Thursday, 5 October, The Louvre and David Toutain

Written 22 October 2023

But they had two new improvements I hadn't seen before. The first was covered cylindrical tea strainers that fit into your cup. You then spooned in the loose tea of your choice from a set of six big cannisters and filled the cup/strainer with hot water from the coffee dispenser. At the table, when your tea had steeped enough, you laid the strainer's lid, open side up, on the table, where it served as a saucer for the strainer and its wet leaves. The other, which you can see on my plate, was little portion cups (for, e.g., jam, Nutella, or condiments) made not of ceramic or paper but of ice-cream-cone material! Once you'd scooped out all the jam to put on your croissant, you could just eat the jam-smeared cup! I didn't trust them quite enough to fill one with milk for my tea; I bagged a tiny red espresso cup from the dish rack for that.

Note that my table is permanently printed with a pencil-sketch (but entirely functional) backgammon board. The two to my right had similar checkerboards. I never saw any playing pieces, but I would guess that reception had some you could request. They also had those tall cylindrical sugar dispensers, but the humidity was so high that the sugar wouldn't come out, so I fell back on the little paper packets supplied on the buffet.

We had prepurchased 10-am timed-entry tickets to the Louvre, so we introduced ourselves to another new friend, the Metro line 13. We caught it at Pernety, just a few blocks from our hotel, and it whisked us to Champs-Elysée-Clémenceau, where we could transfer to old friend Metro line 1 for the ride to Palais Royale—the stop for the Louvre. Amazingly, those three—the 92 bus, the 13 metro, and the 1 metro—took us almost everywhere we wanted to go on this visit to Paris.

At the left here is a mosaic of Buzz Lightyear above a door across the street from the Pernety metro station. It's apparently very well known; it's actually labled on Google maps of the neighborhood if you zoom in far enough. It was only one of several nice pieces of street art we passed on that walk, one of which was about a three-times life size drawing of a panther creeping along a low wall beside the sidewalk. Wish I'd gotten a photo of that one.

We got to the Louvre in good time and correctly guessed that the above-ground entrance was the way to go. Here, at the right, is David, silhouetted against the iconic pyramid. Things seemed a lot better organized than last time (visiting the Delacroix exhibition in 2018). Gone is the little wooden table and the one guy with a wooden stick peering into each purse and bag. I suspect they spent the COVID shutdown upgrading their infrastructure and rethinking the logistics of admission. In the middle of things, a patient museum guard directed traffic: “10:00 am entry, this queue here; 9:30 am entry, that queue over there; 10:30 am entry that queue, way over there.”

They lined us all up in those Disney-style zig-zag lines between ribbons supported by portable posts, waiting for our turn to enter. We were in the shade, the temperature was in the low 70’s, and we passed the time agreeably chatting with a couple from Ithaca, NY, who were lined up next to us.

Inside, we made a bee line for the special exhibition of masterpieces from the art museum in Naples. Strangely, it wasn’t hung separately, like most such exhibitions, but was interspersed, as chronologically appropriate, with the Louvre’s own Italian painting collection, mostly in the grand gallery.

Among the artists featured were Bellini, Colantonio, de Vinci, Titian, Caravagio, and (perhaps my two favorites, at least for their names), Carpaccio and Parmesan.

We had already passed the Winged Victory of Samothrace on the stairs, so despite setting out specifically not to visit the big three, we wound up seeing two of them anyway. Of the Venus di Milo, we saw only the giant poster in the lobby.

I took a bazillion photos and dutifully read the information banners on the walls, but we had to admit, it's not really our favorite genre of painting. It was interesting, though, to see the transition from tempera to oils in paintings hung right there cheek by jowl.

Through a window we passed, I got these two shots. On the left, looking to the left, is the arch of the Carousel du Louvre, currently covered in scaffolding and scrim for renovation. Behind it is another section of the Louvre, across the central courtyard, also covered in scrim and a huge advertising poster. I used to resent those giant posters, but later in the trip, our Tauck tour guide explained that you always hope to see such a poster on a piece of construction. It indicates that the work is sponsored by the advertiser and therefore will have a definite completion date. Scaffolding without such advertising could be there forever, as funds come and go.

