Inspired by a lecture on “Great Museums of the World” by art historian Joan Jacobs that included the Condé Museum in Chantilly, my wife and I recently visited the city, located less than an hour’s car ride from Paris.  The trip unexpectedly brought some outstanding dining as well as an unforgettable art experience.

    First the art, then the food and wine. Briefly, the Condé Museum (www.domainedechantilly),  built in the late 19^th Century to house the private collection of Henri de Bourbon, son of the last king of France, Louis Philippe, is situated in the midst of a picturesque 285-acre park abutting a historic horse racing course. The museum owns three Raphaels and room after room after room of paintings by Delacroix, Watteau, Géricault, Van Dyck, Ingres, Corot and other notable artists, all hung, as stipulated in Henri’s will, side by side in rows, regardless of their period or subject. In addition, there’s display after display of exceptional furniture, ceiling murals, sculpture, stained glass (over 40 panels) enamels, miniatures, “illuminations,” silverware and dishes.

     The grounds also contain a Museum of the Horse, with equine-related displays and a daily dressage demonstration; just a ten-minute walk from the entrance of the museum there’s another park, Le Potager des Princes, loaded with plants, flowers and farm animals.

    Now for the food and wine.

 

Le Jardin d’Hiver

4 Rue du Connetable

33-03-44-65-50-00

www.aubergedujeudepaumechantilly.fr

 

    Located within the ultra-luxurious 18^th Century-style  Relais & Château Auberge Du Jeu De Paume  Hotel, built five years ago by the Aga Khan alongside the museum park ground, there are two dining options there, both overseen  by Clément LeRoy, this year named a Gault & Millau “Future Grand Chef of the World.”  The hotel’s Michelin-starred Rue de Connetable restaurant was closed for August vacation, so we had to make do at the more casual Le Jardin d’Hiver. And make do we did, at what we found to be one of the most outstanding, sensibly priced upscale hotel eateries in this region France. Seating is in beautifully upholstered chairs at polished beige wooden tables situated around a central courtyard. Also, our table afforded us a view of chef de cuisine Charles Benôit-Lacour and his staff at a long prep table putting the finishing touches on many of the plates.

    From a choice of five appetizers we chose a classic cut of foie gras terrine accompanied by a confit of sweet wild blackberries, and an assortment of ripe heirloom tomatoes drizzled with a zesty vinaigrette, sprinkled with bits of green scallion (left), all topped by a puff of decadently rich mozzarella cream that provided just the right acidic balance  of the tomatoes and vinaigrette.   
     A main course of a perfectly roasted Corsican corvina fillet was accompanied by a mix of fresh zucchini and plump cherry tomatoes doused with a delicate verbena and butter sauce.  A large grilled fillet of dewy dorade was served  with a tasty mix of crisp rice and mangoes.

    For dessert we opted for a creamy chocolate mousse topped with black currants and, of course, Chantilly cream, and an order of puff pastries loaded with fresh berries and more Chantilly cream. For wine, from a  short but well-chosen list of French offerings,  we selected a 2014 Domaine Bachelot-Monnot “Les Patrons” Santenay that showed a bouquet and  flavor of ripe cranberries, raspberries and cherries with a smooth finish that complimented the fare quite well. 

  The restaurant is open daily for breakfast, lunch and dinner; expect dinner to cost $105 for two, including service but not wine or tax, which we felt was quite reasonable considering the setting and quality of the fare and service.)

 

Auberge Le Vertugadin

44 rue Connetable

33-03-44-57-03-19

auberge-le-vertugadin@wanadoo.ft

 

    Located on the main street of Chantilly and less than a ten-minute walk from the Condé Museum, this restaurant features well-prepared classic French fare made with fresh local ingredients as well as high quality, friendly yet professional service. Dining is at well-spaced, dark wood tables in a number of small wood-beamed rooms featuring statues of horses and white walls adorned with books.  Also there’s a small garden out back for dining in dry mild weather, which was not the situation on the evening of our visit.

