"On the Quai Sainte-Croix, on the way to the Bordeaux St. Jean train station, a blue awning announces the presence of Le Taquin. This is new since our previous visits, so I decided to look up the restaurant and the chef. It turns out that the chef, Hadrien Lavaud, an intense young man with black eyes and an equally black shock of beard, is one of Bordeaux’s rising star farm-to-table chefs. On the day we arrived for lunch, there was a crowd, about 20 or so, taking up most of the space under the blue awning outside. We were seated inside in view of not only the sunlit terrasse outside but of the kitchen where the chef and his sous, just two people, worked away.What interests me about small restaurants like this is how they handle large crowds. No one seems stressed. Despite the terrace being packed on this day and the dining room reasonably filled, neither the chef or the sous chef seemed to be in any great hurry. No voices were ever raised. At one point I glimpsed Chef Hadrien, tweezers in hand, arranging the carrots that would be served on my plate. It turns out the chef prepares two menus a day. At lunch it is a special menu which “humbly tries to fill you and alert your senses with a kitchen of the market,” says the restaurant’s web site. What that means is that you can choose from an incredibly cheap menu of a starter and main course for 16 euros or, still very inexpensive, a three course lunch that adds dessert for 20 euros. We chose the latter and added a bottle of red Domaine Chiroulet, Cotes de Gascogne 2014. It is a blend of 50 percent merlot, 30 percent cabernet franc, and 20 percent tannat. The wine was, as promised by the label, fruity and round, but also with character.The menu offered two choices for each course - entrée, main, and dessert - so my wife chose one and I chose the other. What that meant for the first course was a salad of beets and carrots with a “cream” of cheese from the Sud Ouest for my bride. On the plate were wedges of beet, discs of carrots and puffs of cream, in this case a cream made of a very mild blue cheese that made the vegetables burst with flavor. I chose the “tarte of poulet” because, what was that? It turned out to be a wafer of puff pastry, baked, then covered with coarsely chopped black olives. Laid over that were thin slices of chicken breast. Around the tart were dollops of cream. The taste began with the crunch of the pastry, the punch of the cubes of black olives, the neutral flavor of the chicken and then a warm flavor of the cream. Of the main courses, my wife chose the “merlu,” a white, firm-fleshed fish known as hake in America. It was served over a bed of creamy risotto, dotted with olive oil, garnished with florets of broccoli and topped with crunchy bread crumbs. The flavors were smooth, crunchy, and creamy. I had an “abanico” of pork. Abanico is a Spanish word meaning to fan out. What it was fanning in this case were slices of roast pork cut from the area behind the neck and in front of the first rib. The tender pork was covered with a yellow sauce made with curcumine, or as we know it, tumeric. The fan of roasted meat was covered with “legumes croquant” which meant crunch snow peas, broccoli florets, and carefully placed slices of crunchy carrot. It was a great mash up of the mellowness of roasted meat with the crunchiness of the vegetables.Finally it was time for dessert. For my bride there was a “daquoise chocolate au lait” which meant little dollops of chocolate cream alongside a larger puff of whipped cream. I had the “cake citron avec fraises”, which as promised, was a spongy lemon cake topped with sliced strawberries in a strawberry sauce. We ordered coffees next, and after I asked our server, a lanky young man in shorts and a turned-backward baseball cap, to suggest a “digestif.” Much to our surprise, we were served small glass of cognac, smooth and mellow, with the announcement that they were “gratuit” … free. With a word of thanks to the chef, we paid our tab and were off, charmed by this little place, the quality of its food and the friendliness of its staff."
