“Cuisine” - Kitchen
If you’re at all tuned in to the world of fine dining, you’ve probably heard that Noma—the always-lauded and sometimes-controversial Copenhagen restaurant that brought Nordic dining to the forefront of the culinary world—is doing a stint in Los Angeles. Rene Redzepi, the chef behind the restaurant, is bringing his entire team over to create an experience. The kicker? It’s $1,500 per person.
It sold out in literal seconds.
Even dining at the regular Noma will run someone upwards of $700 per person. Money aside, the idea here is that Noma acts as a kind of creative incubator, where stages (pronounced “stah-ges,” unpaid kitchen interns) are encouraged to come up with their own dishes and present them for inclusion in the menu. It creates wildly explorative plates. It finds flavors that no one in their right mind would imagine go together (but they do). The place is a career-maker.
I tell you all that to tell you this: Katy and I had an opportunity to eat at a new restaurant in Paris, whose head chef is a Noma alumnus, with several other major restaurants around the world under his belt as well. So when I talk about the food you’ll have a better understanding of what we ate.
I’m not one to always equate cost with enjoyment. If anything, when I’m being charged a high price, you better blow me away. And Cypséle was admittedly a little hit-and-miss for us. Some courses delivered, made me raise my eyebrows and make eye contact with Katy, like, “okay then.” Others were confusing and frankly weren’t entirely pleasant. But that’s the nature of a restaurant that’s 1) in its infancy and 2) changing its menu nearly every night (have you seen Season 3 of The Bear?).
Important disclaimer: our meal cost absolutely nowhere in the ballpark of the two prices above. We’re on one salary here, and we’re not crazy.
Here’s what we ate.
Mise en Bouches - We were met with not one but five amuse bouches. I had trouble keeping track of some of these, but they went something like this:
Goose Barnacles (yes that’s what they’re called, and they weren’t bad)
Some kind of cheese wrapped in an anchovy and fried, like a little salt bomb
A tartlet with a raw fish, a sauce, and fried shrimp heads (big miss for us)
A mini grilled cheese with sweet bread and a slice of duck ham
Uni and polenta, and suddenly they had my attention again
Course 1 - Sea bream wrapped in kohlrabi with a chamomile oil. This was a fine bite. I’m not usually one for perfumy foods, but both the bream and kohlrabi needed the oil to add balance to the plate.
Course 2 - Grilled eel and foie gras with citrus broth. I think I’ve only had eel at midwestern sushi restaurants where it’s drowning in syrupy sweet sauce. The fattiness of the foie and acid of the citrus created something altogether pretty nice. Which is, you know, the goal.
Course 3 - Scallop with sauce nantua. The scallop was wrapped in a dumpling and cooked. Sauce nantua is essentially a bechamel base flavored with crawfish. I’d bathe in it.
Course 4 - Sole and grilled mache veloute. Struggled here. The sauces both had a kind of gelled consistency and, while I love sole, it needed something stronger to pull it together.
Course 5 - Guinea fowl. I’d never eaten guinea fowl before this. I was also not thrilled here. The meat was tough and generally not pleasant to eat.
Plat en supplement - Tarte fondante. A cheese tart. At the beginning of the meal, I was really excited to see the spin they’d put on a cheese tart—about as traditional a French dish as you can think of. But there wasn’t any spin. It was just what it said it was. And I’m not sure why the server suggested we add one for each of us, when we were at the point in the meal where we were already filling up. Katy didn’t finish hers.
Course 6 - the first dessert, a tangelo sorbet, wrapped in cedrat (a kind of citrus), with sparkling sake. This was bright and bubbly and a lot of fun. Much needed after the cheese.
Course 7 - second dessert, an ile flottante with chartreuse. The “ile” is a kind of meringue, and it’s surrounded by a sweet cream spiked with an herby liqueur. And it was absolutely fire.
Mignardises - creme caramel but the caramel was replaced by vin jaune (yellow wine) reduction, and a confit kumquat.
All in all, an interesting meal, and not necessarily “interesting” in the way my dad used to say about books I would loan him when what he really meant was “weird, I didn’t like it.” We had fun, had our boundaries pushed, and drank a banger of a bottle of champagne. What a date night.