                            Appetizers range from a salad of shrimps, salmon and crayfish, to a terrine of rabbit with hazelnuts and onion jam, to a delicious salad of crisp lettuce adorned by two small, slightly oven-roasted plump tomatoes stuffed with local goat’s cheese.  For main courses (from a choice of ten), we enjoyed the moist, grilled sea bream with a tangy pesto-based coating and simply grilled fillets of red mullet doused in a tasty sauce laced with Provençal herbs.

    The bread pudding dessert with ice cream came and a generous portion of Chantilly cream, as did a dessert of two puff pastries with strawberries. As to wine, we drank a light, pleasant 2014 Domaine Michel Joillet Mercurey with a bouquet and flavor of raspberries and strawberries, which had more than adequate acidity to complement the fish main courses.  

    The restaurant is open for lunch and dinner from Tuesday through Sunday;  expect a 3-course dinner to cost an extremely modest $70 for two, including “service,” but not tax or wine.

 
 

La Grange Aux Loups

8 rue du 11 Novembre, Aprémont

33-03-44-25-33-79
www.lagrangeauxloups.com

 

    Situated along a rural road-- a ten-minute car ride from the Condé Museum --this is your typical upscale “French country restaurant.” Dining takes place at white-clothed tables in an elegant rectangular room with grey wainscoting above which one wall shows exposed stone and the others gray wallpaper. Service is provided by a maître d' and two rather harried but quite efficient waitresses.

  In addition to à la carte dining, three separate menus are available: three courses ($38), five courses ($66) and a three-course lobster menu ($82).
    From the last we choose a juicy duck pastille (duck pressed with apricots and red cabbage surrounded by filo dough) accompanied by a small salad of crisp assorted greens, and a portion of a buttery terrine of duck foie gras cooked with white Port wine and served with a strawberry marmalade (right).

     Main course choices ranged from a thin mackerel tart accompanied by roasted squid, chorizo and a smooth ratatouille, to a roasted veal fillet

with a pungent pepper sauce, to a serving of large prawns, with saffron-infused risotto and an assortment of vegetables. For dessert we chose a selection of regional cheeses and an apple tart with vanilla ice cream coated with Calvados-laced Chantilly cream (left). Our choice of wine was a 2014 Bouchard Chambolle-Musigny, which was a bit light but filled with flavors of ripe cranberries and herbs and mated quite well with the fare.

    The restaurant is open Tuesday through Saturday for lunch and dinner.

 

    Also, there are two luncheon dining spots at the Condé Museum itself: Le Hameau  offers  indoor and outdoor seating for French regional cuisine, a large choice of salads and desserts topped with Chantilly cream; La Capitainerie (right), located inside the Museum, “celebrates” the cooking of the 17^th Century chef at Condé,  François Vatel, and offers a range of fare from hamburgers to roast veal with chestnut gnocchi, and, of course, coffee topped with a mound of Chantilly cream.

 

    And  a note about Chantilly cream and lace.  The cream, created by François Vatel in the 17^th century on his appointment as chef to the original Condé Castle, is  crème fraȋche beaten with a dash of vanilla and light brown sugar, and like the similar schlag of Vienna, it’s piled high on ice cream, coffee and most desserts.

    The famous black lace of Chantilly isn’t manufactured any more, but there’s a small museum in town on the  rue d’Aumale that provides examples and explaining the process.

 

 

THE POOL
99 East 52nd Street
212-375-9003

    It was the big restaurant story of the year when Major Food Group, headed by chefs Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone with partner Jeff  Zalaznick (below), took over the lease of what had been The Four Seasons restaurant and turned it into two separate restaurants, The Grill and The Pool. It seemed an odd choice by the landlords, German real estate developer Aby J. Rosen and Michael Fuchs, to sign on Major Food Group, which up until then had been doing much smaller, much less extravagant restaurants around NYC that included the Parm sandwich shop and the retro Italian-American Carbone.

