Paris on a Plate by Stephen Downes

Author:Stephen Downes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2016-07-13T04:00:00+00:00

I’m trying another high recommendation for dinner: ze kitchen galerie, in fashionable lower-case letters, is said to be doing new things for Paris, using Thai flavours. It’s not far from Fogón, so I don’t need to tell you what I’m thinking as I approach along the quai des Grands Augustins.

How swish and contemporary — so like new brasseries in Melbourne. Although to be fair to my home town, most of them provide comfortable chairs these days. I’ve been on about uncomfortable seating in restaurants for decades. The galerie’s chairs score half-marks. The seats are spacious and upholstered in red fabric, but the armrests are narrow and tubular — hopeless. The chairs are also too diverting per se. Any chair that makes you look at it can’t be good to sit upon. It’s a general rule, and I’ll leave you to find the exceptions. Luckily, I’ve got my length of bench seating against a wall.

The galerie is medium-sized. Its floor is of unvarnished pine strips, and narrow Pollock-type canvases in black and vivid reds and yellows hang on white walls. (I remember Clement Greenberg, who discovered Jackson, once told me that every splodge the artist made was intentional to the millimetre. Yeah, Clem, yeah.) Cooks in a small exposed kitchen slave away in the back corner.

Froths, croquettes and salt are à la mode in Paris. It seems you have to have them pretty liberally to be a successful restaurant. It’s what I’ll remember most about ze kitchen galerie, at any rate. None of the dishes is magical. There’s an attempt, at least, I tell myself, to use lemongrass, ginger and chilli. But it’s not right: half-hearted and out of balance. Are the chefs afraid of overdoing things, frightening away customers with conservative Gallic palates? No dish lights up.

I’ve asked for a dégustation, and I’m tasting a handful of fairly small offerings. There have been a couple of chunks of tuna with a vinaigrette, half-moons of black and red radish, and a salty prawn mince. A crustacean soup is pretty one-dimensional with lemongrass and nori shreds. Prawn tails have a lively crunchiness. A couple of bream ravioli have good strong fishiness but are a little too salty — alarm bells ring! They’re said to be flavoured with Thai herbs but I can’t detect the references. Topped with nori and chives, they’re in a green cress froth with a medicinal flavour. Using herbs in contemporary French cooking often seems to result in tastes achieved by infusing a sachet in water to sleep well. Sometimes, some herbal concoctions taste as if they should be smoked. Or taken for an ailment. (Like the rest of the West, the French are obsessed with herbal cures. Shelves upon shelves of pills and capsules that can redress any physiological imbalance known to man are sold each day.) But, to my mind, medicine is not gastronomy. That zinging freshness that Australian cooks have extracted by gentrifing plants of the south-east Asian floodlands is missing.

The galerie’s platings are very attractive — worth the covers of food glossies.

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