Epicured :: 07:53 PM :: easyjetsetter

It's quite exciting to be going out to lunch with a cook and foodwriter. You know the food will be good. We were discussing business, but Clothilde's recommendation for lunch was inspired.

I've mentioned before that I live in a fairly foody area, and that rue des martyrs is the most foody of my local foody streets. My favourite Italian traiteur, Fuxia, has a branch there. They do huge plates of delicately flavoured pasta and gigantic platters of oily yummy antipasti, and they only charge you for how much wine you've drunk. The cheese shops, pastry shops, fish shops, wine shops and butchers that line the street are bonnes addresses for the whole foody community from all over Paris.

We ate at the Rose Bakery at number 46. Apparently the owners are a French woman and English man who used to be in London, but moved to Paris (as should you all) and opened up the same thing. It's just a little hole in the wall. The floors are bare stone, the walls white, the tables metal, and the chairs bleached wood. The dining room is cool and airy, and the front of the shop serves as a counter where people can pick up treats to take away and a little shop area, where you can get specialised products.

The Rose Bakery specialises in organic food, known as produits bios in French. The organic craze in Britain is not matched in France. I suspect this has something to do with the fact that it was in pursuit of faddish "organic" products that many britons experienced daily fresh food and took their time over eating for the first time, habits that the french have always had. So the enduring popularity (and consequent universal availability, range and choice, and lower prices) of organic food in the UK has as much to do with a new-ish culture of eating well than anything else.

The organic sections of the supermarket here are always tiny and very very pricey, but then the high quality of "regular" products mean people aren't willing to pay more for the same thing. So the sections stay small. But it's growing, thanks to places like the Rose Bakery. There are several restos bios in Paris, and not a few markets that sell only organic produce, that can be found here.

Another bonne addresse in my neighbourhood for you: although Clothilde is very familiar with the area, I was able to recommend her a restaurant that she'd not heard of. The Cafe Botak is tucked away in a tiny, lantern lit leafy square below montmartre, but above the marche st pierre. As my Teutonic friend and I discovered, they do godly things with a poivron confite, a goats cheese, and bee poo. They also always have a perfectly cooked fish, a cold soup, and some truly stupendous and rich steak tartare.

Anyway, you arrive at the Rose Bakery, and they sit you down with a brita water filter, a glass that's been pulled out of the freezer, and a sheet of brown paper to cover the table. The menu is simple and full of very English things, like "eton mess" and "ploughman's lunch."

They do a lunchtime menu of either soup or salad, bangers and mash and coffee, for 13 euros, which is, as Clothilde put it "financially interesting" but probably a bit much for lunch. Instead, we both ordered big plates of crudites with samples of all their salads for that day, for the same price. Clothilde mentioned that she often feels like eating salad as a meal is a punishment, but that this was different.

There were cucumbers in yoghurt and parsley sauce, bitter frise lettuce with sweet sultanas, roast potatoes with rosemary, a big floury tomato with fluffy mozarella and crushed basil dribbled on it, and grated carrots in a tangy honey dressing. I was too full for dessert.

Everything was nice about this place. They had yummy apple soap in the bathroom, with a little sign saying "if you like our soap, please don't steal it, we can tell you where to buy your own." They sell the ecologist and give out "go" a very hip english language entertainment magazine. They have a wee shelf with organic products including my favourite "green and black" organic hot chocolate. They sell cranberry juice, and brita water filter replacements, both very rare in france.

The dessert window was almost irresistible, they had nectarine compote, obviously handmade tart shells filled with glossy red fruit, and various gooey cakes and bread. Best of all, they sell brownies by the kilo....

I can't believe I only found this place two weeks before I leave. Does anyone know where the branch in London is?