Guilty pleasure of S.F.’s French bistros
There are so damn many French bistros in San Francisco.
In my neighborhood, there’s Le P’tit Laurent, owned and operated by Laurent Legendre, who also recently opened Chez Marius in Noe Valley. Before that, he started Clementine in the Inner Richmond. Clementine is now Chapeau, but it still trades in home-style French cooking. Over in my editor’s neighborhood, the spot is Gamine. Near Forest Hill, there’s a narrow corridor of a restaurant called ChouChou. Set back into the corner of two tree-lined streets in Duboce Triangle is L’Ardoise. For 20 years, one of the owners of L’Ardoise ran Le Charm in SoMa, which lives on as Cafe Mathilde under the stewardship of a former employee, Mathilde Gravel.
That’s maybe half of them. Sheer prevalence aside, there are two reasons why I find these places remarkable. First off, the menus are all incredibly similar — the hits are always there — and I don’t believe any of them really stands head and shoulders above the rest, execution-wise. But what really boggles my mind is that these places are perpetually packed with happy diners, in spite of some jarring anachronisms.
Let’s start with the bread. We live in a great baking region, during an age of outstanding bread. I mean, say whatever you want about the state of dining around the world, but the bread is getting better. And San Francisco is the epicenter of the movements driving modern bread: fresh flour milled from whole grains, high-hydration doughs, long fermentation. Yet when the bread basket drops at a San Francisco bistro, you’re almost always going to find unremarkable wedges of sweet, store-bought baguette. I’ve got nothing against baguettes. I just find the practice a little lazy, and I can’t help but feel that these places are phoning it in.
Then there’s the truffle oil. Weren’t we all supposed to have wised up to this stuff ? It doesn’t taste or smell like truffles. Sure, at first whiff it stinks in that acceptable way, like one’s own flatulence, but by the time it reaches your face, it reeks of someone else’s fart. Recently, while having an otherwise pleasant dinner at L’Ardoise, I was saddened to catch a deep hit of 2, 4-dithiapentane — that’s the chemical compound employed in truffle oil to approximate the musk of real truffle — from a plate of mushrooms wrapped in puff pastry. The truth is that relatively few things need truffle, and nothing needs truffle oil.
I know — First World problems, right? While I’m letting my inner food snob out, I might as well grumble for a moment about seasonality. Like a gambler frittering away the hours in a Vegas casino, the diner at a San Francisco bistro may be forgiven for losing all track of time outside. The San Francisco bistro menu is largely impervious to season: braises, casseroles, steaks and fish, and all manner of potato preparations that can be replicated yearround. Fresh vegetable service is spotty. The other night at Cafe Mathilde, my butter lettuce salad came with exactly two halves of a cherry tomato. I pushed around the leaves of the salad with my fork to see if I could uncover more, but in the end there was just the lone pair, marooned since summer.
Of course, none of this really matters to anyone but over-informed diners like me. Let me reiterate that these these bistros are generally pretty mobbed, and I doubt that any of my gripes about fart oil, sad tomatoes or boring bread will have any effect on that fact.
So how are we supposed to think about these restaurants? One view is that these are simple neighborhood spots and that I should take my fussiness elsewhere. But that’s not entirely fair. These bistros aren’t terrifically expensive, but they’re not cheap either. I don’t think you’re spending significantly less on dinner than if you were eating at Liholiho Yacht Club, or Rich Table, or Kin Khao. The snob wants to grab the diners by the shoulders and scream at them about all the more adventurous, au courant places they could be eating. The cynics aim their vitriol at the restaurants themselves: These bistros are selling us a cosplay fantasy of Paris that they know exists only in our imaginations.
It’s perhaps instructive to note that these bistros are mostly run by French owners. And when one of them decides to retire or move on, they often pass them to another French owner. They are, at their cores, immigrant restaurants. And like so many immigrant-run businesses, they aim to please. It shows in the service, which is almost always gracious, attentive, patient and accommodating. At the very worst, you could say it’s insincere because who really wants to be that nice to people?
