A Young Parisian Chef’s Nouvelle Stodginess

I wanted more from Le Chêne, and from Duchêne. Not just more salt but more daring, more challenge, more bold and experimental vulgarity. Her crab thermidor (like many of the dishes that I tried, it’s not currently on the ever-changing menu) was deep and warm with vadouvan but could have pushed harder into heat, into depth, into the sweet crustacean funk of the crab itself. Inside many of Duchêne’s faithful, masterful re-creations of haute cuisine are hints of a nervy brilliance: in a dish of oeufs mayonnaise, the normally ghost-white emulsion was bright green with herbs and topped audaciously with a tumble of tuna tartare. The dish evoked so much: a salade Niçoise, a deli-case handshake of tuna and egg salads, a bit of a tuna-melt twang from shaved curls of Mimolette cheese. It was unexpected, strange, a little awkward, fundamentally genius. There were just a few such revelations, but they made me so happy. A side salad of soft lettuces was tossed in a vinaigrette spiked with a splash of fish sauce, inexplicable, terrific; by contrast, a “beetroot condiment” accompanying the pithivier was, to the molecule, and hilariously, just a very fancy ketchup.

Helen, Help Me!
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Depending on where you’re seated in the room, you can catch a glimpse of Duchêne at the pass of the tucked-away kitchen, her ice-blond hair pulled back, a look of concentration tightening her face as she positions a bit of toast or a garnishing wedge of lime before sending a dish out into the dining area. Quiet and focussed, she seems more interested in the labor of the kitchen than in working the room. She emerges only rarely, perhaps to spoon a sauce over a piece of meat as it’s served, and she doesn’t stay to chat. (In contrast, Le May, who oversees the front of house, often leaves his post at the door to roam the dining room and offer advice and tastes of the menu’s deep list of excellent wines.) I find Duchêne’s seriousness intriguing—despite her television background, her adjacency to fame, her clear determination, she is a cook immersed in the work of cooking. This itself is chic, and to this New Yorker spectacularly Parisian: the intensity, the exactitude, the jagged blades of ambition. Her food just needs a little more salt and a little more sizzle. ♦