How To Walk Into a Restaurant

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Entering a restaurant really is an art form in itself. The confidence, the charm, the way new arrivals move across the space — there’s a real elegance to someone who knows how to do it.  – Edward Chisholm, “A Waiter in Paris”

Taking your table at a restaurant is probably something you take for granted. But by treating your entrance as just another trudge, you are losing a golden opportunity to advertise yourself as a customer who’s not to be trifled with. And in this era of non-stop narcissism, it is a way to show off in a manner that actually matters — the matter at hand being: your enjoyment of your meal.

Overstatement?

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Think of a restaurant like a woman. Sometimes all you want is some conversation. Sometimes, you seek the Full Monty. Either way, your approach makes all the difference in the world. Is this your first flirtation? Love at first sight? Or a one-night stand? Are you diffident? Confident? Cocky to a fault? Defensive? Insecure? Project any of these in the wrong way and disaster awaits. Knowing what moves to make is half the battle. And we’re here to help. (With restaurants, not with women — I gave up trying to understand them decades ago.)

My rules will be outlined at the end, but first, let’s get to some preliminaries. Attitude is everything, whether you’re sliding into a seat at a diner or strutting into a temple of haute cuisine.

Inviolable Eating Out Axiom #1: You are on display, whether you like it or not, so you might as well make the most of it.

Restaurant people are savants when it comes to sizing up customers. When your job depends on serving people, and spending anywhere from thirty minutes to three hours with them (and trying to make it a pleasant experience for all concerned), you have to be. The ideal is to treat everyone the same, but human nature dictates otherwise. How you present will determine how you are treated, and nowhere is this more important than in those first few minutes (literally) when you walk in and ask for a table. (For purpose of this discussion, I am assuming a table has already been booked, or they are available for walk-ins. The dynamics of impromptu negotiating for a seat in a packed house we will leave for another time.)

Dressing your best, or at least a highly presentable version of yourself helps too. You’ll be judged by your clothes (and footwear) far more in an expensive restaurant than a cheap one, but even in franchise-land, the person who greets and seats you will notice whether you respect yourself and your surroundings. And it…

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….that if you dress worse than the staff, your service will suffer.

The sociologist in me (yes, I majored in it) could easily go off on a  dissection of the socioeconomic relationships between waitstaff and customers, but we’ll leave Marxist theory out of it for now. Suffice it to say some restaurants cater to a clientele barely above the social station of those working there, while at the higher end of the spectrum, some  customers could probably buy the joint. And if you find yourself in a restaurant where the servers seem substantially better off than the diners, you’re probably in a soup kitchen, or an Asian buffet.

These days (especially in Vegas), they’ll seat you at a top-drawer emporium even if your backwards cap and cargo shorts are screaming “Rube from Paducah”–  but dress like a slob and everyone from the hostesses to the busboy will notice, and be on-guard for the faux pas to come.

They may never come, of course — you may sit down looking like a refugee from a bowling league, and then surprise everyone by getting into a serious discussion with the waiter about malolactic fermentation. But experience has taught them that stereotypes save a lot of time, and people generally live down to the cliches they embody, so they will treat you accordingly until you prove yourself. So do yourself (and the restaurant) a favor and dress like you belong there. (Sexist aside: these days, women are invariably better dressed in restaurants than men.)

Inviolable Eating Out Axiom #2: Read the room!

As the saying goes: You only have one chance to make a first impression so make the most of it.

And the way to make the best impression is in your initial ambulation past the front door. “Walk in like you own the place,” is how my father put it. Easier said than done for most. Most of us sense instinctively that we are out of our element and playing by other’s rules the second we cross the threshold. But there’s a way to exude confidence even in the face of this loss of sovereignty. All you have to do is look the part of someone who knows their forks.

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Have a serious look on your face, but not too grim. Your look should say, “I take my meals seriously,” not “I’m here to give you my cash in order to eat and you better be worthy of it.” The first advertises maturity and experience; the second, a chip on your shoulder. The first look is sober, but always about to break into a smile; the second tells the staff you’re going to be a pain in the ass.

Inviolable Eating Out Axiom #3: Don’t be a pain in the ass, even if the hostess stand has a higher IQ than the hostess.

