French fries finally meat their match

Published on Saturday 19 July 2008 19:36

EVEN if you couldn't be on the Champs-Elysées for Bastille Day last week to watch seven parachutists float down in front of President Nicolas Sarkozy, you can still celebrate the greatness of France with a new local tradition. The hamburger.

Hamburgers and cheeseburgers have invaded Paris. Anywhere likely to be frequented by tourists this summer – even restaurants run by three-star chefs – is serving the beef patty, almost invariably on a sesame seed bun.

"It has the taste of the forbidden, the illicit, the subversive even," said Hlne Samuel, a restaurant consultant. "Eating with your hands, it's pure regression. Naturally, everyone wants it."

It is a startling turnaround in a country where a chef once sued McDonald's for more than 1m in damages over a poster that suggested he was dreaming of a Big Mac. Hamburgers were everything that French dining is not: informal, messy, fast and foreign.

But as French chefs have embraced the quintessentially American food, they have also made it their own, incorporating Gallic flourishes such as cornichons, fleur de sel and fresh thyme.

"It's not just a fad," said Frederick Grasser-Herme, who, as consulting chef at the Champs-Elyses restaurant Black Calvados, developed a burger made with Wagyu beef and seasoned with a 'black ketchup' of blackberries and blackcurrants. "It's more than that. The burger has become gastronomic."

Some of the most celebrated chefs in the city have taken up the challenge. Yannick Alleno, who earned a third Michelin star in 2007 for his precise, rarefied cuisine at Le Meurice, serves a thick, succulent hamburger at his casual restaurant, Le Dali. With smoked bacon, lettuce, dill pickles, mustard, mayonnaise and fries, the burger at Le Dali costs about 28.

The only thing more surprising than the about-face in chefs' attitudes may be the enthusiasm with which their patrons have devoured these haute burgers. "I didn't think we would sell so many," said Sonia Ezgulian, guest chef at Caf Salle Pleyel, which Samuel opened last autumn in an airy, modernist space inside one of Paris's most prestigious concert halls.

On some days, as many as a third of her customers order the burger, which is offered alongside Mediterranean-inspired dishes such as sea bass with fennel confit and pistachios. When a new guest chef replaces Ezgulian at the end of next month, he will keep the burger on the menu. This has even been written into his contract.

Other forms of beef have been enjoyed here for years. Butchers sell kilos of ground meat destined to become steak hach, a pan-seared patty made with lean meat, pressed into an oval and served without a bun.

And while steak tartare features on practically every brasserie menu, chefs now recognise that a hamburger is not simply six ounces of chopped lean beef grilled until crusty.

"No, that would be an error," said Grasser-Herme. "A hamburger is the architecture of taste par excellence," she explained. "The meat needs to be a mix of fatty and lean. Not raw, not rare. It must be medium rare. At the same time the bread needs to be smooth, tepid, toasted on the sesame side. I like to brush the soft side with butter. Everything plays a role."

In developing the Salle Pleyel burger, Samuel and Ezgulian felt the weight of tradition. "We're a little terrified of making a mistake," said Samuel. "We cling to things like the soft buns, sweet-and-sour pickles, onions, tomatoes, cheese. We need these guide-posts because we don't have the history, the context. Otherwise, for us, it's not a burger. It's a hot sandwich."

Yet Ezgulian has taken some liberties. The current version of her burger is a riff on steak tartare. She has kneaded a mixture of chopped sun-dried tomatoes and tangy cornichons and capers into the ground meat. Parmesan shavings stand in for Cheddar.

How did the dripping, juicy hamburger come to be one of the signature dishes of Paris? For one thing, expatriate French chefs reinventing American classics in the US made it safe for their countrymen to try it back home.

"I didn't have this burger culture," said the restaurant consultant Samuel. "A hamburger, what's that? I didn't get it. Then I tasted it at DB Bistro Moderne," she said, speaking of Daniel Boulud's restaurant in Midtown Manhattan.

"If Daniel hadn't done it, maybe I wouldn't have either. He helped me understand."