Audio By Carbonatix
Le Central
is what most people picture when they daydream of lunch at the perfect French cafe — the perfect French cafe this side of France, that is. Whitewashed walls and sunlight streaming in through the windows. A cozy grouping of small dining rooms, with ten seats here, fifteen there. Tables set with simple silver, real cloth napkins folded into little blue crowns, white plates, paper menus. And French art on the walls — not Monet, but cafe scenes and caricatures of tuxedoed waiters speaking in word balloons filled with a language I don’t speak. Or at least not very well. The cafe’s actual servers are quick, kind and considerate (in our dreams, no one is ever rude or snotty), but never overbearing. They bring plates exactly when we want them, watching each other’s tables and timing courses carefully so that desire never becomes need. The background noise is a happy buzz of pleasant conversation in English, with enough French accents to make us feel that we’re somewhere exotic. And in every breath are the scents of comfort: baking bread, roasting garlic, rosemary, lemon and saffron.
As I headed over to Le Central one afternoon for a late lunch, I could smell searing peppercorns from half a block away. The special that night would be lamb au poivre, and while it wasn’t on the lunch menu, the kitchen was already getting ready, putting out test plates whose smell was enough to drive me mad. I consoled myself with a salade d’epinards — a plate of spinach greens with roasted and sliced red peppers, sharp slivers of red onion, hard-boiled egg and chunks of thick bacon all covered in an earthy, pointed walnut vinaigrette — and a plate of commendable, housemade pâtés Le Central.
At the first opportunity, I went back to Le Central sniffing after that au poivre, but it was already gone. Owner Robert Tournier explained that not only does the lineup change every night, but often the entire menu changes from one day to the next. Le Central has no specials, because everything is special. With the exception of some salads and appetizers and the moules et frites, each day’s dishes are subject to the whims of the kitchen, the produce man, the fish supplier and nature. Whatever’s good, that’s what Chris Lynch, the executive chef for the past six years, will cook. “It’s a matter of trust,” Tournier said. “We know what’s good and what’s not.”
For this lunch, I opted for the soupe a l’oignon and a glass of 1999 premieres cotes de Bordeaux off Tournier’s incredibly reasonable and very French list. Wine is available by the glass ($4, in the case of my Bordeaux), by the bottle ($16 if I’d felt like getting loaded) and by the percentage of the bottle consumed. I’d asked the waitress for something “rough and red and powerful,” and she’d brought the Bordeaux without a second thought. A crock of soup followed shortly. Underneath a topping of croutons and a cap of melted Swiss cheese, the broth was deeply flavored with onions cooked down and down again in chicken stock until soft and sweet, grounded by a liberal dose of rosemary, then lifted up from that earthy bite by the strong cheese. I dug in shamelessly with hunks of bread torn from the quartered baguette that arrives at the table even before the menu. Made in-house with full-fat butter and good flour, the bread tasted of Left Bank boulangeries. You’d pay a premium price for this bread at Denver’s best bakery, but here it was given away, because it wasn’t anything special — only perfect.
At first glance, both Le Central’s wine list and its menu are broad and full of surprises. At second glance (and third, and seventh, and probably twentieth), they’re something more. They’re classic. They describe a kitchen and cellar that have been doing only one thing in one place for over twenty years, and doing it better than almost anyone else in town: French — old French. And the French have forgotten more about the art of cooking than anyone else will ever know.
The single biggest contribution of the French to the world’s cooking culture is their infernal arrogance. For hundreds of years, they ate everything. They took every tiny bit of an animal, every leaf and root of any plant they could get their grubby little cheese-eating hands on, and they cooked them in every way they could think of. If the results were awful, they tried again. And again. They kept trying until they got it right, and once they did get it right, they wrote down how they’d done it, and that was that: The Way. Up until the last decade, the way they trained chefs was medieval by most modern standards, but their understanding of food and flavor was a thousand years deep and as wide as most of the world. The French canon of recipe and technique is huge. Like a religion, it names its saints, devils and holy places and clearly delineates the path to culinary transcendence. Anyone who cooks differently is doing it wrong, and anyone who argues with their methods is a fool. While the French cooks’ smug conceit that they know better than anyone else how food should be made is occasionally laughable and the fodder for many good jokes at their expense, that conceit is also deserved. They do know better than anyone else.
And Le Central’s kitchen is cooking straight out of the French culinary playbook. “That’s why we’re in business so long,” Tournier told me. “Nothing fancy. We just try to make the food good and cheap, you know? Just good food.”
