Le Pre Catelan

Le Pre Catelan review at-a-glance

Awards: Three Michelin Star

+There are some great dishes on the menu and the execution from the kitchen was at a high level throughout.

-Chef Frédéric Anton’s style of cooking became repetitive over the tasting.

-Almost complete lack of vegetables outside of the amuse bouches.

Score: 85/100

Verdict: I really struggled with the food at Le Pre Catelan. There were no technical issues, the pacing was quick and the service was fine but it was still hard to love. Each dish was edited down to the most sparse of components. A piece of protein. A sauce. Nothing more, nothing less. Don’t get me wrong, there were some stunning plates - caviar with crab and a langoustine raviolo stand up well to the best dishes at any restaurant. Unfortunately, those standouts were the exception rather than the norm. I can appreciate a stripped-down plate but over a course of a tasting menu, this style quickly became tiresome - would it kill the kitchen to throw in a vegetable or two (apparently yes since there were none in any of the four main savory courses).

This is not to say Chef Frédéric Anton is not a great chef - the amount of skill in the kitchen was evident. He is just not the right great chef for me.

Would I go again? No

Price I Paid: €230 for 10-course tasting menu

Value: 8/20

Le Pre Catelan and Chef Frédéric Anton background

Le Pre Catelan is one of 10 three star restaurants in Paris. Befitting of such a renowned restaurant, it is located in a Napolean era Pavillion in one of the biggest parks in Europe, Bois de Boulogne. This makes for a splendid setting for a meal, steeped in history and class. On the warm summer day I visited, lunch was served outside in the covered garden which provided a secluded sanctuary to enjoy a meal. Perhaps the dining rooms in the grand hotels of Paris have more glamour, but I will take the historic settings of Le Pre Catelan or Ledoyen any day.

The chef at Le Pre Catelan is Frédéric Anton who worked under Joel Robuchon at Jamin for the 8 years prior to taking up his current role in 1997. While Le Pre Catelan was a one-star when he joined, Chef Anton methodically worked his way up the Michelin rankings until he earned his third star in 2007. Anton is known as a bit of a perfectionist, meticulously sourcing the best ingredients and refining his classical style dishes to only their most essential elements. That style did not work for me. Maybe it will work better for you.

I visited for lunch when the restaurant offered a short three-course menu for €98 as well as longer “10” and “14” course tasting menus for €230 and €295. I put the number of courses in quotes as the first 3/4 courses in each menu were essentially amuse bouches so the menu looked much longer than it actually was. Quibbles on the number of dishes aside, this is a reasonable price for Paris where most three stars are in excess of €300 outside of lunch menus. I ended up going with the 10-course menu as I find lunch menus in Paris feature too many concessions to their low cost to feel like you really got to try the chef’s cuisine.

Service was adequate in the way only a French three star can be – devoid of personality but taking care of your every need. That said, despite a packed house and only the second service after the 6-month COVID lockdown, the pacing was brilliant with dishes consistently spaced out and no lulls. One complaint was my €10 bottle of sparkling water was not kept in an ice bucket and quickly went warm on the hot early summer day.

What I ate at Le Pre Catelan

As mentioned previously, the first four courses were served at once and functioned as amuse bouches so I will do two at a time with tomato gelee with basil and eggplant and avocado dishes up first. The tomato dish was a nice refreshing way to start the meal (especially on a hot summer day) but not as good as an almost identical version served at Waldhotel Sonnora. The eggplant and avocado was unique with very good texture (if only I knew how they got the avocado so smooth) and a surprising flavor profile. That said the caviar on it was purely for show and used in such small amounts it added nothing to the dish.

The other two bites were a bit of a mixed bag. On the left, tapioca pearls which had been cooked like risotto and served with a cheese disc was overly rich and could have used more lemon flavor for balance. The bouillabaisse with red mullet on the right was better, the broth being very satisfying and a bit of cooked fish a surprising inclusion at this point in the meal.

