Restaurant Review: Le Coq

The Perfect Order: Mussels À La Paris | Rack Of Lamb | Creamed Spinach

We gotta address the name. Yeah, it means rooster in French. And, yeah, it’s pronounced the way you think it is. How I feel about that doesn’t matter as much as how La Jolla feels about it. Let’s not over-stereotype. I know many advisory-boarding La Jollans who don’t wilt under the burden of a porny curse word. But there is a deep culture of manners and social restraint here; you get the feeling that tawdry newcomers find themselves with a surprising amount of audits and parking tickets.

Yet the name is true to Puffer Malarkey, the restaurant group behind Le Coq and three of the city’s best spots of the last decade: Herb & Wood, Herb & Sea, and Animae. From the get-go, its MO has been to build elaborate, high-end restaurants and then lightly or cartoonishly mock the haughty decorum of high-end restaurants. (Herb & Wood famously has a middle-finger sculpture, handed to the worst guest of the night with much fanfare.)

Le Coq is the group’s final grand effort, a victory lap from an operator (Chris Puffer) and chef (Brian Malarkey) unafraid to make sex appeal a central theme. (The duo’s other restaurants will continue to evolve, but Malarkey told SDM this is their last one as a team in San Diego.) The Parisian steakhouse features James Beard nominee and Animae exec chef Tara Monsod. Monsod is a formidable talent and force of good in San Diego’s food scene. And the location brings Puffer Malarkey full circle. When the duo started almost 20 years ago with restaurants named after textiles (Searsucker was the first), they turned this former auto shop—a lovely, spacious hangar—into Herringbone. That concept was sold, but the gents always wanted it back, standing outside its window like boombox-era John Cusacks.

Inside, erotic art photos line the walls. Surprisingly, they’re not large-format, but small prints, clustered into little lust farms. The restraint is unexpected. It must have killed them not to turn one of Robert Mapplethorpe’s most socially fire-setting nudes into 3,000 square feet of wallpaper and shrink wrap the whole shebang. And the carpet—Le Coq has casino flooring, so thick and luxurious it might have a sleep number. I haven’t seen a carpet this loamy since the ’80s, when a padded bottom was a restaurant status symbol. The softer the underfoot, the more spendy the baked Alaska.

Designers removed those famed Herringbone trees from the dining room. Honestly, I’d ask for them back. Without them or something like them to create distinct parts of the room, it feels like an ornate wedding hall—one giant eating space, wide open with all of us kind of rawly looking at each other. It seems they only changed the bottom half of the restaurant, keeping the top rustic-historic Herringbone (wooden rafters, exposed air ducts, faded brick walls) and turning the bottom into what looks like a very nice Golden Nugget (velvet booths, a massive curtain that appears to be mylar or Bjork’s dress from Coachella). It’s a design mullet: hard-working Americana up top, glitzy flesh party below.

Resist the urge to complain about Le Coq’s prices on the internet. Too late for some of you. This is a high-end steakhouse in an era when the cost of ingredients has never been higher, with one of the country’s top young chefs, and the group spent millions on creating a memorable space. Cross-checking menus, it’s reasonably priced for the game being played—around the same as Steak 48 and maybe even a bit lower than indie favorite Cowboy Star. (For PR’s sake, I’d probably not charge $20 for a taste of four sauces. While I respect the art and time that goes into them—a thick bearnaise, a silky chicken glacé, a potent anchovy herb oil, and an incredible bordelaise—some steakhouses automatically include sauces. Tuck that cost into the steak itself. Proclaiming in print you’re charging five bucks per drizzle feels like an optics issue.)

Assuming restaurants are sourcing the best dry-aged money can buy and know how to sear and properly temp, steaks don’t differentiate steakhouses. Apps and sides do.

Dinner starts with a warm baguette with Pamplie butter. Made in western France, slow-churned in a barrel, fermented for 48 hours using a recipe that’s been unchanged for 120 years, and protected by the French government—well, it’s one of the best butters on the planet, with more fat than most American butter (84 percent versus 81). The restaurant offers chicken-skin butter as well, but I’d stick with the pure form.

