Stéphane Saint Louis is trying to be chill. At his fine dining restaurant, Table Culture Provisions, the dishes are dainty, the tables are few and the patrons are primed for a multicourse tasting menu extravaganza. A house signature is an individual squab pithivier, bird and kohlrabi cocooned in flaky pastry. Assembling one would be a fussy proposition for most. Saint Louis does 25 a night. He finds it therapeutic.
His new restaurant Bijou, also in Petaluma, is roughly three times the size of TCP, as it’s known by locals. The cuisine is still French — on the menu you’ll find rillettes and pommes dauphinoise, gâteau St. Honoré and Croque Monsieur — but the format is à la carte. It’s Saint Louis’ attempt to cook in a way that is more approachable, more relaxed.
As the saying goes, you can take the chef out of the fine dining kitchen, but you can pry the tweezers from his cold dead hands. “I’ve been having a very hard time,” Saint Louis says. “I’m still a fine dining chef. I have to remind myself that things don’t have to be perfect and precise.”
At Bijou, where he’s currently in the kitchen six days a week while his partner, Steven Vargas, holds down the fort at TCP, he finds himself drawn to the garde manger station, where he can finesse crudo and pickles, plated just so, and apply the finishing touches to a superb bowl of trout dip ($14). The cured fish is whipped into a luscious aioli, layered with mashed avocado and a deconstructed sauce ravigote. I can picture him bejeweling the top with crispy fried capers, placing them one by one, then adjusting the accompanying housemade potato chips so that each stands at attention…