FOOD & DRINK
The wedge salad, with fried green tomatoes and watermelon P H OTO : H A I L E Y B O L L I N G E R
When One Table Closes, Another Opens Chef Jean-Robert de Cavel and team revamp the menu of Walnut Hills burger bar Le Bar a Boeuf with dishes reminiscent of downtown’s Table — and the iconic Maisonette R E V I E W BY PA M A M IT C H E L L
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ou can take the French chef out of a fine-dining environment, but you may not be able to take a finedining orientation out of the chef. Not completely, anyhow. Case in point: After closing his more upscale restaurants L and Table in 2020, Chef Jean-Robert de Cavel had two relatively casual restaurants in his portfolio. French Crust Café, adjacent to Findlay Market, is a colorful establishment with
the feel of a Parisian bistro and is a perfect place for lunch or brunch. And Le Bar a Boeuf, which opened in 2015, has an emphasis on unusual burgers and several bourgeois French dishes containing ingredients like escargot and calf liver. Located on the ground floor of a Walnut Hills condo building and drawing patrons largely from nearby neighborhoods, Le Bar a Boeuf features
a large patio with river views and one of the tiniest kitchens imaginable for a full-service restaurant. The somewhat out-of-the-way location and the menu’s focus on ground meat kept me from dining there often. Recently, I heard that de Cavel had relocated with a core staff from Table to the aforementioned compact kitchen. As a consequence, Le Bar a Boeuf’s menu has gotten more interesting as de Cavel and his young colleague, Chef Jordan Brauninger, have introduced a variety of dishes reminiscent of Table — and of the Maisonette, where de Cavel first wowed our city’s palates in 1993. “It’s my place, I own it, but I’d never really spent any time there,” de Cavel said of Le Bar a Boeuf. At the beginning of 2021, he took a couple weeks off after the closure of his other restaurants and then started work at Le Bar a Boeuf with Marilou Lind, Table’s longtime front-of-house manager, and a few other de Cavel loyalists.
“We got lucky that some of our team at Table wanted to help (at Le Bar a Boeuf ),” de Cavel told CityBeat. “It’s a very comfortable place, a family restaurant, really,” he added. Although he hasn’t sought publicity or done any promotion of the staff and menu changes, de Cavel says that wordof-mouth has led to more diners, at times almost overwhelming the kitchen and serving crew. My friends and I had a choice of first or second seating on a Saturday: The first seating was from 5:30-6:15 p.m. and the later one started at 7:30 p.m. We took the earlier option and asked whether we could have a table on the patio. “It depends on whether we have enough servers,” Lind said over the phone. As it turned out, the patio was too hot at that hour, but a few people did find tables there by the time we left around 8 p.m. As happens pretty much everywhere
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