With summer around the corner, the food of Provence, a perennial favorite across the country, is bound to be in the spotlight. The season, after all, is when many of the essential ingredients of this fragrant and colorful Mediterranean cuisine are at their best.
Eggplants, zucchini, ripe tomatoes, peppers and basil—seasoned and perfumed with olive oil, garlic, thyme and even lavender—are the sine qua non of Provençal cooking.
The food of Provence is so enduringly popular that last year, when Michel Jean sold his 20-year old namesake restaurant in New York, the farewell parties digging into bowls of bouillabaisse, plates of pissaladière and glasses of rosé spilled into the street. Now, Vicki Freeman and Marc Meyer, who bought the place, have freshened the decor but retained the name and concept. The menu, by chef Lynn McNeely, still has many Provençal accents. The restaurant will likely have worked out any kinks by Bastille Day, July 14, when it will celebrate the French holiday.
La Provence in Lacombe, La., also conveys the allure of the region. John Besh, executive chef at the award-winning Restaurant August in New Orleans, assumed leadership of the restaurant earlier this year after the death of his mentor, Chris Kerageorgiou, who ran it previously. After a brief closure this spring, Besh reopened the restaurant, which still offers some of Kerageorgiou’s classics, including gratinée of creamy salt cod brandade, daube of rabbit and striped bass with ratatouille. Steven McHugh is the chef de cuisine there.
Restaurants that aim to capitalize on the popularity of Provençal cuisine have menu elements in common, such as rabbit stews, soupe au pistou, salad niçoise, brandade and bouillabaisse. But at the same time, they have expanded the language of the region to include a broader range of crowd-pleasers, such as seared salmon with Provençal vegetables at Bleu Provence in Naples, Fla., and hamburgers served Provençal-style with aïoli at La Provence in Roseville, Calif.
Goblin Market in New York includes a yellowfin niçoise salad, and wild sea bass with niçoise olives, artichokes and roasted potatoes on its New American menu. And there’s tripe Provençal on the menu at Petit Robert Bistro in Boston, where chef-owner Jacky Robert offers a wide variety of French-inspired items.
Others blend Provençal style with influences from around the globe. For example, at David Bouley Evolution in the Ritz-Carlton South Beach in Miami Beach, Fla., the menu is touted as global, an all-inclusive geographic designation that touches on Provence with Long Island duckling glazed with honey and lavender, as well as a daube of chanterelles to accompany the veal.
Even at the new Grass in Miami, an operation that is influenced more by Asia than by France, the free-range chicken breast is seasoned with house-made herbes de Provence, a mixture that invariably includes rosemary and thyme with other herbs, including lavender. The chef, Michael B. Jacobs, dries his own fresh rosemary, thyme and basil every week.
Similarly, Cav Wine Bar in San Francisco, which owes no particular allegiance to the south of France, serves figs stuffed with goat cheese and glazed with lavender honey as well as spice-crusted rare ahi tuna with stewed eggplant, crispy chick peas and panisse, or Provençal chickpea fries.