As he was when Frenchie Pigalle first opened, the Frenchie empire founder, chef Gregory Marchand, was on hand to watch over the proceedings during the first full week of operation of his latest restaurant, L’Altro Frenchie, a.k.a. The Italian Frenchie, which has replaced the regretted Frenchie to Go (where I once had the best pulled-pork sandwich ever).
When I told him I had been waiting impatiently for six months since the new Italian Frenchie was announced last summer, he corrected me: “It’s been eight months.” After all that time, the restaurant’s decor was fresh and new but nondescript: wood banquettes with decorative pillows, white-tiled and pale-green walls, and wooden tables.
I was there to celebrate our foodie friend Jean-Michel’s birthday, along with his sister Élisabeth and our friend Bonnie.
When we arrived, there were several servers milling around and a feeling of confusion in the air. Although it was early and the restaurant wasn’t yet full, it took some time to take our order. We were mostly forgiving of these lapses, normal in a new restaurant, but it didn’t go unnoticed that customers who had arrived after us were served first.
We were mollified by a plateful of big squares of delicious house-made focaccia, studded with pimientos and other goodies, and served with a little bowl of fantastic olive oil for dipping, then further distracted by our starters, which included a lovely vignarola romana, a fittingly springlike mixture of beautifully fresh peas, fava beans, artichoke and asparagus with prosciutto and ail des ours (wild garlic).
Bonnie had ordered the special lunch menu, which came with an excellent starter of asparagus with buffalo mozzarella and wild garlic.
I was thrilled to see carciofi alla giudia, or deep-fried artichokes, on the menu and ordered them for my starter. I’ll never forget the brilliant ones I had in Rome in the springtime several years ago. Big and plump, they were cooked to a turn, rendering the leaves edible – and as crispy as potato chips – and the heart and stem tender and flavorful. I am sorry to say that the Frenchie version was very disappointing, with tough, oily, hard-to-chew leaves and slightly overcooked tender parts, nothing like the wonderful Roman version.
I did far better with my main course: gnudi with sage and beurre noisette (brown butter). I didn’t even know what gnudi was, but I ordered this dish anyway because of more memories, this time of pasta with sumptuous butter and sage sauce eaten many times in Italy. Turns out that gnudi is gnocchi made with ricotta cheese, and I am here to testify that it is exceptionally delicious, all creamy goodness, swimming in buttery sauce with crispy sage leaves floating in it.
Bonnie, too, was happy with her main course: saltimbocca, an old-fashioned dish I had also been tempted by, not because of fond memories of Italy but of long-ago Italian American restaurants where just about everything was unsparingly doused with tomato sauce and cheese. This was a pleasing, much more refined version of the dish. Bonnie was annoyed, however, that both the starter and main course on the fixed-price menu were showered with arugula – nothing against arugula, but the chef could have made an effort to find a different accompaniment – and also that the meat in the dish was chicken, not veal, as stated on the menu, according to the server.
Unfortunately, Jean-Michel and Élisabeth did not fare well with their pasta dish: linguine with crab, crab bisque, datterino tomatoes and wild fennel. Sounds fantastic, but the sauce was strongly acidic, as if vinegar had been added to it. They also felt that the portion was meager.
The restaurant pretty much recovered on the desserts: a thin slice of rich chocolate cake with a candle for the birthday boy, who pronounced it “good, not exceptional.”
The rest of us enjoyed the creamy, obviously housemade kumquat panna cotta, speckled with vanilla and topped with a slug of grappa.
Glitches must be forgiven in a restaurant’s first week of operation. There was enough excellence (definitely in the high quality of the ingredients and in most of the dishes) to make me want to return in a few months to see how L’Altro has evolved.
One thing I find hard to forgive, however, is that someone would create a new restaurant today without thinking about the noise factor, but such is the case. As the restaurant filled up, we asked one of the servers to turn down the very present music. She responded with an oh-so-French moue of dissatisfaction instead of the enthusiastic “of course!” one would have hoped for. As the restaurant got busier, the music finally disappeared, but the noise rose and rose to unpleasant levels, bouncing back at us from the mirrored ceiling. A shame.
Marchand, who soon disappeared after my first sighting of him, had emphasized the fact that the restaurant was “simple,” presumably so that I wouldn’t have too-high expectations. I appreciate that and felt that, overall, it lived up to my expectations. Once the glitches mentioned above have been ironed out, it may even go beyond them.
See our Favorite Restaurants by Arrondissement page to find a good restaurant in the neighborhood where you want to eat.
Favorite