If you miss the restaurant signage, you may mistake the restaurant at the Canopy by Hilton hotel, at the corner of 3rd Street and Park Avenue S. in downtown Minneapolis, for the one that once peddled bacon flights served with shears.
Nearly everything from the former Bacon Social House remains. The dining chairs, vast open kitchen and plasticky booths. That Siberia of a dining section, to the right of the host stand. But in place of the old signage: "Chloe," in neon blue.
It tells you everything you need to know about Vincent Francoual's new restaurant, which opened in December in that very same location: that recycling for the sake of efficiency is fine if you make up for it with the food.
Because in some cases, he does. Dishes across his vast menu of French classics, served on attractive vintage-looking plates, are executed traditionally, and when they're off balance, it's only just. And mostly, it's because of seasoning.
"Is that why the salt and pepper shakers on the table are so prominent?" a dining companion asks.
It made a difference for a side of the haricot verts (green beans), which, despite being cooked to Thanksgiving-inspired oblivion, had the right depth from preserved tomatoes and garlic butter. Baked eggplant, while mushy, also tasted cleanly of the vegetable and olive oil. A generous addition of salt opened these dishes up as powerfully as a good decant does to an old Bordeaux.
It also made the cassoulet a dish I wanted to order again. Without it, the stew was almost there: fat tarbais beans, fall-apart duck, meaty pork-shoulder sausage and a broth that had the kind of body that renders it sticky after a minute in idle. In a good way.
And with a little more assertion, it would have made the escargots more flavorful. What I ate on a recent evening tasted of garlic and little of snail, which otherwise was cooked until it held an appealing enough of a chew.