Gird your loins, paisan, because your biggest challenge is now before you: navigating the hostess stand. Take heart, I say! For stouter men than you have been brought low by vapid machinations taking place behind these innocent-looking podiums, and everyone from captains of industry to A-list celebrities are no match for glazed stares and alphabet-challenged babes manning these stations. But there you are, hungry and anxious, out of your element, with your fate being determined by someone whose only qualifications are are a smile and looking good in a tight dress. If you’re lucky (and you will be about half the time) a manager will be within earshot, eager to please, and with a stronger grasp of spelling, hospitality and arithmetic.

As you approach the young foundling, you should attempt to make eye contact with one of the hostesses (although being removed from their natural habitat, i.e., staring at screen or smartphone) they will feel a small sense of panic in having to engage, face-to-face with a fellow human. This is the tensest of all situations, akin to confronting a startled animal in the wild. Both of you recognizing instantly the other might have them at a disadvantage. Neither wanting to make a false move. But like all big game hunters it is incumbent upon you to impose your will on the native fauna, and reassert the dominance of your species.

Inviolable Eating Out Axiom #4: Always be firm but polite.

You: “Hello, I’m John Smith and I believe I have a reservation for 4 at 6:30 tonight?’

Her (after a furtive glance your way followed by a furrowed brow searching the print in front of her like a Talmudic scholar parsing the Dead Sea Scrolls): “Smith? Could you spell that please?”

You: “S.M….”

Her: “Here it is….For how many, and did you you say 6:00?”

If you’re lucky, a management-level person will be on hand to speed up the process. With them the stakes are higher but also the rewards. Generally they will be more accustomed to encounters with the herds of wildebeests descending upon their territory, and have a vested interest in managing the wildlife with the deft touch of a sympathetic game warden. They also go a long way in signaling to the waitstaff whether you are someone to be taken seriously.  Thus, getting them on your side is imperative. (The only time waiters take hostesses seriously is when they’re trying to have sex with them.)

If the manager offers his/her hand, shake it gently but firmly. Thank them, get their name, and let them know you are there to enjoy yourself and expect them to do their part. This can be done with a nod, a smile, or even a “Boy, am I hungry!” If it’s my first time in a place, I let whoever is seating me know that I have been looking forward to eating there. If it’s my tenth time, I still let my optimism be known. Depending on the culture, you can bow, nod, or express your gratitude any number of ways to the person seating you. All of this takes place within 15-30 seconds at that podium and is way more important than you can imagine.

Inviolable Eating Out Axiom #5: Graciousness goes a long way.

But there is one more gauntlet to be run — the act of actually walking to your table — and this is what separates the punters from the pretenders. Obviously, you will be following someone into the room and to your table, but the last thing you should be doing is looking like you’re a follower…of anyone. Stand erect. Look casual but also like someone who’s been there before and is expecting to have a good time. Serious ebullience is what I call it. Look around. Not too fast. You belong there, remember. Survey the room with confidence. You are checking the layout, the customers, the lighting. You are willing to accept a good table, even a mediocre one, but not a bad one. If you have projected the right kind of self-assured bonhomie at the entrance, a manager wouldn’t think of sitting you next to the kitchen. (Counterintuitive insight: most restaurant pros and food writers don’t mind kitchen proximity. You get a better view of the food and service that way.)

Smile at some of the other diners if they look your way. Walk slowly, slower than the person seating you. They are working but you are not. Glance at the other tables. Are they enjoying themselves? Is the staff operating harmoniously or more frenzied than all-you-can-eat rib night at the Elk’s Lodge? Check out the food hitting the tables with a quick glance. Notice the bus boys — do they move with alacrity or like they have lead weights in their shoes? Is the management actually managing or simply looking good in a $1,000 suit?

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Some of this is hard to catch in a 20 second walk, but with practice, you get good at it.

The table (even a bar stool at a New Jersey diner) is the location from which yourself, and the act of taking one’s seat should be approached with the same, good-natured  authority one would assume at taking the helm of a racing yacht.

Inviolable Eating Out Axiom #6: Exude confidence by relinquishing control.

Think of it this way: Dining out is all about control and losing it. We sacrifice a good deal of control when we place ourselves in someone else’s hands and ask them to feed us. But we are paying them a fair amount to do so and the contract (both social and economic) is significant to both parties. The restaurant may reign over the food, but you have jurisdiction over your own happiness. Self-assurance signals the restaurant you are no piker; letting them do their jobs conveys respect that allows both of you to enjoy yourselves.

