Many of you have known me over the past two decades as someone who writes about change, leadership and other such curiosities. Fewer knew the version before, when food was the centre of things, and I wrote about it constantly. I stopped years ago, without quite meaning to. This is the meal that made me want to start again.
We’re about three hours into dinner, somewhere around the sixth savoury course, and I’m hunched over a fine Limoges plate, dragging a salty piece of anchovy bread through a sauce, and when I look around, my dining companions are somewhere between entranced and feral, a variety of breads being dipped quite frantically into their plates to mop up the last dregs of the sauce that was served. Some of them are doing so with the laminated rye bread, some with the sourdough, and some with this anchovy bread. Anchovy bread shouldn’t have worked, but it did. Laminated rye bread shouldn’t have worked, but it did. And then again, we’re three hours into a meal, and I’ve kind of lost track of the courses and the time, but much to my surprise, I’m not tired. I realise we’re nowhere near finished, and I’m still excited about what is yet to come. I’ve sat through long tasting menus before. In fact, I sat through one a couple of days before this meal. By the third hour, you can either feel like a goose being fattened for market or a goose being bored to death. I’ve been both. Here, I would have happily waited another two hours and eaten all the bread on the table and all of the sauce all over again. At which point I realised that my companions and I were doing the cheapest, oldest act in French eating, right? Wiping down a plate with bread.
In many meals, this part is an afterthought. Not necessarily one you forget, but there’s a little leftover sauce, there’s some bread on the side, you use it to mop it up. Over here, course after course, it felt like the point. And to truly see why, I had to look more closely at the menu, which, as with most things with the benefit of hindsight, gives away the trick before you’ve eaten the thing. The menu cards are structured in a way that each course turns on one preposition: the produce is listed “for” the sauce. The sauce element of each dish is in italics, with a proper name and quotation marks. And again, with the benefit of hindsight, it kind of tells you that the sauce is the protagonist and that the protein or the vegetable exists merely for the sauce. Would it be fair to say that at other restaurants of this rank, the sentence would run the other way? Perhaps.
Arnaud Donckele, who runs Plénitude on the first floor of the Cheval Blanc hotel in Paris, is quite open about this inversion, and often talks about sauces the way perfumers talk about fragrances and scent. And they pay homage to the sauce very clearly. Each sauce arrives separately. It has its own spoon, sometimes something more dramatic than a spoon. There was one course that had something that looked like a little brass whisk. The sauce is poured table-side and then set down on its own little plate with its own little spoon beside the main plate. And you’re asked to taste the sauce separately first. The card for the poultry course, as an example, lists Arbois wine, Isigny cream, agaric essence, shallot, celery reduction, chicken broth, roast jus, brown butter, and then, in one line at the bottom, on its own, flat-leaf parsley. If you think back to the perfumer imagery, these cards list the sauces the way a perfumer would write a formula. Base notes, mid notes, head notes last. And even within that, there’s such a degree of both science and playfulness. The poultry sauce is called “Sotolon”, which is the aroma molecule that gives fenugreek, maple syrup and vin jaune their smell. The Arbois wine comes from the Jura, the region whose wines are often cited as a reference for that molecule. In a way, it’s recursive. He names the sauce for the compound and then builds the sauce on top of the thing in nature that produces the compound. Which isn’t to say that I recognised all this when I was there. I only recognised it while looking at my notes and reflecting on the menu.
It was somewhere around the third course where the question that popped into my head was: would I eat this sauce on its own? And almost every time (and it’s only “almost” because it’s been a week now), perhaps every time, I’d eat the sauce on its own, even without the bread, as good as the bread was. But the sauce and bread, no competition at all. Would I have eaten the proteins on their own? I don’t think so. And in a way, I think it is this asymmetrical proposition on the table that is central to this meal. The sauce does not flatter the lobster. In a way, the lobster is merely the occasion that the sauce requires to be the hero. I’d call it the purest form of French saucerie. I suppose others could call it a very elegant soup with a garnish. To be honest, by the end of the night, I don’t think I or anyone else at the table really cared which it was.
