#blahvsfood goes to Septime, Paris… of the world’s great restaurants.

 You can see why Septime is one of the world’s great restaurants. This is super thoughtful and subtle cooking, served in a casual, unpretentious way. 

The first thing that strikes you at Septime is the service. It’s warm and friendly, completely lacking in the formality (bordering on condescension) that you sometimes get in the world’s most famous restaurants. The meal itself is priced reasonably at about 140 Euros for a 7 course tasting menu and wines start at about 9 or 10 Euros a glass, less than what you would pay for a mediocre supermarket wine in India.

The food itself is wonderful but deceptively simple. There’s no gimmicks and no bells and whistles. The dishes are presented simply and the flavours are clean. So it requires some degree of discernment to realise how much skill goes into producing such clean, strong dishes. 

Brioche with cottage cheese 

The meal started with a barley broth to keep you warm in this cold Parisian winter. This is followed by a perfect brioche with a cottage cheese sauce where they added sea salt to give it the body of a Gouda or emmenthal.

Trout 

Then I had a trout dish where the trout was barely cooked and almost sashimi like, but that still managed to be buttery and creamy. The trout is quite a common fish and rarely served in tasting menus, but it’s also very sustainable to cook with. So I was happy to see it but also extremely impressed because it’s exceedingly rare to elevate trout like this 

Scallops / marrow / raddichio / dashi 

The scallop course was another example of sophisticated thinking. Served in a dashi with marrow and radicchio, there was a striking contrast between the sweet fresh scallop, the fatty marrow and the bitter radicchio. Then the restraint with dashi allowed it to carry all the solid elements and let them shine.

Potatoes / sea urchin / sea urchin butter 

My favourite dish was the potato in sea urchin butter with fresh sea urchin. Sea urchin is one of my favourite things to eat and it’s almost always the star of every dish it is a part of. This dish was really unusual because the star was the humble potato and not the sea urchin. Diced into tiny cubes, it was cooked quite hard without the soft mushiness of most potato preparations. But this humble potato was transformed into something luxurious with the sea urchin butter. And it found a third layer of complexity and flavour thanks to the smooth, sweet sea urchin. This was a memorable, spectacular dish.

Bitter vegetables in satay sauce 

Every dish had these subtle, nuanced ideas to elevate them. There was a bitter leaf salad in satay sauce, but the addition of mushrooms to the satay sauce mare it so much more complex, adding depth and umami. There was a very well cooked chicken dish, soft and moist and perfect skin. But what made it special was the heat in the sauce, a light hum that gently grew in strength, made with mescal and 4 kinds of Mexican peppers.

Chicken and peppers 

Unfortunately, the desserts didn’t get the same thought and consideration as the rest of the meal. They were tasty, but competent rather than memorable.

Nevertheless, Septime continues to be a restaurant that has to be on the must visit list for any gourmand visiting Paris.