Review of L'Arpège restaurant in Paris
by Andy Hayler
Food Rating: 10/10
Last visited: November 2003
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Chef Alain Passard made headlines when he declared that he was not going to cook meat any more. If this was ever entirely true it is no longer so, with a short mixed menu involving fish and meat, but there is a wide selection of ten pure vegetarian starters in addition to the other choices, and you can order a pure vegetarian meal. The dining room is modern, fairly small with Lalique dancing figures as insets to match the Lalique display plates. An amuse bouche was the least interesting element of the meal, a poached egg served in its shell with balsamic vinegar: nice but nothing remarkable. There is just one kind of bread, but it is superb: a country bread with great crust, perfect seasoning and fine texture, using a sourdough (10/10).
My starter was four langoustines cooked and served in their shell, each split in half and coked to perfection, served with a spicy sauce which had remarkably clean taste of ginger: the langoustines were simple but stunning (10/10). Stella had two kinds of smoked potatoes, utterly superb and served with a subtle horseradish cream – I have never eaten potatoes that tasted like this (10/10). Next was a rather superfluous gelée of beetroot and tomato, and then the main course arrived.
Passard likes to cook things slowly (“artisan style”) and my pheasant had been cooked for an hour and a half in a basket with hay, covered with pastry so the flavour and aroma was entirely contained. The meat was superbly tender, having great depth of flavour, served with a simple cooking jus flavoured with 25 year old balsamic vinegar; this worked well but the star was the pheasant itself, which tasted divine (10/10). Stella’s turbot was also cooked very slowly for two hours, also tasting great, served with a simple butter sauce (9/10).
Cheese was in very fine condition: here they go for a smaller board than many places, but everything is perfect. The cheese is sourced from Antony in Alsace, and there is fine aged Comte, along with excellent Beaufort and Corsican ewes milk cheese with ash, along with some more obscure varieties (10/10). I had a very rich chocolate soufflé (9/10) while Stella’s millefeuille with vanilla cream was even better, the puff pastry as light as air (10/10). Coffee was excellent, with a custard tart, a mint wafer and a chocolate wafer all excellent petit fours.
The wine list is very extensive, and goes well beyond France, but the prices are outrageous. There is virtually nothing under EUR 100, the wine we had at EUR 45 was I think literally the cheapest on the wine list (a drinkable Bergerac). The bill is the big problem – at EUR 563 for two, with no pre-dinner drinks, though two extra glasses of wine. Still, this is stratospheric stuff. At least the food is great, while the service was faultless.