02 février 2008
Les Petites Sorcières, Paris
It began coldly, on a dark and chilly January day, somewhere around the rues Froidevaux, Daguerre and the Cimetière de Montparnasse. I was trotting to meet my friend and dear dining companion John on rue Liancourt, a quiet street in the neighborhood. Now what reason could there be to visit such a sleepy street on such a cold day? Well, having lunch at Les Petites Sorcières ("Little Witches"), a bistrot recently acquired by former Ledoyen chef Ghislaine Arabian. It is by no means a new bistrot and has had the same name and location for more than ten years. I remember Les Petites Sorcières from my long-gone days as a researcher for the Guide Lebey des restaurants parisiens, a Paris restaurant guidebook. The place was then run by a Mr. Christian Teule and the food was not bad at all. I particularly remember a very nice vouvray perlant served in a carafe. But today, doing my best to wrap myself into my thin coat, I am hoping to reach the bistrot before I drop dead frozen.
I was curious about Les Petites Sorcières under their new owner because I had no experience of Ghislaine Arabian's cooking, except from reading enthusiastic prose about it, mostly from the pen of respected critics like Claude Lebey and the like. I have never been to Ledoyen while she was there. I enjoy the food and setting at her former husband's bistrot, Le Caméléon. My expectations are rather on the positive side. And I'm freezing, friends, I'm starving too, so let's eat.
While sitting at our table, we are slightly astonished by the fact that the chef is not in her kitchen. She is doing the service, helped by one waitress. Well, we suppose, or rather we hope, that she gets things right before lunch service begins, and that she relies on a solid-gold kitchen team.
Here comes the first course. John's poêlée de palourdes (a very simple marinière of clams with chopped leeks) is just okay, and my cream of cauliflower is one of those heavily creamed restaurant soups that seem to give you a gag reflex after the third spoonful. It is actually thick cream slightly flavored with cauliflower. The soup is not only heavy, it is also quite dated: that kind of dish used to be common in the early 90s, then it passed. Not here, seemingly. Our wine is an unremarkable bordeaux. So far, nothing worth reporting. We are waiting for our main courses to begin discussing the contents or our plates. And we are ready to take any alleviating circumstance into account.
And, at this very instant, the Salt of the Earth enters the room.
Enter Anton Ego.
If you are still wondering who Anton Ego is, you haven't seen Ratatouille. He is the bespectacled, twig-thin, somber and stern food critic who terrorizes all of Paris restaurants. Now some French critics believe he was modelled after them (wonder why); actually he is a combination of several of them, and not only French ones. And his fictional dimension should not be overlooked. However, the one who just entered Les Petites Sorcières was certainly among the models for the Anton Ego character. A bit rounder, a bit less dry (shall I say slimier?), not so tall, but the likeness is undeniable. Hence the name.
Was he expected? I give a quick look around and my experience as a food researcher and reviewer instantly answers my question: a spare table has been set right before the bar counter. This means there very probably was a phone call that went like this: "Hello my dear Ghislaine, sorry I am calling so late; do you still have a little room left? Ah, we'll make some. Thank you very much. See you in ten minutes then."
This arrival of a criticus ex machina will have important consequences on our meal, but also on everybody else's meal in this dining room. From the very moment the ineffable postérieur critique touches its chair, the whole kitchen falls into a strange torpor. Nothing comes out of it. Everything sleeps. There must definitely be something like a spell, or some witchcraft at work, for all of a sudden we are in a Sleeping Beauty scenario. We wonder what we would see if we opened the kitchen door. Everybody snoring, propped on their standing Bamix or leaning on their pans? Everybody dead?
Ah, but the door opens twice — not to reveal the presence of any witch or fairy but to make way for Anton Ego's plates.
Fine, but nobody else gets their food. Most customers having entered the place roughly at the same time, it means that everybody will wait for their main course about 40 minutes. Precisely 45 minutes, I'm being told, but I did not check that. Hunger pangs and cheap Bordeaux are making my head spin ever so slightly.
But Anton Ego is chewing, looking very satisfied, all eyebrows raised, while a good twenty to thirty stomachs, nearby, are growling. "There definitely is a problem", says John after the first thirty minutes. "I'm starving", says I. Then, watching Ego's mastication, I realize what is really happening. In the kitchen, every activity has stalled, until the Master is properly catered to.
Forty-five minutes waiting for a dish is a long time. Very long, you can take my word for it. I know by now that we'll have to wait for Anton Ego to finis his lunch before the kitchen starts working for the mere mortals again. As for the landlady and former chef, she hovers around him, sits at his table for a five-minute chat, and seems totally oblivious of her other clients. But the best things have an ending and Anton Ego finally wipes his lips with his napkin, stands up, salutes and leaves without paying any check. I take a deep breath and think that we're going to see our main courses, at last.
