The Brit taking Paris dining by storm
A new restaurant serving British comfort food is winning over gastronomes and A-list guests alike. Anna Tyzack drops in
For decades the French have been bad-mouthing Britain’s fried breakfasts and fish and chips. Our cuisine, according to les gastronomes across the Channel, is heavy, greasy, and invariably boiled; former French president Jacques Chirac rated it the worst in the world after Finland. Quel scandale then, that the grands fromages of Paris are now competing for tables at France’s first British restaurant on a chic street in the city’s finance district. L’entente, Le British Brasserie – pun intended – is run by an Englishman and serves Scotch eggs, shepherd’s pie and apple crumble. Since it opened three months ago, owner Oliver Woodhead has welcomed Karl Lagerfeld, Marc Jacobs, Suzy Menkes and former French president François Hollande through its doors.
When I arrive on a Thursday lunchtime, Woodhead, 40, is run off his feet serving kidneys on toast to a table of financiers from BNP Paribas. Several critics came in over the weekend – “The place to be pour se consoler du Brexit!” suggested the review in L’express Styles – and the Sunday brunch is already booked up.
“So many people are telling me they are pleasantly surprised,” Woodhead says. “I never expected to be le spot de week-end but last Sunday the champagne was still flowing at 5pm.” Ooh la la.
Naturally, Woodhead’s Gallic friends raised their eyebrows at his plans to open a British brasserie. Some said it was a suicide mission. But for Woodhead, who gave up a retail job to work in a bar in Paris 20 years ago, a British restaurant in France has always been the dream. “The London restaurant scene is light years ahead of Paris,” he says. “Paris stopped evolving a while ago. There have been a few new trends – bistronomie, natural wine – but places doing those things can’t afford to be in this area. It’s ground-breaking what we’re doing here – there are 500 registered French restaurants in Britain and countless French-style establishments; in France there is now one British brasserie.”
While Woodhead has the air of a put-upon public schoolboy (with some adopted Gallic mannerisms) he is in fact fashion blue blood. His parents are Lindy and Colin Woodhead, the international fashion PR magnates; Lindy also wrote ITV’S Mr Selfridge. His connections have no doubt helped encourage the right people through the door, but he is also a bona fide restaurant geek. A disciple of St John, Fergus Henderson’s revered “nose to tail” restaurant in London’s Smithfield, he has served time at Fish La Boissonnerie and Semilla, two of Paris’s most fashionable wine bars. After securing his own restaurant in the 2nd arrondissement, a debacle that took three years, the first thing he did was snaffle a general manager from the Wolseley in London.
Given Britain is a similar terroir to France, with sturdy native breeds, there is no reason, Woodhead says, why its cuisine should be inferior. “The divergence of our two cuisines occurred at the time of the Industrial Revolution,” he explains. “We started canning our food, which was ironically a French innovation, and our cuisine took a dive. The French didn’t industrialise the food chain in the same way.”
Britain’s years of spam and soggy sandwiches are over, though, which hasn’t gone unnoticed in France. “French cuisine is very serious – we have the weight of it resting on our shoulders, passed down from our grandmothers and mothers and it can be inaccessible and intimidating,” explains one diner at L’entente. “The British are much more prepared to freestyle.” This is why Woodhead was certain he had a market. The type of Parisian he targets will have eaten at Wiltons, the Delaunay and the Wolseley in London; they will buy muffins at M&S (there are 10 Simply Foods in Paris) and they will possess a stack of Jamie Oliver cookbooks.
“They’re anglophiles – they wear tweeds and eat Welsh rarebit,” he says. “And they know about le tea-time, which has become a thing in Paris.” When I tell him that my French flatmate at university was obsessed by fish and chips and used to take packets of pork pies back home on the Eurostar for her friends he shakes his fist. “You see! They say our food’s terrible but they secretly gobble it up!”
By dining at L’entente, Parisians are making a public declaration of their affection for our cuisine. French Vogue posted a picture of L’entente’s eggs Benedict on Instagram and earned more than 11,000 likes. The menu features porridge, granola and fish cakes as well as tea-time classics such as scones and Eccles cakes. Everything is homemade, including the tomato ketchup, and behind the bar are bottles of Fever-tree tonic and boxes of Earl Grey tea. As I wait for my table a new order of Paxton and Whitfield cheeses arrives from Gloucestershire. “Some of the French have said ‘English cheese! Quelle drôle d’idée’ and then they try our Stilton and our Cheddar and our Cornish yarg and they can’t believe it,” Woodhead says.
When I point out the lack of English wines, he gets a little sniffy. Surely he could at least stock Nyetimber, the gold medal-winning Sussex sparkling? He flares his nostrils in horror. “It’s delicious but I can find better champagne here for the same price,” he says. “I’m not stocking British products just for the sake of it – we’re not sponsored by the British consulate. This isn’t a cliché English-themed restaurant.”
Apart from the cheese, all his ingredients derive from small French producers: the sausages and bacon, for example, come from Las Laous black pigs raised in the Ariège mountains. “You could say that it is French food with an English twist,” he says. But I wonder, when my Scotch eggs arrive on a wooden board, crisp yet demure, followed by the shepherd’s pie, rich and intense with clouds of mash, if it is really the other way around.
Unlike most restaurants in France, L’entente is not closed during the day. Woodhead, who worked in bars and restaurants in New York for several years, was determined that his guests could drop in for a mid-morning coffee or after-dinner cocktails, seven days a week. “All my favourite restaurants in Paris are closed on Sundays and Mondays – the attitude is ‘we’re French, we deserve our time off ’,” Woodhead says. “I disagree. We’re in hospitality to give people a good time when they’re off work, even if it means working anti-social hours.” His Parisian clientele has embraced “open all hours” with gusto. François Hollande booked in for a late lunch with a friend from Le Figaro, and went into the kitchen to congratulate the chefs, and during Paris Fashion Week stylists Charlotte Stockdale and Katie Lyall hosted a late-night dinner there with guests including the supermodel Jean Campbell.
Presumably Woodhead’s girlfriend and 14-month-old son, Charlie, look less favourably on his 18-hour shifts, but he is determined to shake up Paris’s fusty restaurant scene. “It’s all become so sanitised and safe,” says Woodhead, whose colourful trousers have been ribbed by Parisian food bloggers. “When I first got here you could still feel the spirit of Serge Gainsbourg. There were 10 dive bars in St Germain; now only one of them is left.”
L’entente is definitely no dive bar. The tables are covered in starched linen and the waiters wear fetching blue tunics. There is a map of Britain on the wall and a print depicting a message to French people from General Charles de Gaulle, who was based in Carlton Gardens in London during the Second World War: “France has lost a battle! But France has not lost the war!” It is just the place Woodhead – and Paris’s anglophile gastro pilgrims – have been waiting for. If ever there was an entente cordiale, it is this.