marcus

Les Fontaines used to be the definitive Paris find, excellent food with no decor, lots of locals, but had been discovered as well. Even the celeri remoulade was excellent, which is to me almost inconceivable. Unfortunately ? Lacipiere, who did start out as a butcher, sold the restaurant, probably 5 years ago now, and while it remains slightly above average, it is no longer worth seeking out. Lacipiere's son is the chef owner of Au Bon Accueil, a more upscale and somewhat overrated bistro near the Eiffel Tower. My favorite for a Sunday dinner is L'Ardoise in the first on a side street near the Place Vendome. It is more like a diner than a restaurant, the service is brusque and the turnover rapid, but the prices are low, the chef brings out the succulence of the basic raw materials, particularly veal, and the flavor intensity can be startling.

cabrales, I regret my asides, because the real purpose of my post was to discuss menu vs carte. However, I do stand by my comments and I never made any reference to 6 stars and I don't know why you brought it up. Obviously a restaurant whose staff moves seasonally from one building to another and where both are never open simultaneously is a single restaurant I don't see how this reflects on the chef one way or the other. I'm not sure why you challenge my comment about the professional food press as I would expect you to be indifferent on this subject. After all, someone who downgrages Ducasse, Bras and Veyrat and doesn't like Gagnaire either, is clearly an individual thinker. lizziee, I tried to distinguish between menus, tasting menus and carte. I believe that a number of the restaurants that you name have menus, but not tasting menus.

A few more comments on menu vs carte. I should have made clear that I was referring to conventional menus and not tasting menus which is a whole other subject. There are many variations, but in many cases the menu is a selection of dishes from the carte with 1-4 selections per course, most typically 2. These are full sized portions. In return for selecting from the menu and eating a full meal, the diner receives a substantial discount over the cost of the meal had it been ordered a la carte. The menu may offer a selection of signature dishes or more recent dishes, but seldom the most recent or the most elaborate. The advantage to the restaurant is that the diner orders more food and the restaurant can do better planning in terms of acquiring food stuffs, pre-preparation and cooking processes, because it knows that a significantly larger number of specific dishes will be ordered. My contention is that what the diner receives on the plate does not represent the ultimate capability of the restaurant. Tasting menus, which I only very seldom order, are a large number of small portions of dishes, often not on the carte, intended to showcase the chef's creativity. I have two problems with tasting menus: It provides too much input and doesn't leave me with clear impressions and recollections and the need to produce so many elaborate dishes in small quantities requires a maximum in pre-planning and corner cutting such that the results are often not that good. Many restaurants, including 3 star restaurants, do not offer tasting menus. However, many will let you construct your own tasting menu from the carte by ordering half portions, for example ADPA and Boyer. I think that this is a superior approach for those wanting to order a larger number of dishes or just to eat less. There are always exceptions. As Cabrales points out, the menu of choice at Michel Bras is the tasting menu. This contains his latest creations and is ordered by the majority of diners. He also offers an Auvergnat menu with the famous aligote and beef d'aubrac and an inexpensive rustic menu at lunch with aligote and sausage. The carte here is just an afterthought intended only for those who don't want to order a full meal. A pointer, if you order the tasting menu and ask for a taste of the aligote, they will bring you a pot at no charge, at least that was my experience. I do wonder whether anyone else has observed that since he moved from the cheese cellar in town to his palace on the hillside, that there has been a very slight decline in the complexity and wondrousness of his dishes. I would attribute this to his new dining room seating at least twice as many diners, if not more. With regard to Veyrat, unfortunately I've never been there. Veyrat appears at this time to be the professional food writers consensus single best chef in France and I would very much like to go there, but it has been too far out of the way on my recent visits.

The Auberge de L'ill has always been one of my favorite restaurants since first eating there in 1967 shortly after it received its 3d star. This was prior to several remodelings, the dining room was quite simple and all of the servers were women. I remember clearly the terrine de foie gras, the salmon souffle (a fish course not an appetizer), the cannard sauvage au sang and the poire sidi-brahim for desert. It was the finest meal that I had ever eaten at the time. The salmon souffle had won the award for best new dish created in France a year or two prior. The restaurant has moved on since then, but the dish remains on the menu not because the Haeberlins really want to serve it, but because of the demands of old customers such as myself. I had it again the last time that I visited the restaurant about 3 years ago and it was just as I remembered it which was exactly what I wanted. Admittedly this is not any longer a modern dish and I can understand that in a context free evaluation it might not get a top score, but I would maintain that such a context free approach is not really appropriate in this case. The salmon souffle along with the salmon a L'oseilles from the Troisgros and the loup en croute and the poulet de bresse en vessie from Paul Bocuse and the fillet of sole Ferdinand Point, which I've only tasted in replica, are the seminal dishes of post war French cooking, and although there have been evolutions of style since, there have been very few new examples of such giants. I would suggest that someone wishing to comparatively evaluate this restaurant based on a single lunch should order from the newer dishes. The veal with morels is also very much an older signature dish, although not one of the originals, and also old fashioned. With regard to the off-tasting foie gras, this should definitely have been brought to the attention of the staff. Auberge de L'ille produces one of the very best if not the best goose foie gras and one should know whether there was really a problem or whether this is a question of individual palette. If this was judged to be up to normal standard, then I would wonder. I know that this is controversial, but I have come to believe after long experience that one obtains the best of most restaurants in France by ordering from the carte not the menu. I have observed that the French do this to a much greater extent than visitors. This is true not only in restaurants like Michel Guerard where the dishes are different and clearly more elaborate, but also in restaurants like the Auberge de L'Ill and many others where the meny is a selection from the carte. The dishes on the carte are typically 60%+ more than on the menu and there are a number of reasons. Most significantly, knowing that they will sell more instances of a dish from the menu allows for advance preparation and establishing mini-assembly line processes which take away from the ultimate perfection of the dish. One does need to make sure that the dishes that one orders from the carte are not ones selected for that day's meniu.