My wife and I sat down to lunch one day about 20 years ago at Chez Paul, a small, old-fashioned bistro on the Île-de-la-Cité, in Paris. She’d had about enough, by that time, of all the duck liver and pork fat and cream sauces we’d been consuming for six days straight, so while I soldiered on with the pâté maison and blanquette de veau, she ordered a simple green salad to begin and, for her main course, asked the snappish, timeworn waitress if she could just have “le légume du jour,” the menu’s unspecified vegetable of the day. “Le légume du jour?” the woman asked, incredulously. “,” replied my wife. The waitress shrugged. Out came my pâté and her salad; so far, so good. Then my blanquette de veau was served, and for my wife…a plate of french fries. “Voilà le légume du jour,” announced the waitress, more than a little triumphantly.
A lot has changed in 20 years. Though Chez Paul itself hangs on, bistros like it—once commonplace in Paris—have almost disappeared, and, er, I have an entirely different wife. But what has not changed is the paucity of légumes, other than potatoes, on most French menus, especially traditional ones. There are admittedly certain classic protein-and-vegetable combinations (pigeon with peas, lamb with flageolets, the savory stew called boeuf aux carottes), and some menus do offer simply cooked spinach or green beans as a “garniture” or asparagus as a separate course. There are also at least a few contemporary French chefs who pay special attention to vegetables, most notably the immensely creative Alain Passard at his L’Arpège, in Paris. But as another chef, Jean-Luc Rabanel, puts it, “In general, people in France don’t consider vegetables a food. They’re just something on the side.”
In a different way from Passard, and almost 500 miles to the south, Rabanel and a few other French chefs are doing their best to help change that situation.
La Chassagnette is an all-organic restaurant on a 500-acre farm of the same name, opened in 2000 by Swiss pharmaceuticals heiress Maja Hoffmann (as in Hoffmann-La Roche) and her husband, the American film producer Stanley Buchthal. It’s in the Camargue, one of the most fascinating and romantic parts of France, a vast, marshy river delta defined by the Rhône as it extends down from Arles and then forks, like a wavy wishbone, into two arms flowing to the sea. This extra-ordinary region is famous for its wild white horses, its hot-pink flamingos, and its fighting bulls (raised for the bloodless corridas popular in the region), as well as for its production of rice and sea salt. It is also the home of La Tour du Valat, an important center for the study and conservation of Mediterranean wetlands, founded in 1954 by Maja’s father, Luc Hoffmann, who was a naturalist (he later became vice president of the World Wildlife Fund) as well as a pharmaceuticals magnate.
Maja Hoffmann went to school in Arles and spent much of her childhood in the Camargue, and she inherited her father’s respect for the region’s unique ecosystem. She also became a champion of organic and biodynamic farming, and it was her idea to develop La Chassagnette into a kind of inspirational complex that would include a gastronomic library and study center, a farm supplying fruit and vegetables to local markets, and a restaurant to showcase all that the farm produced.
At first, the kitchen at La Chassagnette was run by Edith and Manu Camacho, proprietors of a popular seafood restaurant called Chez Juju, in nearby Salin-de-Giraud. By the time I first visited, three years ago, the Camachos had returned to Chez Juju, and Rabanel, a widely traveled Gascon-born chef, had taken over, promptly winning La Chassagnette a Michelin star. (It was the first all-organic restaurant in France—and so far the only one—to be given that honor.) I had a wonderful, unusual dinner there, a succession of dishes that seemed alternately rustic (beets baked in a crust of salt; baby cuttlefish roasted with garlic, thyme, and Espelette peppers) and modishly contemporary (gazpacho topped with emulsified tomato water; a flaky pastry stuffed with cumin-scented puréed yellow squash, meant to be dipped into cèpe cream and crushed pine nuts). There was something pleasingly eccentric about the whole affair, and something refreshingly original; it was the kind of food, I remember thinking, that might have resulted if Alice Waters had sat Ferran Adrià down and talked some sense into him.
In the fall of 2005, Rabanel decided to leave La Chassagnette. There were—metaphorically—too many cooks. “I was absolutely persuaded of the possibility to make Chassagnette into a three-star restaurant,” he says. “Unfortunately, the farm had a number of directors and there was also the family of the proprietor to consider, and everyone had his point of view. I decided that I wanted to do something on a smaller scale, something more precise.” Following his departure, the restaurant lost its Michelin star.
And a new star was born. Rabanel’s precise new venue is L’Atelier de Jean-Luc Rabanel, an austere “workshop” restaurant that opened on a side street in Arles early in 2006. He no longer has the agricultural riches of La Chassagnette to draw from, but Rabanel—who grew up on a farm in the village of Monflanquin, just northwest of Cahors—now has a certified-biodynamic farm of his own on the outskirts of the city, which yields a lot of what he uses.
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.
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.