Arnaud Nicolas @ Anne-Emmanuelle Thion

In Paris, Arnaud Nicolas, 34, has launched a spectacularly succulent revolution at the new restaurant and boutique that bears his name on the leafy Avenue de la Bourdonnais in the ever so discreetly chic 7th Arrondissement.

Arnaud Nicolas @Betil-Balkan

Stopping by this elegant pair of rooms with oak parquet floors, exposed stone walls and beams, and battle-ship gray paintwork for dinner the other night, Nicolas was intently concentrated on cutting a slice of a superb looking pâté en croûte for a older woman with a spun-sugar chignon and a belted calico shirt dress that matched her eyes. I was watching her watching him when she glanced at me and smiled. “This is what I’m having for dinner tonight. A slice of this nice young man’s exquisite pâté en croûte, a green salad and a glass of good wine,” she said with dogmatic satisfaction.

Turned sideways, the poultry pate studded with foie gras resembled a beautiful piece of some rare stone except that it was framed with a delicate envelope of impeccable egg-washed pastry. “You absolutely must try it, Monsieur–it’s exquisite!” said the charming woman. “You know, it’s rather nice to have a new vice, especially at my age!” she added, and exited the boutique with an eager spring in her step. As if it were necessary, she confirmed for me that vanity is a major life force, and later in the evening, I couldn’t help but wondering what she wore during her wonderful little supper. Did she remain in the shirt dress, or maybe slip into something more comfortable, perhaps a shot silk dressing gown she’d bought in Saigon many years ago And what perfume was she wearing I’ll never know, but these new mysteries to gnaw make me love living in a big city.

Bruno and I were ushered into the loft-like masculine-feeling dining room and were studying the decidedly alluring menu over a glass of white wine when Nicolas stopped by our table to comment the menu.

“My idea here is to create a showcase for the great French art of charcuterie and to seduce Parisians into wanting to eat it again,” he explained. “Because so many people have only ever tasted industrial charcuterie, this ancient, delicious and very nourishing part of the French diet has experienced a certain disaffection during the last few years, and this is normal when you see what they sell in supermarkets. The absence of real charcuterie in most towns and cities has been accelerated by a drastic decline in the number of professional French charcutiers. Last year, there were only a thousand students learning to become charcutiers in a country of almost sixty million people. So I want to bring la charcuterie back, to make it modern and appealing in the same way that a new generation of patissiers have renewed the art of pastry in Paris,” Nicolas explained.

I told him that we’d been thinking of starting with the quail-and-dried-fruit pate and the poultry-and-foie-gras one, and he suggested we come to the shop next door to inspect them and see the other possibilities (the restaurant is reached through a door from the shop). Frankly, all of the terrines and pâté en croûte were so beautiful looking we’d have been happy with any of them, but Nicolas suggested he create a sampler for us that would include the two we’d already chosen, plus a little couronne du porc, an all-pork terrine in pastry, and some of his luscious looking head cheese.

Cod with quinoa and wild arugula jus @Anne Emmanuelle Thion

Ducking with grilled onions @ Anne-Emmanuelle Thion

Bruno likes head cheese so much he was practically yelping by the time we returned to the table to taste the white Pic Saint Loup I’d ordered to accompany our meal. For our mains, we agreed to try two of Nicolas’s other homemade victuals, a lobster boudin and a lamb sausage served with a puree of Agen prunes. There were lots of other appealing dishes on the menu, though, including cod with baby artichokes, yellow pollack with cockles and a shellfish jus, entrecôte, and grilled duckling with baby onions.

The two pâté en croûtes were among the most elegant foods I’ve ever eaten. The fragility of their crumbly crust was a perfect foil to the earthy carnal loam of meats they surrounded, and the seasoning of each pate was impeccable. There was no salt or pepper on our table, and not only was none needed, it would have been sacrilegious to use either. The distant sweetness of dried fruit teased the quiet farmyard taste of the quail in the one, while the foie gras was a luxurious emollient to the tender chunks of mixed fowl bound with forcemeat. The head cheese in a parsley-brightened aspic packed a porcine punch, and the pork terrine made with a variety of different cuts–throat, shoulder, leg, etc. was remarkable for being refined and rustic at the same time. This charcuterie was ecstatically good.

