At dinner last night at Cache (very good, see other thread), Carmenere asked me why I hadn’t written up our meal at Baca’v, a place that she took my wife & I (and ninkat) to over a week ago. I really had no answer. I just forgot to do so. But I will now. And I even have a couple of photos which I think will help make the point that this is a destination restaurant.
At any rate, this restaurant has been around for awhile, but the chef is relatively new to the place. I believe that Carmenere said that the previous chef (owner) left Paris & asked him to take over. As he is a longtime friend of Carmenere’s, he came right to our table upon seating and proceeded to have a conversation (in French) that seemed to be mostly a happy reacquaintance & catching up.
The food was great, start to finish, but I didnt take notes & really dont remember much of anyone’s food other than my own and my wife’s, blessed be she who never can finish her plates and enables my joyful weight gain. I started with the Marinated Herring & she chose the Celery Remoulade with Half Cooked Foie Gras (photo below). Both excellent. My main was the Parmentier of Blood Pudding w/Pig’s Feet & I was basically in heaven at the preparation - as the description says, not a boudin noir sausage, but an incredibly rich pudding. Sorry, no photo.
My wife’s main was a special blackboard dish that included lobster, pieces of quenelle and other goodies for which photos had to be taken. My inherited leftover amount from her was significant and I enjoyed my 2 plat meal way too much. Desserts were an Ile Flottante for her and, although ninkat and I debated splitting an order of Profiteroles, we each got our own and made them disappear. Apparently, this version is what the chef remembers from his childhood, including the ceremonial pouring of the chocolate sauce over the pastry, and I think that if my mother could do this trick, my childhood memories would be much improved. I’m sure that other pictures were taken and that other memories of the food will be forthcoming (right?), but here are ours:
Thanks for the report, Steve. I would like to add a few words about the chef.
Bacav’ is two restaurants now, this one in the 5th which is the original location and a new location in Boulogne-Billancourt just West of Paris. That’s where the founding chef went and he asked Gilles Choukroun to take over the first location.
Gilles was a pretty famous chef back in the 2000-2010 decade, known for being one of the initiators of the innovative side of Parisian bistronomie, with the likes of Iñaki Aizpitarte (Le Châteaubriand). He has a solid gastronomic background which he exerted at La Truie qui File in Chartres. Then it was Le Café des Délices in Paris, then Angl’Opéra from 2004 to 2008, then MBC near Porte Maillot until 2016. He left Paris after that to travel, mostly to Cambodia, and he came back to Paris recently and accepted the Bacav’ offer. One remarkable aspect of Gille’s cooking is that you can feel all the layers of his previous experiences — haute cuisine, innovative bistronomy, Southeast Asia — through an apparently calm and subdued cuisine which is bursting with flavors and shows an amazing precision in the execution. Desserts, particularly, which are usually my least favorite part of the meal, are uniquely impeccable.