    Fortunately, the NYC Historic Landmarks Commission had long ago granted protected status to the interior, which was located in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building and designed by Restaurant Associates and architect Philip Johnson. When it opened in 1959, there was never a restaurant as spectacular, both for its look and for its role in the city’s social history, which I, along with managing partner Alex von Bidder, compiled in the book The Fours Seasons: A History of America’s Premier Restaurant (1997). Thus, the new owners could do little but polish the premises, which included 20-foot-tall beaded metal curtains, a Richard Lippold bronze sculpture above the bar, and a babbling pool in the middle of the dining room. There had been a Picasso tapestry in the hallway connecting the two dining rooms, but that is now safely at the New-York Historical Society.
    I shall not get into the debate as to whether the Four Seasons needed to be rescued from neglect or opine on whether the faithful regulars will return to The Grill and The Pool (von Bidder and his partner Julian Niccolini plan to open a new restaurant not far from their former one). Things seem to be going very well with a curious new crowd who have been lured by a three-star review of The Grill in the NY Times. Having only dined at a private wine dinner in an upper room, I can only comment that the food was far from special, including a pâté with olives that looked and tasted like the ones in Betty Crocker cookbooks and a filet mignon so heavily crusted with crushed peppercorns as to demolish the taste of the beef and wine.
    I can’t say I was happy to see that the new clientele in The Grill was given to shirt sleeves and even t-shirts, for there is no longer a dress code that once upon a time required a jacket for men (if you arrived coat-less, the restaurant had a rack of blue blazers to choose from). I can report on The Pool dining room, which looks pretty much the same, except that the seasonal potted trees (fake) are no longer arrayed around the pool--no great loss--and the lighting is unconvivially lower. The trees have been replaced by a large Alexander Calder mobile that works beautifully in this space, although the patterned carpet seems to evoke a failed attempt by Jackson Pollack to create a fabric line. The introduction of throbbing music is a travesty in a setting like this.  Guests at The Pool were overall far better dressed than in The Grill.
    I am happy to say that the dining rooms staff could not be friendlier, more knowledgeable or more professional, a vast improvement over the often dour service of the past by captains and waiters who had been going through the motions for too long.
    Apparently Torrisi is in charge of The Pool menu, and he’s kept it relatively simple, not unlike its predecessor at The Four Seasons. Seafood figures large on the two-page menu, beginning with a selection of raw fishes (a whopping $60 for three, five for $95), crudites ($23), foie gras ($32), and “toast,” referring to seafood atop slices of toast. The yellowfin tuna with harissa and olive oil ($21) that I tried was superb (left).
    There’s no denying the excellent overall quality of the ingredients, which included a huge portion of Portuguese turbot a la plancha ($53) as good as any I’ve had in Europe, with all the requisite gelatinous texture intact (right), although the presentation could have been prettier.  A sea bass tartare with oyster sauce and celeries ($22) made for a good appetizer, and wholly unexpected was Dungeness crab rice with green olive oil and bay leaf ($36), which was quite good but might have been had at any number of Chinese restaurants around town. So, too, at this point, charred octopus has become something of a cliché in NYC restaurants, here done with aji dulce and onion blossoms ($26).
    Lobster with orange and coconut vinaigrette ($48) was pleasant enough but a sea bass with a tomato and white mousse ($ ) needed more flavor. There is a whole fish of the day for two (MP) and black pepper duck ($1) and a NY strip steak ($65).
    For this kind of money you still need to order side dishes, not listed on the menu and including duck fat-fried potatoes—six strips of them—and a plate of unattractive slices of eggplant.
    When you open the dessert menu you’ll find a list of 54 vintages of Château d’Yquem Sauternes by the half-bottle, glass or bottle, ranging from $675 for a 2000 up to $19,000 for a 1900. I’m not at all sure why this collection was compiled, since the sale of Sauternes everywhere has plummeted in recent years; this seems more of a Las Vegas high roller wink than a sensible way to spend your money.
    Desserts, all $18, were very disappointing. Strawberry shortcake (left) with corn and lychee took a simple American favorite and gussied it up to be unrecognizable as such, and a chocolate custard with cupuacu fruit and tonka bean was both odd and unsavory.
    Incidentally, The Pool’s website does not list prices, usually a sign the management is testing how much they can be pushed in the near future. The shock of the bill may be cushioned by the grandeur of the room and the superb service staff that makes you feel very welcome. Still, $60 for three pieces of raw fish and $65 for a steak without potatoes is going pretty high into the stratosphere.
    I do look forward to going to The Grill sometime, if only to soak up that uniquely marvelous look that has dated not at all since 1959. For now I’m glad to go back to The Pool, but not rushing to return for the food alone.

