FOOD & DRINK

FOOD

& DRINK

The wedge salad, with fried green tomatoes and watermelon

PHOTO: HAILEY BOLLINGER

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

REVIEW BY PAMA MITCHELL

You 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

Salmon, wrapped in bacon, and served with a soy cream sauce.

PHOTO: HAILEY BOLLINGER

FROM PAGE 35

these days, service did get slow at times, but for the most part we didn’t notice. Our waiter, a Table veteran named Darren, said this was his first night at Le Bar a Boeuf after he had come in on short notice when de Cavel called. We lucked out with Darren, not only because of his knowledge about all of the kitchen’s culinary touches, but also thanks to his long history with de Cavel. I learned a lot from Darren.

For instance, he told us how the featured wedge salad ($12) — a collaboration by both chefs — came together, and it was a doozy. An almost paperthin slice of sweet watermelon formed the base of the salad, topped by a crispy wedge of iceberg lettuce and tangy, chunky blue cheese dressing. The dish included two or three thick, crunchy slices of fried green tomato, which made for a very filling first course.

We shared a couple of other appetizers: crab cakes and “Shrimp Maisonette Style” (each $16). The shrimp blew me away with its garlic butter and white wine sauce dotted with bits of fresh tomato and sliced mushrooms. The plentiful, perfectly cooked crustaceans benefited not only from that savory bath but also from slices of toasted brioche. I could have been happy with a whole order to myself and probably wouldn’t have needed much else. Darren said it was a recent addition to the menu, and bravo for that.

Compared to the shrimp, the crab cakes disappointed in ways I’ve found increasingly common since the price of crabmeat skyrocketed this year. These were better than some I’ve had, but the breading/filler-to-crab ratio still favored breading.

For our entrees, a halibut special was delicious despite being lukewarm, but we did send back an overcooked rack of lamb; we’d ordered it rare. When Darren brought back the fix, apologizing profusely and bringing the hungry diner an extra glass of wine on the house, the dish was perfect. My friend ate her lamb with “oohs” and “ahhs” after each bite. Accompanied by flageolet beans, sauteed asparagus and a sauce with mushrooms, peppers and herbs, it was an exemplary rack of lamb preparation ($38).

I loved my entrée as well: Table Salmon ($28), cooked with the fish wrapped in bacon.

Everything on the plate equaled the fish in quality, and I ate with gusto the wild rice, spring peas and shiitake mushrooms pulled together by soy cream sauce. It was a large enough portion that I took half home and finished it for lunch the next day.

In a subsequent phone conversation, de Cavel told me that he is continuing treatment for a rare soft-tissue cancer diagnosed in 2018 and spoke wistfully about his pending 60th birthday. Retirement or even slowing down doesn’t hold much appeal, he said.

“I’m enjoying myself,” de Cavel said of his role at Le Bar a Boeuf. “We have a young, inexperienced crew and it’s fun to be with them, to try to teach them what I know.”

He said he intends to reopen Table in a new location at some point but doesn’t want to hurry anything.

“I’m surrounded by people I love, it’s a treasure,” he said.

“A treasure,” he repeated with a sigh.

The patio at Le Bar a Boeuf

PHOTO: HAILEY BOLLINGER

Le Bar a Boeuf, 2200 Victory Parkway, Walnut Hills, lebaraboeuf.com.

DRINK Anjou Offers Easy Charm and Clever Cocktails in East Walnut Hills

BY LEYLA SHOKOOHE

The first time I went to Anjou, an intimate cocktail bar in East Walnut Hills that opened in June, the world seemed like it might be starting to right itself in the wake of the pandemic. Vaccines were finally widely available, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even said, “What the heck, take the mask off.”

Ah, happier days.

While I donned a mask to head to Anjou this time around, it was no less pleasant an experience.

