Restaurant Review - Louis XV

One of the finest restauranta in France, with a  truly grand dining room, all gold and glass, with an immensely high ceiling beautifully painted; there is even the most handsome cigar box I have ever seen, a wonderful walnut case that almost made me want to take up smoking. The current chef is Pascal Barbet, Frank Cerrutti having been promoted to an executive chef role within the Alain Ducasse group. Bread arrives on a large wooden chariot, with loaves made fresh each day: bacon bread, semolina, bread, butter bread roll, country bread, walnut and fig loaf, rye bread, raisin bread, baguette and even borrage bread (borrage is used in many local Monegasque dishes).  It is somewhat a matter of taste which of these you may prefer, but from the simple but perfect baguette to the walnut and fig loaf, this is undeniable a fine selection of bread (10/10).

If I say to someone from England that the meal starts with vegetable crudités, this will conjure up images of bad dinner parties with a few stick of supermarket carrot and celery with some dip. The vegetables that you can get in the Riviera markets are a world away from such things, and here the fennel, artichoke, carrot, courgette, radish and dressed leaves were simply dazzling.  I started with a North Italian dish, vitello tonato. Veal is marinated in wine, celery, onion, carrot and cloves for a day, poached slowly then served cold, in this case with celeriac hearts, capers and a little mini-baguette with roasted herbs enlivened with lemon zest (9/10).

Duck was carved by the side of the table; this particular duck had been used to make foie gras, so is quite fatty, resulting in a crispy skin due to the layer of fat just below the skin that the duck developed. This was served with beetroot, which gave a balancing acidity, root vegetables, a few fresh almonds and a roasted fig, along with a superb, rich jus (10/10).

Cheese is from no less than four separate affineurs, with Bernard Antony from Alsace amongst them. The cheeses were in uniformly superb condition, with aged Comte, gorgeous goat cheese, Morbiere, Camembert and Beaufort in beautiful condition (10/10). I tried a delicate feuillet of red berries, the fruit dazzling, with a sorbet of wild strawberries (10/10). 

The chocolate croustillant is simply one of the great desserts, invented here in the 1980s and never off the menu here. It was featured on an episode of UKTV’s “Great Dishes of the World” and a version executed by Roussillon chef Alexis Gaulthier (who used to work at Louis XV) won hands down. The version here, with its smooth yet almost liquid surface of dark chocolate, crisp thin layer of hazelnuts and pastry dough has been subtly refined for years and is as close to an ultimate chocolate dessert as you are ever likely to encounter (10/10).  A dish of perfect macaroons is offered, along with a fine tray of petit fours. Perhaps only the coffee is a relative tiny weakness, though there are many to choose from and perhaps there are better options than the Columbian espresso I had. Oh, and by the way, the cellars here have 400,000 bottles of wine – that is not a typo. 

Below are notes from July 2004, by way of comparison.

The point of the Louis XV is not the grand setting but stunning food that never lets up the quest for perfection throughout the meal. There are many examples of lovely dishes, but it is the unrelenting striving for the best in the details that impresses. Not content with getting their cheese from Antony, one of the best suppliers in France, and keeping it extremely well, they have sought out a supplier from Normandie just for the Camembert, because he makes the cheese by hand, and this is indeed the best Camembert I have tasted. For similar reasons there is another supplier just for the Roquefort, and yet another for the chevre. This is a place that had two pages of mineral waters to choose from, and more than half a dozen different coffees (Ethiopian, Columbian, Brazilian, etc). If you order an infusion, rather than someone snipping off a bit of thyme in the kitchen and putting it in a pot, a miniature nursery of herbs is wheeled out and the chosen herb ceremoniously cut off the living plant for you. Similarly, if you order the old classic Rum Baba, as well as divinely delicate bread sponge, you have a choice of five separate high quality rums to choose from. Bread arrives on a vast chariot – there is corn bread, bacon, olive, baguette, organic, country bread, a veritable bakery of options. Our favourite was the walnut bread, which had delicate texture, beautifully fresh walnuts and a perfect crust, bread that could hardly be bettered. Service is flawless, friendly and effortlessly efficient, without being noticeable.

Highlight dishes include a remarkable cheese and spinach amuse guele that resembled a samosa, but had pastry that no Indian kitchen would ever be likely to create. A risotto of courgette flowers had perfect, fat Arborio rice richly flavoured with stock, but containing surprises like a few baby girolles, and some tiny baby onions that melted on the tongue. A perfect steak was from Salers, and managed to have more flavour than any I had ever tasted up to that moment, accompanied by superb wild mushrooms, some artichokes and a rich demi-glace.

My favourite dessert is the Louis XV croustillant, a simply hazelnut biscuit covered with dark chocolate; sounds ordinary, but wait until you taste the chocolate, which has so smooth a surface it appears solid, yet is actually still soft and has an intensity of taste that makes me salivate just typing this. Fish is exceptionally good here, as in a Mediterranean sea bass with summer vegetables. There is the capacity, as with all the very finest restaurants, to surprise the palate with seemingly simple flavours, as occurs for example with almost all the vegetables here.

A great bargain is the set lunch. This is EUR 90, which sounds quite a bit until you discover what you get for that. There is an amuse bouche, a small starter (we had a perfect chilled cucumber soup poured over truffle slices) then a starter of your choice: I had a simple dish of pasta with tomato sauce, the pasta perfect, the tomatoes having depth of flavour that it is impossible to describe. This is followed by a main course, for which I had chicken simply cooked in a pot with a few vegetables. The chicken was so corn-fed that the skin was distinctly yellow even after the cooking, with the meat having great depth of taste – what was the last time you found this with chicken? Then you have cheese. There is a pre-dessert of the perfect croustillant described above, and then a further dessert of your choice e.g. an apricot tart to die for. You then get coffee and a dish of petit-fours of the highest quality, some divine chocolates and macaroons and lastly some freshly baked Madeleines. Oh, and a bottle of wine (several choices). Not too bad for EUR 90.