Dining on the Wine Trail: Les Insolents, Uzès
Nathan George and Kim Eberhard run this enchanting terraced wine bar, which hosts a succession of traveling chefs - and one of the great natural wine lists of the French south.
It’s easy to feel ambivalent about the modish phenomenon of visiting chefs. But it’s hard to find a downside for young chefs or restaurateurs. Capable, thoughtful chefs find themselves in outsized demand nowadays. This poses a problem for restaurateurs, who are rarely prepared (or inclined) to offer salaries substantial enough to keep capable, thoughtful chefs from wandering off to work elsewhere.1
Resolving this dilemma, nowadays, is a circuit of wine-centric restaurants and bars that play host to chefs for short-term commitments, an arrangement that neatly satisfies chef wanderlust, restaurateur anxiety, and the attention spans of contemporary diners, who tend to leave the house for novelty and entertainment rather than nourishment or restoration in a traditional sense. The deal places a social burden on restaurateurs, who must essentially become full-time chef-scouts. But one senses the task is aided by the mutual trust and shared aesthetics of the international natural wine scene. Hence the bevy of chef-residency success stories in recent years: the Auberge du Chassignolles in Auvergne, P. Franco in London, Le Chardon in Arles, Fulgurances in Paris, and so on.
One glance at the world-beating natural wine list at chef-residency wine bistrot Les Insolents in Uzès reveals another facet of this contemporary hiring arrangement: it works best when the passion in the front of house is more than a match for any visiting chef.
Toulouse native Nathan George and Parisian Kim Eberhard opened Les Insolents in 2019, having met while working together at La Cave des Papilles Marseille. The duo are abundantly skilled: George wields experience gleaned from extensive wine travels with La Cave des Papilles founder Gérard Katz, while Eberhard is a veteran of the Brusssels dining scene. They’re also well-armed: the couple had the perspicacity and good fortune to purchase the remaining wine stocks of the famed Roquebrun cave-à-manger La Cave Saint Martin after Raymond Lecoq’s passing in 2020.
Today Les Insolents’ wine list carries his torch, emphasizing the radical natural vignerons of the Gard and ever-southward, extending into Catalonia. It’s a genuine joy to see estates like Valentin Vallès, Clos Fantine, and Mas Coutelou represented in breadth and depth. Back vintages abound, as do outright rarities, like Clos Fantine’s manna-like white from terret.
How many times, over the years, have I heard restaurateurs and wine buyers in Paris and elsewhere cite lack of storage space, lack of money, and lack of time as reasons to keep a wine list short? Big exciting wine stocks can indeed be maintained. Chambre Noire does it in Paris. Les Insolents does it in Uzès. The only thing is, you have to love doing it.
Enthusiasm abounds at Les Insolents, even at a time when COVID precautions preclude accepting clients in the restaurant’s interior bar space. Eberhard elucidates the menu with a winning verve. She explained that the only unchanging dish on the menu was the fried lamb brain, served with black garlic cream and pickled onion.
When I visited, the chef-in-residence was Théo Léonard, a cook at Ötap, a high-end share-plates establishment in Brussels founded by the conspicuously young chef-entrepreneur Paul-Antoine Bertin. I knew nothing of Léonard’s resume at the time, but I suppose it wouldn’t have changed my response if I did. I still had to ask George the rather embarrassing question of whether brain could be consumed in a partly pink state. Everywhere else I’d consumed brain, from Le Baratin to Amarante to Aux Deux Amis, the chef had poached it right through, yielding the texture and off-white color of tofu.
George gamely reassured me brain was meant to be pink but not bloody. As I tucked in I couldn’t help marveling at the cheek of a chef-residency restaurant whose one constant dish was brain. It’s not the sort of component whose preparation one wishes to imagine a visiting chef mastering on-the-job, if you get my drift. Would you eat fugu from a visiting chef who may not have specialized in its preparation prior to this particular gig?
The brain was impeccable, anyway, well-complemented by the aigre-doux qualities of both the onion and the black garlic cream. It lit up like a lightbulb in the company of a bottle of Jeff Coutelou’s 2015 “Peilhan,” a stirring, mildly effervescent blend of carignan blanc and grenache gris.
Subtler, but even more successful, was a plate of gizzards with mirin and green peppers, which pulled the inconceivable feat of making the peppers’ signature vegetal bitterness scan like a harmonious retro-olfactive grace note. I drank the sauce from my plate at the end.
A main course proved to have been misleadingly termed on the chalkboard as “shrimp, pastis, caponata, fennel salad.” What arrived was a supersized toast skagen, parked on a pasty slab of pain de mie. I can’t think what purpose the caponata served, except perhaps to lend this tasty and satisfying brunch dish an ostensibly dinnertime air.
To be fair, the dish would make a lot of sense on a hot evening in mid-summer. But it was a few days before the end of a mild season. More responsible people were already back at work. In a few days Les Insolents would close for another vacation. I look forward to visiting again for a fresh new experience when they return.
Les Insolents
5 Bd Victor Hugo
30700 UZES
+33 9 53 08 87 05
Open for dinner Wednesday to Monday. Open for lunch on Saturday only. Closed Tuesday. But all this is subject to frequent change.
FURTHER READING
Le Fooding’s brief listing on Les Insolents manages to typify the Uzès clientele as “listless crowds.” Fair enough.
Particularly in France, where one cannot simply fire an overpaid employee, and where restaurateurs are rightly cagey about allowing a chef’s identity to outshine that of the restaurant, since that can affect real estate valuation of leasehold rights.