L'Ecole 2008-2009

[Chris Amirault]

Frittata with Merguez sausage: say more.

[Fat Guy]

The menu description is "Frittata - Merguez, Pepper and Onion." It's basically an open-faced omelette with Merguez sausage, peppers and onions on top. Depending on how strict you are about the definition of frittata, you might argue that it's not a frittata. I'm pretty sure they make the Merguez sausage, but I'd have to double check.

[Fat Guy]

I'd need a source of real statistics to prove it, but it seems to me that L'Ecole is getting more popular. On this late-July Thursday, the lunch sitting was completely packed. Similarly dense crowds were on display my last couple of brunch visits, as well as during my last dinner visit. Perhaps the economic downturn has revealed L'Ecole as the value that it is.

While the $24.07 Restaurant Week lunch specials at some restaurants are a few dollars less than the year-round $28 lunch at L'Ecole, the lunch value at L'Ecole is qualitatively and quantitatively of a higher order than anything I've seen anywhere during Restaurant Week. Not that these prices mean much to me, given that my average cost per meal at L'Ecole is something like three dollars.

As the menu changes almost completely every six weeks and I haven't been in a few weeks, this was my first exposure to the current menu. So far it's a good one.

For appetizers we tried: Cavatelli with rock shrimp, fava beans and ricotta salata, which could have been the whole lunch. Although it's a French restaurant at the French Culinary Institute, the pasta items I've tried have all been at the top of the form. This is surely the influence of the Italian Culinary Academy, which is the other, less-well-known program that shares the facility (the French Culinary Institute and Italian Culinary Academy are the two major components of the International Culinary Center). Also country pate with foie gras and truffles, which plays to the biggest strength of the L'Ecole kitchen: classic French stuff done better than the few remaining classic French restaurants do it. By far the weirdest appetizer of the day (or maybe the month or year) was "Arctic char tartare with walnuts, Stilton and Yorkshire pudding." It sounded like such an odd choice of ingredients -- and not necessarily in a good way -- it was just begging to be tried. I had trouble even envisioning what was going to come. Walnuts and blue cheese crumbled on top of raw char? To my surprise, the walnuts and Stilton are mixed right in with the fish and the mixture is plated up in a ring mold. The flavors don't clash as I suspected they might. I have to go back and re-taste that dish because I haven't decided whether I love it or hate it. On the side is a tasty, superfluous popover.

Entrees: braised marlin with chorizo, clams, kale and saffron potatoes forced me to readjust my feelings about marlin. I now see that it can be a delicious fish when handled properly. All the other components of the dish tied together well with the swordfish-like meatiness of the marlin. A very strong dish. The other two seafood dishes were also successful: salmon with fennel confit, pickled ramps and mussel sauce (I've found that overall the salmon dishes at L'Ecole are well worth ordering); and seared black bass with basil risotto cake, marinated confetti tomatoes and anchovy dressing. The only misstep in the entrees was the gummy basil risotto cake, which continues the restaurant's pattern of avoidable rice items (the paella that accompanied another dish a while back was also not worthy).

Of the desserts I most enjoyed the passion fruit baked Alaska. I so wish the fire codes still allowed for flaming desserts. It's just not the same when they do it behind closed doors in the kitchen. But it's a delicious dessert.

I'll be heading back next week to try more stuff.

[gastrodamus]

I'd need a source of real statistics to prove it, but it seems to me that L'Ecole is getting more popular. On this late-July Thursday, the lunch sitting was completely packed. Similarly dense crowds were on display my last couple of brunch visits, as well as during my last dinner visit. Perhaps the economic downturn has revealed L'Ecole as the value that it is.

←

though far from real stats, the dining room was full during lunch on march of 2008. i remember calling a few days in advance to reserve a table for 6. second seating for dinner for 4 wasn't exactly easy to book last summer either but i think it was for a saturday.

completely agree with your take on the pate w/foie and truffles. i wish they'd offer a degustation de charcuterie of sorts.

i'm amazed by how perfectly cooked the protein is at l'ecole (can't imagine how many students must have been reduced to tears for overcooking protein). the lamb chop i ordered is easily in my top 3.

[Fat Guy]

Meats and fish at L'Ecole are, in my experience, cooked more accurately and reliably than in all but the very top professional restaurants. Indeed, my expectation before ever dining at L'Ecole would have been that there would be a lot of student mistakes in the food. But in general I see far fewer cooking errors from the student cooks at L'Ecole than I do out in the normal restaurant world. The one thing that does happen more often at L'Ecole than in restaurants at large is that production of food slows way down when the kitchen is stressed. It appears they always choose delay over error, which is a good thing and runs counter to how restaurants that need to make money do it. Not that there were any timing issues yesterday. It's just a general observation prompted by gastrodamus's comments above.

Yesterday at lunch for appetizers my group tried the cavatelli (delicious again, especially for fans of butter), the terrine (correct as all L'Ecole charcuterie items are) and the red beet and mustard seed terrine with sweet onion slaw and spicy baby greens (this appeared on another menu once and I was equally uninterested in the dish, which to me represents a lot of work to deconstruct and reconstruct something that tastes like a beet).

Two of the entrees we tried were home runs and illustrated the accurate cooking of proteins mentioned above by gastrodamus. Seared duck breast and braised leg with fingerling potatoes and sour cherry sauce was the best, most tender piece of duck I remember having in ages, the medium-rare breast sliced thin and fanned our around the braised leg. The other strong entree was pan-roasted lamb loin with goat cheese polenta, asparagus, figs and lamb jus. In between L'Ecole and a Ducasse restaurant you're not likely to find jus this good, and the lamb was treated with the same care in cooking as the duck.

