Enough Fine Dining – L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon

Here in Paris the good eating continues.

Monday night we went to dinner at the original Joel Robuchon restaurant in the 7th arrondissement, literally across from where we rented an apartment on the rue du Bac in April 2005.

We went with visiting friend Ed Roberto and Parisian Marc Goldberg from Bryan Garnier.

We've been there at least once before in some year with some friends, but all these amazing restaurants are starting to blur a bit in my memory, perhaps because my brain is packed in butter after all of these July meals.

Joanne Wilson blogged here about their recent visit.

These photos are courtesy of Brad Feld and his magically working iPhone:

The open kitchen:

Our very friendly waiters displaying the wine, a Côte-Rôtie chosen by Marc:

Close up of the front of the wine bottle:

Close up of the back of the wine bottle (in case you couldn't guess):

My beautiful tomato appetizer – I love tomatoes, and the little violet flowers are such a nice contrasting color:

Brad's seafood appetizer:

Ed's appetizer of lobster ravioli with black truffles and green cabbage:

Brad's second appetizer of lobster ravioli with black truffles and green cabbage:

My second appetizer of an egg cooked slowly in a light morel mushroom sauce with a sprinkle of cumin on top:

And a series of terrifying photos, beginning with sweetbread appetizer for Marc:

Appetizer portion of Iberian ham for Ed:

Main course of an entire fish for Brad – look at those fishy eyes. Bleah:

And after eating all the good parts, look at the fishy eyes. Bleah:

A bunch of beef, with and without knife piercing:

And then a porringer of ambrosia – also known as mashed potatoes, but truly a butter transport mechanism. Yum!

The cheese course – the chevre on the left was melting and just perfect, and the Reblochon on the right was just right:

The cheese was served with toasted bread that contained hazelnuts and raisins, which was a wonderful complement:

Baba au rhum for Ed and Marc:

An outstanding coffee sabayon custard dessert for me, with a surprising layer of Greek yogurt with lemon zest, which made a crisp contrast to the richness of the coffee. Extra yum.

A truly beautiful chocolate dessert for Brad – named Le Chocolat Tendance and described on the menu as "onctueuse," which is translated as smooth, unctuous, suave, oily; which makes me laugh, since unctuous actually means excessively smooth in English – which isn't possible for chocolate. It also has Oreo crumbs on top and cocoa ice cream. And photographs beautifully:

Walking home after dinner:

That's a rear view of Ed and me, strolling along between the Louvre and the Tuileries Garden:

And perhaps my favorite Paris photo so far -

And the Best Dining of All – Restaurant Guy Savoy

One celebratory birthday dinner is not enough to celebrate Jason Mendelson, so after our Le Cinq feast on Monday, we headed to Restaurant Guy Savoy on Tuesday.

We're still the happy group:

And photographs are still generously shared by Carl Rosendahl (seated far right):

I'll offer brief descriptions of the foods photographed –

After an amuse bouche of tart vegetable lollipops for the pescaterians and foie gras nibbles for the others, we started with soup served in an intriguing double container:

And beneath the second half of the dish, a surprise.

Fresh spring peas with an egg on top. The server / guide recommended dipping the toasted bread drizzled with herb oil directly into the egg, "as though we were at home."

An oyster, full of the taste of the ocean. I don't love oysters, but this one was just about perfect.

This course deserves some explanation – first the jewel-like lobster is brought to you in this perforated dish, which looks entirely interesting and satisfying on its own. They then pour a liquid over and it begins to steam like a cauldron in Macbeth. I actually said "double double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble."

The smoke completely covers the lobster and chills it further, and the liquid continues to bubble and boil as you eat the dish. Most innovative use of dry ice I've seen so far in my entire life:

A deliciously crispy sea bass, with pepper on the side so that you can adjust the taste to your own preference -

Caviar – I actually didn't love this dish – too oily somehow – but I loved the presentation and Brad loved getting my portion.

Foie gras

A Guy Savoy classic – artichoke soup with black truffle and parmesan, with a truffle filled buttered brioche on the side. By this time I was so full that Brad again received much of my portion:

The lovely red wine:

The lamb:

And a simple carrot, incredibly flavorful and tasty:

Cheese course:

And some strawberry based treats:

A beautifully presented alternating series of matcha tea and jasmine tea based sorbet cones, granita, chilled liquid soup drink thing, and savory tuiles. I don't like jasmine flavors (or rose flavors either) so Jud benefited from my surplus this course -

And the chocolate dessert, which starts as a beautiful shiny orb:

And they then pour a warm fruit liquid over it, the top melts to reveal the contents of tiny minced fruit bits, and the fruit and chocolate flavors blend together in a magical way:

The 700th dessert chosen from the abundant dessert cart. Here, a selection of ice creams, arranged by Carl in a subtle smiley-face design:

I've been fortunate enough to dine at Guy Savoy twice in the past. Here is my blog post comparing my previous experiences at both Le Cinq and Guy Savoy.

