Troquet wasn’t intended to be a great restaurant, only a great wine bar. But to show wines at their best, the owners turned to a classically French style of cooking — no surprise there. The surprise is that the food at Troquet is not only rich and satisfying, but comes off as fresh, different, and exciting. As it turns out, this is a great restaurant even if you don’t drink. The choice of French (and some Italian) food was almost inevitable, because contemporary food — loaded with Asian influences, spices, salt, vinegar, citrus, and pepper — is almost impossible to match with classic wines. The old friends of wine — cheese and butter to foil its acidity — are out of fashion. Winemakers around the world have been doing their best to emphasize fruity and peppery characters, but it’s hard to make wine taste like beer, and beer (if not mineral water) is what goes with lots of trendy cuisine.
Troquet could help change that trend.
Dinner begins minimally with a near-perfect French-bread roll, hard and crusty, and slashed and pulled into a four-point crown on top. These rolls keep coming, and they work with every course as well as every wine. Appetizers are really " small plates, " and the after-theater crowd may get no deeper into the menu than that. The sea-scallop brandade ($12) is really both things: a perfectly seared sea scallop atop a patty of mild brandade (more usually a garlicky Provençal dip of potatoes whipped with salt cod), with an underlying basil-oil sauce. Hazelnut-chèvre tempura ($9) deconstructs the popular goat-cheese salad by turning the cheese into a crunchy fritter and touching up the salad with fresh herbs like chervil and parsley. Red-wine drinkers will go for the crispy-skin confit duck ($12), a nice leg-quarter with a ham-like cure, sure-enough crispy skin, and a base of pretty puy lentils (the little French lentils that hold their shape when cooked) and very small carrot dice.
If you really are using the appetizers as appetizers, the house salad ($8) is very fresh and perfectly dressed. And the fennel-leek soup ($9) is a froth of (not too much) cream and stock, with both aromatics evident and plenty of plump mussels.
Maybe it’s just because I was recently disappointed at Bonfire, but I was knocked out by the flavor of the New York sirloin ($35), a wonderful piece of meat topped with three dabs of salty marrow, exquisite roasted baby carrots, and a minimalist slice of caramelized onion. Roast leg of lamb with braised shoulder ($26) was almost as good on the rare slices of leg, a little dried out with the braised shoulder. The accompanying pilaf of barley and red-bell-pepper mirepoix was superb.
White-wine drinkers might be best served by the potato gnocchi and wild mushrooms ($19), featuring very light and delectable dumplings with a hefty proportion of wild mushrooms, including visible chanterelles and cèpes. Herb-crusted Atlantic cod ($26) was a small piece, and a little salty, but with another nice pilaf of perhaps split peas and corn. And you could certainly raise either glass to the nicely seasoned roast organic chicken ($23), cut fashionably like a chop with a bare leg bone sticking up. The bit of starch under this one was a purée of potatoes and probably celery root.
Well, about that wine. The owner pioneered inexpensive restaurant wine at Uva, in Brighton, and has a marvelous and constantly changing list of bottles and glasses. While the food menu is relatively fixed, the wines by the glass change daily! Troquet offers two-ounce and four-ounce pours at about what the wine would cost by the bottle elsewhere. The glasses, which aren’t huge, are etched with lines indicating these pours, a somewhat tacky (or techy) touch in an otherwise serious dining room. In the modest glasses, two ounces look like a good taste, but not every wine shows at its best this way. The Chilean merlot, Lapostelle " Cuvee Alexandre " ($3.25/$6.50), seemed less fruity in the smaller glass, although just as structured and elegant. On the other hand, the smaller pour bought me a visit with the 1998 Guigal Côte-Rôtie ($5.25/$10.50), a monument of French Rhône red I haven’t been able to afford at home in almost 20 years and still full of dusty fruit, cherries, and berries. Another wine I probably would seldom taste otherwise, the St. Supery Meritage ’97 ($4.75/$9.50), was the best two ounces of the evening: California fruit with Bordeau solidity. I might even buy a bottle of that.
With the wines, the cheese platter (three selections for $11/six for $20) would merit three stars in Paris. The owner produces a tray of eight cheeses at tableside, describes them, and serves your request. With red wine on the table, I took all three creamy cow’s-milk cheeses, both cured sheep cheeses, and the one aged goat, leaving the fresh goat cheeses for another evening. Some of the cow cheeses were served with a spoon; they weren’t rotten, just very ripe and runny. The portions looked small, but these are very rich and powerful cheeses, and small dabs did us fine. The hits of the group were the truffled sheep cheese and the very sharp goat. The plate comes with a goodly heap of triangles of raisin-nut bread, two slices of poached pear and one of guava, and an egg cup of filberts and walnuts. For a walk-in wine tasting, that may be all you will need.
If you can save room for dessert, the regular and decaf cappuccino were excellent, and the chocolate fondant ($8.25) was a fine little round of fallen chocolate cake, served with vanilla ice cream and a few kumquats. Caffè latte panna cotta ($8.25) is coffee-flavored cream with a topping layer of coffee jelly and a side beehive of spice cake. Goat cheesecake ($8.25) is unsweetened and a little plain (yet not goaty-sharp), but the accompanying passion-fruit sauce and gelato were outstanding. Coconut dulce de leche cake ($8.25) was a crumbly but well-flavored flat layered torte, served with caramel ice cream. The chef lightens the pressure of the check with a little plate of chocolate truffles and almond slices.
Troquet is a rather severe room with gray walls and black banquettes and chairs, lightened by French posters on the walls. The tables are covered with white paper clipped over white linen, which is also le vrai bistro, though the dinner prices are a bit more affected than that. There is a candle (which I would rather not have while tasting) and flowers on each table. The music is Piaf. All this suggests that the owners intended to make an informal wine bar, and have backed into a terrific French dining room.
Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com.
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