May 8, 2008
By: Brian Freedman
bfreedman@aroundphilly.com
For a while there, it didn’t seem at all certain that Coquette Bistro and Raw Bar would survive its first year. The chef and sous-chef famously walked out one night a few weeks after it opened. Perhaps even more famously, Coquette made local headlines when a car drove through the glass window fronting the space last fall. Word of impending doom spread, of the gastro-gods exacting some sort of revenge for unknown sins that, nonetheless, must have been pretty serious stuff to warrant such apparently awful karma.
But now, nearly a year after owner Cary Neff—of Sansom Street Oyster House fame—opened the doors to his Queen Village bistro, Coquette finally seems to have settled into the kind of routine it was always intended to, appealing to casual visitors from outside the neighborhood and, perhaps more importantly, to the neighborhooders who could walk there without too much effort.
It’s easy to see why it’s become such a hangout. The vaguely belle-époque-meets-urban-industrial aesthetic seems designed to appeal to just about every conceivable design preference, yet never panders down to a lowest common Disneyfied French denominator: esoteric food-and-imbibing quotes are etched behind the bar, exposed pipes run the length of the ceiling, and charmingly imperfect tiles line the floor:
New and old, Paris and Philly, these design elements are all integrated into a whole that seems to work for both the khaki-and-buttondown set as well as the purposefully disheveled local hipster population, both of which, these days, are cohabitating—or, rather, co-masticating—in harmony. (Vive le fraternité et l’égalité, indeed.)
But what struck me most was the food, which, while using French bistro cuisine as its jumping-off point, never gets bogged down in the kind of forced-Gallic details that relegate so many such places to little more than food museums stocked wall to wall with tired classics done not particularly well.
Malpeque oysters were salty sweet and paired with a restrained mignonette whose gentle shallot pop framed rather than obscured the mollusk’s meat. Grilled sardines the size of a newborn’s forearm—one of several surprisingly Portuguese-inspired dishes—found a perfect foil for their unapologetically briny flavor in a sweet tangle of roasted bell peppers that had been tossed with olive, sherry, anchovies, orange, and garlic.
Only the artichoke hearts disappointed, their unexpectedly bland flavor made even less thrilling by an underseasoned tomato compote. The bites that incorporated pieces of Serrano ham were better, but they still didn’t sing with much clarity of flavor.
But that was a rare misstep, and even the classics we’ve all had far too often before were tweaked just enough to make them relevant again.
Steak frites was anchored by meat so startlingly tender and zippy—the simple Worcestershire-and-soy-based marinade worked wonders—that I wondered with each bite why more bistros don’t treat their beef to such a bath. Even the fries were blissfully crispy, and both they and the hangar steak were flavorful enough on their own that they didn’t require the aid of the excellently eggy, slightly tangy béarnaise sauce off to the side.
Skate wing, too, demonstrated this kitchen’s way with textures. A quick dredging in well-seasoned flour and a stint in the pan had rendered the edges of the ray crispy enough to highlight the butteriness of the heart of the flesh but not so much as to obscure it. Little homemade sourdough croutons echoed this crunch, which was in turn framed by the almost sensual squishiness of the charred tomatoes scattered throughout.
Coquette, after a first year filled with more than its share of turbulence, seems to have finally found some smooth air, and evolved into the kind of place its fans hoped it would one day become. I hadn’t visited it since last summer, and returning after all these months reminded me of what it’s like to hear a song you enjoyed on a CD played live for the first time.
The musicians, more often than not, will change around a few things because, they’ll tell you, they finally know how the song is meant to be played. It’s still fundamentally the same, but the changes that they have made to its performance are likely to lift it up and inject a fresh sense of life to it. That’s Coquette Bistro and Raw Bar these days in a nutshell. Or, rather, an oyster one.
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