French cuisine in Philadelphia

I didn’t come looking for Parisian dining when I set out to explore French restaurants in Philadelphia. I came instead to examine the ways in which chefs and restaurateurs present French cuisine in the City of Brotherly Love and to decide which I would recommend and return to given the opportunity.

The round-up that follows is the fruit of extensive though not exhaustive investigation. Some will contend that I was more interested in the overall experience of French dining in Philadelphia than the cuisine itself. They would be right.

As with all restaurants reviewed and described on France Revisited, I’m looking to enjoy the company of table companions (Bingo! on all accounts) and to find a client-friendly atmosphere, knowledgeable service, fresh produce, cooking skills no less promising than the menu, a price no more ambitious than the combination of the previous four, and anything else that marks a meal.

What I encountered along the way are entrées, toilettes, crêpes, musiques, and Georges.

The Entrée
La Minette, at 6th and Bainbridge, was the first of the restaurants I tested for this article so it was here that I first encountered French restaurant talk à la Philadelphie. Since I’d recently debarked after seven months in France, it confused the francophied emulsion between my ears to have the waiter ask what I wanted for my entrée immediately after I order what I thought to be my entrée.

I know of course that we Americans call the main course the entrée. But I know, too, that in French the entrée indicates the entrance to the meal, meaning the appetizer, whereas le plat (principal) refers to the main dish or course. So having ordered what my mind was telling me was l’entrée only to have a man dressed as a French waiter ask me what I then wanted for my entrée threw me for a loop. I must have shown an expression of foreign incomprehension because he looked back the same way.

It isn’t easy coming home.

After trying a half-dozen other French restaurants in Philadelphia I realize that everyone, including the French restaurateurs, uses the same faux French restaurant terminology. The appetizer is called the hors d’oeuvre even though everyone knows that an hors d’oeuvre is what you have when you’re waiting for a wedding reception to begin, and the main course is called the entrée, even though those who have been to France know that the entrée is what you order when someone else is footing the bill.

I understand that this linguistic pirouette is simply an effort to make the wining and dining experience in America French yet accessible and that it is an English-language phenomenon rather than a Philadelphia phenomenon. Still it’s unnerving to me. I say that out of habit rather than snobbery. It’s like an Englishman who comes to America and hears people windging about how pissed they are; he naturally wonders why they don’t ever suggests going to a proper pub so that they can all get pissed together.

While on the subject of language, I note that La Minette has an unfortunate name that would translate as the kitty if referring to your pussy cat, the darling if referring to your precious loved one, and that hot chick if referring to a girl who probably has a fake ID, none of which is terribly appetizing when you want your duck served medium rare and a glass of pinot.

Nevertheless, I found La Minette, opened in the fall of 2008, to be quite earnest in its effort to be a French bistro. The décor is pleasant industrio-French, the music is a-notch-too-high French, the menu is appetizingly classic and varied French. This isn’t wow food, and the kitchen might try adding some condiments and sauces to enhance its dishes, but still I’d go back, and I’d know what to say when asked about my entrée.

Les Toilettes
Olivier Desaintmartin owns and operates the French restaurants that are the most authentic of the seven that I tried in Philadelphia.

By authentic I mean that they’re effortlessly French. Olivier doesn’t seem to be trying too hard to be the proverbial French chef-restaurateur. That could be because he actually is a French chef-restaurateur, yet some French people try to be too French sometimes—I come across them all the time in France.

Olivier’s Caribou Café, at 11th and Walnut, is simply a welcoming place to go for a meal, a snack, or a drink. What I like about Caribou is that it’s essentially an American bar that serves French food. Sure the waiters here, as in all of these restaurants, have a you’ll-love-it-it’s-French approach to describing some dishes, something that doesn’t happen in, say, Mexican or Chinese restaurants in Philadelphia, but at least they’re polite about it.

Altogether, Olivier and Caribou don’t come across as looking up or down on anyone. As a result I enjoyed a good, moderately-priced meal here that would be worth repeating.

Olivier’s second restaurant, Zinc, around the corner from Caribou on 11th,  is a small, cozy restaurant with a zinc bar. Zinc promotes itself as a bistro à vins, which is quite the fashion in France, where every awning promises something à vins (bar à vins, bistro à vins, restaurant à vins) to indicate that the owner knows something about wine, as though other bistros are operated by people who know about nothing but water, with or without gas.

Similarly, Olivier, 47, who comes from Picardy, in northern France, tells everyone that he’s from Champagne because he thinks that it gives him extra mileage in running French restaurants, as though being French weren’t enough.

He came to the U.S. in 1986 to become the hands-on chef of a new French restaurant then about to open in New York, the soon-to-be great Le Bernadin. After a year he moved onto other opportunities but I’ll spare you the C.V. because what really interests me about Zinc—after the warm oyster and spinach in a puff pastry, the thick pork chop au gratin, and the pinot—is the fact that the word “Toilette” on the door of the WC is missing an s.

