At L’Atelier, Rabanel serves a short and comparatively simple lunch menu—but at dinnertime he offers a single lengthy fixed-price meal that’s ambitious, sometimes surprising, and unerringly bright. The particulars vary nightly, but one evening last summer the meal included almost 20 different dishes (a few of them served simultaneously). Among the highlights were a warm homemade whole-wheat ficelle (thin baguette), soft and very flavorful, with a little bowl of sweet and meaty preserved-tuna rillettes; a gazpacho of tomato and basil, with a faintly smoky flavor, served in a little carafe with a black plastic straw and a soft tomato-parmesan breadstick on the side (this echoed the gazpacho I’d had at La Chassagnette); a dazzling “cassecroûte végétal” (vegetable sandwich) consisting of pieces of baby zucchini, cauliflower, tomato, red pepper, and radish, all either raw or very lightly cooked, between two golden Parmigiano wafers, with a small scoop of tomato sorbet on top—summer on a plate; a nem (spring roll) of raw tuna marinated in soy sauce, lemon juice, and olive oil, wrapped around split snow peas with hazelnuts in balsamic dressing; a little cup of silky chestnut and pumpkin “cappuccino” topped with earthy cèpe mousse (a sort of preview of autumn); a raviolo filled with feta and dried tomatoes, poached in tomato and sweet onion broth, that I’d have to name as one of the best nontraditional pasta dishes I’ve ever had; a small grilled lamb chop from the Aubrac, in south-central France (it tasted like an ancestral memory of lamb, meaty and herbal and basic) with roasted potatoes and a few sprigs of purslane moistened with thyme and garlic broth; a kind of deconstructed rice pudding in which the cooked rice had been puréed with white chocolate, then topped with caramelized grape juice; a frozen mousse of lemon and mint with a tuile flavored with lemon thyme; and a crisp cannolo-like tube of hazelnut pastry wrapped around lemon-flavored sweet-potato cream.
That was the body of the meal. Then came a cow’s-milk Tomme from the Lot-et-Garonne with homemade black cherry, apricot, and fig preserves; a salad of baby greens and herbs garnished with a single rose petal; a pumpkin fritter flavored with green anise and basil; and a warm chocolate cake with a molten center, served with a tuile (flavored with bitter cacao beans) on the side.
The level of cooking was superb throughout. Not one morsel of vegetable or protein seemed over- or underdone; flavors meshed pleasingly; herbal accents were pronounced but never overpowering. Rabanel—whose strong, crevassed face and shock of slick black hair give him a look that is both magisterial and a bit wild—is clearly a man who understands produce. “To have the best quality of vegetables in the right season is vital,” he says. “But you also have to know how to cook them. For each vegetable, there is a correct method, a method that brings out the flavor and texture within.” He has obviously figured these methods out.
Lunch at La Chassagnette—in good weather, anyway—is served outside at communal wood-slat tables under an old-fashioned bamboo arbor blanketed with vines and surrounded by bushy herbs and fruit trees. (The attractive interior dining space is in effect a roomy barn with informal furniture and beautifully crafted cabinetry around the edges.) The chef who replaced Rabanel there, a broad-faced, boyishly handsome young man named Armand Arnal, is a disciple of Alain Ducasse. Born in Montpellier, he worked for that ubiquitous culinary master first at La Grande Cascade, in Paris, and then at Ducasse’s restaurant in Manhattan (where he had earlier logged two years in Daniel Boulud’s kitchen).
Despite his haute background, Arnal is a straightforward, unpretentious chef; his food seems less finely tuned than -Rabanel’s—earthier and simpler—but it is no less focused on fresh produce. Unlike his predecessor, Arnal offers not a multicourse menu but a limited choice of à la carte dishes daily—though he will happily serve a progression of tasting portions if somebody asks, which, of course, I did.
I was immediately seduced by the & well, I don’t want to call it an amuse-bouche (or, as they say in America these days, an “amews”) because that sounds precious, and this was anything but: It was a plate of assorted tiny tomatoes from the garden, in yellow, orange, and several shades of red, perfectly ripe and acid-sweet, served with long wooden toothpicks to skewer them and a cumin-flavored chickpea purée that wasn’t quite hummus to dip them into. After that, Arnal sent out a gingery beet “gazpacho,” earthy and mysterious (not only the beets but also the ginger had been grown on the property), followed by a salad of mesclun with figs and thin slices of Tomme de Brebis from the region of Nîmes; a small block of marinated bonito with lentils in vinaigrette; and a hermetic glass jar packed with a rillettes-like terrine of chicken en gelée. The main dish was a slab of veal breast, thick and meaty (with the fat removed), “lacquered” with tomato syrup and accompanied by a caponata made with fresh grapes instead of the traditional sultanas, and a mound of crunchy, nutty Camarguais red rice.
The most famous dish of the Camargue is gardiane de toro, a kind of beef stew made with bull meat and black olives; Arnal’s toro, which I sampled when I returned for dinner the next night, is about as different as could be: He cures it as “gravlax,” with cubeb pepper, long pepper, Cambodian white peppercorns, and Brazilian cane sugar. Thinly sliced like the finest prosciutto, it is quite extraordinary. In contrast, Arnal showcases the morning’s cullings from the kitchen garden in a daily “chassagnette” of vegetables—tomatoes, carrots, eggplant, scallions, and summer squash, for instance, all cut into fairly large pieces and glazed with tomato syrup. When cèpes are in season, he sautés them with garlic, parsley, and Spanish ham.
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