Dining on the Wine Trail: L'Eurasienne, Epernay
Julie Gézégabelle-Pham's tiny pizzeria-slash-Vietnamese restaurant is a natural wine haven in the heart of arch-conservative Epernay.
No one I know willingly stops in Epernay. It is a one-industry town where the industry in question is particularly hierarchical, conservative, and in hock to luxury conglomerates. L’Eurasienne, Julie Gézégabelle-Pham’s tiny pizzeria-slash-Vietnamese canteen, is a double outlier in the town center, for alongside the organic and natural-style champagnes of her many friends in the local industry, Gézégabelle-Pham also offers a connoisseur’s pick of radical natural wine from elsewhere in France and beyond.
The combination-Pizza-Hut-and-Taco-Bell-like kitchen concept is oddly familiar in French small towns, where one often sees signs offering TACOS - KEBABS - BO BUN - SUSHI etc. L’Eurasienne remains a family business, upon which already hybrid concept Gézégabelle-Pham - an alum of Eric and Aline Serva’s influential Reims natural wine destination Au Bon Manger - has soldered the spirit of a questing natural wine sommelière. (I first met Gézégabelle-Pham when she inquired about the lacto-fermented birch saps of EUFORIA, which I distribute in France. They’re such unusual beverages that I knew we’d be friends.)
It is one thing to champion the masterful Ardèche négociant work of Daniel Sage or the crystalline Brionnais gamays of Le Bois Dieu in Paris or London or Copenhagen. It is quite another challenge to do the same in Epernay, where mere organics remains a subject of bitter controversy, where people get heated about non-dosage.
Gézégabelle-Pham has her work cut out for her. Her conversation flits in tone between the militant ethics of the natural winemakers she admires and the more conciliatory businesswoman she hopes to become in Epernay. The challenge, as I’m learning with my own wine bar in Burgundy, lies in encouraging more conventional palates to consider natural wine appreciation not as replacement for conventional wine or champagne appreciation, but rather as a distinct category unto itself, one with different parameters (whatever we ourselves may feel about the values embedded in the parameters of conventional wine appreciation).
I will profess to having not yet tasted L’Eurasienne’s pizzas. On my first visit I ordered a perfectly tasty if slightly dear bò bún. On my second, Gézégabelle-Pham and I were rushing between tasting rendezvous and she kindly improvised a satisfying family meal of steak, eggs, and fried rice. She knows how wine professionals work and how they like to eat and drink; all that remains is to invite Epernay to join the fun.
L’Eurasienne
11 Rue Gambetta
51200 EPERNAY
FURTHER READING
ISSUE 6: What is Natural Champagne?
Everything is Electric: An Interview with Sébastien Mouzon of Champagne Mouzon-Leroux
A trio of December 2023 reports from the Aube: Domaine de Bichery, Thomas de Marne, and Salima & Alain Cordeuil