Zébulon

Scoring High at Palais Royal

February 9, 2015By Heidi EllisonArchive, Restaurants

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The new restaurant’s interior is bright, spacious and elegant.

A few weeks ago, I reviewed Pirouette, a great little bistro near the Forum des Halles, and now I have tried its new baby sister, Zébulon, in another part of town where it’s often hard to find a reliably good meal, near the Palais Royal.

The friendly reception was the same, while the prices were a tad higher and the interior a bit more elegant: clean, modern and spacious, all in light-colored wood with handsome dark wood chairs. The restaurant stretches from the Rue de Richelieu to the Rue Montpensier, with a glassed-in kitchen between the two dining rooms, a bar in one room and a baby grand in the other.

At lunchtime, you can have two courses for €20, but you get no choice, or you can order anything you want for €45 for three courses.

I chose the first option, with dishes that are not my usual preferences, but I was curious to see what was available for the lower price. As at Pirouette, both dishes were of top quality, satisfying and gastronomically interesting. The first was a dish of cooked romaine lettuce and Swiss chard in a lovely sauce topped with

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succulent morsels of pork and a surprise layer of Parmesan cheese, which had a nice balancing effect. For my main course I had the mullet with tiny grenaille potatoes, Romanesco

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broccoli and beurre blanc sauce. Each element was cooked just right and together they sang in harmony.

My friend the food blogger went à la carte and, as he put it, really “scored,” starting with the “dorade confite” (French food people have recently been using the word “confit” in new ways; in this case, it meant marinated in olive

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oil and lemon). It was encrusted with toasted sesame seeds and served with persimmon. Divine! Yet perhaps even more divine was his luscious, meaty pigeon, its legs stuffed with

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the giblets, cooked with 11 spices and served with pommes Anna (sliced potatoes baked in butter) and purée of celery. Wow!

My less-expensive dishes were not as sophisticated, but they were so delicious that I did not feel at all cheated.

Continuing the adventure, we had two desserts. The charming co-owner Thomas, who waited on us, reminded us that his chef was originally a pastry chef, so we had to try his creations. I went for the mandarin-orange cookie base

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topped with fresh mandarin sections and crème chiboust (pastry cream with meringue), browned under the grill, with a side of basil/mandarin ice cream. Delicious, with one little drawback: the orange sections were nearly tasteless. Could just have been the bad one in the bunch, so I won’t hold it against the chef. The other dessert was a poached pear with honey, marjoram, almonds and lemon/marjoram ice cream. While they were both fine, I was a tiny bit disappointed that they didn’t send me over the moon.

That is a very small complaint about a very fine meal. I can wholeheartedly recommend Zébulon, apparently named after a cartoon character who hops around on a spring, a reference to the restaurant’s country-hopping chef, Yannick Lahopgnou, who is from Cameroon and has worked in Japan and was trained at the Meurice by three-star chef Yannick Alléno.

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