8th Arrondissement: La Madeleine, Champs Elysees Archives - Alexander Lobrano

Pavyllon, Paris | Chef Yannick Alleno Goes for Counter Culture, A-/B+

Alexander Lobrano — Mon, 11 Nov 2019 11:43:48 +0000

With the opening of Pavyllon, chef Yannick Alleno has created a convivial new casual restaurant that aims to make his cooking available to a broader public than the one that can afford his Michelin three-star table upstairs at the lovely Pavillon Ledoyen in the gardens of the Champs Elysees. “Pavyllon is sort of my laboratory,” says Alleno, who seems to inherently understand that French haute cuisine is searching for relevance in a new century. Pavyllon occupies a sunny pretty room overlooking the gardens at the same address.

Why Haute cuisine dining, the traditional pinnacle of the French food chain, has not only become exorbitantly expensive but seems sidelined in a city where they’re so many brilliant young chefs serving spectacularly good and much more affordable food in relaxed and charming restaurants like Septime or the recently opened Maison pat Sota Atsumi.

To wit, I don’t go to Paris haute cuisine restaurants very often anymore, but having been to six or seven of them recently as part of a magazine assignment, I couldn’t help but thinking that I could have eaten just as well–if not better, at a variety of restaurants that would have cost a quarter of what any of these exalted meals did. There was a time when an haute cuisine meal was sort of like going up in a hot-air balloon, or a rare, extravagant and thrilling expedition that offered an enlightening Olympian view of the dining landscape below by dint of serving meals that were so much more head spinningly special, refined, sensual and original than anything you’d probably eaten anywhere else for a very longtime. With a few exceptions, I don’t find that to be true anymore, and I also think that the tight formal formatting of the haute cuisine meal is something that rarely delivers much joy anymore.

These three-star tables are under a huge amount of financial pressure not only because of their exorbitant labor costs, but also because the clientele that can afford Paris haute cuisine dining these days has changed so much. The old-school mix of French clients and foreigners from the U.S., the U.K. and other European countries has diminished at the same time that more and more haute cuisine diners are Asian, Russian, Middle Eastern and hailing from other places with booming economies and very different dining habits and palates. And many customers are also health conscious and environmentally aware in ways that are challenging a concept of luxury dining defined by such foods as foie gras, caviar, sea bass, and other haute cuisine standards.

Clearly, Alleno had all of this in mind when he opened Pavyllon, which serves dishes like beets with chocolate nibs, black olive pistou and ricotta for 21 Euros. He also decided on a counter-service only format, which isn’t new–Joel Robuchon got there first with his L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon, originally in Paris, and now in many other cities, including New York. Perched on a powder-blue velvet-upholstered stool at Pavyllon, you watch your meal being made in the open kitchen on the other side of a wide stone counter, and service is amiable and complicit, a sharp contrast to the drilled, cool and relentlessly calibrated service at many haute cuisine restaurants. “The idea of this place is for people to have a good time,” says Alleno, a remark that sort of underlines how this goal has become so muddled elsewhere.

This restiveness about the future of French haute cuisine is not new–the estimable food critic Francois Simon often complained that haute-cuisine meals were too long when he wrote for Le Figaro and Le Monde, and other chefs, like Pascal Barbot, have wondered about its rote rituals, but it’s become more general. Barbot, for example, serves fresh fruit at the end of a meal at his three-star restaurant L’Astrance, because as he once told me, all of the mignardises and chocolates are just too much. “And does anyone really want a pre-dessert#8221; he once asked me, referring to the appetiser dessert that proceeds the main one at many haute cuisine tables. “It’s all just too much,” he said.

As is true of any laboratory, some experiments are better than others. At a recent meal at Pavyllon, I loved the tart spinach soup with a tiny knob of scamorza and burned nutmeg and the oyster beignet with smoked pike perch eggs, but found the pike perch mousse lined with brioche crusts and celeriac extract a bit timid.

I’ve known Yannick Alleno’s cooking ever since he cooked at the Hotel Scribe many years ago and have always admired his talent, which continues to evolve in interesting ways. So it was interesting to see him riffing on his fascination with Asian cooking via a small plates format at Pavyllon. Some dishes are angelic to the point of being a little plain, like turbot with vegetable ‘pearls’ and salicorne with an herbal jus, while others are succulent and deeply satisfying, including a luscious stroganoff of Wagyu beef under a thatch of celeriac matchsticks and potato straws. The perfect pour with the stroganoff is a glass of the superb Saint Joseph that Alleno is now making with Michel Chapoutier.

Pithiviers of duck and foie gras by chef Sota Atsumi at Maison par Sota Atsumi

On another visit–and there will be one, I’d love to try the boudin noir (black pudding) with suckling pig chops and the Pithiviers of marinated hare with a jus royal, because these pastry tourtes, which are happily very fashionable in Paris this Fall, can be ecstatically good; the best one I’ve had recently was the magnificent duck, foie gras and spinach filled tourte served with quince puree at Maison par Sota Atsumi. I’d also be curious to sample Alleno’s pumpkin-stuffed tortellini and his gluten-free tagliatelle with corn extraction, caviar and crispy chicken skin.

Desserts are excellent, too, including caramel ice cream with Amarena cherries and candied hazelnuts. The wine list is outstanding, too, and they pour a great selection of wines by the glass. Service is eager and charming, too. Usefully, this restaurant is open daily for lunch and dinner, too, and you can book online, which makes it a great option for solo dining. As a laboratory for the future of French haute cuisine, Pavyllon is an interesting and appealing restaurant with some imaginative and technically impressive cooking.

Pavyllon, Carré des Champs-Elysées, avenue Dutuit Metro: Champs-Elysées-Clemenceau, Tel. (33) 01-53-05-10-10, www.yannick-alleno.com/fr/restaurants-reservation/pavyllon Open daily for lunch and dinner. Lunch menu 68 Euros, Prix-fixe menus 145 Euros, 235 Euros, Average a la carte 150 Euros.

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Jacopo, Paris | An Affordable French Take on Fast-Casual Dining, B-/C+

Alexander Lobrano — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 23:50:33 +0000

After reading several positive reviews of Jacopo, the new moderately priced bistro by Thibault Sombardier, a media-loving young chef who has a Michelin star at the seafood restaurant Antoine and who was also a contestant on Top Chef, the French dueling chefs television show, I met a friend for dinner with high expectations. The address in the rue Vernet in the 8^th arrondissement seemed to auger well, too, since this street had once been the location of one of my favorite Paris restaurants, Les Elysees du Vernet at the Hotel Vernet when several superb chefs—notably Bruno Cirino of L’Hostellerie Jerome in La Turbie, successively made it a dark-horse favorite with a beautiful setting under a verriere (glass ceiling) design by Gustave Eiffel (this restaurant still exists and is today known as Le V, but I have no opinion on it today, since I haven’t dined here in at least ten years).

On the way to dinner I also found myself thinking that a decent bistro in this business-and-tourist district of the 8^th Arrondissement along the Champs Elysees might spare some other hapless debutant visitor to Paris the ordeal that befell me on my first night in the French capital (mind you, I’m still eternally grateful to this day that my parents considered this trip to Europe to be an essential part of the education of their four children). On that steamy August night, however, a reunion meal was on the horizon, since my mother, two brothers and me were meeting my father and sister at a hotel just off the Champs Elysees after having traveled on our own for two months.

During those two months when Mom ran the show, we’d eaten exceptionally well, too, including a superb meal at Cipriani in Venice and another one at the Hotel Sacher in Vienna. For the occasion of her children’s first night in Paris, my mother, who had decided to throw caution to winds and spend a good chunk of an inheritance on this trip, had booked us at La Tour d’Argent. She wanted us to have an experience of French haute cuisine, the view of Notre Dame and the Seine by night, and the dozens of intricately stitched lessons in gastronomy, worldliness and gallantry such a meal would surely offer.

Steak at Jacopo

Lemon tart at Jacopo

Suffice it to say, my late father quickly reasserted himself as the family’s final arbiter of all things financial and told my mother to cancel the reservation, because it was, in his view, an absurdly extravagant and foolish place to take adolescent children. “Why don’t you children wait for us in the lobby downstairs,” my mother suggested.

So we sat in a strange row of four armchairs upholstered in some prickly fabric, and eventually they emerged from the elevator, my mother with tear-streaked cheeks first. We ended up walking down the street our hotel was located on and having a meal at the very same Pizza Pino that still exists at the corner of the Champs Elysees and the rue Marignan today (for the uninitiated, Pizza Pino, is a French pizza chain that’s not even on par with such sorry options as Pizza Hut or Sbarro). For ferocious pizza-lovers from the American state that has the best pizza in North America—that would be Connecticut, thank you, this meal was so mind-bendingly bad that it brought on a bout of collective hilarity that disguised, if not completely healed, the conjugal tug of war that had just taken place. To this day, I remained convinced that any cook who puts canned pineapple rings on a pizza is in need of a urgent psychiatric treatment, however.

