A French chef’s salade
Irecently ate at ZCuisine, the idiosyncratic bistro owned by Frenchman Patrick DuPays. When Iwas in Paris a fewyears ago, I interviewed Daniel Rose, an American chef who had a restaurant in Paris where he cooked tradition-based French food. I asked him why he cooked French and why he looked to tradition for his ideas.
“Because traditional French food has a built-in coherence,” he told me.
Every culinary era has its Genius Style, and the Genius Style of our time, a combination of Michel Bras, Thomas Keller, Daniel Humm and Ferran Adrià, has clearly captivated many chefs. The food is plated in a style that is at once spontaneous-looking and highly contrived. There are at least 15 ingredients on the plate and the food is heavily manipulated through compression and dehydration and sous-vide techniques. It is often difficult to tell what you are eating, and the chef’s desire to impress does battle on the palate with his desire to give pleasure.
Patrick’s food is less ambitious, even defiantly unfashionable. The combination of flavors he uses is traditional, based on French cooking. There are a modest number of ingredients on every plate. But the food is thoroughly satisfying. Patrick cooks out of a desire to give pleasure, and if he wishes to impress, it is in order to communicate his pride in the quality of his ingredients and the glory of his culinary heritage.
The problem with the Genius Style is that you have to be a genius to pull it off.
To cook the kind of food Patrick cooks so well, you merely have to be a good cook with a mania for good ingredients, a clear head and a knowledge of and respect for tradition.
One of my favorite dishes at Z is the signature Salade Gourmande, a salad of cured and poached meats, served on crisp greens with a tangy mustard vinaigrette. It is, of course, based on tradition, on the French version of a chef’s salad. In Patrick’s version, he uses the ingredients of his father’s native Pays Basque in Southwest France: blood sausage, tongue, chorizo, duck prosciutto, cognac and Piment d’Espelette, the Basque dried hot pepper.