In 1980, shortly after it opened, I happened into a small, sophisticated-looking restaurant with an interesting-sounding menu on the Rue Duret in Paris, a few steps from the Arc de Triomphe. Called Guy Savoy, it was owned by a young chef of the same name. Born, appropriately enough, on the edge of France’s Savoy region, in the town of Bourgoin-Jallieu, 30 miles or so southeast of Lyon, Savoy started young: He was one of those kids who liked the kitchen more than the playground and once said that his proudest moment was when he first cooked a perfect omelet at the age of seven or eight. Savoy went on to apprentice at Troisgros, near Lyon; L’Oasis, on the Côte d’Azur; the luxurious old-line Lasserre, in Paris; and the posh Le Lion d’Or, in Geneva (where he was an assistant pastry chef). He first attracted the attention of French gastronomes in the late 1970s, when he returned to Paris as chef at La Barrière de Clichy, and then opened his own place, earning his first star from the Guide Michelin within a year.
In 1982, a group of investors talked Savoy into setting up a satellite restaurant—in Greenwich, Connecticut, of all places. The menu was slightly less ambitious than at his Paris establishment, but I ate there several times and it seemed to me that he was pretty successful in bringing his precise, modern but tradition-inspired cuisine to America. Mimi Sheraton, then reviewing restaurants for The New York Times, didn’t agree, finding “too many dishes … contrived and tasteless”; she gave it no stars—the kiss of death. “It was too complicated to have two restaurants then,” Savoy says today. “We weren’t set up to do both that and Paris. Anyway, cuisine had just started to become important in America, and it was hard to find good products and good staff.” He stayed for about two years, then turned the place over to one of his employees, Jean-Louis Gerin (who still runs it, under the name Restaurant Jean-Louis).
Meanwhile, back in Paris, Savoy’s original place was soaring. His food was confident and expressive, simple in conception but executed with great refinement. If he, like so many French chefs, was seduced a little too easily by nouvelle cuisine, he quickly recovered, reconnected with his country roots, and continued to hone his skills. By the time he moved to a larger, fancier location in 1987, he was on almost everyone’s list as one of the gastronomic stars of Paris.
Restaurant Guy Savoy—which won three stars from Michelin in 2002 but probably deserved them at least a decade earlier—has proven to be consistently pleasing and original. The service, like the décor, is sophisticated but relaxed; the tone is one of luxe with nothing to prove.
The wine list is immense—it is literally a tome, brought to the table with its own little stand—and includes many affordable discoveries, as well as the prestige bottles you’d expect at such a restaurant. Most importantly, the food is superb, eschewing pyrotechnics and chem-lab fantasies in favor of streamlined tradition with a dash of wit. (Among other things, Savoy is a master at interweaving “high” and “low” ingredients—black truffles with lentils or artichokes, lobster with carrots, foie gras with red cabbage.)
And now Savoy has returned to America, under very different circumstances. In May 2006, a second Restaurant Guy Savoy opened—at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
The obvious question is not whether he stands a better chance of success now than he did in the early ’80s—he certainly does, given the size and efficiency of his operation today and his own expanded skills as both chef and restaurateur—but whether he can successfully translate his casually high-class style to a town that values spectacle and excess above all.
The answer, clearly, is yes, as I found out when I visited the place recently when Savoy himself was in residence. (He comes three or four times a year for a couple of weeks, and he has installed his son and daughter-in-law, Franck and Laura Savoy, as full-time managers.)
The dining room, bisected by a massive, apparently seamless gray stone wall, has a serious, almost stately look to it (an effect interrupted only by the theme-park copy of the Eiffel Tower, at the Paris Las Vegas casino hotel, visible through a large window at the end of the room). Settling in at a comfortable table, I ordered a tasting menu, which began with a tiny toothpick-speared sandwich of thin-sliced foie gras moistened with black-truffle oil between squares of lightly toasted white bread. My first reaction (left unspoken) was “Ten more, please.” A second palate teaser appeared in a small white-china piece composed of a face-up demitasse cup and a facedown clochelike dome set into an elongated saucer (I couldn’t help thinking of some surrealistic cartoon cross between an eggcup and a tête-à-tête love seat). The demitasse held finely minced bits of fennel and red and yellow cherry tomato, over which was poured cold romaine soup, very leafy and clean in flavor; the dome, when I turned it over, revealed a smudge of basil purée on which sat a miniature eggplant tart.
