The Carte
Six courses,
kept year-round
Everything below is standing work. Members ask for it by letter, by telephone, or by a line to their officer at the house — and nothing here is charged by the hour.
Première
Réservations
The table that is not offered
Some seats are never published. The counter at the pass, the six places laid in the kitchen at the turn of service, the small room above the dining room that the house keeps for its own. We ask for them in the language of the house, through the person who actually decides, and we ask far enough ahead that the asking is a courtesy rather than a favour.
A member tells us the city, the week and the mood of the evening. We come back with two or three suggestions and the reasons for each — who is cooking that season, what the kitchen is proud of at the moment, whether the room suits four or fourteen.
Deuxième
Chef de cuisine
A chef in residence
A chef and, where the evening asks for it, their brigade — brought to your kitchen, your house in the country, the boat, the shooting lodge. Menus are written around what the market gave up that morning rather than around a printed proposal.
For longer engagements — a season in the country, a month by the water — we place a chef and a household cook together, and we stay in the correspondence so that neither of them has to negotiate with you about it.
Troisième
La Cave
Building and keeping a cellar
We build cellars to be drunk. That means a written plan, a budget set by vintage rather than by year, provenance checked bottle by bottle, and honest advice about the wines that will never repay their price.
Members hold standing allocations with growers we have bought from for decades. We tell you what the bottle cost the house and what the house was paid to find it; we take no commission from a producer, ever.
Quatrième
Les Maisons
Domaine and producer visits
The people who make what you drink and eat are, almost without exception, better company than the rooms their work ends up in. We take members to them — four of you at most, usually two — for a morning in the vines, an afternoon in the cellar, and lunch at a family table.
Beyond wine: the salt marshes of Guérande, a cheese affineur's caves under Lyon, a knife-maker in Thiers, the fish market at dawn in San Sebastián, a soy brewery outside Kyoto that has been in one family for sixteen generations.
Cinquième
Les Salons
Private dining rooms
Salons privés, cellar rooms, refectory tables and the occasional dining room taken whole for the evening — from six at a round table to forty down a long one.
We settle the seating plan with you, agree the pace of service with the room, and have the quiet word with the maître d'hôtel beforehand about who should be met at the door and how the evening ought to end.
Sixième
Le Couvert
Tableware and menu commissions
The couvert is everything laid before a guest sits down: the porcelain, the linen, the glass, the card at the place. We commission it from small workshops — a porcelain house in Limoges, a linen weaver in Flanders, two glassblowers, one letterpress printer who still sets by hand.
Menus are set, proofed and printed for the evening, named for each guest, and delivered in time to be laid the afternoon before. Members keep the plates.
Anything not printed here
A carte is a beginning, not a boundary. Members ask us for stranger things than these — a birthday supper cooked in a lighthouse, a wedding lunch for eleven in a vineyard, a jar of the right mustard sent to a hospital room. If it belongs to the table, it belongs to us.