Review: L’Arpège

I dined at Arpège on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2018.

One of the earliest memories I have of food is sitting on the floor in my maternal grandmother’s kitchen, cross-legged, in Jaipur, India, while she is serving my older brother and me. There is only one meal that captures the essence of this moment, the gravity of the memory, and what would eventually become my obsession with food: pressure-cooked yellow daal, resulting in the smoothest texture there is. Home-made garlic chutney. And, of course, this meal is not complete without rotis, made to be served from the stove straight to our plates. At first served with no ghee, our attempts at adhering to some diet, and later on giving in to my grandmother’s pressure and eating roti how it’s always meant to be eaten, with a heaping dollop of ghee.

This is the same care and compassion with which Chef Alain Passard serves his guests in the famed L’Arpège. There have been numerous reviewers who pointed out Arpège’s hospitality faux-pas. In 2016, Eater reviewed Arpège as a “crushing disappointment,” mainly detailing the shortcomings of servers and other kitchen staff. Many others have reiterated these same complaints. My experience could not have been more different. Fortunate enough to dine on New Year’s Eve in 2018, I was nervous. I did not hold French hospitality in the same regard as the rest of the elite culinary world and I did not want to regret spending a hefty sum on one of my last nights in Paris. At the time I was dining, the dinner vegetarian tasting menu was €420 and the land and sea tasting menu was €470.

The team at Arpège and Chef Passard did not disappoint. As soon as I walked in with my dining companion, Chef Passard himself greeted us at the entry-way. I suspect this was a New Year’s Eve special—though he is known for being at the restaurant and chatting with guests often—but I still appreciated it. Right away, our server knew who we were, our dietary preferences, and our drink preferences. He could not have been more attentive without being overbearing. There were definitely no dirty wine glasses left around our table. Chef Passard even escorted me down the stairs from the dining room to the bathroom, illustrating his generosity, which can be easily distinguished from this day and age’s culture surrounding lauded chefs.

Now the food. We were greeted with hot-cold soft boiled egg amuse bouche, served in the shell. It is obvious this is an esteemed dish. This is for a reason. Every note sings. The cream and the eggs are a perfect pair. It’s whimsical presentation piques enough of your interest to excite you for the meal to come. Following this was one of my favorite courses. Three different root vegetable raviolis, one filled with celery, one with sweet potato, and one with radish, served in a consommé that I could only assume had been cooked over multiple hours. Each ravioli released a filling so silky, perfectly complimenting the consommé that accompanied it. It evoked the same emotion I feel when thinking about my grandmother’s daal, and this seemed to be made with just as much care. A visually intriguing dish, the onion gratin with pea shoots was complex. Getting the onions to be that tender and sweet required a level of precision that one would expect from a team like the one at Arpège. Serving a radish carpaccio with microgreens after an onion gratin felt redundant. Although the radish was bright and acidic, the concept felt the same as the onion gratin. My dining companion was served a beet tartare that was far more divine and what I wish I had been served instead. It was perfectly luscious, and kept your taste buds energized as a result of the horseradish cream. This should be served on every tasting menu at Arpège.

The vegetable paupiette was confusing. As a vegetarian in Paris, I was excited by the concept. The flavors in the dish did not meld how I imagine they do in a well-made beef paupiette. Instead of melting in your mouth and pleasantly falling apart, the vegetables were plain old soggy. The flavors did not transfer to every bite. Conversely, the chicken my dining companion was served received a lot of praise. It was the best chicken he had ever had and still remains on his mind to this day. Next up was a celeriac risotto served with black truffle. This illustrates the strength of Chef Passard; the perfect marriage between simplicity and complexity. The celeriac strips were left a little crunchy but remained sweet enough that I wanted to keep going in for a second bite. Our server, and I am sure the team in the kitchen, recognized that at times truffle can be overwhelming for a dish. He shaved on the perfect amount of black truffle. It accentuated the earthy tones of celery root which make it sing as a winter root vegetable.

Dessert was the most disappointing part of the meal. I was very excited about the possibility of being served a millefeuille by Chef Passard. Instead of it balancing crunchy and sweet, it only had one texture which was somewhere in the middle of crunchy and soggy. The cream filling in between the layers felt one-note, only allowing the taste of sugar and no other intricacy. The macaron felt the same—lackluster.

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Despite this, the hospitality more than made up for it. We spotted Chef Passard making the rounds, wondering whether he was only speaking to his friends or going to speak to all the guests in the dining room. My most vivid memory about dining at Arpège is being in awe of how laser focused Chef Passard was on each single guest at each respective table. There was no other emotion other than feeling like he was there to cook only for you and no one else. He did eventually stop by and we had what I would consider a lengthy chat about how I should break up with my dining companion because he didn’t speak French. To top it off, I was unaware that there was a restaurant custom. The staff gifted each guest a beautiful Opinel french knife with the year that was ending and the name of the restaurant in a different font. I was pleasantly surprised.

Arpège exceeded my expectations of my first three-Michelin star experience. It was a tremendously high bar, particularly being in Paris. The dishes they got right were exquisite and really had no room for error. They were crafted with such meticulousness yet included the emotion of cooking and what it means to dine in a communal setting. The dishes that were less successful were so because they had only one flavor, which overwhelmed the rest of the dish. Nevertheless, the quality of the meal cannot be questioned.