I'm being watched. Somebody is creeping up behind me, and although I can't see or hear him, my whole body has stiffened in anticipation. I try to relax – maybe I'm just being paranoid. Maybe the feeling will pass.
It doesn't. From over my left shoulder, a hand appears, brandishing a bottle of wine. My glass is filled. The hand leaves. No more than thirty seconds later, I get that same feeling again. Another hand comes into view, wearing a white glove this time, and sets down a fresh set of cutlery. A minute later, a third person is adding a splash of Vittel to our water glasses.
The next time I sense someone approaching, I turn around. It is another waiter, but he has apparently decided there isn't much left for him to do. He turns our water bottles so the labels are facing outwards, gives us a long look, and exits.
By this poin
t, I've given up on trying to have any sort of meaningful conversation with my date; the parade of unnecessary intrusions has been going on since we first sat down. Because we would prefer not to be overheard by the wait staff, we've stopped talking whenever they've come by.
There was a time when hovering service was expected of a fancy restaurant – if you didn't have the waiter's armpit in your face for most of the evening, you weren't getting your money's worth. But times have changed, and Le Terroir doesn't seem to have gotten the memo. Have they been living in a cave for the past ten years?
Well, sort of, yes. Le Terroir is one of those below-ground restaurants with lots of bricked arches and no windows, another concept that was appealing at a certain point in history but now feels heavily outdated.
But an underground restaurant still has its cozy charms, and its advantages, too; at Le Terroir, a portion of the cellar is dedicated to its vast wine selection, and patrons can, through a glass door, glimpse the stacks of crates and bottles as they are shown to their seats. Wine is important here, as is implied by the name (there are even soil samples of various terroirs – the environment in which a wine is produced – laid into a section of the restaurant's floor). The list itself is a pretty hefty tome, with a wide spectrum of bottles ranging from the under-1000 CZK mark to a justifiably pricey 1949 Latour. For those intimidated by the amount of choice, the sommelier's selection at the front of the menu is a helpful place to start.
Considering the obvious care that has been put into the wines, it was a bit strange to be asked which bottle we wanted before we'd even had a chance to look at the dinner menu. Surely it was understood that we wanted to choose our wine according to our meal? The sommelier didn't seem to get it, though; when we said we'd like to see our food options first, he looked mildly bewildered.
As it turned out, we wouldn't just see our food options: we would hear them, too. Someone at Le Terroir has decided that it would be classy for the servers to spout off, from memory, the evening's offerings – exactly as they are written in the menu that they have just handed their guests.
This kind of thing works in a place where the waiters know the menu so well that they can rattle it off without a second's thought, and add some informative details along the way, but this was nothing short of torture. I felt like I was back in school, watching a completely unprepared student stumble her way through an oral exam. It didn't help, of course, that our poor waitress had to deliver the speech in English, blushing and stammering and awkwardly-pausing her way through a ten-course degustation menu. It was all I could do not to mouth her the answers: "scallops with… SAFFRON CONSOMME."
For all the cluelessness of the wait staff, the food mostly isn't bad. Chef Jan Punčochář prides himself on using high-quality ingredients. His concise menu changes often; the restaurant is even closed on Sundays and Mondays, when it's hard to find fresh produce. The style is French, and even if you don't order a degustation menu (ranging from 1190 CZK for three courses to 1690 CZK for six courses), you will still be pampered with various amuses-bouche between dishes.
My favorite amuse was a piece of crayfish served alongside a fennel salad and slices of orange – perfectly seasoned, simple, and light. I was less keen on the guinea fowl wrapped in bacon and topped with mashed potatoes; although it was good, it was very large, almost enough to be its own course.
My wild duck appetizer (450 CZK), too, was a hefty portion, one I could easily have handled as an entrée. But the seared pieces of duck breast were pleasantly gamey, and were well-complemented by the cubes of fresh pumpkin and spinach leaves served on the side. I quite liked my main course, too, a baked shoulder of wild pig served with chestnuts and Brussels sprouts (640 CZK).
Unfortunately, dessert – a chocolate and quark terrine with strawberry granité – was on the bland side, and my companion's fish of the day (890 CZK) was completely off. The turbot was fairly dry, and served (inexplicably) with pasta and some calamari that were well past their prime. The whole dish was so fishy, in fact, that we could smell it long before it reached our table.
We'd had about 8,000 close encounters with our waiters that evening, but at the end of the meal, there was no one to bring us our check. By the time we left, I was so exhausted that I couldn't even make a snide remark to my friend about the 265 CZK water bottle that appeared on the bill, or the fact that our coats hadn't been hung up on hangers even though there were plenty of empty ones to use. "Let's just get out of here," I said.
So we did.
Le Terroir
Vejvodova 1
Praha 1
map
Tel.: 222 220 260
Open Tues-Sat 11:00-23:00
photographs 2, 3, 5, 6 Ondřej Němec for Lidové Noviny; all others leterroir.cz
This review originally appeared in Czech translation in the 12/19/09 edition of Lidové Noviny.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Restaurant Review: Le Terroir
Monday, June 15, 2009
Restaurant Review: Céleste
This review originally appeared in Czech translation in the 30/05/09 edition of Lidové Noviny.
