Dining on the Wine Trail: La Tête d'Ail, Saint-Hilaire-d'Ozilhan
A quiet rear terrace is the perfect setting for Didier Benoit's elegant, homespun market cuisine.
Much like his highly-principled vigneron neighbors in the village of Saint-Hilaire-d’Ozilhan, Les Frères Soulier, chef Didier Benoit can seem to have materialized out of nowhere with a sterling good taste heretofore unannounced on his public résumé. Before opening his understated and beautiful bistrot La Tête d’Ail in 2019, Benoit worked seven years as a home cook for private clients around the south of France.
This is probably a greater qualification than working as a home cook for private clients around Pennsylvania. I still manage my expectations whenever dining someplace with a private chef. The audience of just one wealthy family - or just the head of one wealthy family - never seems to bring out the best in chefs. Usually it does the opposite. I had the random occasion to dine on a yacht in the Mediterranean where staff outnumbered guests last month. Appetizer was king crab with caviar. The main course was American grass-fed angus beef with truffles. Without wishing to appear ungrateful for a very enjoyable experience, I couldn’t help remarking there appeared to be some kind of luxury component arm’s race going on. Private chefs are a luxury, and there seems to be some mutual expectation, between patron and chef, that they should cook like it, seasonality be damned. (In France, there is a tendency among private chefs to imitate the plating style of rural Michelin one-stars, heavy on edible flowers and splats of diverse mousselines, a smorgasbord of luxury baby food.)
La Tête d’Ail, as even its plucky name seems to suggest, offers none of that. A small sign at the shut-looking front of the restaurant (which faces onto Saint-Hilaire’s main square) directs diners to the rear, where one encounters a handful of umbrella-shaded tables in a quiet backstreet.
Benoit’s menu is as slim as can be, while technically remaining a menu of options. There is one appetizer, one main course with a choice of two accompaniments, two possible desserts, and a cheese. Everything is priced at the scale of a village, not a city, to the extent that it’s hard to believe one is only a twenty minute drive from Avignon.
A light salad of herbs, baby greens and matchsticks of pork offered, for me at least, a delightful Proustian moment, for I’d rarely encountered sprouts since my teenage years, when my vegetarian mother would strew them over almost every dish. (I like sprouts. I just never think of them. I should call my mother more often.)
My cycling companion B breathed an audible sigh of relief upon visible confirmation that the day’s main course was more substantial: a tandoori guinea fowl wing, roasted to succulent moist perfection, accompanied with bulgur and homemade harissa.
We dined with Charles Soulier of Les Frères Soulier, who I hadn’t seen since before the April frosts. (They emerged mostly unscathed.) One of the benefits of cycling to visit vignerons is when you arrive, you feel the same wariness towards wine consumption they do. In the middle of a bicycle journey as in the middle of a strenuous workday in vineyards, beer is more appealing. La Tête d’Ail offers several very satisfying ones from cult Haut-Savoie brewer Brasserie du Mont Salève.
For other occasions - and there will surely be others - Benoit offers a neat selection of natural wines from around the Gard, including the Souliers’ sought-after elixirs.
La Tête d’Ail
6 place Jean Jaurès
30210 SAINT-HILAIRE-D’OZILHAN
Tel: 04 66 22 77 27
Closed all day Monday, Wednesday, and Sunday, and for dinner service Tuesday.
FURTHER READING
A late May 2021 blurb on La Tête d’Ail’s reopening in Midi Libre.