Who knows, I thought as I arrived at the door of Jacopo, maybe if half-decent reasonably priced French food had been easy for us to find all of those years ago, my Parisian learning curve would have had a different point of departure. As is my habit, I read the menu before going inside to meet my friend, and it looked promising—there were lots of things I’d happily eat—and it was indeed quite reasonably priced, too. The long narrow dining room was rather odd-looking, however. With exposed cement walls and ceiling, bright modern lighting fixtures, dark stained parquet floors and Navy blue Fiberglas chairs at small metal edged tables, it looked more like a sports bar in a Sunbelt city than a bistro.

The joint was jumping, though, with a happy mixture of after-work office friends, tourists, and some French out-of-towners who’d must have heard about the place via word-of-mouth. Over a nice pour of Petit Chablis for 7 Euros a glass, a price that sort of par for the game in any central Paris neighborhood if you’re drinking better than plonk, my friend and me studied the menu and the crowd. We were fish out of water here, you see, because like most Parisians, we almost never find ourselves on the Champs Elysees for any reason that doesn’t have to do with some business-specific errand. Though the city of Paris has made a huge effort to enhance and renew the appeal of the avenue, it’s just not a place Parisians gravitate to, because they’ve long since written it off as tourist turf, or sort of a much better looking and considerably less illuminated Gallic version of Times Square in New York City.

I decided to order a meal that was as French at Vercingetorix, the great hero of the Gauls. To wit, onion soup and blanquette de veau, while my friend opted for the oeufs mayonnaise—hard-boiled eggs with mayonnaise, another dish as Gallic as Charles de Gaulle’s nose, and cod persille (parsley butter with tomatoes and bread crumbs). Then I glanced at the wine list, which was where I expected the restaurant would be making its margins, and they so they did. If there was one white at 25 Euros a bottle and a red at 24 Euros, it was an expensive roster, an off-page nod at the rents in this very expensive part of Paris and perhaps targeted at a business crowd at noon. Still, two people having a three-course meal and sharing a bottle of wine could get away for about 35 Euros a piece here, and cheaper still with just a glass of wine with their meal.

Salmon tartare

That’s when it occurred to me: We were having dinner in a French version of the Olive Garden (a popular chain of moderately priced fast-casual Italian restaurants in the United States), or a sort of fast casual pastiche of a real bistro designed to deliver familiar affordable indigenous comfort food at easy prices in a setting that forsook the touristy memes of white laces curtains and red-checked table cloths. And this is when the meal suddenly became really interesting, because even if the French supposedly consumed more hamburgers last year than they did jambon beurre, the famous sandwich made with baguette, ham and salted butter, the success of this no-reservations restaurant is a reflection of a deep yearning for the type of traditional French dishes that few middle-class people in France have the time to prepare anymore and which are now most often found in a handful of expensive tourist-oriented bistros in Paris. But would the food be good at Jacopo?

Our first courses were not promising, to say the least. My onion soup was unpleasantly sweet, which made me less unhappy that it had been served in such a stingy bowl, and was garnished with a large obviously pre-made crouton topped with dried out melted cheese. More puzzlingly, the oeufs mayonnaise were frankly terrible; the three egg halves (what happened to the fourth one?) were overcooked and topped with a thick flavorless foam that had no resemblance to mayonnaise whatsoever. “You can’t expect miracles for these prices,” my pal commented as she observed my optimism deflating. Except, that is, when you can.

My blanquette de veal was so good that I knew that if I found myself at lose ends for a meal in this part of town, I’d pop in to Jacopo again just to eat this delicate stew of tender meat, onions, mushrooms and carrots in a silken and light but flavorful cream sauce.

“This is really good,” I told my pal.

“No!”

“Yes! Have a taste,” I said, and she did.

“It is good, but my fish is overcooked and has no flavor.”

A shared and rather sad baba au rhum concluded this gastronomic foray, and I went off into the night undecided about the utility of this place, because on the one hand, it was better than the fast food places and chain restaurants on the Champs Elysees, and also relatively affordable, and on the other, the cooking was decidedly hit and miss.

Fast forward two weeks. On a rainy day around noon, I found myself in this neighborhood again when I went to collect a travel visa from an embassy located here, and as it started to pour, I found myself standing hungry near the doors of Jacopo just as it opened for lunch, and thought, Why not?

This time round, a steamed artichoke with a vinaigrette sauce as a starter, chicken breast in a nicely made sauce with baby lardons and mushrooms and surprisingly good frites brought on the same sort of pleasantly muddled satisfaction I used to feel many many years ago when I ate at…Howard Johnson’s, the sadly now defunct, solidly middle-class, middle-of-the-road Quincy, Massachusetts based restaurant chain that passed as a treat for their fried clam plates and peppermint-stick ice cream with hot fudge-sauce sundaes.

Everything wasn’t good at Howard Johnson’s—you had to know what to order, and the same thing is true of Jacopo, which is nobly catering to a similar demographic niche, too. To wit, if you know what you’re doing, you can have a perfectly pleasant meal here, especially for this part of Paris. My late father would have loved it.

5bis rue Vernet, 8^th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-42-89-20-22, Metro: George V. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Average 35 Euros. www.jacopo.fr

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Le Drugstore, Paris | Stylish Sustenance on the Champs Élysées, B

Alexander Lobrano — Thu, 17 Aug 2017 03:27:51 +0000

With a striking redesign by British designer Tom Dixon and a tempting new menu by three-star chef Eric Frechon, the legendary Le Drugstore at the top of the Champs-Élysées once again offers a good reason to stroll up the most famous avenue in Paris.

This is good news, too, since with one or two exceptions, the Champs-Élysées has long been a gastronomic wasteland from one end to the other. A case in point: the Pizza Pino restaurant where I ate my first meal in Paris in 1972 is still there, and still serving the same sad pizzas, including those with sunny-side up eggs that made us laugh out loud when we saw them. These were what we we ate on the hot August night my father overruled the reservation my mother had made at La Tour d’Argent.

My two brothers and I had been traveling on our own for over six wonderful weeks (Rome, Pompeii, Perugia, Florence, Sienna, Venice, Vienna, Switzerland, a cruise on the Rhine) when we met my father and sister, who’d just flown in from New York, at a hotel in the rue Marignan. The reunion was fraught in a variety of ways, which is why we ended up at Pizza Pino instead of La Tour d’Argent (my father thought it would be a waste of money to take children to such an expensive restaurant; my mother, who had decided to spend an unexpected inheritance in an uncharacteristic act of well-moderated extravagance, wanted us to enjoy the views of Notre Dame by night and have an experience of real French haute cuisine). The saving grace of Pizza Pino, however, were those egg garnishes, which brought the relief of mirth to a table of people who hailed from one of the world’s great pizza belts, coastal Connecticut from Norwalk to New Haven. I mean, who in their right mind would put an egg on a pizza?!?! Clams, mushrooms, sausage, bacon (oh, bacon!), meatballs, yes, but an egg?

Le Drugstore originally opened in 1958 when French advertising maestro Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, founder of the Publicis agency, returned to Paris after a stint working on Madison Avenue in its “Mad Men” heyday as the center of the advertising industry in the United States. Impressed by the 24/7 life of New York City, Bleustein-Blanchet decided to create a multi-faceted address that would cater to a full-spectrum of consumer self-indulgence on what was then one of the world’s most storied boulevards, the Champs-Élysées. So Le Drugstore became a pulse-point where you get everything from a bottle of Champagne to the latest records, along with a well-made Martini and a then decidedly exotic bite to eat like a cheeseburger, since the restaurant’s D.N.A. was always avowedly American, a reflection of an era when post-war America exemplified modernity and technological innovation.

The concept was a huge hit, and there were once two other Drugstores in Paris, one in Saint-Germain-des-Prés across the street from the Cafe des Deux Magots on the boulevard Saint Germain, and the other at the Rond Point des Champs-Élysées. They thrived during the sixties, seventies and into the early eighties, when Paris nightlife guttered out, never to really recover again. To the horror of local residents, the Saint-Germain-des-Prés Le Drugstore became an Emporio Armani some twenty years ago, and then the one at the Rond Point des Champs-Élysées went belly up, too.

Le Drugstore @ Yann Deret

If the Champs Élysées Le Drugstore survived, it was mainly due to tourist traffic, because Parisians themselves became disaffected with the avenue a longtime ago. Recently, there have been several attempts made to revive Le Drugstore, including an unfortunate Frank Gehry like renovation of the building by Michele Saee in 2004, which happened at the same time that Alain Ducasse was brought in to reboot the restaurant. Neither Saee’s redesign, nor the Ducasse concept went over very well, so fast forward to the new makeover.

What Dixon instinctively understood was that architect Pierre Dufau’s original design should be the compass for his renovation, since its mid-century mannerisms have become stylish all over again. To this end, Dixon used rich materials like marble and brass and sensual ones like glove leather to channel the once giddy glamour of the original design, albeit seen with the bemused but respectful critical distance of sixty years.

