Clown Bar Is the Most Thrilling Restaurant in Paris

There’s a certain unspoken rule to serving brains: Do whatever you can to make them look like something else. Chop them up into meaty stews and porridges; slip them into ravioli filling; cloak them in layers of cream. Clown Bar flouts this etiquette, serving dishes that look for all the world like a line cook split open the skull of a calf, lifted out the gray matter, and delicately set the crenellated hemispheres in a bowl. These aren’t brains—this is a brain, whole and unmissable.

Served in a chilled dashi spiked with soy, ginger, and yuzu, the whole thing is eaten with a spoon, sliding around in the mouth like chawanmushi. The flavor is neutral at first, an offal analog to tofu. But seconds later, the broth sends a wave of salt and spice across the palate, a riff on cerebrospinal fluid. Forgive the pun, but is there another brain dish in the world of fine dining right now that’s more, well, cerebral?

Eat at Clown Bar: that’s my advice for anyone traveling to Paris. It isn’t a secret, or an underrated romantic destination. It’s received nods from high-profile outlets like the New York Times and Financial Times. But I can’t stop thinking of the heady (there I go again) meals I’ve had at this idiosyncratic little landmark on Rue Amelot in the 11th arrondissement. The space abuts the Cirque d’Hiver, and as the name implies, the interior is decorated with Belle Epoque tiles depicting clowns—non-scary, non-Poltergeist, non–Stephen King—having a grand old time. If Clown Bar were in small-plates-obsessed Manhattan, Chicago, or San Francisco, it would easily rank as one of that city’s most vital new restaurants.

I eat my veal brain perched on a backless stool at a polished zinc bar. Behind me, a table of Japanese diners Instagram every dish before digging in; I overhear a staffer tell a drop-in solo diner that the wait time for a table is almost two hours. Meanwhile, a bearded bartender convinces me to try yet another funky skin-contact wine; Paris is natural wine lover’s heaven these days, and Clown Bar is no exception, with a list composed entirely of organic pours. The patrons’ commitment to vins naturels is off-set only by their love of cigarettes, which are smoked in not-insignificant quantities outside the bar’s open-air windows. Do not be surprised if part of your meal is seasoned with secondhand fumes.

The space that houses Clown Bar, an official monument historique, has been around since 1902, but the clowns—in the form of those gorgeous ceramic tiles—didn’t arrive until the 1920s, and the internationally acclaimed cuisine took another century or so. The team behind the Nordic-esque Saturne took over operations in 2014, when chef Sota Atsumi transformed the kitchen into a bastion of high-minded gastronomy. Atsumi is Tokyo-born, but his menu is decidedly in tune with modern French dining—foie gras has a liberal presence, but so do Japanese and other international influences, from mussels steamed in sake to platters of jamón iberico. Beef carpaccio, a nominally Italian dish, arrives in the form of silky sheets of sirloin, pungent anchovy vinaigrette, milky brocciu (a ricotta-like cheese from Corsica), and ripe strawberries scattered throughout. The preparation resembles a chilled, carnivorous pappardelle: you slurp up the crimson flesh like noodles, and it’s gone in two minutes flat.

For all its inventiveness, Clown Bar’s menu is served à la carte, and a meal for two can come in at just €120. This marks a sea change in Parisian dining, which has long attracted visitors to its grand tasting-menu restaurants, places like Alain Ducasse or Guy Savoy where guests can easily drop €350-plus per person—and that’s before wine—on lavish set meals. But while restaurants in my home turf of New York City are trending to extremes, both the super expensive and the super cheap, Paris in 2016 is all about the bistronomie movement, which for the past decade has pushed an agenda of innovative accessibility: simple, creative fare in lean settings.

This phenomenon manifests itself in clustering. If you’re a young, acclaimed French restaurateur, it’s entirely likely you run two or more establishments within walking (or cycling) distance of each other: a tasting-menu spot and a more loose-around-the-collar small-plates place, plus maybe an even more casual cave à vin serving wines and snacks. Septime, the impossible-to-get-into neo-bistro du jour, has its casual, raw-fish-bar sibling Clamato a few doors down (I like to swing by for half a Normandy crab); Le Chateaubriand has Le Dauphin, its international tapas offshoot (tandoori octopus, manioc fritters); Frenchie has its Bar à Vins and its counter-service Frenchie To Go. Saturne, of course, has Clown Bar.

Speaking of which: order the rouget. Atsumi uses it to create a savory parfait of sorts, serving a slab of Mediterranean fish under layers of foie gras and spinach, each formed to the same shape and length as the filet. The foie is the key player here, imparting its lusciousness to the greens but standing up to the gently oily, strongly oceanic rouget. It’s a fussy, fancy dish, and like the veal brain and the carpaccio, it makes Clown Bar, on occasion, feel just a touch more refined than its by-no-means-rustic peers. At his best, Atsumi delivers a double whammy—a high degree of precision and a wallop of pleasure—that wouldn’t be out of place at, say, Le Bernardin, one of New York’s best, most expensive seafood restaurants. And yet Clown Bar’s rouget is just €18.

Put in for the pithivier when you arrive, too. The hot pâté en croûte with date puree —medium-rare duck and jiggly foie encased in flaky pastry—takes about 25 minutes to prepare. It couldn’t be more classically French, you declare. Then you take a bite, and the date puree, uncharacteristically fragrant thanks to a sucker punch of yuzu, refreshes the palate. No, adding a dose of Asian citrus doesn’t make a dish any more "Japanese" than adding vermouth to a martini makes it Italian, but it’s the sort of gentle subversion that reminds you that Clown Bar has no intention of standing still gastronomically, even when it comes to its most traditional dishes.

Witness also the tarte au citron, which receives a subtle tweak from a layer of honey-infused cream. Pairing lemon and honey couldn’t be more obvious to anyone who’s ever drunk a cup of tea—in other words, to anyone at all—so why have you never experienced it in a lemon tart before, at least not at this level on the gustatory Richter scale? The honey is as fragrant as perfume, the curd as sour as Warhead candies.

It’s a devastating cliche to tell people you have that one little bistro in Paris you keep returning to, especially in a city where every restaurant revisited is a missed opportunity to try something new. But to my mind, having a favorite local spot abroad fulfills a deeply human need: the desire to find the familiar within the unfamiliar (as Paris still is to me). This is even more true when you’re traveling alone. And for me, that place is Clown Bar.