From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published July 25, 2008 Chateau Du Lac Old Metairie: 2037 Metairie Rd Reservations advised: 504-831-3773 Lunch Tuesday-Friday. Dinner Tuesday-Saturday. AE, DC, DS, MC, V. www.chateaudulacbistro.com There's no such thing in New Orleans as a fancy French restaurant anymore. We have to make do with the French bistros. Which is no so bad, when we have a few places like Chateau du Lac. Chef Jacques Seleun came to town in 2005. A bad year to open a restaurant here, although doing so in Kenner allowed him and his wife Paige to be part of that rare list of restaurants that we joyfully filled when few others were open. That may have been a good thing, come to think of it. The original Chateau du Lac was a tiny, oddly-proportioned space in a kitschy strip mall on Williams Boulevard. The food was terrific from opening day, but who knew? You could drive by a hundred times and not realize it was something more than the minimal sandwich shop and wine store that the place had been previously. All along, the Seleuns knew they had to get out of there. A majority of their customers came not from Kenner but from the older parts of Metairie and even Uptown. But those people weren't coming often enough, because that is a long, potentially traffic-choked way to drive. The Metairie Road location of Chez Daniel was available. Chef Daniel Bonnot--who became famous here both for French cooking in both the grand and bistro styles--established that location in people's minds as a venue for Gallic cookery. Even though other restaurants came and went there over the years, Old Metairie remembers Chez Daniel and its snails, onion soup, mussels, steak au poivre, and lamb racks. And Old Metairie, New Orleans's first suburb, doesn't seem suburban at all. What better place could there be for a French café with ambitions to sophistication? The Seleuns closed the Kenner restaurant and--while the suspense built among their regulars, who wrote me to ask about Chateau du Lac's fate almost daily--they renovated their new bistro. It opened at the beginning of this year. You couldn't get into the place at first. And with good reason. The food was not only good but different in a hundred delightful, subtle ways from the other French bistros. Jacques is a native of Brittany, from which no other local chefs to my knowledge come. Following the classic path, he started cooking as a teenager, then worked in major Paris and New York restaurants. As I noted in the review of the old place, Chef Jacques's food and style remind of those of Chef Gerard Crozier. The Croziers are gone (in case you're wondering, they're running a UPS store in Knoxville since the hurricane), and the Seleuns filled the gap they left. Like Crozier's bistro, Chateau du Lac has a menu that sticks almost entirely with textbook French cooking, and has a strong emphasis on steak. But let's get started first. I'd say get the mussels. They steam them with two different sauces: the familiar herbal version with white wine, and a lightly creamy version fragrant with saffron. These come out in a large pile, cooked à point (no dried-up ghosts of mussels here), with plenty enough sauce left to serve as a large soup course once you've cleared some of the black shells out of there. Escargots are another specialty in several styles. The cassolette version with a white wine and cream sauce is unlike any other snail concoction in my experience, and one two or three best. Also here are snails with a boursin cheese sauce and the familiar bourguignonne presentation with butter and garlic. The mushroom strudel goes back to the first days of the restaurant, and it's easy to see why. Puff pastry folds over the exotic mushrooms and savory vegetables before being baked to a fragrant, shattery golden, and is finished with an intense demi-glace sauce with more mushrooms. Soups and salads are well made. If you have a jones for Belgian endive, they have a frequent special that delivers more of those spearhead-shaped leaves than you've likely had before you at one time in your life. Chateau du Lac is much stronger in its steaks and other meat dishes than in its seafood entrees. (Another parallel with Crozier's.) The highlight of the menu is a large, dry-aged sirloin strip with bearnaise and pommes frites. At $43, this is by far the most expensive item on the menu, but it's big enough to split. It's rivals the best steaks being served around town. But don't pin your hopes to it, because it's not always available. If not, and you have a meat hunger, the filet mignon pressed into peppercorns and pan-broiled will take care of the job. (They also turn out the filet with a New Orleans bordelaise sauce--garlic butter and herbs). You might imagine that a place like this has a rack of lamb for you, and you'd be right. It's a whole New Zealand baby rack, affordable and edible in its entirety for one diner, seven or eight bones wide, coated with coarse mustard and herbs and roasted. The sauce it a complete departure. It's based on a lamb stock, right enough, but sharpened to a point with sherry vinegar. I was thinking this could be improved with just a touch more sweetness, but that might just be memories of past racks welling up. (How many restaurants even serve a rack of lamb anymore? That missing sweetness does appear with the medallions of pork loin, whose sauce is made with cider and apples. That's a pure Brittany-style dish, there. And also around the roasted half-duck (another rare bird locally). That sauce is made with honey and lavender. In my recent visits I was a bit disappointed not to find the coq au vin Chef Jacques did so brilliantly at the old place. Maybe it will return when the cold weather does. The standing fish entree is salmon with a mint-infused beurre blanc. There's usually a second fish offered as a special. But I get the distinct impression that fish is not the chef's favorite thing to cook. That's okay. We have plenty enough other places for that, and I got a full measure of dietary iodine from the mussels. Great potatoes. The French fries are cut from fresh and fried to order, and that's the gold standard. The gratin dauphinoise is chunky but irresistibly rich and wonderful. Grilled asparagus show up on several of the entrees, and are also available as a side. Desserts are the usual custards and pastries. If you're good, you can get the floating island--a rather exotic performance of that meringue-and-sauce-anglaise old classic. The chef has been playing around with crepes lately. On my most recent visit, he had one wrapped around a fluffy mixture of pastry cream and whipped cream, with raspberries. The wine list makes a bold statement: it's all French. I don't know of another in town like that. This exercises some people, but the only problem I can see is that it raises the price of ordering a bottle of wine a little, the euro being what it is these days. You may as well get worked up about finding only Japanese beer in a sushi bar. At lunch, this is almost a different restaurant. The menu is given over almost entirely to salads, soups, quiches, and croques, with a few specials. With all the big windows, it's a cheery place to have a light lunch. Things are a little sluggish at weekday dinners, and it could be because the menu prices are a shade on the high side. They need one of those Coolinary special menus. (On the other hand, the place is full on Fridays and Saturdays every week.) Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2008 Tom Fitzmorris. 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