It reminded me of the first time I’d ever eaten a real French terrine, as seriously broke student visiting Paris from London where I was sharing an unheated Maisonette with a hot-water-heater the size of small pail with five other people. A friend and I came to Paris on an Inter-rail pass and stayed with his sister-in-law from Philadelphia, who was living on the Ile Saint Louis following a bad divorce. She was a hand-bag designer by trade, but managed to get through a bottle of White Label every day while we were out visiting museums, and because she didn’t cook, she bought prepared food from the traiteur around the corner every night–grated carrot salad, celeri remoulade, marinated artichokes, various cheeses, and, one night, several slices of pistachio-nut studded veal terrine that was staggeringly delicious. In fact, I yearned for that very same pate for years until I found something very close to it a few years ago at butcher Hugo Desnoyer’s boutique in the 16th Arrondissement. Suffice it to say, I am besotted with charcuterie in its every iteration, and I don’t think I’ve ever eaten better in my life than what I had at Arnaud Nicolas’s.

If the lobster boudin was beautifully made, with generous chunks of claw and tail meat suspended in a fine stuffing, we both loved the lamb sausage. The coarse meat was pleasantly lean but very flavorful, with a sauve jus of roast-lamb cooking juices and the Agen plum puree that paired unexpectedly well with this meat. And yet–it occurred to me, I had once had a wonderful lamb tagine with prunes in Fez. Clearly, Nicolas has a sophisticated and world-roving palate.

At the end of our meal we were so sated we just sat and smiled at each other in amiable silence, that great luxury of a happy couple. Then the waiter arrived to talk about dessert. Neither of us really wanted any, but he plied us. “I think our Baba au Rhum is the best in Paris,” he taunted, and after a bit of fascinating chat from him about how rum and tea tasting have a great deal in common in terms of the flavors and aromas one detects, we agreed to split one. And it was sublime.

Though Arnaud Nicolas is not a place to which I will go often, because I want to keep it as a special pleasure, it’s immediately become one of my favorite Paris restaurants.

46 avenue de la Bourdonnais, 7th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-45-55-59-59. Métro : École Militaire. Open for lunch and dinner from Monday to Saturday. Closed Sunday.  Week-day lunch menu 32 Euros, Pirx-fixe menu 35 Euros. Average a la carte 50 Euros. www.arnaudnicolas.paris Google Maps

The post Arnaud Nicolas, Paris | Exquisite Charcuterie and More, A-/B+ appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

L’Assiette @ Stephane Riss

Chef David Rathgeber’s restaurant L’Assiette is not only the best bistro in Montparnasse, but one of the best bistros in Paris. Why I’ll let the chef himself explain why it’s so good. “I don’t like la cuisine d’assemblage (the modern mode for plates of food that are layered compositions of flavors). I like melded flavors that wouldn’t exist without real cooking, and this is what I do at L’Assiette. Some of my dishes are traditional, like cassoulet, and others are my inventions, like pork belly with octopus, but follow the same logic of building new flavors by tempering and intensifying the natural tastes of produce you’re actually working with,” says the chef, 44, an amiable Auvergnat from Clermont-Ferrand. So Rathgeber is a disciple of Escoffier and his cooking adheres to the the great dictums of Curnonsky, the famed 19th century French food critic: “In cooking, as in all the arts, simplicity is the sign of perfection;” “Make food simple and let things taste of what they are;” and “Sauces comprise the honour and glory of French cookery.”

L’Assiette @ Stephane Riss

To be sure, Rathgeber worked for Alain Ducasse at the Louis XV in Monaco and then the Plaza Athénée in Paris for fourteen years, but today his style is purely his own, although a certain love of and respect for vegetables continues to echo Ducasse’s kitchens. Rathgeber also worked at Aux Lyonnais and Benoit, two Ducasse bistros, and he won a Michelin star while working at the former, which is  where I first discovered his cooking. Then, after opening branches of Benoit in New York City and Tokyo, he returned to Paris in 2008 and decided to take over this legendary beau-monde bistro, where everyone from the late French president Francois Mitterand to Yves Saint Laurent president Pierre Bergé once dined regularly, from the beret-wearing, wise-cracking Lucette Rousseau (aka Lulu), when she decided to retire.

“This was a perfect move for me, because the food Lulu was serving was so close to the way that I like to cook and eat, and she’d built up a solid clientele of people who love solidly traditional French food,” says the chef. “Of course cooking is not static, it evolves and changes, which is why I love tinkering with old recipes to reinterpret them without causing them to lose their essential character.”

