The beet bourguignon (beets, pearl onions, braised carrots, raw mushrooms) needed a sauce to tie everything together, ideally one with some fat. So far the meatless main courses I’ve tried could be described as a collection of vegetables sharing a plate. Nothing, maybe? It’s smart, original and not quite like any other scallop dish I’ve had. In the case of the seared scallops with raw green apples and crisp turnip coins in a bright-tasting juice pressed from herbs, apples and celery, who knows. In the case of the excellent roasted monkfish with a pale pink blush at the core, it must be the butter emulsion that insinuates itself about the sea beans, the mussels and the sliced razor clams. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what distinguishes his contemporary French cuisine from the international style in food that stretches from Copenhagen to Mexico City and beyond. What the black filaments of leek ash are doing on the plate I can’t say, but the scraps of soft-boiled egg are there to help when the grains of mustard tug at your throat. Snipped into bite-size cylinders, these leeks are younger, firmer, their onion character not completely subdued. Say hello to your old friend skate Grenobloise, but reimagined as chilled sashimi, and approximately 10 times better than that sounds.Īnd here are leeks in vinaigrette, but not the comfortable old mush you’ve cozied up to before. The sauce on an appetizer of sliced raw fluke is brown butter with a flicker of lemon and a handful of capers, fried until crisp. It should, however, strike them as a very good place to eat seasonal food that flirts with French ideas in exciting ways. So Rebelle, despite its bistronomic pedigree, won’t strike most New Yorkers as a huge departure. While bistronomy put an extra shine on the copper pots in Paris, it hasn’t really resonated in the United States. The idea is to strip out expensive Michelin bait like linens so prices can come down and everybody can pay attention to the food again. Bistronomy isn’t a style of cooking it’s a reordering of priorities across the restaurant. The chef, Daniel Eddy, comes to Rebelle straight from the Paris restaurant Spring, a member of the loosely bound bistronomy movement. The unforced, intermittently French food is inspired by one particular rebellion. The assault on tradition implied by the name turns out to be fairly tame stuff, but you bump into it all over the restaurant. He likes to knock the crust off the rituals of buying something to drink by casting a favorite producer as a poet of barrel fermentation, a virtuoso of natural yeast, or, to give this restaurant’s name in English, a rebel. Cappiello’s way of talking about the 1,600 or so bottles on his list. It was starting to sound like a winemaking supergroup, the Velvet Revolver of pinot noir. Cappiello, is “a rock star of California sparkling wine.” The pinot noir grapes were grown along the Bohemian Highway in Sonoma County, and fermented by Michael Cruse who, according to Mr. With its precise, almost etched framework of acidity, it was a thrill. My neighbors knew the fellowship’s code and offered me a pour of their sparkling rosé, Ultramarine. Cappiello called him “a rock star of the Finger Lakes.” The grapes were grown on the east coast of Seneca Lake and turned into wine with a minimum of hocus-pocus by Kris Matthewson. My Bellwether pinot noir was not, he said, technically a rosé, though it was translucent, the color of raspberry juice, and as highly drinkable as any Provençal pink. Patrick Cappiello, the wine director of this worthwhile modern French restaurant on the Bowery, provided the introductions. I did what one member of the pink wine fellowship does when encountering other members, and offered them a taste. The couple on my left had rosé in their glasses, too. The night was humid, and I was drinking cold rosé at the black-veined marble counter that faces the kitchen of Rebelle.
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