by Holly Hughes
Last fall, I decided that spending all my time chasing talented young chefs around the city as they moved from kitchen to kitchen (usually before opening places of their own) was only part of the culinary equation. I set out to rekindle an old flame, tracking down those restaurants that, while not especially chic anymore, deliver the kind of soul-satisfying boeuf bourguignon on which French cuisine was built. I started with L’Ambassade d’Auvergne, which continues to serve some of the best regional food in Paris. Anyone who loves real French cooking cannot afford to live in fear of fat. At this outpost near the Marais, creamy lentil salad comes with a healthy dollop of goose fat, while blanched cabbage leaves are layered with a fine filling of pork, salt pork, pork liver, Swiss chard, and fresh bread crumbs before being popped into a hot oven where all the flavors fuse into a superb terrine—a brilliant work of edible masonry. The “embassy” also understands basic tableside theater: After serving a generous length of grilled auvergnat sausage, the waiter returns with a copper saucepan and a wooden spoon to whip the aligot—that heavenly concoction of potatoes, cheese curds, and garlic—into a cascade of melting sheets, a coup de théâtre that dazzles the occasional tourist while reassuring the serious Parisians that French cuisine is still alive and well.
Running late for my next stop, I rush into La Grille, a peculiar dining room (it reminds me of Miss Havisham’s) festooned with lace, straw hats, and dusty dolls, as my friend waves away my apologies. “What a wonderful idea to eat here,” she says. “I’d forgotten about this place—so much character.” Geneviève and Yves Cullerre have run La Grille for nearly half a century, turning out almost anthropological classics like duck terrine with hazelnuts, mackerel poached in white wine, and his plat de résistance, a superb grilled turbot in black fishnet stockings (thanks to the scoring of the grill) with a sublime beurre blanc. I live in dread of the inevitable day when the Cullerres retire to some sunny place by the sea. Then again, I might just tag along.
I also hope that Michel Bosshard (“Boboss”) at Auberge Le Quincy won’t hang up his indigo cotton apron anytime soon. With his blue-framed glasses and teasing style, Boboss is as much a part of the ambience as the bric-a-brac that fills this cubbyhole of a restaurant. After greeting me with a big slice of saucisson to nibble on while reading the menu, he insists I have the caillette, an Ardèche specialty of small patties of grilled pork, pork liver, Swiss chard, and herbs that have been rubbed with fat from the caul (the lacy membrane enclosing an animal’s abdomen). I’d been dreaming all day about the foie gras, but he is firm. “If you hate the caillette,” he says, “I’ll bring you some foie gras.” But I don’t, not this caillette—whose bed of mesclun dressed with vinaigrette is the perfect “grassy” foil for the rich meat. I move on to rabbit cooked in shallots and white wine, ending the meal with one of the best chocolate mousses in Paris—all fine with Boboss.
For a meal that’s equally animated but more anonymous, I love La Tour de Montlhéry, one of the last of the night restaurants that fed the workers at Les Halles before the market decamped to the suburbs. Like the décor, the menu here is as authentic as a Doisneau photo—grilled marrowbones, oeufs en gelée, calf’s liver with bacon, and massive côte de boeuf, all accompanied by a cheap but harmless Beaujolais from the barrels inside the front door.
Atmosphere is also the lure at the magnificent Le Train Bleu, inside the Gare de Lyon rail station. The nice surprise here, though, is that aside from being the best place in town to savor the visual opulence of fin de siècle Paris, the ornate dining room also serves some surprisingly good French food. Ignore the contemporary dishes (like scallops sautéed in tamarind-spiked jus de poulet) and go straight for the escargots or oysters to start, followed by grilled sole, steak tartare, or the succulent leg of lamb, which is carved tableside on a silver-domed trolley and served with a delicious potato gratin made with Fourme d’Ambert, a wonderful blue cheese from Auvergne.
As an American, I remain neutral in the ancient quarrel between the French and the English but still find it curious that the French derisively call the Brits “rosbifs” (roast beefs) when they’re such avid boeuf lovers themselves. Just watch the way hungry Gauls go for the hearth-grilled côte de boeuf at Robert et Louise, a rustic hole-in-the-wall in the Marais with exposed half-timbers and a grumpy house poodle. Almost everything here—from the crusty sautéed potatoes that come with the storied rib steak to the great dishes like boudin noir and confit de canard—is cooked over an open fire.