You see, in French the loo is always plural, les toilettes, even if there’s just one; in a restaurant or in someone’s home you would ask Où sont les toilettes, s’il vous plaît? One wonders if maybe Olivier is lying about more than being from Champagne; perhaps he isn’t from France at all but rather from Belgium since, in a quirk of European linguistics, while the French write toilettes the Francophone Belgians write toilette. Notice the missing, though silent, s.

Hence the following Belgian joke:

Why is it “toilettes” in France and “toilette” in Belgium? Because in Belgium you find a clean one on the first try while in France you have to look into several before find one that’s clean.

(By the way, Zinc only has one and it was clean that night.)

When I inquired about Olivier s-less toilette he told me that a French [Belgian?] waitress who worked there made the sign to make him happy and that he didn’t want to disappoint her by changing it. Then he told me that he would be going to France soon and was planning on getting a correctly spelled enamel sign while there.

I’m not going back to either of Olivier’s restaurants until he does. Then I’ll be happy to return.

(Post note, 6 weeks later: Olivier has put up the new toilettes sign.)

Noises
One of my pet restaurant peeves is the music, perhaps because I spend most of my time in a country that isn’t big on restaurant music (though it’s been creeping in), perhaps because I prefer the rhythms of table conversation, perhaps because restaurants make such awful musical choices. If you can’t choose the right music and set it at the right volume how can you choose fresh salmon and time it right?

France Revisited is therefore happy to announce the 2009 winner of worst musical choices in a French-like business in Philadelphia. In the restaurant category the Musical Frog goes to Coquette for its loud, supermarket Christmas music. Admittedly it was December, but couldn’t they at least have found some bad French supermarket Christmas music? There were only two other tables going that evening so I asked the waitress to turn it down, which she did one inadequate notch. On the plate, meanwhile, the onion soup missed the boat, but the fat sea scallops and clams were quite nice. They also have an oyster bar, but I don’t expect to go back to try it.

In the café category, the Musical Frog goes to Miel, the French bakery/café in the French Quarter. The bakery part was welcoming enough, with good croissants and pretty-looking cakes. But while trying to take advantage of the café part I was attacked as if by mosquitoes by a scratchy rap played over the loudspeaker as though someone had set a bad clock radio circa 1985 and forgotten to turn it off. Why the staff was oblivious to this I don’t know. I would return to the take-counter, but if Miel ever wonders why so few people linger over coffee I think I have the answer.

Rittenhouse Square and the War to End All Wars
Rittenhouse Square—with its curved walkways à la Parc Monceau in Paris and its central sculpture “Lion Crushing a Serpent” by French sculptor Antoine-Louis Bayre (the original, which belongs to the Louvre, is at Atlanta’s High Museum as part of its “The Louvre and the Masterpiece” exhibition until September 2009)—is the center of what Philadelphia has designated as its French Quarter. Facing out onto the square is the restaurant that received the most Franco-Philly buzz in 2008, Parc.

Parc is one of many restaurants and bars owned by Stephen Starr, the region’s most prolific restaurateur. Each establishment is highly stylized in its own way. Here the style is a cross between a grand old train station café and Le Grand Colbert, the historical brasserie in Paris where Diane Keaton is dining with Keanu Reeves before being joined by Jack Nickelson.

I found the fare at Parc pleasant and palatable—onion soup, onion tart called pissaladière, mussels, a hefty lamb shank, a thick duck confit, a heavy pot de crème—the service smiley and attentive, and the noise level mind-boggling. They could be blasting Jingle Bells over the sound system and you wouldn’t hear it over the shouting—except in the handsome restrooms that continue the old train station theme.

Of all Philadelphia’s French restaurants Parc has the décor where a deaf Parisian arriving at the train station from heavy shelling in Verdun would feel most at home. For the hearing, this is the place to dine if you want to feel like you’re in Paris’s Gare de l’Est or Gare du Nord train station when word arrives that the Germans have just signed the Armisitice ending WWI up near Compiègne.

Parc, as I say, has decent food, it’s well laid out, it’s well staffed, and it’s loud—and those are the reasons for its success. Like a shell-shocked warrior I’m iffy about returning to the fray, though, however gentile this fray may be. Yet I would return for breakfast or for morning or afternoon coffee so as enjoy a moment of relative calm overlooking Rittenhouse Square.

Crêpes
Beau Monde mostly serves crepes. There are other dishes on the menu as well. In fact, some of those other dishes are actually inside the crepes, such as a boeuf bourgignon crepe and a coq au vin crepe. I stayed away from those.

When you go for a crepe you want to keep it simple, that’s what I say. You don’t want actual prepared dishes in your crepe; you just want them to make a buckwheat crepe, put a few savory edibles on top, fold the crepe shut, let it sit on the griddle for a minute, then call it an entrée (one doesn’t normally order an entrée in a French creperie because the crepe is the entrée: refer to La Minette if confused by that sentence). Then repeat with a wheat crepe and sweet edibles and call it dessert.

Get fancy with the flour if you like but not with the ingredients. Cookbook writers may disagree but they’re just trying to impress you with their creativity. Believe me, keep it simple.

