Bellecour is Pure French Bliss

New Bellecour in Wayzata is the restaurant of Gavin Kaysen’s French history. It’s truly historic.

by

What kind of a goof weeps real tears over a chocolate croissant? Reader, I confess it was this goof typing here. I was sitting in the bakery of Bellecour, Gavin Kaysen of Spoon and Stable’s new French place in Wayzata. It was an unremarkable Thursday morning, the kind with a cloudy, white-gray sky and nothing special disturbing the impatient Gucci moccasins tapping around me in this oh so moneyed suburb. 

I trained my peepers on the pain au chocolat, examining it for points of technical excellence. There were many. The way the sticks of chocolate poking out were melted, but not burned, for instance. That tells you things about temperature. The way the exterior had micron-wide blisters. That tells you about how profoundly the butter is worked into the dough. The way there were layers, and then layers within the layers, visible where the pastry fanned at the corner into uncountable minute leaves. 

Look at the parts, look at the whole, I began to marvel. My God, the workmanship, the infinite detail in every inch—and suddenly tears sprang to my eyes, and I was overcome with that feeling that happens when you hold a new baby, and see the fingernails as small as pin-tops, the little nose like a fresh bean, and you think: Life, life, the miracle, the fragility, the wonder—the bliss of life!  So then I had to put the croissant down and blot my tears and reckon with the fact that I’d now have to spend the rest of my life as the kind of person who weeps over the technical virtues of a croissant. But in my defense it’s a really good croissant: buttery, toasty, flaky, melting in the mouth. More though, this bit of flour and toil carries forth a standard that very few recognize or care about, one that most French bakers can’t even uphold (as someone who has done a croissant-themed walking tour of Paris, I am confident on this point). Who cares? Let’s face it, most eaters are perfectly happy with a good-enough croissant. And while most eaters will register Bellecour as a great French spot, the truth is these details reveal it’s a superlative French spot. 

You feel this the moment you sit in the candlelight-golden main room and the warm bread and vaporously light butter appear. You feel it at the first bite of  gossamer slices of applewood-smoked salmon. Smoked in-house, the fish’s scarlet flesh is so delicate a baby spoon could cut it by accident. It’s dotted with little treasures: pink pearls of roe, small emerald clouds of chive-chevre purée, ruby-colored pickled onions no bigger than wedding rings, and ebony-dark wafers of a dried olive purée. The dish is simple and traditional enough to go past the head and engage straight with the heart—yet smart enough to charm. 

The foie gras torchon is another technical feat of derring-do that weakens the knees. Fine discs of duck liver are accompanied by dots of port wine gelée and brioche toasts that anchor you in the time of Escoffier, while the modern add-ins—cara cara orange and radish when I had it—make it relevant to modern cooking. The fava bean agnolotti are so properly built they have hospital corners, but the way they’re tossed with alabaster and delicate fresh king crab and earthy black trumpet mushrooms turns the whole thing into a sensuous tumble and swoon. 

Selling a steak frites in Wayzata would seem easier than taking candy from a baby, and so I was particularly impressed that the kitchen takes efforts to make it special. And special it is: It’s a local dairy cow from a local dairy farm, marinated in garlic, rosemary, and thyme, and cooked in beef fat, a treatment that results in beefy luxury. 

The desserts, too, sing with flavor. I’ve been eating Diane Yang’s pastries since she was at La Belle Vie, and they’ve never been better. The honey vacherin is the very essence of delicacy lassoed and tugged to earth. It’s a scoop of tart raspberry sorbet resting on a fanciful plank of meringue made of nothing but honey and egg, cantilevered over light vanilla cream that conceals fruit—innocent as a buttercup, sophisticated as theater. The opera cake is A-plus correct, while the Paris-Brest is just the sort of thing you want to see on your French vacation, a cream puff taken to heights, and given warm chocolate sauce.

The wine list by Nicolas Giraud is teeming with white Bordeaux, abundant with Cote de Nuits, and reasonably well supplied with good bottles in the $40 range and good by-the-glass picks around $10. Those glasses of wine come in the thinnest stemware brought by well-trained servers who keep an eye on the table unobtrusively. Is this heaven? 

It’s certainly the restaurant Gavin Kaysen has spent his life working towards. It’s more successful, in many ways, than his flagship Spoon and Stable, the most popular and buzzed-about restaurant in Minneapolis since it opened in the fall of 2014. More successful because here Kaysen has put his considerable talents inside a box of well-defined rules, and he scores perfect 10s across every category, whereas at Spoon there are no limits and no rules, and sometimes the work seems to blow off in different directions, unanchored. At Bellecour, everything is anchored to French bedrock with chains of gold. 

Kaysen came by it honestly. Quizzing him for this story about where he got his viennoiserie chops—viennoiserie being the type of dough croissants are made of, and not a thing savory chefs tend to trouble themselves with—it came out that Kaysen had spent months training four hours a day with a French pastry chef for a 2004 French pastry competition. Of course he won, and of course the judge was one of the world’s greatest French chefs, Pierre Gagnaire, who, after giving him the top medal, told him he was going places and invited him to train exhaustively and compete with the American team for the Bocuse d’Or, the French cooking contest Kaysen won last year with a group including Thomas Keller. 

During the eight years Kaysen cooked at New York City’s Café Boulud, he maintained a traditional French section of the menu, getting hands-on tutelage and authentic French memories from his mentor Daniel Boulud. “I would go through [Daniel’s] recipes from when he was 14, and we would craft old-school dishes like salmon with sorrel, Escoffier-style dishes. Who gets to do that?” Kaysen tells me. When he started plotting the Bellecour menu with chef de cuisine Nick Dugan he says they purposely limited themselves to those old-school confines of top ingredients treated with simplicity: “The hardest part of making this menu was not to add three more garnishes to a dish.” It reminds me of Coco Chanel’s dictum about a well-dressed woman looking in the mirror before she leaves the house and removing one accessory.

Simplicity done well is so French. And so irresistible. I suspect I’ll cry over Bellecour again. It will likely have something to do with how difficult it will be to get a reservation on my birthday.