The Paris Restaurant That Defies Categorization

Here’s the précis on Le Rigmarole, which opened in Paris last year: A young team trained in fancy restaurants is letting their hair down, serving a menu that doesn’t cost a fortune and a fair bit of natural wine to go with it; they’ve set up shop in the 11th Arrondissement, a part of town where many chefs have staged similar rebellions against traditional fine dining. Nothing new there. The restaurant’s website — steely and sparing in detail — doesn’t necessarily beckon, either, nor does a scroll through the Le Rigmarole listings on Instagram, which don’t offer the kind of visual enticement that draws crowds these days.

But the chefs and married couple behind Le Rigmarole, Jessica Yang and Robert Compagnon, engineer some of this guarded veneer on purpose, so that during the course of a meal, they can subvert it. The first surprise comes when the menu’s discordant nature fully registers: skewers grilled over binchotan, largely a new thing for this city, with one or two pastas, something called “butternut beignets,” and a handful of other small dishes, like a seafood tartare.

A night at Le Rigmarole is something of a cross between the improvisatory and reciprocal spirit of an omakase and one of those classic bistros where the owner asks guests what they’d like to eat, and there may as well not be a menu at all. Here, the menu is in flux not just from night to night, based on the market and the seasons, but from person to person. And although there is an a la carte option, it’s best to put oneself in the kitchen’s hands with either the 49 euro or 69 euro chef’s menus.

To this end, every evening, Crislaine Medina, the restaurant’s sole waitress and sommelier, tries to figure out who her guests are and what they like. She doesn’t rely on Google searches, like more polished and well-staffed operations, and she doesn’t probe. She just asks a few simple questions to get a read on the table. She then walks up to the counter and gives Yang and Compagnon a full report — and they get right to it, giving each table of diners an experience to suit their tastes, paying attention to their reactions throughout the night, and calling audibles until the very last moment of the meal.

“Every night at Le Rigmarole is different, and we’re playing with you a little bit,” says Yang. “There’s an internal logic [to the menu] that people try to grasp at.” Le Rigmarole isn’t a neo-bistro, it’s not a Japanese restaurant nor even a traditional yakitori-ya, and no one would call it “fusion.” The restaurant’s only real through-line is the chemistry between the four members of the team — the fourth member is the dishwasher, Moshu Noor Amin, who is from Bangladesh — and what that may produce on any given night.

“When you come here, you learn something about us,” says Compagnon, who was born in New York City, spent his childhood in Paris and London, and studied East Asian Literature at Columbia University. After deciding to become a chef, he worked at Parisian institution Le Jules Verne and the three-Michelin-starred Guy Savoy in Paris, where he and Yang met. Yang, for her part, is a California native who graduated from UC Berkeley and studied at the formidable European culinary school Ferrandi before climbing up the ranks at Guy Savoy.

Dinner usually starts the same way for everyone at the 30-seat restaurant, with Yang’s naturally fermented pickles. This may be followed by a plate of butternut squash tempura — those are the beignets — or a crudo of black mullet. Nothing exhibits much flash or manipulation. A skewer of chicken tenderloin, rare in the center and dressed with spicy Sicilian orange, might be the introduction to the yakitori section: During a stint in New York City, Compagnon worked at Tori Shin, one of America’s best yakitori restaurants; he started out wiping glassware and was eventually promoted to expediter. Whether he and Yang serve someone an adventurous skewer, like the artery of the chicken, or something more crowd-pleasing, like pork belly, depends entirely on the vibe they pick up from the diner.

Clockwise from top: a pasta dish, grilled skewers, and tsukune with paratha

The pastas usually pop up toward the end of a meal. In Paris, Compagnon previously worked under the Italian-born chef Giovanni Passerini at Rino, where he was tasked with making the dough for the noodles. Lately, Compagnon has been cooking a memorable ragu of wild boar and sweetbreads at Le Rigmarole. “He’s been playing with more and more shapes,” says Yang.

Thrown into the progression at some point may be a serving of grilled cuttlefish with a yogurt sauce; the recipe originates from Amin. He’s also responsible for the paratha that accompany the tsukune, a substantial and slightly sweet meatball that is the meal’s final savory flourish and one of the menu’s only permanent features.

Yang’s desserts resemble the one- or two-component dishes typical of scrappy tasting-menu restaurants in Paris, New York, and Copenhagen — though with their sense of precision and decadent flavor, they could easily be at home at Per Se, in New York, where Yang once trained under Thomas Keller’s longtime pastry operative Elwyn Bowles (she also spent time under César Ramírez at the Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, and was the opening pastry chef of Rebelle). On a recent evening at Le Rigmarole, there was an almond sorbet with coriander oil that went to a table that said they couldn’t handle more food (turns out they could), while the chocolate fondant with hazelnut praline finished the job for a guest seated at the counter. Mignardises accompany each check, and Yang’s colleagues like to point out how much time and effort she devotes to preparing each confection on top of all the other prep she handles for the restaurant.

Medina, meanwhile, never stops running around, weaving between tables and communicating with the chefs and the guests. This is the first restaurant where she is in charge of the floor. She knew she was interested in the job minutes into her first meeting with Compagnon and Yang. “I make a lot of decisions based on the energy I pick up from someone,” she says. “Rob and Jess didn’t talk about money or the business. They talked about how they wanted to make people feel.”

To their surprise, it seems to have worked. Le Rigmarole was named the city’s best new restaurant of 2018 by Le Fooding, and word of its charms is beginning to spread beyond France (local writer Alec Lobrano gave it a place on Paris’s Eater 38). They’ve started offering a more premium menu that features dishes like a whole grilled fish, and Medina almost brought on a second hire to work the floor with her. Almost. A waiter came in for a trail, and it didn’t take long for Medina to tell that it wasn’t going to work out. “I realized that it’s really hard to bring someone into this mix,” she says. “We are in it together during service and no one is a slacker. I think that’s why people have responded to this place the way they have.”

Le Rigmarole is hardly the first restaurant to promise spontaneity or pay close attention to guest preferences, but it stands out at a time when so many small and ambitious restaurants present largely calcified experiences from the moment they open for business. There’s an air of freedom to this tight four-person operation, and Le Rigmarole, the way it is right now, is exactly what Yang and Compagnon want it to be. Says Yang, “We like the mayhem.”

Gabe Ulla is a New York-based writer who has contributed to WSJ Magazine, Saveur, and Town & Country. Previously, he worked for Eater. Eileen W. Cho is a Korean American photographer based in Paris, France.
Editor: Monica Burton