Restaurant Review: Provence in the West Village, at Zimmi’s

There’s traditional luxury to be had, if you’re looking for that sort of thing—a truffle-laden pasta special one night, toast soldiers piped with foie-gras mousse and topped with a jiggly squish of Sauternes jelly on another. But there’s just as much sumptuousness to be found in humble preparations such as the terrine du potager, a slice of tender winter vegetables, chilled and gently aspic-bound, arranged chromatically—white leek shading into green leek, into orange carrot, into red pepper—plated next to a dollop of anchovy aioli; or in the lentils, which are braised to a texture as firm yet unctuously yielding as any caviar pearls. (The menu’s only side dish, besides the inevitable French fries, it doesn’t quite fit into any course, and it absolutely should not be missed.) The thrill of these offerings is a matter of philosophy as much as of technique: sure, we all swan around the farmers’ market and covet membership in Rancho Gordo’s bean club, but it still feels a bit rebellious for a restaurant to dedicate so much of a menu to vegetables and legumes, to lavish them so royally with respect, butter, and time.

Meat, too, is prepared with palpable reverence. Pradié presents boeuf bourguignon not as a bowl of stew but as a graceful plated course, with big, tender morsels of beef (cheeks, when I visited) positioned atop a swirl of the wine-based sauce in which they were braised, with a jagged skyline of goodies from the pot: pale pink radishes, glossy hunks of smoky lardons, a pair of carrots as long and slim as dancers’ legs. Duck à l’orange, that nineteen-sixties classic, is punched up with a doubling of citrus sauces: a puddle of the expected sauce bigarade, a chestnut-colored gastrique with demi-glace and orange liqueur, laps up against a yellow pool of sauce maltese, which is something like a hollandaise spiked with orange juice. The main courses have been changing often; I wanted to revisit a lamb stew I’d been enthralled by, dark shreds of meat punctuated with black olives and served over a whip of mashed potatoes, but by the time I returned to Zimmi’s two weeks later it was gone. Other parts of the menu—the pissaladière, the ratatouille—seem to remain happily available from one visit to the next.