French, actually
Don’t be misled by the name: Le Samourai serves classic dishes from France. And, says David Burton, they are rather good.
“Great!” said my companion when I told her we were going to a new bar called Samurai. “I love Japanese food.”
The mistake is easily made, since only fans of French cinema will recognise “Le Samourai” as an oblique reference to a fake quote from the Bushido code in the opening scene of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 neo-noir crime thriller.
Le Samourai is filmed in colour so desaturated it looks like black and white. Cool and minimal the bar is too, being too small to allow any more than a handful of narrow tables and skeletal tall chairs, comfortably padded and backed. There’s no artwork, just eight horizontal lines painted on the wall to represent a police line-up.
In keeping with the intimacy of the place, FOH Peter Lowry, late of the Chow tiki bar, brings his full personality to the fore, with stories like the time his father broke down in France and couldn’t get the garage mechanics to understand a word of his fluent French, as it was spoken with a thick Northern Irish accent. But when Dad committed it all to paper, the mechanics marvelled at this idiot-savant who spoke in tongues yet wrote perfect French.
Falling in with the spirit of things, I left all alcohol-matching decisions to Peter and more importantly to the bartender/manager Ryan McKenna, son of Larry, who came to the table and poured my companion a superb sparkling glass of Escarpment Blanc de Blanc 2012, which he himself had helped Larry to make.
For me: a Lillet, a white vermouth from Bordeaux, made with chardonnay grapes and fortified with a type of grappa.
At $10 a glass, I was more than delighted with a Cote du Rhone from Jean-Luc Colombo, a rock star in the region, with vineyards up and down the valley.
This was to accompany the Coq Au Vin, for once not deconstructed with broccolini or messed around with in any sense: it was a moist, tender whole leg rendered of its fat, served with deliciously reduced red wine gravy and juicy lardons, mushrooms and baby onions.
The rillettes, too, are made in the classically refined manner of Tours. Entirely unsuitable for vegans, glutoids or the lactose-intolerant, they’re served with crunchy thin melba toast (100 per cent wheat) and again, are not tweaked with tuna, nor with salmon – just the glorious heart-stopping fattiness of the original pulled pork, lard and butter. My companion, who had previously thought she didn’t like pork rillettes, helped me demolish the pot quick smart.
For my part, I was happy to steal her tasty thin slices of saucisson sec, made in the Pyrenees.
The intense, custardy cheese quiche, Peter admitted somewhat apologetically, is bought in, mainly because nobody else can cook quiche like Sophie at French CanCan (I totally agree). Sophie also supplies the daytime pastries here, but the very creditable Tarte au Citron is made in-house.
Le Samourai, you see, is owned by the folk at Chow/The Library upstairs. The food is sent down from the kitchen at The Library, having been cooked under the supervision of group head chef Kristan Mulcahy, formerly sous-chef at Logan Brown.
The plates are not filled out with spuds and veges, so diners will probably have room for a cheese course, each with its matching wine and garnishes.
Eat the almost challengingly ripe raw milk Brie de Meaux if you must, but those who order the goat’s cheese or the Swiss Tete de Moin get to enjoy the ripaille ritual, whereby Peter cranks a Swiss shaving device to form prettily crinkled little “chanterelles”.