The profiterole hit the table, craggy on the outside, dewy on the inside, caught as only perfect pâte à choux dough can be, in that millisecond when the expanding balloon of eggy, buttery batter is at the apex of maximum possible magnificence, suddenly sizzled into solidity as a poof of an empty heart, ready for anything. In this case, the practically perfect profiterole was ennobled by a pale globe of Grand Marnier ice cream, the alcohol making the ice cream soft enough to effortlessly yield to the pressure of a spoon. As a chic hat, the profiterole wore at its peak a disc of dried orange, which turned an incoming cascade of hot chocolate sauce into an inky net of rivulets down one side, like a veil over half a beautiful face. My spoon brought back deep chocolate, the haunting flavors of fresh and bottled orange in the ice cream, the tender and crunch of the pâte à choux—is this the best profiterole I’ve ever had, in a lucky, profiterole-rich life? I think yes.
I looked up into the vest-pocket space of Gavin Kaysen’s new 50-seat North Loop bistro, Bellecour—which is very, very different from his Edina quick-serve of the same name—and beheld the gunmetal fog of blue on the walls, the soaring woodwork, the pale veined marble of the bar, the inescapable sense that you stepped through a portal straight into a Parisian bistro in Manhattan, and I thought, “What am I even doing here? Just watching Gavin Kaysen play T-ball?” Set ’em up, watch him swing, and there it goes, up, up, over the fences—it’s another home run, folks! And, uh, then another. Another! Try not to get bored, because we only do home runs here. Set ’em up: cassoulet, quiche, bouillabaisse, steak frites. Boom—watch them sail!
I mean, if you don’t happen to have Gavin Kaysen’s bio at your fingertips, please recall that, after a Minnesota childhood and a zip through cooking school, Kaysen found his bliss in the kitchens of the greatest of great masters of the 20th-century French American culinary dialogue. He was Daniel Boulud’s numéro deux in Manhattan, first running that cooking legend’s New York Café Boulud and less-fancy DB Bistro Moderne, then opening more all around the country. Kaysen developed a close relationship with Boulud’s own cooking mentor, Paul Bocuse, founder and eponym of the world’s most important cooking competition, the Olympics of gastronomy, the Bocuse d’Or. For the Bocuse d’Or, Kaysen has been both a competitor for Team USA, in 2007, and a coach, leading America to our first podium placement with a silver medal in 2015 and a gold medal in 2017.
With that past, you may be wondering: Did Paul Bocuse’s son give Kaysen one of his late father’s chef coats to keep under glass in new Bellecour North Loop? Why yes, he did. Take a picture in front of it, culinary history lovers! Now you may be asking yourself: Is the wallpaper in the North Loop Bellecour a replica of the wallpaper from Paul Bocuse’s restaurant near Lyon? Why yes, it is. Take another picture? You may also be asking yourself: The very name Bellecour, “beautiful heart,” which you have been living with in Minnesota for going on a decade—has it always been a tribute to Bocuse’s roots in the heart of France? Again: Yes.
“Daniel [Boulud] is a little mad at me because I trademarked Bellecour, and he has a dining room at Restaurant Daniel named Bellecour, but he can always use it,” Kaysen told me when we talked. “I asked Paul, ‘Can I call it Bellecour in honor of you, for teaching me and so many American cooks for so many years?’ He said, ‘Yes, of course.’”
Anyway, this is all outrageous pantheon-of-the-cooking-gods stuff, and in case you had doubts, yes, Gavin Kaysen, coach of gold medalists and lifelong player in the biggest big leagues of French American culinary interchange, can make an omelet. About as easily as you can fish a paper clip from a box. Get one at brunch with your latte: Light as a cloud, trembly as puppy love, unpretentious with Boursin cheese—you won’t find a better omelet in Paris itself. And yes, Gavin Kaysen can also make a salade Lyonnaise, the frisée crisp as an October morning, the lardons warm, the poached egg the kind home cooks buy whole sous vide systems to attempt. And Gavin Kaysen continues to employ the supremely talented bakers who make croissants all day—he can have them fill a swoon of a canvas basket with buttery mini croissant buns to start your dinner and ask them to turn their attentions to the sort of profiterole that carries the worldwide standard. (Dessert-heads: Go and get a counter seat and a coffee and taste your way through pastry chef Alex Motz’s short but ideally realized North Loop dessert list: Her opera cake boasts a vital liveliness, as all the different components energize the necessary exquisite precision.)
