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Chez
Celeste
930
NW 23rd Ave., (503) 228-4565
Open
11 am-4:30 pm, 5-10 pm daily. Credit cards accepted. Children
welcome. Prices moderate-expensive.
Nice
touch: Attractive
ceramic work is displayed throughout the restaurant.
Picks:
None.
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I feel a certain sadness in writing this review. Chez Celeste,
which occupies a pleasant storefront on Northwest 23rd Avenue
formerly inhabited by Blue Tango and Vignale, with all earnestness
has brought to town a Continental cuisine learned in Switzerland
and one the owners believe has been executed with style and
class. But in truth this restaurant knows precious little
about decent cooking. I have had five meals there, and not
one item, from appetizer to dessert (count them, 15 plates
in all), was made with the most basic culinary understanding,
let alone anything approaching finesse. With uncanny perseverance
and dogged miscalculation, Chez Celeste managed to produce
one dreadful dinner after another.
It is sad to write this because the restaurant honestly
believes it is turning out exceptionally fine food. But
in fact it resembles nothing so much as 1950s America's
vision of "fancy cooking"; the ingredients may look pretty
on the plate, but virtually everything is devoid of flavor
and freshness. The kitchen lacks the most basic understanding
of what goes together and what doesn't. Something has gone
terribly wrong here: Chez Celeste is so head-shakingly misconceived
and amateurish it is hard to fathom how the restaurant imagines
its efforts could be appreciated by an increasingly sophisticated
food culture.
One could enumerate any number of colossal blunders: an
appetizer of scallops topped with blue cheese surrounding
a mound of mashed potatoes sprinkled with crumbled bacon;
frogs legs swimming in a gloppy tomato sauce that tastes
as if it comes from a can. Is this a menu by Monty Python?
A starter of prawns in garlic sauce showered with Parmesan
flouts a basic principle of Italian cooking not to put cheese
on seafood: The sharp richness of the Parmesan invariably
overwhelms the delicate seafood. Symbolic of the strange
melanges dreamt up by the restaurant is a confused linguistic
coupling on the menu: "Poulet Picatta."
Another opening plate of wild mushrooms crowned with little
caps of very doughy--not flaky--puff pastry reminded me
of what Calvin Trillin once called the "Casa de la Maison
Gourmet House"--that quintessential ersatz French establishment,
an Eisenhower-era Cafe Boeuf, before Americans got savvy.
The dish left me wondering when cheese balls stuffed with
deviled ham, or tomato aspic, might make their appearance.
Chez Celeste is mired firmly in a four-decades-old time
warp, what Gourmet magazine was like in the bad old
days. Perhaps worst of all, almost every dish I tried was
devoid of taste, as if something as fundamental as salting
in the cooking process
were unknown.
Salmon "with light cream of shellfish topped with creme
fraîche" was overcooked to a mush, and no decoration
of asparagus spears jutting out from the inedible mass could
redeem the over-creamed concoction. A breast of duck at
least had some flavor but was masked by an over-sweet apricot
glaze, while the accompanying greasy bread pudding only
confirmed the terrible tristesse at the heart of this experiment.
For some curious reason--a misguided notion of elegance
perhaps--the rim of the plate was filled with paprika, which
had a nasty tendency to run into the meat. An entrecôte
had considerable gristle on it, and it was difficult to
detect any foie gras supposedly stuffing a brace of quails.
Alas, we fared no better with desserts. When I ordered a
chocolate mousse from the menu, the waitress brought a dessert
tray and pointed to a tiramisu, declaring it to be the mousse.
There was no mousse in sight. The tiramisu was listless,
far too firm, and topped with that quintessential '50s icon,
the bottled maraschino cherry. For some curious reason,
a most unpuckering lemon tart was surrounded by what seemed
to be store-bought chocolate sauce. After such an ordeal,
what we needed was a great palate-cleanser, one that would
work the magic of oblivion upon the
entire affair.
It all puts me in mind of the immortal Esther Riva Solomon,
who in 1963 wrote Instant Haute Cuisine:
"I remember how frustrated I felt one day when the chef
at the Cordon Bleu was doing poulet à l'estragon,
chicken breasts in a creamy tarragon-flavored sauce. It
took that skillful man one hour and a dozen pots to make
his chicken gravy. I was awed even before I tasted it. And
it was good. But as I sampled it, I realized with a jolt
that it tasted just like a good canned gravy I'd bought
from time to time back home. It's just one ingredient in
a complex recipe; I thought I could use that canned gravy
and no one would ever know."
Perhaps everything here is made from scratch, but either
you'd never know it or some basic cooking lessons are indicated.
At Chez Celeste, the culinary spirit may be willing but
the fleisch is weak. As my dining partner on one of our
visits noted, "We have had a great, memorably
bad meal."
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