Michael Booth

La Régalade St Honoré

On my way back from Brittany, I made sure to have time for lunch in Paris. Like everyone else, I'd been itching to try the new branch of La Régalade (the original is in the 14e), which has just opened a short walk from the Louvre in the first. 

All of a sudden the 1e has a bunch of great new places, including the very exciting Franco-Chinese Yam T'cha (newly Michelin-starred), and the hyper-blogged about new Spring, opened by the talented Chicago chef Daniel Rose. I first met Daniel a few years ago while writing a piece about the intriguing wave of chef-owned restaurants in Paris for Condé Nast Traveller. Back then his original Spring was just beginning to cause a stir and, after dining there and enjoying his famed generosity as a host I wanted to return the favour so invited him to our place for dinner one night (if I remember, he brought along some stunning wines and was kind enough to say my jarret de veau was one of the best he'd ever tasted, which I am sure it wasn't, but it was awfully nice of him to fib).

So, of course, I wish Daniel well - and await the torrent of media coverage of his new place - but the EUR33 three course lunch at Bruno Doucet's La Régalade was my quarry this time. 

Unlike the branch in the 14e, this one is rather swish outside. Inside, too, all was fresh paint and unmarked furniture, but Doucet's trademark generosity and homesey hospitality was instantly evoked by the magnificent terrine and accompaniments which soon arrived at my table and from which guests are invited to scoff ad libitum. Of course, they rely on their guests' decorum and self respect not to go overboard.

Fools!

 If that is not the best start to any meal ever then I am Joel Robuchon. But it gets better. 

Dreadful photo, sorry, but this was an exquisitely tender piece of veal daube which was followed by a triumphant Grand Marniér souffle - a match for anything on offer at the nearby souffle-centric Le Soufflé.

 

After that there was time to pop by my favourite Paris food store - actually, make that my favourite store of any description - G. Detou to stock up on couverture chocolate for Christmas. 

Meanwhile, on my way home, at Charles de Gaulle airport I was fortunate enough to witness the results of a major renovation and makeover for Paris' number one international hub.

Here they are:

Some plants.

A couple of years ago a young man with a clipboard approached me as I waited for a taxi outside Charles de Gaulle to ask my opinion of the airport. He moved silently away a few moments later, ashen faced, after I had told him precisely what I thought of the world's worst international airport (and I am including Luton in that). It would appear that multicoloured plant pots are the sole outcome of the research.

One thing is for sure. Nothing else has changed.

 

Les Ambassadeurs at the Hotel de Crillon

There is a certain type of inverted snobbery among food enthusiasts about posh restaurants that I find really perplexing. It's the, 'I can't be doing with fancy, Michelin-starred places, with all their silverware and linen. Give me an upturned beer keg, a crusty baguette and a slice of ham, and I'm in heaven,' attitude. Perhaps its Elizabeth 'an omelette and a hair shirt' David's fault, the keep-it-simple brigade often cite her as the ultimate culinary authority, but the truth is, the old bird loved nothing more than stuffing her face in a grand dining room.

Are these people then saying they really love and appreciate food, but aren't interested in tasting some that's been made by the greatest cooks in the world from the finest ingredients and served in an ambience of luxury and refinement?

This is the dining room at Les Ambassadeurs in the Hotel de Crillon, Paris. I dug deep behind the sofa cushions to summon the, actually absurdly reasonable, EUR 80 or so for the five course set lunch menu, and popped by with a friend the other day. 

Cuh! What a load of fancy-schmantzy rubbish! Wish I'd spent 85% of that and gone to some smokey old bistro with tobacco stained ceilings and had a gristly bouef bourgignon and flaccid créme brulée instead. Keep it real!

Jus! What a load of poncey nonsense. 

Well, that's all very nice, but chocolate's chocolate, right?

Essentially, for the price of a tank of petrol, we enjoyed two hours of majestically choreographed, meticulously prepared, culinary excellence. 

