La Crémaillère

[ahr]

We drove cautiously along the country back road, simultaneously enjoying the blazing autumnal foliage while squinting up each drive for some sign of a restaurant. Suddenly we saw it, a hanging sign saying “La Crémaillère” at the entrance to a small gravel lot. We walked up to a sprawling old white clapboard farmhouse – circa 1750, we later learned – and entered the country outpost of La Caravelle. The interior was at once rustic and elegant, early American and country French, immediately home.

Dinner was both up-to-date and near-perfect: I ate onion soup, escargot, duckling bigarade, a small salad with sauce vinaigrette, home-made sorbet, a freshly baked fruit tart (with crust a tad soggy, if truth be told), and dark, rich coffee. We drank a spicy Gewürztraminer and a mid-level Bordeaux, and stumbled back to the car sated and happy. The cost of the meal for four, including wine, tax, and tip was $100.

That was my first contact with serious French restauration, nearly thirty years ago. Barely out of my teens and developing an interest in life’s finer things, I headed north with three older buddies to try the first restaurant reviewed in Seymour Britchky’s new Restaurant Reporter: La Crémaillère in beautiful Bedford, New York. Mr. Britchky wrote, “La Crémaillère is unquestionably one of the finest eating places in the country, and compares well with the best restaurants in France.”

Fast-forward to 2002: Thinning, graying hair, slightly thickening waistline, world-weary ennui, once again Autumn. Inspired by Lizziee’s tour de France but shy a transoceanic ticket, I thought I’d revisit Westchester County and my own past by way of lunch. Unlike myself, La Crémaillère appeared little changed. While in no way institutional, the place had the aura of beloved old institution. Everything felt just as I expected, and the food was unadventurous but delicious.

We began with glasses of Champagne -- not Krug, but OK -- while tearing into warm, crusty bread. The butter (uncultured American butter, Nina and Jaybee) was served too cold, but, to be fair, we arrived slightly before noon, the first of only three lunch parties that day. The prix fixe offered a choice of soup or appetizer, an entrée, and a dessert for a reasonable $33. Having come this far, we chose both soup and appetizer for a supplemental charge.

I didn’t steal a menu, so here’s lunch from memory, related out of deference to FG with minimal adjectival interference:

• Hot vichysoisse. (We ordered billi-bi as well, but minor confusion resultied in double vichysoisses.)
  

• A plate of two terrines, liver mousse, cornichons, coleslaw, (sorry, fresh cabbage salad), radicchio, endive, and grainy mustard, sided by warm toast.
  

• A riff on the usual snails with garlic, shallots, parsley, butter, i.e., those very ingredients, including whole roasted garlic cloves, in a creamy risotto.
  

• Crisply roasted half chicken (great skin!) in a slightly sweet reduction with a hint of black truffle, served with roasted tiny potatoes (tangy from goose/duck/chicken fat?), mushrooms, caramelized onions, and peas.
  

• Leg of baby lamb, rare as requested though slightly too cool, in a pan sauce, served with spinach and a ragout of white beans, artichokes, olives, and probably tomato, atop some very potato-y potato puree.
  

• Molten-center chocolate cake with white mint chocolate-chip ice cream. The plate was decorated with a leaf design, of translucent raspberry sauce outlined in chocolate, that looked like edible stained glass.
  

• An ice cream sampler, of chocolate almond, pistachio, and black cherry, on a meringue-cookie platform in a pool of warm chocolate-mocha sauce. Each ice cream was exemplary of its kind. Both desserts were decorated with crisp wafers of different shapes.
  

• Decaffeinated coffee, maybe even French-press coffee, but hey, two cups probably won’t kill me.
  

A half-bottle of 1997 Bouchard Gevrey-Chambertin from an extensive list went beautifully with our entrées.

All plates were nicely arranged, with the meats, including the chicken, sliced and carefully reassembled. Aside from the bit about the soup, service from the captain, waiter, and bus staff was impeccable. Those ice creams are available in pint containers labeled Crème Crémaillère, probably even in a gourmet shop near you. The sonority of “Crème Crémaillère” notwithstanding, a crémaillère is not a dairy ("creamery"), but rather the rack, or hook, from which a kettle once hung in the hearth. Watch those accents!

For the record, recent kitchen graduates are said to include David Burke and Waldy Malouf; under William Savarese, according to John Mariani in the Wine Spectator, the dinner “menu has become comfortably modern, incorporating new ingredients into fresh ideas thoroughly based on sound French principles.” One aspect of this modernization is apparently that the menu, at least at lunch, is now in English; perhaps dinner is more formal, or perhaps the restaurant maintains parallel sets and we just had that tourist look about us.

As we left, a magazine photographer commandeered the front room for a dessert shoot. My lunch was but a single data point, but I’d gladly return.

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If anyone is interested, I’ll be willing to post further excerpts from Britchky’s 1971 review. It beautifully illustrates how our concept of “cuisine” may have changed, but the essence of cooking – and restaurant reviewing – really has not.

[Toby]

Your meal sounded lovely. I'd like to read more excerpts from Britchky’s review if you could post them.

[Rachel Perlow]

Crisply roasted half chicken (great skin!) in a slightly sweet reduction with a hint of black truffle, served with roasted tiny potatoes (tangy from goose/duck/chicken fat?), mushrooms, caramelized onions, and peas.

I have a feeling Cabrales will be heading here soon!

