Le Servan
32 Rue Saint-Maur, 11th arrondissement, Paris
tel +33.1.55.28.51.82
open Monday through Friday for dinner and Tuesday through Friday for lunch, closed weekends
lunch fixed-price menu (entrée, plat, dessert) €27 and dinner €42 to 62 à la carte, before drinks

Paris’s 11th arrondissement, which sprawls from Place de la Bastille toward the city’s eastern edge, has become emblematic of the capital in today’s complicated times, or at least of how it eats. Other neighborhoods in Paris may be edgier — Belleville, farther out, the French response to Williamsburg — but it’s this bourgeois neighborhood where food-minded visitors, having abandoned the old gilded dining rooms close to the city’s center, gather next to the growing ranks of Parisians who believe great cooking is found in modest places. The 11th is home to Bertrand Grébaut’s much-lauded Septime and Iñaki Aizpitarte’s rule-breaking Le Chateaubriand. And that’s not a coincidence. The arrondissement’s old working-class character and its many storefront bistros were the perfect combination to host the new, casual French aesthetic — precise cooking in lower-rent, tablecloth-free zones.

Le Servan, a quick walk from Chateaubriand and from the Bataclan, a site of 2015’s terror attacks, is located on a quiet stretch of Rue Saint-Maur, in a corner of the 11th that’s earlier on the bobo curve. (That shorthand for “bourgeois bohemian” these days seems to describe most of the Parisian middle class.) On first glance, the restaurant doesn’t make a big impression. Situated next to an auto shop, it feels at times almost more like east London than eastern Paris; a white marble façade and floor-to-ceiling windows frame 40 seats at tables, with five more at the bar facing the open kitchen. The dining room feels a bit too exposed to the street, too bright, tidy, and minimalist to be classically Parisian, the opposite of the studied darkness of Stéphane Jégo’s L’Ami Jean, itself an emblem of the last round of Paris restaurants, with its lusty food, and plenty of male ego.

Tatiana Levha, the chef of Le Servan, and her sister Katia, who runs the front of the restaurant, chose to open here because it was where they lived: a neighborhood that remained affordable to a young chef. In Paris today, this isn’t an unusual location for the type of food they offer: neat, clean-lined French cooking that subtly rewrites expectations. It’s a particularly current representation of where French food, or at least cooking as it’s found in Paris, is headed. I should say “mostly French food,” because the half-Filipino Levha sisters are both quintessentially French and yet guided by a more global sense of taste. Perhaps because of this, the typical diners at Le Servan’s tables include a cross-section of French and American professionals — chefs, wine importers, and so on. Le Servan represents the heart of Paris, as Paris is becoming.

Le Servan’s complex relationship with tradition is evident on its menu. While most of the Paris néobistros hew to a traditional prix fixe format, Servan, which opened in 2014, is decidedly more free-form. The menu’s first section is headed “Zakouskis,” a Russian word for appetizers, a whimsical choice of word, which the Levha sisters use to describe apéritif snacks, although they’re more substantial than that. A meal at Servan reasonably begins here with a bowl of mussels (or cockles in winter) served in a slightly sweetened sauce reminiscent of nuoc mam, plus fine slivers of Thai chili and basil. That dish has become a hallmark of the restaurant, as have deep-fried wontons stuffed with boudin noir, their fried skins as delicate as the rich, bloody filling is not. These might be saddled with the dreaded F-word — fusion — and they would seem obvious in Los Angeles. A Parisian might instead draw an analogy to tapas. But the wontons are neither of those things, and frankly they don’t quite have an obviously French context, possibly aside from those occasional influences from the country’s colonial past that appear around the fringes of what was once classical French cuisine.

Especially in its main courses, such as a lusciously fatty pork chop, Servan can feel misleadingly comfortable to Parisians. That’s really just a gateway effect: As you peel away the flavors in each dish, they reveal themselves to be subtly challenging, mostly because of the Levhas’ fondness for Southeast Asia, incorporated in a way that doesn’t feel forced. Even in the 11th, foreign flavors tend to stay in their own corner, as at the Cambodian or Vietnamese restaurants on Rue Charonne. Tatiana’s approach is to find ways for those different accents to live within a French context: the skin of her roast chicken is crisped almost to the perfection of chicharrones (cracklings), its texture echoed by a crisp cube of tofu just below it, plus potatoes fried to a dark lacquer, with a soy-sauce reduction and a murmur of chile heat. Nearly everything about the dish evokes a sense of comfort, but at the same time those curious little differences require a moment to consider. One night, I witnessed an elderly French couple engaging in the particularly American habit of swapping plates mid-meal, a bold gesture in a country where everyone likes to keep their own plate to themselves.

This mix of cultural references can falter at moments, as when a zakouski of a tandoori-spiced aioli couldn’t quite apologize for the accompanying, oversteamed whole artichoke. More often it not only succeeds but also reveals the sisters’ inspiration coming from their unusual upbringing. Their mother is Filipino and their father is French; Tatiana was born in the Philippines, but by the time Katia was born the family had relocated to Paris. Then they moved to Hong Kong, then Thailand, at which point their parents split, with their father remaining in Bangkok and their mother moving to Paris’s 5th arrondissement with the two girls, then in their teens, to raise them there.

