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