Brad and I went once with Ilana and Warren Katz, longtime friends from Boston. Here is a photo pre-dinner from May 2006 outside of our apartment on Rue du Cherche-Midi where Warren is showing me which way is up.

The lovely Ilana:

Don't I look like I was having fun?!?

I love food and fine dining and feel incredibly lucky and grateful to have had the chance to share some unbelievably fine meals with unbelievably fine friends.

I'm delighted to have had another opportunity to celebrate a Happy Birthday to Jason!

More Fine Dining – Le Cinq

For a celebration worthy of the 40th birthday of Jason Mendelson, we went to Le Cinq at the Four Seasons Hotel George V Paris.

Here's the happy party:

Left to right:

Jud Valeski, CEO of Gnip
David Cohen, CEO of Techstars
moi
Brad Feld
the birthday boy
and photographer extraordinaire, Carl Rosendahl, who kindly photographed the evening and is allowing me to use his images -

And since Carl's photographs are so beautiful, I will let them speak thousands of words for the food and the celebration -

And how do you finish such an extravagant evening?

At Le Cinq, they take a photo of the group, print it out, insert into a beautiful George V envelope and distribute copies to the happy guests -

Fine Dining and Tacos

While we're here in the City of Light we're enjoying both excellent meals and excellent companionship at those meals. I'm proposing new nicknames for Paris, with my top contenders so far being City of Food and City of Calories.

As promised in my last post, I'm catching you up on our incredible meal at L'Arpege with Jeff Clavier on Monday 7/11. Brad and I had been there before in 2005, but didn't have the full degustation experience that we had this time – and this was wonderful. I'm reconstructing the list of courses from memory, so I may be missing one or two, but I'm providing links to an excellent photo-rich review that can give you an idea of what the food looks like. We didn't have the opportunity to photograph the courses during our experience since Brad's phone wasn't working at the time. You'll have to visit for yourself for the tastes!

L'Arpege Listing of Courses:

Amuse bouche of tiny pastry cups with beet cream or radish and tomato
Tomato soup with scoop of creme fraiche (my 2nd favorite course)
Single egg in shell – a L'Arpege signature, with creme fraiche, maple syrup, and chives (3rd favorite course)
Assorted grilled vegetables
Lobster in thin white potatoes (my favorite course)
Red onion gratin with black currants (my least favorite course)
Three vegetable ravioli in consomme
Fish with lemon and pepper for me, fish with white wine for Brad and Jeff
Another fish with green tea powder / lamb for Jeff
Cheese course – incredible Comté
First dessert – rhubarb in mille feuille (rhubarb somewhat overwhelmed by the pastry. I would have preferred more rhubarb flavor.)
2nd dessert – basil ice cream with stewed yellow plums and black currants
Tray of sweets in multiples of 3 with some fascinating vegetable flavor macarons
And surely that is enough!?!!
Oh, the wines – chosen by Jeff. I don't remember the white, but the red was a pinot noir from the Mazis-Chambertin region of Burgundy

A lengthy, thoughtful, and astute review of L'Arpege on the Food Snob blog, with gorgeous photos, is worth a long read, and includes some history on Alain Passard's personal evolution as a chef.

And here is a link to a series of photo tags for L'Arpege on Paris by Mouth. Beautiful.

We had a couple of days to recover, lying about like pythons after devouring several goats, then our friend, Jud Valeski, from Boulder, Colorado, arrived – which necessitated venturing forth in search of more food.

We ate at Saturne, which is reviewed here:

review on the New York Times

review on Paris by Mouth

review on Paris Notebook

review on John Talbot's Paris

Since Jud has a phone that actually works in Europe, he took these beautiful photos of our beautiful meal. We missed photographing the starter, which was chunks of tuna tartare with small slivers of sardine, white onions, parsley, and drizzle of viniagrette.

We're also missing a photo of one of my favorite parts of the meal, which was a hearty country bread served in a linen basket filled with fresh hay that smelled wonderful.

But here is our first entree – fish for Brad and me, and chicken for Jud:

And our second entree – line caught sea bass with peas and summer squash

And dessert of a fromage blanc ice cream with tiny meringue balls and raspberry granita coulis -

A nice way to start our nice week with Jud with modern French food.

