L'Ambroisie
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Review of L'Ambroisie at-a-glance
Awards: Three Michelin star
+Dishes are refined, perfected over Chef Bernard Pacaud’s long career. The restaurant does what it wants to do and does it as well as possible.
-High a la carte price demands perfection from every dish which was not delivered.
-Service is unfriendly and rigid.
Rating: 90 (96 if you consider food only)
Verdict: L'Ambroisie seems to answer a question that I never wanted to be answered - can you serve some of the best food I have ever eaten while still making me not like your restaurant? Apparently, the answer to this is yes. Chef Bernard Pacaud’s food is beautiful in its simplicity, a distillation of French nouvelle cuisine to its purest form. No further editing is needed on his plate, each dish is already precisely reduced to only the key components. There is a protein, a sauce, and a few other carefully selected accompaniments. All of the carefully selected ingredients work together in the pursuit of perfection that is nearly achieved in the best of Pacaud’s dishes.
On the flip side of the near-perfect food, you have disinterested service that bordered on contempt combined with hefty a la carte prices. I tried to separate my view on the food from the service and price but I could not. Many wax poetic about Chef Bernard Pacaud’s cooking, calling it among the best of the world. They are right. They will also excuse the service and prices. Whether they are right to do so will likely come down to the size of your bank account and your preference on service styles. My bank account was too small and my preferred service too casual to make me love the restaurant and excuse these things too.
Price I Paid: €318 for three a la carte courses
Date Visited: November 2017
Value: 7/20
L'Ambroisie Background
If you are reading this blog, you likely know L’Ambroisie’s background and are pouring over reviews to decide if it is worth the price of a monthly mortgage payment visit. Paris has many options for food, ranging from three stars to bistros and L’Ambroisie is a polarizing restaurant. The cost is high and the service is generally unwelcoming. The food is simple, a pursuit of perfection. This can be exciting in its own way but very different than say a meal at Azurmendi or Alinea where flavor combinations and presentations are completely new.
That simplicity can be a stark contrast to the high prices. Starters range from €95-€135, entrees €95-€180 and desserts around €35. Trying to allocate the price of a dish to the different components is frightening - did I just pay €85 for some average lobster, €50 for the sauce and €20 for some turned boiled pumpkin? Depending on how you order, you can expect to spend around €300-€350 for three courses.
In total, this is not that out of line on pricing for a three-star restaurant in Paris. However, where others give you a tasting menu, you will only have a few dishes at L’Ambroisie. In itself that can be nice - you can eat exactly what you want instead of being beholden to the whims of the chef. The issue becomes if any of those three dishes are less than perfect you know exactly how much you paid for that mediocrity. I paid €370 for a meal at Le Cinq which is more than L’Ambroisie cost. Just like L’Ambroisie, Le Cinq had dishes that ranged from transcendent to average. Unlike my meal at L’Ambroisie, the average was forgiven. Is it really fair to hold the food at L’Ambroisie to a different standard just because it uses an a la carte format? Unlikely, but it is hard not to.
The wine card is lengthy and expensive. We ordered one of the cheaper glasses of wine and it cost €35 and came with some cork in it…perhaps in protest or us not ordering a more expensive choice? When we pointed out there was cork in our wine, which should have never made it to the table, no apologies were made and they reluctantly replaced it with a fresh glass.
I visited in L’Ambroisie in November 2017 when I was using an iPhone 6 for pictures so I apologize for the poor photo quality.
Review of What I Ate at L'Ambroisie
There is no procession of nibbles to start a meal at L’Ambroisie. Typically there is only one amuse-bouche and its elaborateness can vary greatly from meal to meal. I have seen reviews where the diner received a half portion of an a la carte dish - scallop and black truffle. I have seen others where the amuse was a far more disappointing beetroot soup. When I visited, our amuse was somewhere between these two extremes, an egg sabayon topped with fresh diced alba truffles. This was very good, the egg lifting up the truffles and providing a luxurious start to the meal.
My starter is a staple on the L’Ambroisie menu - langoustines with sesame and curry (€98). So simple but so good. The langoustines, nestled between two sesame crisps, were succulent and sweet with the most impressive part being their texture - no hint of rubberiness here. The aforementioned crisps added a nice crunch and a bit of welcome grittiness to the sauce. The wilted spinach at the bottom looked pedestrian but offered some bitterness to contrast the langoustines and curry sauce. That aforementioned curry sauce was a treasure, immediately showing a visible sheen the moment the plate is put down. The consistency of the sauce is second only to the flavor, kept adequately mild to highlight the sweetness of the langoustines. This dish featured only a handful of components but they all worked together as they should.
My wife had scallops with watercress and caviar (€168). Just like the langoustines, this dish featured only a few components with one of them being golden osteria caviar which drove the price up into the stratosphere of the main course. Unlike the langoustines, I did not find the execution to be perfect. The watercress puree was peppery and smooth and the caviar ample enough to add the requested salinity. However, I found the scallops to be average. There have been times where I had a scallop and its natural flavor was shocking compared to what you typically get, as if it was an entirely different shellfish. These were not those scallops. Compounding the quality issue, there was an inconsistent cook on the scallops - two were cooked all the way through, one was raw on the inside, short of even a mi cuit. For nearly $200, I expect more.
When we arrived at the restaurant mid-service, the smell of white truffles permeating the dining room was intoxicating so, of course, I had to have at least one course including the “white gold” - sole with white truffle and vin jaune (€178). We were here in November, in the prime of white truffle season, and these were fine specimens with an incredible aroma that drew head turns from across the entire dining room when they brought my dish out. The tangy vin jaune, its consistency flawless as always, complemented the earthy truffles well. The bit of thinly shaved celery added some bitterness and bite, balancing out the sauce. Truth be told, the sauce and sole mostly did a good job getting out of the way and letting the truffles do their job.
My wife’s main course was another long-time staple of the menu which has seasonal variations, brenton lobster with turned potatoes, chestnuts, and “sauce diable” (€145). Perhaps I am small-minded but I don’t see the appeal in Brittany lobster when compared to Maine. Firmer, meatier, and less sweet than its American cousin, the lobster served here was prepared fine (if not a touch overdone) but not as good as the lobster I am used to eating in Massachusetts and Maine. Like all of the sauce work at L’Ambroisie, the sauce diable was the real treasure. It tasted a bit like lobster bisque with a hint of heat and had a glorious texture and mouthfeel. A good dish? Sure. But in the end, we are talking about a relatively average piece of lobster (albeit what appeared to be an entire lobster worth of meat), ordinary pumpkin/potatoes, and a good sauce. At this price, all three of those components need to be transcendent. They all short of that standard.
The restaurant had one pocket of value on its menu - an assortment of desserts (€45) which includes the famous chocolate tart, a souffle, and a citrus dessert which was perfect to share between 2 people. The chocolate tart was exactly as the reviews say - light as air, just the right amount of bitterness in the chocolate, and with just enough vanilla bourbon ice cream to balance it out. The restaurant must have realized this was too good of a value as the price has since been raised to €52.