Passionfruit Butter

I couldn’t not write the last post on my Paris trip, despite the fact that I’m COMPLETELY over reminiscing about every single meal I ate two months ago – so I’ll do my best to whiz through this. Nonetheless. My last official, photographed meal in Paris was at a Guy Savoy restaurant. Not his flagship since, um, we’re not rich, but one of his smaller offshoots, Les Bouquinistes. There was a six-course 75€ menu that we couldn’t pass up, since we wanted to dine in the graces of one of France’s most famous chefs.

Sorry for the crappy iPhone photos. My camera managed to freak on me just an hour before dinner.

The amuse bouche was a chilled sweet pea soup with basil mousse. It tasted exactly like I was eating fresh peas straight from the pod, and I had a particular love affair with chilled soups this summer, so I was predisposed with a soft spot for this. Spot on.

Foie gras with cherries was okay. Service was ABOMINABLE – it took them so long just to bring us this first plate that we bordered on crying. No, this is not said from a purely American standpoint; I understand that French service is characteristically more lax than American service, but it was blatantly neglectful, which would be perturbing anywhere but which was offensive and downright wrong in any restaurant headed by such a celebrated chef as Guy Savoy. So, then, to be fair, I should admit that I was predisposed to be VERY harsh towards any dish they brought us by the time this foie came out. Still, though, I remember the sheer flavor being unremarkable, as though a notch had been turned partially but not quite to 11.

This was not necessarily the lobster-and-beet ravioli as advertised. Instead, it was two thin slices of beets (serving as the pasta in this analogy) enclosing a coarse mixture of lobster and crab. Good. Blah. Ambivalence. That on the left is a piece of lobster meat with a completely gratuitous piece of artichoke heart in what was supposed to be an orange sauce, but which had no flavor whatsoever and might’ve been mistaken for any watery liquid if not for its slightly syrupy viscosity. Again… it seemed partially thought out but not quite executed to its best potential. Overarcing theme at this point in the meal: stopping halfway on the way to what might’ve been an array of striking, potent, complementary flavors. Another disappointment.

And then there was this, a dish to define the night. Grilled royal seabream didn’t taste grilled so much as it tasted of, felt, exuded delicate handling and informed technique. Wafer-thin scallops of zucchini decorated the top of the fish, as much a colorful garnish as it was a crisp, fresh adornment to the flaky white fish. Toasted bread crumbs were scattered with a light hand, an extra something to hit the teeth with each bite to keep this from being just any slice of fish. A neat salad of sliced tomatoes dressed in olive oil hid underneath the filet, and my mind actually keeps taking me back to its exuberant sweetness, which illuminated the entire deal. The olive oil was of a superior quality, and the flavor complex was redolent of the Mediterranean, a welcome reminder in the busy-rainy-crowded streets of Paris.

This was a warm soup, cream of celery with a royal of foie gras and asparagus ribbons. The soup itself tasted good in theory, but the flavor of celery was hardly there. Now, I’m hardly an authority on the subject of using celery in cooking (my knowledge and experience are limited to using the vegetable in the Creole “Holy Trinity” or just as a conduit for sticky peanut butter), but to my amateur mind, celery seems like an odd choice for a hot soup. Sure, it’s a mellow enough player to stand back to the more forward flavors of foie gras and asparagus, but I feel it’s a taste so largely defined by its crisp green fibrousness that it would get lost in any other iteration. At the very least, that was the case here, so while I was happy to eat spoonfuls of the soup, it was a bit hard to remember exactly what I was eating. The foie gras was good at times, though it was almost spongy, lacking the unctuous velvet texture for which it’s praised, and at times it tasted to me like (horrors!) dog food. Everyone else at the table liked it, though.

This roasted veal filet was succulent, a tender meat on its own that was bolstered by bursting moistness. However, the vegetables were definitely throwaway, minus the petals of onion. The carrots and peas felt more than anything like a flashback to cafeteria lunches in lower school (perhaps French people don’t have this association?), and neither of the two contained the punchy freshness that had been so apparent in the amuse. Most appalling and unusual was the presence of whole chunks of lemon, which had been cooked down enough to lose their citrusy plumpness and sunny yellow color – in other words, enough to masquerade as perfectly edible vegetables, making for a VERY bitter surprise. The dish as a whole lacked inspiration, even if the veal was prepared to a T, and as I daydreamed about the seabream, I regretted that our last impression was of this course.

Dessert, too, was throwaway, but I find that throwaway desserts are a lot more forgivable – not to mention a lot more forgiving – than throwaway entrées. A hard round of smooth dark chocolate stood on a raspberry pedestal, with a melting raspberry sorbet and a questionable foam on top. It was all around quite difficult to eat, as the chocolate didn’t lend itself to daintily spooned bites, and the skill level needed to make such a dish was exactly zero on a scale of 1-10 (seriously: arrange raspberries in a circle, toss on a piece of chocolate, halfheartedly scoop on some sorbet, squirt on aforementioned Questionable Foam). The menu read simply “chocolate-raspberry,” and I asked the waiter if this meant that the pastry chef executed different forms of this flavor combination every night. This was not the case – the strange item you see above was standard. Cue crestfallenness… but I can’t deny that it tasted good, particularly with the glass of port that they brought us.

My conclusion? Simply that you don’t need to dine finely to dine well, in Paris but in the rest of the world too. By far my most memorable, most delicious, most skillful meal from my entire Paris trip was at Les Gourmets des Ternes, a standard (if overpriced) indoor/outdoor neighborhood bistro that we stumbled upon by word of mouth. Savoy’s restaurant, despite its location on a sweet French street (I believe it was in/near Saint-Germain, but my memory might fail me?), felt like hotel fare: glamorous but passionless, distinguished by name association but lacking in soul and mastery. A million times over, I’d be better off spending my money at the restaurant of my French lover, Jean-Francois… or at the very least, on falafel in the Marais.