My dinner companion said that he was disappointed because his crepe wasn’t anything special but I think he missed the point: crepes aren’t anything special, they’re just thin pancakes with tasty, non-special stuff inside. Of course they’re special in that you might not have them very often, but generally speaking they’re nothing special.

Anyway, the stuff inside the crepe was good enough for me, but I must warn you that Beau Monde’s menu of supplementary stuff to put in a crepe is so confusingly priced that it’s best not to even think of adding anything extra like a roasted leek to your Cajun gumbo crepe. Keep it simple, that’s what I say.

Crepes naturally cost a few more pesos in Philadelphia than in Paris, which can cause greater expectations than one should actually have. I’m not surprised to pay a bit more here than in Paris, just as in Paris you shouldn’t be surprised to pay $20 for an ordinary hamburger (but good frites) and an imported beer (Bud). As far as I’m concerned words that wear hats, as true French crêpes do, deserve a mark-up.

Overall I liked Beau Monde well enough because a crepe’s basically a crepe as long as the crepe batter is decent, freshly poured, and immediately served. Not sure how recent the pouring was her but in any case a little beer in the batter would help.

Crepes, by the way, though found throughout France, are actually regional fare from Brittany and by extension neighboring Normandy, regions where creperies proliferate. In the absence of grapes to ferment, they ferment apples in those regions, so hard cider is the drink of choice to go with a crepe. Hence the Vermont cider served at Beau Monde which, though flatter than what I’m used to in France, did the trick

A Philly Francophile friend swears by La Creperie, located near Rittenhouse Square, but regrettably I didn’t get there on this trip. I checked it out online though and found the words “Our décor is tastefully French with an exotic accent” quite intriguing. The menu looks authentic enough, though I have my doubt about the list of “pizza crepes,” which sounds like a contradiction in terms to me. Think crepe, think simple, that’s what I say.

Georges Perrier
Georges is another French word with an s, as in Georges Perrier, who has been the region’s most prominent figure in French cuisine for more than three decades now. Having earned much kudos throughout his career, he is the French chef of the Philadelphia region who is the most incontournable, a French term that means you can’t get around mentioning him. His restaurant Le Bec-Fin put Franco-Philly dining on the map in the 1970s and became an dining institution by the mid-1980s.

I did not include Le Bec-Fin on this recent testing expedition, however, for the simple reason that two years ago I had a good meal here and didn’t deem it appropriate to $400+ for dinner for two for another merely good meal. In my review at the time I noted that at Le Bec’s price and for Le Bec’s pretensions one should get not good but excellent. I don’t even like to iron a shirt for anything less than very good.

Do not consider those comments a review of Le Bec-Fin circa 2009. First, because two restaurant years is like twenty human years. Second, because Le Bec-Fin has changed since Georges Perrier declared last year that he was getting out of the race for guidebook stars, and today’s menu shows more palatable numbers.

The Perrier enterprise is nevertheless incontournable as far as Franco-Philadelphia goes, and I would have been remiss to ignore his restaurants altogether. So I chose to test his Brasserie Perrier, just a block away from Le Bec-Fin, and found it much to my liking. The waiter was knowledgeable, the onion soup with its sherry-spiked veal and chicken stock was by far the best of the four onion soups I tried in Philadelphia during this period, the mussels were fresh and meaty, the frites were tasty and plentiful, the salmon was well timed, the gruyere burger (the cheese and the medium rare made it French) was tender and delicious, the atmosphere, music and all, had a nice sense of well-being with a touch of class, and the bill was appropriately moderate.

It was the best French meal I had in Philadelphia during this trip. Then a week after I ate there the restaurant, which opened in 1997, suddenly closed, something having to do with amicable relations with the landlord, said the sign out front. I am proud to say that I enjoyed one of the last onion soups at Brasserie Perrier.

But incontournable Georges Perrier and quite contournable moi are clearly out of sync. I hit his calling-card restaurant in a slump and his fine brasserie while the chef-entrepreneur was flipping the bird bidding a sweet adieu to the landlord.

© 2009, Gary Lee Kraut
Links and addresses for businesses in order of appearance in this article

La Minette, 623 South 6th Street (across from Beau Monde), tel. 215-925-8000. www.bistrolaminette.com.
Caribou Café, 1126 Walnut Street, tel. 215-625-9535. www.cariboucafe.com.
Zinc, 246 South 11th Street, tel. 215-351-9901. www.zincbarphilly.com.
Coquette, corner of 5th Street and Bainbridge Street, tel. 215-238-9000. www.coquettebistro.com.
Miel, 204 South 17th Street, tel. 215-731-9191. www.mielpatisserie.com.
Parc, 227 South 18th Street, tel. 215-545-2262. www.parc-restaurant.com.
Beau Monde, corner of 6th Street and Bainbridge Street, tel. 215-592-0656. www.creperie-beaumonde.com.
La Creperie, 1722 Sansom Street, tel. 215-564-6460. www.lacreperie-cafe.com.
Le Bec-Fin and Le Bar Lyonnais, its downstairs bar and dining area. 1523 Walnut Street, tel. 215-567-1000. www.lebecfin.com.