At still another lunch, I had a sandwich de lardons — thick-cut smoked bacon with brie and bitter greens on that baguette. It came with a side salad gone limp under a homemade creamy Caesar dressing rich with egg and anchovy, as well as russet potato chips fresh from the fryer — sadly dry and burned chips that were the only flaw I’ve found at Le Central.
Finally, Laura and I found time to stop by for dinner. She’d never before accompanied me on a pilgrimage to Le Central; I’d told her that it was becoming my church, the place I go to be reborn after a bad meal elsewhere. Why couldn’t everyone cook this well everywhere, every time, with this kind of confidence? Laura, who doesn’t love French food the way I do, was skeptical — despite our being seated in the charming covered patio with its rough wood and tile tables, tea lights set in miniature coachman’s lamps and chalkboards covered with menu suggestions and upcoming events. She was skeptical right up until our appetizers arrived.
For her, petit chèvre fondue à la Provençale: a wide ceramic dish surrounded by toasted bread rounds and filled with light, fluffy Haystack Mountain goat cheese cut with cream and topped with fresh tomatoes and basil schiffonade. It tasted raw and strong, a wonderful mix of earthy goat’s milk and slightly soured cream cheese. For me, feuillete d’escargots — snails. I admitted to her (and now to you) that I’d never had escargot before. I’ve tried pigs’ ears and rat, ‘gator, brain and raw quail eggs over flying fish roe, but never that one thing kids always think of when imagining icky foreign food.
And now I am in love with snails. If Lynch and Yoann Lerdeux, his executive sous chef of only a month’s standing, are preparing them, I want them on my breakfast cereal. For this dinner, the snails came in a half-moon of crisp pastry baked with brie and a bleu béchamel so rich and musky with aged cheeses that I didn’t need the three sauces (a glossy port reduction, a leek-and-mushroom cream sauce and a thick, meaty gravy) that decorated the plate. The snails themselves were excellent — curled and puckered, a little chewy, like Silly Putty left overnight in a damp pine forest — and Laura had to remind me to taste those sauces before I’d polished off the last bite.
Dinner was tournedos de boeuf au deux sauces — thick medallions of beef tenderloin, tender enough to cut with the edge of a fork, dressed in a sharp, dark mustard sauce enriched with pan juices — and a remoulade studded with bits of caper, cornichon, shallot and shreds of parsley. On the side were whipped potatoes smooth as a cloud, carrots sweetened with honey and tarragon, buttered zucchini, and half a tomato, covered with buttered and herbed breadcrumbs, then baked until soft and sweet. Any one of these could have been an afterthought, replaced with those limp steam-table veggies or mashed potatoes out of a box that some places try to pass off as haute side dishes. Instead they were impeccable, and that said more about Le Central’s kitchen than a flawless tenderloin or to-die-for snails. The care that was given the center of the plate carried over to its sides, so that nothing was wasted, ignored or forgotten.
And then there were the mussels, the moules et frites, a dish with which Le Central earns its motto, “The Affordable French Restaurant”: Served in big bowls nine ways, each of them $7.95 (including all the pommes frites you can stuff in your maw), they are available at lunch, Sunday brunch or dinner. I’ve been cooking mussels on and off for most of my working life. In Italian restaurants, Continental places and horribly ill-conceived fusion bistros, the menus have always included overpriced bowls of these ugly shellfish that needed to be de-bearded, scrubbed, iced and then steamed to death in some murky, awful broth. It was the quintessential throw-away dish, usually handed off to the guy (me) just learning sauté, and at twenty bucks or more a plate, almost pure profit for the owners. I’d never seen anyone take any care in the preparation of mussels, and I’d followed the example of my elders and betters by not caring much myself, knocking them out by the thousands without thought or consideration — until the day I inadvertently did them right for the first time in my life.
White wine, shallots, lemon and butter. This was my accidental communion, my sudden and unexpected connection with something that wasn’t quite divine, but hit me with that same sort of lightning-bolt flash of profound understanding usually associated with fanatical religious conversions. On tasting one of those mussels done so simply and so unwittingly well, I realized there was more to food than just food. It was a revelation.
I don’t know if anyone in Le Central’s kitchen has undergone a similar conversion, but their moules mariniere and moules aux petit lardons were as close as I’ve come to that one ideal taste that day in my kitchen, a taste I’ve been chasing ever since. Lemon, butter, wine and shallots in perfect balance, the sauce warm and sweet and sour and luxurious all at the same time, the black mussels fresh and tender, pink and clean inside, and at once tasting like the sea, the sand and the salt air. Mine was an accident, done once and never repeated. But like most things I’ve tried at Le Central, the mussels were that way every time: only perfect, and nothing more.
