I wasn’t just dining at L’Arpège to assess whether, amidst the ramen burger–level hype, the restaurant actually warranted a special trip across the Atlantic. I’m not particularly attuned to the emotional complexity of produce, so I can’t say for sure that the vegetables were devastated. And finally, when the foam inevitably collapsed to a liquid, the evocation was of frozen grocery store vegetables, reheated in an indistinct white sauce.
The first bite tasted of the sea the second, of commodity cauliflower, simultaneously over- and undercooked. Moreau, before cooking the franken-poultry in hay. And he has been known to sew together opposite halves of a chicken and a duck, like a culinary Dr. He greets his daily shipment of produce with a level of ceremony befitting a foreign dignitary. But, as one of the talking heads in the episode proclaims, once you try one of L’Arpège’s exquisite vegetable dishes, "you can never see cuisine in the same way." Passard, we learn, doesn’t just plant turnips-he runs A/B tests on their growth in different soil types. The camera’s eye on the restaurant is meant to provide a revelation: We have spent our entire lives as deluded diners, mistakenly believing that beets and celery are supporting actors rather than culinary leads. The inaugural episode is a 45-minute panegyric to chef Alain Passard and his lauded restaurant L’Arpège, a temple to vegetables that attracts a steady stream of global pilgrims seeking their culinary truth in a chamomile-stuffed cabbage leaf.
The most recent season of Chef’s Table, a Netflix show catering to viewers who enjoy listening to bombastic classical music while gazing at food that resembles Christmas tree ornaments, turns its attention to France.
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