A QUEST FOR FINE WINES
JEFF GALVIN
We follow the Galvin brothers as they count down to the opening of their new City restaurant
SOME parts of opening a restaurant are arduous, but others are pure fun. One of the most important things about our new restaurant La Chapelle will be the wine. Our quest for the best wine we can find took us last month to one of the finest vineyards in France, where we sampled over 20 of their vintages. Tough work, but somebody had to do it.
The site for this marathon was the vineyards of Paul Jaboulet Aine, who produce the legendary Hermitage La Chapelle, situated in the beautiful Rhone Valley. In fact, this vineyard has been one of the inspirations for the new restaurant, and no part of it more so than the small chapel with a simple cross at the top of a hill overlooking the Rhone river and valley.
It was built in 1235 by Gaspard de Sterimberg, a knight who became a hermit when his fighting days were over. Working in a kitchen is not quite the same as fighting in the Crusades, but we can certainly appreciate the yearning for peace and quiet…
Back down among the vines, we lunched at Frederic Bau’s restaurant. It’s a wonderful place, and you can almost see it as a gift to his wife who, along with Frederic, co-creates the menus.
ROCK STAR CHEF
Although the restaurant is busy, Frederic still found time to give us a guided tour of the kitchen while still looking like a rock star. I’m not sure that’s something Chris and I will ever be able to pull off (or so says Chris’s wife Sara, anyway).
Lovely though it is, duty calls, in the form of dinner at a local bistrot called Mangevin, where we taste 16 Hermitage wines. We were so impressed that we are planning to put many of them on the wine list at La Chapelle.
Christophe – who represents Paul Jaboulet Aine – is very enthusiastic about the possibility of serving some of these fine wines by the glass, something unique to the City, he believes. As well as this, he also promises us that the vertical listing that we will offer will be among the best in the world.
It seems like all that work lifting glasses is going to pay off handsomely.
La Chapelle will open this Autumn