You’d be right to ask what keeps a sauce with this many elements from collapsing into an amorphous puddle of expensive ingredients. The answer is acid. It’s not surprising. All good sauces have balance, and acid is central to it. In this case, there is both craft and engineering. For example, Lambrusco and bonito vinegar against the richness of the egg yolk in the blue fish’s “Eden” sauce, citrus macerated in Muscat in the lobster’s sabayon, amber and white balsamic, yuzu and orange in the red mullet’s absolutely fantastic double sauce, verjuice in the strawberry dessert. Each one of the acids is set against the richness of either butter or cream or coral, and that polarity, that tension, that balance even, is the flavour. My notes say that the sauces were bright and sharp over something that was fundamentally and very particularly rich in a luxurious way. I guess that describes all of the recipes.
A word about the room. It’s two levels, arranged so that every cozy table (none of the tables have more than six seats, if I recall) overlooks the Pont Neuf. A corridor connecting the main dining room to the private dining room is carved by chainsaw from a single tree trunk, running past the wine display to a private dining table that, as clichéd as it sounds, is elegant and simple, with chairs that are rich and comfortable, Limoges on the linen, and glasses so thin they could be musical instruments. The service has to be experienced, but perhaps my shorthand for it was Cirque du Soleil meets Michelin. And you could imagine that theatrical service becomes theatre the moment the performance outruns the knowledge of what’s being served and the quality of the food. In this case, it never did. The maître d’ had quick repartee grounded in real depth of knowledge. Our hostess performed the menu flawlessly and could also answer, mid-pirouette, whether a texture came from a siphon or an immersion blender. We had an opinionated table who asked versions of these questions all night, and she never missed a beat.
I wish I was more of an oenophile and had more to add on the wines. We chose not their most expensive wine pairing and not their cheapest one, a mid-ranged wine pairing, having been burned two nights before by choosing the most expensive wine pairing at a previous restaurant, where it had been an incoherent selection that in no way justified either the price or the pairing with the food. Here, we got a glass of Château d’Yquem, which I understand belongs to the same group as the hotel and the restaurant, and is absolutely delicious. But the one I remember was a red wine served with the red mullet. And all I can say is that it worked without fuss.
Then again, there was the bread. It kept coming, each loaf better than the last. They started with a sourdough that had the most beautiful crunchy crust and this pillowy, slightly chewy, tangy interior. A fellow diner remarked that he didn’t like sourdoughs where the air gaps are too large, and this one absolutely delivered. The butter was worth its own paragraph, but I doubt I can do it justice in prose. It was salted butter, and as an Indian, I can tell you we deeply appreciated it. The anchovy loaf I mentioned. We all looked so suspicious of it when they announced it, but it was rich, salty in the way the tastiest of anchovies are, and incredibly addictive because of that. In a way, the sauces and the breads had us wiping down our plates regularly. And it’s really a nod to that French farmhouse tradition of saucer son assiette. I don’t think it’s an accident. The chef is a charcutier’s son and a farmer’s grandson, and perhaps brings some of that countryside spirit into the palace. Perhaps the chainsaw-carved tree trunk connecting the main dining room to the private dining room is a nod to the countryside. And yes, while the menu had lobster and caviar and all of the expensive accoutrements that a three-star Michelin restaurant is expected to have, the bread and the sauce are what the memory holds most vividly.
I’ve been told that there are chefs who hold three stars of their own who have often said that this restaurant deserves a fourth Michelin star. I think I understand the sentiment, and I don’t know if a fourth star would be for difficulty as much as it would be for the plain contentment of sitting three hours into the most expensive dinner of my life, wiping my plate with bread and hoping, and almost always finding, that the next loaf and the next sauce would be better than the previous one.
Originally published on Substack on 10 June 2026. Read on Substack →