@Bob Peterson for Hungry for Paris

“No, no, that’s not the right color. That’s cream, not almond,” an older man said to his colleague as they stared at a tiny piece of stone down on their knees on the mosaic floor they were creating. “The almond is too dark, the cream would be better. This is a corner of the room and the light in Paris is so often gray,” said his colleague.  They changed it back and forth several times, and finally settled on the cream. I’d never seen such a large and elaborate mosaic being created before, and I never enter this room without remembering their pride and their seriousness.

Roasted figs with creme fraiche

So a passionate attention to detail really does underlie the experience of a meal at one of the most legendary dining rooms in Paris, and this is why I was so curious to go to dinner the other night. Chef Yannick Alleno, who presided at Le Meurice for many years and won three stars there, moved on during the winter of 2013, and now the restaurant has joined the stable of tables run by Alain Ducasse, who placed Christophe Saintagne from Restaurant Alain Ducasse at the Hotel Plaza Athenee, a sister property to Le Meurice, since they’re both part of the Dorchester Group, in the kitchen now that this latter hotel is about to be renovated.

Waiting for Bruno in the street, I couldn’t help but wondering if the impending meal might feel like finding a different bird in the nest another one had built. Then Bruno showed up in his Mini convertible, and it was amusing to watch the top-hatted valet park this nice little car between a Bentley and a Lamborghini. When we went inside and were ushered through the discrete door behind a panel in the lobby, the dining room was not only every bit as magnificent as I remembered but also pleasantly more subdued. Several years ago, designer Philippe Starck had tinkered with the original post-renovation décor, and since I don’t want irony-inflected wit to move the sort of double-barreled grandeur I experience so rarely off-center, I’d never really taken to his tweaks.

Alain Ducasse is both extremely discreet and a real aesthete in the best sense of this word, so it was fascinating to register the subtle but powerful changes he’d made at the restaurant just a few weeks after it became one of his. The only ornament on our ecru linen dressed table was a plump ripe yellow tomato on a small smooth shake of timber (we later learned it came from one of the many trees felled in the forests of Versailles during a terrible storm several years ago), and it was a pregnant clue as to the visual and gastronomic sensibility of the meal that followed.

The first dish to arrive at the table was a small square sandwich of toasted country bread filled with fleshy pleasantly feral tasting cepes and a veil of smoked country ham. At the same time it appeared a waiter brought the salt and pepper in a series of gray porcelain cubes that briefly grabbed my attention with their stark beauty before I was distracted by the arrival of our first course, a black cast-iron casserole. When the lid was removed, we saw a small pretty still-life of vegetables that had been cooked on a bed of gray sea salt, and the waiter then supplied us with long thin forks to spear them with and dip into a tart green herbed dairy sauce. The vegetables—carrots, potatoes, onions, baby leeks—were homey and satisfying, and the gently astringent sauce cleansed the palate for everything to come. This communal dish also whispered that the pleasures of the table are often best shared. As much as this opener surprised us, we were both transfixed by the plate and the small fragile ramekin the sauce came in. “It must be him,” said Bruno, but we couldn’t gracefully upend anything to check until a few minutes later when we saw Belgian ceramicist Pieter Stockman’s named printed on their bottoms.

We’d first discovered Stockman’s exquisite ceramics in a boutique in Antwerp, and I’d later seen them at Restaurant Jean-Francois Piege in Paris. What transfixed me, though, was deciphering what these very carefully objects were saying. What I surmised is that in the 21st century, luxury should pure and delicate, or a series of simple evanescent pleasures that are humble and healthy rather than ostentatious and self-indulgent. Clearly Ducasse had decided to make Le Meurice his laboratory for reinventing French haute cuisine for the 21st century.

This extended to the deeply considered casting of the staff in this dining room, where I happily saw more women working than I ever had before in such an exalted restaurant. Among them, the charming and enviously polyglot Spanish woman who explained the haiku-like menu to us, and then the sommelier, Estelle Touzet, whose love and knowledge of wine and eloquent and thought-provoking way of describing it became one of the major threads of pleasure that animated our evening.

Bruno loved his sautéed autumn fruit and vegetables served with a deglazed sauce of cooking juices and cider vinegar—a varying palate of acidities and different shades of bitterness is another recurring element of this kitchen, while my pate chaud de pintade au chou came as an elegantly fragile cartridge of pastry filled with chunks of tender guinea hen and Savoy cabbage bound by a baked mousse of liver and gizzards.

