Arpège (*)

I was really on the fence about Arpège going into this trip.

It’s one of those places where if you read enough, you’ll find pretty polarized opinions. A lot of people love it, a lot of people really don’t like it at all. I was honestly debating between coming here or going to L’Ambroisie instead, which felt like the more traditional, safer, classical choice.

But I decided to take the plunge on Arpège because it felt more singular. Especially now, with it being essentially fully plant-based, it just seemed like something I wasn’t going to get anywhere else.

I’ll start by saying I have zero regrets. This was easily one of the most memorable fine dining experiences I’ve had.

They start you off with a drink menu that includes teas and juices. I don’t drink alcohol, so I actually really appreciated this. I had a hojicha from Kagoshima that I had never had before and would absolutely get again if I saw it. Later in the meal I also had a fresh juice, beetroot and celeriac, which ended up being one of the sweeter things in the meal (more on that later).

There was a decision between doing à la carte or the tasting. Since I may or may not ever come back here, I went with the tasting, which I’m really glad I did. I saw some à la carte dishes going out, and they were pretty large, and not exactly cheap either, so I’m not entirely sure how the value compares. But for a one-time experience, the tasting felt right.

The meal starts very simply. A plate with a couple of the first radishes of the season and some oyster leaves, basically unadorned, just a little bit of salt. Nice, clean way to begin.

Then a few small tartlets, white asparagus, potato, beetroot, all with really tasty purées.

The first proper dish was a soup made from turnip greens with a beetroot mousseline and some mint oil. Pretty quickly you start to notice the through line of the whole meal, which is just how balanced everything is. Nothing is aggressive, nothing is overdone, everything feels just so.

One of the next dishes was a radish carpaccio with ponzu. On paper, that sounds almost too simple to be interesting, but it was honestly perfect, really clean, really bright, and extremely satisfying.

Then there was a dish with leeks that were cooked but still had a bit of bite and crunch to them, paired with pear and a broth made from cress and licorice. I mentioned to one of the servers that the pear worked really well in the dish, and she went into detail about how these were the last pears of the season, and that they had a bit more sun than usual, so they were higher in fructose. That level of detail and specificity about the produce was really impressive.

My favorite dish of the meal was something I probably would have been least excited about reading it on a menu: spinach, with Meyer lemon confit, a white beetroot purée, and a little sesame oil. I don’t really know how to explain why it was so good. It just was. Everything about it worked. Somewhere around this point in the meal, I realized I wasn’t missing meat at all.

There was a nice bit of presentation where they bring out white asparagus being smoked in hay before the dish comes. The actual course had that really nice smoky note, with a sauce that honestly tasted a lot like a beurre blanc, along with some green vegetables.

There was also a mesclun salad that, again, didn’t sound particularly exciting on paper, but ended up being great, almond praline in the dressing, some green apple for crunch, just really well put together.

Another standout was a take on a risotto using celery root cut down into rice-sized pieces with morel mushrooms, very deep, very umami, and completely satisfying without anything animal-based.

The last savory course was basically a collection of vegetables from the garden that came in that morning, fennel, asparagus, and others, all in a really nice sauce. It felt like a summary of everything that came before it.

The only part of the meal that didn’t really land for me was the desserts. There was a chocolate tart with citrus that leaned very bitter, and it kind of felt like bitter on bitter without enough sweetness to balance it. It came with a geranium ice cream that was actually really good, made with house almond milk and some kind of lentil-based stabilizer. Then there was rhubarb, which may have been the first of the season, but it was very astringent and not really sweetened at all. Again, technically interesting, but I found myself wanting something sweeter at the end of the meal. Ironically, the beetroot and celeriac juice I had earlier was sweeter and more satisfying in that sense than the desserts were. They finish with a couple of mignardises, a small apple tartlet and some fresh apple juice, which were a bit sweeter, but I still felt like I was missing a dessert experience that I might have expected.

Service was pretty much perfect, very precise choreography, but still warm and relaxed. They knew when to go into detail and when to keep things light, and it never felt stiff.

At the end of the meal, they asked me if I wanted to go into the kitchen and meet the chef. Of course I did. I walk in and he is just the warmest, friendliest guy, with very little sense of distance or formality. He comes right up, puts his arm around me, thanks me for coming. Then he takes both of my shoulders, pulls me in a little closer, looks me straight in the eyes, like inches away, and says:

“Vegetables are good!”

And yeah. They are.

It sounds almost ridiculous written out like that, but after that meal it actually felt kind of deep, like that’s the whole philosophy of the place distilled down into one sentence.

I also didn’t expect to be as full as I was. This was lunch, and it was a lot of food. I can’t even imagine what dinner must be like, especially since one of the servers mentioned it’s even more courses. This was an undisputed highlight of the trip so far, and I’m really glad I chose this over something more traditional.