At the right, looking to the right, is the narrower part of the Louvre courtyard. The pyramid is just out of sight to the right, between the near and far sections of the building.

Lunch, and particularly sit-down lunch with a table, can be hard to come by in the Louvre, and tickets are not good for readmission if you leave, so we settled for a lunch of baguette sandwiches from one of the museum’s many snack bars, eaten on singularly uncomfortable sloped benches. At least we scored a small table. David had ham and cheese; I chose roast chicken, lettuce, and tomato. We split the chocolate muffin.

Even on the benches, the scenery is good. At the right here is a random ceiling we passed under on our way to lunch.

We ate on a mezzanine between street level and the vast floor under the pyramid. When we entered, we took the long escalator down from security at street level, but for people with mobility problems, that's not an option, so they've installed an elevator. Now I've seen a freestanding elevator shaft before—there's one in the science building at my college—but this is the first freestanding, shaftless elevator I've ever seen. Compare these two photos, looking at the space in the center of the spiral staircase at the right. In the left-hand photo, the elevator has just begun to rise. Several people are sitting on benches in the open-topped circular space at its top. In the right-hand photo, the elevator has risen about 3/4 of the way up. At the top, it stops level with the large landing at the top of the staircase. In the down position, it sinks entirely into the floor, leaving only the passenger area above ground. A professional operator rides it up and down all day, and attendants at the top and bottom help wheel chair users and folks with crutches maneuver into and out of it.

After lunch, we considered our options, but it's a long way from the pyramid to the Dutch masters, and our feet were pretty well shot, so we soon reversed our Metro route back to the hotel. Rather than going back up through the pyramid, we exited through the underground Carousel shopping mall, which has a direct below-ground entrance to the Metro. And yes, there also, they've replaced the little table and the wooden stick with an x-ray machine and metal detector.

Back at the hotel, we showered and rested up for the rigors of dining out in the evening.

Written 28 October 2023

Dinner was at David Toutain, also just off the rue St. Dominique, so we followed that street in the other direction from Violon d'Ingres and rather farther. When we ate there in 2019, the restaurant was very small and shabby ("a dump" is how David put it), but the food was great. Now, the food is still great, but they spent the COVID shutdown expanding into space next door, renovating, and sprucing up the decor.

Again, we chose the blind tasting menu, with wine pairing for David, nominally 12 courses, but this chef makes it really hard to keep track of what's a course. And again, I didn't take extensive notes because the waiter said they'd give me a complete list at the end, and again, I fell for it. What I got, again, was a very sketchy outline of what the chef thought he might serve. Drat. Anyway . . .

Written 29 October 2023

First amuse-bouche: "Origamis." Each one a bite of something folded into a little one-bite pyramid, served on a dish elaborately draped in a white napkin. David's had avocado in it, but they knew I was allergic (because their on-line reservation program provides space to specify allergies and intolerances), so mine was sweetened turnip folded in very thin slices of crunchy, sweetened raw turnip. Tasty.

Second amuse bouch: For David, one large mussel on the half shell. For me, a china spoon with a bite of smooth squash purée. Oddly, other tables were served two of each; don't know why we got only one. We also each got a little cup of special tangy cold herb tea, meant to be drunk after we ate the food.

First course: A little one-bite red cylinder (balanced on a dish full of oyster shells standing on edge) that combined oysters, raspberry, and cream of shallots and tasted magical—the man’s a genius! Note the face-down raspberry leaf on the edge of the dish.

Third course: Tiny phyllo tartlets of spider crab, topped with shaved raw Caesar's amanita mushrooms. I don't know how to makes the crab so intensely crab flavored!

Fourth course (or maybe something between courses; I give up on the numbering): Warm, crispy "surprise beignets" to be dipped in the little dome of sauce that had carraway and a couple of other things in it that I didn't catch (corn maybe). We were invited to identify the surprise center but couldn't. It turned out to be the softboiled yolk of a quail egg.

At this point, we were offered, for a supplement to the tasting-menu price, a course of caviar, but we declined.

They took the caviar away and brought warm brioches with butter first mixed with herbs then dotted with tiny drops of thyme oil. See what I mean? Is this a course? Or just the normal bread service? Anyway, at this point, for the first time since we sat down, we were given actual utensils, so I was able to spread the butter on the brioche.

