town costs. The three-course menu is simply 20€.
La Vierge is a good higher worth at dinnertime, when Marie and Could’s considerate menu of small plates summons a packed home nightly. The affect of Le Saint-Eutrope chef Harry Lester is palpable within the pair’s mastery of house-cured charcuterie, in addition to within the omnivorous synthesis of French nation rusticity and new-world playfulness in La Vierge’s menu.
An insanely addictive duck salad unites the joyous fats of fried duck pores and skin with the piercing candy salinity of candied salted almonds; a pristine and tender plate of thin-sliced roast beef helps a splat of unctuous sauce gribiche. Spanish and Italian detours like gazpacho and tagliatelli are dealt with with the technical mastery one encounters routinely in London or Sydney and really hardly ever in France.
An interesting (and vegetarian) dish of long-stewed fava beans and ricotta included the precise fava bean shells, their fibrousness rendered palatable by the prepare dinner time and the indelibly savory broth. These quiet wonders are served as in parts one may describe as genuinely shareable: one receives greater than a spoonful, most likely because of the cooks’ clever resolution to keep away from the rote luxurious crutches of many small plates menus: lobster, salmon eggs, edible flowers, and so forth.
The wine choice (at retail costs, plus 9€ corkage) is completely suited to its humble quartier, which is to say it’s an eclectic mélange of pure wines starting from budget-minded southern French choices to extra récherché bottles like these of Alsace’s La Grange d’Oncle Charles. The overarching honesty and generosity of La Vierge’s idea locations the restaurant alongside overachieving friends like Belleville’s Le Cadoret on the vanguard of a brand new technology of Paris bistrot that acknowledges the worth of advantage.
In Different Phrases
L’Categorical (2019) François Régis-Gaudry delivers a rhapsodic evaluate of La Vierge, together with a reasonably complete abstract of the chef-couple’s careers and engaging particulars of the method of growing older mackerel. He says the lunch menu at this “loopy charming” bistrot “may make us cross Paris once more prior to anticipated.”
Time Out (2019) dubs La Vierge “the candy worth bistrot of Charonne,” “for individuals who imagine in a preserved Paris.”
Le Fooding (2018) says La Vierge can rework “your twenty-euro invoice into a real feast!”
Le Monde (2018) gives a totally demented tackle La Vierge, written by Marie Aline within the second particular person (vous), apparently addressing proprietor Greg Again, recounting a lunch on the restaurant at which Again himself was current. It’s virtually unattainable to discern the precise reward for the delicacies by means of one’s astonishment {that a} main newspaper would publish such twittish, vaguely flirtatious scribbling as a evaluate.
