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Au Gourmand restaurant, 17 rue Molière, Paris

At number 17 rue Molière, replacing the “Barrière Poquelin” restaurant, Christophe Courgeau and Hervé de Liboton opened their new “Gourmand” this summer.



Moving away from the rue de Vaugirard just a stone’s throw from the Senate, they have just moved into this new address situated between Bourse (the old Stock Exchange), Palais Royal and the Comédie Française theatre.

We had already appreciated the talent of these two men and were impatient to sample again the creativity and warm welcome that has given them such a name. As far as the décor goes, the style is very ordinary; they haven’t yet had the time to give it a bit of their personality, keeping the previous owner’s red and yellow walls, as well as the black lacquer of the furniture.

To start with: pink champagne and prawns with sesame seeds, accompanied by a surprising tomato sorbet.

Looking at the market-fresh menu meant thinking long and hard, as you can’t taste everything! Also, you have to order dessert at the same time as the meal, and frankly I wasn’t sure I would be hungry enough. This made the head waiter laugh; apparently all resistance is futile.

The all-vegetable menu was very tempting, but we decided to save that for a later date.

In the end, we chose pureed ‘ratte’ potatoes lightly covering Bourgogne snails cooked with pesto and pine nuts.

The other guests tried the duck foie gras from the Gers region of France, served as a light caramelised puree (melt-in-the-mouth and delicate), a refreshing ‘mesclun’ salad of young leaves and market-garden herbs accompanied by artichokes and olives, and finally a mousse of young leeks served with spicey crab and beetroot with sesame seed oil. This last dish was very smart: the beetroot was served in porcelain spoons that we delicately dipped in the mousse.

For the main course, out of four people dining, two chose the creamy risotto cooked with a meat juice sauce (7.50 euros extra). It was so good that they both swooned over it! The farm-bred young pigeon from the Retz region of France was served ‘rosé’ (quite rare) on a bed of pureed middling (ground wheat mixed with bran), green beans, almonds and chorizo, as well as a salmi sauce (made from game ragout) that we finished up to the last drop.

The last dish was fresh haddock, served fried on a bed of white ‘coco’ beans from the Paimpol region, chanterelle mushrooms and tomatoes, a nice change from the standard smoked haddock with potatoes.

For dessert we had a hard time deciding between tasting one of the chef’s classics again – a fine pear tart with Fourme d’Ambert cheese (a creamy blue cheese from the Auvergne region) – and being more adventurous by trying the mirabelle plums pan-fried in Amaretto, served with vanilla ice cream. In the end, we loved both of them.

The coffee came with a surprise: chewing gum flavoured ice cream. For next time, they promised we’d have Carambar flavour (Carambar is a chewy French caramel sweet with terrible corny jokes on the inside wrapper. They remind a lot of French people of when they were kids!)

Essential information:
Au Gourmand
17 rue Molière, 1st arrondissement
Metro: Palais Royal (lines 1 & 7) / Pyramides (lines 7 & 14)
Tel. +33 (0)1 42 96 22 19
Open for dinner Monday to Saturday
Open for lunch Tuesday to Friday

Two-course lunch menu: 28€
Three-course lunch menu: 32€
Seasonal dinner menu: 36€
All-vegetable menu: 30€

To check out the full size photos as a Flickr slideshow, just click here.