Monsod’s tuna tartare is a fantastic taste of local waters. On paper, raw tuna in cream sounds like a fairly indigestible idea, but we’ve been slathering all kinds of dairy manifestations on seafood since the beginning of reason—mayo for a sushi roll’s krabby center, Thomas Keller’s butter jacuzzis for lobster, you name it. Monsod’s cubes of sushi-grade ahi come with crème fraîche and horseradish, then get acidified with pickled gooseberries. It’s a dinner cousin to lox and cream cheese, minus the bagel. It’s actually so soupy it could use some form of bread, like toast points (the bagel of steakhouses).

“Head cheese” is arguably the least appetizing phrase in the history of food, all due respect to “moist.” It’s an iconic art form of European food culture, rarely cooked for American audiences since we have some pretty arbitrary food hangups. It’ll always baffle me that most Americans will gobble hot dogs like baseball breath mints, but organ meats in any other form are seen as mouth crimes.

Monsod delicately fries her head cheese into a croquette. Smart move. Frying is how chefs do the “choo choo… here comes the train” trick to get guests to embrace intimidating foods (think calamari). Head meat will always taste like it just got done with a vigorous workout, and it’s up to you if you like that funk or not. I crave it. Most American food is an offensive deluge of inoffensiveness, a sleepwalking cuisine of breast meat and subs and cheese sauces and medium salsas. That boredom drives us to the pricklier charms of lamb and duck and liver and foods that taste like they have an opinion. Monsod’s croquette—Thompson Heritage pork (an incredible local ranch) with sauce gribiche (a thick, cold, creamy French predecessor to tartar sauce, a fusion of hard-boiled eggs and mustard)—is an opinion well-executed (it takes a full week to make).

Le Coq’s celery salad is a shocking winner. Welcome to the crunchiest salad you’ll ever eat. Celery is always the backup dancer for great food, an underdog sautéed into anonymity at the bottom of a mirepoix; stuck playing the plucky, uneaten sidekick to a chicken wing. Monsod gives it the stage, albeit topped with a party-wig amount of the famed semi-hard cheese P’tit Basque. With golden raisins and celery seed vinaigrette, it’s a weird, willful, Provençal kind of idea, best eaten with a cinematic slow-clap and “Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!” in your head.

Order the steak frites if only to try Monsod’s au poivre. Done wrong, au poivres can taste of booze and bitterness (sometimes from burnt butter or from cooking in reactive pans like a cast iron). Hers is textbook. Concede all your self-governance to this sauce.

Creamed spinach is simultaneously the weary foot soldier of the steakhouse industry and one of America’s warmest and deepest food emotions. Monsod’s is excellent because of the onion soubise—a thick, smooth, French sauce in which onions are cooked in butter, then puréed with heavy cream or bechamel.

Other standouts are the sweet-sour riff on a rack of lamb, which offers a far more creative take than the usual chimichurri—with kalamata olives and French sorrel, plums and pickled grapes. When it comes to the mussels, everything (meat, bread) is merely vessel for the star: the broth. Usually, it’s wine and herbs and cream and, in San Diego, chorizo. But here the chef gives us wine and blue cheese (similar to a southern France idea called Roquefort sauce). It is magic. White wine and blue cheese and silky mussel meat are like charcuterie masquerading as a warm bowl of comfort.

For dessert, you have to try the Paris–Brest—a French pastry classic rarely seen in modern rooms. Shaped like a bicycle wheel (pastry chef Louis Durand of the famed Pâtisserie Durand created it in homage to the Paris–Brest–Paris bike race), it’s baked pâte à choux (cream puff pastry) split in half, filled with pistachio crème mousseline, and studded with caramelized pistachios and powdered sugar.

It’s all part of the sexiness at Le Coq—which I’d argue belongs in steakhouses, both being fleshy desires and whatnot. Maybe the name is part of what makes this swan song great. Maybe La Jolla could benefit from a touch of risqué. Or maybe the planning group is sharpening their pitchforks. As of writing, there’s no external marquee that says “Le Coq,” so perhaps a treaty has been signed.