Culture Beer is a new brasserie on the Champs Elysees where you can get a good beer with some good food, and all at a good price, especially considering that you are on the Champs Elysees.

This article from the New York Times tells all about the food, the beers and the atmosphere at this fun new place run by Heineken.

Paris: Culture Biere

By FLORENCE FABRICANT Published: June 25, 2006 There are big, historic brasseries that dispense beer, to be sure, but in Paris even in these places, a meal is more likely to be washed down with wine than beer. An exception is the new Culture Bière, a classy, modern pavilion of beer that has been installed on the Champs-Élysées. Wine is not served.

Culture Bière is a sleek place with some jazzy lighting, and nothing like the Bofingers and Balzars that epitomize the Parisian brasserie look. On the ground floor is a bar, a cafe for quick bites and a boutique that sells beer accessories like glassware, and high-end foods made with beer, beer-based skin creams and other personal-care products, books, T-shirts and kegs for home use.

A sidewalk cafe serves the same menu as the comfortable upstairs restaurant that overlooks the avenue: a fairly concise list of dishes like fish tartars, plates of assorted tapas, chicken breast poached in a sauce with morels, and pot-au-feu with beer-based mustard. There is even a children’s menu for about 11 euros, or $14 at $1.29 to the euro. Various beers, beer cocktails, some soft drinks and bottled water are sold.

For me it was fine for a lunch on a warm spring afternoon. A trio of tapas (mousse of Munster cheese with cumin, a salted financier with olives, and a little vegetable salad dressed in olive oil) with the nicely bitter Fischer blond, a lovely partner, made for a satisfying interlude. The 18 or so beers that are served, mostly on tap, are grouped by color: white, blond, amber and red. The classification is on the money, and a helpful guide to the heft and intensity of flavor of most of the beers. (Prices range from 2 to 9.50 euros.)

The boutique’s food products, some of which I bought to take home because they were unusual, are of very high quality. A jar of duck rillettes with beer, foie gras made with hops, prunes cooked in dark beer, and beer-based mustards were all priced at 3.99 to 20 euros. The boutique also sells excellent multilayered ice cream and sorbet parfaits, all flavored with beer, which are served in the restaurant and are about 2.40 euros to take out.

But Culture Bière is not some clever entrepreneur’s vision. It is a calculated though subtle attempt by Heineken to persuade Parisians to drink beer. All the beers are brands in the diverse Heineken group, and they include some with relatively low alcohol (3 percent) or none at all (Buckler). But the tie-in with Heineken is not at all heavy-handed. It just might escape your notice completely, and even if it does not, it will not detract from a nice change of pace.

Culture Bière, 65, avenue des Champs-Élysées; 33-1-42-56-88-88; www.culturebiere.com. It is open daily for lunch and dinner.

Photo by Richard Harbus for The New York Times