In Paris, Ghosts of Bistros Past

First night on our Paris vacation, we eat at Au Passage in the 11th arrondissement. It’s a bistrot à vin, a modern wine bar with small plates, which looks like some old tabac (tobacco store)—consciously retro, in other words (our waiter’s a cute guy in a T-shirt). We demolish a hunk of coarse-grained lamb and fig pâté and a pretty arrangement of raw fish (tuna, with thin slices of rhubarb and radish), and drink a cool Gamay. It’s nice, but clearly this is not the meal we came to Paris hoping to find—me, my husband, and our friend Michelle. It's too fussy, too composed, and, honestly, just too California. “I want Amélie food,” Michelle says, whining, still hungry. Strangely, I know what she means: French dishes both nostalgic and charming, served in some mirrored, wood-paneled bistro right out of Brassaï, the Hungarian-born photographer who documented the seedy glamour of Paris's streets and bistros starting in the 1920s.

http://www.chow.com/food-news/117155/in-paris-ghosts-of-the-classic-bistro/