Chef Tom Meyer
Stepping by way of the doorway door of proficient youthful chef Tom Meyer’s restaurant Granite in Paris unleashed a rush of reminiscences and likewise impressed hope all by way of a profoundly testing time. Although the COVID epidemic continues to be very fairly a bit with us, as of this writing (December 16, 2021), consuming places in France preserve open, with assiduous verification of your vaccination standing ahead of you’re allowed inside, and the Gallic gastronomic scene has recovered effectively this yr with the opening of many good new consuming places.
Disadvantaged of consuming places for a great deal of 2020, the French have a deeper, brisker and additional pressing understanding of how crucial they’re to their well-being immediately than almost positively at any time since 1945. That is in any case due to they love good meals fairly a bit, nonetheless it totally goes methodology earlier easy–or superior, gastronomic pleasure. What all of us missed terribly final yr was the simple conviviality, piquant social voyeurism, and random sociability of consuming out, since no utterly totally utterly totally different idiom extra powerfully feeds and frames the finely grained drama of day by day life than a restaurant meal.
So whereas it was thrilling for me to be trying this new restaurant for the primary time, it was furthermore a poignant event. On account of it takes an extreme quantity of braveness to open a restaurant correct now as shortly as we’re nonetheless almost flying in thick fog. The truth that folks chosen to take movement, nonetheless, seeds hope, due to it implies that this too shall go, and reminds us that we’ve generally been delivered by human ingenuity. Cooking is a act of supreme ingenuity, due to it creates pleasure from the compulsory act of day by day nourishment.
And naturally I knew this house intimately from its earlier iteration as chef Daniel Rose’s restaurant Spring. It’s been totally reworked and redecorated since Rose cooked applicable appropriate correct proper right here, although, with a kind of Scandinavian stylish look of cut-out picket paneling on the partitions and naked picket tables surrounded by cosseting topaz-upholstered pedestal chairs. The open kitchen that was a defining attribute of Spring survives, nonetheless, as Meyer’s compact and densely populated work house.
Chef Tom Meyer, 30, beforehand labored as sous-chef to Anne-Sophie Pic at her Michelin three-star restaurant in Valence and was the runner-up finalist all by the use of the Bocuse d’Or cooking opponents in Lyon in 2019. Meyer was tapped for Granite by restauranteur Stephane Manigold, who has develop to be fairly a couple of the astute judges of rising gastronomic expertise in Paris and one amongst many metropolis’s most revolutionary kind makers. Aside from Granite, Manigold’s utterly totally utterly totally different Paris consuming places embrace the great Substance, Contraste, Liquide, Maison Rostang and Bistrot Flaubert.
Figuring out and loving the lyrical implausible problem about Anne-Sophie Pic’s cooking each in Valence and at her Michelin two star restaurant on the Beau Rivage Resort in Lausanne, it was as fascinating to discern her impression on Meyer on account of it was to thrillingly uncover his non-public actual, muscular, full-bodied variety. I notably appreciated his efficiency to be elegant with out ever turning into fussy or over-complicated.
Assembly an excellent good buddy for lunch applicable appropriate correct proper right here, we reminisced relating to the cases this maintain housed Spring and chatted about how fairly a bit the gastronomic panorama in Paris has modified all by way of the nearly twenty years which have handed on account of it opened. To wit, menus are shrunken and up to date French cooking spins extra sturdy on an axis of native, seasonal produce than ever ahead of. And if Parisians, together with me, generally go to consuming places for an expertise they’re incapable of building for themselves at residence, there’s moreover now a prevailing impatience shading to disdain for the excesses of molecular cooking and likewise what I describe on account of the extraordinarily environment friendly Outward Constructive dishes in some excessive profile consuming places all by the use of the Nordic worldwide areas, which bully individuals into kind of a cowed submission.
Our first course was a grilled cepe mushroom with a sabayon flavored with meadowsweet, a wild herb, and a sauce of deeply lowered mushroom jus and white miso. A evaluation in stylish consolation meals, it was a succulent, earthy and kind of moody dish on an early winter day, Subsequent, sardines with haricots verts, Matcha seasoned pistachio oil and a salad of seaweed, an apparently naive nonetheless actually studiously superior constellation of tastes and flavors with a Japanese persona that bewildered at first nonetheless in the end delivered a bracing gust of the ocean.
An unlimited gnocci full of steamed shellfish and garnished with cockles in a lemony sauce, fennel sprigs and Vietnamese coriander had a homey attraction, nonetheless was the one disappointment of this meal, due to the actually really feel of the pasta was unpleasantly pasty. Sea bream with kale in apple juice with a gelee of lovage was a ravishingly flirtatious and actually precise dish, after which Meyer pirouetted to all by way of the course of fiercer funker tastes and textures with a juicy roast pigeon in a sauce of deeply lowered pigeon jus with inexperienced cardamom and kombawa (Japanese citrus) garnished with puffed millet and cocoa nibs.
The little filets of the hen had been impeccably cooked, and the Asian accents added some good percussion to the sauce.
Desserts had been good. The primary one was a fragile rice roll enclosing fairly a couple of spoonfuls of rice pudding, with a garnish of a Mirabelle plums stewed with vin jaune, a pleasantly resinous nod on the chef’s residence house, the Jura in japanese France. Subsequent, an dear chilly mousse of Belizean chocolate, with glasswort, a sea vegetable, and a scorching chocolate sauce infused with lemon and orange leaves was bluntly erotic after the muzzling grandmotherly hug of the rice pudding. What Meyer was providing applicable appropriate correct proper right here was consolation and sensuality in equal measure, and these traits appeared frankly good in view of the conditions we’re residing in.
Meyer is an notably gifted chef who will undoubtedly develop to be fairly a couple of the influential experience of his interval.
Granite, 6 rue Bailleul, 1st Arrondissement, Paris, Metro: Louvre-Rivoli or Les Halles. Open Monday-Friday for lunch and dinner. Closed Saturday and Sunday.
Tél (33) 01-40-13-64-06, Prix-fixe menus 58 Euros (lunch), 75 Euros (5 packages), 95 Euros (seven packages). www.granite.paris
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