First you’ll notice the eye candy: the waiters, all gorgeous in a lean and hungry way, sporting two-day-old stubble, quite well trained in the art of female eye contact. I had my back to the room, but Alexandra couldn’t keep her own eyes off them: "Oh, they're just amazing!"
It was Friday night and we were at Le Chateaubriand on avenue Parmentier in the 11th. The old bistro’s been cleaned up a bit, but with the original dark wood paneling and tiled floor, it’s still got an authentic 1930’s look. Except for a huge blackboard with names of chef Inaki Aizpitarte’s many, many friends inscribed in chalk. There was a big smudge at the bottom where one name had been erased. When I asked, the waiter whispered, “Gerard Depardieu.”
There’s been a lot of chat about Aizpitarte’s high concept food ever since the young Basque chef, formerly of La Famille and Le Transversal, took over Le Chateaubriand. I’d heard about his beet foams and oysters on acai pulp, but the night we were there, it seemed to me that he was giving a trendy spin to fairly straightforward bistro food: a little fusion, a scientific twist or two, and disparate ingredients used as much for shock value as for flavor.
I’d had an enormous lunch at Le Comptoir and then spent the afternoon interviewing Jean Marie Thiercelin at his extraordinary spice shop, Goumanyat et son Royaume, for Saveur—I was in sensory overload, but game to try Aizpitarte’s fare. Sort of.
Actually, there were only a few choices on the blackboard. If Cabillaud rouge, broccoli, orange sanguine, fenouil sounds more like a shopping list than a dish, you wouldn’t be far off the mark: The waiter brought a nice hunk of sautéed rare cod on a rectangular plate. Above it was an emerald-green, fish-shaped smear of pureed broccoli and, to the side, warm blood orange sections sprinkled with fleur de sel. (Concept: red and green are complimentary colors.) Fennel shavings were scattered here and there. Each element was delicious, but as a dish, it never came together.
Alexandra’s Filet de boeuf saignant, mini poisson, pak choy was a vaguely Asian riff on surf and turf: a pinwheel of rare beef and bright green vegetable was pretty to look at and great-tasting, but what were all those curly things? As it turns out, they were the mini-poissons: tiny, crunchy, smoky, salty fish as slender as eels— they reminded me a little of the Spanish eels served at Hyo Tan Nippon restaurant in New York. It was the kind of dish where you keep tasting all the elements to see if you can somehow make them work together.
Wine by the glass is high concept too: I loved “le temps de cerises”, a luscious red with lots of ripe fruit. I forgot to take notes, so I have no idea what it was—a shame since it was superb.
I could have plunged head first into our shared dessert: a bowl of warm bittersweet chocolate “soup.” On the rim were a few more ingredients for the adventurous: fresh sweet litchis, a dollop of crème fraiche, a crunchy sesame tuile and a little pile of matcha, powdered Japanese green tea. Each altered the taste of the soup and transformed it into something entirely new and wonderful. A lovely success.
It was 10:30 when we left and a crowd of black-clad, thirty-somethings were avidly angling for our table. Our waiter was making eye-contact.
Le Chateaubriand, 129 avenue Parmentier, 75011 Paris. Telephone: 01 43 57 45 95. To read an interview (in French) with Inaki Aizpitarte, go here.