Of course, Bellecour is not all Kaysen. The day-to-day, night-to-night is overseen by Bellecour’s chef de cuisine, Aaron Marthaler, who used to run Bouchon, the California French bistro by Thomas Keller, yet another of the world’s greatest cooks of all time. Are you familiar with the 1927 Yankees and their so-called Murderers’ Row of famous players, including Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig? Welcome to the Minneapolis equivalent, bistro-wise.
I have never felt my critical skills to be so useless. I felt like I was walking through the Louvre: Whoa, that painting’s pretty nice! So is that one! Whew, that one too. They’re all masterpieces, I guess! Hey, does anyone need me for anything, or should I just take all my critical faculties and go home?
I suppose I may as well tell you a few dishes I particularly swooned over, as I rifled through my thesaurus for synonyms for “textbook perfection.”
Deviled eggs! Do you like deviled eggs, made with the absolute maximum of a pastry chef’s available skills, with little eggs standing on end, baroquely piped with a dense, mustardy plush of yolk, given crunch with a snow of fried chicken skin and tang with a slice of cornichon pickle pretty as the glass in a piece of costume jewelry? Do you like deviled eggs that hit the table, eliciting gasps of surprise? You pop one in your mouth and think, “This is why people should go to pastry school, so I can have this moment!” If so, you’ll like Bellecour’s deviled eggs. Do you like duck à l’orange, but you wish you could have it as an appetizer so you could get a whole different entrée, too? Then hit Bellecour for its fried duck wings, which are actually duck drumsticks, salt cured and seasoned; slow-cooked in fat till they are confited; deep-fried for crisp; and glazed with an orange, fennel, coriander, and pepper combination that packs all the I-love-French-restaurants emotion and flavor of duck à l’orange but in a chic and convenient snack. The pâté grand-mère is a dense pistachio and pork pâté, with gorgeous big-grain mustard and toast, such as you would proudly serve to Jacques Pépin if he materialized in your living room but equally nice with a glass of wine as you try to catch up with your book-club novel.
Speaking of wine: Zachary Byers has taken over as wine director for all of the Soigné Hospitality spots (Spoon, Demi, and Bellecour), and his glass list is French-bistro ideal: white Bordeaux for your oysters, flowery cru Beaujolais Fleurie for your pâté, inky Haut-Médoc for your steaks—this is how it’s done. The cocktails are by Soigné bar star Jessi Pollak—yes, the one who won national Bartender of the Year—and it’s fun to see her playing in a French idiom: a French 75 with herbes de Provence, a Vesper with lavender. No wonder guests at Spoon and Demi are popping into Bellecour before or after their dinner reservations to stretch the night. Conveniently, the three Soigné spots are all in the single city block bounded by North 1st and 2nd Streets and North 2nd and 3rd Avenues. It’s a block transected by a wide L-shaped driveway and parking lot, and because of this, you can valet your car once with the Soigné team and hit more than one of the properties to experience their work as they investigate delight using different vocabularies.
Now, let me note a few other exquisite bits of French gastronomic excellence found on Bellecour’s dinner menu. The steak frites is based on a small, simple cut, appropriately deeply seasoned and served with some irresistible thin and crisp french fries, gilded with a sprinkle of just-fried herbs and shallots. Smash your nest of fries into the depths of your steak frites sauce—welcome to can’t-stop-till-they’re-gone fries and gravy, in haute couture mode. Also, the cassoulet is dense and filling, and the bouillabaisse is fit for a yacht captain docking in Monaco. Then order the crème brûlée, served with a bit of pineapple and a crunchy garnishing flourish of nuts and coconut and cut in a rectangle as if with a razor, just to show that everyone’s got talent to burn. Lift your fork and say, “So French, so perfect! How lucky we are!” And finally get the profiterole and an espresso and float off to heaven.
Could I quibble that Bellecour North Loop is too safe? No, I actually couldn’t. Kaysen has done his more adventurous reach-and-stretch cooking first, at Spoon and Demi, and if you want to be surprised and taste what he does when he’s boundary-pushing, you only have to walk 40 seconds in one direction or another. Bellecour proves that it’s fun to be in the stands when, shall we say, you watch Murderers’ Row knock a series of balls off a batting tee and out over the farthest outfield fence, because they can.
The exception to the French restraint at Bellecour is found in the day menu, when Kaysen makes an egg-and-sausage breakfast sandwich that just screams “hungover American line cook—Michelin-star edition.” A fat patty of sausage, a tender milk bun, a runny egg, a sploosh of American cheese: outrageously good, build-a-day-around-it good, drag-along-your-rock-star-friends-still-drunk-from-last-night good. The quiche is much the same, but swap in Anna Wintour as your target audience: The center is the quiver-quaver custard quiche is supposed to be, the crust crisp and buttery, a miracle of egg, French-style hard by the Mississippi River.