The first real appetizer was a “mosaic”—like a slice of stratified terrine—of artichoke, foie gras, and milk-fed chicken breast. Very satisfying. Next was a bright salad of assorted heirloom tomatoes—just little cubes of them, cut from the heart of the fruit—with snow peas and tomato-basil granité. Then came a single large oyster shell holding two small oysters, one on top of the other, glazed with crème fraîche and set into an icy oyster-water gelée; the oyster flavor was so intense that the two-oysters-in-one-shell idea seemed an apt metaphor: This was an oyster times two.
One of Savoy’s classic creations is what he calls “Colors of Caviar” (the quotation marks are his). It’s like a fish-roe pousse-café, a straight-sided glass with a layer of dense gray caviar vinaigrette at the bottom, then one of white crème fraîche with caviar, another of finely puréed green beans, and one of (domestic) golden osetra caviar, crowned with a caviar sabayon. The idea is to delve down into it with your spoon, so that each bite is a mix of flavors and textures. It works nicely.
When the next course came out, I had no idea what it was. It was almost loglike in shape, with a golden-brown exterior glistening with butter and sporting a mohawk haircut—a row of bristles sticking straight up along its center. It turned out to be a nice plump Dover sole with its fillets bent back and around; the bristles were its heat-darkened bones. (When I mentioned the mohawk later, Savoy laughed and said, “It’s supposed to look like a rack of lamb.”) The fillets were served boneless in smoked seaweed butter, over sautéed spinach with a checkerboard of cubed Yukon Gold and purple Peruvian potatoes on the side. I generally like sole cooked as simply as possible, but this presentation genuinely enhanced the fish without obscuring its basic character. This was such a stunning dish that a second seafood course—grilled lobster with curls of heirloom carrot in assorted colors and an heirloom-carrot purée with bits of lobster meat and a light crust of herbed bread crumbs— though tasty enough, seemed anticlimactic.
One of Savoy’s most famous dishes appeared next: his artichoke soup, luxurious in texture, concentrated in flavor, topped with thin slices of black truffle and aged Parmigiano-Reggiano and served with a small brioche, the dough interleaved with wisps of mushroom and truffle and slathered with truffle butter. The final savory course was crisp veal sweetbreads in brown butter accompanied by little potato chaussons (slippers), like cottage-fry sandwiches with a bit of black truffle inside.
A cascade of pre-desserts, desserts, and post-desserts ensued: a parfait of strawberry gelée, vanilla-lemon panna cotta, basil gelée, and Sauternes granité, sporting a fried basil leaf on top; a little bar of dark chocolate and crunchy praline with hazelnuts and chicory cream; a dish holding shredded coconut, coconut tapioca, coconut granité, coconut chips, and coconut emulsion; and then a wagon full of sorbets, ice creams, puddings, cookies, marshmallows …
It was an excellent meal, full of contrast and flavor. “Las Vegas is an exciting city, a city of the future,” Savoy told me. “Our customers seem to love us. They are very knowledgeable—when Americans begin to take interest in something, they go all the way—and will eat anything I cook, even sweetbreads, rabbit, kidneys. It’s a pleasure to work here.”