And so we are, after another five minutes our plates appear by the grace of local fairyhood. John's skate grenobloise is skate allright, and not a bad one I reckon (he disagrees), but it cannot decently be called grenobloise for lack of croûtons, lemon slices and a reasonable number of capers. My hachis Parmentier does even less deserve its name. It is actually a small quantity of beef stew, probably a beer carbonade, onto which a ladleful of lumpy mashed potatoes have been casually thrown with a spoonful of sauce added, and down into the oven for five minutes. Inacceptable. We exchange a sorry glance. We pay our check and leave without ordering dessert. Why bother?
Later, I read that Claude Lebey has praised this bistrot as "the best of its kind". Now I realize that there's some ambiguity with the word "kind" and that, not being able to judge the terms within their context, it is not easy to figure out what "kind" he is referring to. But there are strong chances his review is a positive one. However, if he was treated the way I believe he was — which means just the same as Anton Ego —, there is positively no need to wonder.
02 juin 2007
Grrrrrrr — tiger veal!
Just before I touched it: iced tomato soup, croûtons, brocciu quenelle —
or how a careless waiter can spoil a lovely plating in a few seconds.
Chef is not to blame: the soup is delicious.
How do you know you are having lunch in the XVIe, halfway between the place Victor-Hugo and the Porte Maillot? Well, easy — you are surrounded by the inimitable XVIe crowd: business types — role models: Devedjian, Nay and Pécresse —, Palais des Congrès suits-and-ties, bored rich kids a.k.a. nappies (I kid you not, this is the Neuilly-Auteuil-Passy - NAP - term for underage yuppies), loose-Rolex guys who don't apologize when they nearly bump you off your chair with their bottom when sitting down — to sum it up: the France that won. That's it, you couldn't be anywhere else except Deauville or Saint-Tropez, or maybe a yacht off the Malta coast. The posh whorehouse décor, also, could hardly be found elsewhere. So, naturally, when you have built a reasonable awareness of the surroundings, you expect to have a bad meal. When you see the tall, model-like waitress giving a bored look at her watch, you can no longer doubt you will. And yet.
The little tapenade rounds of toast given as an amuse are, well, tapenade toast. There is a small can of Terra Rossa olive oil on the table. Poured on a piece of bread, it tastes very green, slightly acrid, impersonal, therefore perfectly adapted to the modern, undeveloped taste; it could come from anywhere in the world — but I will not begin to rant because there is no serious reason to. Indeed the first course (iced tomato soup with croûtons and a brocciu and herb quenelle) is surprisingly delicious, with a good taste of tomato, slightly sugared, the right amount of vinegar and the contrasting creaminess of the brocciu. The bored waitress, when pouring the soup onto my brocciu and croûtons, does not even look at the plate; she (gasp!) zeroes down on the quenelle, drowns it hopelessly, and pours some on the rim of the plate, too. Nevermind, for I know by now that there is actually someone in the kitchen, even if there are a few brain-deads among the waiting staff.
The main course - veal stufatu with grenaille potatoes and green olives - is admirable. It is rare, in a XVIe restaurant above the bistrot range (there are excellent bistrots in the XVIe but that is another story), to be served a stew with any good taste, if you are ever served any. The potatoes and olives are good, but the veal and the sauce are remarkably tasty. The meat is, so it says on the menu, "veau tigré de Jacques Abbatucci", i.e. Jacques Abbatucci's tiger veal. Now what is tiger veal? It does not come from a calf you chase down riding elephants, but of a local tiger-striped bovine breed. I have not been able to gather much information on that fabulous animal (fabulous in taste as well), no more than I have been able to gather much on the Terra Rossa olive oil (the website is laconical in a typical Corsican way), but suffice it to say that the general manager was quite proud of the former. This seems to be the hardest-to-find meat around, three-star chefs try to get it, Bocuse tries to get it, but to no avail. Face it — for some things, you have to be Corsican, or write at Gastroville. All the more since, in Corsica, breeding animals is one thing, butchering them is another thing. Long ago, during one of my visits to Corsica, my host took me to the tiny butcher shop in Muratu. "Two pounds of veal", she asked. "Sorry, the butcher said, no veal today, we weren't able to catch it. We'll try again this evening, so come back tomorrow."
Nice desserts - the pâtissier spent some time at the Crillon - based on the usual Corsican apparatus of chestnut, brocciu, citrus and particularly citron, plus a little chopped black olive in the financier batter that was the only really successful attempt at including olives in sweet dishes that I have witnessed so far.
So maybe the waitress looked at her watch one second time and the dark red plush and velvet décor might not be anything to write home about, but the inner volumes are quite beautiful, the 25-euro lunch menu is a good deal, the management is really nice (which compensates for the sometimes infuriating clientele) and the food is suprisingly good for "that kind of place". As you sit down you are dead sure you'll never be back, but after the meal, well, you're not so certain anymore...
La Villa Corse Rive Gauche, 141 avenue de Malakoff, Paris XVIe. Métro Porte-Maillot or Victor-Hugo. Tél. 01 40 67 18 44. Not a destination restaurant, but worth a try.