Not long ago, someone told me that the higher-ups at a French airline, which shall remain nameless, were trying to get the foot soldiers to be nice to Americans so they could attract more high-value-added passengers to their transatlantic routes. The idea was to get the staff to smile, things like that. One of the employees attending the course just couldn’t see the point. Why smile at people? Why do like the Americans? We know it’s all phony.

I am telling you this because I have just made a resolution never to mention waiterly sullenness again. We shall take it as a given, a permanent crease in the French psyche (with the exception of the unfailingly friendly staff at Galopin, the favorite restaurant of my dog Bertie the gastro-hound). I will say hardly a word about staff attitude at L’Avant Goût. I will talk about the food. And the other diners.

Such a lot of gushing has been written about L’Avant Goût (which translates as “foretaste”) that I feel a bit churlish, or at least beset by doubts, about being underwhelmed by the experience and not falling in with the consensus.

I started the meal with a velouté d’artichauts acidulée, quenelle de tourteau (cream of artichoke soup with preserved lemon and a blob of crabmeat). The first surprise was that it was chilled (in March?). The second was that it didn’t taste like any artichokes I’ve ever had. The third was that it was really good if you ate a bit of the crabmeat with it. The other starter – sardine fillets with apricots and other bits and pieces (I’ll spare you the French description) – was a sort of unassuming spring roll, rather lacking the courage of its convictions.

For main courses, my dining companion enjoyed her canard sauvage rôti façon pastilla (roast wild duck cooked in filo pastry), while I tried the pot au feu de cochon aux épices, verre de bouillon. The pig had been boiled longer than a Christian in the good old days and was even pinker, but was rather lacking in flavor despite the vaunted spices, while the generous glass of broth was warm, spicy and satisfying. The dish came with a very solid half of a large sweet potato and half a fennel bulb. Where were the boiled vegetables that are an integral part of a pot au feu?

For dessert, the gaufrettes de pomme aux fruits secs, glace au speculoos consisted of a less-than-interesting apple lattice served with ice cream that really did taste like the Belgian spice cookies called speculoos. Lovely. I had the baba retour de Nanteau, chantilly, bonbon de coquelicots. This was basically a rum baba without the rum, but with a good dollop of real Chantilly cream in the center, topped by the most luridly colored crushed candy it has ever been my fortune to see. A coquelicot is a poppy; think of Renoir’s paintings of fields of red poppies. I ate these crunchy bits and felt quite sinful – the scarlet critic.

I wanted to ask what “return from Nanteau” meant in the name of my dessert, but the waiters were too busy. When they came to the table, they seemed to have just remembered that they had to go to another table, urgently, and were thinking very hard about what they had to do there.

It was the other diners who made the evening work. While I was doing my job and feeling a bit grumpy about it, they were having a good old time in a most civilized manner. The restaurant was filled with the contented buzz of the conversation of youngish people with nothing to prove to anyone. That was the real triumph of L’Avant Goût – all those happy people.

My second resolution is to go back and, I hope, forever overcome the slightly sour aftertaste of the first visit.

Richard Hesse

L’Avant-Goût: 26, rue Bobillot, 75013 Paris. Métro: Place d’Italie. Open Tuesday-Friday for lunch and dinner. Tel.: 01 53 80 24 00. Fixed-price menu: €31.

© 2007 Paris Update

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