Both of those dishes were profoundly retro. You just don't see duck with sour-cherry sauce much these days, and the platings were right out of the pre-modern era. But I'd put these dishes up against any contemporary interpretation of the same ingredients, and the old-school dishes would surely win.

The entree I wasn't crazy about was veal paillard with haricot verts, wild mushrooms and spinach-parmesan purée. This was along the lines of what used to be called spa cuisine. I saw several orders go out and plenty of customers seemed thrilled with the dish, so it certainly has a place on the menu, but to me the naked veal cutlet is uninteresting.

I had the passion-fruit baked Alaska again and think it may be the best dessert I've had at L'Ecole. The other desserts were solid, though I think the old-school chocolate tart is one item that doesn't hold up against more contemporary iterations of the same concept. Chocolate tarts, tortes, mini cakes, et al., have gotten a lot better in the past couple of decades.

After lunch I took my guests around the school for a tour. We ran into Nils Noren, Dave Arnold and a chef from Sushi Zen conducting an experiment concerning the best way to kill a fish so as to preserve its flavor. Luckily this occurred after lunch and not before.

[Fat Guy]

Brunch at L'Ecole on Sunday revealed one new treasure I hadn't sampled before. The kitchen sent out the croque-monsieur. (I say "sent out" because we didn't order it, not because it was free. I mean, it was free, but so was the rest of the meal, so being free isn't anything unique to that dish.) The croque-monsieur at L'Ecole is the upscale realization of this snack. It's not just a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich. It's an open-face composition, on FCI's superior bread, consisting of really good ham (and a lot of it), sitting atop a gooey Mornay sauce (either that or a layer of Bechamel topped with a layer of cheese -- I didn't break it down enough to ascertain that). It's also available with an egg, aka croque-madame, with no upcharge for the egg.

One thing I'm starting to notice is that the brunch menu, unlike the lunch and dinner menus, doesn't seem to change at all. I'm not sure if there's going to be a rotation of brunch items or if that menu is locked in permanently.

Separately, today I stopped in with a friend for a cocktail and had the Dave Arnold-designed "cold buttered rum." This is a mixture of rum and a white gooey substance that Dave Arnold manufactures up in the culinary-technology lab. I'm not sure exactly how it is engineered but it does indeed taste like a cold facsimile of hot buttered rum. Go figure. I need to bring some cocktail-savvy people to the bar at L'Ecole for a tasting to get a better read on this, but to me the cocktail program there is high-achieving, as are the bartenders especially a fellow named Gene (sp.?).

[Fat Guy]

Very rewarding early dinner at L'Ecole last night.

The way the L'Ecole dinner seatings work is that if you start before 7pm you're in the first sitting and you get a four-course meal (starter, main, salad and dessert), whereas if you start after 8pm you get a five-course meal (starter, fish, meat, salad and dessert). They don't take reservations between 7 and 8pm. Two different crews of students prepare the meals for the first and second sittings. The second sitting crew are, I gather, the evening students who start their day at 5:45pm -- so they need that time to prep.

Anyway, this was my first first-sitting dinner. It didn't make a difference quality-wise. There was one less course, though we added a cheese course so it was still quite a large meal. Actually it would have been a large meal even without the cheese course. The four- and five-course dinners each cost the same $42, so if you're paying full price the five-course is a better value assuming you have the capacity to eat and enjoy that much food. But if you have a 100% discount, it doesn't really matter.

Appetizers sampled: Grilled smoked salmon, a piece of salmon that still maintains a lot of its fresh flavors and textures -- I assume it's lightly smoked that day, not smoked to preserve -- with a hard-cooked quail egg, yellow beets and orange-curry vinaigrette. I thought this was the most competitive of the three appetizers we tried -- competitive as in something you'd expect to see in an upscale restaurant with two or three New York Times stars (setting aside that the star ratings are, at the moment, somewhat incoherent). Also "sauteed" sweetbreads (fried seems more like it, but I wasn't there watching the preparation) with bacon, crispy shallots, Pommery mustard sauce and apple-cucumber salad. A good dish, and while the three little sweetbreads don't look like much they are quite filling. And the always-correct charcuterie assortment, last night with pate, fromage de tete and duck rillette.

Mains: "sauteed" (here I'd say more like pan-seared) sea scallops -- great big scallops of very high quality, cooked to medium-rare -- with oyster mushrooms, a carrot-curry sauce and some sauteed greens. The spa-cuisine-type of dish last night was steamed steelhead trout (it was either really steamed or, more likely, cooked in the C-Vap oven) with braised leeks, celeriac-Asian pear puree and maitake mushrooms. An excellent piece of fish if you're looking for a minimalist, lowfat dish. And the best dish, in my opinion: a modern interpretation of duck a l'orange, roasted and served with creamed kale (with little pieces of duck confit mixed in), mustard and lime leaves and a sweet-and-sour orange sauce, with a piece of potato terrine on the side. Every duck dish I've had at L'Ecole has featured excellent, well-prepared duck. This one was noteworthy for the big, thick chunks of breast meat cooked medium-rare, slowly and lovingly so a lot of the fat layer under the skin had rendered out.

The cheeses were three from New York State but I didn't note them all. The best was the Old Chatham blue, though. For wine throughout the meal we nursed a bottle of Dr. Konstantin Frank's Rkatsiteli from the Finger Lakes (NY).

I had creme brulee for dessert -- textbook -- and didn't try the other desserts on the table.