In December I had to spend a few days in Paris, doing research on the Radio 4 programme on General de Gaulle which I mentioned last time round. I hadn't been to Paris for years. It hadn't really changed a lot. The only thing that was new was the Union Jack draped over the top of the Arc de Triomphe, and that, it turned out, had been placed there temporarily by Glasgow Rangers supporters over for a match against Paris St Germain. (Scottish supporters with a British flag? Whatever happened to Scottish flags?) I had a chat with some of them, milling round the Etoile, and all they wanted to know was the whereabouts of two drinking places they had been told about, called the Celtic Pub and the Auld Alliance Bar.

I had never heard of either, but I did think at the time that there was something sadly British about going abroad and then making for the nearest place that was a home from home. But then, I suppose it was sadly typical of me as a middle class, liberal, mildly cultured Englishman that for years I had been storing up cuttings, mostly of pieces by Patricia Wells, about typically French, regional, local, neighbourhood restaurants in Paris which I could eat at when I next got back to Paris. It is also typical of me that I left them all behind and had to use my wit and judgement and luck as to where to eat.

I fell on my feet all right. The first night I was in a Nicolas wine shop in the rue Monsigny, near my hotel near the Opera, wondering whether to buy Muscadet Nouveau - I didn't even know there WAS Muscadet Nouveau - and I asked the man if there was anywhere good to eat nearby. He said that if I headed north I would find lots of exotic restaurants - Indian, Chinese, etc. (This is one change I have noticed over the years. For a long time you found in capital cities only foreign eating places from the city's imperial past - Indian and Chinese in London, Indonesian in Amsterdam, Vietnamese and North African in Paris - but now Indian and Chinese are firmly established in Paris.) I said that was the last thing I wanted. Well, he said, if you go down the rue Monsigny there is quite a nice French restaurant. Not the one on the corner, he said hastily (which was a Breton crepe joint) but just beyond.

I went there. It was wonderful. It was a French restaurant of the kind you always hope to find. Busy, full of characters, madame at the till, specials chalked up on a blackboard, classic dishes down the a la carte. Everyone else seemed to be having oysters, but I went for a rather boring-sounding starter, "frisee aux lardons avec oeuf poche", which was excellent, and "confit de canard" which was even more excellent. I spent most of the meal scribbling in a pad and watching people. The man next door, for instance, who spent the whole meal boasting to his girl about the photographs he had just taken in Israel, and never once asked her anything about herself; the two men at the other next table, who I guessed were planning some business venture.

I couldn't have been more wrong. At the end of the meal one turned to me and said, in English, "So you are English?". (How do they always know?) "Where are you from? " I said I was from the West Country, from near Bath. "Ah!", he said, "I have an English aunt living in Bath. Her name was Margaret Finney. She was once mayor of Bath". I made a mental note to check this out, which I haven't done yet, and asked him if he were planning a business venture with his friend.

"Pas du tout!" he said. "We are grumbling about hospitals. I am a radiologist and he is a gynaecologist."

The only person I could think of, off-hand, to ring up in Paris and say hello to was Michael Zwerin, a lovely American jazz musician and writer who has been chronicling music for the Herald Tribune for decades, and whom I see about once a decade. He suggested we met at his local restaurant later in the week, a place called Chez Paul on the corner of rue Lapp and rue Charonne. If I thought the first place was typical of the French places you can never find, this was twice as typical. It was smaller and busier and friendlier, and louder and younger. The patron had a tie on but nobody else did. There was an Asian waitress of astoundingly beautiful bone formation. "I am in love with her," said Mike wistfully, and I don't blame him.

We had a great meal just nattering about jazz and history and films. He told me that the greatest jazz film he had ever seen was an obscure Swedish thing called "Sven Klang's Quintet", and that he had never met anyone else who had seen it, so when I said I had seen it several times he nearly fell on my neck and cried, but Chez Paul is too small to permit that.

Anyway, it was a great meal, because of the food and the place and because of the company, and Mike has been in Paris long enough to become unAmerican and sit and gently stew over a meal like that. I read an interview with Diane Johnson yesterday in which she said: "I don't want to sound overtly unpatriotic, but sometimes I do feel that America has kind of missed the point of daily life. We passionately throw ourselves into food fads, for example, but there is no real, on-going deep-seated understanding of food and the goodness of food..." Well, the French have always prided themselves on being the arbiters of food culture, and middle class, liberal, mildly cultured English people like me have always gone along with this myth, but this time round it seemed to be true.

On BBC Radio 4's The Food Programme, before Christmas, they had a round-up of new cookery books, and they bravely sent an interviewer over to Paris to find out what new cookbooks were on the scene. "Well," they said in the bookshop, "There is a new Ducasse which is very exciting but mostly the new books are very specialised, for instance there is a whole new book on how to do 'clafoutis'...."

"Do you have any books by Jamie Oliver?" said the brave interviewer.

"We know who he is," came the answer, "but I don't think anyone in Paris would actually want..."

"Or Nigella Lawson?"

"I'm sorry. Who?"

And then they went to ask the food writer for Le Monde about the image of foreign food in Paris, and he chuckled maliciously and said, "Well, we are gentle xenophobes in this matter, so each nation has its own image for us. Japanese food is very good if you are on a diet, for example. Italian food? Italian food is OK if there is nothing in the fridge. British food? British cooking is for people who are not interested in food."

Considering that many people would place Italian food higher than French, this is deliciously breathtaking. But British food is silently making inroads while no-one is looking. My radio producer and I stopped one afternoon at a posh Salon de Thé and had Earl Grey and "scones". And on the afternoon menu there was an item called "crumble".

I don't suppose the British will ever produce a single book about crumble as the French have about clafoutis, but I got a small kick out of seeing a plate of indeterminate yellow and purple substance in a Paris window, and knowing it was 100 % British.