It’s more than steak with a green sauce

A couple of years back during one of our trips to Paris, my true love and I were walking in the neighborhood a little north of the Champs-Élysées. We’d already visited at least one museum and were wandering the streets of this fairly swanky district, getting a little warm and cranky as it was a bit past our normal lunch hour.  We saw a restaurant across the street that looked pretty nice and decided to go in.  Unlike most other restaurants in Paris, there was no menu board on the street, but we didn’t notice.

We went inside where it was air-conditioned and were seated, one on each side, at a large bench with people sitting on either side of us. My limited French got us Badoit (French sparkling water) and beer, but nobody offered us menus. Within minutes, a server plopped down two plates, gave us some bread, and filled the plates with a healthy portion of salad. Very nice, but unspectacular.

We finished our salads, the server took away the plates and then replaced them. Then somebody else came by and filled half of our plates with frites (I guess the French have no reason to call them french fries) and right after that, somebody else came by and dropped about five or six slices of medium rare beef and then drenched the beef with a green sauce. That sauce was among the most delicious things I have ever eaten in my entire life.  Seriously.

Now for the good part.  That was only the beginning.  The frites/steak/sauce is endless.  We stopped at two servings but I saw people with three or four. Those servers will deliver slices of steak with that green sauce forever, but you may want to stop after a bit. After you’re done, then they show you a menu but it’s a menu of desserts and they desserts are alleged to be fabulous. I can’t verify that because I was too filled up with steak and frites to even try.

But this isn’t just a restaurant review. When I got home to Philadelphia, I thought it might be possible to find a recipe for that unbelievable sauce. When I tried, I found out that I had stumbled across a bona fide phenomenon. This wasn’t just a neighborhood restaurant but one of several restaurants operating as L’Entrecôte that feature the same frites/steak/sauce model. They were famous for only having a dessert menu. The sauce had a long and honorable history with disputed stories about it’s origins.  The sauce has a Facebook page!  What kind of sauce has a Facebook page?!? Charles Spence, author of Gastrophysics uses Relais de l’Entrecôte as the counter-example of what he tries to achieve in his consulting business.  Wow.

So I think this is worth exploring a little. First, a little language detour. The name of this restaurant is Relais de l’Entrecôte. I don’t know exactly what “relais” means but it is one of many words the French use for restaurants of various types.  One might also see “bistro(t)”, “brasserie”, “restaurant”, “comptoir”, “café”, “bar”, and “bar à vin.” To the French, all these words probably have specific connotations and I can tell a brasserie from a café but I don’t have any idea how to distinguish amongst relais’, comptoirs, or restaurants.

As for l’entrecôte, it’s a specific cut of steak. According to wikipedia, it’s the rib, ribeye, scotch fillet, club, Delmonico, tenderloin, strip, or porterhouse.  I’m a cook, not a butcher so this is totally beyond me but it looks like a London broil to my uneducated eye. At any rate, it is about an inch or a little more thick and has a pronounced grain. When I do this at home, I use a London broil.  That’s probably a sacrilege but I don’t know if I care.  It’s the sauce that’s important, not the steak.

Now we move from language to business. First, how many restaurants do you know that have their own Wikipedia page? Le Relais de Venise – L’Entrecôte, more popularly known as L’Entrecôte Porte-Maillot because of it’s location in Paris, is owned by one Paul Gineste de Saurs. In addition to the location in the 17eme arrondissement, M. de Saurs licenses seven additional operations in London, New York, and Bahrain that are run by one of his daughters. His son (Wikipedia doesn’t give the names of his children) seems to have dominated French expansion with locations in Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes, Montpellier, and Lyon. Another nameless daughter operates three locations in Paris (including our discovery) as well as locations in Geneva, Beirut, Kuwait City, Dubai, Riyadh, and Hong Kong. All serving a basic frites/steak/green sauce.

But that sauce…  Obviously it would be a closely guarded secret with the de Saurs family but it is a widely discussed and imitated all over the internet. According to Wikipedia, it is known as the Café de Paris sauce and has its genesis in the 1940s at the Café de Paris in Geneva, owned by Arthur-François (Freddy) Dumont.  It is allegedly the creation of M. Dumont’s father-in-law, M. Boubier, and is currently licensed to several other European restaurants. The L’Entrecôte group of restaurants (those of the de Saurs family) have a “similar” sauce both make claims to originating and having direct connections to the original.

Now not only does this sauce have a Wikipedia page and a Facebook page but there are dozens of pages where people have attempted to deconstruct and rebuild this unbelievable sauce. There’s one that I’ve been using for the past couple of years but I can’t find the source today, so I can’t attribute it properly. I feel bad about that.

I have tinkered with the recipe I do use but I can’t verify how close it is to the original because (a) we haven’t been to Relais de l’Entrecôte in at least three years and (b) have you ever tried to figure out how close something comes to something you tasted a year and a transatlantic flight ago?

I made a fairly big batch late last week and I think I’ve finally gotten it to where I want it, but I am committed to returning to the restaurant on our next trip to see how close I’ve gotten. In general terms, this green sauce is  VERY heavily dominated by tarragon, sharpened up with mustard, vinegar, and shallots.  And, by the way, it works really well on some vegetables as well as steak but that could be because I’ve strayed from the authentic recipe.  I’m calling it Tarragon Steak Sauce because I can’t confirm how close it is to the Café de Paris sauce or the Relais de l’Entrecôte sauce, but if I can verify my efforts, I’ll come back to edit.

Recipe – Tarragon steak sauce

Ingredients

1 tbl olive oil

2 shallots sliced

3 garlic cloves minced

2 cups chicken stock

1 tsp pepper, freshly ground

1 tsp salt

2 tbl dijon mustard

1 cup tarragon, minced and packed (that seems like a LOT of tarragon.  It is, and don’t be afraid to use more)

1/4 cup white wine

1 1/2 tbl red wine vinegar

1 tsp anchovy paste (or 3-4 anchovies, mashed into a paste)

1 tsp Worcestershire sauce

4 tbl butter

Directions

Heat the oil and sauce the shallots until soft. Add the garlic.  Add the stock and simmer for 5-7 minutes.

Add all remaining ingredients except butter to the stock.  Transfer to a blender and puree until smooth.

Transfer back to the stove and bring to medium-low.  Add the butter and stir until the butter has melted.

Reduce by at least half.  The final version should be liquid, not a paste, but should have a real, discernible texture.

Serve warm.