Looking Beyond the Stars in France

There’s more to good food in France than three-star restaurants--or restaurants with any stars at all. Three excellent eating places, new or newish, in various parts of France demonstrate that it is quite possible to eat well but inexpensively (and informally) in that most gastronomically-inclined of nations. One even proves that it’s possible to eat good fast food. . . .

“I’m just a builder of sandwiches,” says New Zealand-born Drew Harre, proprietor (with his French wife, Chantal) of Cosi, a new and smart but very casual establishment just off the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris. “The customers are the architects.”

Cosi’s specialty--indeed the only thing the place serves, other than beverages and a few desserts--is, according to a chalkboard sign outside the door, “un chausson de pat e cuit au feu de bois et fourre a votre fantaisie . “ That’s, “a slipper of dough cooked in a wood-burning oven and stuffed according to your fancy.” The “slipper” is made from plain pizza dough, baked in large rectangles into a kind of flat bread, thicker than most pizza crust but very light in texture. This is then cut into generous slabs, slit open, and filled with such things (the selection changes daily) as smoked salmon, high-quality canned tuna, blue cheese with celery, chevre with cucumber, air-dried beef, or, and this is the point of the customer being the “architect,” any combination of ingredients. The bread, in fact, is wonderful, and the fillings fresh and unpretentiously perfect. Tuna and blue cheese with celery make a particularly satisfying mix.

“Basically,” says Harre, “I took all the things I don’t like about fast food and threw them away. There are no secret sauces here, nothing frozen, nothing prepackaged. The fillings are made fresh twice daily, and the bread is cooked in small batches. I believe in total openness in everything. You can look down at the end of the counter and see the bread coming out of the oven. I even put the cans of the tuna I use up on a shelf where everybody can see them.”

Even the attractive--one almost wants to say “Californian”--interior of the place, by young French designer Jean-Luc Guigui, reflects this idea: “It’s all done with rusted iron, bare stone, unfinished wood,” Harre notes. “I wanted real materials because I have real food.”

Harre got the Cosi idea originally from his old boss, Georges Bardawil--whose L’Ecluse wine bar chain he used to help run. (Cosi offers a small choice of good wines at about $2 a glass or $10 a bottle.) When Harre mentioned that he wanted to open a restaurant, Bardawil sent him to a mysterious address in Rome. “I found myself in a bakery in a sort of bad neighborhood,” Harre remembers. “Two older men were working hard, sweating, in front of wood-burning ovens, making what they call pizza Romana-- which is like focaccia, except that you cut it open and make sandwiches out of it. I worked with them for 10 days, and then came back to Paris and started planning how to adapt that idea here.”

Harre is also a computer expert, doing consulting for a home grocery-ordering service he helped found, and traveling to Brussels two days a week as a consultant on a new communications network being set up by the European Economic Community. Despite these activities, he plans to open a second Cosi this fall, in the eighth arrondissement and eventually a third one. “Maybe at that one,” he says, “we’ll do actual pizzas and different kinds of bread.”

Auguste (Gu) Galasso already makes “actual pizza,” and has for years--funky, brightly flavored Provencal-style stuff, topped with mozzarella, grated Parmesan, spicy sausage, and small purple-black olives with the stones still in. His original restaurant, Chez Gu in Salon-de-Provence, plays a minor but significant role in contemporary American restaurant history: According to Wolfgang Puck, it was the inspiration for Spago. He used to go there with his colleagues on his nights off, years ago, when he worked at the three-star Oustau de Baumaniere nearby--and it was Chez Gu whose spirit (and wood-oven pizzas) he wanted to emulate when he opened his own establishment.

Like Spago, Chez Gu was a celebrity hangout--complete with a collection of white plates on the walls, signed by virtually every important French entertainer of the time. The menu, though it hardly resembled Spago’s, did offer a mix of simple dishes (not only pizza, but grilled meats, salads and such) and luxury food (caviar, smoked salmon and the like) that does indeed suggest a Spago-like brand of offhanded elegance.

The plates are still in Salon; Gu is not. Three years ago, he sold his restaurant, plates included, and semi-retired to Aix-en-Provence. Now, he has teamed up with his son to open Gu et Fils in that city. Gu still serves his famous pizza, but his food in general seems a bit more elaborate than it used to be. There are, for instance, excellent grilled oysters, a wonderful gigot d’agneau (roast leg of lamb) with wild mushrooms, and assorted homemade pastas. One infelicitous change, though: Gu’s salad used to be a big garlicky mix of sturdy lettuces with lardons of crisp bacon and rough-hewn croutons; now it’s a composition of baby greens ( mesclun ) with shreds of good but subtle mountain ham--very good, but wimpy in comparison.

Franck Cerutti’s Don Camillo, near the flower market and the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, is a far more sophisticated restaurant than Gu et Fils, and certainly than Cosi--but, on its own terms, it too is a casual and reasonably-priced place to eat.

Don Camillo has an appealing modesty about it in several ways. Apart from one assistant in the kitchen, for example, the staff is family: Cerutti’s wife, Veronique, is hostess, his father-in-law is waiter, his mother-in-law brings dishes from the kitchen and helps with the desserts. The dining room is tiny, seating only 25 or so (reservations are imperative), and has a pleasantly handmade look. Perhaps most important of all, though, is Cerutti’s own admirable culinary restraint.

Although he has worked with many of the big names in post- nouvelle French cooking on the Cote dAzur--Jacques Maximin, Alain Ducasse, et al.--he doesn’t try to imitate or one-up them. Instead, he addresses traditional Nicoise dishes, lightening and refining them only slightly, while remaining scrupulously faithful to their spirit. Among his recent specialties, for instance, have been fresh anchovies on a bed of perfectly roasted red and yellow peppers and tomatoes; a salad of stuffed and roasted lapereau (young rabbit) with a salad of wild chicory and earthy-sweet baby fava beans; some pale, tender mignons of veal, wrapped in prosciutto and accompanied by a mesclun salad topped with little “ravioli” of thin, crisp-fried potato slices filled with Parmigiano, ham, and herbs; a succulent, authoritative version of estocifacada-- the Ur-Nicoise dish of stockfish (dried cod or haddock) braised with tomatoes, onions, black olives, garlic, sweet peppers, and potatoes; and a cheese course of sourish carre de Mercantour seasoned with olive oil, sea salt, black pepper, a few threads of sun-dried tomato--and a couple of anchovy filets! (Cerutti also mates big shards of fresh Parmigiano with thin strips of celery and slices of juicy pear--an inspired combination--and offers gorgonzola with potatoes dressed in olive oil and garlic.)

The small but well-chosen wine list includes bottles from Bellet and Villars-sur-Var--both in the Nicoise countryside--as well as several other Provencal wines (including two vintages of Domaine Tempier’s superlative Bandol red), and a full range of Antinori wines from Tuscany, up to and including the remarkable Tignanello.

Cosi, 54, rue de Seine, 75006 Paris, tel. 46.33.35.36. Lunch or dinner for two (sandwiches and desserts): $10-$16 (food only).

Gu Et Fils, 3, rue F.-Mistral, Aix-en-Provence, tel. 42.26.75.12. Lunch for two: $28-$30; dinner for two: $65-$85 (food only).

Don Camillo, 5, rue des Ponchettes, Nice, tel. 93.85.67.95. Lunch or dinner for two: $45-$80 (food only).