FRESH TAKE ON FRENCH
Lucienne at Hotel Alessandra brings modern, chic sensibility to cuisine
To get to Lucienne, the sophisticated modern French restaurant in the Hotel Alessandra, you climb two flights of steep, grand staircase made of pale marble. You can cheat and take the elevator hidden behind a wall, but rising through this stark, epic space under your own horsepower is part of the drama.
At the top, there’s a sleek little bar around a corner and a wine-walled hallway that leads you to my favorite new dining room in the city.
I laughed a little in pleasure and delight at my first sight of the pearly-green-and-silver color scheme; the clever round mirrors ranged along the banquettes; the plump little armchairs; and the filmy sweep of pastoral-printed toile that dressed the window walls to the halfway mark, leaving glimpses of downtown above. It was chic, curvaceous and — dare I say it? — even romantic in a cheeky postmodern way.
Chef Jose Hernandez and his team are delivering food to match the fresh, unexpected surroundings, from an electric little deviled quail egg that might materialize as an amuse bouche, to the thinny-thin apple tart (a Hernandez signature) that writes a finish.
In between, diners can choose either well-priced fourcourse or six-course tasting menus, with wine pairings adding $40 or $55, respectively, to the tab; or for an à la carte menu, which is optional at dinner and standard at lunch.
Hernandez’s precise French technique and modern sensibility make a refreshing addition to downtown’s — and
Houston’s — current dining choices. This is not a city where French cuisine has made much headway, and despite the hotel’s online insistence that Lucienne is “Mediterranean” (a useless umbrella term if ever there were one), Hernandez’s food seems very French at heart.
His dreamy cream of artichoke soup tastes so deeply of artichoke that I am pretty sure Escoffier himself would approve. On the lunch menu, there’s a modernized version of boeuf bourguignon that captures the winy profundity of the classic, while searing the meltingly tender beef in a Texas-friendly way and adding sumptuous glazed shallot hunks and intense little baby carrots. Add a glass of excellent St. Joseph (one of my favorite red Rhones), and you’ve got one of the best “sense of occasion” lunches in town.
Just as satisfying at dinnertime is sliced duck breast (rare if you request) with tart/sweet huckleberry sauce and a contrast of baby turnip that is ever so gently bitter. It’s unfussy and effective.
Hernandez is adept with the expected luxury staples such as variously garnished foie gras (although I prefer his mousse and torchon treatments to the seared version, with accessories that read too sweet for me). Lobster? You betcha, whether it be a pristine lunch-menu lobster roll on some of the formidable housebaked bread or a delicate dinner-menu preparation of silky claw with a rectangle of fennel-flavored bread pudding and the surprise tang of brown butter flavored with saba, a balsa mic like syrup made from reduced grape must. Either way, the lobster meat reigns supreme.
If the menu reads “tartare,” my advice is to order it. Finely diced raw lamb smoothed with quail-egg yolk and sharpened with mustard is seasoned with a crunch of shallot and chive. Minced Gulf shrimp in an open-ended glass globe rings with oceanic notes of salmon roe and dashi gel. They make clean, fresh interludes in a tasting menu or a wonderful small plate, grabbed at the welcoming counter that faces the kitchen, with a glass of wine to go along.
Fish at Lucienne is treated with great respect. It might be a simple seared salmon at lunchtime, satiny and oceanic-tasting on its deftly cooked bed of spinach and asparagus, with a lilting, lemony beurre blanc lighting the way. Or, from the dinner menu, halibut or flounder in a joyous citrus vinaigrette, accessorized with tomato, zucchini and the Provencal chickpea-flour cake known as panisse.
Shellfish other than lobster turned my head here, too. I am not a scallop person, but I loved the seared version perched on a “saffron crawfish broth” that was more of a head-spinning, thick bisque tasting of delicious crawfish fat and shells. Dungeness crab hacked up with chickpeas, chorizo and tomato with lots of bright lemon was fun to eat, even if the character of the crabmeat ended up taking a back seat.
The classically trained Hernandez concentrated on pastry back in his days at Bistro Moderne and Philippe, and he breaks loose at Lucienne with a stupendous pithivier entree, the crown-shaped puff pastry enclosing a light rich duxelles of mushroom and sweetbreads. A dark port reduction alongside adds a rich, seductive tang. There’s nothing like it in the city.
Yet Hernandez’s facility as a pastry chef very occasionally leads him in a sweet direction that seems out of place. I puzzled over an interesting-sounding morel mushroom pot de creme that cloyed rather than enticed as a first course, despite its ravishing little Parmesan biscotti on the side.
I found myself wishing instead for one of the clean, brisk salads that energize the lunch menu: the tumble of beet with a startling pumpkin pesto; or the simple toss of endive with slivers of Gala apple and crumbled blue cheese. When a chef is as adept at salads as Hernandez, I kind of hate to see the genre banished to the lunch menu only.
The desserts, of course, are gorgeous: from the delicate apple tart (the finest in Houston, in my opinion) to a deconstructed vacherin, its rubble of crisp meringue laced with raspberries and pale-green pistachio mousse, all housed in a glass bubble under a flying saucer of green-etched white chocolate. It’s like some otherworldly terrarium, except you can eat it.
Although Lucienne has yet to be discovered by the kinds of crowds that would keep it humming, the service is excellent: attentive but not too, friendly but not too, attuned to little details. I was glad to see the talented Ludovic Poirier added to the team as wine director recently. The wine service was already good; and now I expect the iPad list to get even better.
Worth noting: Like the moderately priced tasting menus, the wine is relatively affordable, with a markup only 1.5 times wholesale.
If I were a hotel guest, I’d be delighted with Lucienne as my in-house restaurant.
As a Houstonian and a downtown booster, I’m just as happy. You can find me in one of those rounded, pearly-green armchairs, gazing past the toile curtains at a steel-gridded vortex that looks like that contraption that hurled Jodie Foster into outer space in “Contact.” I’m not kidding. See to believe.