The freshly-posted instructions on the outside of the Dancing House are very clear: if you want to get to the top of this icon of modern architecture, you'll have to pay a visit to Céleste first.
The Dancing House is a tricky sort of building. Its towers, nicknamed "Fred and Ginger" for their abstract resemblance to a pair of dancers, are oddly shaped – Ginger, the one made out of glass, is tapered to mimic a woman's form – and its windows are staggered in a wavelike pattern. But Frank O. Gehry's and Vlado Milunić's deconstructivist masterpiece is a risky restaurant location for a different reason: it doesn't get much foot traffic, and there's plenty of the other kind.
To get to the restaurant, you pass through Céleste's small ground-floor bar, where the bartender hits the elevator button and calls upstairs to announce your imminent arrival. And once you're up on the seventh floor, the view is wonderful: the river, the castle, the far-off greenery of Petřín. You'd even forget about the traffic jam downstairs, if you couldn't see a half-kilometer-long line of cars stretching up to Karlovo náměstí.
Céleste is sister to one of Prague's best restaurants, Angel. But here the cuisine is French, not Asian, and the mood is more upscale – white tablecloths, fussier waiters, and slightly higher prices. By
all appearances, Céleste is not dissimilar to the previous tenant, La Perle de Prague, which closed recently after having operated since the Dancing House's completion in 1996.
Yet anyone who has visited both restaurants would surely agree that Céleste is a major step up from the overpriced, uninspired La Perle. The new head chef is Gwendal Le Ruyet, a Frenchman from Brittany who spent five years working under Michelin-starred chef Alain Ducasse, among other prestigious international posts. His cooking – much like that of Sofia Smith, who helms Angel's kitchen – is bold and self-assured, with an emphasis on seasonal ingredients.
One of the waiters recommended that I try the lettuce soup as an appetizer, but there was no need; I had been planning on ordering it anyway. I really like cold soups, and this one sounded especially intriguing: a velouté of spring lettuce with pan-seared escargots and tarragon foam (275 CZK). The soup itself turned out to be a rich spinach-green color, full of the snappy flavor of fresh lettuce but slightly under-salted – which didn't really matter because the escargots were very savory (they also, for some reason, seemed to taste mildly of bacon). Some fresh shredded lettuce leaves and a few crunchy miniature croutons added texture to this well-balanced dish.
This is modern French cooking at its best. Le Ruyet has preserved the classic culinary techniques and rich sauces of his predecessors, but the dishes are lighter, more pared-down. He often does away with carbohydrates completely: the preparation of a pan-seared cod fillet (450 CZK as part of a two-course lunch menu; 550 CZK for three courses) cleverly evoked a classic beef Bourguignon, with its thick red wine sauce, pearl onions, and button mushrooms, but there were no potatoes to weigh the meal down.
Another fish dish, the sturgeon fillet (625 CZK) was similarly fresh-tasting and very appropriate for the spring season. It was served with pink grapefruit and fresh radishes, along with a green pea puree that was a nice homage to mushy peas (typically found next to fish and chips in English pubs). The sturgeon was perfectly cooked, but the citrus sauce it came with had an unpleasantly bitter aftertaste, as if some lemon rind had gotten in there by accident.
If you are a die-hard carbohydrate lover, don't worry: Céleste makes their own bread, and it is excellent. We were offered a choice of rosemary, white sesame with onion, black sesame, and rye flavors. Finally, an upscale restaurant that doesn't get its bread from the Mansson bakery like everybody else.
Céleste seems determined to do things differently, and better. Their dessert menu is full of unusual surprises, like the heavenly purple pears with red wine granita, mascarpone, and salted Brittany biscuit (195 CZK). My dinner companion said his roasted lamb with daikon radish and artichokes (595 CZK) was the best he'd ever had in this country, and the server proudly explained that it was organic Moravian lamb, not meat that had been shipped in from New Zealand or elsewhere. And they even offer Mattoni and Bonaqua along with the pricier imported waters.
On both my visits, the service was very good, if a little over-eager. Because I was recognized by a waiter who knew me from my frequent visits to Angel, I can't say for sure that it would be the same for other customers. But I have no doubt that the servers at Céleste will be professional and friendly to everyone who walks into their refined purple and gray-themed dining room.
When you do visit, ask to sit in the "Ginger" section of the restaurant, which is surrounded by glass and has a clearer view. Or, better yet, arrange an evening in their private dining room upstairs, which is absolutely stunning and can seat anywhere from two to twenty people. From there, you can walk out onto the circular terrace that crowns the Fred tower and look out across the city in the fresh air.
When you leave, of course, you'll be walking back into that big intersection. Not the most inspiring setting for a post-dinner walk – but by then, you'll be so drunk on lovely food and magical views that you won't even care.
Céleste Restaurant & Bar
Tančící dům
Rašínovo nábřeží 80
Praha 2 – Nove Mesto
map
Tel: 221 98 41 60
Open Mon-Sat 12:00-14:30, 18:30-22:30. Closed Sunday.
photographs: 1, 3, 4 Tomáš Krist for Lidové Noviny; all others celesterestaurant.cz