[Robert Schonfeld]

I'm not clear. Are we for or against adjectival interference and why?

[Jinmyo]

A very nice account. Thank you, ahr.

[ahr]

Rachel, this is probably not a Cabrales-style restaurant, roast chicken or no.

Robert, in an earlier thread, FG said that adjectives were the opiate of the lazy food writer (not his exact words). I'm certainly lazy, and I'm no food writer, but out of respect I thought that I'd try at least to restrain myself.

[Suzanne F]

Yes, thank you. Well done.

In the past, Fairway carried their ice cream. If they still do, RUN, do not walk, to get some. Even if the name doesn't mean "creamery" you could hardly find more creamer-y ice cream anywhere! Yummmmmmm.

[Robert Schonfeld]

Robert, in an earlier thread, FG said that adjectives were the opiate of the lazy food writer (not his exact words).

That's interesting. Can anyone supply a link to that thread?

[ahr]

Scroll through the first page of Overused restaurant reviewer words & metaphors.

[Double 0]

Yes, thank you.  Well done.

In the past, Fairway carried their ice cream.  If they still do, RUN, do not walk, to get some.  Even if the name doesn't mean "creamery" you could hardly find more creamer-y ice cream anywhere! Yummmmmmm.

Funny you should mention the ice cream, I had it this evening after going to Pam Real Thai and thought that the flavor was out of this world (chocolate almond) but the consistancy was very grainy (icey, maybe from mishandling). We got it from the Amish store on 9th between 49th and 50th. I don't think the butterfat level is as high as B&G or HD, it didn't have that tongue coating texture that they have. I thought that the chocolate was as intense as any I've ever had. I'd be interested in trying a properly handled pint.

[ahr]

Toby, here’s a bit more of the first review in the first issue of Seymour Britchky’s Restaurant Reporter. It illustrates the state of the art in restaurants and restaurant criticism, circa October, 1971. The headings below are mine; the review itself is a seamless essay, one of his relatively rare “raves.”

On the restaurant:

“La Crémaillère is unquestionably one of the finest eating places in the country, and it compares well with the best restaurants in France. Throughout the menu the food is consistently superb. The service is knowledgeable and earnest, and the china, crystal and flatware are elegant and always sparkling. The tables are large, though closer together than they should be in a restaurant of this stature.”

On the menu:

“The wording of the menu is an immediate clue that this is a first class establishment. It is in French, with English translation where necessary, and nowhere is there a superfluous adjective. Nothing is succulent or crisp or fluffy or done to a turn. Each dish is called by its name, and the superlatives are left to the customers.”

He lists items both “familiar” (mackerel in white wine, snails, saucisson chaud, vichyssoise, onion soup, frogs’ legs Provençale, kidneys in mustard sauce, steaks and chops, chocolate mousse, and fruit tarts) and “less familiar” (smoked trout, poached turbot mousseline, roast pigeon with juniper berries, sweetbreads in champagne sauce, and filet mignon in “a sauce highly flavored with truffles”), observing of the familiar items that “[a]t La Crémaillère” one tastes them as if for the first time.”

On the preparation:

“One quality stands out in all the food at La Crémaillère – an almost amazing purity. Many of the dishes require complex preparation, but the fundamental character of the food – the fish, the meat, the vegetables – is always preserved, heightened and brought out, rather than embellished or disguised. The buttered boiled potatoes are an example. They are served with the warm sausages appetizer and with poached fish, and they cannot be described as anything but perfect, elemental potato. How is such a thing achieved? Perhaps it is done by starting with good potatoes, cooking them with the coarse French salt which tastes better than American salt, cutting the potatoes to equal size, so that the right cooking time for one is right for all. But these are simple steps, and there is more to it than that, as evidenced by the tasteless potatoes served in most places.”

I won’t incur the wrath of Lawyer Guy by quoting much further; suffice it to say that the rest of the review and the newsletter demonstrates Mr. Britchky’s insight, wisdom, and acerbic wit. He also reviewed the original Brasserie (“Presumably we must be grateful to the Brasserie. It is the only decent non-Oriental restaurant in the city open 24 hours a day, every day of the year.”), Stonehenge, Le Pont Neuf, and The Ginger Man in this issue.

I’ll close with the first and last paragraphs of what might now be called the Restaurant Reporter’s mission statement:

“The ideal restaurant serves excellent food in agreeable surroundings, courteously and efficiently. Few such places exist. Of the 30,000 restaurants in New York and surrounding communities, only a dozen or so consistently measure up to these standards, with fewer than a hundred more that can be classified as very good, but not great.”

“The Restaurant Reporter accepts no advertising or other incentives that could affect its objectivity. No member of the staff may identify himself as such to any restaurant employee. The experience of the reviewer is that of the ordinary diner in search of a good meal.”

Familiar dishes, familiar issues.

[robert brown]

Did we ever find out what happened to Britchky? FG was supposed to work on it. Remember?

[Biscotti]

I have eaten here many times as it is one of the few really good and appropriate for special occasion restaurants in Westchester.

FYI, it is located in Banksville, NY not Bedford. This only matters I suppose if someone is looking for the phone number.

[ahr]

La C's address invites Bedford/Banksville confusion, but here it is:

La Crémaillère Restaurant

46 Bedford-Banksville Road, Bedford, NY 10506

Phone: (914) 234-9647

A store locator for their ice cream may be found here.