She’s right. Bastide is so authentically French some Angelenos don’t know what to do with it. L.A. food is hardly about sophistication. The city’s body-obsessed residents consider designer water and radicchio salad an elegant dinner; those who do eat flock to places like Spago, with its flamboyant decor and its smoked-salmon pizza. But everything about Bastide whispers subtlety, from the earth-toned river pebbles on the patio floor to the flax-colored table linens.
For its chef, Alain Giraud, Bastide is a radical departure. In the 1980s, Giraud was at Citrus, one of L.A.’s first nouvelle-cuisine hot spots: patrons blew kisses across the stark-white dining room as they pecked at shredded beets artfully arranged on gargantuan plates. But when Citrus’s 15 minutes passed, Giraud’s boss, chef-owner Michel Richard, packed his bags for food-friendlier Washington, D.C. Angelenos “come to a restaurant five or six times, and they’re ready for the next one,” Richard says. Giraud toughed it out, working at a French restaurant on the beach until a producer named Joe Pytka approached him about opening his own shop. It took two years, countless test dinners and endless weeks of repainting the pastel walls to satisfy Parisian designer Andree Putman before Bastide opened to wide acclaim. (Unlike producer-cum-restaurateur Larry David’s spectacular disaster on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”)
The real challenge is getting Atkins-devout Angelenos to savor real French food–and Giraud makes concessions. Much of the menu is fish, and “if you want the chicken cut in half, we do it,” he says. “But if you come here at night, I want to seduce you.” If Giraud succeeds, maybe other great chefs will realize they no longer need a salad spinner to make it in Hollywood.
