restaurant éphémère, vauxrenard

This coming Saturday will be the last service of the season at Restaurant Éphémère, a lovely and unexpected pop-up lunch restaurant tucked in the Beaujolais-Villages hamlet of Vauxrenard.

Run by the Dutch duo of legal recruiter-turned-restauratrice Gusta van Walsem and chef Jessie Ydo, Éphémère is housed in the backyard of Gusta's boyfriend, the acclaimed natural Fleurie vigneron Yvon Métras. Opening his farmhouse home to a stream of friends, neighbors, and tourist clientele all summer was perhaps the last thing I would have expected Métras to do, short of perform in a ballet. But by all accounts the restaurant has been a success. When this past weekend I asked Métras' son Jules how it was going, he replied, "It's full every day, and there's even people we don't know coming!" 

His mild surprise is a testament more to the isolation of Vauxrenard (population: 318) and the near-total absence of promotion behind the project than the quality of the wine and cuisine, which are both splendid. I visited in early July, shortly after Restaurant Éphémère opened, and found the Métras backyard transformed into a dining terrace, where sat, at tables shielded from the sun by a stark yellow tarp, a small cavalcade of natural winemaking peers: van Walsem's friend and fellow Dutch émigrée Florien Kleine Snuverink, a partner at Domaine Les Bottes Rouges in the Jura, Villié-Morgon's Georges Descombes, David and Michele Chapel of Domaine Chapel, along with Métras himself, bemused as ever.

n.d.p. in beaujolais: l'auberge du col du truges, le truges

Living in Beaujolais for the past few months has revealed myriad semi-unknown regional charms. What it has not revealed are many good restaurants. The winemakers I know are kind of sho-ga-nai about the situation, aware that they themselves rarely patronise their rather dire local restaurants.

Most villages have a bar and a restaurant, or one establishment serving as both, pitched at the lowest price range possible for the business to remain viable. (In Beaujolais this is, strangely, still not that cheap. I often dine for the same prices in Paris' better-value restaurants.) In some villages, there persist Michelin-style establishments, but they are perpetually empty-ish, seemingly dependent on the birthdays and anniversaries of the elderly, and on what trickle of Belgian and Dutch tourism still remains. Tourism overall has been in decline since the 1990's, and the corresponding stagnation in the average Beaujolais citizen's income, coupled with the eminent availability of large kitchens in private homes and the laudable persistence of culinary know-how among families, means that the natives simply don't dine out much.

Atop the Col de Truges, however, on the border between high Morgon and Chiroubles, there sits a dowdy auberge whose unadorned Beaujolaise cuisine has remained constant, and consistently excellent, throughout the region's changing fortunes.