For less than either of those you can go for the three-course Petit Max menu and get a choice of four starters, four main courses and four desserts for £16.50, available at both lunch and dinner. It’s a bargain-basement price for choucroute fiends.The priciest items on the menu are sole meuni? and chateaubriand at £18. Shared by two, it is a pleasing dish of fruity, sharp sauerkraut, steamed potatoes, mustard sauce, some tender, fall-apart pork and great snags – a big, rough saucisse de Montbeliard and lightly smoked frankfurters. An invigorating salade Lyonnaise of fris? beans, smoked herring, potato brawn and a perfectly poached and still-warm egg (£6.50) scores goals all over the place for reducing hunger at the same time as awakening the appetite.What else is good? The assiette Alsacienne (£12.50) is a piled-high choucroute that would put even an Alsatian down for the count – and I mean the canine variety. A starter of six giant Basquaise salted anchovies (£6.50) from the Cantabrian Sea served with Echir?utter, Poilane toast and a stack of finely sliced shallot is an unadulterated celebration of sea-salty sweetness. It now feels more darkly glamorous and clubby, having been Botoxed with burgundy walls, potted palms, coppery ceilings and glass-partitioned booths inscribed with bistroesque scrawls of “goug?s au gruy?” and “petite friture”.The owners, Marco Pierre White and Jimmy Lahoud, remain the same, the ma?e d’, Jean-Christophe Slowik is the same, but the “chef patron” is now the doughty, pony-tailed Max Renzland, the original Monsieur Max, England’s most dedicated custodian of bourgeois French cuisine.The huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ White supplies the roast game of the day whenever he’s been downwind of a pheasant or deer, but the rest of the menu is bourgeois and bountiful.Renzland and his chef de cuisine Adam Clark know how to do simple.
In fact, it was all of five days.What was the vastly underrated Parisienne Chophouse is now Chez Max, billed in similarly Franglais style as an “eating house Fran?s”. At Ducasse and Thierry De La Brosse’s bistro, Aux Lyonnais (reviewed last week) you can hoe into a generous three-course menu for £18.So I knew that once I stepped back on to the Eurostar, it would be a long time before I could dine so well, for so little. Jo?Robuchon, generally listed as the finest chef in the world prior to his abdication (and Alain Ducasse’s succession), will launch an open-kitchened diner with a no-bookings policy in the Left Bank’s Hotel Pont Royal next month. Most of my Parisian meals cost less than £30 for two with a bottle of decent wine.Even the three-star chefs are going downmarket with style these days. While our local restaurateurs seem to feel the need to fancy up their food in order to charge us even more for it, their Parisian equivalents appear to be rediscovering the simple pleasures of the bistro, avec bistro prices.
It’s always sad to leave behind all that uneaten jambon de bayonne, quiche Lorraine, St Marcellin, andouillette, poulets de Bresse, cassoulet, confit du canard, oeufs en meurette, salade Lyonnaise, pommes allumettes and tartes aux pommes.
It’s not even so much the quality of the food, as its accessibility. Chez Max, 3 Yeoman’s Row, London SW3, tel: 020 7590 9999 Lunch daily; dinner Mon-Sat. “I tried my best, but he was simply too good for me today.”To go with his Australian wins, Agassi has won two US Open titles and once each at Wimbledon and the French Open He’s also lost six Grand Slam finals.. He also won in 1995, 2000 and 2001, but injured his wrist on the eve of last year’s Australian.The second-seeded Agassi was in complete control throughout the match, finishing off the 31st-seeded Schuettler in one hour, 16 minutes.”There’s not a lot to say,” Schuettler said. “I feel like whatever I do in the first game should be a reflection of what I do in the rest of the match.Agassi now has won the Australian Open four of the seven times he has entered.
