Chef Tom Meyer
Stepping by the entrance door of gifted younger chef Tom Meyer’s restaurant Granite in Paris unleashed a rush of reminiscences and in addition impressed hope throughout a profoundly testing time. Although the COVID epidemic continues to be very a lot with us, as of this writing (December 16, 2021), eating places in France stay open, with assiduous verification of your vaccination standing earlier than you’re allowed inside, and the Gallic gastronomic scene has recovered well this yr with the opening of many excellent new eating places.
Disadvantaged of eating places for a lot of 2020, the French have a deeper, brisker and extra pressing understanding of how necessary they’re to their well-being as we speak than most likely at any time since 1945. That is in fact as a result of they love good meals a lot, nevertheless it goes means past easy–or advanced, gastronomic pleasure. What all of us missed terribly final yr was the simple conviviality, piquant social voyeurism, and random sociability of eating out, since no different idiom extra powerfully feeds and frames the finely grained drama of every day life than a restaurant meal.
So whereas it was thrilling for me to be attempting this new restaurant for the primary time, it was additionally a poignant event. As a result of it takes a number of braveness to open a restaurant proper now after we’re nonetheless just about flying in thick fog. The truth that folks selected to take action, nevertheless, seeds hope, as a result of it implies that this too shall go, and reminds us that we’ve typically been delivered by human ingenuity. Cooking is a act of supreme ingenuity, as a result of it creates pleasure from the important act of every day nourishment.
And naturally I knew this house intimately from its earlier iteration as chef Daniel Rose’s restaurant Spring. It’s been utterly transformed and redecorated since Rose cooked right here, although, with a type of Scandinavian fashionable look of cut-out wood paneling on the partitions and naked wooden tables surrounded by cosseting topaz-upholstered pedestal chairs. The open kitchen that was a defining characteristic of Spring survives, nevertheless, 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 within the Bocuse d’Or cooking competitors in Lyon in 2019. Meyer was tapped for Granite by restauranteur Stephane Manigold, who has turn out to be some of the astute judges of rising gastronomic expertise in Paris and one of many metropolis’s most progressive style makers. Except for Granite, Manigold’s different Paris eating places embrace the excellent Substance, Contraste, Liquide, Maison Rostang and Bistrot Flaubert.
Figuring out and loving the lyrical fantastic thing about Anne-Sophie Pic’s cooking each in Valence and at her Michelin two star restaurant on the Beau Rivage Lodge in Lausanne, it was as fascinating to discern her affect on Meyer because it was to thrillingly uncover his personal exact, muscular, full-bodied fashion. I particularly appreciated his means to be elegant with out ever changing into fussy or over-complicated.
Assembly a pal for lunch right here, we reminisced concerning the days this deal with housed Spring and chatted about how a lot the gastronomic panorama in Paris has modified throughout the nearly twenty years which have handed because it opened. To wit, menus are shrunken and modern French cooking spins tougher on an axis of native, seasonal produce than ever earlier than. And if Parisians, together with me, typically go to eating places for an expertise they’re incapable of making for themselves at residence, there’s now a prevailing impatience shading to disdain for the excesses of molecular cooking and in addition what I describe because the troublesome Outward Sure dishes in some excessive profile eating places within the Nordic nations, which bully folks into type 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 decreased mushroom jus and white miso. A research in stylish consolation meals, it was a succulent, earthy and type 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 however truly studiously advanced constellation of tastes and flavors with a Japanese persona that bewildered at first however finally delivered a bracing gust of the ocean.
An enormous gnocci stuffed with steamed shellfish and garnished with cockles in a lemony sauce, fennel sprigs and Vietnamese coriander had a homey attraction, however was the one disappointment of this meal, as a result of the feel of the pasta was unpleasantly pasty. Sea bream with kale in apple juice with a gelee of lovage was a ravishingly flirtatious and really authentic dish, after which Meyer pirouetted to in direction of fiercer funker tastes and textures with a juicy roast pigeon in a sauce of deeply decreased 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 sensible percussion to the sauce.
Desserts had been excellent. The primary one was a fragile rice roll enclosing a number 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 area, the Jura in japanese France. Subsequent, an opulent 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 right here was consolation and sensuality in equal measure, and these traits appeared frankly excellent in view of the instances we’re residing in.
Meyer is a particularly gifted chef who will undoubtedly turn out to be some of the influential abilities of his technology.
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 programs), 95 Euros (seven programs). www.granite.paris
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