Le Drugstore – the bar @Yann Deret

Staying true to Le Drugstore’s original vocation of spontaneity, there are a variety of settings in which to eat and drink here, from a sidewalk terrace, to a glamorous bar, leather banquettes, wing chairs at tables, and more conventional sit-up-straight tables with chairs. You can also sit on stool at a white-marble counter and watch the action in the open kitchen.

Le Drugstore – Finger Food @Nathalie Carnet

Chef Eric Frechon’s job was to create a menu would read as sophisticated modern comfort food to both Parisians and the international foot traffic the Champs-Elysées attracts most heavily from April to October. This meant offering an array of foods that would also respect a detailed variety of dietary restrictions, both religious and medical, and proposing dishes that instantly read as pleasure to several dozen different nationalities. Oh, and the owners also wanted a wink or two at Le Drugstore’s original ground-breaking American influenced menu. Faced with a tall order, Frechon pulled it off rather brilliantly.

Le Drugstore – Beef tartare @Nathalie Carnet

Stopping by for dinner recently, I knew we’d be in for some fun when I first eyeballed Dixon’s striking dining room, spotted a whole section on Frechon’s menu entitled ‘finger food,’ and surveyed the dining room. Here, a pair of Russian blondes with the animation brought on by Andean snow were flirting with the good-looking Lebanese brothers at the table next to them, there three Japanese women were intently examining one another’s brand new Louis Vuitton handbags, and everywhere else, dozens of interesting, poignant and often amusing cameo performances were taking place with a similarly international cast.

To accompany well-mixed cocktails, we started with some corn tempura with tandoori salt and accras (deep-fried) beignets of salt cod and tiny gray prawns served with aioli sauce. The nibbles were delicious, and it immediately struck me that the food here was now good enough and interesting enough again to tempt Parisians back to a place most hadn’t set foot in for years.

Roasted cauliflower meuniere with curry oil @Nathalie Carnet

Next, we skated by the section of dishes that are available all day, including cheeseburgers, croque Monsieurs, and Cesar salads, to the main menu, which is divided between sections entitled “Le Cru” (The Raw) and Le Cuit (The Cooked). This may sound gimmicky but isn’t, since raw means modishly popular tartares, carpaccios and salads, while cooked ranges from roasted cauliflower with curry oil to grilled red tuna marinated with citrus and ginger. Again, the short take here is seriously well-made international comfort food.

I started with a beautifully composed salad of fresh blue crab, avocado, pink grapefruit, green apple, tomato and butter lettuce in a honey vinaigrette, and Bruno chose the beef carpaccio, which came garnished with a tangle of finely grated daikon, spring onions, coriander and a soy vinaigrette. Both dishes were well-sourced, attractively plated contemporary cosmopolitan classics.

If my main course–a shrimp burger with green onions, coriander and ginger, was rather underwhelming–the ‘burger’ was too small, the ratio between shrimp and bread crumb was off, and the bun it road too sweet, Bruno was very happy with his cod. Steamed and then lightly seared, it was sprinkled with plankton powder, the super food du jour in Paris right now, and briny samphire seaweed, a crunchy iodine-rich sea vegetable that’s a natural pairing with Atlantic fish. A scattering of shell-like gnocchi surrounded the fish and were accented with a gentle garlic foam.

Notable among other choices here is the Japanese Wagyu beef, a sirloin for two that goes for a spritely 195 Euros.

Pineapple carpaccio @Nathalie Carnet

Desserts are excellent at Le Drugstore, and so they should be, since they’re an important part of the culinary bait here. To wit, the whole point of this place is to walk through the door off the cuff and decide to eat and drink something that spoils you. This might mean a pineapple carpaccio flamed with aged rum or a nice raspberry financier with passionfruit sorbet.

So Le Drugstore is what I would call a successful situational restaurant, or a place that’s very handy should you find yourself in this part of Paris and wanting a meal outside normal meal times, or a comfortable place to dine on your own, or an address that’s open on Saturday, Sunday and every other day of the year but which is worth going to for reasons beyond that convenience.

Framed another way, Le Drugstore is a good new incarnation of the emerging new-style 21st century Parisian brasserie and a lot of fun to boot.

133 avenue des Champs-Elysées, 8th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-44-43-79-00.
Métro: Charles de Gaulle-Etoile or George V. Open daily: Monday – Friday 8am-2am; Saturday, Sunday and holidays, 10am-2am. Average 45 Euros. https://restaurantledrugstore.com/en/ledrugstore

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Le Camondo, Paris | Summer in the City, B-

Alexander Lobrano — Thu, 29 Jun 2017 18:59:37 +0000

Le Camondo is a very clever restaurant. This makes great sense, too, because so was the family for which this table was named, and the space the restaurant occupies was formerly the garage and stables of the sumptuous mansion constructed near the Parc Monceau in the 8th Arrondissement of Paris by architect René Sergent for banker Moise de Camondo from 1911-1914.

Today named for Moise’s son Nissim, who was killed during an air battle in World War I, the mansion houses Moise’s superb collection of mostly French art and is one of the most fascinating small museums in Paris. If the art is wonderful–Moise Camondo had a particular passion for 18th century French furniture, artworks, rugs, tapestries, porcelain, and jewelry, what has always intrigued me most about this museum is that it’s such an intimate time-capsule of the life of the Parisian haute bourgeoisie on the eve of the two great cataclysms that sundered European civilization twice in the space of less than fifty years and left it changed forever. And as grand and elegant as its salons may be, the room that I find truly spectacular here is the kitchen, with its huge stove and stunning batterie de cuisine, a whole wall full of copper pots and pans.

Chef Alexis Le Tadic

Le Camondo is a perfect address for summer dining, too, since it has a spacious garden courtyard terrace. The modish contemporary French cooking by young chef Alexis Le Tadic at Le Camondo is pleasant; the service young, friendly and eager; and the people watching first-rate, but you’ll probably enjoy a meal here even more if you know something about the Camondos themselves, since the history of this defunct dynasty–the last Camondos perished in Auschwitz in 1944, is worthy of long brilliant novel or a sententious documentary film.

The Camondos were part of the Sephardic Jewish community in Spain before they resettled in Venice after the Spanish Inquisition in 1492. They later moved on to Istanbul, where they founded Camondo & Cie, one of the greatest banks of the Ottoman Empire, in 1802. Eventually, In 1869, Abraham Solomon Camondo, the eighty-six-year-old patriarch of the family, followed his grandsons Behor Abraham Camondo (1829–1889) and Nissim Camondo (1830–1889) to Paris where they had settled and were successful bankers.

On my way to dinner here on a recent wiltingly hot night, I found myself wondering what the Camondos might have made of this restaurant. Would they have been appalled by the idea of strangers intruding on the sanctuary of their home, or amused that the most workaday parts of their mansion had now become one of the most fashionable restaurants in Paris. A bit of both, I expect.

Arriving, the welcome was cordial and seating was efficient, which provided further evidence of another welcome recent trend in Paris. To wit, the haughty dismissive service style that was pioneered by the Costes brothers at their various waningly fashionable addresses, including the Hotel Costes, Georges at the Centre Pompidou, and La Société in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, has happily been eclipsed by an accelerating return to the golden rules of good hospitality–manners, charm, attentiveness, humor, and efficiency, in Paris fashion restaurants.

Heat wearied, we started with cocktails, both of which were watery and weak, and a plate of very good twenty-month old Bellota ham that was a little the worse for wear from having been sliced ahead of time, and studied the menu. It was a toothsome run of dishes perfectly aimed at a hot summer night. Bruno began with a two-melon soup that was basically pureed cantaloupe garnished with balls of watermelon, and knowing that Le Tadic had worked with brilliant charcutier Arnaud Nicolas (he also cooked at Yves Camdeborde’s Le Comptoir and Jouvence, an excellent modern bistro in the 10th Arrondissement), I chose the pate en croute, which had a wonderfully crumbly crust wrapping an excellent pork terrine that was brightened by a garnish of pickled vegetables. Bruno liked his soup, but I found it rather plain, needing maybe some mint or piment d’Espelette to make it livelier and temper its sweetness. Still, this was summer-in-the-city food that made sense and had appeal.

I saw a lot of Cesar salads at neighboring tables that night, but I opted for the tuna tartare with baby spinach leaves, a nice fresh coarsely chopped red hash of this fish with a whisper of ginger and citrus and vinaigrette-slicked baby leaves. It was generously served and made from good produce. Wanting meat, Bruno preferred the Tataki de Boeuf, thin slices of steak cooked rare garnished with grilled sesame seeds.

There were other dishes on the menu that might appeal on a cooler day, including the Sardinian fregola pasta cooked liked a paella with shellfish that my nice neighbor let me snap; duck breast with roasted figs and potato puree; and turbot with herbs, fennel and green mango.

