The Last Tomato

The Parisian bistronomique scene is drowning

Paris, Summer 2007. The heat that summer was unbearable. The humidity had already exhausted

the kitchen when the lunch service began, but as soon as the doors opened, none of it mattered.

The regulars in their regular seats. Almost always at the same time, with the precision Parisians bring to their dinner or lunch reservations. The restaurant had no fixed menu. It changed every day, depending on what we'd find at the market. For lunch, customers chose only between fish or meat.

With every new customer, we asked the same two questions.

Do you have any allergies? Is there anything you don't eat? We ask once, and we never forget.

That afternoon, a young man came in alone and sat at the bar, facing the open kitchen.

He looked as though he'd just woken up. The pillow creases were still visible on his cheek.

"I'm hungry and thirsty. I eat and drink everything," he said bluntly.

"Would you like an espresso before the meal? We don't mind delaying things a little."

He looked at me with surprise, smiled, and said something that meant it would be perfect.

I made him a lightly roasted coffee from Guatemala, the way I liked it for one's first taste of the day.

He took his first sip. What coffee is this? he asked

From Greece," I answered. "A small import, straight from the farm. Not through distributors."

 In 2007, Paris didn't yet have access to coffee like this. Hippolyte Courty had not yet opened L'Arbre à Café, and Christophe's Servell Terre de Café didn't exist. What passed for speciality coffee in the city was still a mystery to most. The discovery of a small Greek import, roasted lightly, brought directly from a farm—this was not ordinary. This was almost an act of rebellion. The coffee was finished quickly.

He was ready to begin lunch. First came the bread and olive oil. Then the plate.

A whole Coeur de Boeuf tomato, skinned, cool, sat at the centre of a shallow plate, submerged in a transparent, concentrated tomato consommé.

Almost imperceptibly, it was garnished with everything that recalls a Greek salad: cucumber, green pepper, onion, olive, oregano and basil.

The tomato had been infused with the clarified broth of the liquefied Greek salad and a little peppery olive oil. A little frozen Feta cheese, grated over it. A Kalamata olive. Caper and caper leaf.

He cut a piece. He tasted it. He stopped. He looked at me, stretched his hand over the counter and said:

"There is nothing better than what I have just tasted. It is exactly what I wanted, without knowing I wanted it." He smiled. My name is Seb. I'm a sommelier."

"Where?"

"Le Châteaubriand."

That's how I remember it all beginning. Or, at least, that's how I remember that afternoon.

I didn't know then that, without realising it, we were already at the beginning of a change that would acquire a name within a few years.

A year before, two friends had bought a bistro at 131 Avenue Parmentier, in the 11th arrondissement.

Fred and Iñaki. They called it Le Châteaubriand. Around the same time, I opened L'Olivier.

Two different restaurants, in different parts of the city, but both started from a similar idea: to unite the bistro with French haute cuisine and remove the barriers that had kept them separate until then.

No white tablecloths. No unease in the presence of luxury. No codes that told the customer how to behave, how to dress, or whether they really belonged in this space.

Only the essentials. Creation in the kitchen. And the relaxation of the customer.

In those early years, each of us followed our own path. There was no name yet for what was happening, and we didn't need one. There was only the feeling that something had begun to change.

And then other people started to arrive.

First Adeline Grattard with Yam'Tcha. Then Sven and Ewen with Saturne. The Tischenkos with Le Galopin. Bertrand with Théo and Septime.

Somewhere along the way, Florent Ciccoli and James Henry appeared with Bones. Sota Atsumi with AT. Bruno Verjus with Table. Sisters Tatiana and Katia Levha with Le Servan. Simone Tondo, first with Roseval and later with Tondo.

They were not all the same.

Fortunately.

One cooked with more precision, another with more intensity, another with greater obsession over ingredients. One had wine at the centre of the experience, another didn't.

What united them was not a particular cuisine. It was the need to open up the space.

To be able to eat remarkable food without feeling you'd walked into a ceremony whose rules you didn't know.

And then a word began to be used to describe what was happening. Bistronomie.

Sébastien Demorand was one of those who helped the word gain currency, and Alexandre Cammas's Le Fooding spread it far and wide.

As almost always happens, the word came to describe the reality.

It didn't take long for us to understand that this reality hadn't started with us.

Before us all, there were people who had already opened the path; we, for some reason, simply made more noise.

Stéphane Jégo at L'Ami Jean.

Yves Camdeborde at Le Comptoir du Relais.

And at Le Baratin, Raquel Carena together with Philippe Pinoteau, "Pinuche".

For many of us, Raquel was something like a mother.

Not because she tried to teach us anything.

But because her cuisine showed, without any theory, what mattered most then.

You could cook food that felt familiar, almost homely, and at the same time have behind it all the precision, discipline and knowledge of a professional kitchen.

Perhaps that's where we found the essence of what we were trying to do.

Simplicity was not the absence of technique. It was technique that didn't need to shout to be understood.

And that worked. Very well. Restaurants started to fill. Reservations became difficult. Journalists started to write. Chefs who'd known each other until then began to become names and to need another quality—that of star, influencer, celebrity.

And the names began to travel. From Paris to London. From London to New York.

At some point you no longer needed to have been to a restaurant to know what it was like.

You only needed to have seen a photograph. A bare wooden table. A chair that looked as if it had been found in the street. A plate on old ceramic. A glass of natural wine.

An open kitchen. And a chef who almost never wore anything that looked like a chef's coat.

At first, it allEvery step is designed to concentrate and clarify. The tomato should taste like the memory of summer—intense, pure, transparent but comforting. The consommé should shine like clear light. Serve on room-temperature plates. Taste at every stage. Adjust seasoning by the smallest margins. The dish speaks only when it is finished." made sense. Later, it became an identity. And when something becomes an identity, it very easily becomes a recipe. Restaurants started opening that didn't necessarily understand the framework in which this aesthetic was born, or what need it met, if any.