Sometimes, simple isn't best. Sometimes artful, clever, creative and original food is. 

It's a favourite complaint of the inverted food snob to moan about the overbearing service in Michelin starred places but, in my experience, the more stars a place has, the more relaxed and unintimidating the waiters are. I once ate at Alain Ducasse at the Plaza Athenée and the waiter, overhearing me whisper to my companion, 'What's French for doggy bag?", politely interrupted with a big grin and said, 'Eez, Durgee Baag!'

It was the same at Les Ambassadeurs. I made a comment to the waiter at the end of a pre-dessert about the space dust that had been used in it, and five minutes later he returned from the kitchen with a small bag of it as a gift, tied up with gold ribbon.

That's service.

They had a cool new bar, too:

Obviously I was far too intimidated to go in, but nice to know it's there all the same.

Julia Child and Me (Only Julia pictured below.)

Along with the posts about 'discovering macarons' and 'how to make your own granola', it seems obligatory for every food blogger to post about their memories of the American food writer and TV personality, the late Julia Child, currently being reincarnated by Meryl Streep at the pictures.

Sadly, not being American, I knew nothing about Child until I started at the Cordon Bleu, but I do know something about Le Cordon Bleu, which is why the Times asked me to write something about it to tie in with the release of Julie and Julia (on Sept 11th). It  brought my time at the Paris alma mater of Julia Child flooding back.

As I say in the piece, right up until I walked through the door that first day in September, I really wasn’t sure what I would find. I wanted proper, serious, professional culinary training, not just to learn to cook off piste, without recipes and get away from the Jamie and Nigella style of cooking that so dominates the food scene these days, but good enough to equip me to go to work in a good restaurant.

But I had mixed feelings about Cordon Bleu. Would it be stuck in the 1970s (or, perhaps even the 1870s - possibly not as bad, now I think about it)? Would my fellow students be posh debs in twins sets and pearls? Was it little more than a kind of culinary finishing school?

As soon as I walked through the doors, however, I could just tell I’d found the right place. It was a bit smelly, a bit run down, cramped and busy. There was a real mix of students - many had professional cooking experience and most were serious about careers in catering in some form or other.

And then we met the chefs and I really knew this was the place for me. They were grumpy, grouchy, deeply chauvinistic, old fashioned and stubborn, and we all loved them. These were men who had cooked on the haute cuisine frontline in kitchens from across France and in some cases the world. They’d seen it, done it and probably made a soufflé from it.

Though we were paying a fortune for it, I still felt privileged to watch their demonstrations every day at school and what they taught me changed my cooking life forever (sniffs slightly, wiping a tear).

From time to time people get in touch to ask advice on which cooking school to attend, and I'm always happy to endorse LCB. It has its flaws - the menus aren't likely to cause Heston Blumenthal any anxiety; the place is run down and cramped, and the chefs insisted on using pre-grated cheese, but I had the time of my life there, learned stuff I could never have understood from books and the kind of instruction they never have time for on TV shows, and made a bunch of great friends.

And I got to eat an awful lot of cake, left over from the patisserie demos.

Obligatory asparagus food blog post

Spotted these little beauties in my favourite Paris market the other day. They are wild asparagus. No, I've never seen them before either but I fried them in butter and served them as a bed for some fresh scallops with a zingy dressing and they were transcendent - fresh, grassy, crisp and sweet.

(And note the fresh morel mushrooms next door. Sadly, I don't have a name which ends in '...ockerfeller' so I couldn't quite stretch to them).

While I am at it, more Paris food market porn comin' at ya:

Paris chocolate tour part II

Next stop, in my crazy, sugar-fuelled, chocolate zig-zag across town was Jean-Paul Hévin at 231 rue St Honoré in the 1st. 

I first encountered the inspired work of Hevin a few years ago when I was doing a chocolate course at the Hotel Ritz’s sumptuous cooking school around the corner, and was pleased to bump into the man himself, once again, when I visited his shop this time.

