Restaurant Review - When pigs fly south

Au Pied de Cochon in Les Halles near Le Centre Pompidou was my first restaurant experience in Paris. I was 16. We arrived in France late at night, jet-lagged and hungry, and after we checked into our hotel, a woman in our group who had studied in Paris led us to this venerated brasserie, open since 1946.

My foggy memories are more impressions than specifics. I remember the tarnished, buttery glint of the place, and the ornate Belle èpoque etchings on the walls that evoked bittersweet, bygone eras. The waiters rushed with a brusque, almost military organization. It surprised me how many people were eating so late at night.

I ordered a Kir Royale (a drink I’d found mentioned in a tour book and latched onto when I learned teenagers could drink legally in Europe) and something safe like onion soup — certainly not anything like a pig’s foot, after which the restaurant was named. Pig’s foot! Yuck!

These muddied recollections stirred when I learned that Les Freres Blanc restaurant group would open the first U.S. branch of Au Pied de Cochon inside Buckhead’s newborn InterContinental Hotel. I wasn’t naive enough to imagine the restaurant would reincarnate a fragment of my forgotten youth, but I did hope it might import some jaunty-yet-jaded Parisian sophistication to Atlanta’s perpetually pubescent dining scene.

Instead, we’ve mostly gotten a hotel restaurant with Gallic overtones.

It feels very Atlanta when you hand your keys over to the InterContinental valet and they speed your car into the bowels of the hotel parking facilities (unless you drive a new model Mercedes or Jag. Those they leave up front to model). You shuffle down the hotel’s protracted corridor, past registration, into a vast, creamy expanse.

The hotel’s XO Bar, featuring an impressive roster of Cognacs, is on the left. It’s an appealingly adult nook, and I made it a point to come early before dinner each visit to sit among the ripe mix of locals and business travelers. The drinks are steeply priced but generous, and the staffers have a knowing humanity that makes you want to stick around.

You can’t miss the restaurant just beyond the bar. It explodes in front of your face.

Pink, polished marble floors dissolve into a diamond pattern. The soaring walls are covered in undulating drawings — some geometric, some whimsical — that emulate the Paris original. A glossy raw bar anchors the entrance. The chandeliers dripping with blown glass bring to mind a Venetian carnival.

Lest you miss the translation of the restaurant’s name, pig images abound. You can make a game out of finding them. Note the cloven bases of the tables in the bar area. They look like something out of Ruth Gordon’s apartment in Rosemary’s Baby. The servers even adorn pig cufflinks.

The front of the menu sports an illustration of three chefs essentially torturing a pig with glee. Very un-American. Unfortunately, much of what is offered inside the menu has indeed been altered for American tastes. It all reads very French. But much of it tastes like joylessly made hotel food.

So let your thoughts drift back to that raw bar you saw walking in — the primordial oyster shells, the spindly crab legs. It’s an expensive option, but if you have a table of seafood lovers, the “platters” are the way to go here. If you order “Le Royal,” the medium-sized option for $88, a server lugs over a two-tiered presentation of red baskets packed with raw oysters and cooked but chilled crab, shrimp and mussels.

Vinegary mignonette, punchy cocktail sauce and dense aioli are provided alongside, and they are the only accoutrements you need to relish the oceanic orgy. This time of year is particularly good for the sensual pleasure of oysters, and Au Pied does a superb job of sourcing worthy if standard varieties like Malpeque, Belon and Kumamoto.

Beyond the raw bar, the quality of the cooking waffles fiercely. You may be slurping contentedly on the rich broth and sweet-smoky caramelized onions in your French onion soup, only to look up and find your tablemate rummaging fruitlessly for bits of lobster in the watery lobster bisque. You’ll probably savor the traditional garlic bite of the escargot, but push the undersalted, slapdash salade nicoise to the side.

And you’ll generally be happier with fish than meat for your entree. A gentle slab of turbot shines against an appropriately simple bed of arugula and orzo. The light stew of artichokes, zucchini, basil and tomato coulis alongside sea bass is a welcome harbinger of early spring. I wish the pan in which my sea bass was seared had been a bit hotter to give the fish a crispier crust, though.

The duck does not suffer the same execution problem. Well-cooked bits of crisped skin cling to rustic pieces of duck, but the meat remains succulent and nicely augmented by a tart vinegar-based sauce and precise ovals of potatoes and apples. My good experience with meat ends there, though. I find both the bone-in rib eye and lamb rack taste like bland cuts you pick up at the grocery store. For the prices they charge, the lamb should be grassier and the steak should have more mineral tang and depth.

And what of the restaurant’s namesake dish, the pig’s trotter? Well, for those of you who don’t like to discern from whence your food has come, know this: It’s a foot. A bony foot. A bony foot with lots of ropy skin. I’d describe the flavor as ... murky. ‘Nough said.

I scan the online menu of the Au Pied de Cochon in Paris, and I covet the dessert offerings. Their patrons get crepes flambeed with Grand Marnier, boozy Baba au Rhum and refreshing-sounding pineapple carpaccio. Atlantans are treated to crepes filled with overly viscous caramel, served with icy, milky cinnamon ice cream. Floating Islands feature a ridiculously heaping bowl full of créme anglaise with two chewy meringues and a scattering of pistachios. The “poached” pear in the Peach Melba tastes canned (why serve this dish in January in the first place?) and I couldn’t find any raspberry coulis buried under the peaches’ copious clouds of whipped cream.

Thank God they make a mean cappuccino here, otherwise I’d have left these meals bereft.

I depart disturbed at lunch one day, nonetheless. That’s when the pantyhose and suit set come in by the busloads to eat from the restaurant’s noontime buffet, which features saucy chicken and salmon concoctions kept warm in chafing dishes. I pass on the buffet to order what turns out to be the most shameful croque monsieur I’ve ever tasted. The traditional grilled ham and cheese sandwich grantineed with bechamel and gruyere is bastardized here: It’s like a ham and cheese sandwich your Mom would make for your lunchbox, with a little extra cheese melted on top. There wasn’t even any bechamel on top. I can’t even begin to understand why they’d serve such an insulting rendition. At least the decent fries filled me up.

If I return to Au Pied de Cochon, it will not be for lunch. The restaurant is open 24 hours and someday I’ll be grateful for onion soup and Cognac in the middle of the night. Even at 10 p.m. on a slow weeknight, I look out at Peachtree’s thinned traffic through the huge hotel windows and I feel like it’s 3 a.m. in a strange city. A strange American city, of course. Certainly not Paris.

bill.addison@creativeloafing.com