The nearly nude way in which our fish courses were prepared further emphasized the angelic intentions of the kitchen. A magnificent lozenge of butter-basted turbot came on an identically sized piece of fine toast lightly spread with tapenade, all that was needed to emphasize its natural flavor with the foil of a little salt and texture. It reminded me of the innocent simplicity with which fish is often cooked in Scandinavia, while John Dory, also cooked on the bone, was presented on laser-fine slices of fig with coin-sized pieces of turnip and a salad of herbs. Here, the fine graininess of the fig seeds flattered the fish, while the gentle bitterness of the turnips punctuated its natural sweetness.

Main courses were even more plain-spoken in an almost Amish sort of way. Bruno’s colvert (wild duck) was cooked rare and garnished with halved black grapes, kernels of corn and a luscious salamis (the bird’s bones pounded to a smooth paste with red wine and stock), while my veal sweetbreads surprised me even after the detailed explanation of this preparation I’d been given at the beginning of the meal. A perfectly round slice of sweetbread was topped with a fine crust of toasted golden bread crumbs and came with a comma-shaped side dish of roasted heirloom tomatoes with a few melted shards of Parmesan. Restraint was the clear intention of this preparation, with the tomatoes intended to provide an acidic foil to the rich creamy flavor and texture of the sweetbreads. Since I love sweetbreads, this was the one moment in the meal when I yearned for a bit more, but in terms of the logic behind my menu, it was impeccable.

Ducasse is now producing superb chocolate at an atelier in Paris near the Bastille, and it supplied the raw materials for a stunningly good finale—chocolate ice cream decorated with fine broken panes of caramel on a bed of almonds and an accessorizing cocoa mousse and a pitcher of hot chocolate. Following the waiter’s instructions, I spooned up some of the mousse and ice cream with a nut or two and dribbled it with melted chocolate before experiencing an avalanche of pleasure that was propelled into even higher relief by the deceptively modest tone of the proceeding meal. The glass of ten-year-old Barbeito Bual Old Reserve Madeira, which sommelier Touzet explained she’d chosen for the faint flavor of the salt in the island’s soil expressed through the grapes behind the foreground tastes of caramel, leather and tobacco, added a deeper glow of sensuality to this shudderingly good concoction. Bruno enjoyed his roasted figs, which were served in a fragile bowl of mesmerizingly aromatic dried fig leaves with a granite of red wine atop a hazelnut cream, and we were more relieved than surprised when the traditional trolley of post-prandial sweetmeats was brought tableside and contained freshly made fruit compotes and sorbets instead of the usual mignardaises, candies and pastries. This gentle and planed down proposal was much more in keeping with the prevailing—and even invigorating—theme of restraint that had informed our meal than a selection of sugary little cakes would have been.

There was nothing ascetic or puritanical about the moderation that was the rudder of this meal, however. Instead it recognized that many people coming to a restaurant of this caliber today are there to be entertained as much as they are to be fed, and that almost anyone who can afford such an experience probably leads a life of habitual abundance.

Ultimately, this was a superb and very daring meal, because after making his reputation with an

exactingly disciplined take on the simple but naturally baroque character of European Mediterranean cooking, Ducasse has completely revised and reinvented his repertoire. What he instinctively understands, you see, is that as the conventional summit of the French culinary experience, haute cuisine has always been a mirror of our aspirations, pleasures, and even fears, and in his stunningly astute reading of these evolving codes in a still emerging new century, he’s come up with an intriguing new recipe for pleasure. Gallic gastronomic luxury should be simple and wholesome.

Restaurant Le Meurice – Alain Ducasse, Hotel Le Meurice, 228 rue de Rivoli, 1st, Tel. 01-44-58-10-55,

Metro: Concorde or Tuileries. Open Monday to Friday for lunch and dinner. Closed Saturday and Sunday.

Average a la carte 235 Euros, Five-course tasting menu 380 Euros. www.lemeurice.com/le-meurice-restaurant

The post LE MEURICE – Alain Ducasse: New French Haute Cuisine for the 21st Century, A appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

An Elegant Parisienne

The only things that would unfailingly draw me out of my warm lair on a wet and very wintry night in Paris are the possibility of eating really good food and spending time with a favorite friend, so on Wednesday I bundled up and headed off to the 10th arrondissement for dinner with the delightful Dorie and, as it turned out, an excellent meal at Philou, a superb new bistro on a side street just off the pretty Canal Saint Martin. Arriving, I knew I’d like this place right away, since it was friendly and cozy, and the white Saumur Champigny that Dorie and I sipped as an aperitif was a very pleasant pour.

This is the new address of amiable restauranteur Philippe Damas, who formerly ran Le Square Trousseau, so I arrived with solid expectations, too. We studied the chalkboard menu for a while, and finally decided on two starters, a scallop and oyster tartare for me and winter vegetables sauteed in salt butter with sea snails and a light herb pesto for Dorie, and both of them delighted when they arrived. The iodine brightness of the chopped oysters was perfect punctuation for the creamy scallops, which were mixed with finely diced baby endives and a few scattered lingonberries that added some color and bright sweet-and-sour notes to this light and quietly elegant winter preparation. The lightly dressed herb salad atop the tartare was a nice touch, too.

