In an effort to review more restaurants in Paris neighborhoods far from my own, which I tend to neglect, I recently took advantage of the visit of some American visitors who were staying in the 15th arrondissement to seek out a good bistro in that staid residential area. I chose L’Accolade as a likely candidate.
After passing through a rather dreary neighborhood and then the restaurant’s unpromising entrance, with its dirty awning and one chipped table with two chairs in front of the door (for smokers, I presume), I was welcomed with open arms to L’Accolade – only fitting, since the name means “hug.”
In contrast to the exterior, the restaurant was clean and attractive inside. It soon filled up with locals looking for a good lunch, which came out promptly.
While I waited for my friends from Portland, I had the good luck to catch the bearded chef on his way back to kitchen to check with him on the butter content of that day’s menu, since one of my friends has a strong aversion to it. He gave me the rundown on each dish, and it turned out that there was surprisingly little butter in them. Many people mistakenly think that French food is all about butter and cream, but that’s really true only for the cuisine of Normandy.
Once they had arrived and we got down to eating, Mark started off with a dish of big ravioli – is this a new trend? I’ve been seeing a lot of these oversized ravioli in Paris restaurants – filled with shredded duck confit and served with glazed mushrooms, asparagus and two sauces, one of them, which he wasn’t fond of, a bacon mousse.
After that hearty first course, he opted for another, lighter starter instead of a main: the restaurant’s version of a Caesar salad. I warned him that it would probably have little resemblance to what he considers a Caesar salad, and he agreed. It contained chicken, which the French always seem to add to the famously garlicky salad, I suppose to make it more filling.
Ann, also a light eater, skipped the starter and ordered the octopus, which she found highly pleasing with its Thai-style wok vegetables and puréed carrots.
I have rarely been known to skip a course, and this day was no exception. I started with the very fine Scottish gravlax, lavishly accompanied by caviar d’aubergines (baba ganoush), avocado tartar, dill ice cream, herring roe and Nourmoitier potatoes (some of France’s finest, from the eponymous island made famous by some of the films and artworks of Agnès Varda). Fresh and fabulous.
It was followed by a luscious dish of fatty, melt-in-the mouth, slow-cooked (33 hours) pork, smothered in a piquillo-pepper sauce and served with roasted eggplant, Datterino tomatoes, gnocchi and fresh peas.
For dessert, I had a slightly disappointing millefeuille of the deconstructed variety. While the salted-butter caramel sauce and especially the vanilla cream were luscious, I would have preferred a more classic version interlined with all “one thousand” layers of flaky pastry.
The other dessert was an excellent chocolate ice cream with crunchy bits of praline and vanilla whipped cream.
As you can see from the above descriptions, the chef at L’Accolade uses only quality ingredients and goes to a lot of trouble to create generous, satisfying dishes, while the friendly service staff contributes to that huggable atmosphere.
See our Favorite Restaurants by Arrondissement page to find a good restaurant in the neighborhood where you want to eat.
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