Top table: Arpège
Is a meal at this Paris institution worth the eye-watering bill? Pat Nourse says oui.
This is the restaurant with the vegetables, right? Yes, the one with the vegetables (alain-passard. com). In 2001, chef-patron Alain Passard closed Arpège and went off the grid for a year. On his return he announced the meat dishes that helped him win three Michelin stars in the restaurant’s first decade (he holds them to this day) would no longer be on the menu.
Vegetarian? Though he went all-veg at first, Passard eased back a bit and now offers a few meat and fish dishes. But troubled by “the weight and sadness of the cuisine animale”, the chef’s focus remains on the produce delivered to Arpège daily – farmed biodynamically, never refrigerated – from his vegetable gardens. Not everyone likes it, though? Google “Arpège” and one of the first hits is a 2016 piece from Eater titled The Crushing Disappointment of L’Arpège (sample sentiment: “a study in average, unevenly cooked fare”). Whoa. Whoa, indeed. Cost is certainly a factor. The vegetable tasting menu lands at €340 (about $550 per person, not including drinks), while anyone reckless enough to order à la carte can expect to pay as much as €210, about $340, for a single main course. Give the place a wide
berth, then? Here’s the problem: when Arpège is good, it’s very, very good. A piece of turbot, cut from a whole fish that has somehow been roasted on the stovetop and brushed with a sauce barely flavoured with green tea, provides the sensation of something that tastes completely different and yet utterly of itself. Well la-di-da. When Passard cooks asparagus he stands the spears on their ends so that when the thick bits at the bottom are cooked through, the fine tips are still just done. That’s great. Is there anything we can do to improve
the odds of getting the good stuff? Parisian food insiders claim that you should book for lunch, not dinner, and aim for a Monday. That sounds perfectly ridiculous. And perfectly, ridiculously, deliciously Paris to the core.