Now, if you happen to be reading this after only visiting the Edina Bellecour (or the upcoming third location, set to open this fall in the Wells Fargo Center in downtown Minneapolis) and feel that I went to Chipotle and came back describing the Eiffel Tower, come with me on a long tale of disambiguation, history, and logistics. Understanding Bellecour in its current manifestation can be a little confusing if you haven’t been laser-focused on its evolution for the last half dozen years. Bellecour, the concept, debuted in Wayzata in March of 2017, where it was a gargantuan, haute, elaborate, stretching-for-a-farther-horizon type of French spot, and quite different from the Bellecour of today.
The pandemic ended that, and Bellecour became essentially a croissants-and-sandwiches brand limping along, doing takeout inside a newly formed alliance between the kitchenware-and-cooking-classes business Cooks and Bellecour, as the two businesses tried to keep as many folks as possible employed during the crisis. The two businesses committed to one another for a five-year partnership and consciously uncoupled after that, in preparation for the current Bellecour opening this past December as an elaborate bistro and bakery in North Loop and a more streamlined location in Edina.
The Edina storefront feels like the airport location of a long-established brand. This is not to say that the food at the Edina outpost is less-than; Edina sells the same essentially flawless croissants and crepe cakes, but the bright white, brand-new, spick-and-span space is wildly different from the artful-and-eternal-feeling North Loop location. They are not the same. So, if you’ve been to Edina, don’t shortchange yourself by thinking that you’ve experienced the true, fully realized Bellecour—which is how I think of the restaurant in North Loop. Bellecour in its final adult form. The essential butterfly that emerged at the end of a lot of trials and tribulations of crawling and munching?
Speaking of essences, I asked Kaysen what was front of mind when he embarked on this new chapter of Bellecour. His answer surprised me.
“I spent two years thinking about this,” he said, some of that as the pandemic raged and sputtered. “What is a great French bistro? It’s the food, sure. But, actually, I think it’s the décor and how it feels, the energy and vibes. It’s all vibes. OK, not all vibes, but in some ways: all vibes.”
We talked about one of the stranger under-remarked-upon stories in food this century: how Keith McNally spent $8 million—you read that right, $8 million—rebuilding the bistro Pastis in Manhattan, after the original lost its lease, so that it appears today as if it’s been in New York for a hundred years. Go to Pastis and you’ll see irregular tiles that look as if they were layered over one wall repair and then another; you’ll see light fixtures that you feel in your bones are definitely from the gaslight era—but really it’s all contemporary artisan handwork to trick the eye. At first you think, “What a crazy use of 8 million bucks.” Then you lift your champagne and note the packed bar full of leggy models and think, “Of all the ways to waste money, maybe the best is creating a perfect atmosphere for me to drink champagne and eat french fries?”
“The food in a bistro has to be part of the whole,” Kaysen told me. “The food is not the food, if you know what I mean. The food is only part of the whole. When I started the North Loop Bellecour, it was essentially a cement shell; everything in my head was New York’s Balthazar and Pastis. How can you make an incredible French bistro when you’re not in France? You have to build the aesthetic of what you’d get in France. You don’t have the patina, the millwork, the brass rail? Too bad. It’s going to be an expensive build-out, and everything has to be built to age and get that patina.”
We talked about the storage bar in the main dining room, which is backlit through ribbed glass in such a way that it almost looks like you’re looking at it through the windows of a moving train. “Builders, they kept saying, ‘This can’t be done. There’s not enough room.’ I kept saying, ‘Figure it out—60 percent of the restaurants in New York are this small. Don’t tell me it can’t be done. Tell me how we’re going to do it,’” Kaysen said of the space that now has soaring windows and brass and wood everywhere, that feels like it has been in the North Loop since the time when railroads were king.
“People go to a bistro because it feels like a bistro,” said Kaysen. “They’re heading out saying, “I don’t want to be challenged tonight. I want comfort. I want to know that my time and money will be well spent on a reliable return. I want a crown molding, a steak frites, a good glass of wine, and a profiterole.” We had to build all of those vibes from scratch—build the vibes to build the whole, which I guess I started in Lyon.”
Kaysen told me about the first time he was in Paul Bocuse’s restaurant near Lyon. “He had an American flag flying out front with the French flag,” Kaysen recalled. “I said, ‘Chef, why an American flag?’ And he said, ‘In World War II, I was shot, left for dead on the field. But an American soldier picked me up, brought me to an American hospital, and I was saved with American blood.’”
American blood, coursing through the veins of a French colossus; French gastronomical colossi, coursing through the veins of Minneapolis. 107 3rd Ave. N., Mpls., 612-452-6700
Dining and Cooking