The bistro historically has been the backbone of the Paris dining experience. Smallish, usually unpretentious, serving traditional French food in all its glorious buttery/caloric majesty.

Some believe the bistro is in trouble, and numerous stories along these lines have been written over the past decade. Here is one from 2006. Here is another, from 2010. Here is a third, from last year, which seems to suggest the first-rate bistro still exists but requires a careful search.

Bistros seem to be doing well enough, here in the 11th arrondissement; I’d guess we could find a dozen with a quarter mile of where we are staying.

And we went to one of those tonight.

The Astier bistro is one of the better-known bistros in this part of the 11th, as you can see by the 300-plus reviews of the place on Trip Advisor.

It looks like what Americans would expect in a bistro — small tables, tightly packed (be prepared to be part of several conversations), curtains on the door to keep wintry gusts from entering the room.

It serves many of the dishes we would associate with bistros: entrecote (steak), guinea fowl, oysters, foie gras, duck confit, rabbit … and moves on to an enormous cheese plate that, in our case, was simply left at the table for two diners to serve themselves from nearly 20 choices.

We were put in the back room, in what appeared to be a sort of English-speakers enclave, and we didn’t take it personally. The table behind us had two guys who lived up to the French stereotype about loud Americans, and we had a borderline rude Canadian (toward the wait staff), about 12 inches from our table.

I imagine the foreigners can be tiring, for the staff; they were a bit testy, it seemed, and not interested in our attempts at ordering in French.

Bistros tend to bring more food than you want and more calories than you need. It may be considered tres francaise, but the French don’t eat like this, night after night, nor do they spend the not-inconsiderable sums required to eat there.

This neighborhood offers lots and lots of foreign cuisine, and it is easy to understand why that would be, if you lived here.

Earlier in the day, bistros serve a key function here as early-morning dispensers of strong little cups of coffee.

A bistro dinner, meanwhile, should be a once-a-week thing, at most. No matter how good it is or how well the staff treats you.