Food with fresh

With provenance of produce a priority, finds Paris is the perfect place for the modern foodie

The dish I am eating frankly looks like a flowerpot. There is a small shrub sprouting from a rich humus sprinkled in dark soil. I dip in my spoon and find a lentil puree topped with “volcanic” crumbs of powdered mushroom and cacao. It is exquisite: earthy and rich and fresh all at the same time. It is also vegetarian. Yes, that’s right, a cordon bleu French dish with no meat.

The food art “Pot de fleurs du Velay” was presented by the chef Francoise Gagnaire of Anicia Bistro as an example of the “vegetable-led” cuisine currently in vogue in France. Led by the chef Alain Passard, this new kind of cooking puts vegetables “at the centre of the plate”.

Another example is beets, celery and radish cooked in vinegar or “escabeche” with tiny pieces of farmed trout. It zings with colour and tastes tart and smoky. This time the chef is Francois Pasteau of L’epi Dupin Bistro, who sourced the vegetables from gardens around Paris.

A passionate advocate of “carbon friendly” or “écoresponsable” cooking, he argues that locally sourced ingredients and less meat cuts down on carbon emissions.

To finish I have a crème brûlée of passion fruit and saffron served in the fruit itself by Julien Duboue

Even beetroots and radishes come in four or five different colours

from Bistro A Noste. It is perfection. The dishes were served by chefs at a ceremony to reward the best 100 bistros in Paris. Unlike Michelin starred restaurants, bistros tend to be more low key affairs. They are smaller and thankfully cheaper, and the emphasis is more on simple food that has an interesting back story.

Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, says she set up the “Bistro Awards” to remind the world of the power of cooking to create community, especially in the wake of the recent terror attacks on Paris.

“Food brings people together and is a way of sharing our love for the Earth and each other,” she says.

The city has banned supermarkets and instead has 80 fresh produce markets, where Parisians can buy direct from farmers. A visit to Rungis Market on the outskirts of Paris, the largest fresh produce market in the world, means getting up at 4am but the colour and sights and smells are just as glorious as anything else you will experience in Paris during more