Follow on Robuchon

Following our visits to L'Atellier Joel Robuchon in Paris a year ago
Looney Dunes: L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon reviews and comments

From WSJournal, posted in full as it will disappear eventually.
Review of Savoy and Robuchon in Vegas:

The Best Food in America -- Plus Slots

Las Vegas sets a new culinary standard

By RAYMOND SOKOLOV
July 8, 2006; Page P1

"We found Restaurant Guy Savoy Las Vegas a reasonable facsimile of Restaurant Guy Savoy Paris. The same designer, Jean-Michel Wilmotte, has deployed a modern sensibility with plenty of glass and the same signature chocolate and cherry stripes in his graphics. The current menu at Guy Savoy LV contains several signature dishes from the mother shrine, including oysters in ice gelée and the artichoke and black truffle soup.

There is nothing stale about serving whole raw oysters with a cold, opaque white jelly of puréed oyster. The jelly offers the same taste with a completely different texture and an even more intense oysterity. The artichoke soup tries for the same intensity, but the overwhelmingly aromatic assertiveness of the black truffles, in the soup and the toasted mushroom brioche that comes with it, outshines the still-wonderfully-earthy artichoke purée.

Truffles showed up again, in an ancillary role, in both our main courses, poached and roasted squab and rissoles, or croquettes, of veal sweetbread. The waiter said Mr. Savoy bought 60 pounds of black truffles last season and froze them. We don't doubt that.

Nor did we have any complaints about this elegant meal, even after charging the $662.39 bill plus tip to our room. Perhaps the wine list is excessively canted toward very expensive French bottles, but if you've just hit it big at keno, why not splurge on a four-figure Burgundy? Even a non-gaming American gastronome should be very happy to have this very fine Parisian transplant only a domestic flight away.

But we had to agree with the self-described "highly compensated" health-care consultants at the next table that Joël Robuchon at the Mansion is on a dazzlingly higher level than Guy Savoy LV -- or any other restaurant in the U.S. that we know.

Mr. Robuchon reached apogee at a three-star temple in Paris called Jamin. Even his mashed potatoes were world-renowned. Then he closed Jamin in 1996, shunning the gaudy world as perversely as Greta Garbo. The opening of his less formal Paris Atelier three years ago was an event in itself, something like the return of Ted Williams from the Air Force. So his return to high cuisine here at the age of 60 is a stunning rebirth. This place is heaven.

When I tell you I will never forget the unctuous, velvety lettuce soup served over a spring-onion custard with nutmeg, you will think I have gone gaga. Or what about the sea urchin enrobed in mashed potato with a touch of coffee?

Did I mention that each dish was a visual poem? Deep-red tuna, lightly cooked and smoked alongside a couscous whose grains were actually concocted from cauliflower dotted with specks of nori, the black Japanese seaweed familiar from sushi bars?

There are other Asian influences completely assimilated into their Robuchonized dishes. If you have been paying attention to the food of the molecular gastronomy school, those wild acolytes of the Spaniard Ferrán Adriá, you will see that this newest wrinkle hasn't escaped Mr. Robuchon -- or overwhelmed him. Here and there a foam adds a flavor and a playful caprice. One dessert came garlanded with pink cotton candy.

Not a one of the 16 dishes on this menu was a chaos of show-off ingredients. As the chef-in-residence, the Jamin veteran Claude Le Tohic, put it during his regular swing through the dining room, "Mr. Robuchon told us, 'Never more than three flavors in a dish.' "

You could say that about a hot dog on a bun with mustard, but in the hands of the right chef, you hit the jackpot."