While it might be tempting to play identity politics with Tatiana’s cooking, it would also be misguided. After studying English literature, Tatiana trained as a chef with an utterly French trajectory: an apprenticeship at L’Astrance, Pascal Barbot’s inventive but decidedly haute-cuisine spot in the 16th, followed by time at Alain Passard’s three-star Arpège, where Barbot had been sous-chef and where Tatiana picked up Passard’s reverence for vegetables, before returning to the line at L’Astrance. After those two demanding kitchens, whose chefs are contemporary but mindful of the classical past, “I didn’t know where else I would feel comfortable cooking,” Tatiana said, so in 2011 she left to work in a fish shop and, on occasion, to cook with Raquel Carena in the kitchen at Le Baratin in the 20th, Paris’ most influential (and clubby) natural-wine bistro.

These experiences provided, essentially, a trifecta of Paris cooking high and low. And knowing about them helps you to understand the influences at Servan. Tatiana shares Passard’s tidy fanaticism with vegetables: small, succulent wedges of baby zucchini just about deserved equal billing with the leg of lamb with burrata they accompanied. There’s also a dose of Baratin lustiness: Tatiana’s butter-poached veal brains could easily have come from its menu. Having been brought up very much French — all those years at lycée — yet still not totally at ease culturally, she has become a careful student of the hierarchy of French tastes. (All while succeeding as a female chef, still a rarity in Paris.) Vegetables, despite the country’s carnivore tendencies, have become a more comfortable sight on many plates in Paris — certainly more than bold spices and chile heat, although she finds her customers feel less cowed by spice when it’s invoked in the context of hearty French cooking. (Borrowing an idea from Chinese restaurants, she denotes spiciness by printing a small chile next to half a dozen of the 15 dishes on the menu.)

This middle ground between comfort and exoticism keeps surfacing, as in a poached egg with a soy-sauce sabayon, artichoke hearts, and blanched almonds, which is presented almost as a composed salad. I found a similar effect in Tatiana’s artful plate of poached wild oysters, also saladlike: chunks of tomato gelée, dill, and slivers of cucumber all echoing the shellfish’s brininess (plus a chile heat kept in the background by sweet marine flavors). The dish offers, in its way, a display of the evolution far beyond Nouvelle Cuisine, which spoke of lightness but remained faithful to butter; the dish speaks to today’s fresher tastes. Indeed, Tatiana’s cooking nods to the post-butter sensibilities of younger French diners, who make up much of Servan’s clientele, even more so than at other post-Nouvelle restaurants, such as Septime. (Bertrand Grébaut of Septime is Tatiana’s husband, so the two restaurants are inevitably linked.) Almost always, the non-French accents feel like natural extensions of more familiar flavors, a more subtle approach than, say, that of La Lune in Beaune, where Seiichi Hirobe aggressively presents Japanese flavors alongside French ones.

But more than anything, it’s the casual, almost Californian format of meals at Servan that is the Levhas’ most quietly inspired achievement. Get them on the topic, and the sisters will reveal their frustration with the rigid progression of French dining — so pervasive in France that most traditional Asian restaurants usually bend to Gallic conventions: “Even in Chinese restaurants you have to eat entrée-plat-dessert,” Tatiana told me. “Which is crazy. You have to ask them to have everything at the same time.”

The surreptitious sort of post-postmodernism taking place at Servan can even be detected in Katia’s wine selections, which pay homage to the natural-wine frenzy that has consumed east Paris, without giving in to its extremes. She gravitates to bottles like Domaine Jousset’s naturally sparkling Bubulles from Montlouis and Château Saint-Anne’s rugged (but not rustic) red from Bandol. She prefers cleaner, more classic flavors, certainly compared to many wine lists in the 11th, which give a stage to fashionable but often flawed bottles.

This approach is possible because the Levhas have provided their own quietly multicultural definition of Frenchness, at a moment when the very idea of Frenchness in cooking is being called into question — when the old romantic views of France, well beyond food, are colliding with a more complicated present. And while restaurants such as Septime tend to get more credit for upending the old way of dining by incorporating the minimalism of, for example, modern Nordic cooking, Le Servan offers something more inherently Parisian, more street, more in sync with France’s current cultural paroxysms. The Levhas like to talk about how their small neighborhood has finally become fashionable, as they welcome neighbors like Achille, the latest restaurant from serial wine-bar impresario Pierre Jancou. But if parts of the 11th have become a bit bobo, their corner of it feels less forcefully trendy than some. And it’s that gentle transformation that I think also defines their work. Le Servan is part of the evolution of French cooking toward a clear-eyed modernity, but it’s accomplishing that change in a way that’s both unassuming and unthreatening. ●

From issue 98