Review-sifting and Google-mapping led us to dinner at La Cagouille in Montparnasse, known for fish, white Burgundies and cognac. It is also open every day of the year, handy for Sundays and Mondays, when many Parisian restaurants close.
The décor is a bit lost in the 1980s, with slightly random close-up photographs set off against a glass case containing sand, buoys and old fishing nets. We sucked our way through the complementary bowl of clams and got to studying the menu, which was presented Paris-style on a portable whiteboard. No sooner had we chosen, than the board was swapped for an updated one and we had to choose again. There seemed to be a lot of waiting staff around, and service ranged from young and enthusiastic to bland, via old-school impatient. We were treading cautiously after annoying the staff at Le Ribouldingue the night before, but they very gracefully changed our order at the last minute.
We started with pan-roasted baby sole – nicely peppery – and anchovies which came garnished with deep-fried parsley. Lots of the mains were pieces of pan-roasted fish; easy to do, difficult to get wrong, opined N1, and she scanned the menu for the more elaborate dishes, to test the kitchen. Sole (oven-roasted – just a little more difficult than pan-frying) went well with ginger, while monkfish cheeks was a surprisingly heavy dish. For a start, the cheeks themselves are quite chunky, and they are served with a buttery anchovy sauce – powerful, delicious, quite a lot to get through. Just as well we had chosen a stronger white Burgundy – something lighter would have been overpowered by this dish. Leroy Bourgogne Blanc 1997: only a regional level wine, but it was powerful and sharp, smoky and nutty, with a residual fruit character mostly replaced by a butterscotch and caramelised onion character. I am sure it would have been much less interesting had it been younger, and it really goes to show that sometimes you are better off with a slightly less good wine with age on it than a better but too-young one.
Many thanks to the kind American gentleman who gave us the remains of his table’s bottle of Butteaux 1er Cru Chablis as they departed – if we’d been sharper off the mark we would have offered him a glass of our Leroy. But by then it was all gone. When a waiter later raised his eyebrows at the extra bottle of wine that had appeared on our table, we pointed out it had been a gift and that we hadn’t helped ourselves. He reflected rather wryly that such gifts were fine here but in another restaurant they wouldn’t allow them – although quite how they stop you gifting something you have paid for I’m not sure.
Cognacs were very good:
Grosperrin 1961 – full of vanilla, pepper, slightly farmyardy notes, orange and elderflower, a very complex drink with a lot of alcohol burn, since it weighs in at 48%.
Château de Beaulon 1975 – smooth, buttery, gingerbread, peanuts, salted caramel and Lyle’s Golden Syrup, slightly easier to manage than the Grosperrin at only 40% alcohol.
We managed to increase our bill substantially with wine and cognac, but La Cagouille is keenly priced if you choose those dishes belonging to the formule: 26 euros for a starter and a main. Choosing other dishes pushes the price for the starter and main combination up by about 10 or 15 euros, but the formule is plenty interesting: two of the dishes we wanted anyway were on it.
La Cagouille, 10, Place Constantin Brancusi
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