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Final Thoughts

My best guess is I’ve sauntered into at least 15,000 establishments (400/yr for over 40 years – do the math). I stroll in not like I own them, but keenly aware that I own my own space within theirs. And since I was a kid, I always go in expecting a good time.

One can’t be a restaurant obsessive like I am with approaching every doorway, every table and every menu with a childlike eagerness to see what wonders the kitchen will perform. Perhaps this came from my mother not being much of a cook, or maybe it stemmed from my father’s love of the theater of restaurants in all their syncopated, savory and sweet glory. He wasn’t much of a gourmand, but he knew how to get both attention and the best service a joint had to offer.

I want my next meal, no matter where it comes from, to be the best of its kind I’ve ever had, and I carry that unbridled enthusiasm with me into every threshold I’ve ever crossed. It helps to be in love with your subject, but even if you aren’t (and only eat out occasionally) you can ensure your own enjoyment by setting the stage from your first step. If I learned another thing from my dad it was that respect must be earned, but when it comes to restaurants it is something you can command.

MAKING AN ENTRANCE

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1. Dress for success

2. Walk and talk slowly. Spine erect. Shoulders back. Head held high.

3.. Survey the landscape.

4. Smile. A lot.

5. Say please and thank you. A lot.

6. Eye contact is key.

7. Act like you’ve been there before.

8. Acknowledge the bus boys, bar backs, and servers.

9. Act like you own the joint…at least when you’re walking in and to your table. Then act like you’re there to have a good time.

10. Two words: Ebullient solemnity.

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Las Vegas Book Festival – This Saturday

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I look great, don’t I? Especially when photographed at distance, through a mayonnaise jar.

Wait til you see me in person this Saturday at noon, at the Las Vegas Book Festival.

Thankfully, I’ll be on a stage, far away — just me, a microphone and three people (Lotus of Siam’s Penny Chutima, Rosa Ristorante chef/owner Rob Moore, and Eric Gladstone, the brains behind Vegas Unstripped) flapping our gums and chewing on the Las Vegas restaurant scene.

If you follow the Book Festival, you might’ve heard that super-chef and PBS star Hubert Keller was originally scheduled as a headliner, to be interviewed by me, about his life in food, his cookbooks, and his presence on the Las Vegas Strip restaurant scene. Unfortunately, his mother passed away last week (I can relate!), so three of our town’s major players have agreed to pinch hit and come together for a lively discussion about what it means to run a restaurant in the challenging culinary landscape of Las Vegas.

I’m just there as eye candy…

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…but I promise, there will precious little of the “how did you survive Covid?” b.s. that everyone is tired of these days.

Instead, we’ll be sharing secrets, settling scores, and giving you an insider’s perspective on:

Tik Tokkers: Should they all be shot?

How much red sauce is too much red sauce?

Trends that need to end.

How do you tell a bad Thai restaurant from the greatest one in America?

Has Martha jumped the shark?

Is there hope for Henderson?

Now that the Strip officially sucks, what’s next for the neighborhoods?

What wine goes best with a huge ego?

You get the picture.

Come one, come all. It’s free and I promise to sound reasonably sober. and look even better than I do in that little pic above.

Once the conversation ends, I promise you, the drinking will begin.

Downtown Las Vegas, at the Historic Fifth Street School (whose address in actually on Fourth Street – 401 S. 4th St. to be precise). This Saturday at 12:00 pm noon.

Audience participation will be welcomed….even from “influencers.”

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The Best Restaurant(s) in the World

Image(Restaurant Guy Savoy, Paris)
If you take it as a given that French restaurants are the best in the world, it only stands to reason that the best restaurant in the world will be in France.
Don’t get your panties in a bunch, I’m not here to dismiss the cuisines of entire countries — only to point out that, like sushi, Mexican street food, and pasta, the places where some food was invented are generally where you will find the highest elevation of the art. And Paris, in case you’ve forgotten, is where the modern restaurant was born in the latter half of the 18th Century.

Of course, the “best” of anything is a conceit and highly subjective. Measuring a “winner” or “the best” of anything — from wine to women — is a nice parlor game, but ultimately a waste of time unless there’s a stopwatch involved.

Whoever wins these accolades usually comes down to who got fawned over the most in a few influential publications — not who objectively gives diners the best food, drink, and experience. Anyone who thinks the several hundred voters who weigh in on these awards have actually eaten at the places they vote for as “the best restaurant in the world” (as opposed to forming their opinions based upon reading accounts of the few who have), has rocks in their head.

