Granite, Paris | The Solid Talent of Chef Tom Meyer, A-

Chef Tom Meyer

Stepping through the front door of talented young chef Tom Meyer’s restaurant Granite in Paris unleashed a rush of memories and also inspired hope during a profoundly testing time. Though the COVID epidemic is still very much with us, as of this writing (December 16, 2021), restaurants in France remain open, with assiduous verification of your vaccination status before you’re allowed inside, and the Gallic gastronomic scene has recovered smartly this year with the opening of many outstanding new restaurants.

Deprived of restaurants for much of 2020, the French have a deeper, fresher and more urgent understanding of how important they are to their well-being today than probably at any time since 1945. This is of course because they love good food so much, but it goes way beyond simple–or complex, gastronomic pleasure. What we all missed terribly last year was the easy conviviality, piquant social voyeurism, and random sociability of dining out, since no other idiom more powerfully feeds and frames the finely grained drama of daily life than a restaurant meal.

So while it was exciting for me to be trying this new restaurant for the first time, it was also a poignant occasion. Because it takes a lot of courage to open a restaurant right now when we’re still pretty much flying in thick fog. The fact that people chose to do so, however, seeds hope, because it implies that this too shall pass, and reminds us that we’ve often been delivered by human ingenuity. Cooking is a act of supreme ingenuity, because it creates pleasure from the essential act of daily nourishment.

And of course I knew this space intimately from its previous iteration as chef Daniel Rose’s restaurant Spring. It’s been completely remodeled and redecorated since Rose cooked here, though, with a sort of Scandinavian modern look of cut-out wooden paneling on the walls and bare wood tables surrounded by cosseting topaz-upholstered pedestal chairs. The open kitchen that was a defining feature of Spring survives, however, as Meyer’s compact and densely populated work space.

Chef Tom Meyer, 30, previously worked as sous-chef to Anne-Sophie Pic at her Michelin three-star restaurant in Valence and was the runner-up finalist in the Bocuse d’Or cooking competition in Lyon in 2019. Meyer was tapped for Granite by restauranteur Stephane Manigold, who has become one of the most astute judges of emerging gastronomic talent in Paris and one of the city’s most innovative taste makers. Aside from Granite, Manigold’s other Paris restaurants include the superb Substance, Contraste, Liquide, Maison Rostang and Bistrot Flaubert.

Knowing and loving the lyrical beauty of Anne-Sophie Pic’s cooking both in Valence and at her Michelin two star restaurant at the Beau Rivage Hotel in Lausanne, it was as fascinating to discern her influence on Meyer as it was to thrillingly discover his own precise, muscular, full-bodied style. I especially appreciated his ability to be elegant without ever becoming fussy or over-complicated.

Meeting a friend for lunch here, we reminisced about the days this address housed Spring and chatted about how much the gastronomic landscape in Paris has changed during the almost twenty years that have passed since it opened. To wit, menus are shrunken and contemporary French cooking spins harder on an axis of local, seasonal produce than ever before. And if Parisians, including me, often go to restaurants for an experience they’re incapable of creating for themselves at home, there is now a prevailing impatience shading to disdain for the excesses of molecular cooking and also what I describe as the difficult Outward Bound dishes in some high profile restaurants in the Nordic countries, which bully people into sort of a cowed submission.

Our first course was a grilled cepe mushroom with a sabayon flavored with meadowsweet, a wild herb, and a sauce of deeply reduced mushroom jus and white miso. A study in chic comfort food, it was a succulent, earthy and sort of moody dish on an early winter day,  Next, sardines with haricots verts, Matcha seasoned pistachio oil and a salad of seaweed, an apparently naive but actually studiously complex constellation of tastes and flavors with a Japanese personality that bewildered at first but ultimately delivered a bracing gust of the sea.

A giant gnocci filled with steamed shellfish and garnished with cockles in a lemony sauce, fennel sprigs and Vietnamese coriander had a homey charm, but was the single disappointment of this meal, because the texture of the pasta was unpleasantly pasty. Sea bream with kale in apple juice with a gelee of lovage was a ravishingly flirtatious and very original dish, and then Meyer pirouetted to towards fiercer funker tastes and textures with a juicy roast pigeon in a sauce of deeply reduced pigeon jus with green cardamom and kombawa (Japanese citrus) garnished with puffed millet and cocoa nibs.

The little filets of the bird were impeccably cooked, and the Asian accents added some brilliant percussion to the sauce.

Desserts were outstanding. The first one was a delicate rice roll enclosing several spoonfuls of rice pudding, with a garnish of a Mirabelle plums stewed with vin jaune, a pleasantly resinous nod at the chef’s home region, the Jura in eastern France. Next, a plush cold mousse of Belizean chocolate, with glasswort, a sea vegetable, and a hot chocolate sauce infused with lemon and orange leaves was bluntly erotic after the muzzling grandmotherly hug of the rice pudding. What Meyer was offering here was comfort and sensuality in equal measure, and these traits seemed frankly perfect in view of the times we’re living in.

Meyer is an extremely gifted chef who will undoubtedly become one of the most influential talents of his generation.

Granite, 6 rue Bailleul, 1st Arrondissement, Paris, Metro: Louvre-Rivoli or Les Halles. Open Monday-Friday for lunch and dinner. Closed Saturday and Sunday.
Tél (33) 01-40-13-64-06, Prix-fixe menus 58 Euros (lunch), 75 Euros (five courses), 95 Euros (seven courses). www.granite.paris

P.S. I’d like to suggest a perfect last-minute gift for everyone who loves Paris, France, French food, restaurants, cooking, travel and a well told tale, which is my new book MY PLACE AT THE TABLE: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris. This is a sort of gastronomic coming-of-age story about how a shy kid from the suburbs of Connecticut–me, pursued his passions to become a famous food writer in Paris. New Yorker food writer Bill Buford says of my book that “it’s a flat-out wonderful read, filled with stories and secrets.”

If you’d like to offer a signed book, please send me a message through this site, and I’ll mail you a signed book plate with any specified inscription or dedication you might require.

In Paris, the book is for sale at the Red Wheelbarrow. You can also order a copy from your favorite independent bookseller, or from Amazon