Alain Ducasse’s re-launch of a grand (but quite small) brasserie, near the place Wagram, offering an almost exclusively fishy menu; it offers food of solid quality, but the service adds little joy to the place.
Celeb chefs haven’t made a big hit in London by running classic restaurant sites. Think of MPW’s recent sales of Mirabelle and Quo Vadis (both of which had drifted terribly under his ownership), or the almost universally negative critical reception to Gordon Ramsay’s relaunch of Foxtrot Oscar. Is it any different in Paris, we wondered. In the City of Light, Alain Ducasse has snapped up a trio of grand bistro/brasseries in recent years: Benoit, Aux Lyonnais and, most recently, Rech. We weren’t that impressed on a visit to Benoit a couple of years ago (though we have seen favourable reviews elsewhere), and thought we’d take the opportunity of a recent visit to check out Rech.
First impressions are not especially positive: a mile or so north of the Etoile, Rech is not as appealingly located as the more central (and very Belle Epoque) Benoit. Established in 1925, it’s also somewhat less attractively decorated. It seems that it’s customary to refer to it as a brasserie, but it’s really rather too grand and subdued for that. If it were in London, it would be described as a smart fish restaurant.
Our former experience suggests that even well-behaved children present something of a problem in the Ducasse world, and so it proved here. Perhaps no surprise that there was no kids’ menu, but it also seemed quite impossible for the staff to suggest any simpler or cheaper dishes for smaller customers. Not even an offer of half-portions. One somehow senses that children just do no fit into the corporate grand design.
Some people (wrongly in our view) might say that pricey brasseries should not feel the need to cater for smaller people. Fine, let’s look at this as an operation for grown-ups. Grown-ups expect to be shown to a table set up for the number of guests for which a reservation has been made, not one fewer. Grown-ups expect the staff should to know who’s having what. Grown-ups are irked when the same Muzak goes round and round. And these particular grown-ups get very irked when a bottle of wine is overcharged (by 100%) without some credible explanation, and fulsome apology. Overall, we could not help feeling that the staff here, albeit in a perfectly amiable way, were rather going through the motions.
On the culinary front, the high point of our meal was, unfortunately, at the beginning. An amuse of small toasts with a delicious seafood tartare set high expectations. What followed was invariably good, but never remarkable. The menu du jour for example consisted of a lobster soup (possibly the best thing), some rouget (fine), a piece of ‘famous’ Camembert (which we thought rather immature) and a sweet and not especially distinguished chestnut pudding. Other dishes included some scallops more impressive for their size than their taste, and a very good entrecote.
It was tempting to end our meal on a sugar ‘high’, so voluminous were the desserts brought. It is shame, though, that – when taking our order – no one though to warn us that one of the the ‘famous’ Rech éclairs would easily suffice for three (or possibly four) appetites of normal size.
