Bistro Is Cool for Dinner, Not So Hot for Lunch: Paris Dining

2007-02-01 03:58:20.510 GMT

Review by Daniel Young

Feb. 1 (Bloomberg) — Dinner and lunch at Le Chateaubriand, a
fashionable bistro in Paris’s 11th arrondissement, are like night
and day.

At night, globe lights cast a flattering amber glow over
walls painted eggshell white and deep maroon. Minimal flourish and
wattage provide a plain, soft-focused backdrop for the modern,
meticulously crafted plates of the French Basque chef-proprietor,
Inaki Aizpitarte.

A visit the day after is sobering, as it can be in Paris. The
food and presentation are so workmanlike, you might assume they
are by another chef: A capable one, sure, but not Aizpitarte.
Light cast through the casement storefront exposes seams,
wrinkles, tobacco-stained walls. Even Erwin and Franck, silky-
smooth servers except for the five-day stubble they maintain in
solidarity with Aizpitarte, somehow look less dark, less handsome.
Aizpitarte, 34, who took over Le Chateaubriand almost a year
ago, transformed it into a dining destination from a neighborhood
relic in a matter of weeks.

So flow the currents in a city whose culinary compass is
stuck on SW: Today the city’s most restless chefs are foraging the
rustic glories of Gascony and the Basque country, more than
Provence and the Rhone-Alpes, for inspiration. Though Aizpitarte
hails from the hottest corner of contemporary French gastronomy,
his riveting cooking defies regional affiliation.

Divine Dessert

He cultivates ideas from unimagined flavor relationships,
marrying tuna tartare to flash-seared foie gras in one exceptional
appetizer or squid ink to passion fruit in another. He ennobles
humble ingredients, substituting “La vache qui rit” (“The
Laughing Cow”) processed cheese for mascarpone in a divine
dessert cream for poached pears. Nothing feels forced or silly.

The dinner menu, great value at 33 euros ($42.60) for two
courses and 39 euros for three, lists three choices each for
starter, main course and dessert. When asked if this menu changed
from night to night, Franck, a suave, accommodating server, said
the already overloaded staff would be dead if it did. Even with
this short program they didn’t manage to keep the dishware warm.

Sometimes that isn’t an issue. In an Asian take on the French
classic oeuf en gelee, the egg yolk is ingeniously submerged in a
soy jelly and paired with tiny cubes of smoked eel. The yolk, once
pierced, slowly oozes but doesn’t spill richness into the almost-
solid jelly. The eel bits detonate upon contact, providing more
smoke, gram for gram, than TNT.

A Basque-ish appetizer alternative floats tender chipirones
(baby calamari) in garlicky black squid ink with black rice
(Italian Venere) to match. Brilliant.

Asian Influence

Among main courses, the Asian influence is notable in the
pollack (the North Atlantic fish the French call lieu jaune)
poached in a broth with winter greens and black trumpet mushrooms
and striped with wasabi. A beef duo sets pristine fillets beside a
woven ball of stringy, crusty, fatty, succulent oxtail.

The best finish may be an ironic commentary on a prevalent
fashion of Parisian patisserie, peppered chocolate. Whereas most
pastry chefs do theirs with piment d’Espelette, the French Basque
chili pepper, Aizpitarte forgoes the spicy warmth of his native
red powder for the natural sweetness of roasted red pepper
prepared as a dip for bittersweet chocolate bars.

Le Chateaubriand’s location is a Metro-map millimeter too far
west of the Parmentier-Oberkampf intersection to be labeled
trendy. The bobos (bourgeois bohemians) who clog its small dark-
wood tables and chairs with monochromic chic don’t mind. The buzz
is unmistakable, yet the mood is relaxed and casual.

Case in point: A reservation was accepted for 8 p.m., though
the staff meal didn’t finish until 20 minutes later. While few
repeat diners sit down earlier than 9 p.m., some meet a bit
earlier at the bar for pintxos (Basque for tapas) and a wine
listed on the slate board.

Small Producers

The bistro personalizes its selection of wines from small
producers doing grand things through natural means by featuring
the names of the vignerons themselves instead of their domains,
e.g. Jean-Franois Nicq, the maker of an organic, fruity Syrah from
the Languedoc-Roussillon, rather than his Domaine des Foulards
Rouges. Most bottles fall within the 20-35 euro bracket.

