Customer Reviews

The Paris Cafe Cookbook : Rendezvous and Recipes from 50 Best Cafes

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As a reader of Daniel Young's New York Daily News restaurant reviews, one of the things that has always impressed me is the drama he is able to convey: of great food presented flawlessly, of heightened expectations and dashed hopes, and the 8 million (or so) stories that are unfolding in that Naked City.

The happy news is that Young's singular touch, as unique as Lubitsch's, has survived the Atlantic crossing and is flourishing in Paris. The Ernst Lubitsch reference is not used lightly. Each restaurant, each review, each meal, each recipe has its own scenario and is paced like a good movie. And the recipes are so good, your script will be guaranteed a happy ending.

The Paris Cafe Cookbook is book of meals to be made with love and shared with those you love and about a city that Daniel Young loves dearly.

This wonderfully written, beautifully photographed and illustrated hommage to the City of Lights is must for all who love Paris, and, by extension, all who love life.

The recipes from the book are truly delightful. I've made several of them over the past two years. This book is well-written and does justice to a cook outside France, by providing reasonable substitutions. Once while in Paris, I decided to compare the recipe results against the actual dishes at the cafes in the book. Surprisingly, the food tasted and looked very similar. The desserts are especially delicious - Mousse au Chocolat, Profiteroles au Chocolat, Peach Cake with Strawberry Sauce, Creme Brulee, Pear Clafoutis ... ummm!

I live in Paris and know hundreds of restaurants, but Dan Young's wonderful book has led me to wonderful places I never would have found, or have passed by dozens of times without a thought of going inside. I've never had a bad meal with Mr. Young's book, and every new choice is an adventure. As he says in his introdion: finding a greate expensive restaurant is easy, but finding value and wonderful food is a real art. Eat well!

Daniel Young has two different purposes at work in this book, and they don't always seem to go together so well. On the one hand, he wants to give us a representative sampling of café cuisine, so we can recreate at home the tastes and smells of the Paris café experience. And here, I think, he succeeds admirably.

At the same time, however, he is also attempting to present us with something of a portrait of café culture -- a celebration, in the words of the introduction, "of what makes this institution so worth preserving." No less, the author hopes that after reading his book, we "should be prepared to choose a regular Parisian café to call your own." Frankly, I don't think he achieves this second goal nearly so well.

This book is divided, in standard cookbook fashion, by categories of food -- appetizers, entrees, and so on. Cafés are presented within each section based on the representative recipe Young has chosen from its menu. If more than one selection comes from a given café, however, they appear on different pages, sometimes widely separated. While the virtue of this approach is unmistakable for a cookbook, it does make it a bit more difficult to consider any given café.

While the writing about each café is generally pretty good, I didn't find the text-heavy layout and two-color photography particularly inviting. And for a book that's supposed to help us choose a café or two of our own, I was very disappointed that there were so few photos ... and that the ones that there were, were so often less than evocative. If Daniel Young's descriptive writing could be combined with the wonderful photography of Marie-France Boyer's The French Cafe, *that* would be a book to treasure.

In all, your opinion of this book will be colored by what you hope to get out of it. If, like some of the other reviewers on this page, you want to cook authentic and memorable café offerings in your own home, then this is probably just what you're looking for. But if you're searching for something that captures the mystique and romance of the café culture, then "The Paris Café Cookbook," while unquestionably a good start in that direction, will still leave a bit more to be desired.

Wonderful book that not only inspires you to cook up some authentic french food but has you wanting to get there anyway you can. Daniel Young does a great job in giving you personal descriptions of 'authentic' bistros and enamors you with his food travels. Add to the fact he's put in a few nice black and white photos of the bistros and your well on your way to 'gettin down'n'french' in your own kitchen Check out the lemon tarte with prune preserve..i can't wait to try it. Thanks Daniel you gave us a handsome book by which to dream and cook by.