Le Chai de l'Abbaye: The Best Tartines in Paris

You're looking at what I consider the perfect lunch served at one of my favorite places, Le Chai de l'Abbaye, a café just down the street from my apartment in Paris. The Chai makes lots of hot dishes—onion soup, stuffed cabbage, Lyonnais sausage on lentils and the like—but I'm a devotee of this tartine de viande des Grisons. For those unfamiliar with it, a tartine is an open-faced sandwich and it can be made with any kind of topping and any kind of bread, although the topping is usually fairly spare. In general, sandwiches of every variety in France are modest in size, but tartines (coming from the verb tartiner, to spread) are the slimmest members of the sandwich family.

From the bottom up, this tartine is made from a thinnish slice of chewy, hearty pain Poilane (probably the most famous bread in Paris), toasted and buttered while still piping hot; a single-layer of paper-thin viande des Grisons, or air-dried beef from the Swiss canton of Grisons (think bresaola); a scatter of toasted walnut pieces; and a drizzle of olive oil. Since a slice of Poilane bread is as big as a welcome mat, it's cut in half and then each half is cut in finger-size pieces for easy eating.

Tartines like this one make a good light lunch or a nice go-along with an aperitif, but since the form is so versatile, you can top the toasted bread with just about anything and make a tartine for every hour of the day: you can have a scrambled-egg tartine for breakfast and a chocolate tartine for afterschool or even a midnight snack.

When I'm craving a tartine, but want a salad and a little something else to go with it (like Tarte Tatin), I go to La Cuisine de Bar (8 rue du Cherche-Midi), owned by and right next door to the Poilane Bakery. They've got a great assortment of tartines (I like the one with shrimp and avocado), all of them on pain Poilane—bien sur.

-- Dorie Greenspan, special correspondent

Related Links from bon appétit on epicurious.com: