Racines

8 passage des Panoramas, 75002 Paris

You walk through a movie scene to get to this place, and for the night, you’re the star. The cooking at Racines is the sort that looks deceptively simple but reveals a beautiful tension between precision and earthiness on each plate. The challenge of making rustic Italian fresh and innovative is no small task, but Racine is up to it.

A plate of vitello tonnato arrives like it’s there to make you forget every other meal you had on this trip. Then comes a pasta dish that feels like it was smuggled in from an Italian grandmother’s kitchen, except the grandmother in question went to art school and insists on using only the best olive oil in Europe. It’s deeply comforting, unpretentious, but still slyly elegant as if it knows exactly how good it is from start to finish.