Desserts are signed by Christophe Michalak, formerly at the Hotel Plaza Athenee and now working on his own, and they included the excellent pavlova with raspberries, litchi and lime that we shared, plus a beautiful looking millefeuille and a yuzu tart. Simpler choices ran to fruit salad and raspberries with whipped cream.

The menu here will change monthly, both to follow the seasons but also to cater to the large local business clientele–they’re still a lot of banks in this neighborhood, that has already made this place it’s canteen. For many of these people, the restaurant is both a professional and social necessity, since they entertain clients at noon and gather together at the end of long work days for a meal before heading home. So expect to see a lot of well-cut suit jackets drapped on chairs with neckties folded up in their pockets, and expensive shoes from J.M. Weston and Berluti. Suits and shifts on the ladies, too, with simple family heirloom jewelry and quietly expensive handbags from Hermes and Goyard. Adding to the interest of this crowd is the fact that it’s the Parisian cast from which the new French president Emmanuel Macron issues, too.

I enjoyed my meal here, but is it a good choice for visitors Well, yes, because good simple honest food like this can be a relief from the ardors of more elaborate gastronomy, especially when you’re traveling, plus the terrace is lovely, and it’s a great place to book for lunch after visiting the Musée Nissim de Camondo.

This is equally true for Parisians, but given the local passion for al fresco dining during the summer months, many of us locals will probably prefer to come for dinner. And finally, just in case you were wondering about the aristocratic ‘particule’ (de) that proceeds the Camondo’s family name, it indicates the hereditary countship that was bestowed on Abraham Solomon Camondo in 1870 by King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy in recognition of his financial help in liberating Venice from Austrian rule. And if the dense loaf of the Camondo family’s history interests you, the great summer read I’d recommend is the Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal, a perfect page turner of a similar family history that you can find in my Amazon store on this site.

61 bis, rue de Monceau, Paris, 8th arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-45-63-40-40. Metro: Villiers or Monceau. Open for lunch and dinner Tuesday to Saturday. Open for lunch on Sunday. Closed Monday. Average dinner for two 140 Euros. www.lecamondo.fr

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Copenhague, Paris | Suave New Nordic Cooking on the Champs-Elysées, B+

Alexander Lobrano — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 02:15:16 +0000

Ever since it opened in 1955, Copenhague in the Maison du Danemark, has been a showcase for Danish gastronomy and one of the lamentably rare good restaurants on the Champs-Elysées. Now this serene dining room on the first floor overlooking the famous avenue has been updated to reflect the remarkable evolution of Danish cuisine during the last fifteen years.

Smoked brill with celery rave, apple and kale oil

Young Danish chef Andreas Møller, who worked with Erwin Lauterbach, one of the founders of the New Nordic Cuisine (explained by this manifesto) and at Danish gastro czar Claus Meyer’s The Standard, helms the kitchen at Copenhague, which is Paris’s first New Nordic restaurant. With an emphasis on angelic aesthetics, a purity of flavors, short cooking times and seasonal produce, the menu here shakes up a stale local perception of Danish cooking as being all about Smørrebrød (open-faced sandwiches), herring and salmon. In fact for many years, the signature dish of Copenhague was saumon a la l’unilatéral, or salmon slow-cooked skin side down to give it a soft consistency just fractionally beyond raw. It was delicious, but it did little to refute an ingrained French idea that Scandinavian cooking is more about austere sustenance, a la the film “Babette’s Feast,” than ‘real’ gastronomy.

What many people who’ve never been to a cutting edge Copenhagen restaurant like Noma or Geranium will quickly notice is how much of an impact New Nordic cooking has had on Parisian bistronomie, or modern French bistro cooking, in terms of aesthetics and a deep commitment to locavore sourcing. This is explained by the fact that Copenhagen has become the de rigueur destination for young European chefs, with chef Rene Redzepi’s MAD symposium also disseminating these Scandinavian ideas across Europe and the rest of the world.

Scrubbing the former a la carte menu here, along with the oil painting of Queen Margrethe II that dominated the dining room for years, Copenhague now proposes tasting menus, four courses and five course for 55 Euros and 70 Euros at lunch, five and eight courses at 85 Euros and 115 Euros at dinner, instead.

Settling into the sleek graphite colored dining room designed by Danish design team Stine Gam and Enrico Fratesi, the honky-tonk atmosphere of the avenue below immediately receded in a first visual encounter with a space that emitted a quiet chic and serenity, and the outstanding sommelier set us up with excellent Champagne while another waiter explained the menu.

Since I have become habitually wary and weary of tasting menus, which I rarely enjoy and which usually last too long, we chose to have the shorter four-course Menu Decouverte, which runs to 120 Euros a head with the wine pairing we also opted for. I’m also not a great fan of wine pairings, since they too often lead to overkill in my experience, but not knowing much about what was coming, it seemed like a good idea. And it was. In fact, it was one of the best wine pairing experiences I’ve ever had anywhere, since the sommelier has assembled a spectacular list and his pairings were point blank brilliant.

Our first course was a pretty rose of shaved celery root and apple with kale oil on top of smoked brill, and it was a subtle, pleasant composition of flavors and textures that was distinctly Nordic and very refreshing. Wine: Macon-Uchizy Les Maraches 2012 Domaine des Comtes Lafort.

Next, a juicy chuck of monkfish cooked meuniere style with a large chewy kale leaf sprinkled with bread crumbs and the same vegetable presented as an invigorating emerald green puree, all three napped by a delicate langoustine cream sauce. Very pleasant again, but devoid of the more brute side of New Nordic cooking. On the other hand, Copenhague has always been a favorite with French corporate brass, so the wilder shores of modern Scandinavian cooking–dishes including wild foraged foods like moss and shock value ingredients like blood and Cro-Magnon offal like heart and tendons were probably judged ill-suited to the tastes of its gray flannel clad clientele. So what you get at Copenhague is New Nordic Cooking with French good manners. Wine: Domaine Cassiere Ogier Condrieu 2013, liquid proof of human genius.

Even though there was only one other table occupied in the dining room on a rainy Monday night, I doubt the service we enjoyed would be any less charming, informed and well timed when this restaurant is full, since the team of natty young servers has worked all over Europe, and especially London, and clearly enjoys their work.

Bruno, who’s eaten much less widely in Scandinavia than I have, was intrigued by the delicacy of the cooking and its gentle cherubic palate. For my part, I loved this food, too, but occasionally craved an acidulated garnish or two to contrast with its otherwise appealing shyness.

Sautéed veal sweetbreads with roasted Jerusalem artichokes, a frond of turnip green, and foamy beurre noisette in onion petal cups was winsomely feral, and the pretty trellis of Jerusalem artichoke puree against which the food was plated made me wonder if there isn’t some kind of mold that produce this lattice, since I’d seen it before in both Oslo and Stockholm. Wine: Poulsard 2012 Sur Charrieres Domaine Labet.

Our next dish wasn’t part of the menu, but something the chef wanted us to taste, and I’m so glad he did. Assorted winter mushrooms, including mousserons and girolles, came in a rich deeply reduced bovine broth under a thatch of peppery salad leaves with a side garnish of crispy dried chicken skin on a pretty bed of dried nasturtiums that were there for decor. “I suppose you could eat them, though,” hazarded the waiter. This was a deeply solacing and wonderfully bosky dish that paired perfectly with a 2015 Morgon Domaine Anthony Thevenet.

“It’s very earnest this cooking, isn’t it#8221; said Bruno, and it was indeed, with a perfect equilibrium of creativity in the service of flawless technique. The delightful and unexpected harmony of a gastronomic encounter between France and Denmark had been the winsome and consistently charming theme of our meal.

The meal ended with a dessert that was so purposefully naive and sincere it had us both hearing angels’ wings batting against the ceiling. A fractured wafer of meringue road a scoop of fresh white-chocolate ice cream on a wafer of candied celery root atop a sponge biscuit in a pool of herby bright and slightly tart sauce dotted with kale oil. It so cleverly reprised the deepest themes of the dishes that had proceeded it–seasonality and innocent direct flavors, that it was an ideal conclusion to a notably pleasant meal. Wine: a 2014 Cap Corse muscat from the Domaine Yves Leccia.

The quality of Andreas Møller’s cooking also made me keen to return and try Copenhagen’s sister restaurant, Flora Danica, which serves a more conventional herring and salmon heavy menu downstairs and in the garden out back in good weather. One way or another, Copenhagen’s new incarnation indicates that the axis of European gastronomy has tipped quietly northward in search of inspiration.

