Critic gets a top table — and a taste for power — at Emmanuel Macron’s Parisian haunt La Rotonde
shellfish and fish — healthy food. The remarkably slender Brigitte looks to follow a diet of maybe one oyster a day. None of us want oysters but the seafood platters that include a selection start at €29.50 for one and go up to €118.50 for two, three or four to share.
The set-price three-course menu at €46 can be broken down into separately ordered courses at €13.50, €28 and €10.50 but financial wizards can work out that going the whole hog, ordering starter, main course and dessert “saves” you €6. With the current exchange rate more or less matching the pound with the euro, it strikes us as expensive and the 50 cent increments point to a general creeping up.
My choice of dishes comes from Les Classiques à Toute Heure. In place of asparagus, which I only later discover was on the Macron celebration menu, I instinctively lean towards green and good for you and go for haricots verts frais extra fins au xérès et balsamique. They are indeed a heap of very fine green beans of the kind you seemingly only find in France. A squiggle on the plate made with sherry and balsamic vinegars is just right and just enough to provide seasoning.
Again unprompted, cleaving to the Macron diet I order grilled turbot (label rouge) with Béarnaise. With one boiled potato on the plate, this is a whopping €48 and whatever red label means it doesn’t translate into a distinctive slice of fish. Wilton’s in St James’s probably do it better but on looking it up I see wild turbot there is priced at £55.
Hugo Desnoyer, one of the city’s best butchers and restaurant suppliers, is credited with the beef and lamb; eggs are described as bio, and some bio wines wind up the reasonably priced wine list. La Rotonde clearly moves with the times.
Stretching a point to its pretentious limit, Alice’s main course of fillet of sea bass with confit lemon and wild rice could be said to illustrate the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, for whom Macron worked. “The ability to think at the same time two ideas that are apparently opposed” is deemed a virtue — and, you could add, especially for a politician in a country given to demonstrations.
Desserts are a definite strong suit and while we are obviously tempted by pistachio macaron with raspberry compôte, the sight of devilishly dark shiny hot chocolate sauce being poured on to profiteroles filled with vanilla ice cream guides us to share that — to our utter satisfaction.
Trying to come up with the London equivalent to La Rotonde, I remember encountering Theresa May in Bellamy’s in Mayfair before she became leader. Her Majest y the Queen f avo u r s Bellamy’s and actually so do I, but the menu is inspired by the brasseries of France and Belgium.
When Peter Langan was alive, his L a n g a n ’s B r a s s e r i e , w h e r e the wonderfully eclectic selection of paintings included some provided by artist friends who were allowed to “eat down” their payment, might have qualified.
The glory that was The Café Royal with its interesting clientele has been lost in its conversion into a hotel. Christopher Corbin and Jeremy King’s Brasserie Zedel is, ironically, probably the closest we come to La Rotonde, but I have yet to see a politician eating there.
If you can judge a man by the restaurant he chooses, then Emmanuel Macron scores again. I doubt that I’m the first to observe that Montparnasse (Mount Parnassus) in Greek mythology is sacred to the Greek gods Dionysus, Apollo and the Muses. He may be accused by some of being “caviar Left” — their version of champagne socialism — but a long-established brasserie ser ves the people, offers dining solutions at different levels, works long hours and exhibits a belief in the past as potent as the one for the future. Alice remains firmly anti-Brexit.
La Rotonde, 105 Boulevard du Montparnasse, 75006 +33 43 26 48 26