Ravioli with artichoke and truffles at Lea Linster.David Lasker
Luxembourg, with the world's highest per-capita income ($55,000), remains serenely untroubled by waves in the world economy. The country, and especially Luxembourg City, is an international banking and legal centre. Its people appreciate fine food: It has the highest concentration of Michelin-starred restaurants in the world (13) supported by a broad clientele with big expense accounts. But few North American visitors.
Léa Linster, in the bucolic village of Frisange, and Clairefontaine and Ristorante Mosconi, in Luxembourg City, remain terra incognita to foodies from afar. That's just another reason to visit this scenic country, whose capital's ancient fortified walls hulk like stone cliffs over green lowlands riven by rivers and gorges.
"We don't see many Canadian and American tourists. They prefer to go to France. In my 10 years of working here, I've seen maybe 10 Canadian guests," says Arnaud Magnier, chef and owner of Clairefontaine, which has one Michelin star.
Clairefontaine, Ristorante Mosconi and Léa Linster serve an international (French- or Italian-influenced) rather than traditional Luxembourg-type menu.
"For me," says Magnier, who trained in Burgundy, "there really isn't a Luxembourg gastronomy. What happened is that some Alsatian chefs arrived 30 years ago and set up a German kitchen with lots of potatoes and choucroute [sauerkraut]"
Magnier runs a masculine-looking, clubby establishment at 9 Place de la Clairefontaine, which overlooks an elegant square. He changes the menu five times a year, because some patrons "eat here five times a week and they want variety."
Unchanged after 10 years, however, is his signature dish, poulard de Bresse, a $209 (€150) item that serves two to four. It's a free-range chicken from the French region of Bresse (reputedly the world's tastiest bird) and comes with truffles, a foie gras stuffing and a rich and complex Albufera white sauce. To ensure the maximum infusion of truffle flavour into the meat, hen and truffles are sewn into a pig's bladder, then boiled.
Ilario Mosconi's namesake restaurant at 13 Rue Munster overlooks the rushing Alzette River while the massive citadel walls loom above. His is the only restaurant in Luxembourg (and the only Italian restaurant outside Italy) to boast two Michelin stars.
His eight-course gourmet menu starts with two airy and light amuses bouche, continues with zucchini brandade (a purée of dried salted cod, olive oil and milk with a polenta-like consistency), and then a gossamer-light, foamy foie gras and candied-chestnut mousse, which confounds expectations of duck liver as fatty and heavy. Caramele alla Siciliana, comprising lightly fried phyllo dough with a filling of pistachios, oranges and ricotta, and chocolate mousse follow.
Then, previously stimulated cravings for foie gras are satiated with a generous hunk of the rich, buttery treat on a crostino in a sauce of white-bean cream and 25-year-old balsamic vinegar. The hallowed goose organ retains a ghostly presence in the following course, truffled scallops; not in flavour, of course, but in the continuity of the foie gras's liquid-smooth mouth feel.
While Magnier and Mosconi are content to be maître in their own house, Léa Linster has bigger ambitions. A celebrity chef with her own TV show and publishing company, she is recognized on the street. The gold-medal winner at the 1989 Bocuse d'Or remains the first and only woman to triumph at the prestigious international cooking competition named after French chef Paul Bocuse. She won for an innovative lamb treatment that evokes beef Wellington. Instead of a pastry shell, she wraps the lamb in a julienned-potato pancake. The crisped potato shards contrast against the softer textures of the eggplant purée, roasted garlic and currant garnish available on the $132 (€95) menu Bocuse d'Or.
Her restaurant, which has one Michelin star, occupies the much-renovated premises of a café, bowling alley and gas station previously owned by her father, a pastry chef who taught her to make the adorable, crunchy little sourdough loaves that grace her tables. The bread, in turn, showcases one of her favourite local ingredients.
"We have the best butter in the world. … It's better than homemade butter, which has a cheesy taste. A French journalist told me that ours is just industrial butter, and I replied, 'Our country is so small, our industrial butter is like your artisanal butter.' " (The butter - Grand-Duchy - is a national brand regulated by laws that specify what dairy cows can eat and how they are raised.)
Linster's white foam on the ravioli of artichoke and truffles triggers reminiscences of Ferran Adrià, with whom she appears in the 2002 documentary film The Cook, the Dog and Dali: From the Magical Kitchen of Ferran Adrià. "He showed us a new way to be conscious about our work; it was a rethink."
Around me, the room brims with guests for Sunday lunch. The late-day sun sinks low over the meadow, the ambient light turns gold and Linster bustles about the tables, greeting and embracing old friends. At tables with multigenerational families, she kisses and fusses over the children as if they were her own. Her patrons, it is clear, are not just hungry up-market customers. They are pilgrims who make the Sunday drive to Frisange to venerate their own culinary saint.
Special to The Globe and Mail