CHEZ GEORGES

Paris

You’ll find all sorts in Chez Georges, a proper bistro just off Place des Victoires. Dowager duchesses in vintage Dior, picking at île flottante, and street sweepers feasting on the plats du jour. Pinstriped financiers, social X-rays with small, silly dogs, scruffy students and a smattering of tourists, all in search of an oldfashioned, well-priced lunch.

The menu is scrawled, daily, in lilac ink, while old mirrors line the walls, and the floor is clad in small, mosaic-like tiles. Waitresses wear black dresses and white aprons, while Arnaud Brouillet, the patron sports his own long white apron, and watches over proceedings with a well-seasoned eye. I always eat the oeuf en gelée ,ad eeply savoury jelly that gleams like amber, encasing an oozing egg wrapped in ham. The joy. Then steak au poivre, with lashings of nose-clearing peppers and rivers of cream, and a green salad that cuts through any dairy heft. Oh, and some lamb chops, too, pink and chewy. And maybe radishes with butter, and garlicky, butter drenched snails, so hot they strip the skin from the roof of your mouth; soused herring and potato salad, served from a vast bowl. You help yourself. Plus those îles flottantes, clouds of sweetened egg whites afloat in eddies of proper custard.

This is Parisian eating as it should be: classic, unchanging and reassuringly grumpy. restaurantsparisiens. com/chez-georges