142 Avenue des Champs-Elysées, 8th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-44-13-86-26. Metro: George V or Charles-de-Gaulle-Etoile. Open Monday to Friday for lunch and dinner. Closed Saturday and Sunday. www.restaurant-copenhague-paris.fr

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Lucas Carton | The Rejuvenation of a Mythic Parisian Table, A-

Alexander Lobrano — Sun, 24 May 2015 18:21:21 +0000

They’re few dining rooms in Paris that are so deeply invested with a long and mostly very happy album of memories for me than Lucas Carton, the magnificent landmarked restaurant with a spectacular art-nouveau decor by Louis Majorelle just across the street from the Église de la Madeleine in the heart of the city.

So I was a little anxious when I went to dinner here the other night for the first time in a very long time–my purse doesn’t allow me to be a regular, and ultimately relieved but not surprised to rediscover that young chef Julien Dumas’s cooking makes him a brilliantly worthy successor to Alain Senderens, who had billing as head chef here for almost thirty years, despite the fact that it was his lieutenant Jerome Bactel who’d actually been running the kitchen on a daily basis for a while.

In fact Bruno said that our meal reminded him of his initial experience of Yannick Alleno’s cooking, or a dazzling first encounter with a startlingly talented and rapidly rising young chef, and I quite happily agreed. Dumas is exactly what Lucas Carton needs to remain a relevant and desirable restaurant in Paris in 2015. So ultimately I was able to add another gastronomic sketch to the brief but privileged album I carry around in my head of occasions spent on these premises.

To be perfectly honest, the one that really sticks out in this slender volume of memory is deeply tinted to this day by trauma. When I arrived in Paris from London to work as an editor in the rue Cambon offices of Fairchild Publications, this restaurant was the setting for one of the most excruciating meals I’ve ever had in my entire life. Sifting through the still tender shards of remembrance attached to that evening, I don’t find the name of my host or hostess, but I know it was a Paris fashion designer and that the chic little supper was intended to size me up and ‘welcome’ me to Paris, in that order of importance.

To say that things did not go well that night is a massive understatement. My eight years of French failed me miserably within minutes of being seated between the attache de presse who’d organized the evening and a druggy middle-aged Countess who immediately told that she thought les Americains were “des sauvages” (savages) and who regularly left the table for five minutes or longer to then return with white-powder-rimed nostrils. In retrospect, the least she could have done in those days before I became sensible and settled was to offer to share her loot. In any event, the meal was a horror, and the worst of it was a starter salad, a tumble of pretty little leaves, that looked innocent enough until I noticed a tiny gnarled bird’s leg sticking out of the greenery. This leg was so tiny I couldn’t imagine anyone would actually want to eat it, and I found myself wondering if it might have found its way into my plate by dint of some horrific accident in the kitchen, or maybe it was a practical joke, or maybe….

It was the druggy Countess who see me straight by making me the object of shrieking hilarity for the rest of the meal. “Eeets a delicacy, Alexandre! Un grive, a leeetle wild bird with a good funky taste!” Oh, of course. A good funky taste, well now we’re talkin’. Eh bien sur, I used to see packets of grives all the time at the A & P in Westport, Connecticut when I was a child. Not. So I gnawed on the little nugget of meat on the tortured avian leg, and it to my surprise it was fleetingly delicious, because, well, it had a good funky taste.

Over two decades later, I’m still astonished by the fact that the eleven other people at this table not only did nothing to put me at ease or get to know me better, but actively enjoyed my discomfort and repeatedly maladroit manoeuvres. Walking home, I couldn’t help but thinking of one of my mother’s well-worn anecdotes, which was about a boyfriend from Kansas who accompanied her to a clam bake on the North Shore of Boston one summer night, and after being served his lobster before everyone else, he attempted to open it with a knife and fork like a piece of meat, and, frustrated, said, “This is the toughest lobster I’ve ever eaten.” Everyone else agreed heartily, and then encouraged him to pull the beast apart and crack it up with the lobster-claw-shaped aluminum pincers posed on his napkin. “I only put them out when I know the lobster’s going to be tough,” explained the hostess.

What’s nice today, then, is that Lucas Carton no longer intimidates me. In fact, there’s almost no place left in France that does, since I’d dare to say that I’ve long since cracked the codes of Gallic luxury so thoroughly I’ve actually come full circle and recovered my original innate New England preference for simplicity, which never fails in the kitchen or any other realm of life as far as I’m concerned.

Happily, Julien Dumas, who worked with both Alain Ducasse and Jean-Francois Piege, but whose true gastronomic maitre is Jacques Maximin, one of my favorite French chefs, both for his cooking and his personality, is another acolyte of the late great French food critic Maurice Curnonsky’s dictum that ‘Great cooking is when things taste of what they are.” I first tasted his cooking when he was working at Rech, Alain Ducasse’s seafood brasserie in the 17th Arrondissement, and I was immediately impressed by the delicious gastronomic symmetry of his impressively lucid style.

Much too often the pretentiously named amuse bouches (amuse the mouth, a fancy name for the similarly fancily named hors d’oeuvres) that begin a meal come off more as a fiddly waste of calories than anything that actually provokes pleasure. But not at Lucas Carton, where they do exactly what they’re supposed to do, flirtatiously excite your interest in the meal to come. Dumas’s Parmesan madeleine with citrus rind and deliciously acidulated puree of ‘chou pointu,’ or tender turban-like Pontoise cabbage that’s at its best in the Spring. with match-stick slices of dried mullet were racy little pleasures that couldn’t be dampened even by the rather sullen waitress who brought them to the table.

After a composition of morels and shaved squid that was such a brilliant terre-et-mer (earth-and-sea) pairing that I disregarded my reportorial duties in favor of pleasure, the next course was a luscious lobe of roasted beet-juice lacquered foie gras with roasted beets, beet greens and potato puree. Recourse to the superlative is slippery ice by definition, so I’ll moderate myself and say that I think this was the best foie gras I’ve ever eaten, with a dusting of herbs that included rosemary, plus Maldon salt, and the texture of just set custard.

I hadn’t been to Lucas Carton in such a longtime that I’ve forgotten about the way that meals here are rather insistently trellised to the idea of serving a glass of wine with every dish. I’m not a huge fan of this idea, since I find hoping from on overwhelms the palate and gizzards. That said, the Reisling Kabinett 2007 Piesporter Goldtropfchen Riechsgraf von Kesselstatt from the Moselle in Germany napped the foie gras perfectly by reprising the distant sugar in the beet garnish.

This last remark makes the meal sound awfully serious, and alas, it was, which runs contrary to the reason that most people decide to treat themselves to an expensive meal, which is in the hope of gastronomically amplified pleasure. Unfortunately, French haute cuisine has developed an encrusted, rigid and rather joyless service style that often wilts high spirits instead of teasing them. But hopefully over time the urgency of Dumas’s brilliant cooking will induce a psychic or sociological change in the stiff posturing of the dining room staff.

Dumas is one of the best fish cooks in France, so I was especially curious about the next dish, Whiting with buckwheat. The perfectly cooked filet came encased in a crispy buttery buckwheat crepe in a pool of sauce that tasted like a pil-pil sauce with the addition of buckwheat. It was an elegant and deeply satisfying dish.

Roasted pigeon with a sauce of Sicilian pistachios from Bronte was an inspired idea, too, and Dumas’s perfectly crusted sweetbreads in an sauce of carrot juice and veal stock gentled spiked by mustard seeds marinated in verjus was lusciously earthy.

The La Spinetta Moscato d’Asti served with a dessert of Mara strawberries garnished with jasmine petals, caille, yogurt ice cream and buttery caramelized wafers was a brilliant pairing, too.

Ultimately, this was an excellent meal, which made me eager to go back and try the more affordable menu du march served in the more relaxed dining room upstairs and also the relatively good value lunch menus served in the Majorelle dining room at noon. And since Lucas Carton is now back on my list of special occasion tables both for myself and for anyone who asks, here’s hoping they’ll also soon bite the bullet and remove all and any trace of Senderens wildly ill-considered interior-design attempt to turn one of the world’s most beautiful dining rooms into something trendy. Cooking as good as Dumas’s warrants the head-on beauty of the original room.

9 Place de la Madeleine, 8th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-42-65-22-90. Metro: Madeleine. www.lucascarton.com Menu du Cercle (lunch): 89 et 99 euros. Tasting menu: 179 euros. Average a la Carte: 150 euros. Brasserie le Marché de Lucas (casual dining on the first floor): 45 euros (lunch) et 52 euros (dinner). Closed on Sunday and Monday.

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Alléno Paris (formerly Ledoyen) – Chef Yannick Alléno’s Comeback is a Quiet Triumph, and That’s a Good Thing, A-

Alexander Lobrano — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 16:01:26 +0000

Yannick Alléno @ Geoffroy de Boismenu

Please note: This restaurant has now been renamed as Alleno Paris; it was awarded three stars in the 2015 edition of the Michelin Guide to France.