Along with a dazzling array of cakes and flavoured ganaches, the highlight here for me is Hevin’s cheese ganaches made with goat cheese, Epoisses, Roquefort and stinky old Pont l’évêque. Yes, that’s what I thought when I first heard about them, from my chocolate guru Christian Forais (although I didn’t pull quite such a face), but trust me, these so-called aperitif chocolates are extraordinarily good. Not sure how he makes them, but I guess he melts the cream with cheese instead of chocolate (the filling is creamy coloured) and some sugar, along with an additional flavour - cumin with the Epoisses, thyme with the Pont l’évêque, hazlenut with the goat cheese and walnut with the Roquefort. Incidentally, they were originally made to mark the new millennium; so much more appropriate than a great big tent, don’t you think?

Really, truly, honestly, they are staggeringly moreish, not at all cheesy, but unlike any other chocolate you will ever taste. In a good way. Actually, I once heard - or perhaps made up and have come to believe it as true - that the molecular structure of blue cheese, in particular, is an almost perfect match for dark chocolate, so perhaps this isn’t as batty-bonkers as it initially sounds, and, certainly, we all know that saltiness goes very well with all chocolates so why not salty cheese?

All I know is that for the price of a CD (or whatever format the youth of today use to listen to their popular beat combos), you get one of the world’s great, original chocolate experiences.

And Hévin is a very nice man (not sure about the sweaty weirdo next to him though).

I asked him about the secret of his cheese ganaches but he refused, ever so politely, to divulge it and, when I pushed him further, simply called the police and had me forcibly ejected, crying, from the shop.

But not before I had bagged me a box of cheese chocs, of course, which I ate en route to the latest chocolatier to open in Paris, Jacques Genin, whose deeply glamourous chocolatier-cafe-atelier is right at the top of rue de Turenne in the Marais. Definitely the most chic chocolatier in the city, with extremely elegant, thin ganaches covered in the most perfectly tempered couverture I have ever seen - super glossy and crisp, with some inventive flavours like sichuan pepper.

There is is! Quick, someone catch him and get him to make us some more!

Aren't they gorgeous? As Coleridge (or was it Keats?) said, 'A thing of beauty, is a joy forever. Now pass me the After Eights'. 

Finally, because according to a recent EU directive all food bloggers at one time or another are compelled to do something on Parisian macarons, I popped by Pierre Hermé’s new store on the rue Cambon and had a liche and rose flavoured Ispahan sorbet sandwich. 

I’ve tried his ice creams before and, as usual, this was sickly sweet and wincingly perfumed (and his wasabi and grapefruit macaron had zero wasabi flavour, grumble, moan, complain...), but as with the films of the Cohen brothers (Oh Brother Where Art Thou?: That's an hour and a half of my life I won't see again), I never seem to learn where Hermé is concerned.

That said, his crimes pale in comparison to those of Godiva, who judging by the display in their store window around the corner, persist in perpetrating the dangerous delusion that chocolate and strawberries go together (apparently Godiva is owned by a Turkish confectionary giant).

Sorry about the bad picture, but I was trembling with indignation. Chocolate and strawberries? Don’t get me started on that particular culinary heresy. Ooh, why I oughta...!

Phew! Had a brief black out there. Not sure what happened. Anyhoo, I'm off on an assignment for a magazine to Norway tomorrow. Not renowned for its food, Norway, but I am prepared to have my preconceptions overturned and will report back.

The chocolatiers of Paris

Sometimes, occasionally - okay, only really as I write this and reflect on a day spent almost entirely in the pursuit of chocolate perfection - I do ask myself, is it entirely healthy for a grown man in his late 20s (cue awkward coughs and sideways glances) to be so fixated on what is, essentially, candy?

To which the self evident answer is, well, what else is there to do with a free day in Paris? An almost perfect ignorance of art and architecture liberates me from the crushing tedium of galleries and museums. My wife’s necessarily iron grip on the household finances, and the Wiemar Republic-style devaluation of the pound means there isn’t much mileage in shopping in Euros. And, besides, I’m not in my late 20s anyway.