 

    

NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR

    Funny thing is, New Zealand’s finest maker of Sauvignon Blanc doesn’t get out and about. He’s never been to France’s Loire Valley, where the standard for the varietal is set in wine like Sancerre, nor has he seen much of California’s Sauvignon Blanc vineyards. Maybe that’s worked in David Edmonds’ favor. As winemaker at New Zealand’s Nobilo Wines, he has managed to focus all his energies on improving Sauvignon Blanc’s image as a varietal in the shadow of Chardonnay.
    “I’m constantly trying new things in order to dispel the myth of Sauvignon Blanc,” he said over dinner at Gabriel Kreuther restaurant in New York. “Most people think of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc as being the overly fruity, punch-like wines that have had so much success worldwide, like Cloudy Bay.”
    Indeed, Cloudy Bay and Oyster Bay in Marlborough and Monkey Bay in Malawi established a sweet, grassy, pungently aromatic style for the varietal that has made them best-selling wines and pushed winemakers from the U.S., Chile and South Africa to copy them. (Most NZ Sauvignon Blancs are exported.)
    Edmonds, tall, bearded and with a voice not unlike Sean Connery’s, is a good representative of New Zealand’s wine industry, believing that Sauvignon Blanc should be a far more refined wine, which he has been working at since joining Nobilo in 2002. The estate itself was founded in 1936 by Croatian emigres, Nikola and Zuva Nobilo (right), whose family had had more than 300 years of winemaking tradition. In 1943 they planted some of New Zealand’s first commercial vines at Huapai, west of Auckland, this, at a time when wine was not very popular in the country. By the 1970s, Nikola had moved from hybrid grapes to Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir, and in 1994 he was awarded an Order of the British Empire medal for his contribution to the New Zealand wine industry. He died at the age of 94 in 2011. Today the winery is owned by Constellation Wines.
    Waxing poetical, Edmonds says what he wants you to taste in his wines is “the mineral smell of the breeze from an approaching thunderstorm.” By blending wines from five vineyards (Nobilo has holdings in both the northern and southern islands of New Zealand) he can express the individual terroirs—what the Māori call tūrangawaewae, a “place to stand.” “There’s been an evolution of our style,” says Edmonds. “There used to be more minerality ten years ago. We’re finding, perhaps thanks to global  warming, the sun’s ultraviolet rays are giving the grapes higher flavor and concentration now.”
    Nobilo also makes a superb Pinot Noir with more nuance than many of the bigger-bodied Australian styles. And he does not plant Shiraz, one of Australia’s most successful varietals, because “New Zealand doesn’t have the right temperature or soils.”
    In any comparison with Australia’s wines, Edmonds hastens to remind people that New Zealand is more than 2,000 miles from the huge continent to its west, so that comparisons are largely irrelevant. He does keep his Pinot Noir’s alcohol levels at around 13%—more in line with Burgundy models—than the 14% or more of hotter climates like Australia and California.
    Over a very varied meal that ranged from hamachi with black truffles and foie gras and an Alsatian sturgeon and sauerkraut tart to grilled lobster with cashews and tenderloin of pork with grilled radicchio both of Nobilo’s wines showed beautifully. The 2016 Icon Sauvignon Blanc ($22) is certainly the best I have tasted from the New World, closer, to be sure, to Sancerre but also possessing a brightness and tamed grassiness that made it very easy to drink through appetizers and with seafood.
    The 2015 Icon Pinot Noir ($22) was a lush beauty, highly expressive of what happens when that troublesome grape is not pushed too far in trying to build up sugar into alcohol. Nobilo’s is velvety and lightly textured, with levels of light fruit and just the right amount of acid to keep it refreshing. All the more remarkable are the prices on wines of this quality, which, if they came from Oz or Sonoma, might easily cost twice as much.