One of my favorite dining buddies is my friend Emese, with whom I share a deep love of not having to make decisions. (My only birthday request every year is to spend the day deciding absolutely nothing.) As a result, when she visits Paris, we often head to places with a prix fixe – extra points if they also do a wine pairing. These meals are always interesting: often innovative, sometimes divisive, frequently thought-provoking. But they seem to sit in a completely different register than the places you go for the pure comfort of the meal: bistros with an exquisite bourguignon or noodle joints where you can enjoy rich broths teeming with ramen or rice noodles. Eels somehow manages to be both.
The welcome should have been my first clue: The industrial-chic dining room is every inch the harbinger of a daring culinary experience, with the exposed brick and open kitchen that have become mainstays of more contemporary Parisian dining establishments. But despite this slightly less Parisian ambiance, there’s keen attention paid to comfort as well, whether in the servers’ offers to divest diners of coats and bags (something that’s happening less and less frequently and has definitely made me ornery this winter) or simply in the choice of seats, with cozy banquettes along one side and comfortable padded chairs everywhere else. Bread is copious; water is refreshed without needing to crane one’s neck to hail someone. And everyone speaks nearly impeccable English.
Eels offers both an à la carte and tasting menu, with options like Landes yellow chicken with seasonal wild garlic and sorrel cream (21) followed by grilled Basque pork paired with leeks, shiitake mushrooms, and both sesame and peanut sauces (39). Origins of the proteins are touted proudly in brackets. We decided, however, to opt for the five-course prix fixe (89), which can be accompanied by a wine pairing (59) should you so choose.
Our tasting began with the smoked eel appetizer, the restaurant’s namesake and a menu mainstay for good reason.
The smoked eel was wonderfully paired with anise-scented licorice and a toasted butter and celery root emulsion, whose touches of sweetness were the ideal foil for the rich, fatty fish. An apple-hazelnut vierge provided the perfect counterpart thanks to its fresh, crunchy texture and touch of acidity, something that would prove to be a moreish hallmark of this menu.
Our next dish saw seasonal white asparagus paired with hummus, mint, and za’atar; this, for me, was the least successful dish of the night. The mint zabaglione was a bit one-note, and the hummus buried beneath the purple-tipped asparagus seemed out of place. And while the lemon-kiwi vierge did indeed bring some acidity, it wasn’t quite enough relief to really showcase the seasonal asparagus at their best.
I was less than thrilled that both of these dishes were served cold, both from a gustatory perspective and because it may have contributed to a strange pacing problem. While the first two dishes were delivered quite quickly one after the other, our first main took its time in arriving… but once it did, I was charmed.
For this dish, sébaste (rockfish), a mainstay of French fish soups, was cooked to perfection, with crispy skin concealing pearlescent, flavorsome flesh. The fish was topped with an intensely flavorful shrimp and orange blossom vièrge and surrounded by a delightful bouillabaisse sauce, which just barely relied on cream to add that extra fatty note. The first fava beans of the season were still a little bit starchy, but the new potatoes were lovely, as were wedges of sucrine lettuce, which had been charred on one side to add some depth and a touch of caramelized sweetness. Ribbons of fresh, marinated fennel and the fennel-lemon gel added that lovely, very welcome note of acidity and freshness. In a word? Exquisite.
I often feel like the most creative part of any menu, but particularly a tasting, happens at the beginning. And maybe I would have felt that way had we not decided to pay the 10-euro supplement to add the quail as our meat course. (Though that pork chop would have, I’m sure, been lovely.) As it was, however, the quail proved my favorite dish of the night – and that’s saying something. I’ve eaten my share of the little birds of late, which are often roasted until just barely rare by the bone, a preparation I once appreciated and have now tired of.
In this case, however, the quail was wholly reimagined so that the incredibly savory stuffing became the star. Described on-menu as a pâté, the stuffing ate more like a lovely, slightly chunky sausage. It was studded generously with bright green pistachios, whose seasonally appropriate verdancy was echoed by a topping of sautéed seaweed and a few spears of nutty green asparagus. The quail was crisp on the outside and juicy within, and it was harmoniously paired with a deeply flavored amaretto jus and a note of that still-welcome acidity thanks to pickled cherries. Sweet cloves of confit garlic and a single roasted artichoke heart lent even more nutty depth for a harmonious dish that was unequivocally my favorite of the night – and this despite a smear of pistachio paste that felt a little bit out of place. It reminded me of a similarly unwelcome peanut paste at a recent tasting at Les Collonges, which had so overwhelmed an otherwise delicious and delicate scallop dish. As I had there, I opted to enjoy this element separately, spread on the crusty sourdough; on its own, it was delightful, eating like phenomenal peanut butter. Had it not been on the plate at all, however, I wouldn’t have missed it, and the dish would have been perfectly cohesive.
There’s an option to add a 14-euro cheese course from nearby Taka & Vermo, but we opted to go straight into dessert, which would typically have been a white chocolate and miso cream craquant with yuzu marmalade, caramel, and buckwheat praline. My allergy, however, led the staff to instead serve us a seasonal fruit dessert taking advantage of the last of the pears, which were poached until just al dente in a light caramel. They were settled on top of a heavily – and pleasantly – spiced almond biscuit at once rich and crisp. The dish was crowned with a tonka bean crémeux and drizzled tableside with a tart Greek yogurt sauce, bringing those welcome, thoughtful touches of acidity to a delightful close.
If it’s not already clear, this tasting absolutely conquered both my palate and heart with its creativity, generosity, and innovation. On the cover of the menu, a definition of anguille evokes the fish’s length, lack of rigidity, and “prodigious flexibility,” and while such a promise is lofty and could seem empty, here, the team positively delivers.
Eels – 27 rue d’Hauteville, 75010