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A Common touch

Passepartout tours France on a middling budget

By Dave Faries
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
December 19th, 2007 issue

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST
Snail casserole undergoes finishing touches at this good corner kitchen.
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Passepartout

Americká 20
Prague 2–Vinohrady
Tel. 222 513 340
Open daily noon–11 p.m.

Food HH
ServiceHHH
Atmosphere HHH
Overall HH

FROM THE MENU

Onion soup 70 Kč
Snail casserole 160 Kč
Roquefort salad 115 Kč
Foie gras pate 320 Kč
Whole baked chicken 190 Kč
Filet of salmon 290 Kč
Duck confit 220 Kč

Stalking behind the clamorous rush of celebrated names and ambitious kitchens new to the city, another group of restaurants has been filling modest, but perhaps more significant slots.
The heart and soul of a mature dining scene, after all, are neither the glitzy, upscale destinations nor the cheap pub haunts. Instead, people identify with good, mid-range restaurants, the kind that confidently dish out above-standard courses, the kind you visit for casual dates or regular outings.
Once in short supply, examples of this all-important genre began asserting themselves over the past year or so: Masala, Babylon, Le Bifteque and now Passepartout.
It’s possible to walk out of the little French room with wallet intact and mind still mulling over that vague, richness baked into the skin of whole chicken or the faintly perceptible impression left by wine, subsumed in a sturdy bowl of onion soup.
The sweet-sharp tannic scent of wine loiters behind more prominent aromas, onion in particular, but also the heavier presence of oil and a delicate reminder of streaky bacon. It’s the last thing to rise from the steaming spoon and the final, fading note trilling across your palate, finishing with subtle strokes an otherwise overt struggle between bold flavors. The combatants—onion, meat, tart and smoky cheese, and stock pocked by sauté residue—eventually concede to a draw, leaving all the elements in balance.
Beneath the chicken’s sunset skin, glowing in shades of copper and gold, waits meat so juicy, one assumes they brined the bird for some time before popping it into the oven.
To finish off the dish, the kitchen tosses flecks of spinach and garlic over the top,adding sudden bursts of bitter earthiness. Around the centerpiece chicken, couscous, zucchini, carrot and a root vegetable puree, which starts off gently before finding the husky strength of parsnip and perhaps celeriac, fanning out and picking up on pinpricks of seasoning — a lot of activity for one inelegant mash.
It’s a well-rounded serving for just under 200 Kč, reminiscent of those fulfilling ‘blue-plate specials’ from America’s diner era.
Service, indeed, strides along that treacherous boundary between amateurish and neighborly familiarity with great assuredness. On one occasion the waiter read my table well enough to present an order of duck confit with mock formality, deftly twisting the plate from shoulder to table, booming “spaghetti Bolognese” in a false accent and smiling wryly as he awaited our reaction.
Of course, the confit on that particular day turned out parched and stringy. Furthermore, filet of braised salmon leaned on butter sauce to prop up both flavor and texture. Delicate, almost ephemeral in places, the filet also displayed a schizophrenic tendency to shrivel into tacky, crumbling bits. Plump snails surrendered their presence to an assertive, meaty and sharp sauce created from mirepoix, bacon and flamed alcohol.
Passepartout, in other words, stumbles once in awhile.
But the kitchen rarely collapses. The duck confit is served with homemade potato chips laced with garlic, sprinkled in salt, luring depth from the meat — so impressive you conjure up images of Saturday afternoons, football on TV and bags of those chips in your lap.
Another homemade item, foie gras paté, flits gently through meaty, tart and almost rosy flavors, presumably picked up from a liqueur marinade. When paired alongside cubes of very subtle Armagnac jelly, a fruity essence slips into the background. Even Roquefort salad, a simple tumble of leaves, cheese and nuts, plays an intriguing tug of war, yanking shades of bitterness—endive, walnut and the piercing subtext of Roquefort—into an intriguing impasse.
Passepartout replaced a similar nook, Chez Marcel sur la butte — a quaint, chef-driven locale whose reputation seemed to wither over the years. At first glance, it’s a welcome stand in: decent, relatively consistent, friendly and reasonable.
Considered alongside Prague’s other recent mid-range entries, the new iteration shows — hopefully — a market emerging from prolonged culinary adolescence.

Dave Faries can be reached at dfaries@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (19/12/2007):

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