Citrus Étoile, Near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris

In the late 1980s, French cooking tentatively began to recover from the sillier and more baroque excesses of La Nouvelle Cuisine, that unfairly maligned culinary movement that seemed to reduce good food to a series of Jasper Johns-style smears and squibbles ornamented with a few doll house-sized vegetables and an inevitable slice of kiwi fruit or two.

In Paris, a charming restaurant called La Maison Blanche opened in an outlying corner of the 15th arrondissement and quickly attracted both the Beau Monde and food lovers with the sunny and sincere, Portuguese-accented cooking of the late chef Jose Lampreia, and then a brilliant new  restaurant called Le Miravile opened on the banks of the Seine not far from the Hôtel de Ville. This is where I first experienced the brilliant cooking of chef Gilles Epié, the youngest chef ever to win a Michelin star, at the time when it was awarded in 1989.

Michelin star aside, his food was just superb for achieving such an artful and effortless equilibrium between tradition and modernity, and I went often to Miravile, until the restless and inveterately adventurous Epié suddenly decamped to the United States, where he studied English in Washington– he arrived not speaking a word – and then went off to Los Angeles, where he was hired as the chef at L’Orangerie.

He promptly turned this failing table into the most talked about restaurant in LA, won rave reviews as one of the best young chefs working in the US, and eventually went on to run his own restaurant, Chez Gilles, before deciding to return to Paris after ten years in California. When I chatted with Epié before dinner at his Paris restaurant, Citrus Étoile, the other night, he said, “I loved L.A. and living in California encouraged me to create a very personal style of French food that’s light, healthy, and cosmopolitan.”

I hadn’t been to this pleasant table not far from the Arc de Triomphe for a very long time, which made the meal a sort of dazzling rediscovery of a great but curiously under-recognized French chef. Sampling two superb starters – a sea bass carpaccio with French caviar and a salad of shaved beetroot and spinach and fresh pea soup with crabmeat and black truffles, I couldn’t help but think that Epié’s cooking still seems as modern today as it did 25 years ago and that it’s only recently that the rest of the world has caught up with him, in terms of the way he conceives a dish.

The main courses were beautifully cooked as well, including Breton turbot in an almost invisible beurre blanc with asparagus and morels and rack of baby lamb with lamb jus dribbled pea-and-corn filled ravioli and a salad of mint. Desserts recognise that if his regulars may want to conclude a meal with a final indulgence, they prefer that it be light and healthy – pink grapefruit and orange slices with ginger-vanilla ice cream, for example – or let themselves off the hook a bit with the pleasure of dark chocolate tart, spiked with Espelette peppers.

Citrus Étoile, 6 rue Arsène Houssaye, 75008 Paris. Tel: +33 1 42 89 15 51. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Closed Saturdays and Sundays. Prix-fixe menus €45, €85, €90 and €120. Average à la carte €100.

Based in Paris, restaurant columnist Alexander Lobrano has published a new book, Hungry for France, along with a new edition of his popular Hungry for Paris. Find these books and more in our bookstore.

From France Today magazine