Though I’ve never set foot in a Hooters, I have been to several of the other chains, including an outrageously dismal meal at a Red Lobster several years ago, and what interested me about them was how with a bizarre mixture of cynicism and cleverness, they’ve created highly profitable gastronomic algorithms that would seem to make many people happy. With the exception of the dreadful Courte Paille (a short straw indeed), L’Arche, and Hippopotamus chains, Paris has been largely spared the blight of ‘fast-casual dining,’ with the exception of Les Grand Boulevards, the Champs Elysees and Les Halles. Most Parisians, I’d like to believe, still prefer small independent restaurants with ‘real’ cooking.

 What brought all of this to mind was a very good dinner with Bruno the other night at talented chef Antoine Heerah’s newly redecorated and re-formatted Montmartre table Au Clocher de Montmartre, a very shrewd restaurant. What Mr. Heerah, who also runs Chamarre Montmartre and Le Moulin de la Galette, also in Montmartre, has done is coin a smart and appealing French idiom for, well, um, French casual dining. Or in other words, this is the kind of place where you can pop in for a snack–maybe some vegetable tempura or a plate of smoked salmon with a glass of wine, or a quick meal–soup and a salad, or an omelette and a dessert, and be on your way again in less than an hour. You can also decide on a more leisurely meal, and since this dining room is comfortable, well-lit and very good looking and the service is absolutely charming, this is a place where you might happily while away an afternoon over a good book and some ricotta and beet tart and a green salad with a nice glass of red wine, since the restaurant is open from noon to 10.30pm and serves non-stop. In short, this is an intensely customer-friendly restaurant that has been very shrewdly conceived to appeal to the time-short life and times of both tourists–this place is right behind the Sacre Coeur, and Parisians, since you can eat what you want, when you want and in any quantity or sequence that makes you happy.

 Hungry on a rainy night, we nibbled some excellent Spanish charcuterie with Catalan style pan con tomate with a terrific glass of Vouvray to start, and then Bruno ordered an intriguingly named “Salade du Bout du Monde”, which arrived as a nice assortment of greens garnished with smoked eel, haddock, salmon eggs, mackerel rillettes, herring and other fish, and I decided on some “Beef noodles and ravioli” soup.

Though I loved the idea of a cepes omelette–one of the seven different egg preparations on the menu, a combination of my insatiable appetite and unslackable curiosity–two of my guiding stars, I’m happy to confess, led me to order the Roscoff onions stuffed with oxtail. I’ve never come across an onion I don’t like, but these firm, pink ones from the region around the Breton port of Roscoff, are exceptionally good onions and even have an Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC). Even though I see them in shops in London and even once came across them in a Trader Joe’s in Seattle, they never seem to find their way to Paris. Anyway, the onions were filled with tender juicy oxtail meat and garnished with strips of crisply grilled bacon.