Chloe's French Connection

Chloe, the brand-new French restaurant by the Vikings stadium, is actually very, very old in all the right ways.

by

The fragrance arising from a bowl of French onion soup topped with a broiled cheese lid—it’s like an incantation. It bubbles up from the cauldron before you, stirring the soul, blowing around and reordering all the anxieties piled on your inner kitchen table. Right? Your spoon hovers as the scent of salt, onion funk, and a note of sweet caramel unite to create an impression not unlike the warm and generative sea, if that sea were both urban and chic.

Where were you, how old and how hungry, when you had your first French onion soup? Surely it was inside a restaurant. A restaurant like new Chloe in downtown Minneapolis, nestled in the gargantuan shadow of U.S. Bank Stadium, a stadium that is somehow impossible to see from within the room of brick and big windows; pinpoint lights; and welcoming, cozy dark pockets for perching on barstools or sinking into booths. French onion soup gratinée, that particular onion soup with the big crouton and the gooey broiled lid of Gruyère, which is almost always restaurant food, even in France.

I asked chef Vincent Francoual—famous for his now-shuttered longtime Minneapolis landmark, haute French restaurant Vincent—for his earliest personal memory of French onion soup, restaurant-style. “In my little 14th-century town, Puy-l’Évêque, where my parents worked for the post office,” Francoual told me, “I played trumpet next to my brother for the town band. Every little town in France had so many war memorials. We lost so, so many people in World War II. My brother was a good trumpet player. I followed him around, and let’s just say I also had a trumpet. After the flowers, the whole town would go to the restaurant. Tables were already prepared, and you got your French onion soup.”

Francoual was soon off to French state boarding school at 15 to become a chef, which he accomplished with such success he ended up in New York City behind the line at two of the world’s greatest restaurants, Lespinasse and Le Bernardin. In his 20s, Francoual’s relationship with French onion soup continued. “Come home from the bar with everyone, open a new bottle of wine, it’s 4 in the morning—it’s not complicated to make a quick onion soup in 30, 40 minutes. In fact, that’s the best thing you can do: Keep the party going and feel better in the morning. That’s French food, I think. Do the basics, repeat the basics. People here think French food is fancy, but onion soup and a galette? That’s blue-collar food in France, and the older I get, the more I appreciate it.”

Neither of Francoual’s core soups—his childhood one in Puy-l’Évêque and his after-bar soup—is the Chloe French onion soup, he told me. This French onion soup is from this part of his life, when he has a Minnesota daughter, the first of the two important new Chloes in his life, and decades of Minnesota restaurant experience convincing him to make his soup with chicken stock, because Minnesotans love chicken soup above all, particularly above beef stock or beef-with-bacon stock. What a chicken-based French onion soup gratinée it is! Black bubbles of char on the cheese and a thickness to both the bread and onion soup beneath that renders a texture halfway between bread pudding and broth—very thick yet still very much soup. Slipping a spoon into this French onion soup, an inky dark glass of wine from Cahors beside me, I tasted that rare thing where the broth tastes like the whole world, onions and meadow and sky, and the whole thing tastes right.

Humans: We love onion soup. Ancient Maya, ancient Egyptians, ancient Chinese, Pliny the Elder, the actual Viking warriors of early Norway—it’s hard to find a culture on this earth that doesn’t love onions. Some botanists have an “out of India” hypothesis that runs like this: The earliest wild onions grew on that bit of Pangea that would break away and one day travel the world and become India; as it went, bits of earth with onions in them split off and went their own way, and that’s why wild onions are everywhere on the globe. The very first cookbook we have in this big world, 4,000 years old and pressed into clay in cuneiform, is all about onion cookery. (It’s in Yale’s Babylonian Collection, if you want to read it.)

Slipping a spoon into the French onion soup...I tasted that rare thing where the broth tastes like the whole world, onions and meadow and sky.

Eating onion soup at Chloe’s bar one evening, I watched as jovial Francois Paradeise, the 76-year-old general manager of Chloe, told the young, chic women at the host stand an anecdote, then put his elbows out and waddled in a circle like a penguin while the group exploded with laughter. Paradeise grew up in Paris, and he, too, has a memorable, significant French onion soup in his past. It was something he enjoyed before dancing, he told me, dancing at the Parisian nightclubs in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He’d stop at the world’s most famous French onion soup spot, Au Pied de Cochon, back when it was less famous and more of an all-night spot next to the farmers’ market that fed farmers. “In Paris at the time, you show up at the nightclub at 1 o’clock in the morning, they are still setting up. So you go have an onion soup and some red wine, some white wine. That way you don’t have a hangover later, after you’re leaving the club at 5 o’clock in the morning.”

I should admit, before this conversation, I had never talked to Francois Paradeise in my life, though he’s a local legend, opening some dozen restaurants nationally, particularly various Buca di Beppo locations for Parasole Restaurant Holdings. Now that I’ve met Francois Paradeise, all I want to do is talk to him. At one point, when I asked him how long he has worked in restaurants, he quickly answered, “Not one minute. The minute it is work, I leave. Hospitality is happiness. Happiness is not work. It’s something you decide upon. It’s not, I want a million dollars, I want this, I want that. There is no luggage rack on a hearse! The only thing is what you have done for people and what you did to people—and hopefully the ‘for’ outweighs.”

