This is how it would go: My mom and I would prepare by watching a half-dozen episodes of Julia Child's The French Chef from the 1960s and '70s, then go see Julie and Julia, and finally storm Ballard to visit the eight-week old Bastille. And here is how it went...

Julia Child is the ambassador of the omelet. You can cook them for 300 people in one night! I can't believe eggs actually cook in 20 seconds, but—"Voila!"—they look fantastic:

As Bethany Jean Clement reported, Julie and Julia is exactly half excellent. Meryl Streep embodies every way you want Julia Child to be as she discovers Paris: awkward and forthright and tall and an attacker of fish and romancer of buerre blanc. Streep becomes her, yodel-speaking and all. But the woman in Queens is a bore. She sets out to make all of the recipes in Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and she does it (surprise!). But first you must watch her Having a Hard Time in Life. (A quick aside: People Having a Hard Time in Life is the dullest of movie plots, which includes but is not limited to Having a Hard Time With Family, Having a Hard Time With Friends, Having a Hard Time With a Job, Having a Hard Time With a Lover, and Having a Hard Time Living With Oneself. And this bloody woman in Queens experiences all five boring plot points.) So she made the recipes, yes, and suffers while she does it. But Streep-as-Child is astonished by the mundane and swept off her feet by the predictable, and you want the movie to follow her onto the television set, into the writing of her The Way to Cook, and into her nineties. We leave the theater hungry for more Julia Child and more French cooking, and go to Ballard.

The aesthetic at Bastille is flawless—black studded arches, Parisan ceiling moldings, white metro tiles to the corners. We devour a salad made from greens grown on the roof and finished with crumbled hazelnuts ($8); a duck leg confit with sherry vinegar over creamy lentils and carrots with a short bunch of arugula to cut the duck fat ($11); and steak frites ($18). The steak is served with a little pitcher of Béarnaise sauce, a frothy lemon-butter elixir, topped with a thick shock of chopped chives and a fat pinch of chili powder. The meat is clad in a crumbly black char that cuts away to crimson flesh. Our server Adrielle spoke deftly of the preparations and was everywhere without being overbearing. Bastille is a time machine and airplane ticket to dinner with Julia; it is a truffle in the city's crown.