But sometimes you just want Mexican -

After yet ANOTHER day of pouring rain and gray skies, Brad was officially ready for some not-French food. From my extensive (borderline obsessive) reading of food blogs, I knew there are now a few actual Mexican food options in Paris.

We took a taxi to Candelaria, which we didn't know had been reviewed in the Sunday Times T Magazine on May 6th and further reviewed in the New York Times on May 31, 2011.

We're not usually so au courant (see my French?!) but the handmade tacos and actual salsa were worth squeezing in to the tiny, very crowded place. We sat at the single communal table and ate real Mexican, which helped drive away some of the damp and chill of the Parisian summer.

And then it was the weekend, and time to rest from our dining labors.

Longtime Gone / Postcard from Paris

I don't usually quote lyrics by the Dixie Chicks, but my last post was September 1, 2010 and it has indeed been a long time since I've posted to my blog. I think this is primarily due to laziness and the ease of use of Twitter, which I use multiple times each week.

But now I'm in Paris for a month and have more to share than fits in the 140 characters of a tweet, so I'm actually going to post a post. Whee! How exciting -

I have been tweeting away while here, with lots of links to my Google photo albums, which I hope you're enjoying. I'm mostly using my aging Nikon D100 digital SLR camera as a point and shoot and not taking advantage of its magic powers, but I think I'm at least sharing some of the visual flavors of Paris.

And we've started taking advantage of the literal flavors of Paris in the past ten days or so and making some new friends. We had lunch at Les Gourmets de Ternes with Toby Ruckert and Margit Brusda from Stuttgart, Germany, New Zealand, and India, as well as Nabil Hanga from Lagos, Nigeria. It's mostly a meat place, serving slabs of the cold blue beef the French seem to admire, but 4 of the 5 of us had fish instead. Brad really enjoyed the baba au rhum dessert, but I didn't love the celebrity-obsessed owner and don't need to go there again, especially since there is a world of dining splendor surrounding us.

The next day we had lunch with Cliff Shaw and Christy Clark from Boulder, Colorado at Restaurant Dominique Bouchet which I felt was our first "real" French meal. I had salmon carpaccio with pink peppercorns and Granny Smith apple bites, tuna and avocado stack for Brad, giant pasta tubes with lobster for both of us, and dessert of chocolate tart for me. The experience was similar to the meal I enjoyed and blogged about at Les Bouquinistes in April 2005. The space was clean and modern, with contemporary art on the walls and a simple decor. I would have happily gone again during our time in Paris except that, in the Parisian way, the restaurant is closed from July 14th through August 29. So French.

After our now normal afternoon siesta, we had an excellent high-end meal that evening with Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz and his lovely lawyer wife, Anne, at Laurent in the outdoor garden in the Parisian twilight overlooking the Champs-Elysees garden. Although I'm allergic to wine, which is extra unfortunate and difficult in France, I could smell the incredible Domaine Francoise Raveneau 2000 Chablis Grand Cru Blanchot even though I couldn't drink it. My beautiful lobster helped comfort me. And dessert was a comfort, too.

The very next night we were delighted to have dinner with longtime New York friends Fred and Joanne Wilson at Les Fines Gueles which Joanne blogged about here, complete with fun photos. If you squint you can see my fun French scarf in the background of a shot or two. Les Fines Gueles is one of a crop of wine bars I keep reading about on the Parisian food blogs I've recently subscribed to. One of my favorite reviewers, David Lebovitz, reviews it here. I would eat here every week.

The next day we walked down to Sunday lunch to meet Jerome Camblain and Nathalie Besancon at Cafe Marly, trying to burn off at least some of the accumulating calories. The best thing about Cafe Marly is that it overlooks the glass pyramid entrance to the Louvre. As is usual for places with superb views, the food and service are inversely proportional to that view – but what a view!

And the next day, because we hadn't been eating enough food, we had a legendary Top Ten List meal with Jeff Clavier at L'Arpege, which is probably worthy of its very own separate blog post. Truly amazing meal. Here's a photo of L'Arpege lobster from another one of my new favorite Parisian food blogs, Paris by Mouth.

Brad is very relaxed and happy from lots of sleep and an exploration of French wine. Here's his list of his first week in Paris.

I'll do another post soon (famous last words?!?) about eating at Saturne and the upcoming repeat vists to Top Ten List restaurants Le Cinq and Guy Savoy.

Bon appetit!

Bella Italia

In the "better late than never" category, I'm finally posting about our trip to Italy in May.

