Chateaubriand- Chateau Beyond!

A real culinary find, tucked away north of Republique, and courtesy of watermaker S. Pellegrino's list of best restaurant's in the world. I was skeptical at first, and then fell completely in love. What's with Basque-French chefs in Paris and their uncanny ability to bend French food in mind-bending ways? Number 40 on the list, and only 45Euros for the 5-course menu?

Le Chateaubriand is the kind of spare, masculine, place that you'd at first think might be a great neighborhood restaurant with nothing special on the menu. But all the right clues are there that this is a serious kitchen. A wooden table on the side piled with fresh cut sour dough bread still warm from the oven, and a couple blackboards with tapas and wine specials. The well-chosen and quirky wine list. A wooden box of the freshest herbs sitting on the counter in the kitchen. A staff that knew its food and wine menus, and a clientele of serious and unostentatious foodies.

You eat what the chef cooks - something that always makes me happy. No choices here. It's the pre-set five-course prix-fixe menu, or nothing. But wow, wow, wow will you find yourself in good hands.

The tapas notations on the blackboard were enough to signal that the night was going to be special. Boquerones - small fresh anchovies in olive oil were silky, beautiful and lemony. Thin jewel-colored slices of serrano ham, and paper thin slices of air dried salami got our appetites going, along with a super young 2008 Crozes-Hermitage from Dard Ribo -- "C'est Le Printemps" -- which balanced fruit with minerality and was perfect coming off a hot Paris street.

First course packed a beautiful punch. Beautiful pyramids of raw bluefin tuna, thin slices of raw horseradish and beet, all atop a schmear of puree of herring and beet worthy of a Zen calligrapher. The puree was a stunner. Smoky pink in color, smoky and sweet in flavor, it was the perfect foil for the tuna and the crunch vegetables.

Next up was ceviche of red snapper in its lemon juice liquid that half my friends drank straight from the bowl. Our waiter explained that the vegetables in this dish and throughout the meal came from the garden of an Englishwoman who might as well be best friends with Alice Waters for the perfection of her produce. The snapper was beautifully draped with more paper thin slices of heirloom green and red and yellow tomatoes, small wedges of more heirlooms, and sprinkled with the most beautiful baby herbs and edible flowers. It was a stunner in flavor and in presentation.

Fish course was lemon sole, lightly poached with herb oil. It was almost a palate-cleanser course, his mild fish was meant to be crunched with his sprigs of baby seaweed and greens that were the salt of the dish. Beautiful. Our waiters guided us to another Dard Ribo wine for our fish courses, this one a beautiful buttery white St. Joseph that managed to straddle the acidity of the ceviche and the beautiful mildness of the sole.

Meat was the famous Limousin beef - France's answer to Kobe. Cooked rare, and served with a puree of burnt eggplant that was one of the flavor high points of the evening, and took us into another world of the Mediterranean. The puree had graphite color of huitlacoche, silky velvet in texture, it had the most beautiful deep, soul pleasing smoky eggplant flavor. Alongside, a spoonful of fresh greek yogurt, and beautiful young scallions cooked à la Grecque. Each component adding to the whole of flavor. It was about as perfect a steak dish as I've ever had.

What Chef Inaki Aizpitarte did for dessert blew my socks off. A classic, we thought, dessert of red fruits and meringue. Oh No, No! Everything was flipped on its head and had us nearly singing. Beautiful red currants and raspberries with toasty golden brown croutons of sweet meringue and over the top a true CLOUD of white lemon verbena foam. I'm grinning at the thought. Meringue as croutons; foam as visual meringue - a total play on words and on the tongue.

Le Chateaubriand? Let's just call it Le Chateaubeyond :)

129 Avenue Parmentier, 75011 Paris, France
Tel: +33 (0) 1 4357 4595