Next up was a round, flat, compressed disk of cabbage, specficially pointy-headed cabbage, widely touted as tastier and more tender than ordinary round-headed cabbage. It was garnished with a couple of kinds of sprouts (dill and chickweed, maybe), and at the table the waiter spooned on a buttermilk-based sauce with grains of something in it. Mustard maybe? Outstandingly delicious.

Then squares of focaccio with a neon-green herbed oil for dipping.

The next course was threefold, a "declension of tomato," and was again outstandingly delicious. First, tomato sorbet dressed with oil of chopped capers and anchovy, shown here at the left.

Then a thick slice of heirloom tomato, "confit" with watermelon juice and strewn with tiny basil leaves and other stuff.

Finally, a little dish of tomato water flavored with drops of oil of Melilotus (yellow sweet clover).

At the right here, the next course, cod with red bell pepper and "extraction of chives." The red pepper is on top, and the chive extract I take to be the little green splodges around the edge that look like peas.

Next up was mushrooms, specifically a large fresh cèpe (Boletus edulis, in English called either a "bolete" or by its Italian name, "porcini"), the brown object at 9 o'clock on the plate, smoked over citrus peel, some shaved raw cèpes, a rice-paper crisp, and some crumbles of dried cèpe (I think), flavored with blackberry and "reine des près" ("queen of the meadows," Filipendula ulmaria, meadowsweet, in the rose family). To make sure we knew what we were tasting for, they placed a dried specimen of the plant, complete with its dried root, in a little dish on the table. Looking the species up afterward solved a mystery for me. Aspirin, acetyl salicilic acid, is extracted from the bark of willow (genus Salix, hence "salicilic"), but where did the name "aspirin" come from? Turns out you can also get the substance from meadowsweet, which used to be in the genus Spiraea, hence "aspirin." Who knew?!

Then we got yet a third bread, this time with a large ball of that yummy salty Breton butter.

After that came a roasted piece of turbot, accompanied by spelt, and what they called a vichysoisse (a sauce based on leeks; the French seem to use vichysoisse to refer to leek sauces, rather than the cold leek and potato soup by that name, which was invented in New York), and fresh, carefully peeled walnuts.

The next course was another optional one—lobster—and that one we took them up on, choosing to get just one serving to share. Strangely, though, we got not lobster but one of the largest langoustine (Nephrops norvegicus) tails I've ever seen, split but still in the shell. David tackled the job of extracting and dividing it, made more difficult because all they gave us to eat that course with was a spoon. Here's my portion, with spinach and a yummy sabayon sauce. Since langoustine is typically even more expensive than lobster, we didn't quibble.

RThe final seafood course was one the waiter said was the chef's signature and had never been off the tasting menu since the restaurant opened (and, indeed, we remembered it fondly from 2019): squares of smoked eel floating on a very smooth purée of Granny Smith apples and black sesame. Just as good as it was the last time, i.e., very, very good.

The chef (David Toutain) grows the apples (and much of the rest of the produce) himself, on his farm in Normandy. He's from there and goes back every weekend. The influences of Norman cuisine are very clear in his dishes.

The final savory course was a little strip of Norman beef, "chosen by the chef himself," served very rare on a bed of what the waiter said were morels but were clearly small chanterelles and tiny cèpes, with a few small peeled grapes thrown in. I forget what he said the sauce was.

The first dessert was a fig roasted with honey and Melilotus, with fig-leaf-flavored whipped cream and a light ice milk, garnished with red clover leaves and a tiny leafy sprig (viewed edge on in the photo) made of cookie.

The second dessert was figs again—a fig almond crust spread with fig compote and topped with fresh figs and a little fig vinegar. Tasty.

The mignardises took the form of two little lemon tarts and two hand-made chocolates imprinted with the chef's logo. I ate one of the latter, but the tarts went untouched.

This is a restaurant to which we would definitely return. His combinations sometimes seem odd, but he always turns out to know what he's doing.

Afterward, strolling back along the rue St. Dominique toward the stop for the trusty 92 bus, we were able to sight down the street to the Eiffel Tower, lit up for the evening.