We went to Positano on the Amalfi Coast with friends David and Jil Cohen for the first week. Our original hotel was named Hotel Marincanto, but should have been named the Hotel of Stairs. Our room was clean and freshly whitewashed, although the shower was tiny and the towels and linens were thin. It was lovely to open the tall windows and listen to the ocean all night and the view was unbeatable — but the stairs were crazy. We were in the old section of the hotel instead of the shiny new part pictured on the internet, so after a day we moved to the famous Positano hotel Le Sirenuse which is named for the sirens who mythically lived in this region. We played lots of fun tennis and had massages and lots of naps and some great meals, as always. The first night Brad and I had an easier jet lag adjustment than David and Jil, perhaps because of the espresso shot we had in the afternoon. We ate at the Risorante al Palazzo in a lovely outdoor garden area. They served a cuttle fish amuse-bouche, which sounds terrifying but was wonderful, warm and lemony. I had a roasted potato stuffed with fennel puree and served on a bed of lentils, and a white fish that was called carpaccio but was served warm under a bed of cherry tomatoes and arugula. Not a pizza in sight. Italian service is what you would expect, friendly and welcoming and slow. We had another memorable meal at Donna Rosa which is located way up high on the hill above Positano. The big Barolo made it extra fun for all those other lucky people who aren't allergic to wine. Brad and I aren't big boat or water or sun people, but still loved Positano. Here are some reasons why:

One of my very favorite things no matter where I am in the world is to be served breakfast. In Italy they do morning coffee very well, with a pitcher of steaming hot milk served with the coffee. This is the view from the lovely terrace at the Hotel Marincanto.

For the second part of the trip we departed the sunny Amalfi coast and headed to Mezzegra in the Lake Como region. We were to discover that the town's main claim to fame is that it's where Mussolini and his girlfriend were shot at the end of WWII. It took us almost as long to get from Positano to Lake Como as it did to get to Italy from the U.S. A long day, beginning with the $50/person breakfast to go ordered from the hotel, consisting of a meat and cheese sandwich, piece of fruit, and bottle of water. Don't order those. We drove through the garbage lined streets of Naples to the train station in plenty of time for our train, which was clean and shiny and departed on time. And then stopped. Train tracks tend to run through the unlovely parts, so we had a view of an Air Liquide pump station while our train waited for something. After an Italian announcement, lots of people got off the train onto a small platform. We hauled our luggage out, too, until some kind Italian person said that we should get back on our original train to Milan, at which point the train started to move while we were trying to get our selves and our luggage back on the train. More excitement than I like. And then the train seemed like it was going backward for a long time, but still ended up in Rome, and then continued on to Milan two hours late. We were supposed to meet our friends Jeff and Judy Herman in Florence, but they had wisely caught an earlier train to Milan. Our driver was kindly still waiting for us in the pouring rain and drove us to our lovely rented house through crazy rush hour traffic and even crazier pouring rain. It was a long day. And here is what it was like in Mezzegra:

Day One

Day Two

Day Three

You get the idea.

Luckily we're very self-entertaining.

And when the sun did come out, even temporarily, it was lovely:

We refused to be daunted. See us smiling in the rain.

I think that the most daunting thing was the scorpion. Yes, scorpion. I think of Arizona as being scorpion territory, but have since learned that they're distributed all over the planet except New Zealand and Antarctica. This one was resting on the hallway wall of the house. I captured it in a wine carafe and Jeff kindly relocated to a neighbor's yard. It's funny when you see something that you've only seen representations of in books or movies. I assure you that my first real-life scorpion was much bigger than it looks in David's photo.

Nice things about Mezzegra:
the proprietor closed the grocery store to delivery our groceries for free and gave us a bottle of champagne after Brad ran 3 miles to get cash from the nearest ATM

Chinese food in the rain — after a week of Italian food, you want something different. Even mediocre Chinese was a nice break from pasta and pizza and gelato and more pasta and such. They mysteriously gave us scarves with the check, which we were happy to wear. Look at those American teeth, ruining our Russian babushka disguise.

We had a truly fantastic meal at Antica Trattoria del Risorgimento with spectacular 17th century Murano glass chandeliers and a wonderful Dutch host and it turns out, a terrific website. It's definitely worth seeking out this place if you're in the Lake Como area.

We had a great trip and think that it's really great to travel with friends, but a week is about all the vacation I can take, especially in the rain. So we came home a couple of days early. I love having the opportunity to see such beautiful parts of the world, and get to bond with new friends; but it's always wonderful to come home.

And the real reason we take vacation:

Contemporary Dallas II

We finished our Dallas art extravaganza with two more private collections in contemporary homes, both of which confirmed for me that I want to build a fantastic contemporary house of my own. The first house we saw belongs to Deedie and Rusty Rose and was designed by Antoine Predock. I had been fortunate enough to see the house once before when Deedie Rose was kind enough to guide me through the process of choosing an architect. The current art in the house is primarily by emerging artists, particularly from South America, although the Sol LeWitt in the entry is pretty recognizable.