Beef is also very much the focus at Au Moulin à Vent, in the Latin Quarter, where the walls are decorated with shiny copper saucepans and the menu is vast. Make it easy on yourself and go for either the Salers beef chateaubriand with homemade béarnaise sauce or the veal kidney flambéed in Armagnac. But be sure to start your meal with the frogs’ legs à la provençale, little bites of juicy meat on tiny bones in a wonderfully garlicky sauce—the best to be found anywhere. No place in Paris quite channels the jubilation that ended the privation of the World War II years like this standard-bearer from 1946.
I have a soft spot for Chez Georges, a bistro that succeeds brilliantly by flatly ignoring the passage of time. The last time I ate there, I had exactly the same meal I’d had 15 years earlier, when I met Julia Child, who also loved this place. “It’s not often I get real bistro cooking anymore,” she told me before ordering a frisée salad with lardons (“It never tastes as good at home as it does in France,” she insisted) and calf’s liver with bacon. I had the blanquette de veau. Just before dessert, a French designer stopped by to pay his respects, congratulating Madame Child for “civilizing” the American palate. After he’d gone, she asked, “Who was that? Oh dear, I hope this place doesn’t become fashionable.” Well, it has, as a quick look at the antiques dealers and fashion-house bigwigs filling the banquettes makes clear, but the kitchen turns out the same guilelessly retro cooking it always has.
For anyone who lives in Paris, few things are more treacherous than the nostalgia trap, that fretful and despairing mind-set that insists that everything tasted better in the past. Sometimes, though, restaurants change for the better, as I find with Josephine Chez Dumonet, a beautiful 1898-vintage place near the famous Poilâne bakery. Now under the management of Jean-Christian Dumonet, a second-generation owner, I find the food fresher and more vivid than it has been in a long time. The clientele has changed, too. Just as I finish a homemade terrine de campagne, a ripple rises up in the dining room. Joey Starr, France’s most notorious rapper, dressed in immaculate dove-gray sweats and a Yankees baseball cap, is shown to the table next to mine. After my meal—panfried foie gras; monkfish with white beans; and, finally, a plate of cheese from the nearby Quatrehomme fromagerie—Starr and I exchange sheepish grins as our Grand Marnier soufflés arrive at exactly the same time.
Later, walking home, I am elated that France’s bad-boy rapper also chose this place. I have no doubt that Paris’s old-fashioned restaurants will survive, and I also know that the boeuf bourguignon I ate in the Latin Quarter 35 years ago had been every bit as delicious as I’d remembered. Maybe even better.
Address Book
L’ambassade d’Auvergne 22 R. du Grenier-St.-Lazare, 3rd (01-42-72-31-22). Auberge le Quincy 28 Ave. Ledru-Rollin, 12th (01-43-28-46-76). Chez Georges 1 R. du mail, 2nd (01-42-60-07-11). La Grille 80 R. du Faubourg-Possionniere, 10th (01-47-70-89-73). Josephine Chez Dumonet 117 R. du Cherche Midi, 6th (01-45-48-52-40). Au Moulin a Vent 20 R. des Fosses-St.-Bernard, 5th (01-43-54-99-37). Robert et Louise 64 R. Vielle-du-Temple, 3rd (01-42-78-55-89). La Tour de Montlhery Chez Denise 5 R. des Prouvaires, 1st (01-42-36-21-82). Le Train Bleu Gare de Lyon, 12th (01-43-43-09-06).
Someone’s In the Kitchen
THE PERFECT CHEF
By Todd Kliman From The Oxford American
Todd Kliman’s day job—as dining editor for the Washingtonian magazine—was almost beside the point. His casual fascination with the food at a local Chinese restaurant eventually deepened into an obsessive quest, tracking down an el
usive genius who didn’t want to be found.
