Some dining is finer than others: L'Ambroisie, Paris
A reflexion on where to spend our money - if we had it - before the inevitable collapse of civilization.
Despite being securely harboured in the Raging Restaurant reviews, this is not a review, because not only did I have no clue about the prices (my menu was priceless), but I also lost my mind halfway through the menu and started hallucinating about hedonism and pleasure. I managed to keep my sustainability guilt at bay as I was, almost literally, bathing in caviar and gold.
Do not expect a review. This is an elegy.
In a world that is spinning out of control, this is the decadence we need to remember that even when the future looks gloomy, we can bathe in the sun and gold of a past era where we believed in white canvas and silver cutlery, fork face down, as peak civilization.
If you were in love, let’s say, with a beautiful person and you happened to be in Paris and hungry for life, love, and endless fascination and timelessness, you’d have to drag your feet to Place Vendôme at L’Ambroisie.
As I put it, it is imperative that you do so, especially if you call yourself a gastronomer. I have come to the conclusion that, without knowing L’Ambroisie, your gastronomic journey is going nowhere but in circles.
As per Alain Passard (another unmissable rite of passage that helps you put EVERYTHING in gastronomy in the right place and relativize everything else), entering Pacaud’s timeless temple is a rite of initiation.
There is a before and an after.
If you enter alone, you will be doomed to experience this restaurant as a wandering soul, but if you enter it with a loved one, your soul will shine in a thousand mirrors, reflected infinitely in time and space.
The cuisine is civilisation, says Pacaud.
Focusing on beautiful products, cooking them without affectation, and simply offering the best of the best - every day, season after season. In a Haiku-distilled poem, everything that is necessary for gastronomy, always and forever and since ever.
On the floor, only seasoned personnel will mistreat loud Americans.
Still, it will treat them with real, actual white gloves, everyone else, from the elderly Taiwan couple to the Parisian family gathering for the grandmother’s birthday, to the luso-Italian couple of gastronomers.
Everything is perfect by the millimetre and seemingly effortless, like a Swiss clock that works along invisible threads, like a dream machine.
Ancien Régime, but with a meaning.