“Awards” of this sort are simply a way to give a deceptively false measuring stick to those who don’t know much about a subject. Subjectivity disguised as objectivity, all in the name of marketing to the wealthy with more money than taste. Same as with wine scores and Oscar nominations. The rich need these adjudications to convince themselves they’re doing the right thing, and “The “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” is there for them. As Hemingway puts it in “A Moveable Feast”:

The rich came led by the pilot fish. A year earlier they never would have come. There was no certainty then.

Back when El Bulli was garnering these awards (and I was voting on them), I heard from several colleagues who ate there, and what they described was more of a soul-deadening food slog (an edible marathon, if you will) than an actual pleasant experience.

A close friend (who also happens to be a chef) told me he stopped counting after 40(?) courses of (often) indecipherable eats, and was looking for the door two hours before the ordeal ended. (The trouble was, he said, there was literally no place to go — El Bulli being, literally, in the middle of nowhere.)

But Feran Adrià (like Thomas Keller before him and Grant Achatz and René Redzepi after), was anointed because, as in Hollywood, a few influential folks decided they were to be christened the au courant  bucket list-of-the-moment, and woe be to anyone in the hustings to question these lordly judgments. In the cosseted world of gastronomic beneficence (and the slaves to food fashion who follow them) this would be akin to a local seamstress suggesting Anna Wintour adjust her hemline.

Because of this nonsense, we’ve been saddled with the tyranny of the tasting menu for twenty-five years (Keller, Achatz, et al), disguised foods and tasteless foams (Adria), and edible vegetation (Redzepi) designed more for ground cover than actual eating.

As far as I can tell, neither molecular cuisine nor eating tree bark and live ants has caught on in  the real world — beyond trophy-hunting gastronauts, who swoon for the “next big thing” the way the fashion press promotes outlandish threads to grab attention.

Which brings us back to France. More particularly, French restaurants and what makes them so special. Let’s begin with food that looks like real food:

Image(Surf & Turf: Langoustines au Truffes La Tour D’Argent)

….not someone’s idea of playing with their food, or trying to turn it into something it isn’t. This cooking philosophy alone separates fine French cuisine from the pretenders, and gives it a confidence few restaurants in the world ever approach.

For one, there’s a naturalness to restaurants in France that comes from the French having invented the game. Unlike many who play for the “world’s best” stakes, nothing about them ever feels forced, least of all the cooking.  With four-hundred years to get it right, and French restaurants display everything from the napery to the stemware with an insouciant aplomb that is the gold standard.

You don’t have to instruct the French how to run a restaurant any more than you have to teach a fish how to swim. Or at least that’s how it appears when you’re in the midst of one of these unforgettable meals, because, to repeat, they’ve been perfecting things for four hundred years. Everything from the amuse bouche to the petit fours have been carefully honed to put you at ease with with being your best self at the table.

Image(Gruyère gougeres have been around longer than America)

Having been at this gig for a while, I’m perfectly aware that the death of fine French dining, and intensive care service accompanying it, has been announced about every third year for the past thirty.

I’m not buying any of it. When you go to France (be it Paris or out in the provinces), the food is just as glorified, the service rituals just as precise, and the pomp and circumstance just as beautifully choreographed as it was fifty years ago. The fact that younger diners/writers see this form of civilized dining as a hidebound, time-warp does not detract from its prominence in the country that invented it.

Whether you’re in Tokyo or Copenhagen, the style and performative aspects of big deal meals still takes their cues from the French. Only elaborate Mandarin banquets or the hyper-seasonality of a kaiseki dinner  match the formality and structure of haute cuisine.