Located in a cozy nook on Woodburn Avenue, formerly housing Woodburn Dry Cleaners, Anjou comes to us from Chris Wolfe, Andy Smith and Brad Lauck. Pre-pandemic, the trio had a different project in the works in Walnut Hills proper. When Urban Sites contacted them about the Woodburn space, they knew it had potential.

“We wanted to do something different than your average cocktail bar,” says Wolfe, whose history in the service industry includes stints with Sotto, Top Golf and Dewey’s. “We try to make our drinks approachable. The big thing we look for is familiar flavors introduced in a different way.”

Anjou’s cocktail menu lives up to that credo. The names are clever, the ingredients are interesting and, yes, they’re often familiar. What’s more, the whole thing seems fun. Cocktail bars can feel so forced sometimes, hamstrung by a theme or a concept. Anjou has all of the charm with none of the pretension. It does have a broad conceptual underpinning: the bar’s name comes from Margaret of Anjou, wife of King Henry VI.

“The building we’re in is called ‘The Henry,’” Wolfe says. “Henry VI at one point went crazy, so during that time Margaret ruled all of England and parts of France.”

The pair were central figures in the Wars of the Roses, an uprising against Henry’s reign in the 15th Century. Margaret led armies to retrieve Henry after his capture by Richard of York. Anjou’s decor subtly calls to mind powerful women, like Margaret herself. The bathroom’s wallpaper features black line drawings of confident nude women, and there’s a minimalist floral component throughout the bar, with large grayscale flower wallpaper adorning the main wall and several colorful floral portraits.

“We want it to be a sexy spot,” Wolfe says. “They’re sexy women, but they also have this power about them.”

The floral motif extends to several of the drinks, if not overtly — though several of them have botanical incorporations — then certainly at least in color and composition. The She-Wolf is a delightful concoction, featuring Old Tom Gin and pear, ginger and elderflower liqueurs. It is a vivid purple color and comes served in a tumbler with a rose-shaped ice cube.

“It probably has the most pictures out there because it’s a purple drink, it has a rose ice cube in it, but it’s called the She-Wolf because in Shakespeare’s play Henry the VI, he actually refers to Margaret of Anjou as a ‘she-wolf,’” Wolfe says. “The drink features ingredients from England and France, the color is purple, to signify royalty, and it has the rose in there to signify the Wars of the Roses.”

Anjou’s most popular drink, according to Wolfe, is the Benedetto Alfieri, which remains the only cocktail I’ve ever had that prominently features red bell pepper. It really is a fun trip to flavortown, layered and fresh, zingy and bold. I’ve never had anything quite like it.

“It kind of expresses what we do here,” Wolfe says. “It has basil, shallots and red bell pepper — so things you’re familiar with, but maybe not in a cocktail. We boil the shallots and let them simmer and use that water and add sugar to it to make a simple syrup. It really speaks to what we do because it’s about the fresh ingredients, about the familiar taste you might not be used to in a cocktail.”

Other cocktails I sampled include A Ghost of Time, with smoky mezcal and blood orange rooibos tea, and one that’s coming up for the fall season called Once An Island. This one tasted like the pumpkin spice latte’s sexy Mediterranean cousin, with pomegranate, chai, cardamom and, my absolute favorite, smoked cinnamon on top. Cocktails have really leveled up in 2021.

Anjou also offers zero-proof cocktails, wine and beer. A few new cocktails are coming at the end of September, but there’s not necessarily a set seasonal menu.

“We don’t do a set spring/summer/ fall menu or anything like that. We really focus on the ingredients. Are they fresh at the time?” Wolfe says. “It’s really based on what the essence of the drink is.”

Anjou is named after Margaret of Anjou, wife of King Henry VI. PHOTO: HAILEY BOLLINGER The Benedetto Alfieri, with red bell pepper, basil and shallots PHOTO: HAILEY BOLLINGER

Anjou is open Tuesday through Sunday and is located at 2804 Woodburn Ave., East Walnut Hills. More info: anjoucinci.com.

Anjou’s decor features a feminine and floral motif.