Scallop and oyster tartare

Dorie’s vegetables–salsify, daikon, parsnip, potatoes and snow peas were perfectly cooked and the plump chewy sea snails gently poached in a court bouillion brought a touch of oceanic succulence and texture to this beautifully conceived dish.

Our main courses were outstanding, too. My cod on a bed of Le Puy lentils with chopped carrots, celery and lardon was at once light and stick-to-the-ribs consoling on a cold night, while Dorie’s wild duck came with a wonderful half of honey-braised eggplant, a brilliant foil for the rich wild meat.

Desserts were less successful. My caramelized banana mille feuille with coconut ice cream was a good idea, but the pastry was tasted commercial and card-boardy, while Dorie’s lychee gelee garnished with raspberries, a lady finger and some tea ice cream was conceptually wonderful, but not perfectly executed, since the tea in the ice cream was astringent and the glazed lady finger was dull. The wine list is brief and runs to fashionable lesser known regional pours like the red Arbois with a pleasant red cherry nose that we chose as being sturdy enough for the duck, light enough for the cod. Service is efficient and amiable, and this places attracts an exceptionally good-looking crowd of arty young Parisians, many of whom were repairing to canvas enclosed terrace out front for a brief assignation with Philip Morris. If this bistro was in my neighborhood in the 9th, I’d eat here all the time. One way or another, it finds a solid place on my to-go list, especially since it’s also a very good buy.

Philou, 12 Avenue Richerand, 10th, Tel. 01-42-39-04-73. Metro: Republique. Closed on Sunday and Monday.

Formule 15 and 25 € (lunch), menu-carte 25-30 € (dinner).

————–

Ever since I first discovered his cooking at the now defunct Restaurant Eric Frechon in the 19th arrondissement, I’ve been a huge fan of this chef. Not only is he one of the nicest and hardest working cooks in Paris, his brilliant style, a combination of impeccable classical technique and an earthy, sometimes even funky love of French produce, never fails to deliver a truly exquisite meal.

I don’t, of course, go to the three-star Le Bristol very often–it’s rather beyond my means, so I was very happy to be invited for dinner the other night. Arriving, the lobby had a festive atmosphere created by a very pretty Christmas tree, and I immediately noticed that the door to the beautiful Hungarian oak panelled dining room had been moved to one side, a clever idea, since this small change instantly makes this beautiful room more intimate.

Though I very much enjoy the company of my host, this was a business meal, which meant that it was a challenge to remain focused on the conversation when I was experiencing so much private pleasure from what we ate. Instead of a jacket and tie, I wanted to be wearing cashmere pajamas and tucking into this feast in front of the fireplace at home so that I could give it full attention. A first course of Sologne caviar–French caviar just gets better and better, was served atop an airy mousseline of ratte potatoes and smoked haddock, a sublime preparation that was accented by a buckwheat pastry tube filled with delicate citrus cream.

The sommelier supplied a blessedly room temperature glass of excellent Vouvray that was ideal with the caviar and also my first course, a carpaccio of some of the best scallops I’ve ever eaten (you’ll note that I like my scallops raw) with a brilliant sorbet of oysters and a sea-water ‘boule de neige’ topped with caviar.

Next we tasted the Vosne-Romanee aux brulees 1er cru Domaine Meo-Camuzet 2001 that would accompany the rest of our meal, and it was quite simply the best wine I’ve had all year long. It was so good, in fact, that I am still stung by the tragedy of leaving behind a good inch and a half in the bottle, good manners oblige. The wine was sublime with my main course, too, veal sweetbreads cooked in a tobacco leaf and served with a puree of Jerusalem artichokes with a coffee and reglisse jus. Nothing I’ve eaten all year provided more solid evidence of the absolute genius of French cooking either.

Another tragedy struck when the cheese trolley was turned away untouched–I’d have savaged this load of lactic pleasures, but the invisible hour-glass on the table informed me that this wouldn’t be appropriate, so I concluded with a dessert that was lovely for being so simple and refreshing–skinned pink grapefruit segments with a hibiscus gelee, Campari sorbet, and almond meringue.

Sitting in the Metro on the way home from this stunning meal, I couldn’t help but musing on how this meal had been the very definition of a three-star feed and also thinking that the world be an infinitely poorer place without the very occasional pleasure of such transporting gastronomy.

Le Bristol, 112 rue du Faubourg Saint Honore, 8th, Tel. 01-53-43-43-40. Open daily. Average 250 Euros.

The post PHILOU, A Really Good New Bistro, B+; Le BRISTOL, An Exquisite Meal, A appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.