These forms of highly stylized dining follow a path straight up the food chain. There are rules and they are there for a reason, usually having to do with how you will taste and digest what is placed before you. Light before heavy; raw before cooked; simple before complex — you get the picture
You usually begin with something fished directly from the sea. Oysters and other shellfish are a natural match, as is a shrimp cocktail. (A good old-fashioned American steakhouse has more in common, with high falutin’ French than people realize.)  Their natural salinity stimulates the appetite without weighing you down.
Man’s evolution into a more cultivated forms of eating is represented by bread, as is the domestication of animals by the butter slathered upon it. (If you want to stretch the symbolism even further, look at olive oil and the fermentation of wine and beer as representing mankind’s earliest bending of agriculture to his edible wants and needs.)
Image(Early man struggled with the whole pommes soufflé-thing)
From there things get more elaborate, depending on whether you want to go the seafood, wild game, or domesticated fowl route. Vegetables get their intermezzo by using salad greens as a scrub for the stomach to help digest everything that precedes them. (The French think eating a salad at the start of a meal is stupid, and it is.) You finish of course with cheese (“milk’s leap toward immortality” – Clifton Fadiman), and then with the most refined of all foods: sugar and flour and all the wonderful things that can be done with them. A great French meal is thus every bit the homage to nature as Japanese kaiseki, albeit with a lot more wine and creme brûlée.
As I’ve written before, French food is about the extraction and intensification of flavor. Unlike Italians and Japanese, a French cook looks at an ingredient (be it asparagus, seafood, or meat) and asks himself: “Self, how can I make this thing taste more like itself.” All the simmering, searing, pressing, and sieving in a French kitchen is as far a cry from leaving nature well enough alone as an opera is from the warble of a songbird.

With this in mind, we set our sights on two iconic Parisian restaurants: one, as old-fashioned as you can get, and the other a more modern take on the cuisine, by one of its most celebrated chefs. Together, they represent the apotheosis of the restaurant arts. They also signify why, no matter what some critics say, the French still rule the roost. Blessedly, there is no chance of encountering Finnish reindeer moss at either of them.

LA TOUR D’ARGENT

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If experience is any measure of perfection, then The Tower of Money should win “best restaurant in the world” every year, because no one has been serving food this fine, for this long, in this grand a setting.

A restaurant in one form or another has been going on at this location since before the Three Musketeers were swashing their buckles. What began as an elegant inn near the wine docks of Paris in 1582 soon enough was playing host to everyone from royalty to Cardinal Richelieu. It is claimed that the use of the fork in France began in the late 1500s at an early incarnation of “The Tower of Silver”, with Henry IV adopting the utensil to keep his cuffs clean.

Apocryphal or not,  what is certainly true is that Good King Hank (1553-1610) bestowed upon the La Tour its crest which still symbolizes it today:

History, of course, provides the foundation, and the setting continues to provides a “wow” factor unmatched by all but a handful of restaurants in the world. No place but here can you dine with the ghosts of Louis XIV, Winston Churchill and Sarah Bernhardt, all while seeming to float above Paris on this open door to the city’s past — all of it available to anyone with the argent to book a table.
But the proof is in the cooking — that has been, on our last two visits, as awesome as the view. It’s no secret that the glory had started to fade twenty years ago, and that Michelin — the arbiter of all things important in the French food world — had taken notice, and not in a good way.
A reboot of sorts was announced over five years ago, and by the time we visited in 2019, the kitchen was performing at a Michelin two-star level at the very least. Independent of the view, the service, and the iconic wine program, the cooking (and presentation) was well-nigh perfect. It was all you want from this cuisine: focused, intense flavors put together with impeccable technique and an almost scientific attention to detail.
When we returned this past winter, things seemed be have gotten even better. This time we showed up with a party of six. It was a busy lunch, filled with local gourmets and some obvious big business types, but also a smattering of tourists who (like us) had to keep picking their jaws up off the table as spectacle of Paris and its finest French food was spread before them.
I have never been to La Tour at night, but for my money, lunch is the way to go. The food is unchanged (lunch specials are offered, but you can order off the dinner menu and we did), and the sight of the Seine River stretching beneath you and Notre Dame and the Ile de la Cite in the distance are worth the admission all by themselves.
I suppose the ideal time to dine here would be arranging for a table at dusk, so you could see the lights of Paris come alive in all their blazing glory. But as I’ve argued before, lunch has always been the ticket for us when we want to eat and drink ourselves silly in a fine French restaurant.
There’s nothing silly, of course, about the food. This is serious stuff, but there’s nothing stuffy about it, despite its pedigree — French service having retired the snootiness thing decades ago. Meaning: if you show up and are well-behaved, they are friendly to a fault.
(Canard au sang with a side of burns, coming right up)
Credit for that has to lie with owner André Terrail, the third generation of the family to be at the helm. (The Terrails have owned the restaurant since 1911.) Since taking over a few years before his father Claude’s death in ‘o6, Terrail has kept all the historical provenance of his venerated birthright intact — upgrading the cuisine while still managing to keep the whole operation true to its roots. No easy feat that. We don’t know what the problems were twenty years ago, but on our last two visits, we didn’t see any missteps, either on the plate or in the service. And what appeared before us was every bit as stunning as any Michelin 3-starr meal we’ve had…in Paris or elsewhere.
You take good bread for granted in Paris, but even by those lofty standards, this small baguette was a stunner:

Image(Face it: you knead this)

Perfect in every respect: a twisted baguette of indelible yeastiness — perfumed with evidence of deep fermentation — the outer crunch giving way to ivory-pale, naturally sweet dough within that  fought back with just the perfect amount of chew. It (and the butter) were show-stoppers in their own right, and for a brief minute, they competed with the view for our attention. We could’ve eaten four of them (and they were offered throughout the meal), but resisted temptation in light of the feast that lay ahead.

Soon thereafter, these scoops of truffle-studded foie gras appeared, deserving of another ovation:

Image(Home cooking this is not)

From there on, the hits just kept on coming: a classic quenelles de brochet (good luck finding them anywhere but France these days), Then, a slim, firm rectangle of turbot in a syrupy beurre blanc, or the more elaborate sole Cardinale:

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….followed by a cheese cart commensurate with this country’s reputation.

The star of the show has been, since the 1890s, the world-famous pressed duck (Caneton Challandais) — served in two courses, the first of which (below) had the deepest-colored Bèarnaise we’ve ever seen; the second helping bathed in the richest, midnight-brown, duck blood-wine blanket imaginable. Neither sauce did anything to mitigate the richness of the fowl, which is, of course, gilding the lily and the whole point.

Image(You can never be too rich or have too much Béarnaise)

We could go on and on about how fabulous our meal was, but our raves would only serve to make you ravenous for something you cannot have, not for the next ten months, anyway.

Yes, the bad news is the restaurant will be closing today, April 30, 2022 for almost a year — until February 2023 — for renovations. This saddens us, but not too much, since we don’t have plans to return until about that time next year. In the meantime, the entry foyer probably could use some sprucing up (since it looks like it hasn’t been touched since 1953), and we have confidence Terrail won’t monkey with the sixth floor view, or this skinny little pamphlet he keeps on hand for the casual wine drinker:

Image(Not found: 2-Buck Chuck)

If the measure of a great restaurant is how much it makes you want to return, then La Tour D’Argent has ruled the roost for two hundred years. (Only a masochist ever left El Bulli saying to himself, “I sure can’t wait to get back here!”) Some things never go out of style and La Tour is one of them. We expect it to stay that way for another century.

À Bientôt!

RESTAURANT GUY SAVOY

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If La Tour represents the old guard of Parisian dining at its finest, then Guy Savoy — both the man and his restaurant — provides the connective tissue between haute cuisine’s past, present, and a future where new chefs will take up this mantle and teach the world what elegant dining is about.

The Adam Platts of the world may decry the “irrelevance” of the “old gourmet model”, but I stand with Steve Cuozzo in maintaining that the call for luxury and refinement in how we eat (admittedly at rarefied levels of expense), will never go completely out of fashion. Quoting our friend Alan Richman, Cuozzo writes:

As critic Alan Richman eloquently expressed it in the Robb Report a few years ago, fine dining is more than “a demonstration of wealth and privilege . . . It is an expression of culture, the most enlightened and elegant form of nourishment ever devised. Without it we will slowly regress into the dining habits of cave people, squatting before a campfire, gnawing on the haunch of a bar.”

All I can say to the Adam Platts of the world (and younger food writers who echo the same sentiments) is: If you think “the old gourmet model” is dead or dying, plan a trip to France, where formal restaurants are poised to come roaring back, indeed if they haven’t already done so.

Put another way: get your goddamned head out of that bowl of ramen or whatever Nigerian/Uzbekistani food truck you’re fond of these days and wake up and smell the Sauvignon Blanc.

Or just go to Guy Savoy.

(Savoy at his stoves)

If the world’s best restaurant can’t change your mind, nothing will. Before you accuse me of bandwagon-ing, let me remind you that I’ve been singing the praises of Savoy’s cuisine since 2006, and have even gone so far as to travel between Vegas and Paris to compare his American outpost with the original. Back then (2009), the flagship got the nod, but not by much.

