LEBOVITZ: Lunch at a Legendary Restaurant in Paris

By foxytoul @ Adobe Stock

Please read the account of lunch at La Tour d’Argent by chef, author, and long-time traveling friend David Lebovitz, below. He writes in his newsletter:

I’ve been wanting to eat at La Tour d’Argent ever since I was about 10 years old. My family had an oversized book, the Picture Cook Book, published by Life magazine in 1958, which had a picture of people dining at the top-floor restaurant overlooking the Seine with Notre Dame cathedral lit up in the background. That whole book fascinated me, and I loved flipping through the pages, showing everything from California’s open-air barbecues to layouts of the fine dining establishments of Europe.

I don’t know what happened to that book, but I found a copy of it a few years ago at a bookstore in the States and gave it to a French friend, who’s interested in vintage French recipes and cookbooks. I don’t see it on his bookshelves, though, so I suspect he was less interested in global cuisines than I am.

So I can’t confirm if that’s where I saw the picture of La Tour d’Argent, since my parents’ copy is long gone, but there’s a picture taken in La Tour d’Argent in my copy of Salvador Dalí’s cookbook, Les Diners de Gala (above), which I lugged to Paris with me, originally published in 1971. I see it now selling for $13,500, which is still less than Mark Zuckerberg’s $900,000 watch, but Taschen reissued an edition of the book that’s $50 and worth it.

(But if anyone wants my copy, I’ll give you a deal…at $13,000.)

My friend Jane Bertch, owner of La Cuisine Paris cooking school, and I made an agreement last year to take ourselves out to a nice restaurant for our birthdays, which fall a few days apart at the end of December. Since most restaurants are closed during that period, and everyone’s pretty much worn out from all the food and festivities in Paris that month leading up to Christmas and New Year’s, we go out in January, when we can give each other the full attention that two people with birthdays deserve.

Last year we went to Le Clarence, set in a 19th-century private mansion, and this year, to La Tour d’Argent, known for its spectacular view (and its pressed duck, of which they’ve sold a total of 1,178,727 orders as of October 2023, and you’re handed a certificate with your number on it after you’ve had it) and which has undergone a complete remodel and transformation and recently reopened under the guidance of Chef Yannick Franques, who’s refreshed the menu in the last few years. (So it looks a little different than when Salvador Dalí ate there.)

The restaurant evolved as dining tastes and traditions have changed. (They were also reeling after a substantial wine theft last year.) But I liked the new, bright open space with an expansive open kitchen.

And to tell you the truth, I’ve eaten at some multi-starred restaurants, including some three-starred, and I’m generally disappointed. Some of it is that it’s not really my style of dining. I don’t care about being fussed over, or waiters hovering, or tiny bits of food that I’m supposed to savor. And to be honest, again, the food is generally better at smaller restaurants. But as a French friend told me when I moved to Paris, “In France, we eat to be with our friends first, the food is secondary.” So there we were.

I’d been warned about the wine list, which is something like 800 pages. It’s huge and neither one of us is a wine expert, so it took a while to peruse it and figure out what we wanted. I’ve stopped telling sommeliers or waiters that I want a “dry, minerally” white wine since they tend to steer you toward something relatively standard. And you may be missing out on some truly outstanding white wines, such as Chablis and the rounded white wines of the Jura.

It’s fashionable to say that you don’t like sweet wines, but I’ve had extra-dry, zero-dosage (no sugar added, as in “aggressively crisp and tart, the sort of thing that brings tears to your eyes”) Champagne, and it’s too steely for me and lacks finesse. Just a tiny sprinkle of sugar in a bowl of sliced strawberries brings out their natural sweetness and voluptuous flavor.

The sommelier came by to give us some help. We told her what we liked, sort of, and our budget, and she led us to two wines, one from the Jura and another, a Mâcon from Burgundy, so we chose the latter.

We’d selected the four-course fixed-price lunch (€160), which you choose when you reserve. They brought out a succession of small tastes, which began with warm Peanut-Emmenthal gougères, then came tiny little sardine tartlets, an excellent kalamata olive enrobed in something green and wonderful, and a few other savory treats, to kick things off. The flavors were bold and direct, and we were off to a good start.

The first dish was Egg Mystery, an egg slow-cooked sous-vide (above), generally at a low temperature (60ºC/140ºF) for about an hour. This one had a crust of toasted brioche breadcrumbs, a sauce they called a “mousse” of roasted celery root, and black truffles, which they certainly weren’t miserly with. It was really delicious and a miracle of culinary engineering, with the cooked egg whites separated from the yolks, which are revealed when you slice the dome open.

Next up were Scallops, each topped with little seeded biscuits served on a pool of Jerusalem artichoke cream with roasted Jerusalem artichokes. It was a lovely, seasonal dish with a rich, flavorful sauce that unexpectedly paired perfectly with the scallops. Root vegetables have taken off in Paris, which were often referred to as légumes oubliés, forgotten vegetables, and it’s nice to see they’re being fondly handled and remembered.

The dish was also close to perfect. My only suggestion would have been a few roasted, coarsely chopped hazelnuts added for a little more crunch; their earthy flavor would have married nicely with everything else on the plate. But it was very good without them.

The next course included their famous duck, here roasted with Assam pepper, along with red currants and a red cabbage and chestnut confit, which was sort of like a chutney, but without any acidic component.

Once again, it was nice to see a dish that truly reflected the season (people often say they’re cooking seasonally, then you get a dish with blackberries on it in January), with chestnuts and lowly cabbage, elevated into something special. A nice touch was the whisper-thin biscuit in the shape of a duck feather lying on top.

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