Returning to the matter of Le Chateaubriand’s split
personality, it could seem ungrateful to fault Aizpitarte and
partner Frederic Penau for trying to preserve their bistro’s soul
and our “sous” through their 14 euro lunches. Only in an honest
bistro do you find an oversize entrecote quite as fatty as theirs.

Still, it is necessary to warn lunch regulars who might
puzzle over fare rendered unrecognizable to them by the chef’s
nocturnal aspirations.

Le Chateaubriand, 129 Avenue Parmentier, 75011 Paris. Tel.
+33-1-4357-4595

The Bloomberg Questions

How much? Dinner is 39 euros for three courses.
Sound levels? Parisian buzz.
Special feature? Breads from Au Levain du Marais.
Private room? No.
Date place? If you’re dating a foodie who wears black.
Will I go back? Yes.

(Daniel Young is a food critic for Bloomberg News. The
opinions expressed are his own.)

–Editor: Vines (jmr/fnn/bam)

With New York placing 6 of its restaurants in the top 50 and Paris 5, proud locals who were calling London the number one restaurant city only yesterday may have been having second thoughts this morning. I too found myself reassessing my position on the matter, only from the opposite perspective: last night was the first time since moving to London 5 years ago I felt inclined to place it above Paris and New York, my prior cities of residence, as the world’s gastronomic capital.

Could this be the reversal of a starstruck food obsessive gone gooey after breathing the same heady air as celebrated chefs René Redzepi and Grant Achatz, Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal? Potentially, yes. Did I maybe drink one too many mugs of smoke-breathing Guildhall Punch chilled with dry ice at the Awards after party? Not that I remember.

Mostly I was moved by the great hospitality of London, not merely to this international gathering of elite chefs but, more significantly, to their ideas, their accomplishments, their influence.

After the awards I followed Adrià around, snapping photos and waiting for a moment alone with the master. When I got it I asked him through an interpreter what was required of the diner, what made a world’s best restaurant diner?

“They should enjoy themselves and,” replied Adrià, pausing for emphasis, “they must be open-minded”.

That, I thought afterwards, was London: unburdened by traditions set in soil and wide open to discovery, innovation and foreign influence. In the UK, unlike in France, gastronomic chauvinism, justified or not, is rooted in the freedom to look overseas and find what’s best, a glorious task the nation’s food enthusiasts share with the organisers and judges of the 50 Best. The bias for the new over the old is manifest.

Blumenthal denied this had been a rough night for the UK before revealing how delighted he was to see so many of his foreign chef friends, perhaps including a few selected at the expense of his overlooked British colleagues. The best thing about the awards, he said, was their expanding global reach. In his eyes the rankings, for all their subjectivity, were an accurate reflection of modern gastronomy and a new spirit of international exchange.

“15 to 20 years ago the great chefs of France would accuse each other of stealing ideas,” said Blumental. “They were very competitive.” Now if he wants to nick an idea he calls the chef behind it on the phone, as he did with Massimiliano Alajmo, a fellow top 20 chef (from Le Calandre in Padua) also inclined to do strange things like filling a syringe with ragu. (Remember the spag bol from In Search of Perfection on the BBC?)

End of the day, The S. Pellegrino World’s Best Restaurants 2010 is, as Achatz of Alinea, the highest-ranking US restaurant says, “a list”. What could executive chef Daniel Boulud have possibly done in the space of a year for his Daniel to climb from 41st best to 8th best restaurant in the world (apart from garnering a 3rd Michelin star)? Are there really 31 dining destinations on the planet superior to The French Laundry?

“You can’t put too much into it,” said Achatz, as if to warn himself not to get too high – or low. “You can’t hit yourself over the head about it.”

It was heartwarming to see Redzepi accepting his award with 7 members of his kitchen brigade, all of them wearing t-shirts bearing a photo of an 8th – Ali, a Gambian dishwasher who couldn’t get a visa and was left behind in Copenhagen.

“The statement is, we miss him,” said Redzepi, “It is a team. If you surround yourself with people you love anything is possible.”

Does this spirit of teamwork, I asked the unassuming heir to Adrià and Blumenthal, signal the downfall of the tyrant chef?

“I can be angry sometimes,” he replied. “It lasts 5 minutes. Nothing is worth putting yourself through that type of crazy fighting. This isn’t the Nobel Prize.”

Still, he conceded, winning the World’s Best Restaurant prize “wasn’t all that bad”.