Handle: 80, rue Sedaine, 75011
Hours: Open Tuesday-Friday for lunch & dinner. Open Saturday & Sunday for dinner solely. Closed Monday.
Phone: + 33 1 43 57 59 68
Web site / Fb / Instagram
What does it take to make a pure wine bar stand out in an arrondissement saturated with pure wine bars? Coup d’Oeil, a protracted, slender spot tucked within the shadow of a nook brasserie, is seemingly banking on ostentatious design to differentiate itself from rivals.
The institution’s very identify – French for “a look” – calls consideration to its crazy inside. A canoe-shaped communal desk is flanked by sinuous waveform picket bars spanning the partitions. Overhead are extra waveform cut-outs of the identical barely cheap-looking wooden, partially obscuring a much-needed skylight within the rear kitchen. General, it creates the feeling of being trapped in a diagram of geological strata.
On the Left Financial institution, the place Coup d’Oeil proprietor David Rougier made his identify at L’Epure and later at Bar Etna, extravagant restaurant design is a presumably useful method to reassure vacationers and rich Parisians of the worth of pure wines. Within the youthful, much less conservative eleventh, it’s pointless. The truth is, it undermines an institution’s credibility in serving pure wine by implicitly insisting on its luxurious standing in a neighborhood the place it has turn into as regular as craft beer.
The restaurant’s dedication to communal seating could be laudable have been it not for a scarcity of follow-through in service type. Reservations are insensibly inspired for particular clusters of bar seats. Getting into Coup d’Oeil at apéro hour, then, one is directed away from these closest to the entrance home windows to these within the restaurant’s dim center depths, overlooking the stairway to the bathroom.
Such inflexible seating coverage is acceptable to bars at vacation spot eating places providing extremely sought-after delicacies. It’s simply absurd at Coup d’Oeil, the place the small-plates menu consists of the identical pleasing charcuterie, cheeses, preserves, and easy heat dishes out there at any random cave-à-manger. A plate laden with white-and-violet cash of Galician octopus is nice and simple to share however lacks salt and acid. An oeuf-mayo arrives trying lonely, clad in a stray lettuce leaf. Razor clams with garlic and parsley fill the room with their perfume. Their tender tendrils are impeccably seasoned, however one senses the plate’s success is the work of nature, not a chef in control of a critical kitchen.
In sum, Coup d’Oeil’s providing differs from that of a typical cave-à-manger solely in its overwrought inside design and its greater wine costs, which method extra normal restaurant margins. The wine choice itself is a predictable roll-call of nice pure winemakers from Christian Binner to Thierry Puzelat to Jean Foillard. Their present vintages are already well-represented all throughout east Paris. Wine geeks needn’t flock right here for any discoveries.
Coup d’Oeil in Footage
In Different Phrases
Le Fooding (2018) says Coup d’Oeil is cool and “value a glance.”
Le Figaro
(2018) communicates quite much less in its overview than with its headline, which
emphasizes Coup d’Oeil’s communal seating and lunch service. These points are
newsworthy as a result of Parisians hate communal seating at lunch.
Time Out (2018) applauds Coup d’Oeil for presenting a design and a wine checklist hardly ever seen elsewhere. On this latter level, one can solely presume that it was the reviewer’s first-ever go to to the eleventh arrondissement.
