After a 30-year hiatus, my wife and I re-visited Lameloise. Memory plays tricks, but what I remember is that the cooking was steeped in tradition and the sauces were excellent. We had enjoyed an amazing wine from an average vintage year: 1984 H. Jayer.
Obviously the chef is different. It is no longer the Lameloise family. Now Eric Pras is at the helm. His cooking is well adapted to the times: lighter. There is an emphasis on pretty presentations: a bit chi-chi, and precious. It cannot be called regional cuisine, but there is a nod to tradition with some amuses, such as tartlettes with jambon persille and beignets of frog legs with persillade.
The menu contains plenty of nice and high-quality ingredients: scallops, langoustines, lamb from the Pyrenees, pigeon, fresh peas, morels. They serve nicely composed dishes; the types of dishes that will please everybody and will offend nobody.
But something is missing. This is a good place, but not an exciting restaurant. It is hard to pinpoint what is missing. Technically, Pras is immaculate. Perhaps he plays it too safe. Perhaps it lacks a bit of depth. It is also possible that a bit of a rustic dimension is needed to make the dishes more memorable.
Pras is not someone who likes bold statements and flavors that characterize typical bourgeois cooking, such as internal organs (les abats) and deeply flavored cuts of meats and fish. Instead, he likes subtlety that sometimes can be bland or too self-consciously pretty without depth. For instance, the “omble chevalier” appetizer, cold trout and cold smoked eel decorated with a sun shaped potato chip, with sorrel glazed potato spheres, white asparagus, roasted buckwheat grains and fish bouillon is pretty to look at, but is rather fussy, over-complicated, and lacks some depth.
The chef makes ample use of bouillons in other seafood dishes, such as scallops and “lieu jaune” fish. The problem is that the “bouillons” are meant to be the equivalent of Japanese “dashi”, but they fall short. The meat dishes, the spring lamb and the pigeon, thankfully are served without bouillons and with proper French sauces. They are good, but lack the extra “wow” factor when compared with the excellent lamb dishes I had in Germany at Victor’s Gourmet and Waldhotel Sonnora the following week.
EVALUATION: 16/20
