Yeni

The hardest gap in Paris dining for an Istanbul audience: Turkish cooking that doesn't read kebap-shop. Yeni at 7 rue Pasquier in the 8e — a quiet block off the Madeleine — is the answer the chapter has been waiting for. The chef cooks a register that crosses Gaziantep, Istanbul, the Sea of Marmara and the Armenian-Greek-Anatolian overlay her grandmother taught — six or seven mezze daily, market-driven, the menu changing with what came in. Lunch is the homemade-fresh formula; evening shifts upscale into a tapas-and-natural-wine register (Foillard, Vionnet on the list). The cuisine is sentimental, sincere, generous, without artifice — the chef's words, and the room delivers them. The reference Anatolian table in central Paris.