111.1111111111111w-- - Restaurant: Le Francais rr his column got off to
a bad start when I went, last week, to one of my favourite restaurants. Cheap, unfashionable (though central) and serving some of the best pre-nouvelle food in London — heavy platefuls of steaming, richly smelling cas- soulets and stews — it's a place I'd been meaning to write up all along. Unfortu- nately I asked to keep a menu and was rumbled. Its proprietor begged me not to write a word: the last thing he wanted, he said, was strangers coming to his res- taurant. I can't say I'm all that sorry.
My next try was Le Francais in Fulham Road — the Chelsea/South Kensington end. It's a restaurant which started off expensive, but its prices seem to have stayed much the same while those around have soared, and now — with its two prix-fixe menus of £13 and £14— it hovers around the reasonable bracket.
Le Francais specialises in cuisine regionale, that is, provides a menu that changes weekly, each week devoted to a different region of France (though of course there are repetitions). If you plan ahead you can choose your region's cuisine, since a year-plan is drawn up and available. But I went on spec and was faced with the cuisine of the Dauphine — a cuisine not particularly celebrated nor, it turned out, particularly well represented.
The Dauphine is situated between Pro- vence and the Savoie; its local plats are gratins, daubes, crayfish, baby quail and other little birds, such as thrush (special favourites are thrush with juniper berries and pickled thrush). It is also a serious producer of cheese.
I wasn't really surprised not to see any thrush on the menu, but the rest (both what was left out and what was put in its place) was more of a disappointment. The • two starters were Crepe Reinequet and Jambon persill e. The crepe was a bland affair — reheated pancake smothered in a nothingy white sauce in which swam chick- en, mushrooms and cubes of ham. The Jambon persille (which Elizabeth David attributes to the Bourgogne) came with some delicious celeri-remoulade but some rather tired carottes rapees had obviously just been taken out of the fridge.
Their main dishes were similarly lacking in regional flavour: Escalope de lotte aux petits legumes; Truite soufflee aux amandes; Entrecôte dauphinoise (a plain grilled steak); and Civet de lievre. The authoritative periodical La France a Table, founded in 1934 by the celebrated gastronome, Curnonsky, condemns trout with almonds as 'not cooking, but packag- ing', and certainly the Le Francais version of the dish was unmemorable. It would be a bit much to expect the trout to have come straight from one of the Dauphine's fresh- water streams, but my fish was dismallY tasteless. Its accompaniment of fiercelY scrubbed new potatoes (no sign of gratin dauphinois, the baked sliced potato and cream dish which is the Dauphine's only really famous plat) tasted as if they hae come straight out of a tin. The hare was good though, the sauce rich and aromatic. The pudding trolley was a let-down dry pastry with the ubiquitous kiwi or a withered Paris-Brest — and none of the local cheeses was on offer. The regional menu gimmick has, irs drawbacks. The various provincial cuisnes, of France grow out of the variety of 100' produce and conditions. For one chef in a South London kitchen to reproduce the whole gamut of French local flavours frorn non-indigenous ingredients is impossible- All the same, every other time I've gone the cooking hasn't been as lax. TheiAr' agenda does include some betters' cuisines; maybe I'd just gone on an °d night. night. Service is efficient and charming an u 'there is no need to pay over £40 for tw°' For under half that amount you can eat very much comme les Francais at L'Arriste Muscle,: not strictly speaking a restaurant, in Shepherd Market. It's a small, dark, noisy bistro with a chalk-and-slate man' an Algerian street sign and French posters on the wall. Food is simple and cheap: pale de campagne; steak or'jambon d'os salade; saucisson suisse or a l'ail with flageolets; poulet chasseur; ragoia d'agneau; cheese and gateaux. At £4.80, steak is the Most expensive thing on the menu (everything else is around £3) and it is all good' authentic and filling. The wine list, which is several times longer than the menu, is as cheap. A delicious Nuits-Saint-Georges will cost £9.80, though most wines cost around half that. It's not, however, the place to go for a quite tete-a-tete; a large tape collection and the unavoidable pro- ximity of other people put paid to anything but the most robust of conversations.
Nigella Lawson
Previous page
