In trying to explain one of my basic beliefs about food, I sometimes suggest that a plateful of perfectly cooked green beans with a little butter and salt is better than a block of mediocre foie gras. At dinner, Arnal sent out a bowl of haricots verts straight from the garden that were exactly the green beans I’m talking about—al dente, glazed with butter and brightened with just enough salt—pure poetry; I couldn’t stop eating them.
“The farm supplies seventy percent of the food we serve here,” Arnal tells me, “and a hundred percent of the vegetables. But it isn’t just a question of being organic. We try to calculate the ecological cost of everything we do. In two or three years, we’ll have a windmill to supply some of our power, and maybe solar cells to use from June to late September. I hope to win back a Michelin star, but if I want a star, it is not for its own sake but to prove that a good restaurant in the middle of nowhere can live by economic ecology—and if we can do it, why can’t restaurants in the middle of town?”
L’Atelier de Jean-Luc Rabanel 7 Rue des Carmes, Arles (04-90-91-07-69)
La Chassagnette Route du Sambuc, Arles (04-90-97-26-96)
Raising a Toast to the Gardens of France
There’s an excellent small wine list at L’Atelier de Jean-Luc Rabanel—full of obscure and sometimes quite seductive wines, mostly from Provence and the Languedoc-Roussillon—but you have to sort of beg to get it. Rabanel’s wife, Muriel, who oversees the wine cellar, prefers to have “communication” with the customer, discussing vinous possibilities and bringing good things out glass by glass if necessary. That’s just as well, because even aficionados of the wines of southern France like myself would find very few familiar bottles chez Rabanel.
Among the little-known delights produced in the course of two meals I had at L’Atelier were three whites that I was particularly taken with: the rich but angular Zoé Blanc from Préceptorie de Centernach, a Côtes Catalanes that’s mostly Grenache Blanc, with an edge of Macabeo; the sumptuous Terre des Chardons Clairette de Bellegarde; and the racy Picpoul de Pinet, Petit Roubié L’Arbre Blanc. Because I love the red wines of Les Pallières, in Gigondas (co-owned by celebrated Berkeley wine merchant Kermit Lynch), I was disappointed by the estate’s Grenache rosé, Au Petit Bonheur, which seemed flat and oily. Two reds got my attention, though: the intensely fruity, almost electric Terre des Chardons Marginal, a 90/10 blend of Syrah and Grenache from the Costières de Nîmes, produced by carbonic maceration; and Nessun Dorma, from Domaine Combe de la Belle, in the Pays du Gard (80 percent Grenache, the rest Counoise), full of minerals and herbs.
The wine list at La Chassagnette, which is proudly proffered, is an unusual document. At least 30 wines (mostly, but not entirely, southern French) are offered three ways: by the glass, by the bottle, and by the 50-centiliter carafe (two thirds of a conventional bottle). And at least half the wines on the list are organic. Among these are the Château Miraval Coteaux Varois Blanc (mostly Rolle, as Vermentino is called in France), with its flavors of lemongrass and orange blossoms; and the unusual melon-and-honeysuckle Coucou Blanc (Sauvignon Blanc and Sémillon), from Elian Da Ros, in the Côtes Marmandais. Nonorganic but mighty good was a Coteaux du Languedoc called Le Mas de l’Écriture les Pensées, an uncommonly elegant, almost claretlike interweaving of traditional southern French varieties (Syrah, Grenache, Carignan, and Cinsault). —C.A.
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