When chef Yannick Alléno turned on the gas at Alleno Paris, formerly known as the Pavillon Ledoyen, on July 1, 2014, it was poignantly apparent to all early visitors to his new restaurant that he was exultantly relieved to be cooking again. After all, he’d been without a Paris kitchen of his own for over a year and a half since January 2013 when he left Le Meurice, the opulent dining room at the Hotel Le Meurice where he’d won three Michelin stars. And for anyone who’s known him as long as long as I have–we first met after the excellent dinner at the Hotel Scribe in 1999 that pricked my curiosity about who’d cooked it–he’d seemed a bit at loose ends during the well-earned sabbatical he’d claimed for himself after a decade as chef at Le Meurice. The reason is that despite some reasonably successful efforts to coin Alléno as a celebrity chef, he’s still much more of a feet-on-the-ground cook’s cook than he is anything else. Or at least for the time being anyway, although I very much doubt the world will ever bear witness for the full Kardashianization of Yannick Alléno. It’s just not his style.

If Alléno backed away from his job at Le Meurice, however, it was both because he needed a physical and creative respite from the ardors of running the huge culinary plant of a major Paris luxury hotel, but also, I think, because of an inchoate ambivalence about the way in which his job duties were evolving beyond anything to do with making a perfect beurre blanc, to say nothing of inventing a new recipe. In this eccentrically mannerist age where the trope of celebrity dictates that it’s more important to be talked about than to actually even have anything interesting or important to say, much less a real talent, the metier of Parisian chef has been awkwardly caught up in the nets of celebrity and the social media that fuels it, too. Suddenly, just being a great chef is no longer enough to land a spot running one of the most glamorous dining rooms in Paris. No, now you also have to be a persuasively charming, seductive, photogenic media personality to boot. You should also show up as often as possible in the people pages of the glossy magazines and beam from the screens of high-traffic websites. You should pen opulent cookbooks, get a TV gig, make your own wine, endorse all sorts of probable and half-probable products, and think of dozens of reasons every month that you and your restaurant warrant a sound-bite or a Tweet. A Kim Kardashian shaped cupcake Hey! That’s a great idea!

The problem here, of course, is that many of the men and women who are drawn to this physically punishing and relentlessly hard-working metier do so out a real dedication to their craft rather than as a vehicle to fame. To be sure, almost none of them would fly-swat a Michelin star or three if it came their way, but the passion that drives a love of bone-achingly hard work and constant repetitive stress day in and day out isn’t a desire for creative expression, although this certainly becomes part of the metier of any fully evolved chef. Instead, it’s a behind-closed-doors love of great produce, the precision of culinary chemistry, the camaraderie of the kitchen and a collective quest for excellence that begins all over again everyday when the lights go on in the kitchen. This is the world that beckoned to Yannick Alléno as a shy fifteen-year-old apprentice to chef Gabriel Biscay at the Hotel Royal Monceau, and it remains beloved ballast of his career in the same way that it does that of any seriously talented chef.

Dining room at Ledoyen @ Philippe-Vaurès

So it was exciting to go off to Ledoyen on a soft summer night for dinner with a very witty and food-loving colleague from London. For openers, I couldn’t wait to see what Alleno would be up to, but I was also eager because Ledoyen is one of the loveliest restaurants in Paris. Just a few minutes from the heaving traffic circle that is the Place de la Concorde–it suddenly strikes me that this beautiful but automotively encumbered square offers up an obvious opportunity to retool Paris towards being a greener and more pedestrian friendly city in the 21st century, since it’s an absurd extravagance that the whole square is given over to cars–Ledoyen is a romantic white wedding cake of a building tucked away in the gardens at the bottom of the Champs Elysees that offers a surprisingly instant respite from the aural and mental roars of city life without leaving town.

Star decorator Jacques Grange did the beautiful first-floor dining room, which over look the crowns of the surrounding plane trees to give the airy space the feeling of a very luxurious tree house, in 1994, and since he was directly inspired by the good directoire bones of the pavilion’s architecture, his look has aged beautifully. Here and there, though, the room had been discreetly freshened up with more modern table settings and very comfortable celadon velvet chairs that flatter the willow green scheme that dominates the room. The decor was of rather little interest to me, however, since I was champing at the bit to see how Alléno would present himself gastronomically at the debut of a new chapter in his career. Or in other words, now that molecular cuisine is well and truly over and a central Paris location rather limits the locavore reflex for the time being, how could, how would he be new?

Meanwhile, my colleague was well into a second vodka tonic when I got there. Seeing me glance at her glass, she said, “Not my fault, Dearie! You’re the one who’s always late, and anyway, I’m hoping the booze will have burned a place in my poor old gizzards for dinner, since I didn’t finish lunch until quarter of four.” I asked her what she’d had for lunch. “What I had is a a nice coq au vin, the perfect combination of two of my favorite things, cock and wine.” The waiter waiting to present us with menus guffawed, and with my some of favorite reading fresh in hand, he explained that Alléno’s idea here was to begin with an assortment of tasting plates and then settle on a main course before the meal concluded with some dessert hors d’oeuvres and then a dessert.

Our first dish was dazzling. Marinated mackerel arrived in a cool red pool of acidulated hibiscus juice with a pair of sesame-seed garnished poached tomatoes and a refreshingly mentholated tasting shiso leaf. It was what a perfect hors d’oeuvres should be, which is simple, limpid, well-reasoned, and beautiful to behold. It was also winsomely summery, which might make you wonder why it’s taken me several months to get around to writing about this meal, and the answer here is that I this food needed some serious meditation, and also that I knew I’d have to go back again before offering a public opinion. If it’s normal for food writers to revisit a restaurant, what’s more uncommon is such a long critical gestation time, and this says as much about what Alléno is up to at Ledoyen as almost anything else. This modern French cooking offers an intriguing new equilibrium between technicity and sensuality, with a subtle but profound fascination with the transformative power of sauces and an exhilarating but understated commitment to both healthy eating and sustainable produce.

What else could possibly explain a dish as intricately and satisfyingly engineered and executed as foie gras poached in Rivesaltes wine and garnished with a slice of pear with a meringue skin and a pepper and juniper berry gastrique?

Not every dish worked. Butternut squash with grilled seeds and a sauce of fermented bread might have been foreshadowing autumn that night, but it was too timid and too rustic in the context of such urbane gastronomy and didn’t real feel like a natural gesture on the chef’s part.

If I enjoyed the lush artistry of Wagyu beef served with crispy ravioli, olives and green tomatoes, the dish that stunned was a stuffed cep mushroom head prepared en civet, a braising method using red wine, orange peel and juniper berries that’s usually used for game. “What a brilliant idea! This dish alone was worth my train ticket,” crowed my colleague, and I agreed. It was genuis to apply the en civet method to ceps, and to have kept it dialed down enough so that the natural taste of the fleshy and impeccably cooked mushroom permeated the orange and juniper berry seasoned ragout that had been made from its long thick steam. This luxurious hash was then sealed inside of the mushroom cap under a fine fan of laser fine mushroom head and baked, with a final garnish of lardons being added just before it was sent to the table. “So sexy, but also modest, because it just seems like the most natural idea in the world, no#8221; said my colleague. Well, yes, actually, and one small perfect example of why Alléno is a truly great cook and deserved the trio of Michelin stars he won at Le Meurice.

Dessert was lovely, too–pearls of orange coulis sunken into a cinnamon foam as sort of a Gallic riff on a Moroccan orange salad, and with the kitchen performing to such a high standard days after opening, I can only predict good things here in the future. We were dawdling over coffee at the end of the meal when Alléno emerged from the kitchen to greet various friends and clients. During a brief chat with us, he said that he eventually intends to design the menu so that it offers a choice between his own gorgeously imagined dishes and Escoffier style classics, adding that sauces will continue to be more and more important in his cooking, because “Sauces are the expression of an evolved cuisine.”

And to answer the two final and perhaps most urgent questions you’re likely to have about this restaurant–Is it worth the money and is this a good choice for that one special-occasion meal you might be thinking of treating yourself to during a trip to Paris?, the answers are ‘Yes’ and “Very much so,” respectively.

1 Avenue Dutuit, 8th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-53-05-10-00, Metro: Champs-Elysées Clemenceau. www.yannick-alleno.com/restaurant/le-pavillon-ledoyen/ Closed Saturday, Sunday and Monday lunch. Lunch menu 128 Euros. Dinner 295 Euros, Average a la carte 240 Euros.

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Restaurant Pages – The Best New Restaurant of La Rentrée (Fall Season) 2014, A-

Alexander Lobrano — Fri, 10 Oct 2014 12:31:06 +0000

On the eve of my California book tour, I’ve been thinking about all the good news from Paris I’ll have to share, since this year’s rentrée (Fall season) has seen so many superb openings, with the best new restaurant among them being Restaurant Pages, a handsome new bistro near the Arc de Triomphe by Japanese chef Ryuji Teshima. I had already been to Porte 12 and Neige d’Ete, the two other stand out newcomers, before I went to dinner at Pages. To be perfectly honest, I arrived for this meal feeling a little weary of the trope of new restaurants in Paris these days: a no-choice tasting menu, a ‘suggested’ glass of wine to accompany every course, acolyte-in-a-temple style service, and produce from the same handful of suppliers. Even if it’s excellent food, there is something wilting and a little unnerving about immediately being able to identify the wares of Terroirs d’Avenir, Annie Bertin, Joel Thiebault, Hugo Desnoyer and other hyped brand-name suppliers of the new generation of ‘artiste’ chefs who are doing what I would describe of as a sort of precious cuisine Angelique (Angelic cooking style), or one that’s very delicate and sort of aggressively innocent.

