Au Pied de Cochon
★★★☆☆
In the middle of the night, food becomes an illicit thrill. I love eating by the humming light of the fridge - sticky spoonfuls of leftover risotto, chilled sausage singing with mustard, a Ben & Jerry’s tub, and best of all, I think, the fudgey glories of an unfinished crumble. One thing I don’t care for is yesterday’s pizza, although in my student days I was known to trawl the Domino’s box out the bin to munch that last, discarded slice.
At night-time, as opposed to the evening, restaurants offer a different kind of pleasure. Arching over it all is a body-clock weird-out from eating vast plates of food when you’d normally be tucked up, and it’s vaguely surreal to see waiters wearing black bow ties in that dark before the dawn. But for me at least, the experience carries giggling memories of midnight feasts, of sweets scoffed well past bedtime. And isn’t the communality of restaurants, the way they mesh sociable and private life, somehow sharpest at night? For once, conversations are held between tables, not just over them. There’s more jocular togetherness in the queue at the kebab shop than the most solemn gastro-temple, I promise you.
The Eurostar rolled in late. Au Pied de Cochon was round the corner from the flat where we were staying, and it’s open 24 hours. They claim they haven’t locked the doors here since 1946, a playground boast I’m happy to accept. Les Halles market, now no more, of course, used to be next door, and the restaurant fed its marketeers. The brasserie is decked in that faintly shabby splendour typical of Parisian bistros, and the menu is comfortingly predictable, with an offaly emphasis. By now, regular readers will know I eat with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.
So here's bone marrow with mustard: quivering, nutty jelly spiced with popping seeds, roared in the oven till brown and sweet, unabashed and globby on hot toast. It’s by far the best thing we eat. Onion soup, which looked promising under an exhausted crust of Gruyère, is ashtray rinse. Green salad is as fresh and exciting as a Robert Lindsay sitcom.
The signature at the Foot is called ‘La tentation de saint Antoine’. Nothing to do with Flaubert’s play, or anything else arty: Anthony is the patron saint of pigs. (And also of skin disease, but that’s just scratching the surface.) The dish is snout, trotter, tail, ears and chips – all garnished, if that’s the right word, with salt. Tempting it certainly is, and though it isn't set with skill or chosen out with care, I applaud its proud anti-vegginess. The snout’s the best bit, slathered in bearnaise; the trotter is hot and fatty; the tail is fun to dunk and chew; but the ears are horribly gristly. Charlie, who like me is watching his weight, orders kidneys flambéed in Cognac with cream. They’re perfectly pink, in a sauce bloated with potatoes and nubbed with chopped mushrooms, toothsome and reeking with the salty sting of urine.
I finish with perhaps the girliest dish I've ever been served. Rosewater ice-cream, strawberry sorbet and a little meringue, the lot gasping under a ridiculous amount of Chantilly. Pink as Piglet, all it needs is a cherry on top. It’s four in the morning, by now, and the evening has been long and lubricated. The pudding is far too sweet, fatty as a Texan, the rosewater smells like granny perfume, and the whole thing is probably quite disgusting. I lick the bowl clean.
We leave as light is beginning to break, though plenty of tables remain full. It's hard to dislike the Foot, with its pig-fuelled, sleepless menu. There are no great flashes of technique here, nothing that sets the world alight or dances on the palate. But it's blood and guts served with toil and sweat, and I can only admire the commitment and passion needed to keep the place running. Later on, after a snatch of sleep, we visited l’Astrance, where I had one of the greatest meals of my life. Then, the day after, we went to l’Ambroisie, where lunch was so distant from the ones I've most enjoyed, it could have taken place on Pluto. But that, my friends, is for another post.
Au Pied de Cochon, 6 Rue Coquillière, Paris
Tel. +33 (0)1 40 13 77 00
See on the Map
Dinner for two, with drinks and service, costs €100
www.pieddecochon.com
The signature at l’Astrance looks like a strange sort of pie. Layer after layer of mandolined white mushrooms and slivers of apple, bulked and buffed by foie gras steeped in verjuice. There’s a slick of hazelnut oil to bring balance and depth, and a shining splot of roasted lemon. It looks weird and unsettling, like the greyish muck a vegetarian eats at Christmas - but pierced, flaked and fluttering on the tongue, it’s astonishing.
L’Astrance is supposedly the city’s most elusive reservation: a single dining room with just 26 covers, and three stars in the Guide Rouge. Controversially – if only because rich people tend to enjoy ordering waiters about – there’s no menu. Well, not quite. You choose whether you want three, five or seven courses, detail any ridiculous diets or confected allergies, and the kitchen does the rest. There isn’t even a wine list, although the front of house does boast Gault Millau’s sommelier of the year.
Shockingly tender, a langoustine and a prawn are pinkly brothed in a crustacean fumet with a whisper of peanut. Blooming with petals, it’s among the most beautiful things I’ve ever eaten. Then a generous flop of monkfish with asparagus stalks thick as marker pens, a zipping citric sauce and an Asiatic quenelle of mango and papaya. Beside them is a razor clam imbued with garlic and thyme, the flavours floating like mist from the rubbery mollusc. Then red mullet with beetroot leaf and a nasty sauce made with fermented anchovies, smelling like rotten mackerel, piscine and algae green, choking the rouget.
A sorbet of lime and chilli grabs us like a bear-hug, fresh and sparking with delicate heat. Then a witty pudding instead of cheese. What looks like a log of goat’s turns out to be tubular meringue wrapping purées of pistachio and red fruit; and then a passion fruit tart bleeding such concentrated flavour, it takes my breath away. Coffee, cognac, petits fours of jasmine egg-nog served in eggshells, hazelnut madeleines, fresh fruit, and we’re done.
L’Astrance, 4 Rue Beethoven, 75016 Paris 
As the venerable poet 
We ate more or less everything on the menu. Tortilla chips are crunchy and light, and though the guacamole is overpuréed and slightly underseasoned, the salsa is excellent, particularly for the time of year. Courgette fritters have a crunchy, almost pankoey batter, but are flaccid and slightly slimey. Macaroni cheese – a fine accompaniment to any burger, and I salute those who order it – is magnificent, and infinitely better than the one I had in the overpriced and hateful 
Here’s the beef. A mixture of rump, chuck and brisket, in proportions Tom wouldn’t reveal. All bloody good and bloody bloody, as you can see from that charred and beautifully leaking specimen above. Not overminced, exactly the right size, and pinkly, perkily cooked. I also ordered the signature Byron, which was a mistake. One of the difficulties the chain has is that, while it offers a quality product, it has to cater for people more used to the golden arches. The patties are cooked to medium as standard, but some customers refuse all meat that isn’t grey. The restaurant thus suffers a constant struggle between credibility and appeasement. The Byron sauce turns out to be thousand-island dressing, a catch-all sop to those ignorant consumers. But it’s still a fantastic burger, with a lovely X of bacon and melting, unctuous cheese. Sourcing, incidentally, is careful and clever: Aberdeen Angus, aged for three weeks, a ‘fourth-generation East End baker’ for the buns.