The second house and collection we saw was designed by Bill Booziotis as guest house and gallery for Marguerite Hoffman and her late husband, Robert. They have what I would call a seriously important collection, including multiple works by Cy Twombly, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, Ellsworth Kelly, Philip Guston, Joseph Cornell, Agnes Martin, Vija Celmins and other major post-World War II artists. I think the only thing I would want to add is a Rothko. Since we only saw the guest house, perhaps they have one or two in their living room.

After being completely satiated with art and architecture, we headed to New York for more.

Contemporary Dallas

We’re in Dallas for a Wellesley art trip with our in-laws and yesterday had access to two extraordinary homes designed by contemporary architects and filled with amazing art. We first went to the collection of Howard and Cindy Rachofsky, whose home was designed by Richard Meier as basically a one bedroom museum. The current selections from their collection are all created between the years of 2004-2007 by emerging artists. It was great to see major collectors supporting the work of living artists. The second home we visited was designed by Steven Holl for Jessie and Charles Price, whose collection includes works by Joan Mitchell, Ed Ruscha, old master drawings, Brice Marden, and my favorite, a Robert Irwin light installation.

In the afternoon we skipped the curated tour of the Turner exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art, dashed through the Nasher sculpture museum with its terrific design by Renzo Piano, and went back to the hotel for a nice long nap.

We had dinner at Stephan Pyles Restaurant, where the food was lovely (a selection of 4 iced gazpacho was wonderful), but the waiter was very agressive and intrusive.

Today we’re off to Ft. Worth to see the Tadao Ando designed museum as well as the Art of the American Snapshot exhibit at the Amon Carter.

Museums and more Museums

Today we went to the Louvre bright and early. We wandered into some galleries I’d never seen before, which was terrific. Morgan and I got to stand in front of the crown jewels without any other people there for about a minute, which was also terrific and quite rare. We saw the Mona Lisa, of course, and lots of Egyptian artifacts and many many many paintings of dead religious people. The Napoleonic apartments are always amazing with the huge rooms and the tiny bed. Morgan really liked the Feast at Cana, which is a massive painting in the same room as the Mona Lisa. We had lunch at Cafe Marly and got to have the truly French experience of it taking 45 minutes to pay the bill. We did go to L’Orangerie with only a 20 minute wait in line. The Monet murals were sublime, and the private collection downstairs was surprisingly extensive and probably satisfied my need to see French impressionist paintings.

Tomorrow we will go to the Picasso Museum and wander around the Marais and the Place des Vosges, then go to Notre Dame cathedral and maybe take another afternoon nap.

We take the TGV to Provence on Sunday and start riding horses through the countryside on Monday. It’s still quite gray and gloomy here. I’m glad I brought an umbrella!

Ah, Paris

I’m in the City of Light until Sunday, taking my 18 year old niece, Morgan, to France for her birthday gift. We took the overnight flight from Dulles on Wednesday night, arriving here to a cloudy gray city yesterday morning. We came to our incredibly tiny, but wonderfully orange hotel room and slept until 4:00 in the afternoon, which isn’t the recommended way to acclimate to a new time zone, but felt wonderful. We’re staying on the Left Bank near St. Germain and walked around the familiar 6th and 7th arrondissement after having splendid pastries and cafe creme at Laduree, which is literally just around the corner. We walked around until 9:30 and had dinner at a sidewalk cafe also just around the corner from our hotel. It’s always delightful to share my favorite city (or one of my favorites) with a new person, especially one as observant and fun as Miss Morgan.

I slept until right at 2:00 in the morning, and then was wide awake. I could hear Morgan starting to turn over and stir around 3:30. We stayed in bed until 6:30, came downstairs to our contemporary hotel lobby and had breakfast. Now we’re going to head to the Louvre, which I think takes up most of a day. The decorative arts galleries are open again after several years of renovation, and I’m excited to see them. We’ll also try to go to L’Orangerie, which had just opened also after years of renovation when Brad and I were here for the month of May last year and had very long lines. We’ll enjoy the Tuilieries, although it’s kind of a cloudy day again and the flowers won’t be at the biggest blooming.

We’re here in Paris until Sunday afternoon, when we take the TGV to Aix-en-Provence for a 5 day horse riding excursion. I suspect the country farm where we’ll going won’t have a computer in the lobby with free internet access, and my phone and texting isn’t working at all here — so I’ll probably be taking a genuine vacation from the computer for awhile. C’est la vie.