Later, as I sat in a dark part of the bar over my dwindling onion soup, I watched Paradeise and Francoual chat as the chef strode to the host stand for some official business. I wondered, How many years of onion soup do the two have between them? Then another chef breezed past: neat and trim Ferris Shiffer, who ran the elite dining rooms of the Minikahda Club for 26 years and acted as a one-man social safety net for seemingly every cook in the Cities. He could have had a business card saying, “Restaurant shuttered to your great surprise? Call Ferris!” That’s part of how this town sustained its restaurant culture through all our booms and busts. Kind of funny that after he retired, Shiffer couldn’t stand to be out of a professional kitchen, so he found work a few days a week in this bit of comfort and France.

Glancing toward the open kitchen at Chloe, I saw half a dozen young cooks, scrambling. Leading them all was young chef Beth Wells. Raised in Dresser, Wisconsin, near Trollhaugen, Wells first encountered French onion soup when many American chefs do: in culinary school. She then worked everywhere a French-interested and ambitious chef can work in Minneapolis—Alma, Spoon and Stable, and Bellecour—the sort of haute French spots where everyone keeps tweezers in a chef’s coat pocket to place micro herbs. Now she’s tweezer-free, leading a professional life likely much like the one led at Au Pied de Cochon in the 1960s, with a monster cauldron of stock, perpetually simmering and refreshed, beside an infinite stream of caramelizing onions.

“Chicken stock is my eternal project,” she told me. “All day, every day. Stock, demi-glace, reductions, onions, onions, onions. I feel like I’m in cooking school sometimes. You’re in the middle of a busy Friday, and you’re hearing about the history of remouillage. I can’t tell if the French guys are conversing or arguing, but if I have a question, everyone is very kind. It’s been kind of an incredible experience.”

Vincent Francoual thinks Chloe is a bit like cooking school, too. “At this point in my life, I am 54; Chloe is about mentorship,” he told me. “How can I mentor Beth? How can I mentor success?” He then tried to steer me away from the thing he feared I would write, that Chloe is simply Vincent, the Nicollet Mall restaurant, part two.For anyone who remembers Vincent, this place is very, very different. No white tablecloths, and the greatest dishes are not the world’s top 50 pieces of pricey fish; they’re French peasant food done exquisitely.

The buckwheat crepes, or galettes, for instance, are absolute French countryside soul food. Buckwheat flour, in medieval and premodern France, was peasant food, looked down on as “black flour,” as opposed to light and bright wheat flour, and taxed at a lower rate because it was seen as unfit for refined tables. Today, the nutty, gluten-free flour is more associated with Russian blini, but I urge you to try the egg, ham, and cheese galette, either as a light dinner or when Chloe starts serving brunch in the near future. The irony, flinty, antioxidant-rich dark gray buckwheat crepe stands against the richness of egg and cheese, the salt of ham, framing each bite with distinct contrast, refreshing the palate and giving sensual pleasure. Some call the ham and cheese galette the cheeseburger of France, and it’s easy to see why: Rich, simple, big, it hits all the gustatory notes.

“You can’t eat mentoring,” I had pushed back during my conversation with Francoual. “People will come for the crepes. And the îles flottantes.”

Île flottante is one of those cooking-school desserts no one does these days—a few pillows of airy meringue floating in a sweet sea of loose custard, the sort of custard they made in the old days, spoonable like soup. At Chloe, they drizzle the islands with a sticky caramel, and the dessert is sort of magic. Light as a cloud, so eatable you can’t run out of energy for it the way you can with a heavy cake, full of various light flavors that play against each other like flute notes—this is what the whole legend of French food is built upon. What can you cook when you have nothing but your wits, your skill, and a farmyard full of eggs? Îles flottantes!

“Chicken stock is my eternal project. All day, every day.  Stock, demi-glace, reductions, onions, onions, onions.”

– Beth Wells

But then I thought about it some more. Maybe you can eat mentoring. Certainly some people will come to Chloe and see mainly the of-the-moment flashy bits, like the lavender cocktail made opaque with vegan aquafaba bean juice, bright and lively like a summer lavender field you can drink. Some will come for the restaurant-for-adults hospitality—for instance, if you’re gluten-free, they’ll make you a whole special crusty, hot gluten-free baguette. Some will come for the legendary Vincent burger (still excellent). Some will come for the wine list, which reads like two Frenchmen, with a gazillion years of elite restaurant experience between them, plucked out the best dozen bottles available in the Twin Cities and then bargained down the price from the suppliers—which I think is roughly what happened here. I hesitate to recommend a bottle because everything changes often, but you might want to keep an eye out  for the unfashionable dark wintry wines like the Domaine des Ouches Cabernet Franc with its spine of cocoa and flounce of blackberry. It’s a spark of lightning lighting up the buckwheat crepes.

Electric moments like this carry the magic and the nuance that is new here. The inherent understanding of what goes with what; the devotion to cooking something unflashy; the Frenchman at the door who can tell you, as Paradeise told me once, of his uncle who survived Dachau, and how a long life changes your perspectives on ambition and survival: “The curve of life is not flat. The flat thing?” said Paradeise, gliding his hand through the air as if to show a hospital monitor. “That’s death. Up and down is life: We are little sailboats in water; we don’t control the winds and waves, but we do control our sail, and if you control the sail, you can keep going forward instead of going under.” Dining at Chloe reminded me of what’s best about a Dublin pub, a French train station bar: the chance to talk to a neighborhood elder casually dispensing the rarest commodity on earth, wisdom.

It’s too much to expect wisdom and soul from a restaurant, as well as memorable soup, within weeks of opening. Yet that is what seems special at Chloe. A century of French onion soup experience, handed along to a new generation. A French grandpa at the ready to help you with big life, bad life, good life, all life, as you dip your spoon into your personal portion of onion soup, made irresistible.

700 S. 3rd St., Mpls., 612-200-8041

Mpls.St.Paul Daily Edit

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