Passionfruit Butter

Recently, NOLA food critic Brett Anderson bestowed just his third five-bean review over an eight-year tenure upon Stella!, which is headed by the talented and able chef Scott Boswell. Since then, I’ve given a lot of thought to what makes a restaurant superb. In a dining city like New Orleans, it seems we’ve got a lot of four-bean restaurants – Herbsaint, Coquette, Lilette, Bayona, Clancy’s, La Petite Grocery, and I could go on – but only a select few attain that elusive superlative of five whole beans, akin to five stars of excellence in every way.

Food, as I’ve realized, is only the first of many things defining a restaurant’s quality, though it is of course the most obvious. Then there is service, ambiance, location – plus a host of subcategories (within the category of food, for instance, there is quality, creativity, presentation, taste, ingenuity…) – that a restaurant must consider and fine-tune with inexhaustible patience.

With all this said, I keep looking back on my dining experience at Les Gourmets des Ternes, a typical French bistro in the quiet 17th arrondissement, trying to put my finger on exactly what it was that made it the best meal of my trip there. And then I realize it was just that – the experience - that set it off the charts. Presentation was unremarkable, service was typically French (read: aloof), and the things on the menu could’ve been found at most any other traditional French venue in Paris, let alone all of France. But where the menu faltered, where the service left quite a bit to be desired, laughter and personality filled the gaps with abounding enthusiasm – so if I was unsurprised by the foie gras or the steak au poivre on offer, I had a hell of a good time – and that’s an area where even the best restaurants can fall short.

We were seated outside amidst a tight web of tables, every one of which was full. A feeble waiter took our wine order, and before I could even complete my rough translation of the very prolific menu, a silver fox of a man, decked out in a pristine white suit, pounced on us in a flurry of Franglish. “You like foie gras? I’ll bring you foie gras. You gotta try the steak – it’ll make you want to kill yourself. I’ll bring some plates for the table?” Dumbfounded and frazzled, we stuttered and nodded. “Don’t worry. If you don’t like, you pay nothing.” The man, ever-so-Frenchly named Jean-François, signaled to the waiter. It was clear we had no choice, so we settled into our wicker chairs.

Seconds later, the waiter arrived, tray tottering and the ever amiable Jean-François at his side, with a smorgasbord of snacks and delicacies. Humble earthenware tubs housed half-eaten pâté (pictures above is only one of three) – ah, so we were not the first people to be offered this most unusual interpretation of a “tasting menu.” Befuddled by the irony of such a highbrow luxury arriving at our table in this way (breaking the cardinal rule that food should appear untouched), we hesitantly spread the stuff on ripped baguette and proceeded to eat it with the utmost civilization. My favorite, the confit de foie gras, tasted almost as if it had been caramelized, with a sweet pinky flavor that tasted like the furthest thing from offal. It just felt right: like eating with family. This was not the place for impeccable medallions of foie gras served on elegant china or bone-white porcelain.

I was unable to get good shots of the Parisian potatoes or the cold beef salad (much more appetizing than it sounds) before Mom, Neil, and Jenna swept the large, family-style bowls from my clutches (or, rather, from their opportune position under the best pocket of lighting). But each was tasty, with morsels of beef falling apart in succulent, stringy bites, flavored with sliced shallots and a light hand of spices, with a touch of vinegar lending it a mild zing. The potatoes – thin, dense, sweet golden slices – melted in one’s mouth like delicate pats of butter, with shallots making another appearance to give it the necessary balance.

And then came the entrées.

Veal is infallibly tender – notoriously so – but never  more than in this dish of lush veal medallions cradled in a creamy brown sauce that was redolent of warm, smoky mushrooms, with sliced mushrooms scattered on top to bring out the sauce’s subtle flavor.

I have not had the privilege to taste the fabled fries at John Besh’s Lüke, so I can’t make a fair comparison. But can I just say that these French fries were, to me, at this point in my life, the quintessential French fries, their ultimate manifestation, a rebirth away from nirvana if they were Buddhist? A crisp outer layer – and, take note, it was consistently crisp, never mushy or burnt – was laden with the unmistakable flavor of duck fat, but like so many sheets of crepe paper surrounding a much-anticipated gift, the shell shattered with a resonant crunch into its buttery interior. The fact that these fries came to us on a giant platter made them all the more irresistible, all the more accessible. I am pleased to say we ate every single one.

But the magnum opus was that uncomplicated classic, the steak au poivre.

I never said the plating or production of astonishingly photogenic feasts was a high concern at Les Gourmets des Ternes.

I’m wondering now if there’s a correlation between that soaring American standard of food that looks untouched and the common American notion that food should be indisputably, unquestionably dead… or, conversely, that the French eat foie gras in communal containers and would be rather thrilled if their steak mooed upon arrival at the dining table. Americans are warned, when going abroad, that if they order a steak in France, they might be tempted to believe the steak hasn’t been cooked at all – just skewered, a bleeding slab of raw flesh, straight from the butcher paper onto the plate. We are stringently reminded of exactly how to ask for our steak, and then firmly warned that we might just be ridiculed.

Luckily, we all prefer steak on the rare side (admittedly, by American standards), since it’s not as though we could have specified, in the mad hubbub of Jean-François’ order, exactly how we ate our meat. Because when the twin plates of steak au poivre arrived at our table, I heard echoing choruses of bellowing moos faintly in the distance (what you can see in the photo is a healthy flushed fuchsia; what waited beneath that blanket of peppery cream sauce was a scarlet mass of throbbing beef that gushed a red sea into the caramel puddle.

But unlike my fling with saignante steak at Les Côtelettes, every bite of this was passionate, eyes-rolled-back-in-my-head bliss. Had it been cooked any longer, it would have lost the hearty beefy essence that was so reminiscent of idyllic pastoral countryside even on the sidewalks of Paris. The sauce was a work of art on its own, with tiny bits of black peppercorn floating in a pool of deep, caramelized cream. It was simple, not fishing for praise or clutching desperately for attention, but it was quietly, confidently perfect in such a way that I can still taste it, vividly and nostalgically, on my tongue.

So we paid our bill, to Jean-François’ delight (“I told you,” he remarked as we whisked away our credit card). On our way out, he handed us individually wrapped wafers of dark chocolate – his unmistakable visage printed on the wrapper of each one – and insisted that we take a picture. We huddled together, smiling for the camera… and with his other arm around my mom, his hand slid down smoothly to caress my butt so lightly that I couldn’t be quite sure it happened.

Oh, the French.