La Nouvelle Recession Cuisine at Au Petit Paris

For starters, I got the spectacular Champs Elysée salad, which featured a poached egg over greens with giblet confit, bacon and cherry tomatoes. I love to cut up a poached egg over greens and crisp bacon, although I usually think of this kind of salad as a meal in itself. To make matters worse, one of my tablemates got a slice of homemade foie gras terrine served with toasted brioche and truffled vinaigrette. It tasted terrific, as foie gras terrine always does. But if I had it to do over, I might have ordered something lighter. Foie gras and poached egg salad are pretty heavy ­appetizers.

On that first visit to Au Petit Paris, we were graced by the presence of socialite Lynn Wyatt, who entered the place grandly and was seated a few tables away. Every employee in the restaurant seemed to be required to pull out her chair. Both of the two French chefs who own the place came out from the kitchen, toques a-twitter.

Maybe it was the reflected glow of celebrity, but somehow the bad paintings of Paris street scenes, the corny French music and the frumpy lace-curtain atmosphere seemed a little more charming that first night. The food certainly tasted ­better.

French seafood and chilled white wine is your best bet at Au Petit Paris — after all, you can get warm red wine and overcooked rib eye anywhere.
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"Tightened belts will be no bad thing for the hospitality business. It will remind them what hospitality actually means," London restaurant critic A.A. Gill wrote in a recent review. "It will wash away the cynicism and the sham, the cooks who flog their names and consultancies rather than sausage and mash."

I wish Gill were right. If an economic storm is approaching, it would be nice to think that there was a silver lining in it for the Houston restaurant-goer. But the current recession doesn't seem to be wringing out any excesses. In fact, restaurant prices are actually getting higher.

But don't blame the restaurants — blame $100-a-barrel oil. The higher price of transportation, fertilizer and power is pushing food costs higher. Meanwhile, the fall of the dollar against other currencies is making imports like wine, olive oil, cheese and spices much more expensive. The costs of building a restaurant to begin with are way up, too. Welcome to the era of higher prices and lower expectations.

It wasn't all that long ago that we were sitting in a leather booth in the gorgeous multimillion-dollar chocolate and blue interior of Houston's best French restaurant, Bistro Moderne, eating Philippe Schmidt's ethereal bouillabaisse and stunning avocado and crabmeat bombe. Alas, Bistro Moderne has closed its doors.

Au Petit Paris is Houston's French restaurant of the moment. The food is a huge step down from Bistro Moderne's, and the atmosphere is downright shabby by comparison. But the prices are about the same.

Deal with it.