Since its move to the Monnaie de Paris (the old Parisian Mint) in 2015, Savoy’s cuisine and reputation have attained a new level of preeminence (which is all the more incredible when you consider he has held three Michelin stars since 1980).

With mentors like Joël Robuchon and Paul Bocuse having departed to that great stock pot in the sky, and Alain Ducasse having spread himself thinner than a sheet of mille-feuille, Savoy now rules the French gastronomic firmament as a revered elder statesman. The difference being that he and his restaurants haven’t rested on their laurels, but are every bit as harmonious with the times as they were thirty years ago. To eat at Guy Savoy overlooking the banks of the Seine from a former bank window, is to experience the best French cooking from the best French chefs performing at the top of their game. There is something both elemental and exciting about his cooking that keeps it as current as he was as the new kid on the Michelin block back in the 80s.

Dining in the dead of winter can have its challenges. Greenery is months  away, so chefs go all-in on all things rooted in the soil. The good news is black truffles are in abundance; the bad news is you better like beets.

The great news is: in the hands of Savoy and his cooks, even jellied beets achieve an elegance unheard of from this usually humble taproot:

Image(Savoy heard we hated beets, so he tried to hide them from us)

As mentioned earlier, a French chef respects an ingredient by looking at it as a blank canvas to be improved upon. Look no further than this beet hash (Truffes et oefus de caille, la terre autour) lying beneath a quail egg and a shower of tuber melanosporum, both shaved and minced:

Image(Beet-i-ful)

Neither of these would I choose for my last meal on earth. Both gave me new respect for how the French can turn the prosaic into the ethereal –food transcending itself into something beautiful.

Which, of course, is what Savoy did with the lowly artichoke so many years ago, when he combined it with Parmesan cheese and black truffles and turned it into the world’s most famous soup.

There’s no escaping this soup at Guy Savoy, nor should you want to. Regardless of season, it encapsulates everything about the Savoy oeuvre: penetrating flavor from a surprisingly light dish, by turns both classic and contemporary:

Image(Nobody knows the truffles I’ve seen)

We may have come for the truffles, but we stayed for the filet of veal en croute (below), once again lined with, you guessed it, more black truffles.

Image(Filet de veau et truffes cuits en croûte is French for: the most delicious meat dish in the history of the world)

From there we progressed through a salad of roasted potatoes and truffles, a bouillon of truffles served like coffee in a French press, then a melted cheese fondue over a whole truffle:

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…and even something that looked like a huge black truffle but which, upon being nudged with a fork, revealed itself to be a chocolate mousse. All of it served by a staff that looked like teenagers and acted like twenty-year veterans.

Suffice it to say the wine pairings were as outstanding as the food, all of it meshing into a seamless meld of appetite and pleasure — the pinnacle of epicurean bliss — high amplitude cooking where every element converges into a single gestalt.

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We then went nuts with multiple desserts, including a clafoutis (above) and the petit fours carte (like we always do), and rolled away thinking we wouldn’t be eating again for two days. This being Paris, we were at it again later that night, taking down some steak frites at Willi’s Wine Bar

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I write these words not to convince you that Guy Savoy is the greatest restaurant in the world, or even that such a thing exists, but rather to persuade you of the transcendent gustatory experiences you can have at places like it. Until I’ve been to every restaurant in the world, I won’t be able to proclaim one of them “the best.” Even then, the best would only be what best fit my mood, my likes and my expectations at the very moment I was there.

Adam Platt was right about one thing: “the best restaurant in the world” doesn’t have to be fancy. The best restaurant in the world can be something as simple as a plat du jour of boeuf bourguignon , studded with lardons and button mushrooms in a run-down bistro smelling of wine sauces and culinary history. It can be at a tiny trattoria on the Amalfi Coast or a local diner where everyone knows your name, or that little joint where you first discovered a dish, a wine, or someone to love. But your favorite restaurant, no matter where or what it is, owes an homage to the place where it all started.

Emile Zola’s “The Belly of Paris” describes the markets of Les Halles as “…some huge central organ pumping blood into every vein of the city.” Those markets may be gone, but their soul lives on in the form of Parisian restaurants, which remain, one hundred a fifty years later, its beating heart. To eat in the great restaurants of Paris is to be inside the lifeblood of a great city, communing with something far bigger than yourself. To be in them is to be at the epicenter of the culinary universe and the evolution of human gastronomy — where the sights and smells of the food, and the way it is served, reflect the entire history of modern dining.