December 25, 2002

  The chef's spirit

By Paul Reidinger

THE RESTAURANT REALM , being in part physical, must obey the laws of physics, and, as we all glumly recall (or don't recall) from high school, these laws in their desiccated grandeur constitute an abstruse body of knowledge indeed. The physical facts of restaurants are, fortunately, less forbidding and fall within a narrow, stable range: there is a kitchen with pans and a stove; there is a credit card machine; there is tableware and, to arrange it on, tables; and there is, of course, food of some kind. Virtually all the variation by which we distinguish one restaurant from another occurs in another realm, the aesthetic.

But, in a certain sort of restaurant, "table" has a broader, or perhaps deeper, meaning. It refers to more than merely those flat, linen-dressed expanses upon which we rest our elbows while gazing into the eyes, or at the alluring main course, of the person seated across from us. It means the chef's sensibility, and in a certain sort of restaurant – La Table, recently opened in Laurel Heights, is one – that sensibility, distilled to its essence, can be found at the "chef's table."

At some restaurants, the chef's table is a single table, and it's often found at the edge of the kitchen itself, so that you can actually see the staff going about the business of making your food. Its romance is the romance of kitchen bustle, and of unpampered exclusivity, like driving a Hummer, if I may be permitted a perverse comparison.

La Table, the latest production of Pascal Rigo, owner of Chez Nous and Le Petit Robert and all those boulangeries, can't match that gritty intimacy, but it does have La Table du Chef, a spectacular, high-ceilinged cloister (sealed from the madding world by a set of massive doors that would do credit to a medieval fortress) in which chef Marc Rasic offers a menu (including several tasting menus) that shows modern haute French cooking at or near its best, at surprisingly modest cost. The bad news: you don't get to see him make your dinner. The good news: the ambience, aflutter with gold and green fabrics reminiscent of one of Monet's blurry forests, will make you feel as if you've been seated with all the other dignitaries at some hugely important official function.

For those of us who are fortress-minded, there can of course never be too many forbidding doors and secret rooms. But extroverts might be more comfortable in the front of the restaurant, which is basically a snazzy bistro with gorgeous banquettes done up in posh striped fabrics (the look is very much that of a high-end home furnishings shop) and very limber French cooking. We were deeply taken with a soufflé d'omelette au parmesan ($9.50), which sounds like the culinary equivalent of a run-on sentence but turned out to be a kind of golden-brown cloud of whipped eggs that would have made a fine omelet but ended up as a soufflé instead, topped with parmesan shavings and accompanied by a green salad.

For spectacle, if not heft (or satisfaction), the soufflé quite outshone an elegant pot au feu ($13), a confitlike assemblage of chicken pieces and fingerling potatoes. Given those potatoes, the pommes de terre landaises ($6) – more fingerling potatoes, braised in a veal demiglace – were probably overkill, but we ate them anyway.

No such redundancies affect the menus in the fabulously hushed rear dining room. The temper of the cooking here is high-stepping Cal-Med: Italian white anchovies ($13), with julienne bell peppers, olive oil, and baby herbs – like a huge, fancy tapa; a soupish pumpkin velouté ($9.50), given ballast by crisped veal sweetbreads; seared Sonoma duck breast ($24), on a caramelly tasting bed of diced pumpkin, turmeric, red wine, and sherry; and pieces of incomparably meaty John Dory ($25) – the world's premiere white-fleshed fish? – sautéed to a light golden crinkle and arranged atop oozings of chive and potato mousselines.

Great stuff, all of it. But the best signs that your experience at La Table du Chef is likely to be exquisite are the small touches: the slices of cucumber steeping in the table water; the amuse-bouche – for us, rabbit terrine with haricots verts and sections of mandarin orange – brought at the outset of the meal; and the petits fours – passion fruit glacés, pistachio marzipan, madeleines – brought at its close.

Little grace notes have a way of not reducing the cost of a meal, and while I wish I could tell you that La Table du Chef is inexpensive, I can't, because it isn't. Yet the experience is worth the price of the ticket; it is unlikely that any restaurant in town offers a haute-cuisine revel like La Table du Chef's at anything like its competitive price – along with a kind of casual corner where those not in the mood for the rarified atmosphere behind the big doors can take a table of their own. That last might be the ultimate little grace note, since human inclinations, as we know, can be laws unto themselves.