There’s conventional luxurious available, for those who’re searching for that kind of factor—a truffle-laden pasta particular one evening, toast troopers piped with foie-gras mousse and topped with a jiggly squish of Sauternes jelly on one other. However there’s simply as a lot sumptuousness to be present in humble preparations such because the terrine du potager, a slice of tender winter greens, chilled and gently aspic-bound, organized chromatically—white leek shading into inexperienced leek, into orange carrot, into pink pepper—plated subsequent to a dollop of anchovy aioli; or within the lentils, that are braised to a texture as agency but unctuously yielding as any caviar pearls. (The menu’s solely facet dish, in addition to the inevitable French fries, it doesn’t fairly match into any course, and it completely shouldn’t be missed.) The fun of those choices is a matter of philosophy as a lot as of approach: certain, all of us swan across the farmers’ market and covet membership in Rancho Gordo’s bean membership, but it surely nonetheless feels a bit rebellious for a restaurant to dedicate a lot of a menu to greens and legumes, to lavish them so royally with respect, butter, and time.
Meat, too, is ready with palpable reverence. Pradié presents boeuf bourguignon not as a bowl of stew however as a sleek plated course, with massive, tender morsels of beef (cheeks, after I visited) positioned atop a swirl of the wine-based sauce by which they had been braised, with a jagged skyline of goodies from the pot: pale pink radishes, shiny hunks of smoky lardons, a pair of carrots as lengthy and slim as dancers’ legs. Duck à l’orange, that nineteen-sixties traditional, is punched up with a doubling of citrus sauces: a puddle of the anticipated sauce bigarade, a chestnut-colored gastrique with demi-glace and orange liqueur, laps up in opposition to a yellow pool of sauce maltese, which is one thing like a hollandaise spiked with orange juice. The primary programs have been altering usually; I wished to revisit a lamb stew I’d been enthralled by, darkish shreds of meat punctuated with black olives and served over a whip of mashed potatoes, however by the point I returned to Zimmi’s two weeks later it was gone. Different components of the menu—the pissaladière, the ratatouille—appear to stay fortunately accessible from one go to to the following.
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