Before I got in my car and drove to three different states to find him, before I began tracking his whereabouts on the Internet and running down leads that had been passed to me by people I had never met, before I had to admit that I had become a little crazed in my pursuit and that this was about more than just him, but about me, too—before all that, Peter Chang was simply somebody whose cooking I enjoyed.
I was just starting out as a food critic, and had learned through a tipster that a talented chef had taken over the kitchen of a restaurant in Fairfax called China Star, in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, forty minutes from Washington, D.C. In the world of serious food lovers, in an age of rapid information sharing, the real excitement over a new place happens far in advance of the published review in the paper or magazine and at a subterranean level, below the awareness of ordinary folks, those people possessed only of a mere casual interest in food and restaurants. Someone gets a tip and passes on the news, and a following quickly builds—a kind of culinary equivalent of insider trading.
Despite my newness to the job, or perhaps because of it, I had made myself an inviolable rule about tipsters, and that was to take every one of their recommendations seriously. Often, this resulted in driving an hour and a half for dispiriting Thai or dessicated barbecue, and I would feel toyed with and mocked; driving home, I would curse my rule and vow never again, only to get back in the car and hunt down the next lead that came my way, because the truth was that I could be disappointed nine out of ten times but the tenth time, the success, would fill me with such a sense of triumph that it was as if those earlier disappointments had never occurred. As a critic, I was inevitably thought to be gorging myself on the good life, on endless quantities of champagne and caviar and foie gras, each meal richer and more luxurious than the last, but after a while, and to my great dismay—because I had made another vow, which was to not become jaded by an excess of pleasure—these meals blended into indistinction. No matter how exquisite something might be, a diet made up exclusively of exquisite dishes inevitably becomes normal, and normal is boring. The unrequited love is always more interesting than the requited love, and, as it had been with me and dating, so it was with me and restaurant meals. I lived for the chase.
In this case, my tipster was possessed of more than just the usual slate of dish recommendations. He had a backstory to pass on. This chef had won two major cooking competitions in China, a significant achievement by any reckoning, but especially in a culture that is disinclined to valorize the individual. He had cooked for the Chinese premier, Hu Jintao, had written culinary manuals, and had come to the U.S. to cook at the Embassy in Washington, which is where he had been working just prior to joining the restaurant in Fairfax. It all sounded promising.
NOT LONG AFTER, I showed up with a friend one afternoon at China Star, expecting some outward announcement of the great man’s arrival, some manifestation of his specialness, only to find the usual list of beef and broccoli and orange chicken. But there was another menu, the Chinese menu, and on it was a parade of dishes I had never seen. Diced rabbit in hot oil. Sliced tendon of beef with cilantro. I didn’t know where to start, so I started everywhere.
I sat with a friend at a corner table, our mouths afire from the incendiary heat of the Szechuan chilis, alterations that compelled me to keep eating long after I was no longer hungry—a desperate longing for that runner’s high, that intoxication. At the same time, I was filled with a paradoxical sense that I had ordered too much and yet, somehow, not enough. I could have gone to China Star every day for a week and still not have eaten enough to know what Chef Chang’s cuisine was or wasn’t.
I returned not long after that initial encounter, ordered still more dishes, and felt, again, defeated. This time I was convinced there was a right way to order and a wrong way to order, and that I had ordered the wrong way. What was the right way? I wasn’t exactly sure. But whatever it was, I felt certain that it was conveyed in clues offered up by the menu. The key was to decipher them, and I had not done that. Lacking any real guidance from the waiter (except to warn me that a dish was spicy, which in my eagerness to prove my bona fides—which was, really, to demonstrate that I was not the timid, fearful, judging Westerner that I might have presented, and had an active interest in duck blood and internal organs and other such delicacies—I conveniently ignored), it was easy to wind up with a table full of nothing but hot dishes, which was like reading only the dirty parts torn from a novel and concluding that the author has a one-track mind. I hastily devised a plan for my next visit: I would order both hot and cold (temperature) dishes, I would order both spicy and nonspicy dishes, I would seek, above all, balance—the balance that was, surely, there in the menu but that I had, foolishly, missed. I would enlist a group of friends to come along, reinforcements for a campaign that had become more complicated than I had counted on, their presence at the table less about communality and sharing than about subterfuge—masking my intent and allowing me to cover as much culinary ground as possible. I would do it right.