So let’s get on with the business at hand. Who is the greatest chocolatier (someone who makes chocolates, rather than someone who makes chocolate) in Paris today.

The usual answer to that is, whichever one I happen to be standing in, but this time I thought I’d try and be a little more rigorous in my evaluation, which is just another way of saying, I wondered just how many I could visit and sample in one day.

First up was an old classic, and a favourite of mine since I first started coming to Paris about, ahem, that can’t be right... but it seems, well, that was 17 years ago (how can I have reached a stage in my life when I can recall doing anything 17 years ago with any clarity?).

As well as fashioning quite staggering statues, figures and, erm, sausages out of chocolate - not sure why, really, as the guilt you’d feel at dismantling them would surely undermine the pleasure of their consumption (if only for a brief moment, at any rate) - Michel Chaudun also makes the definitive, bare naked ganache truffles.

Ganache - essentially a crystalised blend of chocolate and cream, usually with a little butter and trimoline/sucré inverté (inverted, or syrup sugar - you can use honey) - is usually coated with tempered couverture and often infused with citrues fruits, herbs, teas, spices, alcohol or, these days, any other theoretically edible compound that exists within the universe. But some of Paris’ chocolatiers also sell them in teeny tiny cubes lightly dusted with bitter cocoa powder. I am not sure, but I think Chaudun was the first to do this, and his are still the best: light, smooth and silky with no hint of graininess, and, somehow, delightfully springy. This box of six worked out at over 50 cents a piece, which probably makes them about as costly as mammoth ivory, but they are an unsurpassed sensual pleasure and an essential rite of passage in any chocolate lover’s life.

(His shop is on the corner of the same 7th arrondissement street - rue Malar - as two great value restaurants, Stephane Jego's Basque restaurant L’Ami Jean, and L’Affriolé, by the way).

To counteract the calorific burden of my Chaudun purchase (and as I knew I would pass a couple of really fine patisseries on the way) I actually walked across a good chunk of the Left Bank to the next stop on my chocolate itinerary, the little shoe box shop of John-Charles Rochoux (whose chocolate crocodile featured in my last post) at 16, rue d’Assas in the 6th. I’d read about it on David Lebovitz’s wonderful blog, and thought I’d check it out.

As well as the croc, there were more wacky/troubling, gothic choc-tures (could you eat a baby? A whole one?).

The cheery M Rochoux himself was manning the till and directed me to his basil and tobacco ganaches the flavours of which were punchily vivid. The tobacco flavour had an amazing length - if you can forgive me the choc-poncery - but the basil - which seemed to have candied basil stalk mixed in - was especially, and unexpectedly fab. Definitely up there with the best I have ever tasted, and nice and chunky too.

This is the tobacco ganache. Very nice too it was.

Part II of my chocolate odyssey after the break. No flicking!

Where in the world...?

Hooray, finally we are back in...

Can you guess where we are yet? A chocolate crocodile? A shameless abundance of cigarettes? What kind of crazy people could conjure such fresh japery...?

Hmm, and cheese shaped like breasts you say... Oh, honestly. Will this help?

Yes! That's right! A sunny spring day in Crawley. Scrubs up well, doesn't it?

We went to the family day at Longchamp race course for a picnic on Sunday with some very good friends. 

Our horse won with considerable ease (shown in exhibit A, above), and we started mapping out our next holiday in Barbados, but it was then disqualified for some arcane Frenchy transgression which we never quite fathomed and the 'computer says no' woman behind the counter refused to explain. Cue an outburst of impotent rage familiar to all who have had dealings with French people behind glass, as well as some dark thoughts prompted by a visit with the kids the next day to the Conciergerie.

It wasn't the wretched horse's fault, of course, he did his best, but I did rather wonder if we'd all have been better off if the entire field had bypassed the whole 'running round in circles with a gaily dressed midget on their back' stage, and gone directly to this shop in the Poncelet market.