Still, despite its odd location–the 16th Arrondissement, never a lively or particularly interesting part of the city, which has now gone rather slack due to the palpable exodus of affluent Parisians who’ve decided they just can’t bear to let the government skim them so deeply anymore–this restaurant seduced me the moment I walked through the door. It’s beautiful. Aside from the exposed stone at the back of the room, the walls are white, there’s an immaculate open kitchen up front, tables are comfortably spaced and the lighting from black matte re-editions of lamps that are a famous sixties French design is gentle and beautiful. This initial impression of an alluring serenity was immediately enhanced by the elegance and graciousness of the all Japanese serving staff.

“One of the things I love best about the Japanese is that they’re able to be proud and humble at the same time,” said Bruno, a spot-on observation, since the humility of the serving style here was deeply nourishing and revivifying–you felt like a welcome and respected guest–even before any food came to the table. That said, our waitress, an attractive young Japanese woman who’d grown up in Virginia before going to university in France, seemed to have drunk the whole old-school boilerplate of now very out-dated mannered French formality right down to the horrendous phrases, “Ca vous a plu#8221; and “Je vous souhaite une tres bonne continuation.” This latter phrase has always puzzled me, because it sounds more like something you’d say to a motorist rather than someone eating a meal. Despite the socio-psychological corset she’d laced herself into, she was charming, and winsomely excited about both the restaurant and chef Teshima’s cooking. It was from chatting with her that we learned that Teshima has previously cooked at Passage 53, Alain Senderens and In de Wulf in Belgium. As impressive as these credentials might be, what impressed me most, however, was that Teshima has also been an apprentice to butcher Hugo Desnoyer, the best meat master in Paris.

Even if I hadn’t known about the Desnoyer connection, I might have guessed it when the first course of our meal arrive, a pretty composition–almost none of the young chefs in Paris actually ‘cook’ anymore, rather they layer flavors and textures in artful compositions–of candy beets, fresh coarsely chopped veal tartare, and a gentle but bracing anchovy sauce. It was an exquisite and very sexy way to begin a meal, since the carefully dosed presence of the potent little fish playfully flattered the baseline minerality of the meat.

Next, an exquisite little miniature: a plump perfectly flash-fried langoustine escorted by shavings of celery bulb that had been baked in a crust of bread and a silky yuzu spiked sabayon. This dish demonstrated a stunning mastery of technique and timing, but it was with the next one where Teshima’s signature started to become apparent.

On the border of a small yellow pond of apple-wood smoked Hollandaise sauce, a lozenge of steamed yellow pollack was decorated with a beautiful edible lace made from squid’s ink and garnished with a croquette stuffed with lava beans and chorizo. This dish wasn’t just beautiful and deeply studied, it was delicious, since there an astonishing equilibrium of taste and texture in this dish. Unlike other many other modern bistro chefs, who over intellectualize and over conceptualize the act of cooking, there’s something winningly if subtlely earthy about Teshima, and the winning proof of this is that the man is a proud and unrepentant saucier. By that I mean sauces–yes, real sauces, and not foams. Mind you, I have nothing against foams, but as Teshima demonstrates, the same new technologies used to create them can also be deployed to make a very airy sauce.

For me, the proof of a truly great meal is the gift of a new permanent gastronomic souvenir. So accumulating these marker moments doesn’t happen very often. Among these marker point dishes for me–off-the-top-of-my-head–are Bernard Loiseau’s frogs’ legs in parsley sauce; Jacques Maximin’s quart quarts fish recipe–the fish is cooked with tomato, Nicois olives, basil, fennel and bay leaves in 1/4 butter-1/4 olive oil-1/4 lemon juice-1/4 white wine, a recipe I included in HUNGRY FOR FRANCE; Paul Bocuse’s black truffle soup; Alain Ducasse’s langoustines topped with creme fraiche and caviar and his chiboust dessert; and Joel Robuchon’s potato puree. The new point that Ryuji Teshima added to my culinary compass was a sublime dish of slow cooked but crusted Bresse chicken with charred onions, a slow-cooked egg yolk with the texture of thick custard, a teaspoon of smoked eggplant puree, and a skein of deeply reduced and clarified chicken stock garnished with finely chopped roasted chicken skin. Soothing and sexy don’t often come as a pair, but they did in this dish, which was powerfully consoling and sensual at the same time.

Not surprisingly, the two different types of beef–Normandy and Simmenthal–in a tasting portion with baby potatoes and a persillade sauce fell sort of flat on the heels of the chicken. But this wasn’t because the dish was without interest–it was beautifully prepared and actually fun to taste the beef side-by-side, but it was a very quiet, if coherent, segue from the chicken. The dessert that followed was as gentle, sincere, and, well, yes, loving, as being tucked into bed by your grandmother on a snowy night–a verbena sudashi (Japanese egg custard) came with a scoop of currant sorbet and on another little plate, a white peach vacherin.

This was a deeply enjoyable meal and a beautiful demonstration of how a Japanese chef can sublimate French technique and produce into a cuisine that reflects both his roots and personality.

4 rue Auguste Vacquerie, 16th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-47-20-74-94. Metro: Iéna. Menus 40 et 65 € (lunch) et 80 € (dinner)Closed Sunday and Monday. https://www.facebook.com/pagesparis

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LAZARE–The First Step of a Brasserie Renaissance in Paris (I hope so) B+

Alexander Lobrano — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 09:00:26 +0000

With the launch of Lazare, chef Eric Frechon’s four-month old brasserie in the Gare Saint Lazare, it looks like one of the weakest links in the Parisian food chain may finally be pitched for a revival. I’ve been a half-dozen times since they turned on the gas, and if the food has always been solidly good, more recently, the service has had some necessary fine tuning (a few staff members wrong-footed things for a while with a Costes brothers establishment style attitude) and it’s starting to develop some real atmosphere as the novelty wears off and it becomes an established part of a very busy neighborhood (the Gare Saint Lazare is one of the busiest train stations in Europe).

As a Parisian for almost thirty years, I’ve long had a soft spot for the city’s brasseries, those lively, bustling restaurants where you can usually just wander in off the street and get a table without a reservation. The first one I ever really enjoyed was the Terminus Nord, just across the street from the Gare du Nord, when my brother and I were feeling a little the worse for wear after a first over-eager encounter with Armagnac the night before and wanted some lunch before I returned to stay at his flat in London and he went to the Gare de Lyon on his eventual way to Greece. We didn’t give much thought to where we’d eat on that rainy Sunday afternoon. Instead it was more a question of finding someplace that was open near the station and where I might trundle my much loathed tweed-sided American Tourister suitcase–these were the days before the addition of wheels to luggage forever changed the lives of all travelers for the better–in the door without being shoed away by the waiters. Instinctively, we guessed that this busy-looking place just across from the station might work, and indeed, when we wandered in with my luggage monster around 2pm in the afternoon, a nice older waiter indicated that I could hide the beast off to one side behind a long heavy velvet curtain and then ushered us to a banquette table in the warm and very pretty art-deco dining room.

The menu appealed immediately, too, and we were fascinated by the older woman sitting next to us. She was wearing a huge and slightly moth-eaten Persian lamb toque, lots of rouge and had striking blue eyes that stood out even more for being surrounded by twin circles of sooty make-up. When she fed a shrimp from her plateau de fruits de mer to the apricot toy poodle in a large tapestry bag on the seat next to her, my brother started laughing, and she glanced at us. “Vous etes des freres#8221; Oui. “Et vous aves trop bu hier soir, ca se voit!” Oui. She smiled and shook her head. “Vous etes des mauvais garçons I shrugged, and she laughed. Then her dog barked, and she said, “Tais toi, Abricot!” Apricot, her dog was named Apricot. Who knows exactly why we found it so funny, but we couldn’t stop laughing, and she eventually started chortling with us, so that when the waiter brought our onion soup, he eye-balled the three of us as though we might be a public danger.

