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Jacques Faussat's La Braisiere, Paris

At restaurant La Braisiere in the desirable 17th Arrondissement, near Parc Monceau, Chef Jacques Faussat is in the dining room.

It’s unusual enough for a chef to be in the dining room before service, but it’s unheard of for a chef to be also taking orders from customers and even delivering plates.

It’s a slow night with only one server on staff, the second broke his arm last week in a motocross accident. Normally Anne, who is also Chef’s new companion following the breakup with his former wife and business partner, runs the house with three servers.

But that’s in the busy season, from October to April. Now it’s the very end of July and even Anne is away on holidays. Like tens of thousands of French businesses, the restaurant will locks its doors in two days for the fermeture annuelle, the annual closure, for the month-long vacances in August. Half of all Parisians will leave the city for the countryside, and parts of Paris will seem deserted. There’s no sense for Chef to keep the restaurant open; a large part of his clientele is local businessmen who will have abandoned their suits for shorts and sandals while sipping fruity rosés in Provence.

However for Chef it won’t be vacation time. During August he’ll dive into renovation work to have the restaurant shiny, new and exciting for l’entrée, the first part of September when the expatriate Parisians in their hundreds of thousands return to the city to work and to school and to one-star restaurants.

The clientele here is manifestly Parisian for the restaurant is located on a distinctly non-commercial side street in the 17th, little travelled by tourists, on nobody’s route from ici to la.

Chef Delivers, In More Ways Than One

Our amuse bouche is delivered by Chef, three samplings on a rectangular slab of granite. Chef explains them to us: a small glass cylinder full of gazpacho, a mustard ice cream quenelle, and a flat, crispy cookie. French cooks are very fond of quenelles, and for good reason: they are a pleasing shape, and can they be made from many ingredients, ice cream is one of them. This savoury mustard ice cream has a bite to it and pairs well with the sweet, cold tomato soup and the tiny, delicate cookie with the faintest scent of cumin.

Amuse bouche means something like “mouth fun” and is the little taste that comes before what we call the appetizer, and what the French call the entrée, appears. These days the word is usually shortened to amuse. A great amuse is a little bite of flavour the bursts in your mouth or, in this case, three little bites of flavour that together create a taste sensation. An amuse is an odd kind of harbinger; often a good amuse presages good dishes to follow. But other times an amuse might look good, might be cleverly conceived, but be disappointing when eaten; yet the meal that follows is superb. Occasionally, though rarely, an amuse is the best part of the meal, and the entrées and plats that follow are the disappointments.

At La Braisiere we are about to learn that the amuse is a good omen…

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