Also served around the time of the amuses was high quality, but rather unimaginative, selection of bread (baguette, grissini, and a seeded roll). I would have liked to at least see a brioche to spruce the options up a bit.

We next moved to the best course of the meal, caviar with crab and curry. This was served in a small open caviar tin where the crab was mixed with curry, packed into the bottom of the tin, and topped with a layer of French caviar. While the dish only featured a few ingredients, the crab and caviar were a beautiful pair that was brought together by the well-judged use of curry. Surprisingly, the ice on the dish was not merely for show – it kept the dish at an optimal cold temperature which improved the mouth feel. Tremendous showing from the kitchen (even if I wished the portion was a little bigger).

The caviar was followed by the second-best dish of the afternoon, a langoustine raviolo topped with langoustine jelly and served with foie gras sauce. Great flavor on this dish and very similar to a Joel Robuchon dish which also paired langoustine ravioli with foie gras sauce. While the Le Pre Catelan version was very good, the Robuchon version benefitted from the inclusion of black truffle and brussel sprout leaves which added an earthiness that balanced out the richness. Their omission here was not glaring but some additional complexity would have been nice. I will give the chef bonus points for clever plating on the duck jelly, shaping it exactly like the raviolo.

After two strong, but simple, dishes the meal veered a bit off course with confit salmon and wasabi crème. Interestingly, both the salmon and crème were smoked in cherrywood. Putting taste aside, serving a 1-inch circumference piece of salmon with a wasabi crème and nothing else is a suspect choice for a Parisian three star. Even if you accept this as a good choice, the taste did not save the dish either. The smokiness in the crème was surprising but I mostly felt like I was dipping a decent piece of salmon into a jar of mayonnaise. This was the weakest course of the meal by some margin and quite disappointing as the ‘main’ fish course.

Main course (which I substituted from the 14-course menu in lieu of a sweetbread dish with vin jaune) was pigeon served with an anchovy sauce and a side of confit pigeon leg. The pigeon was cooked accurately and the sauce was supremely flavored but at this point I was exhausted by the repetitive plates featuring protein and rich sauce. While they added a side to this dish (the confit pigeon leg) it was similarly rich and offered no counterpoint to the main. Compounding matters, I found the anchovy in the sauce to be just a tad too strong and the pigeon having rather ordinary flavor. By chance, all three French restaurants I visited on this trip chose to use anchovies in the sauce of the main courses – this was the least effective of the three (the best being Le Clarence’s pairing with turbot). 

In lieu of a cheese board, the chef chose to do a composed cheese described as a cheese souffle with summer truffles. I found this to be both good and disappointing at the same time. The execution of the souffle was beautiful, the texture extremely light and the cheese flavor brought out even more by the indulgent comte sauce. Where it disappointed was listing truffles in the description – their flavor was almost completely absent. I couldn’t help but think the dish would have been many times better had it featured a healthy shaving of Australian winter truffles which were in season during my visit.

The first dessert centered around fresh pollen which came with a sable cookie and an onion!! ice cream. This was a tricky dish for me to judge – the onion ice cream was surprisingly good but by the end the dish felt a bit cloying and left a not great taste in my mouth that was hard for me to place. Maybe I just don’t like pollen?

The next dessert was better but not extraordinary, consisting of poached and bruleed rhubarb, puff pastry filled with vanilla cream, and a side of cream ice cream. The rhubarb was very nice, having a wonderful textural contrast from the brulee and pairing well with the partly melted ice cream served on the side. The puff pastry added further textural contrast but was rather sparse - would it have been too much of an effort to make this a proper mille-feuille and add a few more layers?

Befitting of the starkly minimal meal, in lieu of an extended mirgandises selection the pastry section chose to conclude the meal with chocolate and hazelnut nibbles. Both were very well made with the hazelnut almond bite being particularly good as the roasted/caramelized flavor of the nuts came through very nicely.