Suffice it to say that there’s absolutely no danger of that happening in Rathgeber’s kitchen, since his cooking is exquisitely ground in Gallic gastronomic history at the same time that it’s fresh, unexpectedly light and sometimes surprisingly bold.

On yet another recent woefully rainy night, we were hungry when we arrived in these beautiful dining rooms with painted glass ceilings, a marble counter, lacquered bistro tables and creaking parquet floors, and the little saucer of ham that was served with our glasses of white wine was the perfectly tuned signal that we’d arrived in a place that cared deeply about good food and which would take good care of us at the end of our long days. Potently porcine, this hand-sliced highest quality Burgundian ham was a repudiating reminder that industrial charcuterie should be avoided both for reasons of health and its tragic lack of flavor and texture.

Rathgeber’s menu offered so many things that both of us wanted to try that it took us some time to come to reciprocally acceptable choices. Since a real ballotine de volaille fermiere is something you rarely see on Paris anymore, because this luscious dish rolled breast of chicken stuffed with a forcemeat of its legs and thighs mixed with spinach, herbs and vegetables takes too much time to make, I wasn’t going to miss it, and Rathgeber’s version delivered brilliantly, since it was earthy and richly flavored and sauced with a chicken jus that merged deliciously with the Xeres brightened vinaigrette of the mesclun salad upon which it was served. Recognising that not everyone is as fiercely fanatic about old-fashioned barnyard cooking as I am, Rathgeber also proposed the unexpectedly toothsome tartare of New Caledonian blue shrimp that caught Bruno’s eye. Garnished with salad leaves, beet slices and a scribble of preserved lemon vinaigrette, the crunchy shrimp were seasoned with chopped pignoli nuts, lime zest, and remote traces of lemongrass and ginger to create a dish that was brilliantly vivid and original.

On a raw night, the maitre d’hotel counselled cassoulet as one of the house specialties, which was an entirely unnecessary suggestion, since I had already made this decision while studying the menu online during a fit of procrastination in the middle of the afternoon. It was magnificent, too, since the crust was a crispy skein of savoury lace, the white beans were al dente, the Toulouse sausage was succulent, and the sauce was irresistibly redolent of duck fat rendered by the confit de canard (duck preserved in its own fat) the sturdy ceramic casserole also contained.  This, too, is a dish rarely seen on Paris restaurant menus anymore, which why there was something celebratory and triumphant when it was lowered in front of me, bubbling and pipping hot.

Though we’re often of one mind on most important things, Bruno and I part ways when it comes to issues of gastronomic pleasure vs. healthy eating. I fall squarely for the former, while he is most likely defending the latter. But in this instance, he was truly victorious, since his pork belly and roasted octopus with baby clams, fava beans and roasted tomatoes in a sauce of cooking juices deglazed with aged vinegar offered a sumptuous possibly Lusitanian inspired tapestry of tastes and textures that were lusciously light, bright and clean.

Abetted by the superb red Saint Joseph the shrewd, friendly female sommelier suggested, a quilt-like sense of well-being overcame us, and before long we were chatting with the good-looking couple from Philadelphia across the way who were on their second honeymoons and who were also wallowing in the cassoulet. “Why is cassoulet so delicious#8221; the woman with the beautiful aquarmarine eyes wondered aloud, and I suggested that it was not only the ultimate Gallic expression of umami, but also a perfect reflection of those dishes Rathgeber loves best and does best, dishes with melded flavors, the duck, the fat back, the beans, some tomato, and so forth. “I think it just has to be one of the best things to eat in the entire world,” she sighed, and the two of us and her husband nodded vigorously.

Then, just when a fledgling but fleeting conversation about Donald Trump briefly threatened our sense of sated gastronomic comity, the creme caramel with caramel sauce we were sharing out of delirious gourmandise and floating island they’d ordered for the same reason, arrived and propitiously puffed out the politics.

Through eight years of hard work, the talented David Rathgeber has created one of the very best bistros in Paris, and a place I am never able to return to often enough. So until that occasion, I’ll dreaming about the rabbit stuffed with boned pig’s feet that would have been my choice if I hadn’t had the cassoulet.

181 rue du Chateau, 14th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01-43-22-64-86, Metro: Mouton-Duvernet, Gaite, Alesia, or Pernety. Open Tuesday-Sunday for lunch and dinner. Closed Monday and Tuesday. www.restaurant-lassiette.paris, Lunch menu 23 Euros, average a la carte 50 Euros.

The post L’Assiette, Paris | A Superb Bistro in Montparnasse, A- appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.