Bouchon Racine

My first visit, but why haven't I been coming here all my life?

I’ve wanted to go to Bouchon Racine since it opened in late 2022 and haven’t really tried hard enough to get a table, so lunch with a great wine colleague and friend was a good excuse to scribble a note in my diary thirty days ahead and make a damn effort.

From the moment you enter this small, thoughtful, quite unglamorous restaurant you feel that you’ve uncovered a secret. Given the amount of publicity and praise heaped upon the place, the fact that it still feels intimate and confidential is remarkable.

The menu is on a five-foot blackboard in true bouchon style with several French ingredients I didn’t know, but which were explained with brilliant clarity by our waiter, Ruta, right down to the portion sizes (“five spears of asparagus with a slightly bitter olive oil mayonnaise” - “the pâté is really substantial so I suggest you share it” - “don’t have the salade de pied de boeuf if you don’t like gelatinous textures”).

We listened, having delayed the onset of starters with an aperitif (the underrated Bicyclette; Campari and white wine), some fat salty green olives and baguette et beurre salé. By this stage, we weren’t just hungry, we were excited, keen, perhaps even slightly on the verge of degustatory hysteria. We wanted everything.

Starters came, crowding the small table. Glasses were repositioned to accommodate jambon be Bayonne, celeriac rémoulade, chicken liver pâté and crunchy tomato and goats’ cheese salad. From the cornichons to the croutons, it was flawless.

Our Mas de Daumas Gassac Blanc 2022 was poured, a wine that truly makes sense in relation to this sort of food. I hadn’t had this idiosyncratic Languedoc white blend for a long time, and alongside the gentle, mustardy earthiness of remoulade it made complete sense, its multifaceted character stepping up to the challenges of the mixed starters.

We talked and drank and took forever to finish our starters, but we were never rushed, never even had the feeling of being behind schedule with the kitchen. Eventually the plates were taken away and replaced with lamb sweetbreads, confit de canard and a sharply dressed green salad. The sweetbreads were gentle, perfect, soothing with their quenelle of buttery mash; the duck crispy and dark on its bed of glistening Puy lentils.

Alongside, we had Philippe Jouan Morey St Denis Vieilles Vignes 2014, a wine of extreme burgundian finesse from a seriously underrated vintage. It is everything I love in red burgundy. Slender, delicate, hugely aromatic, a wine that seems on the edge of being too light, too wild, too taut. But only on the edge. In fact, it’s perfect, liminal burgundy, irresistable and joyous, all blood and ceps and faded red fruits, and every time you put your nose in the glass it’s like kissing someone you love. It should be dispensed to the jaded, the weary and the cynical. We dispensed a glass to the kitchen who came back to say it was one of the best wines they’d tasted that had been brought in for corkage. The wine understood the kitchen, and the kitchen understood the wine. There are so few things in this world that are done to this extreme, singular, exquisite level. Jouan’s Morey is one of them. Bouchon Racine is another.

We caught our breath. Then cheese, proper Roquefort, and dessert — crème caramel, of course, and blood orange and Chantilly cream — and then Calvados, young and old, with coffee. Then, creeping in from the hallway like a draught, the sense that soon we were going to have to leave all this beauty and return to the real world.

We weren’t quite able to do it. Reckless with pleasure, we ended up in the pub below the restaurant, The Three Compasses, with a G&T, chatting to another couple who had been sitting upstairs on a nearby table, and who also couldn’t break free of the tractor beam of Bouchon Racine’s brilliance.

There are very few restaurants in the world that have the intoxicating, heady atmosphere that Henry Harris and David Strauss have created here. Rowley Leigh’s much-missed Café Anglais was one of them. Andrew Edmunds is another.

Bouchon Racine is a dangerous thing: a restaurant that is thrilling to enter and difficult to leave, a sybaritic temple to real cooking and real pleasure. Go, and go again.