You know that you’re in good hands in a restaurant when the head waiter tells you that the staff had a meeting before you arrived to discuss whether they thought your table would be large enough or not.
We were a party of nine, celebrating a birthday in the Michelin-starred Le Chantecler in Nice, and we assured him that the table was plenty big enough … not only big enough for us, but also for the tableware, wine, glasses, amuses-bouches and different breads that all appeared before a single course had been served.
It was a tasting menu, but there was no actual written menu, so we had no idea what we would be tasting until each course arrived and was placed ceremonially in front of us. Then our waiter would lean forward with his hands clasped reverentially in front of him and describe the dish we were about to eat. Unfortunately, English wasn’t his strong point and his strangulated vowels made him practically impossible to understand. So there was quite a lot of muttering around the table, ‘Did he just say this is a Japanese spear?’ or ‘He says this is a pear? It looks like a potato to me.’
So I wrote down what I thought he’d said – after conferring with everyone else – and then when they gave us a printed menu at the end, I had a look to see if I was right. But I think our waiter may have had a hand in writing the menu too, as there were some very unexpected ingredients – like ‘squid on a fireplace’. I’m pretty sure he didn’t mention fireplaces in his description, and I couldn’t see any sign of a fireplace anywhere on the table, so I’m guessing that was deemed to be a fire hazard and was banned.
Each course was served on beautiful tableware – all different and all exquisite – and with the most amazing attention to detail. The tiny pieces of fennel set into the cuttlefish jelly must have been snipped up with nail scissors and then positioned in the jelly with tweezers. I pitied the poor trainee who had had to prepare fifty of those.
I think my favourite course was the next one, which was a roasted tomato salad served with a sabayon sauce, which was light and fluffy and very tomato flavoured, even though it was pure white … very clever!
The meat course was pigeon, and was probably my least favourite. It was cooked with cherries and almond and what sounded like ‘oxalis flower’ when the waiter described it – but I couldn’t see a flower on the plate and it isn’t mentioned on the written menu. So he might have been saying ‘wholemeal flour’ or maybe even ‘oxtail soup’ … who knows.
Then came the cheese trolley of dreams, about a hundred cheeses all from small artisanal producers, which was followed by a pre-dessert … what a fabulous idea! How come I’ve never heard of having a pre-dessert before the actual dessert before? I feel this should become compulsory in all restaurants. Our pre-dessert was a goat’s cheese mousse garnished with leaves and topped with a little tuile biscuit sprinkled with pollen.
Then came a birthday cake with one candle, which was whisked away after the singing, and I assumed this would be returned, cut in pieces, as dessert. But it wasn’t.
The actual dessert arrived deconstructed on a trolley, with a chef and his assistant who assembled each individual work of art in front of us. On the bottom was a cream of olive oil, then a leaf of bitter chocolate which was so thin and delicate that you could see light shining through parts of it. On top of that was a scoop of olive oil and orange blossom ice cream, followed by another chocolate leaf. The final flourish was a drizzle of olive oil and orange blossom over the top. And I noticed that the plate was decorated with tiny blobs of chocolate in the exact pattern of the restaurant logo … this was attention to detail on steroids.
And if you’re at all dubious about the idea of olive oil ice cream, don’t be – it tastes divine.
I assumed this was the end of the meal, and that the birthday cake must have been a polystyrene replica, dusted off and brought out for every celebration before the proper dessert arrived … but I was wrong.
The birthday cake returned and was cut into slices for us – an après-dessert in addition to the pre-dessert. It was a meringue with chantilly cream and berries. They called it a pavlova, but no Australian would have agreed with that description; it was far too crisp and solid to be a serious contender as a pavlova.
Finally, some petits fours and an intriguing offer from the head waiter to bring the ‘herb trolley’ to our table. Of course we said yes, and so a trolley full of greenery was trundled across the room and a waitress snipped off pieces of rosemary, savory, mint and lemon verbena to create individual pots of herbal tea for us all.
As we lingered over our tea and got ready to leave, I had the distinct impression that the table was much less roomy than it had been when we arrrived – either the table had shrunk or we’d expanded over the course of a very special four-hour dinner.
