There’s eel on the menu at Bûcheron. Though marketed as a tartine, it may not charm you enough to order it. Slippery, muddy and riddled with bones, eel can be tricky to cook and a disaster to serve. There is no such disaster at Bûcheron. The tartine served here is, in fact, a revelation — not just because of the dish’s interplay between smoke and sweetness, which will haunt you, but also because of how referential it is.
“A Reuben,” one dining companion said. “Ca kho,” said another, referring to the Vietnamese classic, a braised and caramelized catfish. The smoked eel sandwich I savored at a clubby, modern British restaurant in London — so wildly delicious I can remember it nearly a decade later. This one comes close. But will it get Minnesotans to try eel on toast at a neighborhood bistro?
It should. Bûcheron, it turns out, is a neighborhood restaurant inasmuch as someone covertly dressed in rags woven from baby alpaca. The technical word to describe it is bistronomy, a Parisian restaurant movement that inspired Bûcheron. And to truly appreciate what this means, consider the pommes dauphine, which may resemble spherical Tater Tots accompanied by accoutrements (celery sticks joined by a pale, sunny cheese dip) typically reserved for the fluorescent wings you — and I, semi-regularly — would order, by the bucket, at a sports bar. It’s so much more than that, though. These pommes are choux-pastry and mashed potato, deep fried until the exterior is crisp and golden but thin enough to yield to an interior that’s creamy yet weightless.
The technically driven dishes are prepared so you don’t need to appreciate detail to enjoy a meal here. For those who do, the Skrei cod isn’t just reminiscent of a good, crusty supper-club walleye; it’s about how beautifully the cod flakes, how triumphantly complex the beurre blanc is; the way radish cuts through all the butter.
Bûcheron is the right vessel for this veil of nonchalance. You can spend dearly for a meal for which you’ve planned weeks in advance, bookending it with $28 foie gras and a $25 glass of G. Richomme Champagne. Or, you could walk in, sit at the bar, split a chicory salad and those pommes, while nursing a $45 bottle of Finger Lakes riesling. Both would offer compelling experiences, rendered by a front-of-house team that genuinely means well.
On any given night, you may find co-owner Jeanie Janas Ritter and general manager Tyler McLeod making the rounds, asking if you live in the neighborhood and dispensing tips for getting reservations. You’ll probably meet a chef who emerges from the kitchen to serve a plate or two, like they would at modest but chef-driven bistros in Paris’ iconic 11th arrondissement, eager to tell you why the dishes they’ve toiled over are worth the explanation (they are).
You could leave happy if you had just the heady, cassoulet-esque garbure soup, accompanied by an excellent miche bread; a quiet little gem salad with lobster (crisp, sweet, bright), bound by an old-school sherry-mayo dressing. There’s probably much more to it, but that exquisite foie gras is maddeningly simple, too: it’s thick and gratifyingly rich like crème brûlée and tastes pristine, without traces of the phantom livery, alcoholic tang you’d get with inferior product. And it spreads like cold butter on a very hot day over a warm scone that tastes like something (lovingly) baked by a Midwesterner residing in the Loire Valley.
Foie gras isn’t new to Bûcheron’s chef and co-owner Adam Ritter. An alum of the four-star Demi, Ritter likely prepared hundreds of iterations of the dish, a recurring course on the contemporary French-Midwestern tasting menu. The restaurant that he left to start along with his partner, Jeanie, forgoes some of the ceremonious trimmings associated with fine dining while charting its own course.