The soup was delicious (alas, the Terminus Nord is at best average these days), and so was the big tray of oysters on a bed of crushed ice that we shared with a daringly ill-advised bottle of Muscadet. Though I liked this place a lot, I didn’t know that it was a brasserie until many years later when I moved to Paris. Then, hungry and lonesome on a snowy night, I ventured out of my new apartment on the first night I’d ever be spending there after having moved before two weeks of travel in Italy, and was relieved to find a pleasant looking little restaurant just down the road and around the corner. It looked mostly empty when I peered in through a screen of lace curtains, and that was a good thing, since I correctly guessed I’d get a table and had learned it’s generally better to avoid busy restaurants when you’re dining on your own. A pleasant salad of mache (lamb’s lettuce) and chopped beet root followed by a rather good choucroute garni made everything right in the world, and when I crowed about my find the next day in the office, I became an instant figure of fun. “The Brasserie Balzar! Gee, did you hear that everyone, Alec discovered the Brasserie Balzar!” Little did I know that it was one of the more fashionable brasseries in Paris in those days (it, too, is a shadow of its former self), but at least I learned what a brasserie was, sort of.

It actually took a little reading to flesh out the term–the word is the French word for ‘brewery,’ and the genus was brought to Paris by Alsatians fleeing the German occupation of Alsace-Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. In Alsace, many breweries had simple restaurants attached to their premises where they served hearty food like choucroute garni–sauerkraut draped with sausages, smoked bacon, and brined pork, and it was on this model that the first Paris brasseries were based when they started opening up to feed a rapidly growing city at the end of the 19th century.

As a newcomer to Paris working for a fashion-lifestyle publisher, I kept erratic hours and traveled a lot, which made me a natural customers for the city’s brasseries. And if I don’t ever remember having a head-thrown-back gastronomic experience in any of them, they served honest, satisfying reasonably priced food with amiable service in settings with a lot of atmosphere. Many of my friends in those early days in Paris were single like me, and so on Sunday afternoons, a brasserie-going Tom-Tom would often get started among us, as one friend called another to suggest dinner, and that friend called another, and so on, so we’d end up a large happy table in one of the our favorite brasseries–maybe Le Balzar, La Coupole, Brasserie Flo, Le Vaudeville, which also seemed like a failsafe way of seeing off a bout of the Sunday night blues.

Then in the early nineties, many of Paris’s great brasseries were bought up by one of two chains, the Freres Blanc or the Brasserie Flo group, and they began a long sad skid into mediocrity that was inversely plotted against their rising prices. So aside from an occasional oyster and steak tartare foray, I gradually stopped going to them, as did many other Parisians, and I missed them.

And this is why Frechon’s clever and very sincere new place is so welcome. The three-star chef at Epicure, the gastronomic restaurant of the hotel Le Bristol, likes brasseries as much as I do, and when I ran into him the first time I went to Lazare, he told me that his ideas was to “resurrect and revive a great Parisian institution for a new century.” What this translates to is a menu that’s a hybrid of homey well-prepared bistro and brasserie dishes, which have been shrewdly modernized by Frechon and acting chef Thierry Colas, like an excellent lighter riff on a classic choucroute garni of grilled pork on a bed of pickled turnips.

Among other dishes I’ve liked from the regularly evolving menu are the shrimp beignets served in a wire basket with a side of homemade tomato chutney, a puckish first-class feint at fast food you might actually want to eat, and deviled eggs with crabmeat.

The best main course I’ve ever had here was an impeccably prepared sole Dieppoise–sole in a sauce of fish fumet with tiny tender mussels and button mushrooms, but the daily specials, including pot au feu (Wednesday), brandade de more (Friday) and saucisse de Toulouse (Saturday) are very good, too. Based on a recipe of Frechon’s grandmother, the Paris-Deauville, a baked soufflé with a light caramel sauce, is one of those desserts that I can’t eat often enough, too–it’s rich but light and induces the same happy feelings as an affectionate pat on the head, and the chocolate tart is excellent, too.

If Lazare is a perfect choice when you want good solid French feed instead of a creative performance from a young chef, it’s especially pleasant on Sunday nights, when it’s become a go-to address for Parisians returning from weekends in Normandy or their country houses, the only caveat being that it’s necessary to book at least a week ahead of time to land a table at this deservedly popular restaurant.

In a Word: Three-star chef Eric Frechon relaunches the Paris brasserie for the 21st century with a solidly good menu of brasserie classics (steak tartare) and updated bistro-style comfort food.

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Lazare, Parvis de la Gare Saint-Lazare, rue Intérieure, 8th, Tel. 01-44-90-80-80. Metro: Gare Saint Lazare. Open daily from 7:30am to midnight. Average 60 Euros. www.lazare-paris.fr

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LA SCENE, Hotel Prince de Galles–Exquisite Contemporary French Cooking, B+/A-

Alexander Lobrano — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 18:43:58 +0000

Whispering Maitre d’Hotel, hard-working chefs at La Scene

Within minutes of sitting down at La Scène, the new restaurant at the exquisitely renovated Hotel Prince de Galles on the Avenue George V, I concluded that this is very shrewdly conceived new table indeed. Belgian designer Bruno Borrione, whose work I had last admired at Les Avises hotel in Avize in Champagne, has created a beautiful and boldly contemporary restaurant, which suddenly makes most other hotel dining rooms in Paris look stuffy and dated. Here, chef Stéphanie Le Quellec, one of the most talented female chefs in France, works with her team in a stunning matte-finished white-marble-lined open kitchen that’s surely the ‘scene’ to which the restaurant’s name refers. This breaks major conventions of upmarket restaurant protocal in Paris, too, since the kitchen, usually hidden, is in full view and the cooks are cast as characters in the evening’s entertainment.

Suffice it to say, however, that this is a very very serious show.

Borrione fleshes out the idea of this restaurant as a sort of gastronomic supper club with white leather lined tub chairs at white marble pedestal tables, low lighting, good sight lines, and a sort of minimalist cosmopolitan aesthetic that wisely reprises the good art deco bones of the hotel, which just reopened after a two-year $100 million renovation that was accomplished with impeccable good taste by Borrione for the adjacent bar and dining room and most public spaces and the ever-present Pierre Yves Rochon for the rooms upstairs. And FYI, the Prince de Galles, which opened in 1928, owes its name to its original ambition, which was to welcome the Prince of Wales, future Edward VIII, son of King George V, to Paris during his annual visits.

Bar at Hotel Prince de Galles

Despite an entirely absent welcome from the very agitated seeming maitre d’hotel, we settled in over glasses of pink Champagne and read Le Quellec’s brilliant little menu, which hits a perfect bull’s eye in terms of the prevailing gastronomic gestalt at the highest end of the Gallic food chain in 2013. Suddenly, the goal at this most exalted level of French cooking is all about cross-hatching a serious commitment to healthy eating with an equally serious desire for gastronomic pleasure.

So I started out with several meaty Joël Dupuch oysters, sliced and garnished with tiny fava beans and penja pepper in a sauce of Matcha tea under an aromatic foam of Umbrian olive oil, a dish that was intensely satisfying for its simplicity, juxaposiiton of textures and rippling notes of complementary flavors. Bruno’s beautiful vegeteable starter made reference to the cooking I remembered Le Quellec doing while she was Executive chef at the Terre Blanche hotel in Provence when it was still run by Four Seasons. To wit it was precise, delicate and extremely subtle, with the baby vegetables and tofu being amplified by plum vinegar, a pistachio condiment and an herbal sorbet. Needless to say, it made the increasingly herbivorous Bruno very happy.

I eat less meat than I ever have before, too, which means that it was a real treat to tuck into impeccably cooked veal sweetbreads with an exquisite riff on a Grenobloise garnish that included tiny cubes of lemon and croutons. The jus was magnificent, too–deeply flavored but wonderfully light, as was a garnish of miniature girolles.

Bruno’s turbot with fresh hazelnuts, wild garlic, crayfish and a foamy shellfish jus showed off the wiry mettle of a really talented chef, too, since everything about this dish was impressive–the immaculately cooked fish, the clever garnishes, and the superb sauce. While my veal sweetbreads were textbook perfect, it was this fish dish that showed why Le Quellec, 30, is destined to become one of the great chefs of France–it was as powerfully original as it was technically perfect.

Desserts were excellent, too. Bruno had an ethereal looking and pleasant tasting pastry composed of lemon-verbena foam, panes of sugar, and raspberries, while I savored a sort of post-modern riff on a millefeuille, which was excellent, with parchment thin and crispy pastry and an airy aromatic vanilla-bean flavored pastry cream.

Service was a little shirty all through the evening, but once the team relaxes–it’s too stiff and too self-conscious, I think this is going to become an excellent and very popular restaurant and rather expect it to emerge as one of the big hits of La Rentree. It was doubtless with this goal in mind that the restaurant wisely did a quiet opening at the end of May, which gives it the time to find its rhythm during the summer. N.B. It will be closed from July 28th through August 18th.

La Scène, Hotel Prince de Galles, 33 Avenue George V, 8th arrondissement, Tel. 01-53-23-78-50, Metro: George V. Open for lunch Monday-Friday. Open for dinner Monday to Saturday. Sunday brunch only. Reservations required. Prix-fixe menus four-courses 125 Euros, six-courses 165 Euros, average a la carte 120 Euros. www.la-scene-restaurant.com

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