Great Meals Await in Tokyo's Tiny Outposts Kosuke Okahara for The New York Times Yamane Yoshiyuki prepares a drink at Dill Fait Beau. ONE evening my French friend Pierre and I were browsing in a tiny embroidery store in the Shimo-Kitazawa neighborhood of Tokyo, a district of alleys and narrow streets not far from downtown, when a Japanese man in a chef's white jacket emerged from a door at the back, offering - of all things - slices of French baguette with hunks of rillettes on top. He held out the plate and encouraged us to try it. We bit in: the pâté was smooth, subtle and sublimely Angevine. "Superb," Pierre pronounced, and the man grinned with delight. It turned out he was the husband of the woman who owned the little store, and that he had his very own French bistro, Dill Fait Beau, right in the back, behind the racks of embroidery. "My husband stole my store!" she joked. "Why don't you come and have dinner?" the man, Yamane Yoshiyuki, rejoined. "Why not?" said Pierre - and we did. There was a distinct through-the-looking-glass feel to stepping through a small sliding glass door and finding ourselves in a miniature, utterly French bistro, with six stools along the counter, and a sleek little kitchen on the other side. But in Shimo-Kitazawa, such an experience is not entirely unexpected. Here, in one of Tokyo's oldest neighborhoods, the narrow streets and lanes are mostly too small for cars, and the area, which has so far managed to elude development, maintains a lively cultural identity. Populated by students, musicians and actors, Shimo-Kitazawa is filled with shops, cafes, theaters and scores of excellent, diminutive places to eat. What to do with an unwanted corridor? Turn it into a thriving hole in the wall. Often too small for tables and chairs, these places may be no more than a narrow kitchen plus a counter and stools for customers. Yet for all their tininess, some of them serve up exceptional, and for the most part cheap, food. Often - as here at Dill Fait Beau - the food is foreign. French, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Indian, Spanish - a multiplicity of nationalities is represented, as well as simple, old-fashioned Japanese regional cuisine. Mr. Yoshiyuki, the chef and owner at Dill Fait Beau, had trained in Tokyo under a Cordon Bleu chef, and had clearly mastered the cuisine with a meticulous, unsparing attention to detail. The salade paysanne with Roquefort and lardons matched anything you'd get in Perigord; likewise the coquilles gratinée, thick with garlic, and the small but sublime grilled steak with zucchini, mushrooms and turnip. The modest portions guaranteed there was room for the golden, melting tarte Tatin and a tarte aux poires with claret sorbet. Although I did wish I'd been able to decipher what the chef had meant when he asked if we'd like to try the "crafty"; as it turned out it was clafoutis, a delicious French dessert that somehow manages to be both custard and sponge cake at the same time. In no time, we and the staff of two, consisting of the chef and his young female dishwasher and helper, along with two other diners - Japanese women of a certain age, who had come here to sip Champagne and eat exotically - fell into a friendly multilingual badinage about the Frenchness of the food, and the fact that Pierre, a real live Frenchman, was enjoying it. That is part of the magic of these tiny places: it's hard not to become fast friends with your fellow diners. It's also hard to spend a lot of money. If you're on a tight budget, you can often get an interesting dinner for less than 1,000 yen (about $13, at 78 yen to the dollar), though sometimes that dinner can be just a little too interesting. The following night, we found ourselves sitting in Techan, a market stall near the Shimo-Kitazawa Metro station that specializes in yakitori (grilled chicken skewers), and a dark soup of chicken parts, which was seething in a big caldron. Rain pattered on the tin roof overhead, and around us the tiny semi-outdoor restaurant was packed with a cheerful evening throng seeking shelter from the weather, keeping warm with steaming tumblers of hot sake. And cigarettes. Everyone seems to smoke in Tokyo.