A month or so after my Las Vegas meal, I dined at Savoy’s Paris restaurant, again with a tasting menu and with Savoy in the kitchen. Many of the courses were the same as they’d been in the States, which offered a nice opportunity to compare the two places. Again the meal began with those little foie gras sandwiches—but here they came around twice, so I’d have to deem this course twice as good as its American equivalent. Next came “Tout Petit Pois,” a shallow bowl filled with silky pea purée, pea gelée, peas anointed with chive oil, baby watercress sprouts, and a poached quail egg, the quintessence of spring. The eggcup-cum-love-seat appeared next; this time, the soup was finely minced broccoli and cauliflower with gazpacho, and part two was a cheerful little cherry tomato stuffed with chèvre. The mosaic of artichoke, foie gras, and chicken breast was nearly identical to its Las Vegas counterpart, but the bird involved, a poulet de Bresse, seemed more flavorful. The tomato salad and two-in-one oyster were not served, but “Colors of Caviar” was, and again it worked wonderfully.
The sole looked less impressive than the one in Las Vegas, smaller, burnt-butter-brown rather than golden-brown in color, with shorter and consequently less impressive-looking bones sticking up. I thought the fish had a bit more flavor in Las Vegas, too. The next course was not lobster but a cube of perfectly roasted duck foie gras, seasoned with mustard seeds and luxuriating in a smooth, seductive sauce based on red cabbage; alongside it was a little sphere of cabbage, strewn with truffle threads, enclosing puréed Jerusalem artichoke lightly flavored with horseradish. The brioche with the truffled-artichoke soup that followed seemed more buttery in flavor than in Las Vegas; the sweetbreads and their chaussons were all but identical to their American cousins. Again came countless sweet things.
The verdict? While I prefer the more intimate feeling of the Paris dining room and find the wine list a touch more interesting and the service a little bit more knowledgeable there, I’m convinced that the food in Las Vegas is absolutely the equal of its French counterpart. Pricing is similar at both locations, although the prix-fixe Menu Prestige, $290 in Las Vegas, runs $340 in Paris (the euro’s exchange rate also contributes to the disparity).
Savoy must be pleased by how well things are working, because a third Guy Savoy is now under construction, in Moscow. It will be an elaborate affair—a serious restaurant on the Paris or Las Vegas level, as well as a bistro serving specialties both Russian and French and a cellar for cigars and premium alcohols. “It won’t be open for at least another year,” Savoy tells me. “Things are much more difficult in Russia than they are in America.”
Restaurant Guy Savoy 18 Rue Troyon, 17th, Paris (01-43-80-40-61)
Restaurant Guy Savoy Caesars Palace 3570 Las Vegas Blvd. S., Las Vegas (877-346-4642)
Left Bank Guy
Guy Savoy was one of the first Michelin-starred Paris chefs (along with Michel Rostang) to open a casual bistro as a counterpoint to his more serious restaurant—in his case, the 20-seat Bistro de L’Étoile, which appeared in 1988 directly across the Rue Troyon from Restaurant Guy Savoy. “It was never really a commercial venture,” he says. “Just a place for friends.” Nonetheless, he went on to open two more L’Étoiles nearby. “But I wanted real restaurants, not bistros,” he says, so seven years ago he closed them all.
Today, in their place, are four restaurants “with Guy Savoy”: La Butte Chaillot, not far from the Rue Troyon; Le Chiberta, in the 8th arrondissement; and two places on the Left Bank. One is the venerable Atelier Maître Albert, which has been converted into a stylish place with black walls, slate tabletops crossed with orange paper place mats, and a bank of rotisseries at one end of the room. The food is hearty and generous—a heroic salad of seasonal leaves with sautéed chicken livers; artichoke soup enhanced not with truffles but with wild mushrooms and a swirl of gingerbread cream; perfect roast chicken with a potato purée that seems more like a butter purée with a bit of potato stirred in.
Les Bouquinistes (named for those Seine-side booksellers who operate out of dark-green wooden stalls) is the other. It is smaller, brighter, and a bit more pretentious, with a less tradition-bound menu. Very nice soy-marinated tuna comes with a superfluous lemon-ginger sorbet—but the snails and chanterelles with chive gnocchi and the oversize shrimp with mild saté spices and pea risotto are delicious.
Atelier Maître Albert 1 Rue Maître-Albert, 5th (01-56-81-30-01); three-course meal, about $75.
Les Bouquinistes 53 Quai des Grands-Augustins, 6th (01-43-25-45-94); tasting menu, $105.