But they held onto the stereotypes. The small table. The old chair. The natural wine.

The producer with a name. The farmer. The fisherman. The rancher. The winemaker.

And all of that was good. Perhaps it was even among the best things that had happened to gastronomy in those years.

The producer had re-entered history. The product acquired a face.

The chef began to speak more about where he'd found the tomato, the fish, the meat.

In only a few kitchens did something else happen. The raw material became the dish itself.

An exceptional tomato on the plate. An exceptional carrot. A piece of raw fish.

A good cheese. A little oil. A little salt. And the plate ended there.

We saw it more and more often. And it wasn't what we were. It was an imitation without effort, almost. Our idea, sterilised of meaning, retaining only an image. A parody.

The tomato could be exceptional. But then someone had to decide what to do with it. Skin it. Cool it. Keep its juice. Clarify it. Decide how much acidity was needed. How much oil. How much salt. And when all of this had to stop. That was cooking. It wasn't necessarily more things.

It was more care over the same thing.

And then I began to understand that something had changed, not in gastronomy but in how I perceived it

almost ten years after opening L'Olivier.

The 2008 financial crisis had mutated the neighbourhoods. Airbnb had begun transforming residences and residents into a tourist product. Speculators had begun investing in real estate, but also in young chefs and their image. The financial crisis had passed, but it had left behind a city that was more expensive, more touristy, and far more difficult to live and work in.

I made the difficult decision to change course before it was too late, even though the restaurant was at its height.

Seb had already left for the Gard to become a winemaker. Ad Vinum opened in 2016. A year later I left as well, moving on to the next step I'd been planning. But it didn't take long for me to understand, with each visit to Paris and to my usual places, that the decision wasn't mine alone.

Looking back now, I see that each person from that group had already taken their own path. Some restaurants closed. Some were sold. Some left Paris.

Some continued with other people beside them. And some didn't live to see how the story would end.

Sébastien Demorand left on 21 January 2020. His absence took something from that era. We never went back to Omnivore as we used to. And I never got to have him at my table in Samos, as we'd promised each other.

Bertrand Grébaut left in July. He was forty-four years old. Septime is still there.

But the man who created it with Théo is not.

Iñaki had already distanced himself from Châteaubriand for some time, and the kitchen now continues with another chef. At the end of September, he will definitively close his chapter at Le Châteaubriand.

Florent, after becoming a chef to save Bones, renamed it Jones and later sold it.

And Bruno announced that Table would hold its last service in December.

When I read it, I didn't think that another restaurant was closing. But the images came back to me. That afternoon in 2007. Seb at the bar. The coffee from Guatemala. The tomato on the plate.

And everything we didn't yet know. We didn't know that what we were doing would acquire a name.

We didn't know the name would become a trend. We didn't know the trend would eventually become an aesthetic, and we didn't know that, fifteen or twenty years later, we would look back and understand that that period had ended. Perhaps before today, when all of this is being announced.

The people who created it were no longer all in the same place. Each had taken their own path.

Yet, in one way or another, we all still work in gastronomy.

The last dinner hasn't come yet.

The Tomato!

2007 version

1. Blanch and skin the tomato: Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Submerge the Coeur de Boeuf tomato, whole, for 45 seconds. Immediately transfer to ice water. Once cooled, carefully peel away the skin. Remove the core. Do not cut.

2. Dehydrate the tomato: Place the skinned tomato on a perforated tray in the refrigerator at 12°C (no colder). The tomato will lose excess moisture and concentrate its flavour.

3. Make the Greek Salad broth: Combine 1 green bell pepper, cut into small pieces; the cucumber, cut into small pieces; the onion, cut into small pieces; a sprig of fresh oregano; 1 tablespoon white wine vinegar; and 2 teaspoons fine sea salt in a blender. Purée until completely liquid. Pass through a fine sieve, pressing gently. Taste and adjust seasoning. This is your horta consommé base.

4. Infuse the tomato with the broth: Place the dehydrated tomato in a vacuum bag with the broth from step 3. Seal using a vacuum machine at low pressure—1 or 2 gentle pulses only. Do not crush the tomato. Let rest for 30 minutes

5. Make the tomato consommé: Blend the tomatoes with fresh basil leaves and fresh oregano sprigs. Purée completely. Pour into a shallow container and freeze for at least 1 day. Once frozen solid, strain through a fine-mesh sieve (lined with cheesecloth, if available) and let drip slowly into a bowl below for 4–6 hours at room temperature. Do not squeeze. Adjust seasoning with fine sea salt and white wine vinegar. You should have a transparent, concentrated tomato essence.

6. Dry the olives: If using fresh Kalamata olives, place on a perforated tray in a low-temperature oven or dehydrator at 45°C until completely dry, then chop finely.

7. Assemble the plate: Pour a small pool of tomato consommé into the centre of a shallow white plate. Place the infused tomato in the centre of the consommé. Using a microplane, grate the frozen 60 grams feta cheese, frozen directly over the tomato at the last moment—just enough to veil it lightly. Drizzle 2 tablespoons cold-pressed Koroneiki olive oil around the plate in a thin line. Scatter the dried Kalamata olives, capers, and caper leaves around the plate. Serve immediately.

   
   

Every step is designed to concentrate and clarify. The tomato should taste like the memory of summer—intense, pure, transparent but comforting. The consommé should shine like clear light. Serve on room-temperature plates. Taste at every stage. Adjust seasoning by the smallest margins. The dish speaks only when it is finished."