I’ve confirmed my status as the oldest person in my cohort. In fact, I’m a solid 20 years older than the youngest of the group. And all of this is ok, because I put them to shame in the kitchen and then remind them that the internet didn’t exist when I was born. I also have to dad-voice them on occasion, like reminding them that food scraps do not go in the sink because there is no garbage disposal here, and all it does is clog the drain. Come on, kids.
We’ve cooked a lot. I’m not as nervous going into a practical anymore. My organization, time management, and speed have vastly improved. My tourné cut, a mind-numbingly wasteful and tedious motion that pares a potato down to something roughly the size of your thumb, is also better. I’m proud of that, and already tired of eating mashed potatoes made from the collateral damage of practice.
All this being said, I’m starting to notice my relationship with cooking—and food, for that matter—is changing. The big, rich, heavy foods that make up a lot of the French cookbooks take their toll. I long for salad (and also pizza). At home, and even in the first weeks here, coming home to make dinner was the highlight of my day. Now, after a three-hour cook, I’m thankful to have leftovers or fixings for a jambon beurre in the fridge.
Auggie and his Norwegian nanny (manny? Male nanny? Babysitter? Buddy?) are becoming fast friends, to the point that Aug is now willing to throw a fit in front of and even at him. It’s his surest sign of love.
Before we left, at Auggie’s two-year doctor’s appointment, a pediatrician asked me loads of questions about this trip to France. He followed up my answers with something that worried me: “Sometimes kids can regress pretty far when big life events like this happen to them. They may stop talking, start acting out more, stop showing signs of progress. You’ll just want to keep an eye out for that.” I can say very thankfully that none of that is an issue, at least after a month. Auggie is, inexplicably, speaking in full sentences now. He’s also inquisitive as ever, often asking us forty times in a row what “that” is (“what that, Daddy? What that?”) while pointing at a picture of something like a trash truck—a thing he most certainly knows—in one of his books.
His love of trains has deepened, as well as his love of firetrucks. He now associates firetrucks with the French “pin-pon, pin-pon” siren, and will deepen his voice and say “BIG FI-UH TWUCK” when he sees one.
We’ve been here for a month. Remarkable. Katy posted a really nice video to her Instagram that sums up our time here quite nicely—and includes Auggie riding at least three carousels. I won’t say yet that I’m homesick. I do miss my friends. Katy does too. We’re both also still taken with the vibrancy and novelty of living in Paris. And I think I can speak for both of us when I say we’re happy.
Katy and I have continued our exploration of Paris as we’ve been able, though it’s relegated to weekends now. This past Sunday we visited the Rodin Museum and Gardens where we got to see The Thinker (which is outdoors? Did everyone know that? That this famous statue just…sits outside?), and The Kiss. As ever, Katy was remarkably patient with me as my mood soured thanks to the rain, being given bad directions by museum staff to the stroller-accessible entrance, and the vast number of people due to it being free entrance day. She also took a beautiful picture of me admiring The Thinker which doesn’t show my angst at all. Hers was the real talent on display.
But the entire weekend wasn’t ours. I had a practical on Saturday. After the group finished, sweaty and tired and a little angry at having our weekend taken away from us, several of us went out for a beer. Katy had been excited to meet my new friends, and it was a chance to get out of the apartment. We brought Auggie, who not only was allowed inside the bar but became something of a greeter and doorman.
The lot of us drank French beer and ate saucisson and baguette. At one point, around a small, cramped table, we had two Hoosiers, a toddler, a Canadian, a Mexican, an American on her gap year after high school (aforementioned youngest in the group), a French American, a New Yorker married to a Frenchman, said Frenchman, and their miniature dachshund. We laughed a lot. My friends love Katy (obviously) and vice versa—and Auggie was the talk of the group on Monday morning. The oldest of us were the last ones standing, and I called that out with pride. But I was informed that no, they didn’t go home—they all went out to a club without us, because we’re old.
And that’s ok. I probably couldn’t keep up. Like how they can’t keep up with me in the kitchen.