Beauty at the Beast
Old World finery takes a magical culinary tour at La Bête.
But the coolest thing about this dish was its vibrant interplay of Old World refinement—the fancy china, the autumnal squash puree, the old-fashioned popover—and edgy intensity: pungent blue cheese, tart onion jam, the very mysteries of the cosmos in the soup. In short, robust dinner and an eloquent comment on the soul of La Bête. Old and new each elevate the other here.
And so pork rinds—pork rinds!—arrived all crackly and salty and lacquered with grease (and oversensitivity; they went stale quick), alongside an inspired, trendy complement of pickled shallots. That homespun favorite, bread pudding, came as a main dish, swollen with the musky savories of no fewer than four (hon-shimeji, chanterelle, cremini, shiitake) varieties of mushroom. Sometimes the commanding flavors resulted in something overwrought (a dish of blush-perfect slices of lamb leg with pickled ramps, lamb sausage, and—kapow!—harissa) or unmitigated, like salt cod croquettes whose citrus-kissed brininess grew tiresome.
Other times all the overthinking landed the chefs in the realm of the great-in-theory, as in the case of a nuanced scallop dish, served in a fragrant broth with bits of apple and matsutake mushroom and cabbage and bacon. Was this soup? Then it needed to be billed thus on the menu. Was it a main dish? Then it needed some form of starch to bolster, complement, or sop all the juice. (Menu descriptions can be misleading here: A knockout creamy compilation of gnocchi and shelled Manila clams, enriched with truffles and celeriac, was billed as Manila clams with gnocchi, celery root, chive, and truffle; conjuring a bowl of clams in shells rather than the stewy marvel that arrived.)
But for the most part, these chefs land on the balmy shores of sweet success. Brunch is less distinguished but more satisfying, with some of the dishes from the evening card along with populist crowd-pleasers like a journeyman burger (a fatty, with bacon) and coffee cake that ate like butter held together with veins of sugary cinnamon.
It reminded me of a dessert we demolished at the close of one dinner: A banana split with scoops of Olympic Mountain vanilla, chocolate, and blackberry astream with hot fudge and anointed with whipped cream. No bells, no whistles. Just $10 worth of ridiculous goodness, done real. “Our vision is really just to make the food we want to cook,” Moritz told me later. That’s a slogan that could be needlepointed onto a sampler, then hung amid La Bête’s abstract art for all the demimonde to enjoy.
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Published: December 2010
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