Old-Fashioned French Bistro Cuisine at Benoit in Paris

The incessant search for gastronomic novelty may dominate the world’s conversation about good food across the internet and on television, but many visitors to Paris come to the city with their hearts set on a very different dining experience. To wit, they yearn for old-fashioned French bistro cuisine – that quintessentially Gallic style of cooking which was born of rural thrift and the guiding idea of braising tough meat for a long time, to make it tender, and then napping it in a sauce made of its own richly flavoured, deglazed cooking juices.

Although this set of traditional culinary skills remains current, for economic reasons, as a style of restaurant cooking it’s time-consuming and thus expensive. Many Parisian restaurants no longer want to undertake this type of cooking when it’s so much easier to serve easily made dishes, like salmon tartare or sliced tomatoes with mozzarella. This is what makes Benoit, a bistro on the edge of the Marais in the heart of the city, which has been in business since 1912, such a precious address.

When the Petit family, who’d founded Benoit, decided to sell in 2005, the bistro was purchased by gastronomic entrepreneur and former chef Alain Ducasse, who’s lately made it a business priority to rescue classic French restaurants from oblivion, something for which I am actually very grateful.

While I didn’t like all of the changes that initially took place at Benoit on Ducasse’s watch – the expansion of the restaurant created a ‘caste’ system, which means that the best tables are in the original front room, while the less desirable ones are in the new dining room in the back– I tip my hat to Monsieur Ducasse for having saved such an ‘ur Parisian’ restaurant from destruction. Too many storied tables in this neighbourhood have become bars or clothing stores, or faced extinction altogether.

At Benoit, the standard menu is always complimented by a regularly changing array of special dishes – including, until the end of July, some of the world’s best lamb, the prés-salés from the Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy. My most recent meal there reminded me of just how good this kitchen can be when it’s at its best. Dining with another gastronomically avid Parisian, we started with Provençal asparagus with a truffled mousseline sauce and Langue de Lucullus, a rock-of-ages speciality from the small city of Valenciennes in northern France, which is comprised of fi ne layers of smoked beef tongue interleaved with pork-liver pate.

Next, I tucked into a pearly chunk of turbot on a bed of Swiss Chard, which was accompanied by a light sauce of its own cooking juices, one that was brightened by the addition of some pleasantly Maderised vin jaune from the Jura. Meanwhile, my friend delighted in a fillet of beef with ivory-coloured medallions of bone marrow and a beautifully made Bordelaise sauce, plus a side of macaroni au gratin in a diminutive copper saucepan.

Listening in on the conversations around us – in Italian, Spanish, German and several other languages – everyone else was as delighted by the cooking as we were, because what Benoit serves is a bouquet of taste that constitutes the glory of French gastronomy and one can only hope it will survive forever more.

We concluded our meal with an immaculately executed strawberry Charlotte – a fraise-filled cream cake that’s surrounded by a fence of sponge ‘ladyfingers’. We also delighted in a luscious serving of chocolate-sauced profiteroles, which came to the table replete with a dainty little porcelain pitcher of more of the same sauce, just in case we wanted it. That teasingly generous detail says everything about this glorious bistro, which is a Parisian monument that, in my book, is almost on a par with the Arc de Triomphe.

Benoit, 20 rue Saint Martin, Paris 4th. Tel: +33 1 58 00 22 05. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Lunch menu €39. Average à la carte dinner €85. www.benoit-paris.com

Based in Paris, restaurant columnist Alexander Lobrano has published a new book, Hungry for France, along with a new edition of his popular Hungry for Paris. Find these books and more in our bookstore.

From France Today magazine