Noted Chef Alain Giraud to Open Restaurant Here

It’s often said that as one door closes, another opens. Even as diners packed Dante Palisades last Saturday night to eat a final meal and take home a sentimental doggie bag, a new owner was making plans to meet his contractor there on Monday morning.   Chef and owner Alain Giraud says his plans for the Swarthmore Avenue space are to ‘simplify and clarify it,’ to make it ‘more contemporary, light, clear.’ One major change will be an expansion of the sidewalk dining to accommodate outdoor seating for about 20 patrons.   The restaurant, Maison Giraud, will feature a bakery, and the chef is already imagining Palisadians dropping in for coffee and a toasted brioche with homemade preserves.   ’The key for us is to be part of the community of the Palisades,’ Giraud told the Palisadian-Post Monday. He will open seven days a week, all day, and likes to think about the restaurant as a home to the village.   ’I’m all the time referring to a home,’ he says. ‘If you show up in my home, even if it’s not dinner(time), I will give you something.’   So it will be at the Maison, which will open as early as 7 or 7:30 a.m., with busy moms stopping in before or after dropping off kids, and residents coming by for a ‘typical California lunch’a salad, something green, something light.’ He’ll stay open through the afternoon, offering ‘go’ter,’ which means ‘taste’ in French and also denotes the country’s traditional 4 p.m. snack. Perhaps his customers will pick up cannel’s, little cakes from Bordeaux, before worrying about dinner.   Part of Giraud’s charm lies in his delightful descriptions of food, replete with small histories or legends. He offers never just a tomato, but instead his thoughts on heirloom tomatoes and whether they are overrated, before a quick assembly, in his mind, of a juicy slice topped with a bit of fleur de sel and settled next to some crusty pain de campagne, grilled and brushed with olive oil.   Giraud was born in Paris to a family of restaurateurs. He studied at the Culinary Institute in N’mes from 1974-76 and then cooked at four restaurants with two-star Michelin ratings in Paris (the H’tel de Crillon) and the south of France.   The chef came to the U.S. in 1988, planning to stay for only a couple of months. But he stayed on, first gaining recognition in Los Angeles cooking with Michel Richard at Citrus. He opened Lavande in 1998, then launched Bastide in 2002. Along the way, he garnered numerous awards, including Chef of the Year from Bon Appetit magazine in 2003 and the California Restaurant Writers Association in 2000, and a rare four-star rating from the Los Angeles Times for Bastide. In 2008, he and two partners started Anisette, a brasserie in Santa Monica (they decided to close last September despite strong reviews).   With all his experience, acclaim and training, Giraud says he will keep things ‘not complicated’ at his new restaurant on Swarthmore and follow a mantra of ‘ingredients, ingredients, ingredients.’   ’We (chefs) have to have guts to simplify and not complicate the food,’ he says.   He’s animated about shopping at the farmers’ markets in the Palisades and Santa Monica and using locally grown fruits, herbs and vegetables. ‘The most exciting thing for me,’ he says, ‘is that America is beginning to realize the bounty that we have here.’   Giraud, engaging and open, without any of the hauteur one might expect from a chef of his stature, speaks a strongly accented English peppered with endearing sound effects like ‘zoom,’ ‘clack, clack,’ and ‘ching, ching,’ in the most unexpected places.   He’s reluctant to characterize the new venture in traditional French terms, both because he feels they are sometimes misused and because he just doesn’t like labels.   ’It is not a bistro, not a brasserie’it is a restaurant,’ he says. ‘A restaurant with a twist, for sure.’   His wife, Catherine, has a business of her own called Lavender Blue. She began 15 years ago selling only table linens and only from Provence, but now offers ‘everything for the table,’ says her husband. ‘She buys the things by instinct, by taste.’   Giraud will take advantage of that taste by locating her new retail boutique on one side of the existing space (towards Monument). It will be separated by a wall and have two entrances of its own, one from the expanded patio outside. But Giraud plans to have four windows running across the dividing wall to bring the lively texture of that space into the restaurant.   Back to that dinner. Giraud is set to offer residents a number of dining options in what he finds to be ‘a rare place in the sense of a village and community.’   Parents will be able to find a simple family dinner as early as 5:30 p.m., but the restaurant will also cater to couples looking for a later, more romantic meal. Those who don’t feel like going out at all will be able to ring Giraud and order something like ‘a roast chicken, a lovely salad, a strawberry tart, and add some small cookies for the kids.’   ’We want to create something that is about lifestyle,’ the chef says. ‘The traditional high-end restaurant is one dimension; we want something that is very convenient for the community.’   At least once a month, he will show off a bit, building a meal around one ingredient when it is at the peak of the season.   But first, drawings are being plan-checked, demolition work is about to begin and all the hard work of staffing and launching a new restaurant must take place.   Giraud hopes to welcome Palisadians to Maison Giraud in mid-May.