I WOULD DO IT RIGHT, and in fact, I did do it right, though I did not do it at China Star. I returned to the restaurant with my five-member crew, only to learn that Chang had moved on and was cooking at a place in Alexandria, fifteen minutes closer to Washington. The restaurant was called TemptAsian Café—in intention and appearance no different from tens of thousands of Americanized Chinese restaurants across the land. When I stopped in with my wife one night, two people were waiting for carryout orders, and hearing the manager call out the contents of the stapled bags for a man in running shorts—chicken and green beans, orange beef, General Tso’s chicken—I thought I might have been mistaken in thinking this was Chef Chang’s place. I whispered my doubts to my wife. A cheerless and brusque waitress materialized, directed us to a table, and handed us a couple of Americanized Chinese menus. Now I was certain this could not have been where the estimable Chef Chang had landed.
“Do you have a Chinese menu?” I asked.
She gave me a scrutinizing once-over, her brow knitting. It was as if I had mispronounced the password, proving myself an interloper, undeserving of being handed the Chinese menu. For a long moment, she regarded my face, not simply for evidence of my seriousness but rather, it seemed, for evidence of my worth.
Stupidly, I smiled. Or rather, reflexively I smiled, because I had not wanted to smile. Even as I was smiling, I had not thought I was smiling, but I am an American, and that is what we Americans do in any situation where we are being denied what we think we indisputably deserve access to. We smile. Even when we do not know the native language. Even when we commit egregious acts of cultural ignorance. The smile, we think, is our badge, our passport—the smile will erase everything else we have done or, as the case may be, not done; the smile will put us over; the smile will deliver us to the vital center.
I smiled, and the waitress turned and left. My wife and I raised an eyebrow at each other across the table, wondering what exactly had just happened. “Well, I guess it’s just gonna be beef and broccoli then, huh?” she said.
And then, just as abruptly as she had left, the waitress returned and grudgingly handed over the Chinese menus, which, in contrast to the bound and printed regular menu, had been cobbled together hastily via the aid of a computer. This was more like it. Here were many of the dishes I had eaten at China Star, plus a good number more that I hadn’t seen before, like a dish of fish with sour mustard greens that was preceded by a red asterisk, the universal warning that the preparation listed is going to be hot.
I pointed to the number on the menu, trying to order.
The waitress frowned. She directed me to something tamer, without an asterisk. I persisted, and she touted more aggressively the merits of the dish she had suggested. I knew from experience that we had begun that verbal joust that sometimes takes place in ethnic restaurants that don’t know and don’t court Westerners, and that each eager parry was going to be met by a forcef
ul thrust. In some restaurants, the trick was to make multiple visits within a short span of time, demonstrating your sincerity by virtue of familiarity; then, and only then, was the staff likely to relent and allow you access to the real stuff, the good stuff, the stuff you’d truly come for. But I didn’t want to wait. In my mind, I had already bypassed this tedious and time-consuming process by having eaten twice at China Star.
When I asked for the grilled fish with cold rice gluten, her eyes bulged for a split second before she shook her head no.
No, you don’t have it in? I wanted to scream. Or no, you’re not going to serve it to me, regardless?
What the hell did I have to do to earn the restaurant’s trust to be able to taste Chef Chang’s food again?
Whether my inner torment was visible on my face, and she had taken pity on me, or whether I had demonstrated a willingness to try any number of dishes that would have put a scare into most Westerners, or both, or neither, I don’t know, but she relented and decided to bring out the fish with sour mustard greens.
It was wonderful, sour and spicy in a way that dishes featuring fish almost never are, but even if it had been merely ordinary, I would have made sure that we devoured all of it, in this way making the very unsubtle, I hoped, point that we were deserving of being shown the full extent of the chef’s repertoire of dishes.
WHAT FOLLOWED WAS extraordinary: Chinese cooking like I had never tasted, better than anything Chef Chang had prepared at China Star—or maybe it was that I had learned how to order from him, in much the way that you need to read two or three books by Faulkner just to begin to grasp even a little of what he is up to.