Case in point, during that same dinner with the butter lettuce salad at Mathilde, one of the owners noticed that my wife and I had brought our baby with us, and scurried over to offer a high chair. At that time, our sad-sack 3-month-old didn’t yet have the muscular control to command a chair of her own, but she’d already accompanied us to her fair share of restaurants. Nobody had ever offered her a place to sit. I instantly forgave the tomatoes.
The food at these bistros, which I chided earlier for being repetitive, is only so because that’s what we ask for. French onion soup is pad Thai. Does the French staff eat it every day? No. Do they want to serve it every day? Hell no. But it’s where the money is. If these bistros are selling an unrealistic fantasy, so is the sushi chef, the wok cook and the taquero. Not to mention the Michelinstarred chef.
For me, these bistros are a guilty pleasure — one I indulge with some frequency.
I stick to Le P’tit Laurent because I find that a neighborhood restaurant loses some of its romance if it’s not in your neighborhood. We go once every couple months. I always begin with a Ricard, because it makes me feel sophisticated to pour a little water into my glass and watch the pastis turn cloudy, just like its more fiery and alcoholic forebear, absinthe. As for my dinner order, I pretend like I’m not going to get a bowl of onion soup, but who am I kidding? And then it’s nearly always the cassoulet for me. What’s wrong with cheesy onion soup or duck confit that peels off the bone? And who can argue with crisp-fried potatoes?
These places are comfortable. I don’t necessarily mean comfortable in the comfort-food sense (although that applies, too). What I mean is that you’re in little danger of feeling silly or outclassed. Back at Mathilde, I overheard a woman at a nearby table say excitedly to her companion, “I’ve never ordered bone marrow before!” — and it made me so happy. An unfortunate combination of arrogance and self-consciousness usually squelches my own excitement about trying something for the first time. I liked being in the presence of enthusiastic diners.
I thought about other people in my own life who might still get a thrill from trying dishes they’ve heard of, but never seen. My mom came to the U.S. from Taiwan in her 20s. She and my dad have done well in the States, made a nice life for their family, and watched with active interest as I’ve burrowed deeper and deeper into the world of restaurants and food writing. She’s in her 70s now and she’s never been to France — or Europe, for that matter — but she wants to go. I think she’d like it.
Anyway, Mom and I don’t often get a chance to dine together, just the two of us, but she was coming to town for a visit and I thought she’d get a kick out of tasting some classic French bistro cooking. Having already visited a few too many of the aforementioned restaurants in recent weeks, I booked us a table at Monsieur Benjamin.
Monsieur Benjamin is a bistro. You’ll find a lot of the same dishes on the menu for about the same price as the other bistros in San Francisco. The difference, of course, is that Monsieur Benjamin is a Corey Lee restaurant. Lee is Korean, perhaps the most respected chef in America, and the holder of three Michelin stars for his elegant and innovative restaurant Benu.
To be honest, I’d long ago made my verdict about Monsieur Benjamin. Bistro cuisine is too messy for Corey Lee. He’s too exacting for his own good, too intellectual, not willing to let “good enough” be. I hadn’t visited his bistro in a long time.
What I found was that the restaurant had settled into itself. There had been time to get a little scuff on the floors, and for a specific energy to develop. It was bustling on a Thursday night — buzzy but not hectic. The menu was largely as I remembered it from the early days. We ordered sweetbreads, which Mom said she’d maybe had before in a Chinese soup, but never like this: breaded and fried crisp on the outside, tender and meaty within. We shared a thick puck of foie gras terrine, a bright but unflashy butter lettuce salad, oeufs mayonnaise and crab remoulade. I was really pleased to find my darling cassoulet on the menu, and even more pleased when it arrived in its earthenware dish, rustic as ever, a light topsoil of crunchy breadcrumbs hiding all manner of riches below.
As Mom and I ate, I considered how to talk about this place, with its classical French cuisine and Korean owner, its familiar menu and modern sensibility. It is distinct from its ilk yet cut from the same cloth.
Another bistro, another immigrant restaurant.