T Magazine: Food Matters | A Peek Inside the Hottest New Restaurant in Paris

Written By Unknown on Jumat, 10 Januari 2014 | 17.35

No one could ever accuse the French chef David Toutain of forgetting his roots. Conveyed to the table by a very serious young woman in a well-cut black pantsuit, a gently curved rectangle of white bisque porcelain contained two salsifies, which had been roasted to a deep ivory color and were accompanied by a white-chocolate cream decorated with wood sorrel and other herbs. "You dip the roots into the sauce," the waitress instructed, "and be careful, because they're hot."

Restaurant David Toutain is also burning up. It opened on a quiet side street in the Seventh Arrondissement just before Christmas and instantly became one of the most sought-after reservations in Paris. On a recent rainy Friday night, the high-ceilinged dining room — a spare, handsome space with ecru walls and custom-made walnut tables — was packed with a diverse international crowd, most of whom had first discovered Toutain's earthy but ethereal cooking when he was chef at Agapé Substance, a restaurant in St.-Germain-des-Prés. Toutain, 32, has worked with some of Paris's most famous chefs, including Bernard Loiseau, Marc Veyrat, Alain Passard (Arpège) and Andoni Luis Aduriz (Mugaritz), as well as Paul Liebrandt at Corton in New York. His cooking awes with its originality. If the two dishes that followed the roasted salsify were pleasantly satisfying — deep-fried pigskin curls to dip in a bacon emulsion and wands of smoked eel to dredge in a delicate mayonnaise — the plump oyster in a warm kiwi that followed stunned as a simple but potent cameo of unexpected tastes, bringing a dictum by the great French chef Auguste Escoffier to mind: "Cooking becomes genius when things taste of what they are." The sweet, acidic juice of the kiwi, and its delicate graininess, amplified the milky iodine-rich taste of the bivalve and underlined its silky texture.

The rhythm of the prix-fixe menu, which changes daily, is intentionally varied. Toutain composes meals so that a quiet dish, like seared foie gras in baked potato bouillon with black truffles, sets up the drama of another dish meant to dazzle, like a monochromatic white composition of cuttlefish with yuba (bean-curd sheet) and nearly translucent Parmesan gnocchi, seasoned with the juice extracted from cooking the cheese at a very low temperature for many hours. Toutain also loves vegetables and frees them from the bit part they often play in French cooking, with dishes like coddled egg in sunny yellow cream of corn, or a dessert of Jerusalem artichokes, both roasted and as the flavoring for ice cream, served with shards of praline.

"My grandparents lived on a farm and every summer during vacations there, meals would begin with crudités from their garden," Toutain says. "I never really thought about it then, but the purity of those tastes became a compass point for me." He cites Dan Barber of Blue Hill as an influence and proudly calls attention to the carefully sourced table accessories in his restaurant, including recycled carving knives cut down to table size by a Belgian metalsmith, handmade ceramics by a Brussels potter and dishes from Pieter Stockmans, another Belgian. "I don't want a beautiful restaurant," he adds. "I want a unique one."


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